ALSO BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

King Rat

Perdido Street Station

The Scar

Iron Council

Looking for Jake: Stories

Un Lun Dun

Contents

Cover

Other Books By This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Part 1 - BESŹEL

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part 2 - UL QOMA

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Part 3 - BREACH

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Part 4 - Coda BREACH

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Reader’s Guide

Excerpt from Kraken

About the Author

Copyright

In loving memory of my mother,
Claudia Lightfoot

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For all their help with this book I’m extremely grateful to Stefanie Bierwerth, Mark Bould, Christine Cabello, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Simon Kavanagh, Penny Haynes, Chloe Healy, Deanna Hoak, Peter Lavery, Farah Mendlesohn, Jemima Miéville, David Moench, Sue Moe, Sandy Rankin, Maria Rejt, Rebecca Saunders, Max Schaefer, Jane Soodalter, Jesse Soodalter, Dave Stevenson, Paul Taunton, and to my editors Chris Schluep and Jeremy Trevathan. My sincere thanks to all at Del Rey and Macmillan. Thanks to John Curran Davis for his wonderful translations of Bruno Schulz.

Among the countless writers to whom I’m indebted, those I’m particularly aware of and grateful to with regard to this book include Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, Jan Morris, and Bruno Schulz.

“Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelganger streets, mendacious and delusive streets.”

—Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories

Part One
BESŹEL

Chapter One

I COULD NOT SEE THE STREET or much of the estate. We were enclosed by dirt-coloured blocks, from windows out of which leaned vested men and women with morning hair and mugs of drink, eating breakfast and watching us. This open ground between the buildings had once been sculpted. It pitched like a golf course—a child’s mimicking of geography. Maybe they had been going to wood it and put in a pond. There was a copse but the saplings were dead.

The grass was weedy, threaded with paths footwalked between rubbish, rutted by wheel tracks. There were police at various tasks. I wasn’t the first detective there—I saw Bardo Naustin and a couple of others—but I was the most senior. I followed the sergeant to where most of my colleagues clustered, between a low derelict tower and a skateboard park ringed by big drum-shaped trash bins. Just beyond it we could hear the docks. A bunch of kids sat on a wall before standing officers. The gulls coiled over the gathering.

“Inspector.” I nodded at whomever that was. Someone offered a coffee but I shook my head and looked at the woman I had come to see.

She lay near the skate ramps. Nothing is still like the dead are still. The wind moves their hair, as it moved hers, and they don’t respond at all. She was in an ugly pose, with legs crooked as if about to get up, her arms in a strange bend. Her face was to the ground.

A young woman, brown hair pulled into pigtails poking up like plants. She was almost naked, and it was sad to see her skin smooth that cold morning, unbroken by gooseflesh. She wore only laddered stockings, one high heel on. Seeing me look for it, a sergeant waved at me from a way off, from where she guarded the dropped shoe.

It was a couple of hours since the body had been discovered. I looked her over. I held my breath and bent down toward the dirt, to look at her face, but I could only see one open eye.

“Where’s Shukman?”

“Not here yet, Inspector…”

“Someone call him, tell him to get a move on.” I smacked my watch. I was in charge of what we called the mise-en-crime. No one would move her until Shukman the patho had come, but there were other things to do. I checked sightlines. We were out of the way and the garbage containers obscured us, but I could feel attention on us like insects, from all over the estate. We milled.

There was a wet mattress on its edge between two of the bins, by a spread of rusting iron pieces interwoven with discarded chains. “That was on her.” The constable who spoke was Lizbyet Corwi, a smart young woman I’d worked with a couple of times. “Couldn’t exactly say she was well hidden, but it sort of made her look like a pile of rubbish, I guess.” I could see a rough rectangle of darker earth surrounding the dead woman—the remains of the mattress-sheltered dew. Naustin was squatting by it, staring at the earth.

“The kids who found her tipped it half off,” Corwi said.

“How did they find her?”

Corwi pointed at the earth, at little scuffs of animal paws.

“Stopped her getting mauled. Ran like hell when they saw what it was, made the call. Our lot, when they arrived …” She glanced at two patrolmen I didn’t know.

“They moved it?”

She nodded. “See if she was still alive, they said.”

“What are their names?”

“Shushkil and Briamiv.”

“And these are the finders?” I nodded at the guarded kids. There were two girls, two guys. Midteens, cold, looking down.

“Yeah. Chewers.”

“Early morning pick-you-up?”

“That’s dedication, hm?” she said. “Maybe they’re up for junkies of the month or some shit. They got here a bit before seven. The skate pit’s organised that way, apparently. It’s only been built a couple of years, used to be nothing, but the locals’ve got their shift patterns down. Midnight to nine a.m., chewers only; nine to eleven, local gang plans the day; eleven to midnight, skateboards and rollerblades.”

“They carrying?”

“One of the boys has a little shiv, but really little. Couldn’t mug a milkrat with it—it’s a toy. And a chew each. That’s it.” She shrugged. “The dope wasn’t on them; we found it by the wall, but”—shrug—“they were the only ones around.”

She motioned over one of our colleagues and opened the bag he carried. Little bundles of resin-slathered grass. Feld is its street name—a tough crossbreed of Catha edulis spiked with tobacco and caffeine and stronger stuff, and fibreglass threads or similar to abrade the gums and get it into the blood. Its name is a trilingual pun: it’s khat where it’s grown, and the animal called “cat” in English is feld in our own language. I sniffed it and it was pretty low-grade stuff. I walked over to where the four teenagers shivered in their puffy jackets.

“’Sup, policeman?” said one boy in a Besź-accented approximation of hip-hop English. He looked up and met my eye, but he was pale. Neither he nor any of his companions looked well. From where they sat they could not have seen the dead woman, but they did not even look in her direction.

They must have known we’d find the feld, and that we’d know it was theirs. They could have said nothing, just run.

“I’m Inspector Borlú,” I said. “Extreme Crime Squad.”

I did not say I’m Tyador. A difficult age to question, this—too old for first names, euphemisms and toys, not yet old enough to be straightforward opponents in interviews, when at least the rules were clear. “What’s your name?” The boy hesitated, considered using whatever slang handle he’d granted himself, did not.

“Vilyem Barichi.”

“You found her?” He nodded, and his friends nodded after him. “Tell me.”

“We come here because, ’cause, and …” Vilyem waited, but I said nothing about his drugs. He looked down. “And we seen something under that mattress and we pulled it off.

“There was some …” His friends looked up as Vilyem hesitated, obviously superstitious.

“Wolves?” I said. They glanced at each other.

“Yeah man, some scabby little pack was nosing around there and …

“So we thought it…”

“How long after you got here?” I said.

Vilyem shrugged. “Don’t know. Couple hours?”

“Anyone else around?”

“Saw some guys over there a while back.”

“Dealers?” A shrug.

“And there was a van came up on the grass and come over here and went off again after a bit. We didn’t speak to no one.”

“When was the van?”

“Don’t know.”

“It was still dark.” That was one of the girls.

“Okay. Vilyem, you guys, we’re going to get you some breakfast, something to drink, if you want.” I motioned to their guards. “Have we spoken to the parents?” I asked.

“On their way, boss; except hers”—pointing to one of the girls—“we can’t reach.”

“So keep trying. Get them to the centre now.”

The four teens looked at each other. “This is bullshit, man,” the boy who was not Vilyem said, uncertainly. He knew that according to some politics he should oppose my instruction, but he wanted to go with my subordinate. Black tea and bread and paperwork, the boredom and striplights, all so much not like the peeling back of that wet-heavy, cumbersome mattress, in the yard, in the dark.

STEPEN SHUKMAN AND HIS ASSISTANT Hamd Hamzinic had arrived. I looked at my watch. Shukman ignored me. When he bent to the body he wheezed. He certified death. He made observations that Hamzinic wrote down.

“Time?” I said.

“Twelve hours-ish,” Shukman said. He pressed down on one of the woman’s limbs. She rocked. In rigor, and unstable on the ground as she was, she probably assumed the position of her death lying on other contours. “She wasn’t killed here.” I had heard it said many times he was good at his job but had seen no evidence that he was anything but competent.

“Done?” he said to one of the scene techs. She took two more shots from different angles and nodded. Shukman rolled the woman over with Hamzinic’s help. She seemed to fight him with her cramped motionlessness. Turned, she was absurd, like someone playing at dead insect, her limbs crooked, rocking on her spine.

She looked up at us from below a fluttering fringe. Her face was set in a startled strain: she was endlessly surprised by herself. She was young. She was heavily made up, and it was smeared across a badly battered face. It was impossible to say what she looked like, what face those who knew her would see if they heard her name. We might know better later, when she relaxed into her death. Blood marked her front, dark as dirt. Flash flash of cameras.

“Well, hello cause of death,” Shukman said to the wounds in her chest.

On her left cheek, curving under the jaw, a long red split. She had been cut half the length of her face.

The wound was smooth for several centimetres, tracking precisely along her flesh like the sweep of a paintbrush. Where it went below her jaw, under the overhang of her mouth, it jagged ugly and ended or began with a deep torn hole in the soft tissue behind her bone. She looked unseeingly at me.

“Take some without the flash, too,” I said.

Like several others I looked away while Shukman murmured—it felt prurient to watch. Uniformed mise-en-crime technical investigators, mectecs in our slang, searched in an expanding circle. They overturned rubbish and foraged among the grooves where vehicles had driven. They lay down reference marks, and photographed.

“Alright then.” Shukman rose. “Let’s get her out of here.” A couple of the men hauled her onto a stretcher.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “cover her.” Someone found a blanket I don’t know from where, and they started again towards Shukman’s vehicle.

“I’ll get going this afternoon,” he said. “Will I see you?” I wagged my head noncommittally. I walked towards Corwi.

“Naustin,” I called, when I was positioned so that Corwi would be at the edge of our conversation. She glanced up and came slightly closer.

“Inspector,” said Naustin.

“Go through it.”

He sipped his coffee and looked at me nervously.

“Hooker?” he said. “First impressions, Inspector. This area, beat-up, naked? And …” He pointed at his face, her exaggerated makeup. “Hooker.”

“Fight with a client?”

“Yeah but… If it was just the body wounds, you know, you’d, then you’re looking at, maybe she won’t do what he wants, whatever. He lashes out. But this.” He touched his cheek again uneasily. “That’s different.”

“A sicko?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. He cuts her, kills her, dumps her. Cocky bastard too, doesn’t give a shit that we’re going to find her.”

“Cocky or stupid.”

“Or cocky and stupid.”

“So a cocky, stupid sadist,” I said. He raised his eyes, Maybe.

“Alright,” I said. “Could be. Do the rounds of the local girls. Ask a uniform who knows the area. Ask if they’ve had trouble with anyone recently. Let’s get a photo circulated, put a name to Fulana Detail.” I used the generic name for woman-unknown. “First off I want you to question Barichi and his mates, there. Be nice, Bardo, they didn’t have to call this in. I mean that. And get Yaszek in with you.” Ramira Yaszek was an excellent questioner. “Call me this afternoon?” When he was out of earshot I said to Corwi, “A few years ago we’d not have had half as many guys on the murder of a working girl.”

“We’ve come a long way,” she said. She wasn’t much older than the dead woman.

“I doubt Naustin’s delighted to be on streetwalker duty, but you’ll notice he’s not complaining,” I said.

“We’ve come a long way,” she said.

“So?” I raised an eyebrow. Glanced in Naustin’s direction. I waited. I remembered Corwi’s work on the Shulban disappearance, a case considerably more Byzantine than it had initially appeared.

“It’s just, I guess, you know, we should keep in mind other possibilities,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“Her makeup,” she said. “It’s all, you know, earths and browns. It’s been put on thick, but it’s not—” She vamp-pouted. “And did you notice her hair?” I had. “Not dyed. Take a drive with me up GunterStrász, around by the arena, any of the girls’ hangouts. Two-thirds blonde, I reckon. And the rest are black or bloodred or some shit. And …” She fingered the air as if it were hair. “It’s dirty, but it’s a lot better than mine.” She ran her hand through her own split ends.

For many of the streetwalkers in Besźel, especially in areas like this, food and clothes for their kids came first; feld or crack for themselves; food for themselves; then sundries, in which list conditioner would come low. I glanced at the rest of the officers, at Naustin gathering himself to go.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know this area?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s a bit off the track, you know? This is hardly even Besźel, really. My beat’s Lestov. They called a few of us in when they got the bell. But I did a tour here a couple years ago—I know it a bit.”

Lestov itself was already almost a suburb, six or so k out of the city centre, and we were south of that, over the Yovic Bridge on a bit of land between Bulkya Sound and, nearly, the mouth where the river joined the sea. Technically an island, though so close and conjoined to the mainland by ruins of industry you would never think of it as such, Kordvenna was estates, warehouses, low-rent bodegas scribble-linked by endless graffiti. It was far enough from Besźel’s heart that it was easy to forget, unlike more inner-city slums.

“How long were you here?” I said.

“Six months, standard. What you’d expect: street theft, high kids smacking shit out of each other, drugs, hooking.”

“Murder?”

“Two or three in my time. Drugs stuff. Mostly stops short of that, though: the gangs are pretty smart at punishing each other without bringing in ECS.”

“Someone’s fucked up then.”

“Yeah. Or doesn’t care.”

“Okay,” I said. “I want you on this. What are you doing at the moment?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.”

“I want you to relocate for a bit. Got any contacts here still?” She pursed her lips. “Track them down if you can; if not, have a word with some of the local guys, see who their singers are. I want you on the ground. Listen out, go round the estate—what’s this place called again?”

“Pocost Village.” She laughed without humour; I raised an eyebrow.

“It takes a village,” I said. “See what you can turn up.”

“My commissar won’t like it.”

“I’ll deal with him. It’s Bashazin, right?”

“You’ll square it? So am I being seconded?”

“Let’s not call it anything right now. Right now I’m just asking you to focus on this. And report directly to me.” I gave her the numbers of my cell phone and my office. “You can show me around the delights of Kordvenna later. And …” I glanced up at Naustin, and she saw me do it. “Just keep an eye on things.”

“He’s probably right. Probably a cocky sadist trick, boss.”

“Probably. Let’s find out why she keeps her hair so clean.”

There was a league-table of instinct. We all knew that in his street-beating days, Commissar Kerevan broke several cases following leads that made no logical sense; and that Chief Inspector Marcoberg was devoid of any such breaks, and that his decent record was the result, rather, of slog. We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

Officers Shushkil and Briamiv were surprised, then defensive, finally sulky when I asked them what they were doing moving the mattress. I put them on report. If they had apologised I would have let it go. It was depressingly common to see police boots tracked through blood residue, fingerprints smeared and spoiled, samples corrupted or lost.

A little group of journalists was gathering at the edges of the open land. Petrus Something-or-other, Valdir Mohli, a young guy called Rackhaus, a few others.

“Inspector!” “Inspector Borlú!” Even: “Tyador!”

Most of the press had always been polite, and amenable to my suggestions about what they withhold. In the last few years, new, more salacious and aggressive papers had started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American owners. It had been inevitable, and in truth our established local outlets were staid to dull. What was troubling was less the trend to sensation, nor even the irritating behaviour of the new press’s young writers, but more their tendency to dutifully follow a script written before they were born. Rackhaus, who wrote for a weekly called Rejal!, for example. Surely when he bothered me for facts he knew I would not give him, surely when he attempted to bribe junior officers, and sometimes succeeded, he did not have to say, as he tended to: “The public has a right to know!”

I did not even understand him the first time he said it. In Besź the word “right” is polysemic enough to evade the peremptory meaning he intended. I had to mentally translate into English, in which I am passably fluent, to make sense of the phrase. His fidelity to the cliché transcended the necessity to communicate. Perhaps he would not be content until I snarled and called him a vulture, a ghoul.

“You know what I’m going to say,” I told them. The stretched tape separated us. “There’ll be a press conference this afternoon, at ECS Centre.”

“What time?” My photograph was being taken.

“You’ll be informed, Petrus.”

Rackhaus said something that I ignored. As I turned, I saw past the edges of the estate to the end of GunterStrász, between the dirty brick buildings. Trash moved in the wind. It might be anywhere. An elderly woman was walking slowly away from me in a shambling sway. She turned her head and looked at me. I was struck by her motion, and I met her eyes. I wondered if she wanted to tell me something. In my glance I took in her clothes, her way of walking, of holding herself, and looking.

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her.

Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

Chapter Two

I HAD A CONSTABLE DROP ME north of Lestov, near the bridge. I did not know the area well. I’d been to the island, of course, visited the ruins, when I was a schoolboy and occasionally since, but my rat-runs were elsewhere. Signs showing directions to local destinations were bolted to the outsides of pastry bakers and little workshops, and I followed them to a tram stop in a pretty square. I waited between a care-home marked with an hourglass logo, and a spice shop, the air around it cinnamon scented.

When the tram came, tinnily belling, shaking in its ruts, I did not sit, though the carriage was half-empty. I knew we would pick up passengers as we went north to Besźel centre. I stood close to the window and saw right out into the city, into these unfamiliar streets.

The woman, her ungainly huddle below that old mattress, sniffed by scavengers. I phoned Naustin on my cell.

“Is the mattress being tested for trace?”

“Should be, sir.”

“Check. If the techs are on it we’re fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence.” Perhaps she was new to the life. Maybe if we’d found her a week later her hair would have been electric blonde.

These regions by the river are intricate, many buildings a century or several centuries old. The tram took its tracks through byways where Besźel, at least half of everything we passed, seemed to lean in and loom over us. We wobbled and slowed, behind local cars and those elsewhere, came to a crosshatching where the Besź buildings were antique shops. That trade had been doing well, as well as anything did in the city for some years, hand-downs polished and spruced as people emptied their apartments of heirlooms for a few Besźmarques.

Some editorialists were optimists. While their leaders roared as relentlessly at each other as they ever had in the Cityhouse, many of the new breed of all parties were working together to put Besźel first. Each drip of foreign investment—and to everyone’s surprise there were drips—brought forth encomia. Even a couple of high-tech companies had recently moved in, though it was hard to believe it was in response to Besźel’s fatuous recent self-description as “Silicon Estuary.”

I got off by the statue of King Val. Downtown was busy: I stop-started, excusing myself to citizens and local tourists, unseeing others with care, till I reached the blocky concrete of ECS Centre. Two groups of tourists were being shepherded by Besź guides. I stood on the steps and looked down UropaStrász. It took me several tries to get a signal.

“Corwi?”

“Boss?”

“You know that area: is there any chance we’re looking at breach?”

There were seconds of silence.

“Doesn’t seem likely. That area’s mostly pretty total. And Pocost Village, that whole project, certainly is.”

“Some of GunterStrász, though …”

“Yeah but. The closest crosshatching is hundreds of metres away. They couldn’t have …” It would have been an extraordinary risk on the part of the murderer or murderers. “I reckon we can assume,” she said.

“Alright. Let me know how you get on. I’ll check in soon.”

***

I HAD PAPERWORK ON OTHER CASES that I opened, establishing them a while in holding patterns like circling aircraft. A woman beaten to death by her boyfriend, who had managed to evade us so far, despite tracers on his name and his prints at the airport. Styelim was an old man who had surprised an addict breaking and entering, been hit once, fatally, with the spanner he himself had been wielding. That case would not close. A young man called Avid Avid, left bleeding from the head after taking a kerb-kiss from a racist, “Ébru Filth” written on the wall above him. For that I was coordinating with a colleague from Special Division, Shenvoi, who had, since some time before Avid’s murder, been undercover in Besźel’s far right.

Ramira Yaszek called while I ate lunch at my desk. “Just done questioning those kids, sir.”

“And?”

“You should be glad they don’t know their rights better, because if they did Naustin’d be facing charges now.” I rubbed my eyes and swallowed my mouthful.

“What did he do?”

“Barichi’s mate Sergev was lippy, so Naustin asked him the bareknuckle question across the mouth, said he was the prime suspect.” I swore. “It wasn’t that hard, and at least it made it easier for me to gudcop.” We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them. Naustin was one of those who’d switch to hard questioning too easily. There are some suspects that methodology works on, who need to fall down stairs during an interrogation, but a sulky teenage chewer is not one.

“Anyway, no harm done,” Yaszek said. “Their stories tally. They’re out, the four of them, in that bunch of trees. Bit of naughty naughty probably. They were there for a couple of hours at least. At some point during that time—and don’t ask for anything more exact because you aren’t going to get it beyond ‘still dark’—one of the girls sees that van come up onto the grass to the skate park. She doesn’t think much of it because people do come up there all times of day and night to do business, to dump stuff, what have you. It drives around, up past the skate park, comes back. After a while it speeds off.”

“Speeds?”

I scribbled in my notebook, trying one-handedly to pull up my email on my PC. The connection broke more than once. Big attachments on an inadequate system.

“Yeah. It was in a hurry and buggering its suspension. That’s how she noticed it was going.”

“Description?”

“‘Grey.’ She doesn’t know from vans.”

“Get her looking at some pictures, see if we can ID the make.”

“On it, sir. I’ll let you know. Later at least two other cars or vans come up for whatever reason, for business, according to Barichi.”

“That could complicate tyre tracks.”

“After an hour or whatever of groping, this girl mentions the van to the others and they go check it out, in case it was dumping. Says sometimes you get old stereos, shoes, books, all kinds of shit chucked out.”

“And they find her.” Some of my messages had come through. There was one from one of the mectec photographers, and I opened it and began to scroll through his images.

“They find her.”

COMMISSAR GADLEM CALLED ME IN. His soft-spoken theatricality, his mannered gentleness, was unsubtle, but he had always let me do my thing. I sat while he tapped at his keyboard and swore. I could see what must be database passwords stuck on scraps of paper to the side of his screen.

“So?” he said. “The housing estate?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“South, suburbs. Young woman, stab wounds. Shukman’s got her.”

“Prostitute?”

“Could be.”

“Could be,” he said, cupped his ear, “and yet. I can hear it. Well, onward, follow your nose. Tell if you ever feel like sharing the whys of that ‘and yet,’ won’t you? Who’s your sub?”

“Naustin. And I’ve got a beat cop helping out. Corwi. Grade-one constable. Knows the area.”

“That’s her beat?” I nodded. Close enough.

“What else is open?”

“On my desk?” I told him. The commissar nodded. Even with the others, he granted me the leeway to follow Fulana Detail.

“SO DID YOU SEE the whole business?”

It was close to ten o’clock in the evening, more than forty hours since we had found the victim. Corwi drove—she made no effort to disguise her uniform, despite that we had an unmarked car-through the streets around GunterStrász. I had not been home until very late the previous night, and after a morning on my own in these same streets now I was there again.

There were places of crosshatch in the larger streets and a few elsewhere, but that far out the bulk of the area was total. Few antique Besź stylings, few steep roofs or many-paned windows: these were hobbled factories and warehouses. A handful of decades old, often broken-glassed, at half capacity if open. Boarded facades. Grocery shops fronted with wire. Older fronts in tumbledown of classical Besź style. Some houses colonised and made chapels and drug houses: some burnt out and left as crude carbon renditions of themselves.

The area was not crowded, but it was far from empty. Those who were out looked like landscape, like they were always there. There had been fewer that morning but not very markedly.

“Did you see Shukman working on the body?”

“No.” I was looking at what we passed, referring to my map. “I got there after he was done.”

“Squeamish?” she said.

“No.”

“Well …” She smiled and turned the car. “You’d have to say that even if you were.”

“True,” I said, though it was not.

She pointed out what passed for landmarks. I did not tell her I had been in Kordvenna early in the day, sounding these places.

Corwi did not try to disguise her police clothes because that way those who saw us, who might otherwise think we were there to entrap them, would know that was not our intent; and the fact that we were not in a bruise, as we called the black-and-blue police cars, told them that neither were we there to harass them. Intricate contracts!

Most of those around us were in Besźel so we saw them. Poverty deshaped the already staid, drab cuts and colours that enduringly characterise Besź clothes—what has been called the city’s fashionless fashion. Of the exceptions, some we realised when we glanced were elsewhere, so unsaw, but the younger Besź were also more colourful, their clothes more pictured, than their parents.

The majority of the Besź men and women (does this need saying?) were doing nothing but walking from one place to another, from late-shift work, from homes to other homes or shops. Still, though, the way we watched what we passed made it a threatening geography, and there were sufficient furtive actions occurring that that did not feel like the rankest paranoia.

“This morning I found a few of the locals I used to talk to,” Corwi said. “Asked if they’d heard anything.” She took us through a darkened place where the balance of crosshatch shifted, and we were silent until the streetlamps around us became again taller and familiarly deco-angled. Under those lights—the street we were on visible in a perspective curve away from us—women stood by the walls selling sex. They watched our approach guardedly. “I didn’t have much luck,” Corwi said.

She had not even had a photograph on that earlier expedition. That early it had been aboveboard contacts: it had been liquor-store clerks; the priests of squat local churches, some the last of the worker-priests, brave old men tattooed with the sickle-and-rood on their biceps and forearms, on the shelves behind them Besź translations of Gutiérrez, Rauschenbusch, Canaan Banana. It had been stoop-sitters. All Corwi had been able to do was ask what they could tell her about events in Pocost Village. They had heard about the murder but knew nothing.

Now we had a picture. Shukman had given it to me. I brandished it as we emerged from the car: literally I brandished it, so the women would see that I brought something to them, that that was the purpose of our visit, not to make arrests.

Corwi knew some of them. They smoked and watched us. It was cold, and like everyone who saw them I wondered at their stockinged legs. We were affecting their business of course-plenty of locals passing by looked up at us and looked away again. I saw a bruise slow down the traffic as it passed us—they must have seen an easy arrest—but the driver and his passenger saw Corwi’s uniform and sped again with a salute. I waved back to their rear lights.

“What do you want?” a woman asked. Her boots were high and cheap. I showed her the picture.

They had cleaned up Fulana Detail’s face. There were marks left—scrapes were visible below the makeup. They could have eradicated them completely from the picture, but the shock those wounds occasioned were useful in questioning. They had taken the picture before they shaved her head. She did not look peaceful. She looked impatient.

“I don’t know her.” “I don’t know her.” I did not see recognition quickly disguised. They gathered in the grey light of the lamp, to the consternation of punters hovering at the edge of the local darkness, passed the picture among themselves and whether or not they made sympathy noises, did not know Fulana.

“What happened?” I gave the woman who asked my card. She was dark, Semitic or Turkish somewhere back. Her Besź was unaccented.

“We’re trying to find out.”

“Do we need to worry?”

After I paused Corwi said, “We’ll tell you if we think you do, Sayra.”

We stopped by a group of young men drinking strong wine outside a pool hall. Corwi took a little of their ribaldry then passed the photograph round.

“Why are we here?” My question was quiet.

“They’re entry-level gangsters, boss,” she told me. “Watch how they react.” But they gave little away if they did know anything. They returned the photograph and took my card impassively.

We repeated this at other gatherings, and afterwards each time we waited several minutes in our car, far enough away that a troubled member of any of the groups might excuse himself or herself and come find us, tell us some dissident scrap that might push us by whatever byways towards the details and family of our dead woman. No one did. I gave my card to many people and wrote down in my notebook the names and descriptions of those few that Corwi told me mattered.

“That’s pretty much everyone I used to know,” she said. Some of the men and women had recognised her, but it had not seemed to make much difference to how she was received. When we agreed that we had finished it was after two in the morning. The half-moon was washed out: after a last intervention we had come to a stop, were standing in a street depleted of even its latest-night frequenters.

“She’s still a question mark.” Corwi was surprised.

“I’ll arrange to have the posters put around the area.”

“Really, boss? Commissar’ll go for that?” We spoke quietly. I wove my fingers into the wire mesh of a fence around a lot filled only with concrete and scrub.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’ll roll over. It’s not that much.”

“It’s a few uniforms for a few hours, and he’s not going to … not for a …”

“We have to shoot for an ID. Fuck it, I’ll put them up myself.” I would arrange for them to be sent out to each of the city’s divisions. When we turned up a name, if Fulana’s story was as we had tentatively intuited, what few resources we had would vanish. We were milking leeway that would eradicate itself.

“You’re the boss, boss.”

“Not really, but I’m the boss of this for a little bit.”

“Shall we?” She indicated the car.

“I’ll walk it to a tram.”

“Serious? Come on, you’ll be hours.” But I waved her off. I walked away to the sounds only of my own steps and some frenzied backstreet dog, towards where the grey glare of our lamps was effaced and I was lit by foreign orange light.

SHUKMAN WAS MORE SUBDUED in his lab than out in the world. I had been on the phone to Yaszek asking for the video of the kids’ interrogation, the previous day, when Shukman contacted me and told me to come. It was cold, of course, and fuggy with chemicals. There was as much dark and many-stained wood as steel in the huge windowless room. There were notice boards on the walls, from each of which grew thickets of papers.

Dirt seemed to lurk in the room’s corners, on the edges of its workstations: but once I had run a finger along a grubby-looking groove by the raised spill-stopper, and it had come back clean. The stains were old. Shukman stood at the head of a steel dissecting table on which, covered with a slightly stained sheet, the contours of her face plain, was our Fulana, staring as we discussed her.

I looked at Hamzinic. He was only slightly older, I suspected, than the dead woman. He stood respectfully close by, his hands folded. By chance or not he stood next to a pinboard to which was attached among the postcards and memos a small gaudy shahada. Hamd Hamzinic was what the murderers of Avid Avid would also term an ébru. These days the term was used mainly by the old-fashioned, the racist, or in a turnabout provocation by the epithet’s targets: one of the best-known Besź hip-hop groups was named Ébru WA.

Technically of course the word was ludicrously inexact for at least half of those to whom it was applied. But for at least two hundred years, since refugees from the Balkans had come hunting sanctuary, quickly expanding the city’s Muslim population, ébru, the antique Besź word for “Jew,” had been press-ganged into service to include the new immigrants, become a collective term for both populations. It was in Besźel’s previously Jewish ghettos that the Muslim newcomers settled.

Even before the refugees’ arrival, indigents of the two minority communities in Besźel had traditionally allied, with jocularity or fear, depending on the politics at the time. Few citizens realise that our tradition of jokes about the foolishness of the middle child derives from a centuries-old humourous dialogue between Besźel’s head rabbi and its chief imam about the intemperance of the Besźel Orthodox Church. It had, they agreed, neither the wisdom of the oldest Abrahamic faith, nor the vigour of its youngest.

A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DöplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DöplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.

The Besźel ghetto was only architecture now, not formal political boundary, tumbledown old houses with newly gentrified chic, clustered between very different foreign alter spaces. Still, that was just the city; it wasn’t an allegory, and Hamd Hamzinic would have faced unpleasantnesses in his studies. I thought slightly better of Shukman: a man of his age and temperament, I was perhaps surprised that Hamzinic felt free to display his statement of faith.

Shukman did not uncover Fulana. She lay between us. They had done something so she lay as if at rest.

“I’ve emailed you the report,” Shukman said. “Twenty-four-, -five-year-old woman. Decent overall health, apart from being dead. Time of death, midnightish the night before last, give or take, of course. Cause of death, puncture wounds to the chest. Four in total, of which one pierced her heart. Some spike or stiletto or something, not a blade. She also has a nasty head wound, and a lot of odd abrasions.” I looked up. “Some under her hair. She was whacked round the side of the head.” He swung his arm in slow-motion mimicry. “Hit her on the left of her skull. I’d say it knocked her out, or at least down and groggy, then the stab wounds were the coup de grace.”

“What was she hit with? In the head?”

“Something heavy and blunt. Could be a fist, if it was big, I suppose, but I seriously doubt it.” He tugged the corner of the sheet away, expertly uncovered the side of her head. The skin was the ugly colour of a dead bruise. “And voilà.” He motioned me closer to her skinheaded scalp.

I got near the smell of preservative. In among the brunette stubble were several little scabbed puncture marks.

“What are they?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re not deep. Something she landed on, I think.” The abrasions were about the size of pencil-points pushed into skin. They covered an area roughly my hand-breadth, irregularly breaking the surface. In places there were lines of them a few millimetres long, deeper in the centre than at either end, where they disappeared.

“Signs of intercourse?”

“Not recently. So if she’s a working girl maybe it was a refusal to do something that got her in this mess.” I nodded. He waited. “We’ve washed her down now,” he said eventually. “But she was covered in dirt, dust, grass stains, all the stuff you’d expect from where she was lying. And rust.”

“Rust?”

“All over. Lots of abrasions, cuts, scrapes, postmortem mostly, and lots of rust.”

I nodded again. I frowned.

“Defensive wounds?”

“No. Came quick and unexpected, or her back was turned. There’s a bunch more scrapes and whatnot on the body.” Shukman pointed to tear marks on her skin. “Consistent with dragging her along. The wear and tear of murder.”

Hamzinic opened his mouth, closed it again. I glanced up at him. He sadly shook his head: No nothing.

Chapter Three

THE POSTERS WERE UP. Mostly around the area our Fulana was found but some in the main streets, in the shopping streets, in Kyezov and Topisza and areas like that. I even saw one when I left my flat.

It wasn’t even very close to the centre. I lived east and south a bit of the Old Town, the top-but-one flat in a six-storey towerlet on VulkovStrász. It is a heavily crosshatched street—clutch by clutch of architecture broken by alterity, even in a few spots house by house. The local buildings are taller by a floor or three than the others, so Besź juts up semiregularly and the roofscape is almost a machicolation.

Laced by the shadows of girdered towers that would loom over it if they were there, Ascension Church is at the end of VulkovStrász, its windows protected by wire grilles, but some of its stained panes broken. A fish market is there every few days. Regularly I would eat my breakfast to the shouts of vendors by their ice buckets and racks of live molluscs. Even the young women who worked there dressed like their grandmothers while behind their stalls, nostalgically photogenic, their hair tied up in dishcloth-coloured scarves, their filleting aprons in patterns of grey and red to minimise the stains of gutting. The men looked, misleadingly or not, straight off their boats, as if they had not put their catches down since they emerged from the sea, until they reached the cobbles below me. The punters in Besźel lingered and smelled and prodded the goods.

In the morning trains ran on a raised line metres from my window. They were not in my city. I did not of course, but I could have stared into the carriages—they were quite that close—and caught the eyes of foreign travellers.

They would have seen only a thin man in early middle age in dressing gown at his morning yoghurt and coffee, shake-folding a copy of a paper—Inkyistor or Iy Déurnem or a smudgy Besźel Journal to keep my English practiced. Usually alone—once in a while one or other of two women about his age might be there. (An economic historian at Besźel University; a writer for an art magazine. They did not know of each other but would not have minded.)

There when I left, a short distance from my front door on a poster stand, Fulana’s face watched me. Though her eyes were closed, they had cropped and tinkered with the picture so that she did not look dead but stupefied. Do you know this woman? it said. It was printed in black and white, on matte paper. Call Extreme Crime Squad, our number. The presence of the poster might be evidence that the local cops were particularly efficient. Maybe they were all over the borough. It might be that, knowing where I lived, they wanted to keep me off their back with one or two strategic placements, especially for my eyes.

It was a couple of kilometres to ECS base. I walked. I walked by the brick arches: at the top, where the lines were, they were elsewhere, but not all of them were foreign at their bases. The ones I could see contained little shops and squats decorated in art graffiti. In Besźel it was a quiet area, but the streets were crowded with those elsewhere. I unsaw them, but it took time to pick past them all. Before I had reached my turning on Via Camir, Yaszek called my mobile.

“We’ve found the van.”

I PICKED UP A CAB, which sped-stalled repeatedly through the traffic. The Pont Mahest was crowded, locally and elsewhere. I had minutes to look into the dirty river as we edged toward the western bank, the smoke and the grimy dockyard ships in the reflected light of mirrored buildings on a foreign waterfront—an enviable finance zone. Besź tugs bobbed in the wakes of ignored water taxis. The van was skew-whiff between buildings. It was not a lot that it was in, but a channel between the premises of an import-exporters and an office block, a stub of space full of trash and wolf shit, linking two larger streets. Crime-scene tape secured both ends—a slight impropriety, as the alley was really crosshatch, but rarely used, so the tape was a common rule-bend in such circumstances. My colleagues were faddling around the vehicle.

“Boss.” It was Yaszek.

“Is Corwi on her way?”

“Yeah, I gave her the info.” Yaszek said nothing about my commandeering of the junior officer. She walked me over. It was an old, beat-up VW, in very bad condition. It was more off-white than grey, but it was darkened with dirt.

“Are you done dusting?” I said. I put on rubber gloves. The mectecs nodded and worked around me.

“It was unlocked,” Yaszek said.

I opened the door. I prodded the split upholstery. A trinket on the dashboard—a hula-dancing plastic saint. I pulled open the glove compartment onto a battered road atlas and dirt. I splayed the pages of the book but there was nothing inside: it was the classic Besź driver’s aid, though an edition old enough to be black and white.

“So how do we know this is it?” Yaszek led me to the rear and pulled it open. I looked in on more dirt, a dank though not sick-making smell at least as much rust as mould, nylon cord, piled-up junk. “What is all this?”

I poked it. A few bits. A little motor from something, rocking; a broken television; remnants of unidentifiable bits and pieces, corkscrewed detritus, on a layer of cloth and dust. Layers of rust and scabs of oxide.

“See that?” Yaszek pointed at stains on the floor. Had I not been looking carefully I might have said it was oil. “A couple of people in the office call it in, a deserted van. The uniforms see its doors are open. I don’t know whether they listen to their alerts or if they’re just thorough when they check through outstandings, but either way we’re lucky.” One of the messages that would have been read to all Besź patrols the previous morning would have requested they investigate and report any grey vehicles, and refer to ECS. We were fortunate these officers had not just called in the impounders. “Anyway they saw some muck on the floor, had it tested. We’re verifying, but it looks like it’s Fulana’s blood type, and we’ll have a definite match soon.”

Lying like a mole below heavy refuse, I leaned down to look under the debris. I moved it gently, tilting the junk. My hand came away red. I looked piece by piece, touched each to gauge their heft. The engine thing might be swung by a pipe that was part of it: the bulk of its base was heavy and would break what it was swung into. It did not look scuffed, though, nor bloodied nor specked with hair. As a murder weapon it did not convince me.

“You’ve not taken anything out?”

“No, no paperwork, no nothing. There was nothing in here. Nothing here except this stuff. We’ll get results in a day or two.”

“There’s so much crap,” I said. Corwi had arrived. A few passersby were hesitating at either end of the alleyway, watching the mectecs working. “It’s not going to be a problem of not enough trace; it’s going to be too much.

“So. Let’s assume for a minute. That junk in there’s got rust all over her. She’s been lying around in there.” The smears had been on her face as well as her body, not concentrated on her hands: she had not tried to push the rubbish away from her, or protect her head. She was unconscious or dead when she was in the van while the rubbish knocked against her.

“Why were they driving around with all this shit?” said Corwi. By that afternoon we had the name and address of the van’s owner, and by the next morning we had verification that the blood was our Fulana’s.

THE MAN’S NAME was Mikyael Khurusch. He was the van’s third owner, officially at least. He had a record, had done time for two assault charges, for theft, the last time four years previously. And—“Look,” said Corwi—he had been done for Sex Buying, had approached a policewoman undercover in a prostitution blackspot. “So we know he’s a John.” He had been off radar since, but was, according to hurried intel, a tradesman selling bits and pieces in the city’s many markets, as well as three days a week from a shop in Mashlin, in western Besźel.

We could connect him and the van, and the van and Fulana—a direct link was what we wanted. I went to my office and checked my messages. Some make-work on the Styelim case, an update from our switchboard on the posters and two hang-ups. Our exchange had promised for two years to upgrade to allow Caller ID.

There had been, of course, many people calling to tell us they recognised Fulana, but only a few—the staff who took those calls knew how to filter the deluded and the malicious and to a startling degree were accurate in their judgements—only a few so far that looked worth chasing. The body was a legal assistant in a small practice in Gyedar borough, who had not been seen for days; or she was, an anonymous voice insisted, “a tart called Rosyn ‘The Pout,’ and that’s all you get from me.” Uniforms were checking.

I told Commissar Gadlem I wanted to go in and talk to Khurusch in his house, get him to volunteer fingerprints, saliva, to cooperate. See how he reacted. If he said no, we could subpoena it and keep him under watch.

“Alright,” Gadlem said. “But let’s not waste time. If he doesn’t play along put him in seqyestre, bring him in.”

I would try not to do that, though Besź law gave us the right. Seqyestre, “half-arrest,” meant we could hold a nonwilling witness or “connected party” for six hours, for preliminary interrogation. We could not take physical evidence, nor, officially, draw conclusions from noncooperation or silence. The traditional use was to get confessions from suspects against whom there was not sufficient evidence to arrest. It was also, occasionally, a useful stalling technique against those we thought might be a flight risk. But juries and lawyers were turning against the technique, and a half-arrestee who did not confess usually had a stronger case later, because we looked too eager. Gadlem, old-fashioned, did not care, and I had my orders.

Khurusch worked out of one of a line of semiactive businesses, in an economically lacklustre zone. We arrived in a hurried operation. Local officers on cooked-up subterfuge had ascertained that Khurusch was there.

We pulled him out of the office, a too-warm dusty room above the shop, industrial calendars and faded patches on the walls between filing cabinets. His assistant stared stupidly and picked up and put down stuff from her desk as we led Khurusch away.

He knew who I was before Corwi or the other uniforms were visible in his doorway. He was enough of a pro, or had been, that he knew he was not being arrested, despite our manner, and that therefore he could have refused to come and I would have had to obey Gadlem. After a moment when he first saw us—during which he stiffened as if considering running, though where?—he came with us down the wobbling iron staircase on the building’s wall, the only entrance. I muttered into a radio and had the armed officers we had had waiting stand down. He never saw them.

Khurusch was a fatly muscular man in a checked shirt as faded and dusty looking as his office walls. He watched me from across the table in our interview room. Yaszek sat; Corwi stood under instructions not to speak, only watch. I walked. We weren’t recording. This wasn’t an interrogation, not technically.

“Do you know why you’re here, Mikyael?”

“No clue.”

“Do you know where your van is?”

He looked up hard and stared at me. His voice changed—suddenly hopeful.

“Is that what this is about?” he said eventually. “The van?” He said a ha and sat a little back. Still guarded but relaxing. “Did you find it? Is that—”

“Find it?”

“It was stolen. Three days ago. Did you? Find it? Jesus. What was … Have you got it? Can I have it back? What happened?”

I looked at Yaszek. She stood and whispered to me, sat again, and watched Khurusch.

“Yes, that’s what this is about, Mikyael,” I said. “What did you think it was about? Actually no, don’t point at me, Mikyael, and shut your mouth until I tell you; I don’t want to know. Here’s the thing, Mikyael. A man like yourself, a delivery man, needs a van. You haven’t reported yours as missing.” I looked down briefly at Yaszek, Are we sure? She nodded. “You’ve not reported it stolen. Now I can see that the loss of that piece of shit and I do stress piece of shit wouldn’t cut you up too badly, not on a human level. Nonetheless, I’m wondering, if it was stolen, I can’t see what would stop you alerting us and indeed your insurance. How can you do your job without it?”

Khurusch shrugged.

“I didn’t get it together. I was going to. I was busy …”

“We know how busy you are, Mik, and still I ask, why didn’t you report it gone?”

“I didn’t get it together. Really there’s nothing fucking dubious—”

“For three days?”

“Have you got it? What happened? It was used for something, wasn’t it? What was it used for?”

“Do you know this woman? Where were you on Tuesday night, Mik?” He stared at the picture.

“Jesus.” He went pale, he did. “Someone was killed? Jesus. Was she hit? Hit and run? Jesus.” He pulled out a dented PDA, then looked up without turning it on. “Tuesday? I was at a meeting. Tuesday night? Christ’s sake I was at a meeting.” He gave a nervous noise. “That was the night the goddamn van got stolen. I was at a meeting, and there’s twenty people can tell you the same.”

“What meeting? Where?”

“In Vyevus.”

“How’d you get there, with no van?”

“In my fucking car! No one’s stolen that. I was at Gamblers Anonymous.” I stared. “Fuck’s sake I go every week. Last four years.”

“Since you were last in prison.”

“Yes since I was in fucking prison, Jesus, what do you think put me there?”

“Assault.”

“Yeah, I broke my fucking bookie’s nose because I was behind and he was threatening me. What do you care? I was in a room full of fucking people on Tuesday night.”

“That’s, what, two hours at the most…”

“Yeah and then afterwards at nine we went to the bar—it’s GA not AA—and I was there till after midnight, and I didn’t go home alone. There’s a woman in my group … They’ll all tell you.”

He was wrong about that. Of the GA group of eighteen, eleven wouldn’t compromise their anonymity. The convenor, a wiry pony-tailed man who went by Zyet, “Bean,” would not give us their names. He was right not to do so. We could have forced him, but why? The seven who would come forward all verified Khurusch’s story.

None was the woman he claimed to have gone home with, but several of them agreed that she existed. We could have found out, but again what would the point have been? The mectecs got excited when we found Khurusch’s DNA on Fulana, but it was a tiny number of his arm hairs on her skin: given how often he hauled things in and out of the vehicle, it proved nothing.

“So why didn’t he tell anyone it was missing?”

“He did,” Yaszek told me. “He just didn’t tell us. But I spoke to the secretary, Ljela Kitsov. He’s been pissing and moaning about it for the last couple of days.”

“He just never got it together to tell us? What does he even do without it?”

“Kitsov says he just piddles stuff up and down across the river. The occasional import, on a very small scale. Pops abroad and picks up stuff to resell: cheap clothes, dodgy CDs.”

“Abroad where?”

“Varna. Bucharest. Turkey sometimes. Ul Qoma, of course.”

“So he’s just too dithery to report the theft?”

“It does happen, boss.”

Of course, and to his rage—despite having not reported it stolen, he was now suddenly eager to have it returned—we wouldn’t give him his van back. We did take him to the pound to verify it was his.

“Yes, it’s mine.” I waited for him to complain about how ill it had been used, but that was obviously its usual colour. “Why can’t I have it? I need it.”

“As I keep saying, it’s a crime scene. You’ll get it when I’m ready. What’s all this for?” He was huffing and grumping, looked into the back of the van. I held him back from touching anything.

“This shit? I don’t fucking know.”

“This, I’m talking about.” The ripped-up cord, the pieces of junk.

“Yeah. I don’t know what it is. I didn’t put it here. Don’t look at me like that—why would I carry garbage like this?”

I said to Corwi in my office afterwards: “Please, do please stop me if you have any ideas, Lizbyet. Because I’m seeing a may-or-may-not-be working girl, who no one recognises, dumped in plain sight, in a stolen van, into which was carefully placed a load of crap, for no reason. And none of it’s the murder weapon, you know—that’s pretty certain.” I prodded the paper on my desk that told me.

“There’s rubbish all over that estate,” she said. “There’s rubbish all over Besźel; he could’ve picked it up anywhere. ‘He’ … They, maybe.”

“Picked it up, stashed it, dumped it, and the van with it.”

Corwi sat rather stiff, waiting for me to say something. All the rubbish had done was roll into the dead woman and rust her as if she, too, were old iron.

Chapter Four

BOTH OF THE LEADS WERE BOGUS. The office assistant had resigned and not bothered to tell them. We found her in Byatsialic, in the east of Besźel. She was mortified to have caused us trouble. “I never hand in notice,” she kept saying. “Not when they’re employers like that. And this has never happened, nothing like this.” Corwi found Rosyn “The Pout” without any difficulty. She was working her usual pitch.

“She doesn’t look anything like Fulana, boss.” Corwi showed me a jpeg Rosyn had been happy to pose for. We couldn’t trace the source of that spurious information, delivered with such convincing authority, nor work out why anyone would have mistaken the two women. Other information came in that I sent people to chase. I found messages and blank messages on my work phone.

It rained. On the kiosk outside my front door the printout of Fulana softened and streaked. Someone put up a glossy flyer for an evening of Balkan techno so it covered the top half of her face. The club night emerged from her lips and chin. I unpinned the new poster. I did not throw it away—only moved it so Fulana was visible again, her closed eyes next to it. DJ Radic and the Tiger Kru. Hard Beats. I did not see any other pictures of Fulana though Corwi assured me they were there, in the city.

Khurusch was all over the van, of course, but with the exception of those few hairs Fulana was clean of him. As if all those recovering gamblers would lie, anyway. We tried to take the names of any contacts to whom he had ever lent the van. He mentioned a few but insisted it had been stolen by a stranger. On the Monday after we found the body I took a call.

“Borlú.” I said my name again after a long pause, and it was repeated back to me.

“Inspector Borlú.”

“Help you?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could help me days ago. I’ve been trying to reach you. I can help you more like.” The man spoke with a foreign accent.

“What? I’m sorry, I need you to speak up—it’s a really bad line.”

It was staticking, and the man sounded as if he was a recording on an antique machine. I could not tell if the lag was on the line, or if he was taking a long time to respond to me each time I said anything. He spoke a good but odd Besź, punctuated with archaisms. I said, “Who is this? What do you want?”

“I have information for you.”

“Have you spoken to our info-line?”

“I can’t.” He was calling from abroad. The feedback from Besźel’s outdated exchanges was distinctive. “That’s kind of the point.”

“How did you get my number?”

“Borlú, shut up.” I wished again for logging telephones. I sat up. “Google. Your name’s in the papers. You’re in charge of the investigation into the girl. It’s not hard to get past assistants. Do you want me to help you or not?”

I actually looked around but there was no one with me. “Where are you calling from?” I parted the blinds in my window as if I might see someone watching me from the street. Of course I did not.

“Come on Borlú. You know where I’m calling from.”

I was making notes. I knew the accent.

He was calling from Ul Qoma.

“You know where I’m calling from and that is why please don’t bother asking my name.”

“You’re not doing anything illegal talking to me.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. You don’t know what I’m going to tell you. It is—” He broke off, and I heard him mutter something with his hand over the phone, for a moment. “Look Borlú, I don’t know where you stand on things like this but I think it is lunatic, an insult, that I am speaking to you from another country.”

“I’m not a political man. Listen, if you’d rather…” I started the last sentence in Illitan, the language of Ul Qoma.

“This is fine.” He interrupted in his old-fashioned Illitan-inflected Besź. “It’s the same damn-faced language anyway.” I wrote that he said that. “Now shut up. Do you want to hear my information?”

“Of course.” I was standing, reaching, trying to work out a way to trace this. My line was not equipped, and it would take hours to go backwards, through BesźTel, even if I could get hold of them while he was speaking to me.

“The woman who you’re … She’s dead. Isn’t she? She is. I knew her.”

“I’m sorry to …” I only said this after he was silent many seconds.

“I’ve known her … I met her a time ago. I want to help you, Borlú, but not because you’re a cop. Holy Light. I don’t recognize your authority. But if Marya was … if she was killed, then some people I care about may not be safe. Including the one I care about most, my very own self. And she deserves … So—this is all I know.

“Her name’s Marya. That’s what she went by. I met her here. Ul Qoma-here. I’m telling you what I can, but I never knew much. Not my business. She was a foreigner. I knew her from politics. She was serious—committed, you know? Just not to what I thought at first. She knew a lot; she was no time-waster.”

“Look,” I said.

“That’s all I can tell you. She lived here.”

“She was in Besźel.”

“Come on.” He was angry. “Come on. Not officially. She couldn’t. Even if she was, she was here. Go look at the cells, the radicals. Someone’ll know who she is. She went everywhere. All the underground. Both sides, must have done. She wanted to go everywhere because she needed to know everything. And she did. That’s all.”

“How did you find out that she’d been killed?” I heard his hiss of breath.

“Borlú, if you really mean that you’re stupid and I’m wasting my time. I recognized her picture, Borlú. Do you think I’d be helping you if I didn’t think I had to? If I didn’t think this was important? How do you think I found out? I saw your fucking poster.”

He put the phone down. I held my receiver to my ear a while as if he might return.

I saw your poster. When I looked down at my notepad, I had written on it, beside the details he had given me, shit/shit/shit.

I DID NOT STAY in the office much longer. “Are you alright, Tyador?” Gadlem said. “You look …” I’m sure I did. At a pavement stall I had a strong coffee aj Tyrko—Turkish style—a mistake. I was even more antsy.

It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.

I dialled the number of Sariska, the historian, that evening. Sex would have been good, but also sometimes she liked to talk over cases that I was working on, and she was smart. I dialled her number twice but disconnected twice before she could respond. I would not involve her in this. A disguised-as-hypothesis infraction of the confidentiality clause on ongoing investigations was one thing. Making her accessory to breach was another.

I kept coming back to that shit/shit/shit. In the end I got home with two bottles of wine and set out slowly—cushioning them in my stomach with a pick-pick supper of olives, cheese, sausage—to finish them. I made more useless notes, some in arcane diagram form as if I might draw a way out, but the situation—the conundrum—was clear. I might be the victim of a pointless and laboured hoax, but it did not seem likely. More probable was that the man on the telephone had been telling the truth.

In which case I had been given a major lead, close information about Fulana-Marya. I had been told where to go and who to chase to find out more. Which it was my job to do. But if it came out that I acted on the information no conviction would ever stand. And much more serious, it would be far worse than illegal for me to pursue it, not only illegal according to Besź codes—I would be in breach.

My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel—the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit. It was done. (Perhaps because I was drunk it did not occur to me then that it had not been necessary for him to tell me how he had come by the information, and that he had to have had reasons for doing so.)

I WOULD NOT, but who would not be tempted to burn or shred the notes of that conversation? Of course I would not, but. I sat up late at my kitchen table with them spread out in front of me, idly writing shit/shit on them crosswise from time to time. I put on music: Little Miss Train, a collaboration, Van Morrison duetting with Coirsa Yakov, the Besź Umm Kalsoum as she was called, on his 1987 tour. I drank more and put the picture of Marya Fulana Unknown Foreign Detail Breacher next to the notes.

No one knew her. Perhaps, God help us, she had not been properly here in Besźel at all, though Pocost was a total area. She could have been dragged there. The kids finding her body, the whole investigation, might be breach too. I should not incriminate myself by pushing this. I should perhaps just walk away from the investigation and let her moulder. It was escapism for a moment to pretend I might do so. In the end I would do my job, though doing it meant breaking a code, an existential protocol more basic by a long way than any I was paid to enforce.

As kids we used to play Breach. It was never a game I much enjoyed, but I would take my turn creeping over chalked lines and chased by my friends, their faces in ghastly expressions, their hands crooked as claws. I would do the chasing too, if it was my turn to be invoked. That, along with pulling sticks and pebbles out of the ground and claiming them the magic Besź mother lode, and the tag /hide-and-seek crossbreed called Insile Hunt, were regular games.

There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it. There is a sect in Besźel that worships Breach. It’s scandalous but not completely surprising given the powers involved. There is no law against the congregation, though the nature of their religion makes everyone twitchy. They have been the subject of prurient TV programs.

At three in the morning I was drunk and very awake, looking over the streets of Besźel (and more—the crosshatch). I could hear the barking of dogs and a call or two of some scrawny, wormy street wolf. The papers—both sides of the argument still as if it were that, an argument—were all over the table. Fulana-Marya’s face was wineglass-ringed, as were the illegal shit/shit/shit notes.

It is not uncommon for me to fail to sleep. Sariska and Biszaya were used to sleepily walking from the bedroom to the bathroom to find me reading at the kitchen table, chewing so much gum that I would get sugar blisters (I would not take up smoking again). Or looking over the night city and (inevitably, unseeing but touched by its light) the other city.

Sariska laughed at me once. “Look at you,” she said, not without affection. “Sitting there like an owl. Melancholy bloody gargoyle. You mawkish bugger. You don’t get any insight, you know, just because it’s night. Just because some buildings have their lights on.” She was not there to tease me though just then and I wanted whatever insight I could get, even spurious, so I looked on out.

Planes went over the clouds. Cathedral spires were lit by glass skyscrapers. Recurved and crescent neoned architecture across the border. I tried to hook up my computer to look some stuff up, but the only connection I had was dial-up and it was all very frustrating so I stopped.

“Details later.” I think I actually said it aloud. I made more notes. Eventually, at last, I called the direct line to Corwi’s desk.

“Lizbyet. I’ve had a thought.” My instinct as always when I lie was to say too much, too quickly. I made myself speak as if idly. She was not stupid though. “It’s late. I’m just leaving this for you because I’m probably not going to be in tomorrow. We’re not getting anywhere with the street-beat, so it’s pretty obvious it’s not what we thought—someone would’ve recognised her. We’ve got the picture out to all the precincts, so if she’s a street girl off her patch maybe we’ll get lucky. But meanwhile I’d like to look in a couple of other directions while we can keep this running.

“I’m thinking, look, she’s not in her area, it’s a weird situation, we can’t get any beep. I was talking to a guy I know in Dissident Unit, and he was saying how secretive the people he’s watching are. It’s all Nazis and reds and unifs and so on. Anyway it got me thinking about what kind of people hide their identities, and while we’ve still got any time I’d like to chase that a bit. What I’m thinking is—hold on I’m just looking at some notes … Okay, might as well start with unifs.

“Talk to the Kook Squad. See what you can get by way of addresses, chapters—I don’t know much about it. Ask for Shenvoi’s office. Tell him you’re on a job for me. Go by the ones you can, take the pictures, see if anyone recognises her. I don’t need to tell you they’re going to be weird with you—they’re not going to want you around. But see what you can do. Keep in touch, I’ll be on the mobile. Like I say, I won’t be in. Okay. Talk tomorrow. Okay, bye.”

“That was terrible.” I think I said that aloud too.

When I had done that I called the number of Taskin Cerush in our admin pool. I had been careful to take a note of her direct line when she had helped me through bureaucracy three or four cases ago. I had kept in touch. She was excellent at her job.

“Taskin, this is Tyador Borlú. Can you please call me on my mobile tomorrow or when you get the chance and let me know what I might have to do if I wanted to put a case to the Oversight Committee? If I wanted to push a case to Breach. Hypothetically.” I winced and laughed. “Keep this to yourself, okay? Thanks, Task. Just let me know what I need to do and if you’ve got any handy insider suggestions. Thanks.”

There had not been much question about what my terrible informant had been telling me. The phrases I had copied and underlined.

same language

recognise authority—not

both sides of the city

It made sense of why he would call me, why the crime of it, of what he’d seen, or that he’d seen it, would not detain him as it would most. Mostly he had done it because he was afraid, of whatever Marya-Fulana’s death implied for him. What he had told me was that his coconspirators in Besźel might very possibly have seen Marya, that she would not have respected borders. And if any group of troublemakers in Besźel would be complicit in that particular kind of crime and taboo, it would be my informer and his comrades. They were obviously unificationists.

SARISKA MOCKED ME in my mind as I turned back to that night-lit city, and this time I looked and saw its neighbour. Illicit, but I did. Who hasn’t done that at times? There were gasrooms I shouldn’t see, chambers dangling ads, tethered by skeletal metal frames. On the street at least one of the passersby—I could tell by the clothes, the colours, the walk—was not in Besźel, and I watched him anyway.

I turned to the railway lines a few metres by my window and waited until, as I knew it would eventually, a late train came. I looked into its rapidly passing, illuminated windows, and into the eyes of the few passengers, a very few of whom even saw me back, and were startled. But they were gone fast, over the conjoined sets of roofs: it was a brief crime, and not their faults. They probably did not feel guilty for long. They probably did not remember that stare. I always wanted to live where I could watch foreign trains.

Chapter Five

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW much about them, Illitan and Besź sound very different. They are written, of course, in distinct alphabets. Besź is in Besź: thirty-four letters, left to right, all sounds rendered clear and phonetic, consonants, vowels and demivowels decorated with diacritics—it looks, one often hears, like Cyrillic (though that is a comparison likely to annoy a citizen of Besźel, true or not). Illitan uses Roman script. That is recent.

Read the travelogues of the last-but-one century and those older, and the strange and beautiful right-to-left Illitan calligraphy—and its jarring phonetics—is constantly remarked on. At some point everyone has heard Sterne, from his travelogue: “In the Land of Alphabets Arabic caught Dame Sanskrit’s eye (drunk he was despite Muhamed’s injunctions, else her age would have dissuaded). Nine months later a disowned child was put out. The feral babe is Illitan, Hermes-Aphrodite not without beauty. He has something of both his parents in his form, but the voice of those who raised him—the birds.”

The script was lost in 1923, overnight, a culmination of Ya Ilsa’s reforms: it was Atatürk who imitated him, not, as is usually claimed, the other way around. Even in Ul Qoma, no one can read Illitan script now but archivists and activists.

Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.

Besźel’s dark ages are very dark. Sometime between two thousand and seventeen hundred years ago the city was founded, here in this curl of coastline. There are still remains from those times in the heart of the town, when it was a port hiding a few kilometres up the river to shelter from the pirates of the shore. The city’s founding came at the same time as another’s, of course. The ruins are surrounded now or in some places incorporated, antique foundations, into the substance of the city. There are older ruins too, like the mosaic remnants in Yozhef Park. These Romanesque remains predate Besźel, we think. We built Besźel on their bones, perhaps.

It may or may not have been Besźel, that we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones. Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined with its neighbour. I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.

“BOSS.” Lizbyet Corwi called me. “Boss you are on fire. How did you know? Meet me at sixty-eight BudapestStrász.”

I had not yet dressed in day clothes though it was after noon. My kitchen table was a landscape of papers. The books I had on politics and history were propped in a Babel-tower by the milk. I should keep my laptop from the mess, but I never bothered. I brushed cocoa away from my notes. The blackface character on my French drinking chocolate smiled at me. “What are you talking about? What’s that address?”

“It’s in Bundalia,” she said. An industrial presuburb northwest of Funicular Park, by the river. “And are you kidding me what is it? I did what you said—I asked around, got the basic gist of which groups there are, who thinks what of each other, blah blah. I spent the morning going round, asking questions. Putting the fear in. Can’t say you get much respect from these bastards with the uniform on, you know? And I can’t say I had much hopes for this, but I figured what the hell else did we have to do? Anyway I’m going around trying to get a sense of the politics and whatnot, and one of the guys at one of the—I guess you’d say lodges maybe—he starts to give me something. Wasn’t going to admit it at first, but I could tell. You’re a fucking genius, sir. Sixty-eight BudapestStrász is a unificationist HQ.”

Her awe was already close to suspicion. She would have looked at me even harder if she had seen the documents on my table, that I had negotiated with my hands when she phoned me. Several books were open to their indices, propped to show what references they had to unificationism. I really had not come across the BudapestStrász address.

In typical political cliché, unificationists were split on many axes. Some groups were illegal, sister-organisations in both Besźel and Ul Qoma. The banned had at various points in their history advocated the use of violence to bring the cities to their God-, destiny-, history-, or people-intended unity. Some had, mostly cack-handedly, targeted nationalist intellectuals—bricks through windows and shit through doors. They had been accused of furtively propagandising among refugees and new immigrants with limited expertise at seeing and unseeing, at being in one particular city. The activists wanted to weaponise such urban uncertainty.

These extremists were vocally criticised by others keen to retain freedom of movement and assembly, whatever their secret thoughts and whatever threads connected them all out of view. There were other divisions, between different visions of what the united city would be like, what would be its language, what would be its name. Even these legal grouplets would be watched without ceasing, and checked up on regularly by the authorities in whichever their city. “Swiss cheese,” Shenvoi said when I spoke to him that morning. “Probably more informers and moles in the unifs even than in the True Citizens or Nazis or other nutters. I wouldn’t worry about them—they’re not going to do dick without the say-so of someone in security.”

Also, the unifs must know, though they would hope never to see proof of it, that nothing they did would be unknown to Breach. That meant I would be under Breach’s purview too, during my visit, if I was not already.

Always the question of how to get through the city. I should have taxied as Corwi was waiting, but no, two trams, a change at Vencelas Square. Swaying under the carved and clockwork figures of Besź burghers on the town facades, ignoring, unseeing, the shinier fronts of the elsewhere, the alter parts.

The length of BudapestStrász, patches of winter buddleia frothed out from old buildings. It’s a traditional urban weed in Besźel, but not in Ul Qoma, where they trim it as it intrudes, so BudapestStrász being the Besźel part of a crosshatched area, each bush, unflowered at that time, emerged unkempt for one or two or three local buildings, then would end in a sharp vertical plane at the edge of Besźel.

The buildings in Besźel were brick and plaster, each surmounted with one of the household Lares staring at me, a little manlike grotesque, and bearded with that weed. A few decades before these places would not have been so tumbling down; they would have emitted more noise and the street would have been filled with young clerks in dark suits and visiting foremen. Behind the northern buildings were industrial yards, and beyond them a curl in the river, where docks used to bustle and where their iron skeletons still graveyard lay.

Back then the region of Ul Qoma that shared the space had been quiet. It had grown more noisy: the neighbours had moved in economic antiphase. As the river industry of Besźel had slowed, Ul Qoma’s business picked up, and now there were more foreigners walking on the worn-down crosshatched cobbles than Besź locals. The once-collapsing Ul Qoma rookeries, crenellated and lumpenbaroque (not that I saw them—I unsaw carefully, but they still registered a little, illicitly, and I remembered the styles from photographs), were renovated, the sites of galleries and .uq startups.

I watched the local buildings’ numbers. They rose in stutters, interspersed with foreign alter spaces. In Besźel the area was pretty unpeopled, but not elsewhere across the border, and I had to unseeing dodge many smart young businessmen and -women. Their voices were muted to me, random noise. That aural fade comes from years of Besź care. When I reached the tar-painted front where Corwi waited with an unhappy-looking man, we stood together in a near-deserted part of Besźel city, surrounded by a busy unheard throng.

“Boss. This is Pall Drodin.”

Drodin was a tall and thin man in his late thirties. He wore several rings in his ears, a leather jacket with obscure and unmerited membership insignia of various military and other organisations on it, anomalously smart though dirty trousers. He eyed me unhappily, smoking.

He was not arrested. Corwi had not taken him in. I nodded a greeting to her, then turned around slowly 180 degrees and looked at the buildings around us. I focused only the Besź ones, of course.

“Breach?” I said. Drodin looked startled. So in truth did Corwi, though she covered it. When Drodin said nothing I said, “Don’t you think we’re watched by powers?”

“Yeah, no, we are.” He sounded resentful. I am sure he was. “Sure. Sure. You asking me where they are?” It is a more or less meaningless question but one that no Besź nor Ul Qoman can banish. Drodin did not look anywhere other than in my eyes. “You see the building over the road? The one that used to be a match factory?” A mural’s remains in scabs of paint almost a century old, a salamander smiling through its corona of flames. “You see stuff moving, in there. Stuff you know, like, comes and goes, like it shouldn’t.”

“So you can see them appear?” He looked uneasy again. “You think that’s where they manifest?”

“No no, but process of elimination.”

“Drodin, get in. We’ll be in in a second,” Corwi said. Nodded him in and he went. “What the fuck, boss?”

“Problem?”

“All this Breach shit.” She lowered her voice on Breach. “What are you doing?” I did not say anything. “I’m trying to establish a power dynamic here and I’m at the end of it, not Breach, boss. I don’t want that shit in the picture. Where the fuck you getting this spooky shit from?” When I still said nothing she shook her head and led me inside.

The Besźqoma Solidarity Front did not make much of an effort with their decor. There were two rooms, two and a half at generous count, full of cabinets and shelves stacked with files and books. In one corner wall space had been cleared and cleaned, it looked like, for backdrop, and a webcam pointed at it and an empty chair.

“Broadcasts,” Drodin said. He saw where I was looking. “Online.” He started to tell me a web address until I shook my head.

“Everyone else left when I came in,” Corwi told me.

Drodin sat down behind his desk in the back room. There were two other chairs in there. He did not offer them, but Corwi and I sat anyway. More mess of books, a dirty computer. On a wall a large-scale map of Besźel and Ul Qoma. To avoid prosecution the lines and shades of division were there—total, alter, and crosshatched—but ostentatiously subtle, distinctions of greyscale. We sat looking at each other a while.

“Look,” Drodin said. “I know … you understand I’m not used to … You guys don’t like me, and that’s fine, that’s understood.” We said nothing. He played with some of the things on his desktop. “And I’m no snitch either.”

“Jesus, Drodin,” Corwi said, “if it’s absolution you’re after, get a priest.” But he continued.

“It’s just… If this has something to do with what she was into, then you’re all going to think it has something to do with us and maybe it even might have something to do with us and I’m giving no one any excuses to come down on us. You know? You know?”

“Alright enough,” Corwi said. “Cut the shit.” She looked around the room. “I know you think you’re clever, but seriously, how many misdemeanours do you think I’m looking at right now? Your map, for a start—You reckon it’s careful, but it wouldn’t take a particularly patriotic prosecutor to interpret it in a way that’ll leave you inside. What else? You want me to go through your books? How many are on the proscribed list? Want me to go through your papers? This place has Insulting Besź Sovereignty in the Second Degree flashing over it like neon.”

“Like the Ul Qoma club districts,” I said. “Ul Qoma neon. Would you like that, Drodin? Prefer it to the local variety?”

“So while we appreciate your help, Mr. Drodin, let’s not kid ourselves as to why you’re doing it.”

“You don’t understand.” He muttered it. “I have to protect my people. There’s weird shit out there. There’s weird shit going on.”

“Alright,” Corwi said. “Whatever. What’s the story, Drodin?” She took the photograph of Fulana and put it in front of him. “Tell my boss what you started telling me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s her.” Corwi and I leaned forward. Perfect synchronised timing.

I said, “What’s her name?”

“What she said, she said her name was Byela Mar.” Drodin shrugged. “It’s what she said. I know, but what can I tell you?”

It was an obvious, and elegantly punning, pseudonym. Byela is a unisex Besź name; Mar is at least plausible as a surname. Together their phonemes approximate the phrase byé lai mar, literally “only the baitfish,” a fishing phrase to say “nothing worth noting.”

“It isn’t unusual. Lots of our contacts and members go by handles.”

“Noms,” I said, “de unification.” I could not tell if he understood. “Tell us about Byela.” Byela, Fulana, Marya was accruing names.

“She was here I don’t know, three years ago or so? Bit less? I hadn’t seen her since then. She was obviously foreign.”

“From Ul Qoma?”

“No. Spoke okay Illitan but not fluent. She’d talk in Besź or Illitan—or, well, the root. I never heard her talk anything else—she wouldn’t tell me where she came from. From her accent I’d say American or English maybe. I don’t know what she was doing. It’s not… it’s kind of rude to ask too much about people in this line.”

“So, what, she came to meetings? She was an organiser?” Corwi turned to me and said without lowering her voice, “I don’t even know what it is these fuckers do, boss. I don’t even know what to ask.” Drodin watched her, no more sour than he had been since we arrived.

“She turned up like I said a couple of years ago. She wanted to use our library. We’ve got pamphlets and old books on … well on the cities, a lot of stuff they don’t stock in other places.”

“We should take a look, boss,” Corwi said. “See there’s nothing inappropriate.”

“Fuck’s sake, I’m helping, aren’t I? You want to get me on banned books? There’s nothing Class One, and the Class Twos we got are mostly available on-fucking-line anyway.”

“Alright alright,” I said. Pointed for him to continue.

“So she came and we talked a lot. She wasn’t here long. Like a couple of weeks. Don’t ask me about what she did otherwise and stuff like that because I don’t know. All I know is every day she’d come by at odd times and look at books, or talk to me about our history, the history of the cities, about what was going on, about our campaigns, that kind of thing.”

“What campaigns?”

“Our brothers and sisters in prison. Here and in Ul Qoma. For nothing but their beliefs. Amnesty International’s on our side there, you know. Talking to contacts. Education. Helping new immigrants. Demos.” In Besźel, unificationist demonstrations were fractious, small, dangerous things. Obviously the local nationalists would come out to break them up, screaming at the marchers as traitors, and in general the most apolitical local wouldn’t have much sympathy for them. It was almost as bad in Ul Qoma, except it was more unlikely they would be allowed to gather in the first place. That must have been a source of anger, though it certainly saved the Ul Qoman unifs from beatings.

“How did she look? Did she dress well? What was she like?”

“Yeah she did. Smart. Almost chic, you know? Stood out here.” He even laughed at himself. “And she was clever. I really liked her at first, you know? I was really excited. At first.”

His pauses were requests for us to chivvy him, so that none of this discussion was at his behest. “But?” I said. “What happened?”

“We had an argument. Actually I only had an argument with her because she was giving some of the other comrades shit, you know? I’d walk into the library or downstairs or whatever and someone or other would be shouting at her. She was never shouting at them, but she’d be talking quietly and driving them mad, and in the end I had to tell her to go. She was … she was dangerous.” Another silence. Corwi and I looked at each other. “No I ain’t exaggerating,” he said. “She brought you here, didn’t she? I told you she was dangerous.”

He picked up the photograph and studied it. Across his face went pity, anger, dislike, fear. Fear, certainly. He got up, walked in a circle around his desk—ridiculous, too small a room to pace, but he tried.

“See the problem was …” He went to his small window and looked out, turned back to us. He was silhouetted against the skyline, of Besźel or Ul Qoma or both I could not tell.

“She was asking all this stuff about some of the kookiest underground bollocks. Old wives’ tales, rumours, urban myths, craziness. I didn’t think much of it because we get a lot of that shit, and she was obviously smarter than the loons into it, so I figured she was just feeling her way around, getting to know stuff.”

“Weren’t you curious?”

“Sure. Young foreign girl, clever, mysterious? Intense?” He mocked himself with how he said that. He nodded. “Sure I was. I’m curious about all the people who come here. Some of them tell me shit, some of them don’t. But I wouldn’t be leader of this chapter if I went around pumping them. There’s a woman here, a lot older than me … I been meeting her on and off for fifteen years. Don’t know her real name, or anything about her. Okay, bad example because I’m pretty sure she’s one of your lot, an agent, but you get the point. I don’t ask.”

“What was she into, then? Byela Mar. Why did you kick her out?”

“Look, here’s the thing. You’re into this stuff…” I felt Corwi stiffen as if she would interrupt him, needle him to get on with it, and I touched her no, wait, to give him his head on this. He was not looking at us but at his provocative map of the cities. “You’re into this stuff you know you’re skirting with … well, you know you step out of line you’re going to get serious trouble. Like having you lot here, for a start. Or make the wrong phone call we can put our brothers in shit, in Ul Qoma, with the cops there. Or—or there’s worse.” He looked at us then. “She couldn’t stay, she was going to bring Breach down on us. Or something.

“She was into … No, she wasn’t into anything, she was obsessed. With Orciny.”

He was looking at me carefully, so I did nothing but narrow my eyes. I was surprised, though.

By how she did not move it was clear that Corwi did not know what Orciny was. It might undermine her to go into it here, but as I hesitated he was explaining. It was a fairy tale. That was what he said.

“Orciny’s the third city. It’s between the other two. It’s in the dissensi, disputed zones, places that Besźel thinks are Ul Qoma’s and Ul Qoma Besźel’s. When the old commune split, it didn’t split into two, it split into three. Orciny’s the secret city. It runs things.”

If split there was. That beginning was a shadow in history, an unknown—records effaced and vanished for a century either side. Anything could have happened. From that historically brief quite opaque moment came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. All we know is nomads on the steppes, then those black-box centuries of urban instigation—certain events, and there have been films and stories and games based on speculation (all making the censor at least a little twitchy) about that dual birth—then history comes back and there are Besźel and Ul Qoma. Was it schism or conjoining?

As if that were not mystery enough and as if two crosshatched countries were insufficient, bards invented that third, the pretend-existing Orciny. On top floors, in ignorable Roman-style town-houses, in the first wattle-and-daub dwellings, taking up the intricately conjoined and disjointed spaces allotted it in the split or coagulation of the tribes, the tiny third city Orciny ensconced, secreted between the two brasher city-states. A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip. Orciny was where the Illuminati lived. That sort of thing.

Some decades previously there would have been no need for explanations—Orciny stories had been children’s standards, alongside the tribulations of “King Shavil and the Sea-Monster That Came to Harbour.” Harry Potter and Power Rangers are more popular now, and fewer children know those older fables. That’s alright.

“Are you saying—what?” I interrupted him. “You’re saying that Byela was a folklorist? She was into old stories?” He shrugged. He would not look at me. I tried again to make him out and say what he was implying. He would only shrug. “Why would she be talking to you about this?” I said. “Why was she even here?”

“I don’t know. We have stuff on it. It comes up. You know? They have them in Ul Qoma, too, you know, Orciny stories. We don’t just keep documents on, you know, just just what we’re into. You know? We know our history, we keep all kinds of…” He trailed off. “I realised it wasn’t us she was interested in, you know?”

Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say they didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research. Their library must have defensively complete holdings of anything that even implied a blurring of urban boundaries. She had come—you could see it—seeking information not on some ur-unity but on Orciny. What an annoyance when they realised her odd researches weren’t quirks of investigation but the very point. When they realised that she did not much care about their project.

“So she was a time-waster?”

“No, man, she was dangerous, like I said. For real. She’d cause trouble for us. She said she wasn’t sticking around anyway.” He shrugged his shoulders vaguely.

“Why was she dangerous?” I leaned in. “Drodin, was she breaching?”

“Jesus, I don’t think so. If she did I don’t know shit about it.” He put up his hands. “Fuck’s sake, you know how watched we are?” He jerked his hand in the direction of the street. “We’ve got you lot on a semipermanent patrol in the area. Ul Qoman cops can’t watch us, obviously, but they’re on our brothers and sisters. And more to the goddamned point, watching us out there is … you know. Breach.”

We were all silent a moment then. We all felt watched.

“You’ve seen it?”

“Course not. What do I look like? Who sees it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse … we’re gone. Do you …” He shook his head, and when he looked back at me it was with anger and perhaps hate. “Do you know how many of my friends have been taken? That I’ve never seen again? We’re more careful than anyone.”

It was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.

Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car. If Byela, Fulana, had been breaching, she would have brought that in. So it was likely not suspicion of that specifically that had made Drodin afraid.

“There was just something.” He looked up out of the window at the two cities. “Maybe she would, she would have brought Breach on us, eventually. Or something.”

“Hang on,” Corwi said. “You said she was leaving …”

“She said she was going over. To Ul Qoma. Officially.” I paused from scribbling notes. I looked at Corwi and she at me. “Didn’t see her again. Someone heard she’d gone and they wouldn’t let her back here.” He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true, and if it is I don’t know why. It was just a matter of time … She was poking around in dangerous shit, it gave me a bad feeling.”

“That’s not all, though, is it?” I said. “What else?” He stared at me.

“I don’t know, man. She was trouble, she was scary, there was too much … there was just something. When she was going on and on about all the stuff she was into, it started to give you the creeps. Made you nervous.” He looked out of the window again. He shook his head.

“I’m sorry she died,” he said. “I’m sorry someone killed her. But I’m not that surprised.”

THAT STINK OF INSINUATION and mystery—however cynical or uninterested you thought yourself it stuck to you. I saw Corwi look up and around at the shabby fronts of the warehouses when we left. Perhaps seeing a little long in the direction of a shop she must realise was in Ul Qoma. She felt watched. We both did, and we were right, and fidgety.

When we drove out, I took Corwi—a provocation I admit though not aimed at her but at the universe in some way—for lunch in Besźel’s little Ul Qomatown. It was south of the park. With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the buildings’ designs, a squat self-parody. You can see the trimmings in the shade called Besźel Blue, one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma. These properties are local.

These few streets—mongrel names, Illitan nouns and a Besź suffix, YulSainStrász, LiligiStrász, and so on—were the centre of the cultural world for the small community of Ul Qoman expatriates living in Besźel. They had come for various reasons—political persecution, economic self-betterment (and how the patriarchs who had gone through the considerable difficulties of emigrating for that reason must be rueing it now), whim, romance. Most of those aged forty and below are second and now third generation, speaking Illitan at home but Besź without an accent in the streets. There is maybe an Ul Qoman influence to their clothes. At various times local bullies and worse break their windows and beat them in the streets.

This is where pining Ul Qoman exiles come for their pastries, their sugar-fried peas, their incense. The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions, or even rubbish, sewage, and, spoken by the daring, pigeons or wolves). But those smells are in Besźel.

Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.

“Boss,” Corwi said. We sat at a corner café, Con ul Cai, that I frequented. I had made a great show of greeting the proprietor by name, like doubtless many of his Besź clientele. Probably he despised me. “Why the fuck are we here?”

“Come on,” I said. “Ul Qoman food. Come on. You know you want it.” I offered her cinnamon lentils, thick sweet tea. She declined. “We’re here,” I said, “because I’m trying to soak up the atmosphere. I’m trying to get into the spirit of Ul Qoma. Shit. You’re smart, Corwi, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know here. Help me with this.” I counted off on my fingers. “She was here, this girl. This Fulana, Byela.” I almost said Marya. “She was here—what?—three years ago. She was around dodgy local politicos, but she was looking for something else, which they couldn’t help her with. Something even they thought was dodgy. She leaves.” I waited. “She was going to Ul Qoma.” I swore, Corwi swore.

“She’s been researching stuff,” I said. “She goes over.”

“We think.”

“We think. Then suddenly she’s back here.”

“Dead.”

“Dead.”

“Fuck.” Corwi leaned in, took and began thoughtfully to eat one of my pastries, stopped mouth full. For a long time neither of us said anything.

“It is. It’s fucking breach, isn’t it?” Corwi said eventually.

“… It looks like it might be breach, I think—yes I think it does.”

“If not to get over, to come back. Where she gets done. Or postmortem. Gets dumped.”

“Or something. Or something,” I said.

“Unless she crossed legit, or she’s been here the whole time. Just because Drodin’s not seen her…”

I recalled the phone call. I made a sceptical maybe face. “Could be. He seemed pretty sure. It’s sus, whatever.”

“Well…”

“Alright. So say it’s breach: that’s alright.”

“Bullshit it is.”

“No, listen,” I said. “That means it wouldn’t be our problem. Or at least… if we can persuade the Oversight Committee. Maybe I’ll get that started.”

She glowered. “They’ll give you shit. I heard they were getting—”

“We’ll have to present our evidence. It’s circumstantial so far but might be enough to get it passed over.”

“Not from what I heard.” She looked away and back. “Are you sure you’d want to, boss?”

“Shit yes. Shit yes. Listen. I get it. It’s a credit to you that you want to keep it, but listen. If there’s a chance we’re right… you can’t investigate breach. This Byela Fulana Foreigner Murdered Girl needs someone to look after her.” I made Corwi look at me by waiting. “We’re not the best people, Corwi. She deserves better than we can do. No one’s going to be able to look out for her like Breach. Christ, who gets Breach on their behalf? Sniffing out a murderer?”

“Not many.”

“Yeah. So if we can we need to hand it over. The committee knows that everyone would try to pass off everything; that’s why they make you jump through hoops.” She looked at me dubiously and I kept on. “We don’t have proof and we don’t know the details, so let’s take the next couple of days putting a cherry on top. Or proving ourselves wrong. Look at the profile we’ve got of her now. We’ve got enough at bloody last. She disappears from Besźel two, three years ago, turns up dead now. Maybe Drodin’s right she was in Ul Qoma. Aboveboard. I want you to hit the phone, make some contacts here and over there. You know what we’ve got: foreigner, researcher, et cetera. Find out who she is. Anyone fobs you off, hint this is a Breach issue.”

On my return I went by Taskin’s desk.

“Borlú. Got my call?”

“Ms. Cerush, your laboured excuses for seeking my company are becoming unconvincing.”

“I got your message and I’ve got it in motion. No, don’t commit to eloping with me yet, Borlú, you’re bound to be disappointed. You may have to wait a while to talk to the committee.”

“How’s it going to work?”

“When did you last do this? Years ago, right? Listen, I’m sure you think you’ve got a slam dunk—Don’t look at me like that, what’s your sport? Boxing? I know you think they’ll have to invoke”—her voice grew serious—“instantly I mean, but they won’t. You’ll have to wait your turn, and it could be a few days.”

“I thought—”

“Once, yes. They’d have dropped what they were doing. But it’s a tricky time, and it’s more us than them. Neither set of reps relish this, but honestly Ul Qoma’s not your issue at the moment. Since Syedr’s lot came into the coalition screaming about national weakness the government’s fretting about seeming too eager to invoke, so they’re not going to rush. They’ve got public enquiries about the refugee camps, and there’s no way they’re not going to milk those.”

“Christ, you’re kidding. They’re still freaking out about those few poor sods?” Some must make it through and into one city or the other, but if they did it would be almost impossible for them not to breach, without immigration training. Our borders were tight. Where the desperate newcomers hit crosshatched patches of shore the unwritten agreement was that they were in the city of whichever border control met them, and thus incarcerated them in the coastal camps, first. How crestfallen were those who, hunting the hopes of Ul Qoma, landed in Besź.

“Whatever,” Taskin said. “And other stuff. Glad-handing. They’re not going to shunt off business meetings and whatnot like they would’ve done once.”

“Whoring it for the Yankee dollar.”

“Don’t knock it. If they’re getting the Yankee dollar here that’ll do me. But they’re not going to rush for you, no matter who’s died. Did someone die?”

IT DID NOT TAKE CORWI LONG to find what I had sent her to find. Late the next day she came into my office with a file.

“I just got it faxed over from Ul Qoma,” she said. “I been trail-chasing. It wasn’t even so hard, when you knew where to start. We were right.”

There she was, our victim—her file, her picture, our death mask, and suddenly and rather breathtakingly photographs of her in life, monochrome and fax-smudged but there, our dead woman smiling and smoking a cigarette and midword, her mouth open. Our scribbled notes, her details, estimated and now others in red, no question marks hesitating them, the facts of her; below her various invented names, there her real one.

Chapter Six

“MAHALIA GEARY.”

There were forty-two people around the table (antique, would there ever be question?), and me. The forty-two were seated, with folders in front of them. I stood. Two minutes-takers transcribed at their stations in the room’s corners. I could see microphones on the table, and translators sat nearby.

“Mahalia Geary. She was twenty-four. American. This is all my constable’s doing, Constable Corwi, all this information, ladies and gentlemen. All the information’s in the papers I sent.” They were not all reading them. Some did not have them open.

“American?” someone said.

I did not recognise all of the twenty-one Besź representatives. Some. A woman in her middle ages, severe skunk-stripe hair like a film-studies academic, Shura Katrinya, minister without portfolio, respected but past her moment. Mikhel Buric of the Social Democrats, official opposition, young, capable, ambitious enough to be on more than one committee (security, commerce, arts). Major Yorj Syedr, a leader of the National Bloc, the rightist grouping with whom Prime Minister Gayardicz controversially worked in coalition, despite Syedr’s reputation not only as a bully but a less than competent one. Yavid Nyisemu, Gayardicz’s under-minister for Culture and committee chair. Other faces were familiar, and with effort more names would come. I recognised none of the Ul Qoma counterparts. I did not pay close attention to foreign politics.

Most of the Ul Qomans flicked through the packets I had prepared. Three wore headphones, but most were fluent enough in Besź at least to understand me. It was strange not to unsee these people in formal Ul Qoma dress—men in collarless shirts and dark lapel-less jackets, the few women in spiral semiwraps in colours that would be contraband in Besźel. But then I was not in Besźel.

The Oversight Committee meets in the giant, baroque, concrete-patched coliseum in the centre of Besźel Old Town, and of Ul Qoma Old Town. It is one of very few places that has the same name in both cities—Copula Hall. That is because it is not a crosshatched building, precisely, nor one of staccato totality-alterity, one floor or room in Besźel and the next in Ul Qoma: externally it is in both cities; internally, much of it is in both or neither. All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.

To me it was as if another presence were there: the reason for the meeting. Perhaps several of us in the room felt watched.

As they fussed with their papers, those who did so, I thanked them again for seeing me. A little political gush. These meetings of the Oversight Committee were regular, but I had had to wait days to see them. I had despite Taskin’s warning tried to convene an extraordinary meeting to pass over responsibility for Mahalia Geary as quickly as possible (who wanted to think of her murderer free? There was one best chance of sorting that), but short of epochal crisis, civil war or catastrophe, this was impossible to arrange.

What about a diminished meeting? A few people missing surely wouldn’t … But no, I was quickly informed, that would be quite unacceptable. She had warned me and she had been right, and I had grown more impatient with each day. Taskin had given me her best contact, a confidential secretary to one of the ministers on the committee, who had explained that the Besźel Chamber of Commerce had one of its increasingly regular trade fairs with foreign businesses, and that counted out Buric, who had had some success overseeing such events, Nyisemu, and even Syedr. These of course were sacrosanct occurrences. That Katrinya had meetings with diplomats. That Hurian, commissioner of the Ul Qoma Exchange, an impossible-to-reschedule meeting with the Ul Qoman health minister, and very et cetera, and there would be no special meeting. The young dead woman would have to remain inadequately investigated a few more days, until the gathering, at which time, between the indispensable business of adjudication on any dissensus, of the management of shared resources—a few of the larger grid power lines, drains and sewage, the most intricately crosshatched buildings—I would be given my twenty-minute slot to make my case.

Perhaps some people knew the details of these strictures, but the specifics of the Oversight Committee’s machinations had never been of interest. I had presented to them twice before, long before. The committee’s makeup had been different then, of course. Both times, the Besź and Ul Qoman sides almost bristled at each other: relations had been worse. Even when we had been noncombatant supporters of opposing sides in conflicts, such as during the Second World War—not Ul Qoma’s finest hour—the Oversight Committee had had to convene. What uncomfortable occasions those must have been. It had not met, however, as I recalled from my lessons, during our two brief and disastrous open wars against each other. In any case, now our two nations were, in rather a stilted fashion, supposed to be effecting some sort of rapprochement.

Neither of these previous cases I had presented had been so urgent. The first time was a contraband breach, as most such referrals are. A gang in western Besźel had started selling drugs purified from Ul Qoman medicines. They were picking up boxes near the city’s outskirts, from near the end of the east-west axis of the crossroad railway lines that split Ul Qoma into four quadrants. An Ul Qoman contact was dumping the boxes from the trains. There is a short stretch in the north of Besźel where the tracks themselves crosshatch with and serve also as Ul Qoman tracks; and the miles of north-seeking railroads leading out of both city-states, joining us to our northern neighbours through the mountain gash, are also shared, to our borders, where they become a single line in existential legality as well as mere metal fact: up to those national edges, the track was two juridical railroads. In various of those places the boxes of medical supplies were dropped in Ul Qoma, and stayed there, abandoned trackside in Ul Qoman scrub: but they were picked up in Besźel, and that was breach.

We never observed our criminals taking them, but when we presented our evidence that that was the only possible source, the committee agreed and invoked Breach. That drug trade ended: the suppliers disappeared from the streets.

The second case was a man who had killed his wife and when we closed in on him, in stupid terror he breached—stepped into a shop in Besźel, changed his clothes, and emerged into Ul Qoma. He was by chance not apprehended in that instance, but we quickly realised what had happened. In his frantic liminality neither we nor our Ul Qoman colleagues would touch him, though we and they knew where he went, hiding in Ul Qoman lodgings. Breach took him and he was gone too.

This was the first time in a long time I had made this request. I put my evidence. I addressed myself as much, politely, to the Ul Qoman members as to the Besź. Also to the observing power that must, surely, invisibly have watched.

“She’s resident in Ul Qoma, not Besźel. Once we knew that we found her. Corwi did, I mean. She’d been there for more than two years. She’s a PhD student.”

“What’s she studying?” Buric said.

“She’s an archaeologist. Early history. She’s attached to one of the digs. It’s all in your folders.” A little ripple, differently iterated among the Besź and the Ul Qomans. “That’s how she got in, even with the blockade.” There were some loopholes and exceptions for educational and cultural links.

Digs are constant in Ul Qoma, research projects incessant, its soil so much richer than our own in the extraordinary artefacts of pre-Cleavage ages. Books and conferences bicker over whether that preponderance is coincidence of scattering or evidence of some Ul Qoman specific thing (the Ul Qoman nationalists of course insist the latter). Mahalia Geary was affiliated with a long-term dig at Bol Ye’an, in western Ul Qoma, a site as important as Tenochtitlan and Sutton Hoo, which had been active since its discovery almost a century ago.

It would have been nice for my compatriot historians had it crosshatched, but though the park on the edge of which it was located did, just a little, the crosshatch coming quite close to the carefully ploughed-up earth full of treasures, a thin strip of total Besźel even separating sections of Ul Qoma within the grounds, the dig itself did not. There are those Besź who will say that lopsidedness is a good thing, that had we had half as rich a seam of historic rubble as Ul Qoma—anything like as many mixed-up sheila-na-gigs, clockwork remnants, mosaic shards, axe heads, and cryptic parchment scraps hallowed with rumours of physical misbehaviour and unlikely effects—we would simply have sold it off. Ul Qoma, at least, with its mawkish sanctimoniousness about history (obvious guilty compensation for the pace of change, for the vulgar vigour of much of its recent development), its state archivists and export restrictions, kept its past somewhat protected.

“Bol Ye’an’s run by a bunch of archaeologists from Prince of Wales University in Canada, which is where Geary was enrolled. Her supervisor’s lived on and off in Ul Qoma for years—Isabelle Nancy. There’s a bunch of them who live there. They organise conferences sometimes. Even have them in Besźel one year in every few.” Some consolation prize for our remnant-barren ground. “The last big one was a while ago, when they found that last cache of artefacts. I’m sure you all remember.” It had made the international press. The collection had quickly been given some name, but I could not remember it. It included an astrolabe and a geared thing, some intricate complexity as madly specific and untimed as the Antikythera mechanism, to which as many dreams and speculations had attached, and the purpose of which, similarly, no one had been able to reconstruct.

“So what is the story with this girl?” It was one of the Ul Qomans who spoke, a fat man in his fifties with a shirt in shades that would have made it questionably legal in Besźel.

“She’s been based there, Ul Qoma, for months, for her research,” I said. “She came to Besźel first, before she’d been to Ul Qoma, for a conference about three years ago. You might remember, there was the big exhibition of artefacts and stuff borrowed from Ul Qoma, and there was a whole week or two of meetings and so on. Loads of people came over from all over the place, academics from Europe, North America, from Ul Qoma and everything.”

“Certainly we remember,” Nyisemu said. “Plenty of us were involved.” Of course. Various state committees and quangos had had stands; government and opposition ministers had attended. The prime minister had started the proceedings, Nyisemu had formally opened the exhibition at the museum, and it had been required attendance for all serious politicians.

“Well she was there. You might even have noticed her—she caused a bit of a stink, apparently, was accused of Disrespect, made some terrible speech about Orciny at a presentation. Almost got chucked out.” A couple of faces—Buric and Katrinya certainly, Nyisemu perhaps—looked as if that sparked something. At least one person on the Ul Qoman side of things looked reminiscent too.

“So she calms down, it seems, finishes her MA, starts a PhD, gets entry into Ul Qoma, this time, to be part of this dig, do her studies—she’d never have got back in here, I don’t think, not after that intervention, and frankly I’m surprised she got in there—and she’d been there since except for holidays for a while. There’s student accommodation near the dig. She disappeared a couple of weeks ago and turned up in Besźel. In Pocost Village, in the estate, which is, you will recall, total in Besźel, so alter for Ul Qoma, and she was dead. It’s all in the folder, Congressman.”

“You haven’t shown breach, have you? Not really.” Yorj Syedr spoke more softly than I would expect from a military man. Opposite him several of the Ul Qoman congressmen and -women whispered in Illitan, his interjection spurring them to confer. I looked at him. Near him Buric rolled his eyes, saw me see him doing so.

“You have to forgive me, Councillor,” I said eventually. “I don’t know what to say to that. This young woman lived in Ul Qoma. Officially, I mean, we have the records. She disappears. She turns up dead in Besźel.” I frowned. “I’m not really sure … What else would you suggest was evidence?”

“Circumstantial, though. I mean, have you checked the Foreign Office? Have you found out, for example, whether perhaps Miss Geary left Ul Qoma for some event in Budapest or something? Maybe she did that, then came to Besźel? There’s almost two weeks unaccounted for, Inspector Borlú.”

I stared. “As I say, she wouldn’t have got back into Besźel after her little performance …”

He made an almost regretful face and interrupted me. “Breach is … an alien power.” Several of the Besź and some of the Ul Qoman members of the committee looked shocked. “We all know it’s the case,” Syedr said, “whether it is polite to acknowledge it or not.

“Breach is an I say it again alien power, and we hand over our sovereignty to it at our peril. We’ve simply washed our hands of any difficult situations and handed them to a—apologies if I offend, but—a shadow over which we have no control. Simply to make our lives easier.”

“Are you joking, Councillor?” someone said.

“I’ve had enough of this,” Buric began.

“We don’t all cosy up to enemies,” Syedr said.

“Chair,” Buric shouted. “Will you allow this slander? This is outrageous …” I watched the new nonpartisan spirit I had read about.

“Of course where its intervention’s necessary I fully support invocation,” Syedr said. “But my party’s been arguing for some time that we need to stop … rubber-stamping the ceding to the Breach of considerable authority. How much research have you actually done, Inspector? Have you spoken to her parents? Her friends? What do we actually know about this poor young woman?”

I should have been more prepared for this. I had not expected it.

I had seen Breach before, in a brief moment. Who hadn’t? I had seen it take control. The great majority of breaches are acute and immediate. Breach intervenes. I was not used to seeking permissions, invoking, this arcane way. Trust to Breach, we grow up hearing, unsee and don’t mention the Ul Qoman pickpockets or muggers at work even if you notice, which you shouldn’t, from where you stand in Besźel, because breach is a worse transgression than theirs.

When I was fourteen I saw the Breach for the first time. The cause was the most common of all such—a traffic accident. A boxy little Ul Qoman van—this was more than thirty years ago, the vehicles on Ul Qoma’s roads were much less impressive than they are now—had skidded. It had been travelling a crosshatched road, and a good third of the cars in that area were Besź.

Had the van righted, the Besź drivers would have responded traditionally to such an intrusive foreign obstacle, one of the inevitable difficulties of living in crosshatched cities. When an Ul Qoman stumbles into a Besź, each in their own city; if an Ul Qoman’s dog runs up and sniffs a Besź passerby; a window broken in Ul Qoma that leaves glass in the path of Besź pedestrians—in all cases the Besź (or Ul Qomans, in the converse circumstances) avoid the foreign difficulty as best they can without acknowledging it. Touch if they must, though not is better. Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it. (Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish from the other city, it’s just rubbish, and it drifts across borders, like fog, rain and smoke.)

The van driver I saw did not recover. He ground diagonally across the tarmac—I do not know what the street is in Ul Qoma, it was KünigStrász in Besźel—and thudded into the wall of a Besź boutique and the pedestrian window-shopping there. The Besź man died; the Ul Qoman driver was badly hurt. People in both cities were screaming. I did not see the impact, but my mother did, and grabbed my hand so hard I shouted in pain before I even registered the noise.

The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they are in the street.

I was older than that when I looked up to see the bloody result of that breaching accident, and remember remembering those arcana, and that they were bullshit. In that moment when my mother and I and all of us there could not but see the Ul Qoman wreck, all that careful unseeing I had recently learned was thrown.

In seconds, the Breach came. Shapes, figures, some of whom perhaps had been there but who nonetheless seemed to coalesce from spaces between smoke from the accident, moving too fast it seemed to be clearly seen, moving with authority and power so absolute that within seconds they had controlled, contained, the area of the intrusion. The powers were almost impossible, seemed almost impossible, to make out. At the edges of the crisis zone the Besź and, I could still not fail to see, Ul Qoman police were pushing away the curious in their own cities, taping off the area, closing out outsiders, sealing off a zone inside of which, their quick actions still visible though child-me so afraid to see them, Breach, organising, cauterising, restoring.

These kind of rare situations were when one might glimpse Breach, performing what they did. Accidents and border-perforating catastrophes. The 1926 Earthquake, a grand fire. (There had once been a fire grosstopically close to my apartment. It had been contained in one house, but a house not in Besźel, that I had unseen. So I had watched footage of it piped in from Ul Qoma, on my local TV, while my living room windows had been lit by the fluttering red glow of it.) The death of an Ul Qoman bystander from a stray Besź bullet in a stickup. It was hard to associate those crises with this bureaucracy.

I shifted and looked about the room at nothing. Breach has to account for its actions to those specialists who invoke it, but that does not feel like a limitation to many of us.

“Have you spoken to her colleagues?” Syedr said. “How far have you taken this?”

“No. I haven’t spoken to them. My constable has, of course, to verify our information.”

“Have you spoken to her parents? You seem very keen to divest yourself of this investigation.” I waited a few more seconds before speaking over the muttering on both sides of the table.

“Corwi’s got word to them. They’re flying in. Major, I’m not sure you understand the position we’re in. Yes I am keen. Don’t you want to see the murderer of Mahalia Geary found?”

“Alright, enough.” Yavid Nyisemu. He galloped his fingers on the table. “Inspector, you might not take that tone. There’s a concern, both reasonable and growing, among representatives that we’re too quick to cede to Breach in situations where we might actually choose not to, and that doing so’s dangerous and potentially even a betrayal.” He waited until eventually his requirement was clear and I made a noise that could be thought apology. “However,” he continued. “Major, you might also consider being less argumentative and ridiculous. For goodness’ sake, the young woman’s in Ul Qoma, disappears, turns up dead in Besźel. I can hardly think of a more clear-cut case. Of course we’ll be endorsing the surrender of this to Breach.” He cut the air with his hands as Syedr began to complain.

Katrinya nodded. “A voice of sense,” Buric said. The Ul Qomans had obviously seen these internal fights before. The splendours of our democracy. Doubtless they conducted their own squabbles.

“I think that’ll be all, Inspector,” he said, over the major’s raised voice. “We’ve got your submission. Thank you. The usher’ll show you out. You’ll be hearing from us shortly.”

THE CORRIDORS OF COPULA HALL are in a determined style that must have evolved over the many centuries of the building’s existence and centrality to Besź and Ul Qoman life and politics: they are antique and haute, but somehow vague, definitionless. The oil paintings are well executed but as if without antecedent, bloodlessly general. The staff, Besź and Ul Qoman, come and go in those in-between corridors. The hall feels not collaborative but empty.

The few Precursor artefacts in alarmed and guarded bell jars that punctuate the passages are different. They are specific, but opaque. I glanced at some as I left: a sag-breasted Venus with a ridge where gears or a lever might sit; a crude metal wasp discoloured by centuries; a basalt die. Below each one a caption offered guesses.

Syedr’s intervention was unconvincing—he gave the impression that he had decided to make his stand on the next petition that crossed the desk, and had the misfortune for it to be mine, a case with which it was hard to argue—and his motivations questionable. If I were political I would not in any circumstances follow his lead. But there was a reason to his caution.

The powers of the Breach are almost limitless. Frightening. What does limit Breach is solely that those powers are highly circumstantially specific. The insistence that those circumstances be rigorously policed is a necessary precaution for the cities.

That is why these arcane checks and balances between Besźel, Ul Qoma, and the Breach. In circumstances other than the various acute and unarguable breaches—of crime, accident or disaster (chemical spill, gas explosion, a mentally ill attacker attacking across the municipal boundary)—the committee vetted all potential invocations—which were, after all, all circumstances in which Besźel and Ul Qoma would denude themselves of any powers.

Even after the acute events, with which no one sane could argue, the representatives of the two cities on the committee would carefully examine ex post facto justifications they commissioned for Breach’s interventions. They might, technically, question any of these: it would be absurd to do so, but the committee would not undermine their authority by not going through important motions.

The two cities need the Breach. And without the cities’ integrities, what is Breach?

Corwi was waiting for me. “So?” She handed me coffee. “What did they say?”

“Well, it’s going to be handed over. But they made me jump through hoops.” We walked towards the police car. All the streets around Copula Hall were crosshatched, and we made our way unseeing through a group of Ul Qoman friends to where Corwi had parked. “You know Syedr?”

“That fascist prick? Sure.”

“He was trying to make out as if he wouldn’t let the case go to Breach. It was weird.”

“They hate Breach, don’t they, the NatBloc?”

“Weird to hate it. Like hating air or something. And he’s a nat, and if there’s no Breach, there’s no Besźel. No homeland.”

“It’s complicated, isn’t it,” she said, “because even though we need them, it’s a sign of dependence that we do. Nats are divided, anyway, between balance-of-power people and triumphalists. Maybe he’s a triumphalist. They reckon Breach are protecting Ul Qoma, the only thing stopping Besźel taking over.”

“They want to take it over? They’re living in a dreamworld if they think Besźel would win.” Corwi glanced at me. We both knew it was true. “Anyway, it’s moot. He was posturing, I think.”

“He’s a fucking idiot. I mean, as well as being a fascist he’s just not very clever. When are we going to get the nod?”

“A day or two, I think. They’ll vote on all the motions put in front of them today. I think.” I did not know how it was organised, in fact.

“So in the meantime, what?” She was terse.

“Well, you’ve got plenty of other stuff to be getting on with, I take it? This isn’t your only case.” I looked at her as we drove.

We drove past Copula Hall, its huge entrance like a made, secular cave. The building is much larger than a cathedral, larger than a Roman circus. It’s open at its eastern and western sides. At ground level and for the first vaulted fifty feet or so above it is a semienclosed thoroughfare, punctuated with pillars, traffic streams separated by walls, stop-started with checkpoints.

Pedestrians and vehicles came and went. Cars and vans drove into it near us, to wait at the easternmost point, where passports and papers were checked and motorists were given permission—or sometimes refused it—to leave Besźel. A steady current. More metres, through the inter-checkpoint interstice under the hall’s arc, another wait at the buildings’ western gates, for entry into Ul Qoma. A reversed process in the other lanes.

Then the vehicles with their stamped permissions-to-cross emerged at the opposite end from where they entered, and drove into a foreign city. Often they doubled back, on the crosshatched streets in the Old Town or the Old Town, to the same space they had minutes earlier occupied, though in a new juridic realm.

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.

Copula Hall like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one.

There are places not crosshatched but where Besźel is interrupted by a thin part of Ul Qoma. As kids we would assiduously unsee Ul Qoma, as our parents and teachers had relentlessly trained us (the ostentation with which we and our Ul Qoman contemporaries used to unnotice each other when we were grosstopically close was impressive). We used to throw stones across the alterity, walk the long way around in Besźel and pick them up again, debate whether we had done wrong. Breach never manifested, of course. We did the same with the local lizards. They were always dead when we picked them up, and we said the little airborne trip through Ul Qoma had killed them, though it might just as well have been the landing.

“Won’t be our problem much longer,” I said, watching a few Ul Qoman tourists emerge into Besźel. “Mahalia, I mean. Byela. Fulana Detail.”

Chapter Seven

TO FLY TO BESŹEL from the east coast of the US involves changing planes at least once, and that’s the best option. It is a famously complicated trip. There are direct flights to Besźel from Budapest, from Skopje, and, probably an American’s best bet, from Athens. Technically Ul Qoma would have been harder for them to get to because of the blockade, but all they needed to do was nip into Canada and they could fly direct. There were many more inter national services to the New Wolf.

The Gearys were coming in to Besźel Halvic at ten in the morning. I had already made Corwi break the news of their daughter’s death to them over the phone. I told her I would escort them to see the body myself, though she could join me if she chose. She did.

We waited at Besźel Airport, in case the plane came in early. We drank bad coffee from the Starbucks analogue in the terminal. Corwi asked me again about the workings of the Oversight Committee. I asked her if she had ever left Besźel.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been to Romania. I’ve been to Bulgaria.”

“Turkey?”

“No. You?”

“There. And London. Moscow. Paris, once, a long time ago, and Berlin. West Berlin as it was. It was before they joined.”

“Berlin?” she said. The airport was hardly crowded: mostly returning Besź, it seemed, plus a few tourists and Eastern European commercial travellers. It is hard to tourist in Besźel, or in Ul Qoma—how many holiday destinations set exams before they let you in?—but still, though I had not been I had seen film of the newish Ul Qoma Airport, sixteen or seventeen miles southeast, across Bulkya Sound from Lestov, and it got vastly more traffic than us, though their visitor conditions were not less strenuous than our own. When it had been rebuilt a few years previously, it had gone from somewhat smaller to much larger than our own terminal in a few months of frenetic construction. From above its terminals were concatenated half-moons of mirrored glass, designed by Foster or someone like that.

A group of foreign orthodox Jews were met by their, judging by clothes, much less devout local relatives. A fat security officer let his gun dangle to scratch his chin. There were one or two intimidatingly dressed execs from those gold-dust recent arrivals, our new high-tech, even American, friends, finding the drivers with signs for board members of Sear and Core, Shadner, VerTech, those executives who did not arrive in their own planes, or copter in to their own helipads. Corwi saw me reading the cards.

“Why the fuck would anyone invest here?” she said. “Do you reckon they even remember agreeing to it? The government blatantly slips them Rohypnol at those junkets.”

“Typical Besź defeatist talk, Constable. That’s what’s doing our country down. Representatives Buric and Nyisemu and Syedr are doing precisely the job with which we entrust them.” Buric and Nyisemu made sense: it was extraordinary Syedr had got into organising the trade fairs. Some favour pulled in. The fact that, as these foreign visitors showed, there were even small successes was even more remarkable for that.

“Right,” she said. “Seriously, watch these guys when they come out—I swear that’s panic in their eyes. Have you seen those cars ferrying them around town, at tourist spots and crosshatchings and whatever? ‘Seeing the sights.’ Right. Those poor sods are trying to find ways out.” I pointed at a display: the plane had landed.

“So you spoke to Mahalia’s supervisor?” I said. “I tried to call her a couple of times but can’t get through and they won’t give me her mobile.”

“Not for very long,” Corwi said. “I got hold of her at the centre—there’s like a research centre that’s part of the dig in Ul Qoma. Professor Nancy, she’s one of the bigwigs, she has a whole bunch of students. Anyway I called her and verified that Mahalia was one of hers, that no one had seen her for a while, et cetera et cetera. I told her we had reason to believe dot dot dot. Sent over a picture. She was very shocked.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. She was … kept going on about what a great student Mahalia was, how she couldn’t believe it, what had happened, so on. So you were in Berlin. Do you speak German then?”

“I used to,” I said. “Kin bisschen.”

“Why were you there?”

“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”

“Fuck!”

“I know, I know. That’s what we said at the time. Totally missing the point.”

“Split cities? I’m surprised the acad let you go.”

“I know, I could almost feel my freebie evaporating in a gust of other people’s patriotism. My super said it wasn’t just a misunderstanding of our status it was an insult to Besźel. Not wrong, I suppose. But it was a subsidised trip abroad, was I going to say no? I had to persuade him. I did at least meet my first Ul Qomans, who’d obviously managed to overcome their own outrage, too. Met one in particular at the conference disco as I recall. We did our bit to ease international tensions over ‘99 Luftballons.’” Corwi snorted, but passengers began to come through and we composed our faces, so they would be respectfully set when the Gearys emerged.

The immigration officer who escorted them saw us and nodded them gently over. They were recognisable from the photographs we had been sent by our American counterparts, but I would have known them anyway. They had the expression I have seen only on bereaved parents: their faces looked clayish, lumpy with exhaustion and grief. They shuffled into the concourse as if they were fifteen or twenty years older than they were.

“Mr. and Mrs. Geary?” I had been practicing my English.

“Oh,” she said, the woman. She reached out her hand. “Oh yes, you are, you’re Mr. Corwi are you, is that—”

“No, ma’am. I’m Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel ECS.” I shook her hand, her husband’s hand. “This is constable Lizbyet Corwi. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, I, we, are very deeply sorry for your loss.”

The two of them blinked like animals and nodded and opened their mouths but said nothing. Grief made them look stupid. It was cruel.

“May I take you to your hotel?”

“No, thank you, Inspector,” Mr. Geary said. I glanced at Corwi, but she was following what was said, more or less—her comprehension was good. “We’d like to … we’d like to do what it is we’re here for.” Mrs. Geary clutched and unclutched at her bag. “We’d like to see her.”

“Of course. Please.” I led them to the vehicle.

“Are we going to see Professor Nancy?” Mr. Geary asked as Corwi drove us. “And May’s friends?”

“No, Mr. Geary,” I said. “We can’t do that, I’m afraid. They are not in Besźel. They’re in Ul Qoma.”

“You know that, Michael, you know how it works here,” his wife said.

“Yes yes,” he said to me, as if they had been my words. “Yes, I’m sorry, let me … I just want to talk to her friends.”

“It can be arranged, Mr. Geary, Mrs. Geary,” I said. “We’ll see about phone calls. And …” I was thinking about passes through Copula Hall. “We’ll have to get you escorted into Ul Qoma. After we’ve dealt with things here.”

Mrs. Geary looked at her husband. He stared out at the buildup of streets and vehicles around us. Some of the overpasses we were approaching were in Ul Qoma, but I was certain he wouldn’t forebear staring at them. He would not care even if he knew not to. En route there would be an illicit, breaching, view to a glitzy Ul Qoman Fast Economy Zone full of horrible but big public art.

The Gearys both wore visitors’ marks in Besź colours, but as rare recipients of compassionate-entry stamps they had no tourist training, no appreciation of the local politics of boundaries. They would be insensitive with loss. The dangers of their breaching were high. We needed to protect them from unthinkingly committing acts that would get them deported, at least. Until the handover of the situation to Breach was made official, we were on babysitting duty: we would not leave the Gearys’ sides while they were awake.

Corwi did not look at me. We would have to be careful. Had the Gearys been regular tourists, they would have had to undergo mandatory training and passed the not-unstringent entrance exam, both its theoretical and practical-role-play elements, to qualify for their visas. They would know, at least in outline, key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details—and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies—distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. They would know a little tiny bit (not that we locals knew much more) about Breach. Crucially, they would know enough to avoid obvious breaches of their own.

After a two-week or however-long-it-was course, no one thought visitors would have metabolised the deep prediscursive instinct for our borders that Besź and Ul Qomans have, to have picked up real rudiments of unseeing. But we did insist that they acted as if they had. We, and the authorities of Ul Qoma, expected strict overt decorum, interacting with, and indeed obviously noticing, our crosshatched neighbouring city-state not at all.

While, or as, sanctions for breach are severe (the two cities depend on that), breach must be beyond reasonable doubt. We all suspect that, while we are long-expert in unseeing it, tourists to the Old Besźel ghetto are surreptitiously noticing Ul Qoma’s glass-fronted Yal Iran Bridge, which in literal topology abuts it. Look up at the ribbon-streaming balloons of Besźel’s Wind-Day parade, they doubtless can’t fail (as we can) to notice the raised teardrop towers of Ul Qoma’s palace district, next to them though a whole country away. So long as they do not point and coo (which is why except in rare exceptions no foreigners under eighteen are granted entry) everyone concerned can indulge the possibility that there is no breach. It is that restraint that the pre-visa training teaches, rather than a local’s rigorous unseeing, and most students have the nous to understand that. We all, Breach included, give the benefit of the doubt to visitors when possible.

In the mirror of the car I saw Mr. Geary watch a passing truck. I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma.

His wife and he murmured to each other occasionally—my English or my hearing was not good enough to tell what they said. Mostly they sat in silence, each alone, looking out of windows on either side of the car.

Shukman was not at his laboratory. Perhaps he knew himself and how he would seem to those visiting the dead. I would not want to be met by him in these circumstances. Hamzinic led us to the storage room. Her parents moaned in perfect time as they entered and saw the shape below the sheet. Hamzinic waited with silent respect while they prepared, and when her mother nodded he showed Mahalia’s face. Her parents moaned again. They stared at her, and after long seconds her mother touched her face.

“Oh, oh yes that’s her,” Mr. Geary said. He cried. “That’s her, yes, that’s my daughter,” as if we were asking formal identification of him, which we were not. They had wanted to see her. I nodded as if that were helpful to us and glanced at Hamzinic, who replaced the sheet and made himself busy as we led Mahalia’s parents away.

“I DO WANT TO, to go to Ul Qoma,” Mr. Geary said. I was used to hearing that little stress on the verb from foreigners: he felt strange using it. “I’m sorry, I know it’s probably going to be … to be hard to organise but, I want to see, where she …”

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course,” Corwi said. She was keeping up with a reasonable amount of the English, and spoke occasionally. We were eating lunch with the Gearys at the Queen Czezille, a comfortable enough hotel with which the Besź Police had a long-standing arrangement. Its staff were experienced in providing the chaperoning, almost surreptitious imprisonment, that unqualified visitors required.

James Thacker, some middle-ranking twenty-eight-or -nine-year-old at the US embassy, had joined us. He spoke occasionally to Corwi in excellent Besź. The dining room looked out at the northern tip of Hustav Isle. Riverboats went by (in both cities). The Gearys picked at their peppercorned fish.

“We suspected that you might like to visit your daughter’s place of work,” I said. “We’ve been in discussion with Mr. Thacker and his counterparts in Ul Qoma for the paperwork to get you through Copula Hall. A day or two I think is all.” Not an embassy, in Ul Qoma, of course: a sulky US Interests section.

“And … you said that this is, this is for the Breach now?” Mrs. Geary said. “You said it won’t be the Ul Qomans investigating it but it’ll be with this Breach, yes?” She stared at me with tremendous mistrust. “So when do we talk to them?”

I glanced at Thacker. “That will not happen,” I said. “The Breach is not like us.”

Mrs. Geary stared at me. “‘Us’ the … the policzai?” she said.

I had meant the “us” to include her. “Well, among other things, yes. It… they aren’t like the police in Besźel or in Ul Qoma.”

“I don’t—”

“Inspector Borlú, I’ll be happy to explain this,” Thacker said. He hesitated. He wanted me to go. Any explanation carried out in my presence would have to be moderately polite: alone with other Americans he could stress to them how ridiculous and difficult these cities were, how sorry he and his colleagues were for the added complications of a crime occurring in Besźel, and so on. He could insinuate. It was an embarrassment, an antagonism to have to deal with a dissident force like Breach.

“I don’t know how much you know about Breach, Mr. and Mrs. Geary, but it is … it isn’t like other powers. You have some sense of its… capabilities? The Breach is … It has unique powers. And it’s, ah, extremely secretive. We, the embassy, have no contacts with … any representative of Breach. I do realise how strange that must sound, but… I can assure you Breach’s record in the prosecution of criminals is, ah, ferocious. Impressive. We will receive word of its progress and of whatever action it takes against whoever it finds responsible.”

“Does that mean …?” Mr. Geary said. “They have the death penalty here, right?”

“And in Ul Qoma?” his wife said.

“Sure,” Thacker said. “But that’s not really at issue. Mr. and Mrs. Geary, our friends in Besźel and the Ul Qoma authorities are about to invoke Breach to deal with your daughter’s murder, so Besź laws and Ul Qoman laws are kind of irrelevant. The, ah, sanctions available to Breach are pretty limitless.”

“Invoke?” said Mrs. Geary.

“There are protocols,” I said. “To be followed. Before Breach’ll manifest to take care of this.”

Mr. Geary: “What about the trial?”

“That will be in camera,” I said. “Breach … tribunals,” I had tried out decisions and actions in my head, “are secret.”

“We won’t testify? We won’t see?” Mr. Geary was aghast. This must all have been explained previously, but you know. Mrs. Geary was shaking her head in anger, but without her husband’s surprise.

“I’m afraid not,” Thacker said. “It is a unique situation here. I can pretty much guarantee you, though, that whoever did this will not only be caught but, be, ah, brought to pretty severe justice.” One could almost pity Mahalia Geary’s killer. I did not.

“But that’s—”

“I know, Mrs. Geary, I’m truly sorry. There are no other posts like this in the service. Ul Qoma and Besźel and Breach … These are unique circumstances.”

“Oh, God. You know, it’s… it’s all, this is all the stuff Mahalia was into,” Mr. Geary said. “The city, the city, the other city. Besźel”—Bezzel, he said it—“and Ul Qoma. And or seen it.” I didn’t understand that.

“Or seen ee,” Mrs. Geary said. I looked up. “It’s not Orsinnit, it’s Orciny, honey.”

Thacker pouted polite incomprehension and shook his head in question.

“What’s that, Mrs. Geary?” I said. She fiddled with her bag. Corwi quietly took out a notebook.

“This is all this stuff Mahalia was into,” Mrs. Geary said. “It’s what she was studying. She was going to be a doctor of it.” Mr. Geary grimace-smiled, indulgent, proud, bewildered. “She was doing real well. She told us a little bit about it. It sounds like that Orciny was like the Breach.”

“Ever since she first came here,” Mr. Geary said. “This is the stuff she wanted to do.”

“That’s right, she came here first. I mean … here, this, Besźel, right? She came here first, but then she said she needed to go to Ul Qoma. I’m going to be honest with you, Inspector, I thought it was kind of the same place. I know that was wrong. She had to get special permission to go there, but because she’s, was, a student, that’s where she stayed to do all her work.”

“Orciny … it’s a sort of folk tale,” I told Thacker. Mahalia’s mother nodded; her father looked away. “It is not so really like the Breach, Mrs. Geary. Breach is real. A power. But Orciny is …” I hesitated.

“The third city,” Corwi said in Besź to Thacker, who still furrowed his face. When he showed no comprehension, she said, “A secret. Fairy tale. Between the other two.” He shook his head and looked, uninterestedly, Oh.

“She loved this place,” Mrs. Geary said. She looked longing. “I mean, sorry, I mean Ul Qoma. Are we near where she lived?” Crudely physically, grosstopically, to use the term unique to Besźel and Ul Qoma, unnecessary anywhere else, yes we were. Neither Corwi nor I answered, as it was a complicated question. “She’d been studying it all for years, since she first read some book about the cities. Her professors always seemed to think she was doing excellent in her work.”

“Did you like her professors?” I said.

“Oh, I never met them. But she showed me some of what they were doing; she showed me a website for the program, and the place she worked.”

“This is Professor Nancy?”

“That was her advisor, yes. Mahalia liked her.”

“They worked well together?” Corwi was watching me as I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Mrs. Geary even laughed. “Mahalia seemed to argue with her all the time. Seemed they didn’t agree on much, but when I said, ‘Well how does that work?’ she told me it was okay. She said they liked disagreeing. Mahalia said she learned more that way.”

“Did you keep up with your daughter’s work?” I said. “Read her essays? She told you about her Ul Qoman friends?” Corwi moved in her seat. Mrs. Geary shook her head.

“Oh no,” she said.

“Inspector,” said Thacker.

“The stuff she did just wasn’t the sort of thing that I could … that I was real interested in, Mr. Borlú. I mean since she’d been over here, sure, stories in the paper about Ul Qoma would catch our eye a bit more than they had before, and sure I’d read them. But so long as Mahalia was happy, I … we were happy. Happy for her to get on with her thing, you know.”

“Inspector, when do you think we might be receiving the Ul Qoma transfer papers?” Thacker said.

“Soon, I think. And she was? Happy?”

“Oh, I think she …” Mrs. Geary said. “There were always dramas, you know.”

“Yeah,” her father said.

“Now,” said Mrs. Geary.

“Oh?” I said.

“Well now it wasn’t … only she’d been kind of stressed recently, you know. I told her she needed to come home for a vacation—I know, coming home hardly sounds like a vacation, but you know. But she said she was making real progress, like making a breakthrough in her work.”

“And some people were pissed about that,” Mr. Geary said.

“Honey.”

“They were. She told us.”

Corwi looked at me, confused. “Mr. and Mrs. Geary …” While Thacker said that, I explained quickly to Corwi in Besź, “Not ‘pissed’ drunk. They’re American—‘angry.’ Who was pissed?” I asked them. “Her professors?”

“No,” Mr. Geary said. “Goddammit, who do you think did this?”

“John, please, please …”

“Goddammit, who the fuck are First Qoma?” Mr. Geary said. “You haven’t even asked us who we think did this. You haven’t even asked us. You think we don’t know?”

“What did she say?” I said. Thacker was standing now and patting the air, Calm down everybody.

“Some little bastard at a conference tells her her work was goddamn treason. Someone’d been gunning for her since the first time she came here.”

“John, stop, you’re mixing it up. That first time, when that man said that, she was here, here here, Besźel-here, not in Ul Qoma, and that wasn’t First Qoma, that was the other ones, here, nationalists or True Citizens, something, you remember …”

“Wait, what?” I said. “First Qoma? And—someone said something to her when she was in Besźel? When?”

“Hold on boss, it’s …” Corwi spoke quickly in Besź.

“I think we all need to take a minute,” Thacker said.

He placated the Gearys as if they had been wronged, and I apologised as if I had wronged them. They knew that they were expected to stay in their hotel. We had two officers stationed downstairs to ensure compliance. We told them that we would tell them as soon as we had news that their paperwork for travel had come through, and that we would be back the following day. In the meantime, if they needed anything or any information—I left them my numbers.

“He will be found,” Corwi said to them as we took leave. “Breach will take who did this. I promise you that.” To me outside she said, “Qoma First, not First Qoma, by the way. Like the True Citizens, only for Ul Qoma. As pleasant as our lot, by all accounts, but a lot more secretive and thank fuck not our headache.”

More radical in their Besźel-love even than Syedr’s National Bloc, True Citizens were marchers in quasi-uniform and makers of frightening speeches. Legal but not by much. We had not succeeded in proving their responsibility for attacks on Besźel’s Ul Qomatown, the Ul Qoman embassy, mosques and synagogues and leftist bookshops, on our small immigrant population. We—by which I mean we policzai, of course—had more than once found the perpetrators and that they were members of TC, but the organisation itself disavowed the attacks, just, just, and no judge had yet banned them.

“And Mahalia annoyed both lots.”

“So her Dad says. He doesn’t know …”

“We know she certainly managed to get the unificationists here mad, ages ago. And then she did the same to the nats over there? Any extremists she hasn’t made angry?” We drove. “You know,” I said, “that meeting, of the Oversight Committee … it was pretty strange. Some of the things some people were saying …”

“Syedr?”

“Syedr, sure, among others, some of what they were saying didn’t make much sense to me at the time. Maybe if I followed politics more carefully. Maybe I’ll do that.” After a silence I said, “Maybe we should ask around a bit.”

“The fuck, boss?” Corwi twisted in her seat. She did not look angry but confused. “Why were you even grilling them like that? The muckamucks are invoking fucking Breach in a day or two to deal with this shit, and woe betide whoever did Mahalia then. You know? Even if we do find any leads now, we’re going to be off the case any minute; this is just biding time.”

“Yeah,” I said. I swerved a little to avoid an Ul Qoman taxi, unseeing it as much as possible. “Yeah. But still. I’m impressed with anyone who can piss off so many nutters. All of whom are at each other’s throats as well. Besź Nats, Ul Qoman Nats, anti-Nats …”

“Let Breach deal. You were right. She deserves Breach, boss, like you said. What they can do.”

“She does deserve them. And she’ll get them.” I pointed, drove on. “Avanti. For the next little while she’s got us.”

Chapter Eight

EITHER HIS TIMING WAS PRETERNATURAL or Commissar Gadlem had had some techie rig up a cheat on his system—whenever I came into the office, any emails from him were invariably top of my inbox.

Fine, his latest said. I gather Mr. & Mrs. G ensconced in hotel. Don’t particularly want you tied up for days in paperwork (sure you agree) so polite chaperoning only please till formalities complete. Job done.

Whatever information we had I would have to hand over when the time came. No point making work for myself, Gadlem was saying, nor costing the department my time, so take my foot off the accelerator. I made and read notes that would be illegible to everyone else, and to me in an hour’s time, though I kept and filed them all carefully—my usual methodology. I reread Gadlem’s message several times, rolling my eyes. I probably muttered something out loud to myself.

I spent some time tracking down numbers—online and through a real live operator on the end of the phone—and placed a call that made clucking noises as it ran through various international exchanges. “Bol Ye’an offices.” I’d called twice before but previously had gone through a kind of automated system: this was the first time I’d had anyone pick up. His Illitan was good, but the accent was North American; so in English I said: “Good afternoon, I’m trying to reach Professor Nancy. I’ve left messages on her voicemail, but—”

“Who’s calling please?”

“This is Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad.”

“Oh. Oh.” The voice was quite different now. “This is about Mahalia, isn’t it? Inspector, I’m … Hold on I’m going to try to track down Izzy.” A long hollow-acousticked pause. “This is Isabelle Nancy.” Anxious-sounding, American I’d have guessed if I hadn’t known she was from Toronto. Not much like her voicemail voice.

“Professor Nancy, I’m Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Policzai, ECS. I think you have spoken to my colleague Officer Corwi? You got my messages maybe?”

“Inspector, yes, I’m … Please accept my apologies. I’d meant to call you back but it’s been, everything’s been, I’m very sorry …” She shifted between English and good Besź.

“I understand, Professor. I am sorry too about Miss Geary. I know this must be a very bad time for all of you and your colleagues.”

“I, we, we’re all in shock here, Inspector. Real shock. I don’t know what to tell you. Mahalia was a great young woman and—”

“Of course.”

“Where are you? Are you … local? Would you like to meet?”

“I’m afraid I’m calling internationally, Professor; I’m still in Besźel.”

“I see. So … how can I help you, Inspector? Is there any problem? I mean any problem other than, than all of this, I mean …” I heard her breath. “I’m expecting Mahalia’s parents any day now.”

“Yes, I just was with them actually. The embassy here is putting in paperwork for them, and they should come to you soon. No, I am calling you because I want to know more about Mahalia and what she was doing.”

“Forgive me, Inspector Borlú, but I was under the impression … this crime … will you not be invoking Breach, I thought…?” She had calmed and was speaking only Besź now, so what the hell I gave up on my English, which was no better than her Besź.

“Yes. The Oversight Committee … excuse me, Professor I don’t know how much you know about how these matters go. But yes, responsibility for this will be passed over. You understand how that will work, then?”

“I think so.”

“Alright. I’m just doing some last work. I’m curious, is all. We hear interesting things about Mahalia. I want to know some things about her work. Can you help me? You were her advisor, yes? Do you have time to speak to me about that for a few minutes?”

“Of course, Inspector, you’ve waited long enough. I don’t know quite what—”

“I want to know what she was working on. And about her history with you and with the program. And tell me about Bol Ye’an, too. She was studying Orciny, I understand.”

“What?” Isabelle Nancy was shocked. “Orciny? Absolutely not. This is an archaeology department.”

“Forgive me, I’d been under the impression … What do you mean, this is archaeology?”

“I mean that if she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she’d be doing her doctorate in Folklore or Anthropology or maybe Comp Lit. Granted, the edges of disciplines are getting vague. Also that Mahalia is one of a number of young archaeologists more interested in Foucault and Baudrillard than in Gordon Childe or in trowels.” She did not sound angry but sad and amused. “But we wouldn’t have accepted her unless her PhD was real archaeology.”

“So what was it?”

“Bol Ye’an’s an old dig, Inspector.”

“Please tell me.”

“I’m sure you’re aware of all the controversy around early artefacts in this region, Inspector. Bol Ye’an’s uncovering pieces that are a good couple of millennia old. Whichever theory you subscribe to on Cleavage, split or convergence, what we’re looking for predates it, predates Ul Qoma and Besźel. It’s root stuff.”

“It must be extraordinary.”

“Of course. Also pretty incomprehensible. You understand we know next to nothing about the culture that produced all this?”

“I think so. That’s why all the interest, yes?”

“Well … yes. That and the kind of things you have here. What Mahalia was doing was trying to decode what the title of her project called ‘A Hermeneutics of Identity’ from the layouts of gears and so on.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Then she did a good job. The aim of a PhD’s to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you’re doing after the first couple of years. I’m joking, you understand. What she’s doing would have had ramifications for theories of the two cities. Where they came from, you know. She played her cards pretty close, so I was never sure month to month where she stood exactly on the issue, but she still had a couple of years to make up her mind. Or to just make something up.”

“So she was helping with the actual dig.”

“Absolutely. Most of our research students are. Some for primary research, some as part of their stipend deal, some a bit of both, some to suck up to us. Mahalia was paid a little bit, but mostly she needed to get her hands on the artefacts for her work.”

“I see. I’m sorry, Professor, I’d been under the impression that she’d been working on Orciny …”

“She used to be interested in that. She first went to Besźel for a conference, some years ago.”

“Yes, I think I heard about that.”

“Right. Well, it caused a little stink because at that time she was very into Orciny, totally—she was a little Bowdenite, and the paper she gave didn’t go down very well. Led to some remonstrations. I admired her guts, but she was on a hiding to nothing with all that stuff. When she applied to do her PhD—to be honest I was pretty surprised it was with me—I had to make sure she knew what would and wouldn’t be … acceptable. But… I mean, I don’t know what she was reading in her spare time, but what she was writing, when I got the updates on her PhD, they were, they were fine.”

“Fine?” I said. “You don’t sound …”

She hesitated.

“Well … Honestly I was a little, a little bit disappointed. She was smart. I know she was smart, because, you know, in seminars and so on she was terrific. And she worked superhard. She was a ‘grind,’ we’d say”—the word in English—“always in the library. But her chapters …”

“Not good?”

“Fine. Really, they were okay. She’d pass her doctorate, no problem, but it wasn’t going to set the world on fire. It was kind of lacklustre, you know? And given the number of hours she was working, it was a bit thin. References and so on. I’d spoken to her about it, though, and she promised that she was, you know. Working on it.”

“Could I see it?”

“Sure.” She was taken aback. “I mean, I suppose. I don’t know. I have to work out what the ethics of that are. I’ve got the chapters she gave me, but they’re very unfinished; she wanted to work on them more. If she’d finished it it would be public access, and no problem, but as it is … Can I get back to you? She probably should have been publishing some of them as papers in journals—that’s kind of the done thing—but she wasn’t. We’d talked about that too; she said she was going to do something about it.”

“What’s a Bowdenite, Professor?”

“Oh.” She laughed. “Sorry. It’s the source of this Orciny stuff. Poor David wouldn’t thank me for using the term. It’s someone inspired by the early work of David Bowden. Do you know his work?”

“… No.”

“He wrote a book, years ago. Between the City and the City. Ring any bells? It was a huge thing for the later flower children. The first time for a generation anyone had taken Orciny seriously. I guess it’s not a surprise you haven’t seen it; it’s still illegal. In Besźel and in Ul Qoma. You won’t find it even in the university libraries. In some ways it was a brilliant piece of work—he did some fantastic archival investigations, and saw some analogies and connections that are … well, still pretty remarkable. But it was pretty crackpot ramblings.”

“How so?”

“Because he believed in it! He collated all these references, found new ones, put them together into a kind of ur-myth, then reinterpreted it as a secret and a cover-up. He … Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really, thought he did believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said he believed it. He came to Ul Qoma, from where he went to Besźel, managed I do not know how to go between the two of them—legally I assure you—several times, and he claimed to have found traces of Orciny itself. And he went further-said that Orciny wasn’t just somewhere that had existed in the gaps between Qoma and Besźel since their foundings or coming together or splitting (I can’t remember where he stood on the Cleavage issue): he said it was still here.”

“Orciny?”

“Exactly. A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight.”

“What? Doing what? How?”

“Unseen, like Ul Qomans to Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites. David said he was going to go into it and disappear.”

“Wow.”

“Exactly, wow. Wow is right. It’s notorious. Google it, you’ll see. Anyway, when we first saw Mahalia she was pretty unreconstructed. I liked her because she was spunky and because Bowdenite she may have been but she had panache and smarts. But it was a joke, you understand? I even wondered if she knew it, if she was joking herself.”

“But she wasn’t working on that anymore?”

“No one reputable would supervise a Bowdenite PhD. I had this stern word with her about it when she enrolled, but she even laughed. Said she’d left all that behind. As I say, I was surprised she’d come to me. My work’s not as avant-garde as hers.”

“The Foucaults and the $$i$$eks not your thing?”

“I respect them of course, but—”

“Aren’t there any of those, what should we say, theory types she could have gone with?”

“Yes, but she told me she needed to get her hands on the actual objects. I’m an artefact scholar. My more philosophically oriented colleagues would … well, I wouldn’t trust many of them to brush the dirt off an amphora.” I laughed. “So I guess it made sense to her; she was really insistent on learning how to do that side of things. I was surprised but pleased. You understand these pieces are unique, Inspector?”

“I think so. I’ve heard all the rumours, of course.”

“You mean their magic powers? I wish, I wish. But even so these digs are incomparable. This material culture makes no sense at all. There is nowhere else in the world that you’ll dig up what looks like cutting-edge late antiquity, really beautiful complicated bronzework mixed right up with frankly neolithic stuff. Stratigraphy looks like it goes out of the window with this. It was used as evidence against the Harris Matrix—wrongly, but you can see why. That’s why these digs are popular with young archaeologists. And that’s not even counting all the stories, which is all they are but which hasn’t stopped unlikely researchers pining for a chance to have a look. Still, I’d have thought Mahalia would have tried to go to Dave, not that she’d have had much luck with him.”

“Dave? Bowden? He’s alive? He teaches?”

“Certainly he’s alive. But even back when she was into this, Mahalia wouldn’t have got him to supervise her. I’m willing to bet she must have spoken to him when she was first investigating. And I’m willing to bet she got pretty short shrift. He repudiated all this years ago. It’s the bane of his life. Ask him. A burst of adolescence he’s never been able to shake off. Never published anything else worth a damn—he’s the Orciny man for the rest of his career. He’ll tell you this himself if you ask him.”

“I may. You know him?”

“He’s a colleague. It’s not a big field, pre-Cleavage archaeology. He’s at Prince of Wales too, at least part-time. He lives here, in Ul Qoma.”

She lived several months of the year in apartments in Ul Qoma, in its university district, where Prince of Wales and other Canadian institutions gleefully exploited the fact that the US state (for reasons now embarrassing even to most of its right-wingers) boycotted Ul Qoma. It was Canada, instead, that was enthusiastically forging links, academic and economic, with Ul Qoman institutions.

Besźel, of course, was a friend of both Canada and the US, but the enthusiasm with which the two countries combined plugged into our faltering markets was dwarfed by that with which Canada cosied up to what they called the New Wolf economy. We were a street mongrel, maybe, or a scrawny milkrat. Most vermin are interstitial. It is very hard to prove that the shy cold-weather lizards in cracks in Besź walls can live in Besźel only, as frequently claimed: certainly they die if exported into Ul Qoma (even more gently than by children’s hands), but they tend to do so in Besź captivity as well. Pigeons, mice, wolves, bats live in both cities, are crosshatched animals. But by unspoken tradition, the majority of the local wolves—mean, bony things long-since adapted to urban scavenging—are generally if nebulously considered Besź: it is only those few of respectable size and none-too-vile pelt, the same notion held, that are Ul Qoman. Many citizens of Besźel avoid transgressing this—entirely unnecessary and invented—categorical boundary by never referring to wolves.

I had scared off a pair once, as they foraged through rubbish in the yard of my building. I had thrown something at them. They had been unusually kempt, and more than one of my neighbours had been shocked, as if I had breached.

Most of the Ul Qomanists, as Nancy described herself, were bilocated like her—she explained it with audible guilt, mentioning again and again that it must be a historical quirk that located the more fecund archaeological sites in areas of Ul Qoman totality, or heftily Ul Qoma–weighted crosshatching. Prince of Wales had reciprocal arrangements with several Ul Qoman academies. David Bowden lived more of each year in Ul Qoma, and less back in Canada. He was in Ul Qoma now. He had, she told me, few students, and not much of a teaching load, but I still could not get hold of him on the number she gave me.

A little ferreting online. It was not hard to confirm most of what Isabelle Nancy had told me. I found a page that listed Mahalia’s PhD title (they had not yet taken her name offline, nor put up one of the online tributes I was sure would be coming). I found Nancy’s list of publications, and David Bowden’s. His included the book Nancy had mentioned, from 1975, two articles from around the same time, one more article from a decade later, then mostly journalism, some of it collected into a volume.

I found fracturedcity.org, the main discussion site for the kooks of dopplurbanology, Ul-Qoma-and-Besźel obsession (the site’s approach of conjoining the two as a single object of study would outrage polite opinion in both cities, but judging by comments on the forum it was commonly if mildly illegally accessed from both, too). From there a series of links (cheekily, confident in the indulgence or incompetence of our and the Ul Qoman censors, many were servers with .uq and .zb addresses) gave me a few paragraphs copied from Between the City and the City. It read as Nancy had suggested.

My phone startled me. I realised that it was dark, after seven.

“Borlú,” I said, sitting back.

“Inspector? Oh, shit, sir, we have a situation. This is Ceczoria.” Agim Ceczoria was one of the officers stationed at the hotel to look after Mahalia’s parents. I rubbed my eyes and scanned my email to see if I’d missed any messages coming in. There was a noise behind him, a commotion. “Sir, Mr. Geary … he went AWOL, sir. He fucking … he breached.”

“What?”

“He got out of the room, sir.” Behind him was a woman’s voice, and she was shouting.

“What the hell happened?”

“I don’t know how the fuck he got past us, sir, I just don’t know. But he wasn’t gone long.”

“How do you know? How did you get him?”

He swore again.

“We didn’t. Breach did. I’m calling from the car, sir, we’re en route to the airport. Breach are … escorting us. Somewhere. They told us what to do. That’s Mrs. Geary you can hear. He has to go. Now.”

CORWI HAD GONE, and she wasn’t answering her phone. I took an unmarked squad car from the pool, but ran it with the sirens making their hysteric gulp gulp noises, so I could ignore traffic laws. (It was only the Besź rules which applied to me and which therefore I was with authority ignoring, but traffic law is one of the compromise areas where the Oversight Committee ensures close similarity between the rules of Besźel and Ul Qoma. Though the traffic cultures are not identical, for the sake of the pedestrians and cars who have, unseeing, to negotiate much foreign traffic, our vehicles and theirs run at comparable speeds in comparable ways. We all learn to tactfully avoid our neighbour’s emergency vehicles, as well as our own.)

There were no flights out for a couple of hours, but they would sequester the Gearys, and in some hidden way Breach would watch them onto the plane, to make sure they were on it, and airborne. Our embassy in the US would already be informed, as well as the representatives in Ul Qoma, and a no visa flagged in their names on both our systems. Once they were out, they would not be back in. I ran through Besźel airport to the office of the policzai, showed my badge.

“Where are the Gearys?”

“In the cells, sir.”

Depending on what I saw I was ready with, do you know what just happened to these people, whatever they’ve done they’ve just lost a daughter, and so on, but it was not necessary. They had given them food and drink and treated them gently. Ceczoria was with them in the little room. He was muttering to Mrs. Geary in his basic English.

She looked at me tearfully. Her husband was, I thought for a second, asleep on the bunk. I saw how very motionless he was and revised my opinion.

“Inspector,” Ceczoria said.

“What’s happened to him?”

“He’s … Breach did it, sir. He’ll probably be okay, wake up in a bit. I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they did to him.”

Mrs. Geary said, “You’ve poisoned my husband …”

“Mrs. Geary, please.” Ceczoria rose and came closer to me, lowered his voice though he was talking now in Besź. “We didn’t know anything about it, sir. There was a little bit of a commotion outside and someone came into the lobby where we were.” Mrs. Geary was crying and talking to her unconscious husband. “Geary kind of lurches in and passes out. The hotel security go at them, and they just look at this shape, someone behind Geary in the hallway, and the guards stop and wait. I hear this voice: ‘You know what I represent. Mr. Geary breached. Remove him.’” Ceczoria shook his head, helpless. “Then, and I still can’t see anything properly, whoever’s speaking’s gone.”

“How …?”

“Inspector, I don’t fucking know. I … I take responsibility, sir. Geary must have got past us.”

I stared at him. “Do you want a bloody biscuit? Of course it’s your responsibility. What did he do?”

“Don’t know. Breach were gone before I could say a word.”

“What about…” I nodded at Mrs. Geary.

“She wasn’t deported: she didn’t do anything.” He was whispering. “But when I told her we had to take her husband, she said she’d go with him. She doesn’t want to stick around on her own.”

“Inspector Borlú.” Mrs. Geary was trying to sound controlled. “If you’re talking about me you should talk to me. Do you see what’s been done to my husband?”

“Mrs. Geary, I’m terribly sorry.”

“You should be …”

“Mrs. Geary, I didn’t do this. Neither did Ceczoria. Neither did any of my officers. Do you understand?”

“Oh Breach Breach Breach …”

“Mrs. Geary, your husband just did something very serious. Very serious.” She was quiet but for heavy breaths. “Do you understand me? Has there been some mistake here? Were we less than clear in our explanations of the system of checks and balances between Besźel and Ul Qoma? Do you understand that this deportation is nothing to do with us, but that we have absolutely no power to do anything about it, and that he is, listen to me, he is incredibly lucky that’s all he’s got?” She said nothing. “In the car I got the impression that your husband wasn’t quite so clear on how it works here, so you tell me, Mrs. Geary, did something go wrong? Did he misunderstand our… advice? How did my men not see him leave? Where was he going?”

She looked still as if she might cry; then she glanced at her supine husband and her stance changed. She stood straighter and whispered something to him that I did not catch. Mrs. Geary looked at me.

“He was in the air force,” she said. “You think you’re looking at some fat old man?” She touched him. “You never asked us who might have done this, Inspector. I don’t know what to make of you, I really don’t. Like my husband said, you think we don’t know who did this?” She clutched and folded and unfolded a piece of paper, without looking at it, took it out of a side pocket of her bag, put it in again. “You think our daughter didn’t talk to us? First Qoma, True Citizens, Nat Bloc … Mahalia was afraid, Inspector.

“We haven’t figured out exactly who did what, and we don’t know why, but where was he going, you say? He was going to find out. I told him it wouldn’t work—he didn’t speak the language, he didn’t read it—but he had addresses we got from the internet and a phrase book and, what, was I going to tell him not to go? Not to go? I’m so proud of him. Those people hated Mahalia for years, since she first came here.”

“Printed out from the internet?”

“And I mean here, Besźel. When she came to the conference. Then the same thing with others, in Ul Qoma. Are you going to tell me there’s no connection? She knew she’d made enemies, she told us she’d made enemies. When she went looking into Orciny she made enemies. When she looked deeper she made more. They all hated her, because of what she was doing. What she knew.”

“Who hated her?”

“All of them.”

“What did she know?”

She shook her head and sagged. “My husband was going to investigate.”

He had climbed out of a ground-floor bathroom window, to avoid my watching officers. A few steps across the road, what could have merely been a breaking of the rules we had set him, but he had blundered out of a crosshatching and into an alter area, a yard that existed only in Ul Qoma; and Breach, who must have watched him all the time, had come for him. I hoped they hadn’t hurt him too badly. If they had I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any doctor back home who would be able to identify the agent of his injury. What could I say?

“I’m sorry for what happened, Mrs. Geary. Your husband shouldn’t have tried to evade Breach. I … We are on the same side.” She looked at me carefully.

She whispered to me eventually, “Let us go, then. Go on. We can walk back to the city. We have money. We … my husband’s going crazy. He needs to be looking. He’ll just come back. We’ll come through Hungary and, or, we’ll come up via Turkey or Armenia-there are ways we can get in, you know … We’re going to find out who did this …”

“Mrs. Geary, Breach are watching us now. Now.” I raised my open hands slowly and filled them with air. “You wouldn’t get ten metres. What is it you think you can do? You don’t speak Besź, Illitan. I … Let me, Mrs. Geary. Let me do my job for you.”

MR. GEARY WAS STILL UNCONSCIOUS when the plane boarded. Mrs. Geary looked at me with reproach and hope, and I tried to tell her again that there was nothing I could do, that Mr. Geary had done this himself.

There were not many other passengers. I wondered where Breach was. Our remit would end when the plane doors were sealed. Mrs. Geary cushioned her husband’s head as he lolled in the stretcher in which we carried him. In the plane doorway, as they took the Gearys to their seats, I showed my badge to one of the attendants.

“Be good to them.”

“The deportees?”

“Yeah. Seriously.” He raised his brows but nodded.

I went to where the Gearys were seated. Mrs. Geary stared at me. I squatted.

“Mrs. Geary. Please pass my apologies to your husband. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but I understand why.” I hesitated. “You know … if he’d known Besźel better, he could probably have avoided falling into Ul Qoma, and Breach couldn’t have stopped him.” She just stared. “Let me get that.” I stood, took her bag and put it overhead. “Of course when we know what’s happening, if we get any leads at all, any information, I’ll tell you.” Still she didn’t say anything. Her mouth was moving: she was trying to decide whether to plead with me or accuse me of something. I bowed a little, old-fashioned, turned and left the plane and the two of them.

Back in the airport building, I took out the paper I had taken from the side pocket of her bag and looked at it. The name of an organisation, True Citizens, copied from the internet. That his daughter must have told him hated her, and where Mr. Geary had been going with his own dissident investigations. An address.

Chapter Nine

CORWI COMPLAINED, more dutifully than with fervour. “What’s this all about, sir?” she said. “Aren’t they going to be invoking Breach any minute?”

“Yes. In fact they’re taking their time. They should’ve done it by now; I don’t know what the holdup is.”

“So what the fuck, sir? Why are we in such a rush to do this? Mahalia’ll have Breach hunting for her killer soon.” I drove. “Damn. You don’t want to hand it over, do you?”

“Oh, I do.” So …

“I just want to check some things first, in this unexpected little moment we have.”

She stopped staring at me when we arrived at the headquarters of the True Citizens. I had called in and got someone to check the address for me: it was as it was written on Mrs. Geary’s paper. I had tried to contact Shenvoi, my acquaintance undercover, but couldn’t get him, so relied on what I knew and could quickly read on the TCs. Corwi stood beside me, and I saw her touch the handle of her weapon.

A reinforced door, blocked-off windows, but the house itself was or had been residential, and the rest of the street remained so. (I wondered if there had ever been any attempt to close the TC down on zoning charges.) The street almost looked crosshatched, its random-seeming variation between terraced and detached buildings, but it was not, it was total Besźel, the variation of styles an architectural quirk, though it was only a corner away from a very crosshatched area.

I had heard it alleged by liberals that this was more than irony, that the proximity of Ul Qoma gave the TC opportunities to intimidate the enemy. Certainly no matter how they unsaw them, the Ul Qomans in physical proximity must have registered at some level the paramilitary fatigues, the Besźel First patches. You could almost claim it was breach, though of course not quite.

They were milling as we approached, lounging, smoking, drinking, laughing loud. Their efforts to claim the street were so overt they might as well have been pissing musk. All but one were men. All eyed us. Words were spoken and most of them ambled into the building, leaving a few by the door. In leather, denim, one despite the cold in a muscle top his physiology deserved, staring at us. Bodybuilder, several men with cropped hair, one affecting an antique Besź-aristo cut like a fussy mullet. He leaned on a baseball bat—not a Besź sport but just plausible enough that he could not be done for Possessing Weapon with Intent. One man muttered to Haircut, spoke rapidly on a cell phone, clicked it shut. There were not many passersby. All there were of course were Besź, so they could and did stare at us and the TC crew, though most then looked away.

“You ready for this?” I said.

“Fuck off, boss,” Corwi muttered back. The bat holder swung it as if idly.

A few metres from the reception committee I said loudly into my radio: “At TC headquarters, four-eleven GyedarStrász, as planned. Check-in in an hour. Code alert. Ready backup.” I thumbed the radio off quickly before the operator had the chance to audibly respond along the lines of What on earth are you on about, Borlú?

The big man: “Help you, Officer?” One of his comrades looked Corwi up and down and made a kiss-kiss noise that might be the chirrup of a bird.

“Yes, we’re coming in to ask a few questions.”

“I don’t think so.” Haircut smiled, but it was Muscles doing the talking.

“We really are, you know.”

“Not so much.” This was the man who had made the call, a blond suede-headed man, pushing in front of his big acquaintance. “Got Entry and Search papers? No? Then you will not be coming in.”

I shifted. “If you’ve got nothing to hide, why keep us out?” Corwi said. “We’ve some questions …” but Muscles and Haircut were laughing.

“Please,” Haircut said. He shook his head. “Please. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

The close-shorn man gestured him to shut up. “We’re done here,” he said.

“What do you know about Byela Mar?” I said. They looked without recognition, or uncertain. “Mahalia Geary.” That time they knew the name. The telephoner made an ah noise; Haircut whispered to the big man.

“Geary,” Bodybuilder said. “We read the papers.” He shrugged, que sera. “Yes. A lesson in the dangers of certain behaviours?”

“How so?” I leaned against the doorjamb companionably, forcing Mullet to back up a step or two. He muttered again to his friend. I could not hear what.

“No one’s condoning attacks, but Miss Geary”—the man with the phone said the name with exaggerated American accent, and stood between us and all the others—“had form and a reputation among patriots. We’d not heard from her for a while, true. Hoped she might have gained some perspective. Seems not.” He shrugged. “If you denigrate Besźel, it’ll come back to bite you.”

“What denigration?” Corwi said. “What do you know about her?”

“Come on, Officer! Look at what she worked on! She was no friend of Besźel.”

“Alright,” Yellow said. “Unif. Or worse, a spy.” I looked at Corwi and she at me.

“What?” I said. “Which you going to go for?”

“She wasn’t…” Corwi said. We both hesitated.

The men stayed in the doorway and would not even bicker with us anymore. Mullet seemed minded to, in response to my provocations, but Bodybuilder said, “Leave it, Caczos,” and the man shut up, and only watched us from behind the bigger man’s back, and the other who had spoken remonstrated with them quietly and they backed a few feet away but still watched me. I tried to reach Shenvoi, but he was away from his secure phone. It occurred to me that he might (I was not one of the few who knew his assignment) even be in the building before me.

“Inspector Borlú.” The voice came from behind us. A smart black car had pulled up behind ours, and a man was walking towards us, leaving the driver’s door open. He was in his early fifties, I would say, portly, with a sharp, lined face. He wore a decent dark suit without a tie. What hair had not receded was grey and cut short. “Inspector,” he said again. “Time for you to leave.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Of course, of course,” I said. “Only forgive me … who in the name of the Virgin are you?”

“Harkad Gosz. Barrister for the True Citizens of Besźel.” Several of the thuggish men looked rather startled at that.

“Oh terrific,” whispered Corwi. I took Gosz in ostentatiously: he was clearly high-rent.

“Just popping by, are you?” I said. “Or did you get a call?” I winked at the phone-man, who shrugged. Amiably enough. “I take it you don’t have a direct line to these donkeys, so who did it come through? They put the word to Syedr? Who dropped you a line?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess why you’re here, Inspector.”

“A moment, Gosz … How do you know who I am?”

“Let me guess—you’re here asking questions about Mahalia Geary.”

“Absolutely. None of your boys seem too cut up about her death. And yet lamentably ignorant about her work: they’re labouring under the delusion that she was a unificationist, which would make the unifs laugh very hard. Never heard of Orciny? And let me repeat—how do you know my name?”

“Inspector, are you really going to waste all our time? Orciny? However Geary wanted to spin it, whatever foolishness she wanted to pretend to, whatever stupid footnotes she wanted to stick in her essays, the thrust of everything she was working on was to undermine Besźel. This nation is not a plaything, Inspector. Understand me? Either Geary was stupid, wasting her time with old wives’ tales that manage to combine being meaningless with being insults, or she was not stupid, and all this work about the secret powerlessness of Besźel was designed to make a very different point. Ul Qoma seems to have been more congenial for her, after all, didn’t it?”

“Are you joking with me? What’s your point? That Mahalia pretended to be working on Orciny? She was an enemy of Besźel? What, an Ul Qoman agent…?”

Gosz came close to me. He motioned the TC-ers, who backed into their fortified house and half closed the door, waiting and watching.

“Inspector, you have no Entry and Search. Go. If you’re going to insist on this, let me dutifully recite the following: continue this approach and I’ll complain to your superiors about harassment of the, let’s recall, entirely legal TC of B.” I waited a moment out. There was more he wanted to say. “And ask yourself what you’d infer about someone who arrives here in Besźel; commences research on a topic long and justifiably ignored by serious scholars, that’s predicated on the uselessness and weakness of Besźel; makes, unsurprisingly, enemies at every turn; leaves and then goes straight to Ul Qoma. And then anyway, which you appear to be unaware of, starts to quietly drop what was always an entirely unconvincing arena for research. She’s not been working on Orciny for years—might as well have admitted the whole thing was a blind, for goodness’ sake! She’s working at one of the most contentious pro–Ul Qoman digs of the last century. Do I think there’s reason to suspect her motives, Inspector? I do.”

Corwi was staring at him literally with her mouth open. “Damn, boss, you were right,” she said without lowering her voice. “They’re batshit.” He looked at her coldly.

“How would you know all that, Mr. Gosz?” I said. “About her work?”

“Her research? Please. Even without the newspapers ferreting around, PhD topics and conference papers aren’t state secrets, Borlú. There’s a thing called the internet. You should try it.”

“And …”

“Just go,” he said. “Tell Gadlem I sent my regards. Do you want a job, Inspector? No, not a threat, it’s a question. Would you like a job? Would you like to keep the one you have? Are you for real, Inspector How-Do-I-Know-Your-Name?” He laughed. “Do you think this”—a point at the building—“is where things end?”

“Oh no,” I said. “You got a call from someone.”

“Now go.”

“Which paper did you read?” I said with raised voice. I kept my eyes on Gosz but turned my head enough to show I was talking to the men in the doorway. “Big man? Haircut? Which paper?”

“That’s enough, now,” the crop-haired one said, as Muscles said to me, “What?”

“You said you read it in the paper about her. Which one? Far as I know no one’s mentioned her real name yet. She was still a Fulana Detail when I saw it. I’m obviously not reading the best press. So what should I be reading?” A mutter, a laugh.

“I pick things up.” Gosz did not tell the man to shut up. “Who knows where I heard it?” I could not make too much of this. Information leaked fast, including from supposedly secure committees, and it was possible her name had got out and even been published somewhere, though I hadn’t seen it—and if it had not, it would soon. “And what should you be reading? Cry of the Spear, of course!” He waved a copy of the TC newspaper.

“Well this is all very exciting,” I said. “You’re all so informed. Poor fuddled me, I suppose it’ll be a relief to hand this over. I can’t possibly keep hold of it. Like you say, I haven’t got the right papers to ask the right questions. Of course Breach don’t need any papers. They can ask anything they want, of anyone.”

That quietened them. I looked at them—at Muscles, Mullet, the telephoner and the lawyer—seconds more, before I walked, Corwi behind me.

***

“WHAT AN UNPLEASANT BUNCH OF FUCKERS.”

“Ah well,” I said. “We were fishing. A bit cheeky. Though I wasn’t expecting to be spanked like quite such a naughty boy.”

“What was all that stuff…? How did he know who you are? And all that business about threatening you …”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was real. Maybe he could make life hard if I pushed this. Not my problem very long.”

“I guess I have heard,” she said. “About links, I mean. Everyone knows the TC are the street soldiers of the NatBloc, so he must know Syedr. Like you said that’s probably the chain: they call Syedr, who calls him.” I said nothing. “Probably is. Might be who they heard about Mahalia from, too. But would Syedr really be so dumb as to feed us to the TC?”

“You said yourself he is pretty dumb.”

“Okay, yeah, but why would he?”

“He’s a bully.”

“True. They all are—that’s how the politics work, you know? So maybe, yeah, that’s what’s going on, bluster to scare you off.”

“Scare me off what?”

“Scare you, I mean. Not ‘off’ anything. They’re congenital thugs, those guys.”

“Who knows? Maybe he’s got something to keep to himself, maybe he hasn’t. I admit I like the idea of the Breach hunting him and his. When the invocation finally comes.”

“Yeah. I just thought you seemed … We’re still chasing stuff, I wondered if you were wishing you could … I wasn’t expecting to do any more of this. I mean we’re just waiting. For the committee …”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well. You know.” I looked at her and away. “It’ll be good to give this one up; she needs Breach. But we haven’t handed over just yet. The more we have to give them, the better I guess …” That was questionable.

Big breath in, out. I stopped and bought us coffee from a new place, before we went back to the HQ. American coffee, to Corwi’s disgust.

“I thought you liked it aj Tyrko,” she said, sniffing it.

“I do, but even more than I like it aj Tyrko, I don’t care.”

Chapter Ten

I WAS IN EARLY THE NEXT MORNING but had no time to orient myself to anything. “El jefe wants you, Tyad,” said Tsura, on desk duty, as I entered.

“Shit,” I said. “He in already?” I hid behind my hand and whispered, “Turn away, turn away, Tsura. Be on a piss break at my ingress. You didn’t see me.”

“Come on, Tyad.” She waved me away and covered her eyes. But there was a note on my desk. See me IMMEDIATELY. I rolled my eyes. Canny. If he had emailed it to me or left it as a voicemail I could have claimed to not see it for a few hours. I couldn’t avoid him now.

“Sir?” I knocked and poked my head around his door. I considered ways to explain my visit to the True Citizens. I hoped Corwi was not too loyal or honourable to blame me if she was taking shit herself for it. “You wanted me?”

Gadlem looked at me over the rim of his cup and beckoned, motioned me to sit. “Heard about the Gearys,” he said. “What happened?”

“Yes sir. It was … it was a cock-up.” I had not tried to contact them. I did not know if Mrs. Geary knew where her paper had gone. “I think they were, you know, they were just distraught and they did a stupid thing …”

“A stupid thing with a lot of preplanning. Quite the most organised spontaneous foolishness I’ve ever heard of. Are they lodging a complaint? Am I going to hear stern words from the US embassy?”

“I don’t know. It would be a bit cheeky if they did. They wouldn’t have much to stand on.” They had breached. It was sad and simple. He nodded, sighed, and offered me his two closed fists.

“Good news or bad news?” he said.

“Uh … bad.”

“No, you get the good news first.” He shook his left hand and opened it dramatically, spoke as if he had released a sentence. “The good news is that I have a tremendously intriguing case for you.” I waited. “The bad news.” He opened his right hand and slammed it on his desk with genuine anger. “The bad news, Inspector Borlú, is that it’s the same case you’re already working on.”

“… Sir? I don’t understand …”

“Well no, Inspector, who among us understands? To which of us poor mortals is understanding given? You’re still on the case.” He unfolded a letter and waggled it at me. I saw stamps and embossed symbols above the text. “Word from the Oversight Committee. Their official response. You remember, the little formality? They’re not handing the Mahalia Geary case over. They’re refusing to invoke Breach.”

I sat back hard. “What? What? What the hell …?”

His voice was flat. “Nyisemu for the committee informs us that they’ve reviewed the evidence presented and have concluded that there’s insufficient evidence to suppose any breach occurred.”

“This is bullshit.” I stood. “You saw my dossier, sir, you know what I gave them, you know there’s no way this wasn’t breach. What did they say? What were their reasons? Did they do a breakdown of the voting? Who signed the letter?”

“They’re not obliged to give any reasons.” He shook his head and looked disgusted at the paper he held in fingertips like tongs.

“God damn it. Someone’s trying to … Sir, this is ridiculous. We need to invoke Breach. They’re the only ones who can … How am I supposed to investigate this shit? I’m a Besźel cop, is all. Something fucked is going on here.”

“Alright, Borlú. As I say they’re not obliged to give any reasons, but doubtless anticipating something of our polite surprise, they have in fact included a note, and an enclosure. According to this imperious little missive, the issue wasn’t your presentation. So take comfort in the fact that no matter how cack-handed you were, you more or less convinced them this was a case of breach. What happened, they explain, is that as part of their ‘routine investigations,’” his scare quotes were like birds’ claws, “more information came to light. To whit.”

He tapped one of the pieces of mail or junk on his desk, threw it to me. A videocassette. He pointed me to the TV/VCR in the corner of his office. The image came up, a poor sepia-tinted and static-flecked thing. There was no sound. Cars puttered diagonally across the screen, in not-heavy but steady traffic, above a time-and-date stamp, between pillars and the walls of buildings.

“What am I looking at?” I worked out the date—the small hours, a couple of weeks ago. The night before Mahalia Geary’s body was found. “What am I looking at?”

The few vehicles sped up, beetled with tremendous jerky business. Gadlem waved his hand in bad-tempered play, conducting the fast-forwarding image with the remote control as if it were a baton. He sped through minutes of tape.

“Where is this? This picture is shit.”

“It’s a lot less shit than if it was one of ours, which is rather the point. Here we are,” he said. “Deep of the night. Where are we, Borlú? Detect, detective. Watch the right.”

A red car passed, a grey car, an old truck, then—“Hello! Voilà!” shouted Gadlem—a dirty white van. It crawled from the lower right to the upper left of the picture toward some tunnel, paused perhaps at an unseen traffic signal, and passed out of the screen and out of sight.

I looked at him for an answer. “Mark the stains,” he said. He was fast-forwarding, making little cars dance again. “They’ve trimmed us a bit. An hour and change later. Hello!” He pressed play and one, two, three other vehicles, then the white van—it must be the same one—reappeared, moving in the opposite direction, back the way it came. This time the angle of the little camera captured its front plates.

It went by too quick for me to see. I pressed the buttons on the built-in VCR, hurtling the van backwards into my line of sight, then bringing it a few metres forward, pausing it. It was no DVD, this, the paused image was a fug of ghost lines and crackles, the stuttering van not really still but trembling like some troubled electron between two locations. I could not read the number plate clearly, but in most of its places what I saw seemed to be one of a couple of possibilities—a vye or a bye, zsec or kho, a 7 or a 1, and so on. I took out my notebook and flicked through it.

“There he goes,” murmured Gadlem. “He’s onto something. He has something, ladies and gentlemen.” Back through pages and days. I stopped. “A lightbulb, I see it, it’s straining to come on, to glow illumination across the situation …”

“Fuck,” I said.

“Indeed fuck.”

“It is. That’s Khurusch’s van.”

“It is, as you say, the van of Mikyael Khurusch.” The vehicle in which Mahalia’s body had been taken, and from which it had been dumped. I looked at the time on the image. As I looked at it onscreen it almost certainly contained dead Mahalia. “Jesus. Who found this? What is it?” I said. Gadlem sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Wait, wait.” I held up my hand. I looked at the letter from the Oversight Committee, which Gadlem was using to fan his face. “That’s the corner of Copula Hall,” I said. “God damn it. That’s Copula Hall. And this is Khurusch’s van going out of Besźel into Ul Qoma and coming back in again. Legally.”

“Bing,” said Gadlem, like a tired game-show buzzer. “Bing bing bloody bing.”

AS PART, WE WERE TOLD—and to which, I told Gadlem, we would return—of the background investigations pursuant to any invocation of Breach, CCTV footage of the night in question had been investigated. That was unconvincing. This had looked so clear a case of breach no one had any reason to pore so hard through hours of tape. And besides, the antique cameras in the Besź side of Copula Hall would not give clear enough pictures to identify the vehicle—these were from outside, from a bank’s private security system, that some investigator had commandeered.

With the help of the photographs provided by Inspector Borlú and his team, we heard, it had been ascertained that one of the vehicles passing through an official checkpoint in Copula Hall, into Ul Qoma from Besźel and back again, had been that in which the deceased body had been transported. Accordingly, while a heinous crime had been committed and must be investigated as a matter of urgency, the passage of the body from the murder site, though it appears it was in Ul Qoma, to the dumping ground in Besźel had not, in fact, involved breach. Passage between the two cities had been legal. There were, accordingly, no grounds to invoke Breach. No breach had been committed.

This is the sort of juridical situation to which outsiders react with understandable bewilderment. Smuggling, they regularly insist, for example. Smuggling is breach, yes? Quintessentially, yes? But no.

Breach has powers the rest of us can hardly imagine, but its calling is utterly precise. It is not the passage itself from one city to the other, not even with contraband: it is the manner of the passage. Throw felid or cocaine or guns from your Besź rear window across a crosshatched yard into an Ul Qoman garden for your contact to pick up—that is breach, and Breach will get you, and it would still be Breach if you threw bread or feathers. Steal a nuclear weapon and carry it secretly with you through Copula Hall when you cross but cross that border itself? At that official checkpoint where the cities meet? Many crimes are committed in such an act, but breach is not one of them.

Smuggling itself is not breach, though most breach is committed in order to smuggle. The smartest dealers, though, make sure to cross correctly, are deeply respectful of the cities’ boundaries and pores, so if they are caught they face only the laws of one or other or both places, not the power of Breach. Perhaps Breach considers the details of those crimes once a breach is committed, all the transgressions in Ul Qoma or Besźel or both, but if so it is only once and because those crimes are functions of breach, the only violation Breach punishes, the existential disrespect of Ul Qoma’s and Besźel’s boundaries.

The theft of the van and the dumping of the body in Besźel were illegal. The murder in Ul Qoma was horribly so. But what we had assumed was the particular transgressive connection between the events had never taken place. All passage had appeared scrupulously legal, effected through official channels, paperwork in place. Even if the permits were faked, the travel through the borders in Copula Hall made it a question of illegal entry, not of breach. That is a crime you might have in any country. There had been no breach.

“THIS IS FUCKING BULLSHIT.”

I walked back and forth between Gadlem’s desk and the frozen car on-screen, the conveyance of the victim. “This is bullshit. We’ve been screwed.”

“It is bullshit, he tells me,” Gadlem said to the world. “He tells me we’ve been screwed.”

“We’ve been screwed, sir. We need Breach. How the hell are we supposed to do this? Someone somewhere is trying to freeze this where it stands.”

“We’ve been screwed he tells me, and I note he tells me so as if I am disagreeing with him. Which when last I looked I was not doing.”

“Seriously what …”

“In fact it could be said I agree with him on a startling scale. Of course we’ve been screwed, Borlú. Stop spinning like a drunk dog. What do you want me to say? Yes, yes, yes this is bullshit; yes someone has done this to us. What would you have me do?”

“Something! There must be something. We could appeal …”

“Look, Tyador.” He steepled his fingers. “We are both in accord about what’s happened here. We’re both pissed off that you are still on this case. For different reasons perhaps but—” He waved that away. “But here’s the problem you’re not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlú, however they’ve come by the evidence, this is the correct decision.”

“Have we checked with the border guards?”

“Yes, and there’s bugger all, but you think they keep records of everyone they wave through? All they needed was to see some vaguely plausible pass. You can’t argue with that.” He waved his hand at the television.

He was right. I shook my head.

“As that footage shows,” he said, “the van did not breach, and, therefore, what appeal would we be making? We can’t invoke Breach. Not for this. Nor, frankly, should we.”

“So what now?”

“What now is you are continuing this investigation. You started it, finish it.”

“But it’s…”

“… in Ul Qoma, yes, I know. You’re going over.”

“What?”

“This has become an international investigation. Ul Qoma cops weren’t touching it while it looked like a Breach matter, but now this is their murder investigation, on the what-looks-like convincing evidence that it occurred on their soil. You are going to get to experience the joys of international collaboration. They’ve requested our help. On-site. You’re going to Ul Qoma as the guest of the UQ militsya, where you’ll be consulting with officers from their Murder Team. No one knows the status of the investigation better than you.”

“This is ridiculous. I can just send them a report…”

“Borlú, don’t sulk. This has crossed our borders. What’s a report? They need more than a bit of paper. This case has already turned out to be more convoluted than a dancing worm, and you’re the man on it. It needs cooperation. Just go over, talk them through it. See the bloody sights. When they find someone we’re going to want to bring charges against them here, too, for the theft, the body-dumping, and so on. Don’t you know this is an exciting new era of cross-border policing?” It was a slogan from a booklet we had received when last we upgraded our computer equipment.

“The chance of us finding the killer just dropped hard. We needed Breach.”

“He tells me. I agree. So go and improve the odds.”

“How long am I going to be gone for?”

“Check in every couple of days with me. We’ll see how it goes. If it’s stretching more than a couple of weeks we’ll review—it’s a big enough pain that I’m losing you for those days.”

“So don’t.” He looked at me sardonically: What’s the choice? “I’d like Corwi to come with me.”

He made a rude noise. “I’m sure you would. Don’t be stupid.”

I ran my hands through my hair. “Commissar, I need her help. If anything she knows more about the case than I do. She’s been integral to it from the beginning. If I’m going to take this over the border …”

“Borlú, you’re not taking anything anywhere; you’re a guest. Of our neighbours. You want to saunter over with your own Watson? Anyone else you’d like me to supply? Masseuse? Actuary? Get this in your head: over there you’re the assistant. Jesus, it’s bad enough that you press-ganged her in the first place. Under what authority, please? Instead of focusing on what you’ve lost, I suggest you remember the good times you had together.”

“This is—”

“Yes, yes. Don’t tell me again. You want to know what’s bullshit, Inspector?” He pointed the remote control at me, as if he could stop me or rewind me. “What’s bullshit is a senior officer of the Besźel ECS stopping off, with the subordinate officer he’s quietly commandeered as his personal property, for an unauthorised, unnecessary, and unhelpful confrontation with a group of thugs with friends in high places.”

“… Right. You heard about that, then. From the lawyer?”

“What lawyer would you be speaking of? It was representative Syedr who was good enough to call this morning.”

“Syedr called you himself? Damn. Sorry, sir. I’m surprised. What, was he telling me to leave them alone? I thought part of the deal was that he was never quite open about being connected to TCs. Hence sending for that lawyer, who seemed a tad out of the league of the tough guys.”

“Borlú, I know only that Syedr had just heard about the previous day’s tête-à-tête and was aghast to hear that he’d been mentioned, phoned in no small spleen to threaten various sanctions against you for slander should his name come up again in any such context, et cetera. I don’t know and don’t want to what led to that particular little investigative cul-de-sac, but you might ask yourself about the parameters of coincidence, Borlú. It was this same morning, only hours after your fabulously fruitful public argument with the patriots, that this footage popped up, and that Breach was called off. And no I have no idea what that might mean either, but it’s an interesting fact, is it not?”

“DON’T ASK ME, BORLÚ,” Taskin said when I phoned her. “I don’t know. I just found out. I get rumours is all I get. Nyisemu’s not happy about what happened, Buric is livid, Katrinya’s confused, Syedr’s delighted. That’s the whisper. Who leaked what, who’s messing with who, I don’t have anything. I’m sorry.”

I asked her to keep her ears out. I had a couple of days to prepare. Gadlem had passed on my details to the relevant departments in Besźel and to a counterpart in Ul Qoma who would be my contact. “And answer your damn messages,” he said. My pass and orientation would be organised for me. I went home and looked at clothes, put my old suitcase on my bed, picked up and put down books.

One of the books was new. I had received it in the mail that morning, having paid extra for expedited shipping. I’d ordered it online from a link on fracturedcity.org.

My copy of Between the City and the City was old and bruised, intact but with the cover folded back and its pages stained and annotated by at least two hands. I had paid an outrageous price for it despite these deficits because of its illegality in Besźel. It was not much of a risk, having my name on the dealer’s list. It had been easy for me to ascertain that the book’s status was, in Besźel at least, more a mildly embarrassing throwback than due to any ongoing sense of sedition. The majority of illegal books in the city were only vaguely so: sanctions were rarely applied, even the censors rarely cared.

It was published by a long-gone anarcho-hippy press, though judging by the tone of the opening pages it was far drier than its florid, druggy cover would suggest. The print wobbled rather up and down the pages. There was no index, which made me sigh.

I lay on the bed and called the two women I saw, told them I was going to Ul Qoma. Biszaya, the journalist, said, “Cool, make sure you go to the Brunai gallery. There’s a Kounellis exhibition. Buy me a postcard.” Sariska the historian, sounded more surprised, and disappointed that I might be gone for I did not know how long.

“Have you read Between the City and the City?” I said.

“When I was an undergrad, sure. My cam-cover was The Wealth of Nations.” During the 1960s and ’70s, some banned literature could be bought bound in the stripped covers of legal paperbacks. “What about it?”

“What did you think?”

“At the time, that it was amazing, man. Plus that I was unspeakably brave to be reading it. Subsequently that it was ridiculous. Are you finally going through adolescence, Tyador?”

“Could be. No one understands me. I didn’t ask to be born.” She had no memories of the book, in particular.

“I cannot fucking believe this,” Corwi said when I called her and told her. She kept repeating it.

“I know. That’s what I told Gadlem.”

“They’re taking me off the case?”

“I don’t think there’s a ‘they.’ But unfortunately, yes, no, you can’t come.”

“So that’s it? I’m just dropped off?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Son of a bitch. The question,” she said after a minute we’d spent without saying anything, only listening to each other’s silence and breath, like teenagers in love, “is who would have released that footage. No, the question is how did they find that footage? Why? How many fucking hours of tape are there, how many cameras? Since when do they have the time to go through that shit? Why this one time?”

“I don’t have to leave immediately. I’m just thinking … I’ve got my orientation the day after tomorrow …”

“So?”

“Well.”

“So?”

“Sorry, I’ve been thinking this through. About this footage that’s just slapped us upside the head. Do you want to do a last little investigating? Couple of phone calls and a visit or two. There’s one thing in particular I have to sort out before my visa and whatnot comes through—I’ve been thinking about that van swanning over to foreign lands. This could get you in trouble.” I said this last jokingly, as if it were something appealing. “Of course you’re off the case, now, so it’s a bit unauthorised.” That wasn’t true. She was in no danger—I could okay anything she did. I might get in trouble but she would not.

“Fuck, yes, then,” she said. “If authority’s stiffing you, unauthorised is all you’ve got.”

Chapter Eleven

“YES?” Mikyael Khurusch looked at me more closely from behind the door to his shabby office. “Inspector. It’s you. What… Hello?”

“Mr. Khurusch. Small point.”

“Let us in, please, sir,” Corwi said. He opened the door wider to see her, too, sighed and opened to us.

“How can I help you?” He clasped, unclasped his hands.

“Doing okay without your van?” Corwi said.

“It’s a pain in the arse, but a friend’s helping me out.”

“Good of him.”

“Isn’t it?” Khurusch said.

“When did you get an AQD visa for your van, Mr. Khurusch?” I said.

“I, what, what?” he said. “I don’t, I have no—”

“Interesting that you stall like that,” I said. His response verified the guess. “You’re not so stupid as to out-and-out deny it, because, hey, passes are matters of record. But then what are we asking for? And why aren’t you just answering? What’s the trouble with that question?”

“Can we see your pass, please, Mr. Khurusch?”

He looked at Corwi several seconds.

“It’s not here. It’s at my house. Or—”

“Shall we not?” I said. “You’re lying. That was a little last chance for you, courtesy of us, and oh, you pissed it up a wall. You don’t have your pass. A visa, Any Qualified Driver, for multiple entry-reentry into and out of Ul Qoma. Right? And you don’t have it because it’s been stolen. It was stolen when your van was stolen. It was, in fact, in your van when your van was stolen, along with your antique street map.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ve told you, I wasn’t there, I don’t have a street map, I have GPS on my phone. I don’t know anything—”

“Not true, but true that your alibi checks out. Understand, no one here thinks you committed this murder, or even dumped the body. That’s not why we’re ticked off.”

“Our concern,” Corwi said, “is that you never told us about the pass. The question is who took it, and what you got for it.” Colour left his face.

“Oh God,” he said. His mouth worked several times and he sat down hard. “Oh God, wait. I had nothing to do with anything, I didn’t get anything …”

I had watched the CCTV footage repeatedly. There had been no hesitation in the van’s passage, on that guarded and official route through Copula Hall. Far from breaching, slipping along a crosshatched street, or changing plates to match some counterfeit permission, the driver had had to show the border guards papers that raised no eyebrows. There was one kind of pass in particular that might have expedited so uncomplicated a journey.

“Doing someone a favour?” I said. “An offer you couldn’t refuse? Blackmail? Leave the papers in the glove compartment. Better for them if you don’t know anything.”

“Why else would you not tell us you’d lost your papers?” Corwi said.

“One and only chance,” I said. “So. What’s the score?”

“Oh God, look.” Khurusch looked longingly around. “Please, look. I know I should’ve taken the papers in from the van. I do normally, I swear to you, I swear. I must have forgotten this one time, and that’s the time the van gets stolen.”

“That’s why you never told us about the theft, wasn’t it?” I said. “You never told us the van was stolen because you knew you’d have to tell us eventually about the papers, and so you just hoped the whole situation would sort itself out.”

“Oh God.”

Visiting Ul Qoman cars are generally easy to identify as visitors with rights of passage, with their licence plates, window stickers and modern designs: as are Besź cars in Ul Qoma, from their passes and their, to our neighbours, antiquated lines. Vehicular passes, particularly AQD multiple-entry, are neither cheap nor effortless to get hold of, and come hedged with conditions and rules. One of which is that a visa for a particular vehicle is never left unguarded in that vehicle. There’s no point making smuggling easier than it is. It is, though, a not-uncommon oversight, or crime, to leave such papers in glove compartments or under seats. Khurusch knew he was facing at the very least a large fine and the revocation of any travel rights to Ul Qoma forever.

“Who did you give your van to, Mikyael?”

“I swear to Christ, Inspector, no one. I don’t know who took it. I seriously do not know.”

“Are you saying that it was total coincidence? That someone who needed to pick up a body from Ul Qoma just happened to steal a van with pass papers still in it, waiting? How handy.”

“On my life, Inspector, I don’t know. Maybe whoever nicked the van found the papers and sold them to someone else …”

“They found someone who needed trans-city transport the same night they stole it? These are the luckiest thieves ever.”

Khurusch slumped. “Please,” he said. “Go through my bank accounts. Check my wallet. No one’s paying me dick. Since the van got taken I’ve not been able to do fucking anything, no business at all. I don’t know what to do …”

“You’re going to make me cry,” said Corwi. He looked at her with a ragged expression.

“On my life,” he said.

“We’ve looked up your record, Mikyael,” I said. “I don’t mean your police record—that’s what we checked last time. I mean your record with the Besźel border patrol. You got random audited a few months after you first got a pass. A few years ago. We saw First Warning marks on several things, but the biggest by far was that you’d left the papers in the car. It was a car at the time, right? You’d left it in the glove compartment. How’d you get away with that one? I’m surprised they didn’t revoke it there and then.”

“First offence,” he said. “I begged them. One of the guys who found it said he’d have a word with his mate and get it commuted to an official warning.”

“Did you bribe him?”

“Sure. I mean, something. I can’t remember how much.”

“Why not? I mean, that’s how you got it in the first place, right? Why even bother?”

A long silence. AQD vehicle passes are generally advertised as for businesses with a few more employees than Khurusch’s sketchy concern, but it is not uncommon for small traders to help their applications with a few dollars—Besźmarques being unlikely to move the Besź middlemen or issuing clerks at the Ul Qoman embassy.

“In case,” he said hopelessly, “I ever needed help picking stuff up. My nephew’s done the test, couple of mates, could’ve driven it, helped me out. You never know.”

“Inspector?” Corwi was looking at me. She’d said it more than once, I realised. “Inspector?” She glanced at Khurusch, What are we doing?

“Sorry,” I said to her. “Just thinking.” I motioned her to follow me to the corner of the room, warning Khurusch with a pointed finger to stay put.

“I’m going to take him in,” I said quietly, “but something’s … Look at him. I’m trying to work something out. Look, I want you to chase something up. As quick as you can, because tomorrow I’m going to have to go to this damn orientation, so I think tonight’s going to be a long night. Are you okay with that? What I want is a list of all the vans reported stolen in Besźel that night, and I want to know what happened in each case.”

“All of them …?”

“Don’t panic. It’ll be a lot for all vehicles, but factor out everything but vans round about this size, and it’s only for one night. Bring me everything you can on each of them. Including all paperwork associated, okay? Quick as possible.”

“What are you going to do?”

“See if I can make this sleazy sod tell the truth.”

COEWI, through cajoling, persuasion and computer expertise, got hold of the information within a few hours. To be able to do that, so quickly, to speed up official channels, is voodoo.

For the first couple of hours as she went through things, I sat with Khurusch in a cell, and asked him in various ways and in several different formulations Who took your van? and Who took your pass? He whined and demanded his lawyer, which I told him he would have soon. Twice he tried getting angry, but mostly he just repeated that he did not know, and that he had not reported the thefts, of van and papers, because he had been afraid of the trouble he would bring on himself. “Especially because they already warned me on that, you know?”

It was after the end of the working day when Corwi and I sat together in my office to work through it. It would be, as I warned her again, a long night.

“What’s Khurusch being held for?”

“At this stage Inappropriate Pass Storage and Failure to Report Crime. Depending on what we find tonight I might add Conspiracy to Murder, but I have a feeling—”

“You don’t think he’s in on whatever, do you?”

“He’s hardly a criminal genius, is he?”

“I’m not suggesting he planned anything, boss. Maybe even that he knew about anything. Specific. But you don’t think he knew who took his van? Or that they were going to do something?”

I wagged my head. “You didn’t see him.” I pulled the tape of his interrogations out of my pocket. “Take a listen if we have a bit of time.”

She drove my computer, pulling the information she had into various spreadsheets. She translated my muttered, vague ideas into charts. “This is called data mining.” She said the last words in English.

“Which of us is the canary?” I said. She did not answer. She only typed and drank thick coffee, “made fucking properly,” and muttered complaints about my software.

“So this is what we have.” It was past two. I kept looking out of my office window at the Besźel night. Corwi smoothed out the papers she had printed. Beyond the window were the faint hoots and quietened mutter of late traffic. I moved in my chair, needing a piss from caffeinated soda.

“Total number of vans reported stolen that night, thirteen.” She scanned through with her fingertip. “Of which three then turn up burnt out or vandalised in some form or other.”

“Joyriders.”

“Joyriders, yes. So ten.”

“How long before they were reported?”

“All but three, including the charmer in the cells, reported by the end of the following day.”

“Okay. Now where’s the one where you have … How many of these vans have Ul Qoma pass papers?”

She sifted. “Three.”

“That sounds high—three out of thirteen?”

“There are going to be way more for vans than for vehicles as a whole, because of all the import-export stuff.”

“Still though. What are the statistics for the cities as a whole?”

“What, of vans with passes? I can’t find it,” she said after a while of typing and staring at the screen. “I’m sure there must be a way to find out, but I can’t figure out a way to do it.”

“Okay, if we have time we’ll chase that. But I’m betting it’s less than three out of thirteen.”

“You could … It does sound high.”

“Alright, try this. Of those three with passes that got stolen, how many owners have previous warnings for condition-transgressions?”

She looked through papers and then at me. “All three of them. Shit. All three for inappropriate storage. Shit.”

“Right. That does sound unlikely, right? Statistically. What happened to the other two?”

“They were … Hold on. Belonged to Gorje Feder and Salya Ann Mahmud. Vans turned up the next morning. Dumped.”

“Anything taken?”

“Smashed up a bit, a few tapes, bit of change from Feder’s, an iPod from Mahmud’s.”

“Let me look at the times—there’s no way of proving which of these were stolen first, is there? Do we know if these other two still have their passes?”

“Never came up, but we could find out tomorrow.”

“Do if you can. But I’m going to bet they do. Where were the vans taken from?”

“Juslavsja, Brov Prosz, and Khurusch’s from Mashlin.”

“Where were they found?”

“Feder’s in … Brov Prosz. Jesus. Mahmud’s in Mashlin. Shit. Just off ProspekStrász.”

“That’s about four streets from Khurusch’s office.”

“Shit.” She sat back. “Talk this out, boss.”

“Of the three vans that get stolen that night that have visas, all have records for failing to take their paperwork out of their glove compartments.”

“The thief knew?”

“Someone was visa-hunting. Someone with access to border-control records. They needed a vehicle they could get through Copula. They knew exactly who had form for not bothering to take their papers with them. Look at the positions.” I scribbled a crude map of Besźel. “Feder’s is taken first, but good on Mr. Feder, he and his staff have learnt their lesson, and he takes his paperwork with him now. When they realise that our criminals use it instead to drive here, to near where Mahmud parks hers. They jack it, fast, but Ms. Mahmud keeps her pass in the office now too, so after having made it look like a robbery, they dump it near the next in the list and move on.”

“And the next one’s Khurusch’s.”

“And he’s remained true to his previous tendency, and leaves his in the van. So they’ve got what they need, and it’s off to Copula Hall, and Ul Qoma.” Quiet.

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s… looking dodgy, is what it is. It’s a very inside job. Inside what, I don’t know. Someone with access to arrest records.”

“What the fuck do we do? What do we do?” she said again after I was quiet too long.

“I don’t know.”

“We need to tell someone …”

“Who? Tell them what? We don’t have anything.”

“Are you …” She was about to say joking, but she was intelligent enough to see the truth of it.

“Correlations might be enough for us, but it’s not evidence, you know—not enough to do anything with.” We stared at each other. “Anyway … whatever this is … whoever …” I looked at the papers.

“They’ve got access to stuff that…” Corwi said.

“We need to be careful,” I said. She met my eyes. There was another set of long moments when neither of us spoke. We looked slowly around the room. I do not know what we were looking for but I suspect that she felt, in that moment, as suddenly hunted and watched and listened-to as she looked like she did.

“So what do we do?” she said. It was unsettling to hear alarm like that in Corwi’s voice.

“I guess what we’ve been doing. We investigate.” I shrugged slowly. “We have a crime to solve.”

“We don’t know who it’s safe to talk to, boss. Anymore.”

“No.” There was nothing else I could say, suddenly. “So maybe don’t talk to anyone. Except me.”

“They’re taking me off this case. What can I …?”

“Just answer your phone. If there’s stuff I can get you to do I’ll call.”

“Where does this go?”

It was a question that did not, at that point, mean anything. It was merely to fill the near noiselessness in the office, to cover up what noises there were, that sounded baleful and suspicious—each tick and creak of plastic an electronic ear’s momentary feedback, each small knock of the building the shift in position of a sudden intruder.

“What I would really like,” she said, “is to invoke Breach. Fuck them all, it would be just great to sic Breach on them. It would be great if this weren’t our problem.” Yes. The notion of Breach exacting revenge on whomever, for whatever this was. “She found something out. Mahalia.”

The thought of Breach had always seemed right. I remembered though, suddenly, the look on Mrs. Geary’s face. Between the cities, Breach watched. None of us knew what it knew.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“No?”

“Sure, it’s just… we can’t. So … we have to try to focus on this ourselves.”

“We? The two of us, boss? Neither of us knows what the fuck’s going on.”

Corwi was whispering by the end of the last sentence. Breach were beyond our control or ken. Whatever situation or thing this was, whatever had happened to Mahalia Geary, we two were its only investigators, so far as we could trust, and she would soon be alone, and I would be alone, too, and in a foreign city.

Part Two
UL QOMA

Chapter Twelve

THE INNARD ROADS OF COPULA HALL seen from a police car. We did not travel fast and our siren was off, but in some vague pomp our light flickered and the concrete around us was staccato blue-lit. I saw my driver glance at me. Constable Dyegesztan his name was, and I had not met him before. I had not been able to get Corwi even as my escort.

We had gone on the low flyovers through Besźel Old Town into the convolutes of Copula Hall’s outskirts, and down at last into its traffic quadrant. Past and under the stretches of facade where caryatids looked at least somewhat like figures from Besź history, towards where they were Ul Qoman, into the hall itself, where a wide road overlit by windows and grey lights was sided at the Besź end by a long line of pedestrians seeking day entry. In the distance beyond the red taillights we were faced by the tinted headlights of Ul Qoman cars, more gold than ours.

“Been to Ul Qoma before, sir?”

“Not for a long time.”

When the border gates came into view Dyegesztan spoke to me again. “Did they have it like this before?” He was young.

“More or less.”

A policzai car, we were in the official lane, behind dark imported Mercedeses that probably carried politicians or businesspeople on fact-finding missions. A way off was the engine-grumbling line of quotidian travellers in cheaper cars, spivs and visitors.

“Inspector Tyador Borlú.” The guard looked at my papers.

“That’s right.”

He went carefully over everything written. Had I been a tourist or trader wanting a day-pass, passage might well have been quicker and questioning more cursory. As an official visitor, there was no such laxity. One of those everyday bureaucratic ironies.

“Both of you?”

“It’s right there, Sergeant. Just me. This is my driver. I’m being picked up, and the constable here’ll be coming straight back. In fact if you look, I think you can see my party over in Ul Qoma.”

There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour. Beyond, beyond the stateless space and the backwards-to-us-facing Ul Qoman checkpoint, a small group of militsya officers stood around an official car, its lights stuttering as pompously as our own, but in different colours and with a more modern mechanism (true on-off, not the twisting blinder that our own lamps contained). Ul Qoman police lights are red and darker blue than the cobalt in Besźel. Their cars are charcoal and streamlined Renaults. I remember when they drove ugly little local-made Yadajis, more boxy than our own vehicles.

The guard turned and glanced at them. “We’re due about now,” I told him.

The militsya were too far for any details to be clear. They were waiting for something though. The guard took his time of course—You may be policzai but you get no special treatment, we watch the borders—but without excuses to do otherwise eventually saluted somewhat sardonically and pointed us through as the gate rose. After the Besź road itself the hundred metres or so of no-place felt different under our tires, and then through the second set of gates and we were on the other side, with uniformed militsya coming towards us.

There was the gunning of gears. The car we had seen waiting sped in a sudden tight curve around and in front of the approaching officers, calling out one truncated and abrupt whoop from the siren. A man emerged, putting on his police cap. He was a bit younger than me, thickset and muscular and moving with fast authority. He wore official militsya grey with an insignia of rank. I tried to remember what it meant. The border guards had stopped in surprise as he held out his hand.

“That’ll do,” he shouted. He waved them away. “I got this. Inspector Borlú?” He was speaking Illitan. Dyegesztan and I climbed out of the car. He ignored the constable. “Inspector Tyador Borlú, Besźel Extreme Crime, right?” Shook my hand hard. Pointed to his car, in which his own driver waited. “Please. I’m Senior Detective Qussim Dhatt. You got my message, Inspector? Welcome to Ul Qoma.”

COPULA HALL HAD OVER CENTURIES SPREAD, a patchwork of architecture defined by the Oversight Committee in its various historic incarnations. It sat across a considerable chunk of land in both cities. Its inside was complicated—corridors might start mostly total, Besźel or Ul Qoma, become progressively crosshatched along their length, with rooms in one or other city along them, and numbers also of those strange rooms and areas that were in neither or both cities, that were in Copula Hall only, and of which the Oversight Committee and its bodies were the only government. Legended diagrams of the buildings inside were pretty but daunting meshes of colours.

At ground level, though, where the wide road jutted into the first set of gates and wire, where the Besź Border Patrol waved arrivals to a stop in their separated lines—pedestrians, handcarts, and animal-drawn trailers, squat Besź cars, vans, sub-lines for various kinds of passes, all moving at different speeds, the gates rising and lowering out of any phase—the situation was simpler. An unofficial but ancient market where Copula Hall vents into Besźel, within sight of the gates. Illegal but tolerated street hawkers walked the lines of waiting cars with roasted nuts and paper toys.

Beyond the Besźel gates, below the main mass of Copula Hall, a no-man’s-land. The tarmac was unpainted: this was neither a Besź nor an Ul Qoman thoroughfare, so what system of road markings would be used? Beyond towards the other end of the hall the second set of gates, which we on the Besźel side could not but notice were better kept than our own, with weapon-wielding Ul Qoman guards staring, most of them away from us at their own efficiently shepherded lines of visitors to Besźel. Ul Qoman border guards are not a separate wing of government, as they are in Besźel: they are militsya, police, like the policzai.

It is bigger than a coliseum, but Copula Hall’s traffic chamber is not complicated—an emptiness walled by antiquity. From the Besźel threshold you can see over the crowds and crawling vehicles to daylight filtering in from Ul Qoma, beyond. You can see the bobbing heads of Ul Qoman visitors or returning fellow countrymen approaching, the ridges of Ul Qoman razorwire beyond the hall’s midpoint, beyond that empty stretch between checkpoints. You can just make out the architecture of Ul Qoma itself through the enormous gateway hundreds of metres off. People strain to see, across that junction.

On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Besźel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Besźel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma’s weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbour, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. We drove as if coincidentally by the Copula Hall exit into Ul Qoma.

I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the lines of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besź emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking around in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been breach to see before.

Near the Ul Qoma exit is the Temple of Inevitable Light. I had seen photos many times, and though I had unseen it dutifully when we passed I was aware of its sumptuous crenellations, and had almost said to Dyegesztan that I was looking forward to seeing it soon. Now light, foreign light, swallowed me as I emerged, at speed, from Copula Hall. I looked everywhere. From the rear of Dhatt’s car, I stared at the temple. I was, suddenly, rather astonishingly and at last, in the same city as it.

“First time in Ul Qoma?”

“No, but first time in a long time.”

IT WAS YEARS since I had first taken the tests: my passmark was long expired and in a defunct passport. This time I had undergone an accelerated orientation, two days. It had only been me and the various tutors, Ul Qomans from their Besź embassy. Illitan immersion, the reading of various documents of Ul Qoman history and civic geography, key issues of local law. Mostly, as with our own equivalents, the course was concerned to help a Besź citizen through the potentially traumatic fact of actually being in Ul Qoma, unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.

“Acclimatisation pedagogy’s come a long way with computers,” said one of the teachers, a young woman who praised my Illitan constantly. “We’ve got so much more sophisticated ways of dealing with stuff now; we work with neuroscientists, all sorts of stuff.” I got spoiled because I was policzai. Everyday travellers would undergo more conventional training, and would take considerably longer to qualify.

They sat me in what they called an Ul Qoma simulator, a booth with screens for inside walls, on which they projected images and videos of Besźel with the Besź buildings highlighted and their Ul Qoman neighbours minimised with lighting and focus. Over long seconds, again and again, they would reverse the visual stress, so that for the same vista Besźel would recede and Ul Qoma shine.

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Besź maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border. There were folktales of renegades who breach and avoid Breach to live between the cities, not exiles but insiles, evading justice and retribution by consummate ignorability. Pahlaniuk’s novel Diary of an Insile had been illegal in Besźel (and, I was sure, in Ul Qoma), but like most people I had skimmed a pirated edition.

I did the tests, pointing with a cursor at an Ul Qoman temple, an Ul Qoman citizen, an Ul Qoman lorry delivering vegetables, as quick as I could. It was faintly insulting stuff, designed to catch me inadvertently seeing Besźel. There had been nothing like this the first time I had done such studies. Not very long ago the equivalent tests would have involved being asked about the different national character of Ul Qomans, and judging who from various pictures with stereotyped physiognomies was Ul Qoman, Besź, or “Other” (Jewish, Muslim, Russian, Greek, whatever, depending on the ethnic anxieties of the time).

“Seen the temple?” Dhatt said. “And that there used to be a college. Those are apartment blocks.” He jabbed his finger at buildings as we passed, told his driver, to whom he had not introduced me, to go various routes.

“Weird?” he said to me. “Guess it must be strange.”

Yes. I looked at what Dhatt showed me. Unseeing, of course, but I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country. I had them in the background now, hardly any more present than Ul Qoma was when I was at home. I held my breath. I was unseeing Besźel. I had forgotten what this was like; I had tried and failed to imagine it. I was seeing Ul Qoma.

Day, so the light was that of the overcast cold sky, not the twists of neon I had seen in so many programmes about the neighbouring country, which the producers evidently thought it easier for us to visualise in its garish night. But that ashy daylight illuminated more and more vivid colours than in my old Besźel. The Old Town of Ul Qoma was at least half transmuted these days into a financial district, curlicued wooden rooflines next to mirrored steel. The local street hawkers wore gowns and patched-up shirts and trousers, sold rice and skewers of meat to smart men and a few women (past whom my nondescript compatriots, I tried to unsee, walked on their way to Besźel’s more quiet destinations) in the doorways of glass blocks.

After mild censure from UNESCO, a finger-wag tied to some European investment, Ul Qoma had recently passed zoning laws to stop the worst of the architectural vandalism its boomtime occasioned. Some of the ugliest recent works had even been demolished, but still the traditional baroque curlicues of Ul Qoma’s heritage sights were made almost pitiful by their giant young neighbours. Like all Besźel dwellers, I had become used to shopping in the foreign shadows of foreign success.

Illitan everywhere, in Dhatt’s running commentary, from the vendors, taxi drivers and insult-hurling local traffic. I realised how much invective I had been unhearing on crosshatched roads at home. Each city in the world has its own road-grammar, and though we were not in any total Ul Qoma areas yet, so these streets shared the dimensions and shapes of those I knew, they felt in the sharp turns we took more intricate. It was as strange as I had expected it would be, seeing and unseeing, being in Ul Qoma. We went by narrow byways less frequented in Besźel (deserted there though bustling in Ul Qoma), or which were pedestrian-only in Besźel. Our horn was constant.

“Hotel?” Dhatt said. “Probably want to get cleaned up and have something to eat, right? Where then? I know you must have some ideas. You speak good Illitan, Borlú. Better than my Besź.” He laughed.

“I’ve got a few thoughts. Places I’d like to go.” I held my notebook. “You got the dossier I sent?”

“Sure did, Borlú. That’s the lot of it, right? That’s where you’re at? I’ll fill you in about what we’ve been up to but”—he held up his hands in mock surrender—“truth is there’s not that much to tell. We thought Breach was going to be invoked. Why didn’t you give them it? You like making work for yourself?” Laugh. “Anyway, I only got assigned all this in the last couple of days, so don’t expect too much. But we’re on it now.”

“Any idea where she was killed yet?”

“Not so much. There’s only CCTV of that van coming through Copula Hall; we don’t know where it went then. No leads. Anyway, things …”

A visiting Besź van, one might assume, would be memorable in Ul Qoma, as an Ul Qoman one would be in Besźel. The truth is that unless someone saw the sign in the windscreen, people’s assumption would be that such a foreign vehicle was not in their home city, and accordingly it would remain unseen. Potential witnesses would generally not know there was anything to witness.

“That’s the main thing I want to track down.”

“Absolutely. Tyador, or is it Tyad? Got a preference?”

“And I’d like to talk to her advisors, her friends. Can you take me to Bol Ye’an?”

“Dhatt, Quss, whichever’s fine by me. Listen, just to get this out of the way, avoid confusions, I know your commissar told you this”—he relished the foreign word—“but while you’re here this is an Ul Qoman investigation, and you don’t have police powers. Don’t get me wrong—we’re totally grateful for the cooperation, and we’re going to work out what we do together, but I’ve got to be the officer here. You’re a consultant, I guess.”

“Of course.”

“Sorry, I know turf bullshit is bullshit. I was told—did you speak to my boss yet? Colonel Muasi?—anyway, he wanted to make sure we were cool before we talked. Of course you’re an honoured guest of the Ul Qoman militsya.”

“I’m not restricted to … I can travel?”

“You’ve got your permit and stamp and all that.” A single-entry trip, a month renewable. “Sure if you have to, if you want take a tourist day or two, but you’re strictly a tourist when you’re on your own. Cool? It might be better if you didn’t. I mean shit, no one’s going to stop you, but we all know it’s harder to cross over without a guide; you could breach without meaning to, and then what?”

“So. What would you do next?”

“Well look.” Dhatt turned in his seat to look at me. “We’ll be at the hotel soon. Anyway listen: like I’m trying to tell you, things are getting … I guess you haven’t heard about the other one … No, we don’t even know if there’s anything there and we only just got sniff ourselves. Look, there may be a complication.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“We’re here, sir,” the driver said. I looked out but stayed in the car. We were by the Hilton in Asyan, just outside the Ul Qoma Old Town. It was at the edge of a total street of low, modern concrete Ul Qoman residences, at the corner of a plaza of Besź brick terraces and Ul Qoman faux pagodas. Between them was an ugly fountain. I had never visited it: the buildings and pavements at its rim were crosshatched, but the central square itself was total Ul Qoma.

“We don’t know for sure yet. Obviously we’ve been up to the dig, talked to Iz Nancy, all Geary’s supervisors, all her classmates and that. No one knew anything; they just thought she’d fucked off for a couple of days. Then they heard what had happened. Anyway, the point is that after we spoke to a bunch of the students, we got a phone call from one of them. It was only yesterday. About Geary’s best friend—we saw her the day we went in to tell them, another student. Yolanda Rodriguez. She was totally in shock. We didn’t get much out of her. She was collapsing all over the place. She said she had to go, I said did she want any help, blah blah, she said she had someone to look after her. Local boy, one of the others said. Once you’ve tried Ul Qoman …” He reached over and opened my door. I did not get out.

“So she called?”

“No, that’s what I’m saying, the kid who called wouldn’t give us his name, but he was calling about Rodriguez. It seems like—and he was saying he’s not sure, could be nothing, et cetera et cetera. Anyway. No one’s seen her for a little while. Rodriguez. No one can get her on her phone.”

“She’s disappeared?”

“Holy Light, Tyad, that’s melodramatic. She might just be sick, she might have turned her phone off. I’m not saying we don’t go looking, but don’t let’s panic yet, right? We don’t know that she’s disappeared …”

“Yeah we do. Whatever’s happened, whether anything’s happened to her at all, no one can find her. That’s pretty definitional. She’s disappeared.”

Dhatt glanced at me in the mirror and then at his driver.

“Alright, Inspector,” he said. “Yolanda Rodriguez has disappeared.”

Chapter Thirteen

“WHAT’S IT LIKE, BOSS?” There was a lag on the hotel’s line to Besźel, and Corwi and I were stutteringly trying not to overlap each other.

“Too early to say. Weird to be here.”

“You saw her rooms?”

“Nothing helpful. Just student digs, with a bunch of others in a building leased by the university.”

“Nothing of hers?”

“Couple of cheap prints, some books complete with scribbled margin notes, of which none are interesting. A few clothes. A computer which either has really industrial-strength encryption or nothing germane on it. And on that I have to say I trust Ul Qoman geeks more than ours. Lots of Hi Mom love you emails, a few essays. She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”

“You have no idea what you’re saying, do you, boss?”

“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.” Perhaps one day we would be finished with I-don’t-understand-the-internet jokes. “On which topic she hadn’t updated her MySpace since moving to Ul Qoma.”

“So you didn’t figure her all out?”

“Sadly no, the force was not with me.” It really had been a star-tlingly bland and uninformative room. Yolanda’s, by contrast, a corridor over, into which we had also peered, had been crammed with hipster toys, novels and DVDs, moderately flamboyant shoes. Her computer was gone.

I had gone carefully through Mahalia’s room, referring often to the photographs of how it had been when the militsya entered, before the books and few bits and pieces had been tagged and processed. The room was cordoned, and officers kept the students away, but when I glanced out of the door over the little pile of wreaths I could see Mahalia’s classmates in knots at either end of the corridor, young women and men with little visitors’ marks discreetly on their clothes. They whispered to each other. I saw more than one weeping.

We found no notebooks and no diaries. Dhatt had acquiesced to my request for copies of Mahalia’s textbooks, the copious annotations of which appeared to be her preferred study method. They were on my table: whoever had photocopied them had been rushed, and the print and handwriting yawed. As I spoke to Corwi I read a few cramped lines of Mahalia’s telegraphic arguments with herself in A People’s History of Ul Qoma.

“What’s your contact like?” Corwi said. “Your Ul Qoman me?”

“Actually I think I’m his you.” The phrase was not best chosen but she laughed.

“What’s their office like?”

“Like ours with better stationery. They took my gun.”

In fact the police station had been rather different from our own. It did have better fittings, but it was large and open-plan, full of whiteboards and cubicles over which neighbouring officers debated and bickered. Though I am sure most of the local militsya must have been informed that I was coming, I left a wake of unabashed curiosity as I followed Dhatt past his own office—he was ranked enough to get a little room—to his boss’s. Colonel Muasi had greeted me boredly with something about what a good sign of the changing relationships between our countries, herald of future cooperation, any help at all I needed, and had made me surrender my weapon. That had not been agreed beforehand, and I had tried to argue it but had given in quickly rather than sour things so early.

When we had left it had been to another roomful of not-very-friendly stares. “Dhatt,” someone had greeted him in passing, in a pointed way. “Ruffling feathers, am I?” I had asked, and Dhatt had said, “Touchy touchy. You’re Besź, what did you expect?”

“Fuckers!” said Corwi. “They did not.”

“No valid Ul Qoman licence, here in advisory role, et cetera.” I went through the bedside cupboard. There was not even a Gideon Bible. I did not know whether that was because Ul Qoma is secular, or because of lobbying by its disestablished but respected Lux Templars.

“Fuckers. So nothing to report?”

“I’ll let you know.” I glanced over the list of code phrases we had agreed to, but none of them—I miss Besź dumplings = am in trouble, Working on a theory = know who did it—were remotely germane. “I feel fucking stupid,” she had said as we came up with them. “I agree,” I had said. “I do too. Still.” Still, we could not assume that our communications would not be listened to, by whatever power it was that had outmanoeuvred us in Besźel. Is it more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?

“Same weather over here as back home,” I said. She laughed. That cliché witticism we had arranged meant nothing to report.

“What next?” she said.

“We’re going to Bol Ye’an.”

“What, now?”

“No. Sadly. I wanted to go earlier today, but they didn’t get it together and it’s too late now.” After I had showered and eaten, and wandered around the drab little room, wondering if I would recognise a listening device if I saw one, I had called the number Dhatt gave me three times before getting through to him.

“Tyador,” he had said. “Sorry, did you try to call? Been flat out, got caught tying up some stuff here. What can I do for you?”

“It’s getting on. I wanted to check about the dig site …”

“Oh, shit, yeah. Listen, Tyador, it’s not going to happen tonight.”

“Didn’t you tell people to expect us?”

“I told them to probably expect us. Look, they’ll be glad to go home, and we’ll go first thing in the morning.”

“What about What’s-her-name Rodriguez?”

“I’m still not convinced she’s actually … no, I’m not allowed to say that, am I? I’m not convinced that the fact that she’s missing is suspicious, how’s that? It’s hardly been very long. But if she’s still gone tomorrow, and not answering her email or her messages or anything, then it’s looking worse, I grant you. We’ll get Missing Persons on it.” So …

“So look. I’m not going to get a chance to come over tonight. Can you …? You’ve got stuff you can do, right? I’m sorry about this. I’m couriering over a bunch of stuff, copies of our notes, and that info you wanted, about Bol Ye’an and the university campuses and all that. Do you have a computer? Can you go online?”

“… Yeah.” A departmental laptop, a hotel Ethernet connection at ten dinar a night.

“Alright then. And I’m sure they’ve got video-on-demand. So you won’t be lonely.” He laughed.

I READ Between the City and the City for a while, but stalled. The combination of textual and historic minutiae and tendentious therefores was wearing. I watched Ul Qoman television. There were more feature films than on Besź TV, it seemed, and more and louder game shows, all a channel-hop or two from newsreaders listing the successes of President Ul Mak and the New Reform packages: visits to China and Turkey, trade missions to Europe, praise from some in the IMF, whatever Washington’s sulk. Ul Qomans were obsessed with economics. Who could blame them?

“Why not, Corwi?” I took a map and made sure all of my papers, my policzai ID, my passport and my visa were in my inside pocket. I pinned my visitor’s badge to my lapels and went into the cold.

Now there was the neon. All around me in knots and coils, effacing the weak lights of my far-off home. The animated yammering in Illitan. It was a busier city than Besźel at night: now I could look at the figures at business in the dark that had been unseeable shades until now. I could see the homeless dossing down in side streets, the Ul Qoman rough sleepers that we in Besźel had had to become used to as protubs to pick our unseeing ways over and around.

I crossed Wahid Bridge, trains passing to my left. I watched the river, that was here the Shach-Ein. Water—does it crosshatch with itself? If I were in Besźel, as these unseen passersby were, I would be looking at the River Colinin. It was quite a way from the Hilton to Bol Ye’an, an hour along Ban Yi Way. Aware that I was crisscrossing Besźel streets I knew well, streets mostly of very different character than their Ul Qoman topolgangers. I unsaw them but knew that the alleys off Ul Qoma’s Modrass Street were in Besźel only, and that the furtive men entering and emerging from them were customers of the cheapest Besź prostitutes, who if I failed to unsee them I might have made out as miniskirted phantoms in that Besźel darkness. Where were Ul Qoma’s brothels, near what Besźel neighbourhoods? I policed a music festival once, early in my career, in a crosshatched park, where the attendees got high in such numbers that there was much public fornication. My partner at the time and I had not been able to forebear amusement at the Ul Qoman passersby we tried not to see in their own iteration of the park, stepping daintily over fucking couples they assiduously unsaw.

I considered taking the subway, which I never had (there is nothing like it in Besźel), but it was a good thing to walk. I tested my Illitan on conversations I overheard; I saw the groups of Ul Qomans unsee me because of my clothes and the way I held myself, double-take and see my visitor’s mark, see me. There were groups of young Ul Qomans outside amusement arcades that rang with sound. I looked at, could see, gasrooms, small vertically oriented blimps contained within integuments of girders: once urban crow’s nests to guard against attack, for many decades now architectural nostalgias, kitsch, these days used to dangle advertisements.

There was a siren I quickly unheard, of a Besź policzai car, that passed. I focused instead on the locals moving quickly and without expression to get out of its way: that was the worst kind of protub. I had marked Bol Ye’an on my street map. Before coming to Ul Qoma I had considered travelling to its topolganger, the physically corresponding area of Besźel, to accidentally glimpse that unseen dig, but I would not risk it. I did not even travel to the edges where the ruins and park trip over tinily into Besźel itself. Unimpressive, people said, like most of our antique sites: the large majority of the great remnants were on Ul Qoman soil.

Past an old Ul Qoman edifice, though of European style, I—having planned this route—stared down a slope the length of Tyan Ulma Street, heard distantly (across a border, before I thought to un-hear) the bell of a tram crossing the street in Besźel a half mile in front of me in the country of my birth, and I saw filling the plateau at the street’s end under the half-moon the parkland, and ruins of Bol Ye’an.

Hoardings surrounded them, but I was above and could look down over those walls. An up-down treed and flowered landscape, some parts wilder, some coiffed. At the northern end of the park, where the ruins themselves were, what looked at first like a wasteland, was scrub punctuated with old stones of fallen temples, canvas-covered walkways linking marquees and prefab office buildings in some of which lights were still on. Ground showed the marks of digging: most of the excavation was hidden and protected by tough tents. Lights dotted and shone down at the winter-dying grass. Some were broken, and shed nothing but excess shadow. I saw figures walking. Security guards, keeping safe these forgotten then remembered memories.

In places the park and the site itself were edged right up to its rubble and boscage by the rear of buildings, most in Ul Qoma (some not) that seemed to jostle up against it, against history. The Bol Ye’an dig had about a year before the exigencies of city growth would smother it: money would breach the chipboard and corrugated iron boundary, and with official expressions of regret and necessity, another (Besźel-punctuated) block of offices would rise in Ul Qoma.

I traced on my map the proximity and route between Bol Ye’an and the offices of Ul Qoma University used by Prince of Wales Archaeology Department. “Hey.” It was a militsya officer, his hand on the butt of his weapon. He had a partner a pace behind.

“What are you doing?” They peered at me. “Hey.” The officer at the rear pointed at my visitor’s sign.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m interested in archaeology.”

“The fuck you are. Who are you?” Finger click for papers. The few unseeing Besź pedestrians crossed without probably being conscious that they did so to the other side of the street. There is little more unsettling than nearby foreign trouble. It was late, but there were some Ul Qomans close enough to hear the exchange, and they did not pretend not to listen. Some stopped to watch.

“I’m …” I gave them my papers.

“Tye Adder Borlo.”

“More or less.”

“Police?” They stared all confused at me.

“I’m here assisting the militsya with an international investigation. I suggest you contact Senior Detective Dhatt of the Murder Team”

“Fuck.” They conferred out of my hearing. One radioed something through. It was too dark to take a shot of Bol Ye’an on my cheap cell phone camera. The smell of some heavy-scented street food reached me. This was increasingly the prime candidate for the smell of Ul Qoma.

“Alright, Inspector Borlú.” One of them returned my documents.

“Sorry about that,” his colleague said.

“It’s quite alright.” They looked annoyed, and waited. “I’m on my way back to the hotel anyway, officers.”

“We’ll escort you, Inspector.” They would not be deterred.

When Dhatt came to pick me up the next morning, he said nothing beyond pleasantries when he came into the dining hall to find me trying “Traditional Ul Qoman Tea,” which was flavoured with sweet cream and some unpleasant spice. He asked how the room was. Only when I had finally got into his car and he lurched away from the kerb faster and more violently than even his officer the previous day had done did he say to me finally, “I wish you hadn’t done that last night.”

THE STAFF AND STUDENTS of the Prince of Wales University Ul Qoman Archaeology program were mostly at Bol Ye’an. I arrived at the site for the second time in less than twelve hours.

“I didn’t make us appointments,” Dhatt said. “I spoke to Professor Rochambeaux, the head of the project. He knows we’re coming again, but the rest of them I thought we’d take by chance.”

Unlike for my distance viewing of the night, up close the walls blocked off the site from watchers. Militsya were stationed at points outside, security guards within. Dhatt’s badge got us immediately into the little complex of makeshift offices. I had a list of the staff and students. We went first to Bernard Rochambeaux’s office. He was a wiry man about fifteen years my senior, who spoke Illitan with a strong Quebecois accent.

“We’re all devastated,” he told us. “I didn’t know the girl, you understand? Only to see in the common room. By reputation.” His office was in a portacabin, folders and books on the temporary shelves, photographs of himself in various dig sites. Outside we heard young people walking past and talking. “Any help we can give you, of course. I don’t know many of the students myself, not well. I have three PhD students at the moment. One is in Canada, the other two being, I think, over there.” He indicated the direction of the main dig. “Them I know.”

“What about Rodriguez?” He looked at me and signalled confusion. “Yolanda? One of your students? Have you seen her?”

“She’s not one of my three, Inspector. I’m afraid there’s not much I can tell you. Have we … Is she missing?”

“She is. What do you know about her?”

“Oh my God. She’s missing? I don’t know anything about her. Mahalia Geary I knew by reputation of course, but we had literally never exchanged words other than at a welcome-new-students party a few months ago.”

“A lot longer than that,” Dhatt said. Rochambeaux stared at him.

“There you go—it’s impossible to keep track of time. Is it really? I can tell you about her all the things you already know. Her supervisor’s the one who can really help you. Have you met Isabelle?”

He had his secretary print a list of staff and students. I did not tell him we had one already. When Dhatt did not offer it to me I took it. Judging by the names, and in accordance with law, two of the archaeologists detailed were Ul Qoman.

“He’s got an alibi for Geary,” Dhatt said when we left. “He’s one of the very few who does. Most of them, you know, it was late in the night, no one can vouch, so alibi-wise at least they’re all fucked. He was on a conference call to a colleague in an uncongenial time zone roundabout the time she was killed. We checked it.”

We were looking for Isabelle Nancy’s office when someone called my name. A trim man in his early sixties, grey beard, glasses, hurrying between temporary rooms towards us. “Is it Inspector Borlú?” He glanced at Dhatt, but seeing the Ul Qoman insignia looked back at me. “I heard you might be coming. I’m glad to coincide with you. I’m David Bowden.”

“Professor Bowden.” I shook his hand. “I’m enjoying your book.”

He was visibly taken aback. He shook his head. “I take it you mean my first one. No one ever means the second one.” He dropped my hand. “That’ll get you arrested, Inspector.” Dhatt was looking at me in surprise.

“Where’s your office, Professor? I’m Senior Detective Dhatt. I’d like to talk to you.”

“I don’t have one, SD Dhatt. I’m only in here a day a week. And it’s not professor. Plain doctor. Or David is fine.”

“How long will you be here this morning, Doctor?” I said. “Could we grab a word with you?”

“I … of course, if you’d like, Inspector, but as I say, I’ve no office. Normally I meet students at my flat.” He gave me a card and when Dhatt raised an eyebrow he gave Dhatt one too. “My number’s on that. I’ll wait around if you’d like; we can probably find a place to talk.”

“Did you not come in to see us, then?” I said.

“No, this is chance. I wouldn’t normally be in today at all, but my supervisee didn’t turn up yesterday and I thought I might find her here.”

“Your supervisee?” Dhatt said.

“Yes, they only trust me with the one.” He smiled. “Hence no office.”

“Who is it you’re looking for?”

“Her name’s Yolanda, SD. Yolanda Rodriguez.”

He was horrified when we told him that she was unreachable. He stammered for something to say.

“She’s gone? After what happened to Mahalia, now Yolanda? Oh my God, Officers, do you—”

“We’re looking into it,” Dhatt said. “Don’t jump to conclusions.”

Bowden looked stricken. We had similar reactions from his colleagues. One by one we went through the four academics we could find on-site, including Thau’ti, the senior of the two Ul Qomans, a young taciturn man. Only Isabelle Nancy, a tall well-dressed woman with two pairs of glasses of different prescriptions on chains around her neck, was aware that Yolanda had disappeared.

“It’s good to meet you, Inspector, Senior Detective.” She shook our hands. I had read her statement. She claimed she had been at home when Mahalia was murdered but could not prove it. “Anything I can do to help,” she kept saying.

“Tell us about Mahalia. I get the sense she was well-known here, if not by your boss.”

“Not so much anymore,” Nancy said. “At one point maybe. Did Rochambeaux say he didn’t know her? That’s a bit… disingenuous. She’d ruffled some feathers.”

“At the conference,” I said. “Back in Besźel.”

“That’s right. Down south. He was there. Most of us were. I was, David, Marcus, Asina. Anyway she’d been raising eyebrows at more than one session, asking questions about dissensi, about Breach, that sort of thing. Nothing explicitly illegitimate, but a bit vulgar, you could say, the sort of thing you’d expect from Hollywood or something, not the nuts-and-bolts stuff of Ul Qoman or pre-Cleavage or even Besź research. You could see the bigwigs who’d come along to open proceedings and dedicate ceremonies and whatnot were getting a bit leery. Then finally she out and starts raving about Orciny. So David’s mortified, of course; the university’s embarrassed; she nearly gets chucked out—there were some Besź representatives there who made a big hoo-ha about it.”

“But she didn’t?” Dhatt said.

“I think people decided she was young. But someone must have given her a talking-to, because she simmered down. I remember thinking the Ul Qoman opposite numbers, some of whom had also turned up, must be pretty sympathetic to the Besź reps who were so put out. When I found out she was coming back for a PhD with us I was surprised she’d been allowed in, with dubious opinions like that, but she’d grown out of it. I’ve already made a statement about all this. But tell me, do you have any idea what’s happened to Yolanda?”

Dhatt and I looked at each other. “We’re not even sure anything’s happened to her at all,” Dhatt said. “We’re checking into it.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said again and again. “But I normally see her around, and it’s a good few days now, I think. That’s what makes me … I think I mentioned that Mahalia disappeared a bit before she was … found.”

“She and Mahalia knew each other?” I said.

“They were best friends.”

“Anyone who might know anything?”

“She’s seeing a local boy. Yolanda, I mean. That’s the rumour. But who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

“Is that allowed?” I asked.

“These are adults, Inspector, SD Dhatt. Young adults, yes, but we can’t stop them. We, ah, make them aware of the dangers and difficulties of life, let alone love, in Ul Qoma, but what they do while they’re here …” She shrugged.

Dhatt tapped a foot when I spoke to her. “I’d like to speak to them,” he said.

Some were reading articles in the tiny make-do library. Several, when finally Nancy escorted us to the site of the main dig itself, stood, sat and worked in that deep, straight-edged hole. They looked up from below striae discernable in shades of earth. That line of dark—the residue of an ancient fire? What was that white?

At the edges of the big marquee was wild-looking scrubland, thistled and weedy between a litter of broken-off architecture. The dig was almost the size of a soccer pitch, subdivided by its matrix of string. Its base was variously depthed, flat-bottomed. Its floor of compacted earth was broken by inorganic shapes, strange breaching fish: shattered jars, crude and uncrude statuettes, verdigris-clogged machines. The students looked up from the section they were in, each at various careful depths, through various cord borders, clutching pointed trowels and soft brushes. A couple of the boys and one girl were Goths, much rarer in Ul Qoma than in Besźel or in their own homes. They must have got a lot of attention. They smiled at Dhatt and me sweetly from beneath eyeliner and the muck of centuries.

“Here you see,” Nancy said. We stood a way from the excavations. I looked down at the many markers in the layered dirt. “You understand how it is here?” It might be anything that we could see beneath the soil.

She spoke quietly enough that her students, though they must have realised that we were talking, could probably not make out about what. “We’ve never found written records from Precursor Age except a few poem fragments to make sense of any of it. Have you heard of the Gallimaufrians? For a long time when the pre-Cleavage stuff was first unearthed, after archaeologist-error was grudgingly ruled out,” she laughed, “people made them up as an explanation for what was being fished up. A hypothetical civilisation before Ul Qoma and Besźel that systematically dug up all artefacts in the region, from millennia ago to their own grandmother’s bric-a-brac, mixed them all up and buried them again or chucked them away.”

Nancy saw me looking at her. “They didn’t exist,” she reassured me. “That’s agreed now. By most of us, anyway. This”—she gestured at the hole—“is not a mix. It is the remnants of a material culture. Just one we’re still not very clear on. We had to learn to stop trying to find and follow a sequence and just look.”

Items that should have spanned epochs, contemporaneous. No other culture in the region made any but the scantest, seductively vague references to the pre-Cleavage locals, these peculiar men and women, witch-citizens by fairy tale with spells that tainted their discards, who used astrolabes that would not have shamed Arzachel or the Middle Ages, dried-mud pots, stone axes that my flat-browed many-greats grandfather might have made, gears, intricately cast insect toys, and whose ruins underlay and dotted Ul Qoma and, occasionally, Besźel.

“This is Senior Detective Dhatt of the militsya and Inspector Borlú of the policzai,” Nancy was telling the students in the hole. “Inspector Borlú’s here as part of the investigation into the … into what happened to Mahalia.”

Several of them gasped. Dhatt crossed off names, and I copied him, as one by one the students came to talk to us in the common room. They had all been interviewed before but came docile as lambs, and answered questions they must have been sick of.

“I was relieved when I realised you were here for Mahalia,” the Goth woman said. “That sounds awful. But I thought you’d found Yolanda and something’d happened.” Her name was Rebecca Smith-Davis, she was a first year, working on pot reconstruction. She got teary when she spoke about her dead friend and her missing friend. “I thought you’d found her and it was … you know, she’d been …”

“We’re not even sure Rodriguez is missing,” Dhatt said.

“You say. But you know. With Mahalia, and everything.” Shook her head. “Them both being into strange stuff.”

“Orciny?” I said.

“Yeah. And other stuff. But yeah, Orciny. Yolanda’s more into that stuff than Mahalia was, though. People said Mahalia used to be way into it when she first started, but not so much now, I guess.”

Because they were younger and partied later, several of the students, unlike their teachers, had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death. At some unspoken point Dhatt deemed Yolanda an official missing person, and his questions grew more precise, the notes he took longer. It did not do us much good. No one was sure of the last time they had seen her, only that they hadn’t seen her for days.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened to Mahalia?” Dhatt asked all the students. We got no after no.

“I’m not into conspiracies,” one boy said. “What happened was … unbelievably horrible. But, you know, the idea that there’s some big secret …” He shook his head. He sighed. “Mahalia was … she could piss people off, and what happened happened because she went to the wrong part of Ul Qoma, with the wrong person.” Dhatt made notes.

“No,” said a girl. “No one knew her. You maybe thought you did, but then you realise she was doing all kinds of secret stuff you didn’t know anything about. I think I was a bit scared of her. I liked her, I did, but she was kind of intense. And smart. Maybe she was seeing someone. Some local crazy. That’s the kind of thing she’d have … She was into weird stuff. I’d always see her in the library—we’ve got like reading cards for the university library here?—and she’d be making all those little notes in her books.” She made cramped writing motions and shook her head, inviting us to agree on how strange that was.

“Weird stuff?” Dhatt said.

“Oh, you know, you hear stuff.”

“She pissed someone off, yo.” This young woman spoke loud and quickly. “One of the crazies. You heard about her first time to the cities? Over in Besźel? She nearly got into a fight. With like academics and like politicians. At an archaeology conference. That’s hard to do. It’s amazing she ever got let back in anywhere.”

“Orciny.”

“Orciny?” Dhatt said.

“Yeah.”

This last speaker was a thin and straightlaced boy wearing a grubby T-shirt featuring what must have been the character from a children’s television show. His name was Robert. He looked mournfully at us. He blinked desperately. His Illitan was not good.

“Do you mind if I speak to him in English?” I said to Dhatt.

“No,” he said. A man put his head round the corner of the door and stared at us. “You go on,” Dhatt said to me. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He left, closing the door behind him.

“Who was that?” I said to the boy.

“Doctor UlHuan,” he said. The other of the Ul Qoman academics on-site. “Will you find who did this?” I might have answered with the usual kind, meaningless certainties, but he looked too stricken for them. He stared at me and bit his lip. “Please,” he said.

“What did you mean about Orciny?” I said eventually.

“I mean”—he shook his head—“I don’t know. Just keep thinking about it, you know? Makes you nervy. I know it’s stupid but Mahalia used to be right up in that, and Yolanda was getting more and more into it—we used to rip shit out of her for it, you know?—and then both of them disappear…” He looked down and closed his eyes with his hand, as if he did not have the strength to blink. “It was me who called about Yolanda. When I couldn’t find her. I don’t know,” he said. “It just makes you wonder.” He ran out of what to say.

“WE’VE GOT SOME STUFF,” Dhatt said. He was pointing me along the walkways between the offices, back out of Bol Ye’an. He looked at the masses of notes he had made, sorted through the business cards and phone numbers on scraps. “I don’t know yet what it is that we’ve got, but we’ve got stuff. Maybe. Fuck.”

“Anything from UlHuan?” I said.

“What? No.” He glanced at me. “Backed up most of what Nancy said.”

“You know what it’s interesting that we didn’t get?” I said.

“Eh? Not following,” Dhatt said. “Seriously, Borlú,” he said as we neared the gate. “What d’you mean?”

“That was a group of kids from Canada, right…”

“Most of them. One German, one a Yank.”

“All Anglo-Euro-American, then. Let’s not kid ourselves—it might seem a bit rude to us, but we both know what outsiders to Besźel and Ul Qoma are most fascinated with. You notice what not a single one of them brought up, in any context, as even possibly to do with anything?”

“What do you …” Dhatt stopped. “Breach.”

“None of them mentioned Breach. Like they were nervous. You know as well as I do that normally it’s the first and only thing foreigners want to know about. Granted this lot have gone a bit more native than most of their compatriots, but still.” We waved thanks to the guards who opened the gate, and we stepped out. Dhatt was nodding carefully. “If someone we knew just disappeared without a single damned trace and out of nowhere like this, it’s one of the first things we’d consider, right? However much we might not want to?” I said. “Let alone people who must find it a whole lot harder than us not to breach every minute.”

“Officers!” It was one of the security detail, an athletic-looking young man with a mid-period David Beckham Mohican. He was younger than most of his colleagues. “Officers, please?” He jogged towards us.

“I just wanted to know,” he said. “You’re investigating who killed Mahalia Geary, right? I wanted to know … I wanted to know if you knew anything. If you got anywhere. Could they have got away?”

“Why?” said Dhatt eventually. “Who are you?”

“I, no one, no one. I just… It’s sad, it’s terrible, and we all, me and the rest of us, the guards, we feel bad and we want to know if, whoever, if who did this …”

“I’m Borlú,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Aikam. Aikam Tsueh.”

“You were a friend of hers?”

“I, sure a little bit. Not really, but you know I knew her. To say hello. I just want to know if you found anything.”

“If we did, Aikam, we can’t tell you,” said Dhatt.

“Not now,” I said. Dhatt glanced at me. “Have to work things out first. You understand. But maybe we can ask you a few questions?” He looked alarmed for a moment.

“I don’t know anything. But sure, I guess. I was worried if they could get out of the city, past the militsya. If there was a way you could do that. Is there?”

I made him write his phone number in my notebook before he went back to his station. Dhatt and I watched his back.

“Did you question the guards?” I said, watching Tsueh go.

“Of course. Nothing very interesting. They’re security guards, but this site’s under ministry aegis, so the checks are a bit more stringent than usual. Most of them had alibis for the night of Mahalia’s death.”

“Did he?”

“I’ll check, but I don’t remember his name being red-flagged, so he probably did.”

Aikam Tsueh turned at the gate and saw us watching. Raised his hand hesitantly in a good-bye.

Chapter Fourteen

SIT HIM IN A COFFEE SHOP—a teahouse, really, we were in Ul Qoma—and Dhatt’s aggressive energy dissipated somewhat. He still drummed his fingers on the edge of the table in a complicated rhythm I could not have mimicked, but he met my eyes, did not shift in his seat. He listened and made serious suggestions for how we might proceed. He twisted his head to read the notes I made. He took messages from his centre. While we sat there he did a gracious job, in truth, of obscuring the fact that he did not like me.

“I think we need to get some protocol in place about questioning,” was all he said, when first we sat, “too many cooks,” to which I murmured some half apology.

The tea shop staff would not take Dhatt’s money: he did not offer it very hard. “Militsya discount,” the serving woman said. The café was full. Dhatt eyed a raised table by the front window until the man who sat there noticed the scrutiny, rose, and we sat. We overlooked a Metro station. Among the many posters on a nearby wall was one I saw then unsaw: I was not sure it was not the poster I had had printed, to identify Mahalia. I did not know if I was right, if the wall was alter to me now, total in Besźel, or crosshatched and a close patchwork of information from different cities.

Ul Qomans emerged from below the street and gasped at the temperature, shrank into their fleeces. In Besźel, I knew—though I tried to unsee the Besź citizens doubtless descending from Yan-jelus Station of the overland transit, which was by chance a few scores of metres from the submerged Ul Qoman stop—people would be wearing furs. Among the Ul Qoman faces were people I took to be Asian or Arab, even a few Africans. Many more than in Besźel.

“Open doors?”

“Hardly,” Dhatt said. “Ul Qoma needs people, but everyone you see’s been carefully vetted, passed the tests, knows the score. Some of them are having kids. Ul Qoman pickaninnies!” His laugh was delighted. “We’ve got more than you lot, but not because we’re lax.” He was right. Who wanted to move to Besźel?

“What about the ones that don’t make it through?”

“Oh, we have our camps, same as you, here and there, round the outskirts. The UN’s not happy. Neither’s Amnesty. Giving you shit about conditions too? Want smokes?” A cigarette kiosk was a few metres from the entrance to our café. I had not realised I was staring at it.

“Not really. Yes, I guess. Curiosity. I haven’t smoked Ul Qoman I don’t think ever.”

“Hold on.”

“No, don’t get up. I don’t anymore; I gave up.”

“Oh come on, consider it ethnography, you’re not at home … Sorry, I’ll stop. I hate people who do that.”

“That?”

“Pimping stuff on people who’ve given up. And I’m not even a smoker.” He laughed and sipped. “Then at least it would be some fucked-up resentment at your success in quitting. I must just generally resent you. Malicious little bastard I am.” He laughed.

“Look, I’m sorry about, you know, jumping in like that…”

“I just think we need protocols. I don’t want you to think—”

“I appreciate that.”

“Alright, no worries. How about I handle the next one?” he said. I watched Ul Qoma. It was too cloudy to be so cold.

“You said that guy Tsueh has an alibi?”

“Yeah. They called it in for me. Most of those security guys are married and their wives’ll vouch, which okay isn’t worth a turd, but we couldn’t find any link from any of them to Geary except nods in a corridor. That one, Tsueh, actually was out that night with a bunch of the students. He’s young enough to fraternise.”

“Convenient. And unusual.”

“Sure. But he’s got no connections between anyone and anything. The kid’s nineteen. Tell me about the van.” I went over it again. “Light, am I going to have to come back with you?” he said. “Sounds like we’re looking for someone Besź.”

“Someone in Besźel drove the van through the border. But we know Geary was killed in Ul Qoma. So unless the killer murdered her, raced over to Besźel, grabbed a van, raced back, grabbed her, raced back again to dump the body, and why, we might add did they dump the body where they dumped it?, we’re looking at a cross-border phone call followed by a favour. So two perps.”

“Or breach.”

I moved.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or breach. But from what we know someone’s gone to a fair bit of trouble to not breach. And to let us know that.”

“The notorious footage. Funny how that turned up …”

I looked at him, but he did not seem to be mocking. “Isn’t it?”

“Oh come on, Tyador, what, are you surprised? Whoever’s done this, smart enough to know not to fuck with the borders, gives a friend over your side a call, and now’s shitting rocks that Breach is going to appear for him. And that would be unfair. So they’ve got some little helper in Copula Hall or Traffic or something and they’ve given them a whisper what time they crossed. It isn’t as if Besź bureaucrats are irreproachable.”

“Hardly.”

“There you go, then. See, you look happier.”

It would be a smaller conspiracy that way, than some of the other looming possibilities. Someone had known which vans to look for. Pored over a bunch of videos. What else? In that freezing but pretty day, cold muting Ul Qoma’s colours to everyday shades, it was hard and felt absurd to see Orciny in any corners.

“Let’s retrace,” he said. “We’re not going to get anywhere hunting for this fucking van driver. Hopefully your lot are on that. We’ve got nothing except a description of the van, and who in Ul Qoma’s going to admit having even maybe seen a Besź van, with or without permit to be there? So let’s go back to square one. What was your break?” I looked at him. I looked at him carefully and thought over the order of events. “When did she stop being Unknown Corpse One? What started it?”

In my room at the hotel were the notes I had taken from the Gearys. Her email address and phone number were in my notebook. They did not have their daughter’s body nor could they return to collect it. Mahalia Geary lay in the freezer waiting. For me, you could say.

“A phone call.”

“Yeah? A snitch?”

“… Sort of. It was his lead got me to Drodin.” I saw him remember the dossier, that this was not how it was described there.

“What are you … Who?”

“Well this is the thing.” I paused a long time. Eventually I looked at the table and drew shapes in my spilled tea. “I’m not sure what to … It was a phone call from here.”

“Ul Qoma?” I nodded. “What the fuck? From who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why were they calling?”

“They saw our posters. Yeah. Our posters in Besźel.”

Dhatt leaned in. “The fuck they did. Who?”

“You realise that this puts me in—”

“Of course I do.” He was intent, spoke quickly. “Of course I do, but come on, you’re police, you think I’m going to fuck you over? Between us. Who was it?”

It was not a small thing. If I was accessory to breach, he was now accessory to accessory. He did not seem nervous about it. “I think they were unifs. You know, unificationists?”

“They said so?”

“No, but it was what they said and how they said it. Anyway, I know it was totally not-on, but it was that got me on the right track … What?” Dhatt was sitting back. His fingers drummed faster now, and he was not looking at me.

“Fuck, we’ve got something. I cannot fucking believe you didn’t mention this before.”

“Hold on, Dhatt.”

“Okay, I can really—I can see that this puts you in a bit of a position.”

“I don’t know anything about who this was.”

“We’re still in time; we can maybe hand it over and explain that you were just a bit late …”

“Hand what over? We don’t have anything.”

“We have a unif bastard who knows something is what we have. Let’s go.” He stood and jiggled his car keys.

“Go where?”

“Go fucking detecting!”

“OF BLOODY COURSE,” Dhatt said. He was tearing up Ul Qoma streets, the car’s siren gasping. He turned, shouting abuse at scuttling Ul Qoman civilians, swerved wordlessly to avoid Besź pedestrians and cars, accelerating with the expressionless anxiety foreign emergencies occasion. If we hit one of them it would be a bureaucratic disaster. A breach now would not be helpful.

“Yari, it’s Dhatt.” He shouted into his cell phone. “Any clue if the cc of the unifs are in at the moment? Excellent, thanks.” He slapped it shut.

“Looks like at least some of them are. I knew you’d spoken to Besź unifs, of course. Read your report. But what kind of fool am I”—slap slap of his forehead with the heel of his hand—“didn’t occur to me to go talk to our own little homegrowns. Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers—and we have our share of fuckers, Tyad—are all talking to each other. I know where they hang out.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“I hate those little sods. I hope … Goes without saying, I mean, that I’ve met some great Besź in my time.” He glanced at me. “Nothing against the place and I hope I get to visit, and it’s great that we’re all getting on so well these days, you know, better than it used to be—what was the fucking point of all that shit? But I’m Ul Qoman and I’m fucked if I want to be anything else. You imagine unification?” He laughed. “Fucking catastrophe! Unity is strength my Ul Qoman arse. I know they say crossbreeding makes animals stronger, but what if we inherited, shit, Ul Qoman sense of timing and Besź optimism?”

He made me laugh. We passed between ancient age-mottled roadside stone pillars. I recognised them from photographs, remembered too late that the one on the eastern side of the road was the only one I should see—it was in Ul Qoma, the other in Besźel. So most people said, anyway: they were one of the cities’ controversial disputed loci. The Besź buildings I couldn’t help fail to completely unsee were, I glimpsed, sedate and tidy, but in Ul Qoma wherever we were was an area of decay. We passed canals, and for several seconds I did not know which city they were in, or if it was both. By a weed-flecked yard, where nettles poked out from below a long-immobile Citroën like a hovercraft’s skirt of air, Dhatt braked hard and got out before I had even undone my seatbelt.

“Time was,” Dhatt said, “we’d have locked every one of these fuckers away.” He strode towards a tumbledown door. There are no legal unificationists in Ul Qoma. There are no legal socialist parties, fascist parties, religious parties in Ul Qoma. Since the Silver Renewal almost a century before under the tutelage of General Ilsa, Ul Qoma had had only the People’s National Party. Many older establishments and offices still displayed portraits of Ya Ilsa, often above “Ilsa’s Brothers” Atatürk and Tito. The cliché was that in older offices there was always a faded patch between those two, where erstwhile brother Mao had once beamed.

But this is the twenty-first century, and President Ul Mak (whose portrait you can also see where managers are most obsequious), like President Umbir before him, had announced certainly not a repudiation but a development of the National Road, an end to restrictive thinking, a glasnostroika, as Ul Qoman intellectuals hideously neologised. With the CD-and-DVD shops, the software startups and galleries, the bullish Ul Qoman financial markets, the revalued dinar, came, they said, New Politics, a very vaunted openness to hitherto dangerous dissidence. Not to say that radical groups, let alone parties, were legalised, but their ideas were sometimes acknowledged. So long as they displayed restraint in meetings and proselytisation, they were indulged. So one heard.

“Open!” Dhatt slammed on the door. “This is the unif hangout,” he said to me. “They’re constantly on the phone to your lot in Besźel—that’s kind of their deal, right?”

“What’s their status?”

“You’re about to hear them say they’re just a group of friends meeting for a chat. No membership cards or anything, they’re not stupid. Shouldn’t take a fucking bloodhound for us to track down some contraband, but that’s not really what I’m here for.”

“What are we here for?” I looked around at decrepit Ul Qoman facades, Illitan graffiti demanding that so-and-so fuck off and informing that such-and-such person sucked cock. Breach must be watching.

He looked at me levelly. “Whoever made that phone call to you did it from here. Or frequents this place. Pretty much guarantee it. Want to find out what our seditionist pals know. Open.” That to the door. “Don’t be fooled by their whole who us? thing; they’re perfectly happy to smack shit out of anyone quote working against unification unfuckingquote. Open.”

The door obeyed this time, a crack onto a small young woman, the sides of her head shaved, showing tattooed fish and a few letters in a very old alphabet.

“Who …? What do you want?”

Perhaps they had sent her to the door hoping her size would shame anyone out of what Dhatt did next, which was to shove the door hard enough to send her stumbling backwards into the grotty hallways.

“Everyone here now,” he shouted, striding through the corridor, past the dishevelled punkess.

After confused moments when the thought of attempting to get out must have crossed their minds and been overruled, the five people in the house gathered in their kitchen, sat on the unstable chairs where Dhatt put them, and did not look at us. Dhatt stood at the head of the table and leaned over them.

“Right,” he said. “Here it is. Someone made a phone call that my esteemed colleague here is keen to recall, and we’re keen to find out who it was who was so helpful on the phone. I won’t waste your time by pretending I think any of you are going to admit it, so instead we’re going to go round the table and each of you is going to say, ‘Inspector, I have something to tell you.’” They stared at him. He grinned and waved them begin. They did not, and he cuffed the man nearest him, to the cries of his companions, the man’s own shout of pain and a noise of surprise from me. When the man looked slowly up his forehead was stained with incoming bruise.

“‘Inspector, I have something to tell you,’” Dhatt said. “We’re just going to have to keep going till we get our man. Or woman.” He glanced at me; he had forgotten to check. “That’s the thing with cops.” He got ready for a backwards swipe across the same man’s face. I shook my head and raised my hands a bit, and the unificationists gathered around the table made various moans. The man Dhatt threatened tried to rise but Dhatt grabbed his shoulder with his other hand and shoved him back into the chair.

“Yohan, just say it!” the punk girl shouted.

“Inspector, I’ve got something to tell you.”

Around the table it went. “Inspector, I have something to tell you.” “Inspector, I have something to tell you.”

One of the men spoke slowly enough, at first, that it might have been a provocation, but Dhatt raised an eyebrow at him and slapped his friend yet again. Not as hard, but this time blood came.

“Holy fucking Light!”

I dithered by the door. Dhatt made them all say it again, and their names.

“Well?” he said to me.

It had been neither of the two women, of course. Of the men, one’s voice was reedy and his Illitan accent, I presumed, from a part of the city I didn’t recognise. It could have been either of the other two. One in particular—the younger, named, he told us, Dahar Jaris, not the man Dhatt menaced, but a boy in a battered denim jacket with NoMeansNo written on the back in English print that made me suspect it was the name of a band, not a slogan—had a voice that was familiar. Had I heard him say exactly the words my interlocutor had used, or had I heard him speak in the same long-dead form of language, it might have been easier to be sure. Dhatt saw me looking at him and pointed questioningly. I shook my head.

“Say it again,” Dhatt said to him.

“No,” I said, but Jaris was gabbling pointlessly through the phrase. “Anyone speak old Illitan or Besź? Root-form stuff?” I said. They looked at each other. “I know, I know,” I said. “There’s no Illitan, no Besź, and so on. Do any of you speak it?”

“All of us,” said the older man. He did not wipe the blood from his lip. “We live in the city and it’s the language of the city.”

“Careful,” said Dhatt. “I could charge you on that. It’s this one, right?” He pointed at Jaris again.

“Leave it,” I said.

“Who knew Mahalia Geary?” Dhatt said. “Byela Mar?”

“Marya,” I said. “Something.” Dhatt fished in his pocket for her photograph. “But it’s none of them,” I said. I was in the door frame, and moving out of the room. “Leave it. It’s no one. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

He approached me close, looking quizzical. “Hmm?” he whispered. I shook my head minutely. “Fill me in, Tyador.”

Eventually he pursed his lips and turned back to the unificationists. “Stay careful,” he said. He left and they stared after him, five faces frightened and bewildered, one of them bloody and dripping. My own was set, I suspect, from the effort of not showing anything.

“You’ve got me confused, Borlú.” He drove much more slowly than we had come on the return. “I can’t work out what just happened. You backed away from that, and it was our best lead. The only thing that makes sense is that you’re worried about complicity. Because sure, if you got a call and went with it, if you took them up on that information, then yeah that’s breach. But no one’s going to give a shit about you, Borlú. It’s a little tiny breach, and you know as well as I do that they’ll let that go if we sort out something bigger.”

“I don’t know how it is in Ul Qoma,” I said. “In Besźel breach is breach.”

“Bullshit. What does that even mean? Is that what this is? That’s it?” He slowed behind a Besź tram; we rocked over the foreign rails in the crosshatched road. “Fuck, Tyador, we can sort it out; we can come up with something, no problem, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

“That’s not it.”

“I fucking hope that’s it. I really do. What else is your beef? Listen, you wouldn’t have to incriminate yourself or anything—”

“That’s not it. None of those were the ones that made the phone call. I don’t know for sure the phone call was even from abroad. From here. I don’t know anything for sure. Could have been a crank call.”

“Right.” When he dropped me at the hotel he did not get out. “I’ve got paperwork,” he said. “I’m sure you do too. Take a couple of hours. We should talk to Professor Nancy again, and I want to have another word with Bowden. Does that meet with your approval? If we drove there and asked a few questions, would those methods be acceptable?”

After a couple of tries I got Corwi. At first we tried to stick to our stupid code, but it did not last.

“I’m sorry boss, I’m not bad at this shit, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to snag Dhatt’s personnel files from the militsya. You’ll cause a sodding international incident. What do you want, anyway?”

“I just want to know what his story is.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Who knows? They’re old-school here.”

“Yeah?”

“Robust interrogations.”

“I’ll tell Naustin, he’ll love it, get an exchange. You sound rattled, boss.”

“Just do me a favour and see if you can get anything, okay?” When I had rung off I picked up Between the City and the City and put it down again.

Chapter Fifteen

“STILL NO LUCK WITH THE VAN?” I said.

“Not pitching up on any cameras we can find,” Dhatt said. “No witnesses. Once it’s through Copula Hall from your side it’s mist.” We both knew that with its make and its Besź number plates, anyone in Ul Qoma who glimpsed it would likely have thought it elsewhere and quickly unseen it, without noticing its pass.

When Dhatt showed me on the map how close Bowden’s flat was to a station, I suggested we go by public transport. I had travelled on the Paris and Moscow Metros and the London Tube. The Ul Qoma transit used to be more brutalist than any—efficient and to a certain taste impressive, but pretty unrelenting in its concrete. Something over a decade ago it was renewed, at least all those stations in its inner zones. Each was given to a different artist or designer, who were told, with exaggeration but not as much as you might think, that money was no object.

The results were incoherent, sometimes splendid, variegated to a giddying extent. The nearest stop to my hotel was a camp mimicry of Nouveau. The trains were clean and fast and full and on some lines, on this line, driverless. Ul Yir Station, a few turns from the pleasant, uninteresting neighbourhood where Bowden lived, was a patchwork of Constructivist lines and Kandinsky colours. It was, in fact, by a Besź artist.

“Bowden knows we’re coming?”

Dhatt lifted a hand for me to wait. We had ascended to street level and he had his cell to his ear, was listening to a message.

“Yeah,” he said after a minute, shutting the phone. “He’s waiting for us.”

David Bowden lived in a second-floor apartment, in a skinny building, giving him the whole storey to himself. He had crammed it with art objects, remnants, antiquities from the two cities and, to my ignorant eye, their precursor. Above him, he told us, was a nurse and her son: below him a doctor, originally from Bangladesh, who had lived in Ul Qoma even longer than he had.

“Two expats in one building.” I said.

“It’s not exactly a coincidence,” he said. “Used to be, before she passed away, that upstairs was an ex-Panther.” We stared. “A Black Panther, made it out after Fred Hampton was killed. China, Cuba and Ul Qoma were the destinations of choice. When I moved here, when your government liaison officer told you an apartment had come up, you took it, and blow me if all the buildings we were housed in weren’t full of foreigners. Well, we could moan together about whatever it was we missed from home. Have you heard of Marmite? No? Then you’ve obviously never met a British spy in exile.” He poured me and Dhatt, unbidden, glasses of red wine. We spoke in Illitan. “This was years ago, you understand. Ul Qoma didn’t have a pot to piss in. It had to think about efficiencies. There was always one Ul Qoman living in each of these buildings. Much easier for a single person to keep an eye on several foreign visitors if they were all in one place.”

Dhatt met his eye. Fuck off, these truths don’t intimidate me, his expression said. Bowden smiled a little bashfully.

“Wasn’t it a bit insulting?” I said. “Honoured visitors, sympaticos being watched like that?”

“Might have been for some of them,” Bowden said. “The Philbys of Ul Qoma, the real fellow travellers, were probably rather put out. But then they’d also be the ones most likely to put up with anything. I never particularly objected to being watched. They were right not to trust me.” He sipped his drink. “How are you getting on with Between, Inspector?”

His walls were painted beiges and browns in need of renovation, and busy with bookshelves and books and the folk art in Ul Qoman and Besź styles, antique maps of both cities. On surfaces were figurines and the remnants of pottery, tiny clockwork-looking things. The living room was not large, and so full of bits and pieces it was cramped.

“You were here when Mahalia was killed,” Dhatt said.

“I have no alibi, if that’s what you mean. My neighbour might have heard me puttering about, ask her, but I don’t know.”

“How long have you lived here?” I said. Dhatt pursed his lips without looking at me.

“God, years.”

“And why here?”

“I don’t understand.”

“So far as I can tell you have at least as much Besź stuff as local.” I pointed at one of the many old or reproduction Besź icons. “Is there a particular reason you ended up here rather than Besźel? Or anywhere else?”

Bowden turned his hands so that his palms faced the ceiling.

“I’m an archaeologist. I don’t know how much you know about this stuff. Most of the artefacts that are worth looking at, including the ones that look to us now like they were made by Besź craftsmen, are in Ul Qoman soil. That’s just how it’s always been. The situation was never helped by Besźel’s idiotic willingness to sell what little heritage it could dig up to whoever wanted it. Ul Qoma’s always been smarter about that.”

“Even a dig like Bol Ye’an?”

“You mean under foreign direction? Sure. The Canadians don’t technically own any of it; they just have some handling and cataloguing rights. Plus the kudos they get from writing up, and a warm glow. And dibs on museum tours, of course. The Canadians are happy as Larry about the US blockade, believe me. Want to see a very vivid green? Tell an American archaeologist you work in Ul Qoma. Have you seen Ul Qoma’s laws on antiquities export?” He closed his hands, fingers interlocking like a trap. “Everyone who wants to work on Ul Qoma, or Besźel, let alone if they’re into Precursor Age, ends up here if they can get here.”

“Mahalia was an American archaeologist…” Dhatt said.

“Student,” Bowden said. “When she finished her PhD she’d have had a harder time staying.”

I was standing, glancing into his study. “Could I …?” I indicated in.

“I … sure.” He was embarrassed at the tiny space. It was if anything even more cramped with the tat of antiquity than his living room. His desk was its own archaeology of papers, computer cables, a street-finder map of Ul Qoma, battered and several years old. Amid the mess of papers were some in a strange and very ancient script, neither Illitan nor Besź, pre-Cleaved. I could not read any of it.

“What’s this?”

“Oh …” He rolled his eyes. “It arrived yesterday morning. I still get crank mail. Since Between. Stuff that people put together and say is in the script of Orciny. I’m supposed to decode it for them. Maybe the poor sods really believe it’s something.”

“Can you decode that one?”

“Are you kidding? No. It doesn’t mean anything.” He closed the door. “No news of Yolanda?” he said. “This is seriously worrying.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Dhatt. “Missing Persons are on it. They’re very good. We’re working closely with them.”

“We absolutely have to find her, Officers. I’m … This is crucial.”

“Do you have any idea who might have any grievance against Yolanda?”

“Yolanda? My God no, she’s sweet, I can’t think of anyone. Mahalia was a bit different. I mean … Mahalia was … what happened to her was utterly appalling. Appalling. She was smart, very smart, and opinionated, and brave, and it isn’t quite so … What I’m saying is I can imagine Mahalia getting people angry. She did that. It’s the kind of person she was, and I mean that as a compliment. But there was always that fear that Mahalia might one day piss off the wrong person.”

“Who might she have pissed off?”

“I’m not talking specifics, Senior Detective, I have no idea. We didn’t have very much contact, Mahalia and I. I hardly knew her.”

“Small campus,” I said. “Surely you all knew everyone.”

“True. But honestly I avoided her. We hadn’t spoken for a long time. We didn’t get off to a very auspicious start. Yolanda, though, I know. And she’s nothing like that. She’s not as clever, maybe, but I cannot think of a single person who doesn’t like her, nor why anyone would want to do anything to her. Everyone’s horrified. Including the locals who work there.”

“Would they have been devastated about Mahalia, too?” I said.

“I doubt any of them knew her, to be frank.”

“One of the guards seemed to. Made a point of asking us about her. About Mahalia. I thought he might be her boyfriend or something.”

“One of the guards? Absolutely not. Sorry, that sounded a bit peremptory. What I mean is that I’d be amazed. Knowing what I do of Mahalia, I mean.”

“Which isn’t much, you said.”

“No. But, you know, you pick up on who’s doing what, which students do what. Some of them—Yolanda’s one—hang out with the Ul Qoman staff, but not Mahalia. You will tell me if you find anything out about Yolanda? You have to find her. Or even if you just have theories about where she is, please, this is terrible.”

“You’re Yolanda’s supervisor?” I said. “What’s her PhD on?”

“Oh.” He waved. “‘Representing Gender and the Other in Precursor Age Artefacts.’ I still prefer ‘pre-Cleavage’ but it makes an unfortunate pun in English, so Precursor Age is the newly preferred term.”

“You said she’s not smart?”

“I did not say that. She’s perfectly intelligent enough. It’s fine. She’s just … There aren’t that many people like Mahalia in any postgraduate program.”

“So why weren’t you her supervisor?”

He stared at me as if I was mocking him.

“Because of her bullshit, Inspector,” he said at last. He stood and turned his back, seemed to want to walk around the room, but it was too small. “Yes, these were the tricky circumstances under which we met.” He turned back to us. “Senior Detective Dhatt, Inspector Borlú. Do you know how many PhD students I have? One. Because no one else wanted her. Poor thing. I have no office at Bol Ye’an. I have no tenure nor am I on tenure track. Do you know what my official title is, at Prince of Wales? I’m a Corresponding Lecturer. Don’t ask me what that means. Actually, I can tell you what it means—it means We are the world’s leading institution for Ul Qoma, Besźel and Precursor Age studies, and we need all the names we can get, and we may even entice a few rich kooks onto our program with your moniker, but we are not so stupid as to give you a real job.”

“Because of the book?”

“Because of Between the City and the City. Because I was a stoned young man with a neglectful supervisor and a taste for the arcane. No matter that you turn around a little later and say ‘Mea culpa, I messed up, no Orciny, my apologies.’ No matter that eighty-five percent of the research still holds up and is still used. Hear me? No matter what else you do, ever. You can never walk away from it no matter how hard you try.

“So when, as happens regularly, someone comes to me and tells me that the work that fucked things up is so great, and that she’d love to work with me—and this is what Mahalia did at the conference over in Besźel where I first met her—and that it’s such a travesty that the truth is still banned in both cities, and that she’s on my side … Did you know by the way that when she first arrived here she not only smuggled a copy of Between into Besźel but told me she was going to shelve it in the history section of the University Library, for Christ’s sake? For people to find? She told me that proudly. I told her to get rid of it immediately or I would set the policzai on her. Anyway, when she tells me all that, yes, I got shirty.

“I meet these people pretty much every conference I go to. I tell them I was wrong and they think either that I’ve been bought off by the Man, or that I’m afraid for my life. Or that I’ve been replaced by a robot or something.”

“Did Yolanda ever talk about Mahalia? Wasn’t it hard, you feeling like that about her best friend …”

“Feeling like what? There was nothing, Inspector. I told her I wouldn’t supervise her; she accused me of cowardice or capitulation or something, I can’t remember; that was the last of it. I gathered that she’d more or less shut up about Orciny in the years since she’d been on the program. I thought good, she’s grown out of it. That was it. And I heard she was clever.”

“I got the impression Professor Nancy was a bit disappointed with her.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. She wouldn’t be the first person to be a letdown in writing, but she still had a reputation.”

“Yolanda wasn’t into Orciny stuff? That’s not why she was studying with you?”

He sighed and sat down again. It was unimpressive, his lacklustre up-down.

“I thought not. I wouldn’t have supervised her. And no, not at first… but she’d mentioned it recently. Brought up dissensi, what might live there, all that. She knew my feelings, so she was trying to act as if it was all hypotheticals. It sounds ridiculous, but it honestly hadn’t even occurred to me that it was because of Mahalia’s influence. Was she talking to her about it? Do you know?”

“Tell us about the dissensi,” Dhatt said. “Do you know where they are?”

He shrugged. “You know where some are, SD. There’s no secret about lots of them. A few paces of back yard here, a deserted building there. The central five metres or so of Nuistu Park? Dissensus. Ul Qoma claims it; Besźel claims it. They’re effectively crosshatched or out of bounds in both cities while the bickering goes on. There’s just not that much exciting about them.”

“I’d like a list from you.”

“If you want, but you’ll get it quicker via your own department, and mine is probably twenty years out of date. They do get resolved, time to time, and new ones emerge. And then you might hear of the secret ones.”

“I’d like a list. Hang on, secret? If no one knows they’re disputed, how can they be?”

“Quite. They’re secretly disputed, SD Dhatt. You have to get your head into the right mindset for this foolishness.”

“Doctor Bowden …” I said. “Do you have any reason to think anyone might have anything against you?”

“Why?” He was very abruptly alarmed. “What have you heard?”

“Nothing, only …” I said, and paused. “There’s some speculation that someone is targeting people who’ve been investigating Orciny.” Dhatt made no move to interrupt me. “Perhaps you should be careful.”

“What? I don’t study Orciny, I haven’t for years …”

“As you say yourself, once you’ve started this stuff, Doctor… I’m afraid you’re the doyen whether you like it or not. Have you received anything that could be construed as a threat?”

“No …”

“You were burgled.” That was Dhatt. “A few weeks ago.” We both looked at him. Dhatt was unembarrassed by my surprise. Bowden’s mouth worked.

“But that was just a burglary,” he said. “Nothing was even taken …”

“Yes, because they must’ve got startled—that was what we said at the time,” Dhatt said. “Could be it was never their intent to take anything.”

Bowden, and more surreptitiously I, looked around the room, as if some malevolent gris-gris or electronic ear or painted threat might jump suddenly to light.

“SD, Inspector, this is utterly absurd; there is no Orciny …”

“But,” Dhatt said, “there are such things as nutters.”

“Some of whom,” I said, “for whatever reason are interested in some of the ideas being explored by yourself and Miss Rodriguez, Miss Geary …”

“I don’t think either of them were exploring ideas …”

“Whatever,” Dhatt said. “The point is they got someone’s attention. No, we’re not sure why, or even if there is a why.”

Bowden was staring absolutely aghast.

Chapter Sixteen

DHATT TOOK THE LIST Bowden gave him and sent an underling to supplement it, sent officers to the itemised lots, derelict buildings, patches of kerb and little promenade spaces on the river’s shore, to scuff stones and probe at the edges of disputed, functionally crosshatched patches. I spoke to Corwi again that night—she made a joke about hoping this was a secure line—but we were unable to say anything useful to each other.

Professor Nancy had sent a printout of Mahalia’s chapters to the hotel. There were two more or less finished, two somewhat sketchy. I stopped reading them after not very long, looked instead at the photocopies of her annotated textbooks. There was a vivid disparity between the sedate, somewhat dull tone of the former, and the exclamation points and scribbled interjections of the latter, Mahalia arguing with her earlier selves and with the main text. The marginalia were incomparably the more interesting, to the extent that you could make any sense of them. I put them down eventually for Bowden’s book.

Between the City and the City was tendentious. You could see it. There are secrets in Besźel and in Ul Qoma, secrets everyone knows about: it was unnecessary to posit secret secrets. Still, the old stories, the mosaics and bas-reliefs, the artefacts the book referred to were in some cases astonishing—beautiful and startling. Young Bowden’s readings of some still-unsolved mysteries of Precursor or Pre-Cleavage age works were ingenious and even convincing. He had an elegantly argued claim that the incomprehensible mechanisms euphemistically slanged as “clocks” were not mechanisms at all, but intricately chambered boxes designed solely to hold the gears they contained. His leaps to the therefore were lunatic, as he now admitted.

Of course there would be paranoia, for a visitor to this city, where the locals would stare and stare furtively, where I would be watched by Breach, of which snatched glances would not feel like anything I had experienced.

My cell phone rang, later, while I was sleeping. It was my Besź phone, showing an international call. It would piss credit, but it was on the government.

“Borlú,” I said.

“Inspector…” Illitan accent.

“Who is this?”

“Borlú I don’t know why you … I can’t talk long. I … thank you.”

“Jaris.” I sat up, put my feet on the floor. The young unif. “It’s…”

“We’re not fucking comrades, you know.” He was not speaking in Old Illitan this time, but quickly in his own everyday language.

“Why would we be?”

“Right. I can’t stay on the line.”

“Okay.”

“You could tell it was me, couldn’t you? Who called you in Besźel.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Right. This call never fucking happened.” I said nothing. “Thanks for the other day,” he said. “For not saying. I met Marya when she came over here.” I had not given her that name for a while, but for the moment when Dhatt had questioned the unifs. “She told me she knew our brothers and sisters over the border; she’d worked with them. But she wasn’t one of us, you know.”

“I know. You set me on that track in Besźel …”

“Shut up. Please. I thought she was at first, but the stuff she was asking about, it was … She was into stuff you don’t even know about.” I would not preempt him. “Orciny.” He must have interpreted my silence as awe. “She didn’t give a shit about unification. She was putting everyone in danger so she could use our libraries and our contacts lists … I really liked her, but she was trouble. She only cared about Orciny.

“Borlú, she fucking found it, Borlú.

“Are you there? Do you understand? She found it…”

“How do you know?”

“She told me. None of the others knew. When we realised how … dangerous she was she was banned from meetings. They thought she was, like, a spy or something. She wasn’t that.”

“You stayed in touch with her.” He said nothing. “Why, if she was so …?

“I … she was …”

“Why’d you call me? In Besźel?”

“… She deserved better than a potter’s field.”

I was surprised he knew the term. “Were you together, Jaris?” I said.

“I hardly knew anything about her. Never asked. Never met her friends. We’re careful. But she told me about Orciny. Showed me all her notes about it. She was … Listen, Borlú, you won’t believe me but she’d made contact. There are places—”

“Dissensi?”

“No, shut up. Not disputed: places that everyone in Ul Qoma thinks are in Besźel, and everyone in Besźel thinks are in Ul Qoma. They’re not in either one. They’re Orciny. She found them. She told me she was helping.”

“Doing what?” I only spoke at last because the silence went on so long.

“I don’t know much. She was saving them. They wanted something. She said. Something like that. But when I said to her once ‘How d’you know Orciny’s on our side?’ she just laughed and said ‘I don’t, they’re not.’ She wouldn’t tell me a lot. I didn’t want to know. She didn’t talk about it much at all. I thought she might be crossing, through some of these places, but…”

“When did you last see her?”

“I don’t know. A few days before she … before. Listen, Borlú, this is what you need to know. She knew she was in trouble. She got really angry and upset when I said something about Orciny. The last time. She said I didn’t understand anything. She said something like she didn’t know if what she was doing was restitution or criminal.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. She said Breach was nothing. I was shocked. Can you imagine? She said everyone who knew the truth about Orciny was in danger. She said there weren’t many but anyone that did wouldn’t even know how much shit they were in, wouldn’t believe it. I said ‘Even me?’ she said ‘Maybe, I maybe already told you too much.’”

“What do you think it means?”

“What do you know about Orciny, Borlú? Why the fuck would anyone think Orciny was safe to fuck with? How d’you think you stay hidden for centuries? By playing nice? Light! I think somehow she got mixed up working for Orciny, is what I think happened, and I think they’re like parasites, and they told her she was helping them but she found something out, and when she realised they killed her.” He gathered himself. “She carried a knife at the end, for protection. From Orciny.” A miserable laugh. “They killed her, Borlú. And they’re going to kill everyone who might trouble them. Everyone who’s ever brought attention to them.”

“What about you?”

“I’m fucked, is what. She’s gone, so I’m gone too. Ul Qoma can go fuck itself and so can Besźel and so can Or-fucking-ciny. This is my good-bye. Can you hear the sound of wheels? In a minute this phone is going out the fucking window when we’re done and say-onara. This call’s a good-bye present, for her sake.”

By the last words he was whispering. When I realised he had rung off I tried to call him back but his number was blocked.

***

I RUBBED MY EYES for long seconds, too long. I scribbled notes on the hotel-headed paper, nothing I would ever look at again, just trying to organise thoughts. I listed people. I saw the clock and did a time-zone calculation. I dialled a long-distance number on the hotel phone.

“Mrs. Geary?”

“Who is this?”

“Mrs. Geary, this is Tyador Borlú. Of the Besźel police.” She said nothing. “We … May I ask how Mr. Geary is?” I walked barefoot to the window.

“He’s alright,” she said finally. “Angry.” She was very careful. She could not decide about me. I pulled the heavy curtains back a little, looked out. No matter that it was the small hours, there were a few figures visible in the street, as there always are. Now and then a car passed. So late, it was harder to tell who was local and who foreign and so unseeable in the day: the colours of clothes were obscured by streetlamp light and the huddled quick night-walking blurred body language.

“I wanted to say again how sorry I was about what happened and to make sure you were alright.”

“Have you got anything to tell me?”

“You mean have we caught who did this to your daughter? I’m sorry, Mrs. Geary, we have not. But I wanted to ask you …” I waited, but she did not hang up, nor say anything. “Did Mahalia ever tell you she was seeing anyone here?”

She only made some sound. When I had waited several seconds I continued. “Do you know Yolanda Rodriguez? And why was it the Besź nationalists Mr. Geary was looking for? When he breached. Mahalia lived in Ul Qoma.”

She made the sound and I realised that she was crying. I opened my mouth but could only listen to her. Too late as I woke up more I realised that I should perhaps have called from another phone, if my and Corwi’s suspicions were right. Mrs. Geary did not break the connection, so after a little while I said her name.

“Why are you asking me about Yolanda?” she said finally. She had pulled her voice together. “Of course I met her, she’s Mahalia’s friend. Is she …?”

“We’re just trying to get hold of her. But…”

“Oh my God, is she missing? Mahalia confided in her. Is that why …? Is she …?”

“Please don’t, Mrs. Geary. I promise you there’s no evidence of anything untoward; she may have just taken a few days away. Please.” She started again but controlled herself.

“They hardly spoke to us on that flight,” she said. “My husband woke up near the end and realised what had happened.”

I said, “Mrs. Geary, was Mahalia involved with anyone here? That you know of? In Ul Qoma, I mean?”

“No.” She sighed it. “You’re thinking ‘How would her mother know?’ but I would. She didn’t tell me details, but she …” She gathered herself. “There was someone who hung around with her, but she didn’t like him that way. Said it was too complicated.”

“What was his name?”

“Don’t you think I’d have told you? I don’t know. She met him through politics, I think.”

“You mentioned Qoma First.”

“Oh, my girl made them all mad.” She laughed a bit. “She got people sore on all sides of it. And even the unifiers, is that what they are? Michael was going to check them all. It was easier to find names and addresses for Besźel. That’s where we were. He was going to check them all out, one at a time. He wanted to find them all, because … one of them did this.”

I promised her all the things she wanted me to, rubbing my forehead and staring at Ul Qoma’s silhouettes.

Not later enough, I was woken by Dhatt’s phone call.

“Are you still in fucking bed? Get up.”

“How long before you …” It was morning, not that early.

“I’m downstairs. Hurry up, come on. Someone sent a bomb.”

Chapter Seventeen

IN BOL YE’AN men of the Ul Qoma bomb squad lounged outside the tiny ersatz postroom, talking to several awed security guards, chewing, squat in their protective clothes. The squad wore their visors up, angling from their foreheads.

“You Dhatt? It’s cool, SD,” one said, glancing at Dhatt’s insignia. “You can go in.” He eyed me and opened the door onto the cupboard-sized room.

“Who caught it?” Dhatt said.

“One of the security boys. Sharp. Aikam Tsueh. What? What?” Neither of us said anything, so he shrugged. “Said he didn’t like how it felt; he went out to the militsya outside, asked them to take a look at it.”

Pigeonholes covered the walls, and large brown parcels, opened and unopened, lay in corners and plastic bins, on tabletops. Displayed on a stool in the centre, surrounded by ripped envelope and fallen letters trodden with footprints, was a package splayed, electronic innards jutting like wire stamens from a flower.

“This is the mechanism,” the man said. I read the Illitan on his Kevlar: his name was Tairo. He spoke to Dhatt, not me, pointing with a little laser pen, red-dotting what he referred to. “Two layers of envelope.” Scribbling with the light all over the paper. “Open the first one, nothing. Inside’s another one. Open that…” Clicked his fingers. Indicating the wires. “Nicely done. Classic.”

“Old-fashioned?”

“Nah, just nothing fancy. But nicely done. Not just son et lumiere either—this wasn’t made to scare someone, it was made to fuck someone up. And I tell you what also. See this? Very directed. It’s linked up with the tag.” The remnants of it visible in the paper, a red strip on the inner envelope, printed in Besź Pull here to open. “Whoever does is going to get a faceful of bang and fall down. But short of pretty bad luck, anyone standing next to them’s only going to need a new hairdo. The blast is directed.”

“It’s defused?” I asked Tairo. “Can I touch it?” He did not look at me but at Dhatt, who nodded him to answer.

“Fingerprints,” Tairo said, but shrugged. I took a ballpoint from one of the shelves and took out its cartridge, not to mark anything. I prodded gently at the paper, smoothing down the inner envelope. Even scored open by the defusers, it was easy to read the name written on it: David Bowden.

“Check this,” Tairo said. He rummaged gently. Below the parcel on the inside of the outer envelope, someone had scribbled, in Illitan, The heart of a wolf. I recognised the line but could not place it. Tairo sang it and grinned.

“It’s an old motherland song,” Dhatt said.

“It wasn’t a scare and it wasn’t for generalised mayhem either,” Dhatt said to me quietly. We sat in the office we had commandeered. Opposite us, trying politely to avoid eavesdropping, Aikam Tsueh. “That was a kill-shot. What the fuck?”

“With Illitan written on it, sent from Besźel,” I said.

Dusting didn’t turn anything up. Both envelopes had been scrawled on, the address on the outer and Bowden’s name on the inner in a chaotic script. The package was sent from Besźel from a post office that was grosstopically not far from the dig itself, though of course the package would have been imported a long way round through Copula Hall.

“We’ll get the techs on it,” Dhatt said. “See if we can trace it backwards, but we’ve got nothing to point to anyone. Maybe your lot’ll turn something up.” The chances were low to nil we could reconstruct its journey backwards through both the Ul Qoman and Besź postal services.

“Listen.” I made sure Aikam could not hear. “We know Mahalia had pissed off some hardcore nats back home. I get it, such organisations cannot possibly exist in Ul Qoma, of course, but if by some inadvertent glitch any of them are out here too, the chances are reasonable that she might have pissed them off too, no? She was mixed up in stuff that could have been designed to annoy them. You know, undermining the power of Ul Qoma, secret groups, porous boundaries, all that. You know.”

He watched me without expression. “Right,” he said eventually.

“Two out of two students with special interests in Orciny are out of the picture. And now we’ve got a bomb to Mr. Between Cities.”

We looked at each other.

After a moment, louder now, I said, “Well done, Aikam. That was really something that you did.”

“Have you held a bomb before, Aikam?” Dhatt said.

“Sir? No.”

“Not in national service?”

“I haven’t done mine yet, Officer.”

“So how do you know what a bomb feels like?”

Shrug. “I didn’t, I don’t, I just… It was wrong. Too heavy.”

“I bet this place gets a lot of books in the mail,” I said. “Maybe computer stuff too. They’re pretty heavy. How did you know this was different?”

“… Different heavy. It was harder. Under the envelopes. You could tell it wasn’t paper, it was like metal or something.”

“Matter of fact is it even your job to be checking mail?” I said.

“No, but I was in there, just because. I was thinking that I could bring it out. I wanted to, and then I felt that one and it was … there was something about it.”

“You have good instincts.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you think about opening it?”

“No! It wasn’t to me.”

“Who was it to?”

“It wasn’t to anyone.” That outer envelope had named no recipient, only the dig. “That’s another reason, that’s why I looked at it, maybe, because I thought that was weird.”

We conferred. “Okay, Aikam,” Dhatt said. “You gave your address to the other officer, in case we need to get hold of you again? When you go out would you send in your boss and Professor Nancy, please?”

He hesitated in the doorway. “Do you have any information about Geary yet? Do you know what happened yet? Who killed her?” We told him no.

Kai Buidze, the chief guard, a muscular fifty-year-old, ex-army I’d guess, came in with Isabelle Nancy. She, not Rochambeaux, had offered her help in any way she could. She was rubbing her eyes. “Where’s Bowden?” I said to Dhatt. “Does he know?”

“She called him when the bomb squad opened the outer envelope and there was his name.” He nodded at Nancy. “She heard one of them reading it out. Someone’s gone to get him. Professor Nancy.” She looked up. “Does Bowden get a lot of mail here?”

“Not so much. He doesn’t even have an office. But a bit. Quite a lot from foreigners, a few from prospective students, people who don’t know where he lives or who assume he’s based here.”

“Do you send it on?”

“No, he comes in to check it every few days. Throws most of it away.”

“Someone’s really …” I said quietly to Dhatt. Hesitated. “Trying to outrun us, know what we’re doing.” With everything that was happening, Bowden might be wary now of any packages to his home. With the outer envelope and its foreign postmark discarded, he might even have thought something with only his name written on it an internal communication, something from one of his colleagues, and torn the strip. “Like someone knew he’d been warned to be careful.” After a moment I said, “They’re bringing him in?” Dhatt nodded.

“Mr. Buidze,” Dhatt said. “You had any trouble like this before?”

“Not like this. Sure, we get, you know, we had some letters from fuckups. Excuse me.” A glance at an unruffled Nancy. “But you know, we get warnings from Leave-the-Past-Alone types, people who say we’re betraying Ul Qoma, all that shit, UFO watchers and junkies. But an actual … but this? A bomb?” He shook his head.

“That’s not true,” Nancy said. We stared at her. “This happened before. Not here. But to him. Bowden’s been targeted before.”

“Who by?” I said.

“They never proved anything, but he got a lot of people angry when his book came out. The right. People who thought he was disrespectful.”

“Nats,” Dhatt said.

“I don’t even remember which city it was from. Both lots had it in for him. Probably the only thing they agreed on. But this was years ago.”

“Someone’s remembered him,” I said. Dhatt and I stared at each other and he pulled me aside.

“From Besźel,” he said. “With a little Illitan fuck-you on it.” He threw up his hands: Any ideas?

“What’s the name of those people?” I said after a silence. “Qoma First.”

He stared. “What? Qoma First?” he said. “It came from Besźel.”

“Maybe a contact there.”

“A spy? A nat Qoman in Besźel?”

“Sure. Don’t look like that—it’s not so hard to believe. They’d send it from over there to cover their tracks.”

Dhatt wagged his head noncommittally. “Okay …” he said. “Still a hell of a thing to organize, and you’re not—”

“They never liked Bowden. Maybe they figure if he’s got wind that they’re after him he might have alarm bells, but not with a package from Besźel,” I said.

“I get the idea,” he said.

“Where’s Qoma First hang out?” I said. “That’s what they’re called, right? Maybe we should visit—”

“That’s what I keep trying to tell you,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go. There is no ‘Qoma First,’ not like that. I don’t know how it is in Besźel, but here …”

“In Besźel I know exactly where our own versions of these characters hang out. Me and my constable went round there recently.”

“Well congratulations but it doesn’t work that way here. There’s not like a fucking gang with little membership cards and a house they all live in; they’re not unifs and they’re not The Monkees.”

“You’re not saying you’ve got no ultranationalists …”

“Right, I’m not saying that, we’ve got plenty, but I’m saying I don’t know who they are or where they live, very sensibly they keep it that way, and I’m saying Qoma First’s just a term some press guy came up with.”

“How come the unificationists congregate but this lot don’t? Or can’t?”

“Because the unifs are clowns. Dangerous clowns sometimes, alright, but still. The sort of people you’re talking about now are serious. Old soldiers, that sort of thing. I mean you got to … respect that…”

No wonder they could not be allowed to gather visibly. Their hard nationalism might rebuke the People’s National Party on its own terms, which the rulers would not permit. The unifs, by contrast, were free or free-ish to unite the locals in loathing.

“What can you tell us about him?” Dhatt said, raising his voice to the others who watched us.

“Aikam?” Buidze said. “Nothing. Good worker. Dumb as a brick. Okay look, I’d have said that until today, but given what he just did, scratch that. Not nearly as tough as he looks. All pecs and no teeth, that one. Likes the kids, makes him feel good to hobnob with clever foreigners. Why? Tell me you’re not eye-balling him, SD. That parcel came from Besźel. How the hell would he—”

“Absolutely it did,” Dhatt said. “No one here’s accusing anyone, least of all the hero of the hour. Standard questions.”

“Tsueh got on with the students, you said?” Unlike Tairo, Buidze did not look for permission to answer me. He met my eye and nodded. “Anyone in particular? Good friends with Mahalia Geary?”

“Geary? Hell no. Geary probably never even knew his name. Rest her.” He made the Sign of Long Sleep with his hand. “Aikam’s friends with some of them, but not Geary. He hangs out with Jacobs, Smith, Rodriguez, Browning …”

“Just that he asked us—”

“He was very keen to know about any leads in the Geary case,” Dhatt said.

“Yeah?” Buidze shrugged. “Well that got everyone really upset. Of course he wants to know about it.”

“I’m wondering …” I said. “This is a complicated site, and I notice that even though it’s mostly total, there’s a couple of places where it crosshatches a bit. And that’s got to be a nightmare to watch. Mr. Buidze, when we spoke to the students, not a single one of them mentioned Breach. At all. Didn’t bring it up. A group of foreign kids? You know how much foreigners are obsessed with that stuff. One of their friends is disappeared and they’re not even mentioning the most notorious bogeyman of Ul Qoma and Besźel, which is even real, and they don’t mention it? Which couldn’t help but make us wonder what are they afraid of?”

Buidze stared at me. He glanced at Nancy. He looked around the room. After long seconds he laughed.

“You’re joking. Okay then. Alright then, Officers. Yeah they’re scared alright, but not that someone’s breaching from fuck knows where to mess with them. Is that what you’re thinking?” He shook his head. “They’re scared because they don’t want to get caught.” He held up his hands in surrender. “You’ve got me, Officers. There is breaching going on that we’re not able to stop. These little sods breach all the damn time.”

He met our stares. Not defensive. He was matter-of-fact. Did I look as shocked as Dhatt? Professor Nancy’s expression was if anything embarrassed.

“You’re right, of course,” Buidze said. “You can’t avoid all breach, not in a place like this, and not with kids like these. These aren’t locals, and I don’t care how much training you give them, they’ve never seen anything like this before. Don’t tell me it’s not the same back in your place, Borlú. You think they’re going to play loyal? You think while they wander around town they’re really unseeing Besźel? Come on. Best any of us can hope for’s they’ve got the sense not to make a big thing of it, but of course they’re seeing across the border. No we can’t prove it, which is why Breach wouldn’t come unless they really fuck up. Oh it’s happened. But much rarer than you think. Not for a long time.”

Professor Nancy still looked down at the table. “You think any of the foreigners don’t breach?” Buidze said, and leaned in towards us, spreading his fingers. “All we can get from them’s a bit of politeness, right? And when you get a bunch of young people together, they’re going to push it. Maybe it’s not just looks. Did you always do what you’re told? But these are smart kids.”

He sketched maps on the table with his fingertips. “Bol Ye’an crosshatches here, here, and the park it’s in here and here. And yeah, over at the edges in this direction, it even creeps into Besźel total. So when this lot get drunk or whatever, don’t they egg each other on to go stand in a crosshatch bit of the park? And then, who knows if they don’t, maybe standing still there, without a single word, without even moving, cross over into Besźel, then back again? You don’t have to take a step to do that, not if you’re in a crosshatch. All here.” Tapped his forehead. “No one can prove shit. Then maybe next time when they’re doing that they reach down, grab a souvenir, straighten back up into Ul Qoma with a rock from Besźel or something. If that’s where they were when they picked it up, that’s where it’s from, right? Who knows? Who could prove it?

“So long as they don’t flaunt it, what can you do? Even Breach can’t watch for breach all the time. Come on. If they did, not a single one of this foreign lot would still be here. Isn’t that right, Professor?” He looked at her not unkindly. She said nothing but looked at me in embarrassment. “None of them mentioned Breach, SD Dhatt, because they’re all guilty as hell.” Buidze smiled. “Hey, don’t get me wrong: they’re only human, I like them. But don’t make this more than it is.”

As we ushered them out, Dhatt got a call that had him scribbling notes and muttering. I closed the door.

“That was one of the uniforms we sent to get Bowden. He’s gone. They got to his apartment and no one’s answering. He’s not there.”

“They told him they were coming?”

“Yeah, and he knew about the bomb. But he’s gone.”

Chapter Eighteen

“I WANT TO GO BACK AND TALK to that kid again,” Dhatt said.

“The unificationist?”

“Yeah, Jaris. I know, I know, ‘It wasn’t him.’ Right. You said. Well, whatever, he knows something and I want to talk to him.”

“You won’t find him.”

“What?”

“Good luck. He’s gone.”

He fell behind me a few steps and made a phone call.

“You’re right. Jaris is nowhere. How did you know? What the fuck are you playing at?”

“Let’s go to your office.”

“Fuck the office. The office can wait. Repeat, how the fuck did you know about Jaris?”

“Look …”

“I’m getting a bit spooked by your occult abilities, Borlú. I didn’t sit on my arse—when I heard I’d be babysitting you, I looked you up, so I know a little bit, I know you’re no one to fuck with. I’m sure you did the same, so you know the same.” I should have done. “So I was geared up to be working with a detective. Even some hot shit. I wasn’t expecting this lugubrious tutting bugger. How the fuck did you know about Jaris, and why are you protecting that little shit?”

“Okay. He phoned me last night from a car or I think from the train and told me he was going.”

He stared at me. “Why the fuck did he call you? And why the fuck did you not tell me? Are we working together or not, Borlú?”

“Why did he call me? Maybe he wasn’t bananas about your interrogation style, Dhatt. And are we working together? I thought the reason I was here was to obediently give you everything I’ve got, then watch TV in my hotel room while you find the bad guy. When did Bowden get burgled? When were you going to tell me that? I didn’t see you rushing to spill whatever shit you found out from UlHuan at the dig, and he should have the choicest info—he is the bloody government mole, isn’t he? Come on, it’s no big deal, all public works have them. What I object to is you cutting me out then coming the ‘How could you?’”

We stared at each other. After a long moment he turned and walked to the kerb.

“Put out a warrant for Jaris,” I said to his back. “Put a stop on his passports, inform the airports, stations. But he only called me because he was en route, to tell me what he thinks happened. His phone’s probably smashed up by the tracks in the middle of Cucinis Pass, halfway to the Balkans by now.”

“So what is it he thinks happened?”

“Orciny.”

He turned in disgust and waved the word away.

“Were you even going to fucking tell me this?” he said.

“I told you, didn’t I?”

“He’s just done a runner. Doesn’t that tell you anything? The goddamn guilty run.”

“What, you talking about Mahalia? Come on, what’s his motive?” I said that but remembered some of what Jaris had told me. She had not been one of their party. They had driven her out. I hesitated a little. “Or you mean Bowden? Why the hell and how the hell would Jaris organise something like that?”

“I don’t know, both. Who knows what makes these fuckers do what they do?” Dhatt said. “There’ll be some fucked-up justification or other, some conspiracy thing.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said carefully, after a minute. “It was … Okay, it was him who called me from here in the first place.”

“I knew it. You fucking covered for him …”

“I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. When he called last night he told me. Wait, wait, listen, Dhatt: why would he call me in the first place if it was him who killed her?”

He stared at me. After a minute he turned and hailed a cab. He opened its door. I watched. The cab had halted skew-whiff on the road: Ul Qoman cars sounded their horns as they went past, Besź drivers cut quietly around the protub, the law-abiding not even whispering cusses.

Dhatt stood there half-in, half-out, and the cabbie made some remonstrance. Dhatt snapped something and showed him his ID.

“I don’t know why,” he said to me. “Something to find out. But it’s a bit fucking much, isn’t it? That he’s gone?”

“If he was in on it there’s no sense him drawing my attention to anything. And how’s he supposed to have got her to Besźel?”

“Called his friends over there; they did it …”

I shrugged a doubting maybe. “It was the Besź unifs who gave us our first lead on all this, guy called Drodin. I’ve heard of misdirection, but we didn’t have anything to misdirect. They don’t have the smarts or contacts to know which van to steal—not the ones I’ve met. Plus there’s more policzai agents than members on their books anyway. If this was unifs it was some secret hardcore we’ve not seen.

“I spoke to Jaris … He’s scared,” I said. “Not guilty: scared and sad. He was into her, I think.”

“Alright,” Dhatt said after a while. He looked at me, motioned me into the cab. He stayed standing outside for several seconds, giving orders into his phone too quiet and quick for me to follow. “Alright. Let’s change the record.” He spoke slowly as the cab drove.

“Who gives a fuck what’s gone down between Besźel and Ul Qoma, right? Who gives a fuck what my boss is telling me or what yours is telling you? You’re police. I’m police. Let’s fix this. Are we working together, Borlú? I could do with some help on a case that’s getting more fucked by the minute, how about you? UlHuan doesn’t know fuck, by the way.”

Where he took me, a place very close to his office, was not as dark as a cop bar in Besźel would have been. It was more salubrious. I still would not have booked a wedding reception there. It was, if only just, during working hours, but the room was more than half-full. It cannot have all been local militsya, but I recognised many of the faces from Dhatt’s office. They recognised me, too. Dhatt entered to greetings, and I followed him past whispers and those so-charmingly frank Ul Qoman stares.

“One definite murder and now two disappearances,” I said. I watched him very carefully. “All people who are known to have looked at this stuff.”

“There is no fucking Orciny.”

“Dhatt, I’m not saying that. You said yourself there are such things as cults and lunatics.”

“Seriously fuck off. The most culty lunatic we’ve met just fled the scene of the crime, and you gave him a free pass.”

“I should have said first thing this morning, I apologise.”

“You should’ve called last night.”

“Even if we could find him I thought we didn’t have enough to hold him. But I apologise.” Held my hands open.

I stared at him some time. He was overcoming something. “I want to solve this,” he said. The pleasant burr of Illitan from the customers. I heard the clucks as one or two saw my visitor’s mark. Dhatt bought me a beer. Ul Qoman, flavoured with all kinds of whatnot. It would not be winter for weeks, and though it was no colder in Ul Qoma than in Besźel, it felt colder to me. “What do you say? If you won’t even fucking trust me …”

“Dhatt, I’ve already told you stuff that—” I lowered my voice. “No one else knows about that first phone call. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t understand any of this. I’m not solving anything. I’m by some fluke that I do not know the whys of any more than you, being used. For some reason I’ve been a repository for a bunch of information that I don’t know what to do with. I hope there’s a yet after that, but I don’t know, just like I don’t know anything.”

“What does Jaris think happened? I’m going to track that fucker down.” He would not.

“I should’ve called, but I could … He’s not our guy. You know, Dhatt. You know. How long you been an officer? Sometimes you know, right?” I tapped my chest. I was right, he liked that, nodded.

I told him what Jaris had said. “Fucking crap,” he said, when I was done.

“Maybe.”

“What the fuck is this Orciny stuff? That’s what he was running from? You’re reading that book. The dodgy one Bowden wrote. What’s it like?”

“There’s a lot in it. A lot of stuff. I don’t know. Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”

“Crap.”

“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”

“Maybe I’ll take a look at it after you,” Dhatt said. “Who the fuck knows anything.” He said the last word carefully.

“Qussim.” A couple of his colleagues, men of about his age or mine, raising their glasses to him, just about to me. There was something in their eyes, they were moving in like curious animals. “Qussim, we’ve not had a chance to meet our guest. You’ve been hiding him away.”

“Yura,” Dhatt said. “Kai. How’s tricks? Borlú, these are detectives blah and blah.” He waved his hands between them and me. One of them raised his eyebrow at Dhatt.

“I just wanted to find out how Inspector Borlú was finding Ul Qoma,” the one called Kai said. Dhatt snorted and finished his beer.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said. He sounded as amused as angry. “You want to get drunk and get into an argument with him, maybe even if you’re far gone enough, Yura, a fight. You’ll bring up all manner of unfortunate international incidents. The fucking war might get dusted off. You might even say something about your dad. His dad was in the UQ Navy,” he said to me. “Got tinnitus or some shit in a fucking idiot’s skirmish with a Besź tugboat over some disputed lobster pots or whatever.” I glanced, but neither of our interlocutors looked particularly outraged. There was even a trace of humour on Kai’s face. “I’ll save you the trouble,” Dhatt said. “He’s as much of a Besź wanker as you think, and you can spread that around the office. Come on, Borlú.”

We went via his station’s garage and he picked up his car. “Hey …” He indicated me the steering wheel. “It never even occurred to me, maybe you want to give the Ul Qoman roads a go.”

“No, thanks. I think it would be a bit confusing.” Driving in Besźel or Ul Qoma is hard enough when you are in your home city, negotiating local and foreign traffic. “You know,” I said. “When I was first driving … it must be the same here, as well as seeing all the cars on the road you’ve got to learn to unsee all the other cars, the ones abroad, but unsee them fast enough to get out of their way.” Dhatt nodded. “Anyway, when I was a kid first driving we had to get used to zooming past all these old bangers and stuff in Ul Qoma, donkey carts in some parts and what have you. That you unsaw, but you know … Now years later most of the unseens have been overtaking me.”

Dhatt laughed. Almost embarrassed. “Things go up and down,” he said. “Ten years from now it’ll be you lot doing the overtaking again.”

“Doubt it.”

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll shift; it always does. It’s already started.”

“Our expos? A couple of little pity investments. I think you’ll be top wolf for a while.”

“We’re blockaded!”

“Not that you seem to be doing too bad on it. Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke.”

“Don’t knock that,” Dhatt said. “Have you tasted Canuck Cola? All this is old Cold War bullshit. Who gives a fuck who the Americans want to play with, anyway? Good luck with them. Oh Canada …” He sang the line. Dhatt said to me, “What’s the food like at that place?”

“Okay. Bad. No worse than any other hotel food.”

He yanked the wheel, took us off the route I’d come to know. “Sweet?” he said into his phone. “Can you chuck some more stuff on for supper? Thanks, beautiful. I want you to meet my new partner.”

Her name was Yallya. She was pretty, quite a lot younger than Dhatt, but she greeted me very poised, playing a role and enjoying it, waiting at the door of their apartment to triple-kiss me hello, the Ul Qoman way.

On the way to the house, Dhatt had looked at me and said “You okay?” It was quickly obvious that he lived within a mile, in grosstopic terms, of my own house. From their living room I saw that Dhatt and Yallya’s rooms and my own overlooked the same stretch of green ground, that in Besźel was Majdlyna Green and in Ul Qoma was Kwaidso Park, a finely balanced crosshatch. I had walked in Majdlyna myself often. There are parts where even individual trees are crosshatched, where Ul Qoman children and Besź children clamber past each other, each obeying their parents’ whispered strictures to unsee the other. Children are sacks of infection. That was the sort of thing that spread diseases. Epidemiology was always complicated here and back home.

“How you liking Ul Qoma, Inspector?”

“Tyador. Very much.”

“Bullshit, he thinks we’re all thugs and idiots and being invaded by secret armies from hidden cities.” Dhatt’s laughter was not without edge. “Anyway we’re not getting much chance to exactly go sightseeing.”

“How’s the case?”

“There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there’s a dead girl at the end of it all.”

“Is that true?” she said to me. They were bringing out food in bits and pieces. It was not home cooking, and seemed to include a lot of convenience and prepackaged food, but it was better quality than I’d been eating, and was more Ul Qoman, though that is not an unmitigated good. The sky darkened over the crosshatched park, with night and with wet clouds.

“You miss potatoes,” Yallya said.

“Is it written on my face?”

“It’s all you eat, isn’t it?” She thought she was being playful. “This too spicy for you?”

“There’s someone watching us from the park.”

“How can you tell from here?” She glanced over my shoulder. “Hope for their sake they’re in Ul Qoma.” She was an editor at a financial magazine and had, judging by the books I saw and the posters in the bathroom, a taste for Japanese comics.

“Are you married, Tyador?” I tried to answer Yallya’s questions though they came too fast really for that. “Is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“No, but the first time for a long time.”

“So you don’t know it.”

“No. I might once have claimed to know London, but not for years.”

“You’re well travelled! And now with all this are you mixing with insiles and breachers?” I did not find this line adorable. “Qussim says you’re spending your time where they’re digging up old hex stuff.”

“It’s like most places, much more bureaucratic than it sounds, no matter how weird the stories are.”

“It’s ridiculous.” She looked contrite, quite suddenly. “I shouldn’t make jokes about it. It’s just because I don’t know almost anything about the girl who died.”

“You never ask,” Dhatt said.

“Well, it’s … Do you have a picture of her?” Yallya said. I must have looked surprised because Dhatt shrugged at me. I reached into my inner pocket jacket, but remembered when I touched it that the only picture I had—a small copy of a copy taken in Besźel, tucked into my wallet—was of Mahalia dead. I would not show that.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.” In the little quiet it occurred to me that Mahalia was only a few years younger than Yallya.

I stayed longer than I had expected. She was a good host, particularly when I got her off this stuff—she let me steer the conversation away. I watched her and Dhatt perform gentle bickering. The proximity of the park and of other people’s affection was moving, to the point of distracting. Watching Yallya and Dhatt made me think of Sariska and Biszaya. I recalled the odd eagerness of Aikam Tsueh.

When I left, Dhatt took me down to the street and headed for the car, but I said to him, “I’ll make my own way.”

He stared. “Are you okay?” he said. “You’ve been funny all night.”

“I’m fine, sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude; it was very kind of you. Really it was a good night, and Yallya … you’re a lucky man. I just, I’m trying to think things through. Look, I’m okay to go. I’ve money. Ul Qoman money.” I showed him my wallet. “I’ve got all my papers. Visitor’s badge. I know it makes you uncomfortable having me out and about, but seriously, I’d like to walk; I need to be out for a bit. It’s a beautiful night.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? It’s raining.”

“I like rain. Anyway, this is drizzle. You wouldn’t last a day in Besźel. We get real rain in Besźel.” An old joke but he smiled and surrendered.

“Whatever. We have to work this out, you know; we’re not getting very far.”

“No.”

“And us the best minds our cities have, right? And Yolanda Rodriguez remains unfound, and now we’ve lost Bowden, too. We’re not going to win medals for this.” He looked around. “Seriously, what is going on?”

“You know everything I know,” I said.

“What bugs me,” he said, “isn’t that there’s no way to make sense of this shit. It’s that there is a way to make sense of it. And it’s not a way I want to go. I don’t believe in …” He waved at malevolent hidden cities. He stared the length of his street. It was total, so none of the lights from windows above was foreign. It was not so late, and we were not alone. People were silhouetted by the lights of a road perpendicular to Dhatt’s street, a road mostly in Besźel. For a moment I thought one of the black figures had, for seconds long enough to constitute breach, watched us, but then they moved on.

When I started walking, watching the wet-edged shapes of the city, I was not going anywhere in particular. I was moving south. Walking alone past people who were not, I indulged the idea of walking to where Sariska or Biszaya lived, or even Corwi—something of that melancholy connection. They knew I was in Ul Qoma: I could find them and could walk alongside them in the street and we would be inches apart but unable to acknowledge each other. Like the old story.

Not that I would ever do such a thing. Having to unsee acquaintances or friends is a rare and notoriously uncomfortable circumstance. What I did do was walk past my own house.

I half expected to see one of my neighbours, none of whom, I think, knew I was abroad, and who might therefore be expected to greet me before noticing my Ul Qoman visitor’s badge and hurriedly attempting to unbreach. Their lights were on, but they were all indoors.

In Ul Qoma I was in Ioy Street. It is pretty equally crosshatched with RosidStrász where I lived. The building two doors along from my own house was a late-night Ul Qoman liquor store, half the pedestrians around me in Ul Qoma, so I was able to stop grosstopically, physically close to my own front door, and unsee it of course, but equally of course not quite, with an emotion the name of which I have no idea. I came slowly closer, keeping my eyes on the entrances in Ul Qoma.

Someone was watching me. It looked like an old woman. I could hardly see her in the dark, certainly not her face in any detail, but something was curious in the way she stood. I took in her clothes and could not tell which city she was in. That is a common instant of uncertainty, but this one went on for much longer than usual. And my alarm did not subside, it grew, as her locus refused to clarify.

I saw others in similar shadows, similarly hard to make sense of, emerging, sort of, not approaching me, not even moving but holding themselves so they grew more in focus. The woman continued to stare at me, and she took a step or two in my direction, so either she was in Ul Qoma or breaching.

That made me step back. I kept backing away. There was an ugly pause, until as if in belated echo she and those others did the same, and were gone suddenly into shared dark. I got out of there, not quite running but fast. I found better-lit avenues.

I did not walk straight to the hotel. After my heart had slowed and I had spent some minutes in a not-empty spot, I walked to the same vantage point I had taken before, overlooking Bol Ye’an. I was much more careful in my scrutiny than I had been, and tried to affect Ul Qoman bearing, and for the hour I watched that unlit excavation, no militsya came. So far they tended to be either violently present or altogether absent. Doubtless there was a method of ensuring subtle intervention from the Ul Qoman police, but I did not know it.

At the Hilton I requested a 5 a.m. wakeup call, and asked the woman behind the desk if she would print me up a message, as the tiny room called a “business centre” was closed. First she did so on marked Hilton paper. “Would you mind doing it on plain?” I said. I winked. “Just in case it’s intercepted.” She smiled, not sure what intimacy it was she was privy to. “Can you read that back to me?”

“‘Urgent. Come ASAP. Don’t call.’”

“Perfect.”

I was back overlooking the site the next morning, having taken a circuitous walked route through the city. Though as law demanded I wore my visitor’s mark, I had placed it at the very edge of my lapel, where cloth folded, only visible to those who knew to look. I wore it on a jacket that was a genuine Ul Qoman design and was, like my hat, not new but new to me. I had set out some hours before any shops were open, but a surprised Ul Qoman man at the farthest reach of my walk was several dinar richer and lighter his outer clothes.

Nothing guaranteed that I was not watched, but I did not think I was by the militsya. It was not long after dawn, but Ul Qomans were everywhere. I would not risk walking closer to Bol Ye’an. As the morning wore on the city filled with hundreds of children: those in the strict Ul Qoman school uniforms, and dozens of street children. I attempted to be moderately unobtrusive, watched from behind the overlong headlines of the Ul Qoma Nasyona, eating fried street food for breakfast. People began to arrive at the dig. Arriving often in little groups, they were too far away for me to tell who was who as they entered, showing their passes. I waited a while.

The little girl I approached in her outsized trainers and cutoff jeans looked at me sceptically. I held up a five-dinar note and a sealed envelope.

“You see that place? You see the gate?” She nodded, guarded. They were opportunist couriers, these kids, among everything else.

“Where you from?” she said.

“Paris,” I said. “But that’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone. I have a job for you. Do you think you could persuade those guards to call someone for you?” She nodded. “I’m going to tell you a name, and I want you to go there, and find the person with that name, and only that person, and I want you to hand over this message.”

She was either honest or realised, smart girl, that from where I stood I could see almost her entire route to the door of Bol Ye’an. She delivered it. She threaded in and out of the crowds, tiny and quick—the sooner this lucrative task was done the sooner she could get another. It was easy to see why she and the other homeless children like her had the nickname “job-mice.”

A few minutes after she reached the gates, someone emerged, moving fast, bundled up, head down, walking stiffly and quickly away from the dig. Though he was far away, alone like that and expected, I could tell that it was Aikam Tsueh.

I HAD DONE THIS BEFORE. I could keep him in sight, but in a city I didn’t know it was hard to do so while ensuring that I could not be seen. He made it easier than it should have been, never once looking behind him, taking in all but a couple of places the largest, most crowded and crosshatched roads, which I presumed were the most direct routes.

The most complicated point came when he took a bus. I was close to him, and was able to huddle behind my paper and keep him in sight. I winced when my phone rang, but it was not the first in the bus to do so, and Aikam did not glance at me. It was Dhatt. I diverted the call and switched the ringer off.

Tsueh disembarked, and led me to a desolate total zone of Ul Qoman housing projects, out past Bisham Ko, way out from the centre. No pretty corkscrew towers or iconic gasrooms here. The concrete warrens were not deserted but full of noise and people between the stretches of garbage. It was like the poorest estates of Besźel, though even poorer, with a soundtrack in a different language, and children and hustlers in other clothes. Only when Tsueh entered one of the dripping towerblocks and ascended did I have to exercise real care, padding as soundlessly as I could up the concrete stairs, past graffiti and animal shit. I could hear him racing ahead of me, stopping at last, and knocking softly. I slowed.

“It’s me,” I heard him say. “It’s me, I’m here.”

An answering voice, alarm, though that impression may have been because I expected alarm. I continued to quietly and carefully climb. I wished I had my gun.

“You told me to,” Tsueh said. “You said. Let me in. What is it?”

The door creaked a little, and the second voice came whispering, but just a little louder. I was one stained pillar away now. I held my breath.

“But you said…” The door opened more and I heard Aikam step forward, and I turned and went fast across the little landing behind him. He did not have time to register me, or to turn. I shoved him hard, and he barrelled into the ajar door, slamming it open, pushing aside someone beyond him, falling and sprawling on the floor of the hallway beyond. I heard a scream, but I had followed him through the door and slammed it closed behind me. I stood against it, blocking exit, looking along a gloomy corridor between rooms, down at where Tsueh wheezed and struggled to stand, at the screaming young woman backing away, staring at me in terror.

I put my finger to my lips and, surely by coincidence of her breath running out, she ebbed to silence.

“No, Aikam,” I said. “She didn’t say. The message wasn’t from her.”

“Aikam,” she blubbered.

“Stop,” I said. I put my finger to my lips again. “I’m not going to hurt you, I’m not here to hurt you, but we both know there are others who want to. I want to help you, Yolanda.”

She cried again and I could not tell if it was fear or relief.

Chapter Nineteen

AIKAM GOT TO HIS FEET and tried to attack me. He was muscular and held his hands as if he had studied boxing but if he had he was not a good student. I tripped him and pushed his face down onto the stained carpet, pinioned an arm behind his back. Yolanda shouted his name. He half rose, even with me straddling him, so I pushed his face down again, ensuring that his nose bled. I stayed between both of them and the door.

“That’s enough,” I said. “Are you ready to calm down? I’m not here to hurt her.” Strength to strength, eventually he would overpower me unless I broke his arm. Neither eventuality was desirable. “Yolanda, for God’s sake.” I caught her eye, riding his shuffles. “I have a gun—don’t you think I’d have shot you if I wanted to hurt you?” I switched to English for the lie.

“’Kam,” she said at last, and almost instantly he grew calm. She stared at me, backed into the wall at the corridor’s end, her hands flat against it.

“You hurt my arm,” Aikam said beneath me.

“Sorry to hear it. If I let him up, is he going to behave?” That in English again to her. “I’m here to help you. I know you’re scared. You hear me, Aikam?” Switching between two foreign languages was not hard, so adrenalised. “If I let you up, you going to go look after Yolanda?”

He did nothing to clear away the blood that dripped from his nose. He cradled his arm and, unable to put it comfortably around Yolanda, sort of loomed lovingly over and around her. He put himself between me and her. She looked out at me from behind him with wariness, not terror.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I know you’re scared. I’m not Ul Qoma militsya—I don’t trust them any more than you do. I’m not going to call them. Let me help you.”

IN WHAT YOLANDA RODRIGUEZ called the living room she cowered in an old chair they had probably pulled in from an abandoned flat in the same tower. There were several such pieces, broken in various ways but clean. The windows overlooked the courtyard, from which I could hear Ul Qoman boys playing a rough makeshift version of rugby. They were invisible through the whitewash on the glass.

Books and other things sat in boxes around the room. A cheap laptop, a cheap inkjet printer. No power, though, so far as I could tell. There were no posters on the walls. The door to the room was open. I stood leaning by it, looking at the two pictures on the floor: one of Aikam; the other, in a better frame, of Yolanda and Mahalia smiling behind cocktails.

Yolanda stood, sat again. She would not meet my eye. She did not try to hide her fear, which had not abated though I was no longer its immediate object. She was afraid to show or indulge her growing hope. I had seen her expression before. It is not uncommon for people to crave deliverance.

“Aikam’s been doing a good job,” I said. I was back to English. Though he did not speak it, Aikam did not ask for translation. He stood by Yolanda’s chair and watched me. “You had him trying to find out how to get out of Ul Qoma, below the radar. Any luck?”

“How did you know I was here?”

“Your boy’s been doing just what you told him to. He’s been trying to find out what’s going on. What did he ever care about Mahalia Geary? They never spoke. Now you, though, he cares about. So there’s something odd when, like you told him to, he’s been asking all about her. Gets you thinking. Why would he do that? You, you did care about her, and you do care about yourself.”

She stood again and turned her face to the wall. I waited for her to say something, and when she did not I continued. “I’m flattered you’d get him to ask me. The one police you think just might possibly not be part of what’s happening. The outsider.”

“You don’t know!” She turned to me. “I don’t trust you—”

“Okay, okay, I never said you did.” A strange reassurance. Aikam watched us jabbering. “So do you never leave?” I said. “What do you eat? Tins? I guess Aikam comes, but not often …”

“Can’t come often. How did you even find me?”

“He can explain. He got a message to come back. For what it’s worth he was trying to look after you.”

“He does that.”

“I can see.” Dogs began to fight outside, noise told us. Their owners joined in. My phone buzzed, audible even with the ringer off. She started and backed away as if I might shoot her with it. The display told me it was Dhatt.

“Look,” I said. “I’m turning it off. I’m turning it off.” If he was paying attention, he would know his call was rerouted to voicemail before the rings had all sounded out. “What happened? Who got to you? Why did you run when you did?”

“I didn’t give them the chance. You saw what happened to Mahalia. She was my friend. I tried to tell myself it wasn’t going down like that, but she’s dead.” She said it with what sounded almost like awe. Her face collapsed and she shook her head. “They killed her.”

“Your parents haven’t heard from you …”

“I can’t. I can’t, I have to …” She bit her nails and glanced up. “When I get out…”

“Straight to the embassy next country along? Through the mountains? Why not here? Or in Besźel?”

“You know why.”

“Say I don’t.”

“Because they’re here, and they’re there too. They run things. Looking for me. It’s just ’cause I got away when I did that they haven’t found me. They’re ready to kill me like they killed my friend. Because I know they’re there. Because I know they’re real.” Her tone alone was enough reason for Aikam to hug her then.

“Who?” Let’s hear it.

“The third place. Between the city and the city. Orciny.”

A WEEK OR SO would have been long enough ago for me to tell her she was being foolish or paranoid. The hesitation—when she told me about the conspiracy, there were those seconds when I was tacitly invited to tell her she was wrong, during which I was silent-vindicated her beliefs, gave her to think I agreed.

She stared and thought me a co-conspirator, and not knowing what was occurring I behaved like one. I could not tell her her life was not in danger. Nor that Bowden’s was not—perhaps he was dead already—nor mine, nor that I could keep her safe. I could tell her almost nothing.

Yolanda had stayed hidden in this place, that her loyal Aikam had found and tried to prepare, in this part of town that she had never intended to so much as visit and of which she did not know the name the day before she arrived here, after an arduous, circuitous and secret midnight dash. He and she had done what they could to make the place bearable, but it was an abandoned hovel in a slum, that she could not quit for terror of being spotted by the unseen forces she knew wanted her dead.

I would say that she could never have seen the like of this place before, but that may not be true. Maybe she had once or twice watched a documentary named something like The Dark Side of the Ul Qoma Dream or The Sickness of the New Wolf or what have you. Films about our neighbour were not generally popular in Besźel, were rarely distributed, so I could not vouch, but it would not be surprising if some blockbuster had been made with the backdrop of gangs in the Ul Qoma slums—the redemption of some not-too-hardcore drug-runner, the impressive murder of several others. Perhaps Yolanda had seen footage of the failed estates of Ul Qoma, but she would not have meant to visit.

“Do you know your neighbours?”

She did not smile. “By voice.”

“Yolanda I know you’re afraid.”

“They got Mahalia, they got Doctor Bowden, now they’re going to get me.”

“I know you’re afraid, but you have to help me. I am going to get you out of here, but I need to know what happened. If I don’t know, I can’t help you.”

“Help me?” She looked around the room. “You want me to tell you what’s up? Sure, you ready to bunk down here? You’ll have to, you know. If you know what’s going on, they’ll come for you too.”

“Alright.”

She sighed and looked down. Aikam said to her, “Is it okay?” in Illitan, and she shrugged, Maybe.

“HOW DID SHE FIND ORCINY?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know and I do not want to. There are access points, she said. She didn’t tell me any more and that was alright by me.”

“Why didn’t she tell anyone but you?” She seemed to know nothing of Jaris.

“She wasn’t crazy. You’ve seen what happened to Doctor Bowden? You don’t admit you want to know about Orciny. That was always what she was here for, but she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s how they want it. Orcinians. It’s perfect for them that no one thinks they’re real. That’s just what they want. That’s how they rule.”

“Her PhD …”

“She didn’t care about it. She was just doing enough to keep Prof Nance off her back. She was here for Orciny. Do you realise they contacted her.” She stared at me intently. “Seriously. She was a bit… the first time she was at a conference, in Besźel, she sort of said a load of stuff. There was a load of politicians and stuff there as well as academics and it caused a bit of—”

“She made enemies. I heard about it.”

“Oh, we all knew the nats had their eyes on her, nats on both sides, but that wasn’t the issue. It was Orciny who saw her then. They’re everywhere.”

Certainly she had made herself visible. Shura Katrinya had seen her: I remembered her face at the Oversight Committee when I mentioned the incident. As had Mikhel Buric, I recalled, and a couple of others. Perhaps Syedr had seen her too. Perhaps there had been interested unknown others. “After she first started writing about them, after she was reading all that stuff in Between, and writing it up, and researching, making all her mad little notes”—she made tiny scribbling motions—“she got a letter.”

“Did she show you?”

She nodded. “I didn’t understand it when I saw it. It was in the root form. Precursor stuff, old script, before Besź and Illitan.”

“What did it say?”

“She told me. It was something like: We are watching you. You understand. Would you like to know more? There were others too.”

“She showed you?”

“Not straightaway.”

“What were they saying to her? Why?”

“Because she worked them out. They could tell she wanted to be part of it. So they recruited her. Had her do stuff for them, like, like initiation. Give them information, deliver things.” This was impossible stuff. With a look she challenged me to mock and I was silent. “They gave her addresses where she should leave letters and things. In dissensi. Messages back and forth. She was writing back. They were telling her things. About Orciny. She told me a little bit about it, and the history and that, and it was like … Places no one can see because they think they’re in the other city. Besź think it’s here; Ul Qomans think it’s in Besźel. The people in Orciny, they’re not like us. They can do things that aren’t…”

“Did she meet them?”

Yolanda stood beside the window pane, staring out and down at an angle that kept her from being framed by its whitewash-diffused light. She turned to look at me and said nothing. She had calmed into despondency. Aikam came closer to her. His eyes went between us like a spectator at a tennis match. Finally Yolanda shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“She wanted to. I don’t know. I know at first they said no.” Not yet, they had said. “They told her stuff, history, stuff about what we were doing. This stuff, the Precursor Age stuff… it’s theirs. When Ul Qoma digs it up, or even Besźel, there’s this whole thing about whose is it, where was it found, you know, all that? It’s not Ul Qoma’s or Besźel’s. It’s Orciny’s; it always was. They told her about stuff we’d found that no one who hadn’t put it there could know. This is their history. They were here before Ul Qoma and Besźel split, or joined, around them. They never went away.”

“But it was just lying there until a bunch of Canadian archaeologists—”

“That’s where they kept it. That stuff wasn’t lost. The earth under Ul Qoma and Besźel’s their storeroom. It’s all Orciny’s. It was all theirs, and we were just… I think she was telling them where we were digging, what we were finding.”

“She was stealing for them.”

“We were stealing from them … She never breached, you know.”

“What? I thought all of you—”

“You mean … like games? Not Mahalia. She couldn’t. Too much to lose. Too likely someone was watching, she said. She never breached, not even in one of those ways that you can’t tell, standing there, you know? She wouldn’t give Breach a chance to take her.” She shivered again. I squatted down and looked around. “Aikam,” she said in Illitan. “Can you get us something to drink?” He did not want to leave the room, but he could see she was not afraid of me anymore.

“What she did do,” she said, “was go to these places where they’d leave her letters. The dissensi are entrances to Orciny. She was so close to being part of it. She thought. At first.” I waited, and at last she continued. “I kept asking her what was up. Something was really wrong, in the last couple of weeks. She stopped going to the dig, meetings, everything.”

“I heard.”

“‘What is it?’ I kept saying, and at first she was like, ‘Nothing,’ but in the end she told me she was scared. ‘Something’s wrong,’ she said. She’d been frustrated I think because Orciny wouldn’t let her in, and she’d been going mad with work. She was studying harder than I’d ever seen. I asked her what it was. She just kept saying she was scared. She said she’d been going over and over her notes, and that she was figuring stuff out. Bad stuff. She said we could be thieves without even knowing.”

Aikam came back. He carried for me and for Yolanda warm cans of Qora-Oranja.

“I think she’d done something to make Orciny angry. She knew she was in trouble, and Bowden too. She said so just before she—”

“Why would they kill him?” I said. “He doesn’t even believe in Orciny any more.”

“Oh, God, of course he knows they’re real. Of course he does. He’s denied it for years because he needs work, but have you read his book? They’re going after everyone who knows about them. Mahalia told me he was in trouble. Just before she disappeared. He knew too much, and I do too. And now you do too.”

“What are you intending to do?”

“Stay here. Hide. Get out.”

“How’s that going?” I said. She looked at me in misery. “Your boy did his best. He was asking me how a criminal might get out of the city.” She even smiled. “Let me help you.”

“You can’t. They’re everywhere.”

“You don’t know that.”

“How can you keep me safe? They’re going to get you now too.”

Every few seconds there came the sounds of someone ascending outside the apartment, shouts and the noise of a handheld MP3 player, rap or Ul Qoman techno played loud enough to be insolent. Such everyday noises could be camouflage. Corwi was a city away. Listening now it seemed that every few noises paused by the door to the apartment.

“We don’t know what the truth is,” I said. I had intended to say more, but realising that I was not sure whom I was trying to convince of what, I hesitated, and she interrupted me.

“Mahalia did. What are you doing?” I had taken out my phone. I held it up as if surrendering, both hands.

“Don’t panic,” I said. “I was just thinking … we need to work out what we’re going to do. There are people who might be able to help us—”

“Stop,” she said. Aikam looked as if he might come for me again. I got ready to sidestep but waved the phone so she could see it was not on.

“There’s an option you never pursued,” I said. “You could go outside, cross the road a little bit down the way there, and walk into YahudStrász. It’s in Besźel.” She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Stand there, wave your hands. You could breach.” Her eyes got wider.

Another loud man ran upstairs outside, and we three waited. “Did you ever think it was worth a try? Who can touch Breach? If Orciny’s out to get you …” Yolanda was staring at the boxes of her books, her boxed-up self. “Maybe you’d be safer, even.”

“Mahalia said they were enemies,” she said. She sounded far away. “She once said the whole history of Besźel and Ul Qoma was the history of the war between Orciny and Breach. Besźel and Ul Qoma were set up like chess moves, in that war. They might do anything to me.”

“Come on,” I interrupted. “You know most foreigners who breach are just ejected—” But she interrupted back.

“Even if I knew what they’d do, which neither of us do, think about it. A secret for like more than a thousand years, in between Ul Qoma and Besźel, watching us all the time, whether we know it or not. With its own agenda. You think I’d be safer if Breach had me? In the Breach? I’m not Mahalia. I’m not sure Orciny and the Breach are enemies at all.” She looked at me then and I did not disdain her. “Maybe they work together. Or maybe when you invoke you’ve been handing power to Orciny for centuries, while you all sit there telling each other it’s a fairy tale. I think Orciny is the name Breach calls itself.”

Chapter Twenty

FIRST SHE HAD NOT WANTED ME TO ENTER; then Yolanda did not want me to leave. “They’ll see you! They’ll find you. They’ll take you and then they’ll come for me.”

“I can’t stay here.”

“They’ll get you.”

“I can’t stay here.”

She watched me walk the width of the room, to the window and back to the door.

“Don’t—you can’t make a phone call from here—”

“You have to stop panicking.” But I stopped myself, because I was not sure that she was wrong to do so. “Aikam, are there other ways out of this building?”

“Not the way we came in?” He looked intently and emptily a moment. “Some of the apartments downstairs are empty, and maybe you could go through them …”

“Okay.” It had begun to rain, fingertipping against the obscured windows. Judging by the halfhearted darkening of the white windows, it was only just overcast. Washed out of colour, perhaps. Still it felt safer to escape than if it had been clear or coldly sunny, as it had that morning. I paced the room.

“You’re alone in Ul Qoma,” Yolanda whispered. “What can you do?” I looked at her at last.

“Do you trust me?” I said.

“No.”

“Too bad. You’ve no choice. I’m going to get you out. I’m not in my element here, but…”

“What do you want to do?”

“I’m going to get you out of here, back to home ground, back to where I can make things happen. I’m going to get you to Besźel.”

She protested. She had never been to Besźel. Both cities were controlled by Orciny, both were overlooked by Breach. I interrupted her.

“What else are you going to do? Besźel’s my city. I can’t negotiate the system here. I have no contacts. I don’t know my way around. But I can get you out from Besźel, and you can help me.”

“You can’t—”

“Yolanda, shut up. Aikam, don’t move another step.” No time for this immobility. She was right, I could promise her nothing but an attempt. “I can get you out, but not from here. One more day. Wait here. Aikam, your job’s finished. You don’t work at Bol Ye’an any more. Your job’s to stay here and look after Yolanda.” He would provide little protection, but his continued interventions at Bol Ye’an would eventually attract other people’s attention than my own. “I will be back. You understand? And I’ll get you out.”

She had food for some days, a diet of tins. This little living room/bedroom, another, smaller, filled with only damp, the kitchen with its electricity and gas supplies disconnected. The bathroom was not good but it would not kill them another day or two: from some standpipe Aikam had brought buckets that stood ready to flush. The many air fresheners he had bought made a stink different than it would otherwise have been.

“Stay,” I said. “I’ll be back.” Aikam recognised the phrase, though it was in English. He smiled and so I said the words again for him in an Austrian accent. Yolanda did not get it. “I will get you out,” I said to her.

On the ground floor a few shoves at doors yielded me an empty apartment, a long time since fire-damaged but still smelling of carbon. I stood in its glassless kitchen and watched the hardiest girls and boys outside refuse to get out of the rain. I watched for a long time, looking into all the shadows I could see. I saw only those children. My sleeves pulled over my fingertips in case of a fringe of glass, I vaulted out into the yard, where if any of the kids saw me emerge they did not remark.

I know how to watch to ensure I am not followed. I walked quickly through the byway meanders of the project, between its bins and cars, graffiti and children’s playgrounds, until I made it out of cul-de-sac land into the streetscape of Ul Qoma, and Besźel. With relief at being one of several pedestrians rather than the only purposeful figure in sight, I breathed out a little, I took on the same rain-avoidance gait as everyone else, and at last turned on my phone. It scolded me with how many messages I had missed. All from Dhatt. I was starving and uncertain of how to get back to the Old Town. I wandered, looking for a Metro but finding a phone box. I called him.

“Dhatt.”

“It’s Borlú.”

“Where the fuck are you? Where’ve you been?” He was angry but conspiratorial, his voice quieter as he turned and muttered into his phone, not louder. A good sign. “I’ve been trying to call you for fucking hours. Is everything … Are you alright? What the fuck’s going on?”

“I’m alright, but…”

“Something happened?” Anger but not only anger in his voice.

“Yeah, something happened. I can’t talk about it.”

“The fuck you can’t.”

“Listen. Listen. I need to talk to you but I don’t have time for this. You want to know what’s been going on, meet me, I don’t know”—flipping through my street map—“in Kaing Shé, in the square by the station, in two hours, and Dhatt, do not bring anyone else. This is serious shit. There’s more going on here than you know. I don’t know who to talk to. Now are you going to help me?”

I made him wait an hour. I watched him from the corner as he must surely have known I would. Kaing Shé Station is the city’s major terminus, so the square outside it bustled with Ul Qomans in cafés, by street performers, buying DVDs and electronics from stalls. The topolganger square in Besźel was not quite empty, so unseen Besź citizens were grosstopically there too. I stayed in the shadows of one of the cigarette kiosks shaped in homage to an Ul Qoman temporary hut, once common on the wetlands where scavengers sifted through the crosshatched mud. I saw Dhatt look for me, but I stayed out of sight while it grew dark and watched to see if he made any calls (he did not) or hand signals (he did not). He only set his face more and more as he drank teas and glowered in the shadows. At last I stepped into his line of sight and moved my hand in a little regular motion that caught his eye and beckoned him over.

“What the fuck is going on?” he said. “I’ve had your boss on the phone. And Corwi. Who the fuck is she anyway? What’s happening?”

“I don’t blame you being angry, but you’re keeping your voice low, so you’re being careful and you want to know what’s going on. You’re right. Something’s up. I found Yolanda.”

When I would not tell him where she was he was enraged enough to start threatening an international incident. “This is not your fucking city,” he said, “you come here and use our resources, you fucking hold up our investigations,” and so on, but still he kept his voice low and walked with me, so I let his anger ebb out a bit and began to tell him how Yolanda was afraid.

“We both know we can’t reassure her,” I said. “Come on. Neither of us knows the truth about what the hell’s going on. About the unifs, the nats, the bomb, about Orciny. Shit, Dhatt, for all we know …” He stared at me, so I said, “Whatever this is”—I glanced around to indicate everything that was happening—“it goes somewhere bad.”

We were both silent a while. “So why the fuck are you talking to me?”

“Because I need someone. But yeah, you’re right, it might be a mistake. You’re the only person who might understand … the scale of what might be going on. I want to get her out. Listen to me: this is not about Ul Qoma. I don’t trust my own lot any more than you. I want to get that girl out, away from Ul Qoma and Besźel. And I can’t do it from here; this isn’t my patch. She’s watched here.”

“Maybe I could.”

“You volunteering?” He said nothing. “Right. I am. I have contacts back home. You don’t cop for this long without being able to score tickets and false papers. I can hide her; I can talk to her in Besźel before I get her out, get some more sense of all this. This isn’t about giving up: the opposite. If we get her out of harm’s way we’ve got a much better chance of not getting blindsided. We can maybe work out what’s going on.”

“You said Mahalia had already made enemies back in Besźel. I thought you wanted them for this.”

“The nats? That doesn’t make much sense anymore. A, all this is way beyond Syedr and his boys, and B, Yolanda hasn’t pissed off anyone back home; she’s never been there. I can do my job there.” I could go beyond my job, I meant—could pull strings and favours. “I’m not trying to cut you out, Dhatt. I’ll tell you what I know if I get any more from her, maybe even come back and we can go hunting criminals, but I want to get that girl out of here. She’s scared to death, Dhatt, and can we really say she’s wrong to be?”

Dhatt kept shaking his head. He was neither agreeing nor disagreeing with me. After a minute he spoke again, tersely. “I sent my crew back to the unifs. No sign of Jaris. We don’t even know the little fucker’s real name. If any of his mates know where he is or that he was seeing her they’re not saying.”

“Do you believe them?”

He shrugged. “We’ve been checking them out. Can’t find anything. Doesn’t look like they know shit. One or two of them it’s obvious ‘Marya’ rings a bell, but most of them never even met her.”

“This is all beyond them.”

“Oh, they’re up to all kinds of shit, don’t you worry; we’ve got moles say they’re going to do this and that, they’re going to break the boundaries, planning all sorts of revolutions …”

“That’s not what we’re talking about. And you hear that stuff all the time.”

He was silent while I listed for him again what had happened on our watch. We slowed down in the dark and sped up in the pools of lamplight. When I told him that according to Yolanda, Mahalia had said that Bowden was in danger too, he halted. We stood in that freezing silence for seconds.

“Today while you were fucking around with Little Miss Paranoid we searched Bowden’s flat. There’s no sign of forced entry, no sign of struggle. Nothing. Food left on the side, books page-down on the chair. We did find a letter on his desk.”

“From who?”

“Yallya told me you’d be onto something. The letter doesn’t say. It’s not in Illitan. It was just a single word. I thought it was in weird-looking Besź but it isn’t. It’s in Precursor.”

“What? What does it say?”

“I took it to Nancy. She said it’s an old version of the script she hasn’t seen before and she wouldn’t want to swear to it yadda yadda, but she’s pretty sure it’s a warning.”

“A warning of what?”

“Just a warning. Like a skull-and-crossbones. A word that is a warning.” It was dark enough that we could not see each other’s faces well. Not deliberately, I had steered us close to an intersection with a total Besź street. Those squat brick buildings in their brown light, the men and women walking beneath them in long coats under the swinging sepia signs that I unsaw bisected the Ul Qoman sodium-lit strip of glass fronts and imports like something old and recurrent.

“So who might use that kind of…?”

“Don’t fucking tell me about secret cities. Don’t.” Dhatt looked haunted and hunted. He looked sick. He turned and bundled himself into the corner of a doorway, punched his own palm furiously several times. “What the fuck?” he said, looking into the dark.

What lived like Orciny would live, if one indulged Yolanda’s and Mahalia’s ideas? Something so small, so powerful, lodged in the crevices of another organism. Willing to kill. A parasite. A tick-city, quite ruthless.

“Even if… even if, say, something is wrong with my lot and your lot, whatever,” Dhatt said at last.

“Controlled. Bought.”

“Whatever. Even if.”

We whispered under the foreign shriek of a flap above us in Besźel swinging in the wind. “Yolanda’s convinced that Breach is Orciny,” I said. “I’m not saying I agree with her—I don’t know what I’m saying—but I promised her I’d get her out.”

“Breach would get her out.”

“You prepared to swear she’s wrong? You prepared to abso-bloody-lutely swear she’s got nothing to worry about from them?” I was whispering. This was dangerous talk. “They’ve no way in yet—nothing’s fucking breached—and she wants to keep it that way.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“I want to get her away. I’m not saying anyone here’s got her in their sights, I’m not saying she’s right about anything she’s saying, but someone killed Mahalia, and someone got to Bowden. Something’s going on in Ul Qoma. I’m asking for your help, Dhatt. Come with me. We can’t do this officially; she won’t cooperate with anything official. I promised her I’d look after her, and this is not my city. You going to help me? No, we can’t risk doing this by the book. So are you going to help me? I need to get her to Besźel.”

We did not go back to the hotel room that night, nor to Dhatt’s house. Not overcome by anxiety but indulging it, behaving as if this all might be true. We walked instead.

“Fuck’s sake, can’t believe I’m doing this,” he kept saying. He looked behind us more than I did.

“We can find a way to blame me,” I told him. It was not what I might have expected, despite that I’d risked telling him what I had, to have him be part of this, to put himself so on this line.

“Stick us to crowds,” I told him. “And to crosshatching.” More people, and where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

“I’ve got an exit anytime on my visa,” I said. “Can you get her a pass out?”

“I can get one for me, sure. I can get one for a fucking cop, Borlú.”

“Let me rephrase that. Can you get an exit visa for Officer Yolanda Rodriguez?” He stared at me. We were still whispering.

“She won’t even have an Ul Qoman passport …”

“So can you get her through? I don’t know what your border guards are like.”

“Oh what the fuck?” he said again. As the numbers of walkers fell our pedestrianism ceased being camouflage and risked becoming its opposite. “I know a place,” Dhatt said. A drinking club, the manager of which greeted him with almost convincing pleasure, in the basement opposite a bank in the outskirts of Ul Qoma Old Town. It was full of smoke and men who eyed Dhatt, knowing what he was, despite that he was in civilian clothes. It looked for a second as if they thought him there to bust the drag act, but he waved at them to get on with it. Dhatt gestured for the manager’s phone. Lips thinned, the man passed it to him over the counter and he passed it to me.

“Holy Light, let’s do this, then,” he said. “I can get her through.” There was music, and the growl of conversation was very loud. I stretched the phone to the extent of its cord and huddled down, squatting, by the bar, at stomach-level of the men around me. It felt quieter. I had to go through an operator to get an international line, which I did not like to do.

“Corwi, it’s Borlú.”

“Christ. Give me a minute. Christ.”

“Corwi, I’m sorry to call so late. Can you hear me?”

“Christ. What time … Where are you? I can’t fucking hear a word, you’re all—”

“I’m in a bar. Listen, I’m sorry about the time. I need you to organise something for me.”

“Christ, boss, are you fucking kidding?”

“No. Come on. Corwi, I need you.” I could almost see her rubbing her face, maybe walking phone in hand and sleepy to the kitchen and drinking cold water. When she spoke again she was more focused.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m coming back.”

“Serious? When?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. Dhatt, the guy I’m working with here, he’s coming over to Besźel. I need you to meet us. Can you get everything in motion and keep it on the QT? Corwi—black-ops stuff. Serious. Walls have ears.”

Long pause. “Why me, boss? And why at two-thirty in the morning?”

“Because you’re good, and because you’re the soul of discretion. I need no noise. I need you in a car, with your gun and preferably one for me, and that’s it. And I need you to book a hotel for them. Not one of the department’s usuals.” Another long silence. “And listen … he’s bringing another officer.”

“What? Who?”

“She’s undercover. What do you think? She wanted a free trip.” I glanced apology at him, though he could not hear me over the criminal din. “Keep this low, Corwi. Just a little moment in the investigation, okay? And I’m going to want your help getting something, getting a package, out of Besźel. You understand?”

“… Think so, boss. Boss, someone’s been calling for you. Asking what’s going on with your investigation.”

“Who? What do you mean, what’s going on?”

“Who I don’t know, won’t leave his name. He wants to know, Who are you arresting? When are you back? Have you found the missing girl? What are the plans? I don’t know how he got my desk number, but he blatantly knows something.”

I was clicking at Dhatt to pay attention. “Someone’s asking questions,” I said to him. “Won’t say his name?” I asked Corwi.

“No, and I don’t recognise his voice. Crap line.”

“What does he sound like?”

“Foreign. American. And scared.” On a bad, an international, line.

“God damn,” I said to Dhatt, hand over the receiver. “Bowden’s out there. He’s trying to find me. He must be avoiding our numbers here in case he’s traced … Canadian, Corwi. Listen, when did he call?”

“Every day, yesterday and today, won’t leave his details.”

“Right. Listen. When he calls again, tell him this. Give him this message from me. Tell him he’s got one chance. Hold on, I’m thinking. Tell him we’re … Tell him I’ll make sure he’s okay, I can get him out. We have to. I know he’s afraid with everything going on, but he’s got no chance on his own. Keep this to yourself, Corwi.”

“Jesus, you’re determined to fuck my career.” She sounded tired. I waited silently until I was sure she would do it.

“Thank you. Just trust me he’ll understand and please don’t ask me anything. Tell him we know more now. Shit, I can’t go into this.” A loud burst from the sequined Ute Lemper look-alike made me wince. “Just tell him we know more and tell him he has to call us.” I looked around as if inspiration might jump to me, and it did. “What’s Yallya’s mobile number?” I asked Dhatt.

“Huh?”

“He doesn’t want to call us on mine or yours, so just…” He recited it to me and I to Corwi. “Tell our mystery man to call that number, and we can help him. And you call me back on that, too, okay? From tomorrow on.”

“What the fuck?” said Dhatt. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“You’re going to have to borrow her phone; we need one so Bowden can find us—he’s too scared to, we don’t know who’s listening to ours. If he contacts us, you might have to …” I hesitated.

“What?”

“Jesus, Dhatt, not now, okay? Corwi?”

She was gone, the line disconnected, by her or by the old exchanges.

Chapter Twenty-One

I EVEN CAME WITH DHATT into his office the next day. “The more you’re a no-show, the more people wonder what the fuck’s going on and the more they’re going to notice you,” he said. As it was there were plenty of stares from his office colleagues. I nodded at the two who had tried halfheartedly to start an altercation with me.

“I’m getting paranoid,” I said.

“Oh no, they’re really watching you. Here.” He handed me Yallya’s cell phone. “I think that’s the last time you’re getting invited to supper.”

“What did she say?”

“What do you think? It’s her fucking phone; she was seriously pissed off. I told her we needed it, she told me to fuck off, I begged, she said no, I took it and blamed you.”

“Can we get hold of a uniform? For Yolanda …” We huddled over his computer. “Might get her through easier.” I watched him use his more up-to-date version of Windows. The first time Yallya’s phone rang we froze and looked at each other. A number appeared that neither of us knew. I connected without a word, still meeting his eyes.

“Yall? Yall?” A woman’s voice in Illitan. “It’s Mai, are you … Yall?”

“Hello, this isn’t Yallya actually …”

“Oh, hey, Qussim …?” but her voice faltered. “Who is this?”

He took it from me.

“Hello? Mai, hey. Yeah, he’s a friend of mine. No, well spotted. I had to borrow Yall’s phone for a day or two, have you tried the house? Alright then, take care.” The screen went dark and he handed it back. “That’s another fucking reason you can field this shit. You’re going to get a pissload of calls from her friends asking you if you still want to go for that facial or if you’ve seen the Tom Hanks movie.”

After the second and third such call, we no longer started when the cell rang. There were not many, however, despite what Dhatt said, and none on those topics. I imagined Yallya on her office phone, making countless angry calls denouncing her husband and his friend for the inconvenience.

“Do we want to put her in a uniform?” Dhatt spoke low.

“You’re going to be in yours, right? Isn’t it always best to hide in plain sight?”

“You want one too?”

“Is it a bad idea?”

He shook his head slowly. “It’ll make life easier for some of it… I think I can get through my side on police papers and my say-so.” Militsya, let alone senior detectives, trumped Ul Qoman border guards, without much trouble. “Alright.”

“I’ll do the talking at the Besźel entrance.”

“Is Yolanda okay?”

“Aikam’s with her. I can’t go back … Not again. Every time we do …” We still had no idea how, or by whom, we might be watched.

Dhatt moved too much, and after the third or fourth time he had snapped at one of his colleagues for some imagined infraction I made him come with me for an early lunch. He glowered and would not speak, staring at everyone who passed us.

“Will you stop?” I said.

“I am going to be so fucking glad when you’re gone,” he said. Yallya’s phone rang and I held it to my ear without speaking.

“Borlú?” I tapped the table for Dhatt’s attention, pointed at the phone.

“Bowden, where are you?”

“I’m keeping myself safe, Borlú.” He spoke in Besź to me.

“You don’t sound like you feel safe.”

“Of course not. I’m not safe, am I? The question is, how much trouble am I in?” His voice was very strained.

“I can get you out.” Could I? Dhatt shrugged an exaggerated what the fuck? “There are ways out. Tell me where you are.”

He sort of laughed. “Right,” he said. “I’ll just tell you where I am.”

“What else do you propose? You can’t spend your life in hiding. Get out of Ul Qoma and I can maybe do something. Besźel’s my turf.”

“You don’t even know what’s going on …”

“You’ve got one chance.”

“Help me like you did Yolanda?”

“She’s not stupid,” I said. “She’s letting me help.”

“What? You’ve found her? What…”

“Like I told you, I told her. I can’t help either of you here. I might be able to help you in Besźel. Whatever’s going on, whoever’s after you …” He tried to say something, but I did not let him. “I know people there. Here I can’t do a thing. Where are you?”

“… Nowhere. Doesn’t matter. I’ll … Where are you? I don’t want to—”

“You’ve done well to stay out of sight this long. But you can’t do it forever.”

“No. No. I’ll find you. Are you … crossing now?”

I couldn’t help glancing around and lowering my voice again. “Soon.”

“When?”

“Soon. I’ll tell you when I know. How do I contact you?”

“You don’t, Borlú. I’ll contact you. Keep this phone.”

“What if you miss me?”

“I’ll just have to call every couple of hours. I’m afraid I’m going to have to bother you, a lot.” He disconnected. I stared at Yallya’s phone, looked up at last at Dhatt.

“Do you have any fucking idea how much I hate not knowing where I can look?” Dhatt whispered. “Who I can trust?” He shuffled papers. “What I should be saying to whom?”

“I do.”

“What’s going on?” he said. “Does he want out too?”

“He wants out too. He’s afraid. He doesn’t trust us.”

“I don’t blame him one bit.”

“Neither do I.”

“I don’t have any papers for him.” I met his eye and waited. “Holy Light, Borlú, you going to fucking …” He whispered furiously. “Alright, alright, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Tell me what to do,” I said to him, without breaking my gaze, “who to call, what corners to cut, and you can fucking blame me. Blame me, Dhatt. Please. But bring a uniform in case he comes.” I watched him, poor man, agonise.

It was after 7 p.m. that night that Corwi called me. “We’re go,” she said. “I’ve got the paperwork.”

“Corwi, I owe you, I owe you.”

“Do you think I don’t know that, boss? It’s you, your guy Dhatt, and his ahem ‘colleague,’ right? I’ll be waiting.”

“Bring your ID and be ready to back me up with Immigration. Who else? Who else knows?”

“No one. I’m your designated driver, again, then. What time?”

The question, what is the best way to disappear? There must be a graph, a carefully plotted curve. Is something more invisible if there are no others around, or if it is one of many? “Not too late. Not like two in the morning.”

“I’m glad to fucking hear it.”

“We’d be the only ones there. But not in the middle of the day either; there’s too much risk someone might know us or something.” After dark. “Eight,” I said. “Tomorrow evening.” It was winter and the nights came early. There would be crowds still, but in the dim colours of evening, sleepy. Easy not to see.

IT WAS NOT ALL LEGERDEMAIN; there were tasks we should and did perform. Reports of progress to finesse, and families to contact. I watched and with occasional over-the-shoulder suggestions helped Dhatt construct a letter saying polite and regretful nothing to Mr. and Mrs. Geary, whose main liaison now was with the Ul Qoma militsya. It was not a good feeling of power, to be present a ghost in that holding message, knowing them, seeing them from inside the words which would be like one-way glass, so they could not look back in and see me, one of the writers.

I told Dhatt a place—I did not know the address, had to describe it in vague topography, which he recognised—a piece of parkland walking distance from where Yolanda hid, to meet me at the end of the following day. “Anyone asks, tell them I’m working from the hotel. Tell them about all the ridiculous paperwork hoops they make us jump through in Besźel, that keep me busy.”

“It’s all we ever fucking talk about, Tyad.” Dhatt could not stay in one place, he was so anxious, so frenetic with lack of trust, in anything, so troubled. He did not know where to look. “Blame you or not, I’m going to be on school liaison for the rest of my fucking career.”

We had agreed there was a good possibility we would not hear from Bowden again, but I got a call on poor Yallya’s phone half an hour after midnight. I was sure it was Bowden though he said nothing. He called again just before seven the next morning.

“You sound bad, Doctor.”

“What’s happening?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Are you going? Is Yolanda with you? Is she coming?”

“You have one shot, Doctor.” I scribbled times on my notepad. “If you’re not going to let me come for you. You want out, be outside the main traffic gate of Copula Hall at seven p.m.”

I disconnected. I tried to make notes, plans on paper, could not. Bowden did not call me back. I kept the phone on the table or in my hand throughout my early breakfast. I did not check out of the hotel—no telegraphing of movements. I sorted through my clothes for anything I could not afford to leave, and there was nothing. I carried my illegal volume of Between the City and the City, and that was all.

I took almost the whole day to get to Yolanda and Aikam’s hide. My last day in Ul Qoma. I took taxis in stages to the ends of the city. “How long you staying?” the last driver asked me.

“A couple of weeks.”

“You like it here,” he said, in enthusiastic beginner’s Illitan. “Best city in the world.” He was Kurdish.

“Show me your favourite parts of town, then. You don’t get trouble?” I said. “Not everyone’s welcoming to foreigners, I heard …”

He made a pooh-poohing noise. “Are fools all over everywhere, but is the best city.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Four years and some. I was one year in camp …”

“A refugee camp?”

“Yeah, in the camp, and three years study for Ul Qoma citizenship. Speaking Illitan and learning, you know, not to, you know to unsee the other place, so not to breach.”

“Did you ever think of going to Besźel?”

Another snort. “What’s in Besźel? Ul Qoma is the best place.”

He took me first past the Orchidarium and the Xhincis Kann Stadium, a tourist route he had obviously taken before, and when I encouraged him to indulge more personal preferences he started to show me the community gardens where alongside Ul Qoman natives those Kurds, Pakistanis, Somalis and Sierra Leoneans who got through the stringent conditions for entry played chess, the various communities regarding each other with courteous uncertainty. At a crossroads of canals he, careful not to say anything unequivocally illegal, pointed out to me where the barges of the two cities-pleasure craft in Ul Qoma, a few working transport boats unseen in Besźel—wove between each other.

“You see?” he said.

A man on the opposite side of a nearby lock, half-hidden in people and little urban trees, was looking straight at us. I met his eye—for a moment I was not sure but then decided he must be in Ul Qoma, so it was not breach—until he looked away. I tried to watch where he went, but he was gone.

When I expressed choices between the various sights the driver proposed, I made sure the resulting route crisscrossed the city. I watched the mirrors as he, delighted with this fare, drove. If we were followed it was by very sophisticated and careful spies. I paid him a ridiculous amount, in a much harder currency than I was paid in, after three hours of escorting, and I had him drop me where backstreet hackers abutted cheap secondhand shops, around the corner from the estate where Yolanda and Aikam hid.

For moments I thought they had skipped out on me, and I closed my eyes, but I kept repeating in a whisper up close to the door, “It’s me, it’s Borlú, it’s me,” and at last it opened, and Aikam ushered me in.

“Get ready,” I said to Yolanda. She looked dirty to me, thinner and more startled like an animal than even when I had last seen her. “Get your papers. Be ready to agree with whatever me or my colleagues say to anyone at the border. And get lover-boy used to the idea that he’s not coming, because we’re not having a scene at Copula Hall. We’re getting you out.”

SHE MADE HIM STAY IN THE ROOM. He looked as if he would not do as she asked, but she made him. I did not trust him to be unobtrusive.

He demanded to know again and again why he could not come. She showed him where she had his number, and she swore that she would call him from Besźel, and from Canada, and that she would call for him there. It took her several such promises until he stood at last miserable as a neglected thing, staring as we closed the door on him and walked fast through the shadowing light to the corner of the park, where Dhatt was waiting in an unmarked police car.

“Yolanda.” He nodded to her from the driver’s seat. “Pain in my arse.” He nodded to me. We set off. “What the fuck? Who exactly have you pissed off, Miss Rodriguez? You’ve got me fucking my life and collaborating with this foreign wacko. There’s clothes in the back,” he said. “Course I’m out of work, now.” He very well might not be exaggerating.

Yolanda stared at him until he glanced into the mirror and snapped at her, “For fuck’s sake, what, you think I’m peeping?” and she scootched down in the rear seat and began to wriggle out of her clothes, replacing them with the militsya uniform he had brought for her, that almost fit.

“Miss Rodriguez, do as I say and stick close. There’s fancy dress for our possible-other-guest too. And that’s for you, Borlú. Might save us a bit of shit.” A jacket with a fold-down militsya blazon on it. I made it visible. “I wish they had rank on them. I’d’ve fucking demoted you.”

He did not meander, nor make the mistake of the guilty nervous and drive more slowly, more carefully than the cars around us. We took the main streets, and he flicked on and off the headlights at other drivers’ infractions as Ul Qoman drivers do, little messages of road-rage code like aggressive Morse, flick flick, you cut me up, flick flick flick, make up your mind.

“He called again,” I said to Dhatt quietly. “He might be there. In which case …”

“Come on, pain in my arse, say it again. In which case he’s going over, right?”

“He’s got to get out. Did you get spare papers?”

He swore and punched the steering wheel. “Fuck I really wish I’d thought of a way to talk myself out of this fucking shit. I hope he doesn’t come. I hope fucking Orciny does get him.” Yolanda stared at him. “I’ll sound out whoever’s on duty. Get ready to crack out your wallet. If push comes to shove I’ll give him my fucking papers.”

We saw Copula Hall over the roofs and through cables of telephone exchanges and gasrooms many minutes before we arrived at it. The way we came, we first passed, as unseeing as we could, the building’s rear-to-Ul Qoma, its entryway in Besźel, the queues of Besź and returning Ul Qoman passengers siphoning in in patient dudgeon. A Besź police light was flashing. We were obliged not to and did not see any of it, but we could not but be aware as we did so that we would be on that side soon. We rounded the huge building to its Ul Maidin Avenue entrance, opposite the Temple of Inevitable Light, where the slow line into Besźel proceeded. There Dhatt parked—a bad job not corrected, skewed from the kerb with the swagger of militsya, keys hanging ready—and we emerged to cross through the night crowds towards the great forecourt and the borders of Copula Hall.

The outer guards of militsya did not ask a thing or even speak to us as we cut across the lines of people, walked over the roads weaving through stationary traffic, only ushered us through the restricted gates and on into the grounds proper of Copula Hall, where the huge edifice waited to eat us.

I looked everywhere as we came. Our eyes never stopped moving. I walked behind Yolanda, moving uneasily in her disguise. I raised my stare above the sellers of food and tat, the guards, the tourists, the homeless men and women, the other militsya. Of the many entrances we had chosen the most open, wide and unconvoluted under a vault of old brickwork, with a view clear through the yawning interstitial space, over the mass of crowds filling the great chamber on both sides of the checkpoint—though more, noticeably, on the Besźel side, wanting to come in to Ul Qoma.

From this position, this vantage angle, for the first time in a long time we did not have to unsee the neighbouring city: we could stare along the road that linked Ul Qoma to it, over the border, the metres of no-man’s-land and the border beyond, directly into Besźel itself. Straight ahead. Blue lights awaited us. A Besź bruise just visible beyond the lowered gate between the states, the flashing we had unseen minutes before. As we passed the outer fringes of Copula Hall’s architecture, I saw at the far end of the hall standing on the raised platform where the Besź guards watched the crowds a figure in policzai uniform. A woman—she was very distant yet, on the Besźel side of the gates.

“Corwi.” I did not know I’d said her name aloud until Dhatt said to me, “That her?” I was about to tell him it was too far off to know, but he said to me, “Hold on a second.”

He was looking back the way we had come. We stood somewhat apart from most of those heading into Besźel, between lines of aspirant travellers and on a thin fringe of pavement vehicles travelling slowly. There was, Dhatt was right, something about one of the men behind us that was disconcerting. There was nothing about his appearance which stood out: he was bundled against the cold in a drab Ul Qoman cloak. But he walked or shuffled towards us somewhat across the directionality of the line of his fellow pedestrians, and I saw behind him disgruntled faces. He was pushing out of his turn, walking towards us. Yolanda saw where we were looking, and gave a little whimper.

“Come on,” Dhatt said, and put his hand to her back and walked her more quickly towards the entrance of the tunnel, but seeing how the figure behind us tried as far as the constraints of those around him would permit to raise his speed as well, to exceed our own, to come towards us, I turned around suddenly and began to move toward him.

“Get her over there,” I said to Dhatt behind me, without looking. “Go, get her to the border. Yolanda, go to the policzai woman over there.” I accelerated. “Go.”

“Wait,” Yolanda said to me but I heard Dhatt remonstrate with her. I was focused now on the approaching man. He could not fail to see that I was coming towards him, and he hesitated and reached into his jacket, and I fumbled at my side but remembered I had no gun in that city. The man backed up a step or two. The man threw up his hands and unwrapped his scarf. He was shouting my name. It was Bowden.

He pulled out something, a pistol dangling in his fingers as if he were allergic to it. I dived for him and heard a hard exhalation behind me. Behind me another spat-out breath and screams. Dhatt shouted and shouted my name.

Bowden was staring over my shoulder. I looked behind me. Dhatt was crouched between cars a few metres away. He was wrapping himself up in himself and bellowing. Motorists were hunched in their vehicles. Their screams were spreading to the lines of pedestrian travellers in Besźel and in Ul Qoma. Dhatt huddled over Yolanda. She lay as if tossed. I could not see her clearly, but there was blood across her face. Dhatt was gripping his shoulder.

“I’m hit!” he shouted. “Yolanda’s … Light, Tyad, she’s shot, she’s down …”

A commotion started in the hall a long way off. Over the sedately moving traffic I saw at the farthest end of the enormous room a surge in the crowd in Besźel, a movement like animal panic. People scattering away from a figure, who leaned on, no, raised, something in both hands. Aiming, a rifle.

Chapter Twenty-Two

ANOTHER OF THOSE ABRUPT LITTLE SOUNDS, hardly audible over the rising screams the length of the tunnel. A shot, silenced or muffled by acoustics, but by the time I heard it I was on Bowden and had pushed him down, and the explosive percussion of the bullet into the wall behind him was louder than the shot itself. Architecture sprayed. I heard Bowden’s panicked breath, put my hand on his wrist and squeezed until he dropped his weapon, kept him down out of the sightline of the sniper targeting him.

“Down! Everybody down!” I was shouting that. So sluggishly it was hard to believe, the crowds were falling to their knees, their cowering and their screams more and more exaggerated as they realised the danger. Another sound and another, a car braking violently and with an alarm, another implosive gasp as bricks took a bullet.

I kept Bowden on the tarmac. “Tyad!” It was Dhatt.

“Talk to me,” I shouted to him. The guards were all over the place, raising weapons, looking everywhere, yelling idiot pointless orders at each other.

“I’m hit, I’m okay,” he replied. “Yolanda’s head-shot.”

I looked up, no more firing. I looked up further, to where Dhatt rolled and gripped his wound, to where Yolanda lay dead. Rose slightly more and saw militsya approaching Dhatt and the corpse he guarded, and way off policzai running towards where the shots had come from. In Besźel the police were buffeted and blocked by the hysterical crowd. Corwi was looking in all directions—could she see me? I was shouting. The shooter was running.

His way was blocked, but he swung his rifle like a club when he had to, and people were clearing from around him. Orders would be going out to block the entrance, but how fast would they go? He was moving into a part of the crowd who had not seen him shoot, and were surrounding him, and good as he was he would drop or hide his weapon.

“God damn it.” I could hardly see him. No one was stopping him. He had some way to go before he was out. I looked, carefully, item by item, at his hair and clothes: cropped; grey tracksuit top with a hood behind; black trousers. All nondescript. Did he drop his weapon? He was into the crowd.

I stood holding Bowden’s gun. A ridiculous P38, but loaded and well kept. I stepped towards the checkpoint, but there was no way I could get through it, all that chaos, not ever and not now with both lines of guards in uproar flailing guns around; even if my Ul Qoman uniform got me through the Ul Qoman lines, the Besź would stop me, and the shooter was too far for me to catch. I hesitated. “Dhatt, radio help, watch Bowden,” I shouted, then turned and ran the other way, out into Ul Qoma, towards Dhatt’s car.

The crowds got out of my way; they saw me coming with my militsya emblazoning, saw the pistol I held, and scattered. The militsya saw one of their own, in pursuit of something, and did not stop me. I turned the emergency lights on and started the engine.

I sent the car breakneck, dodging local and foreign cars, screaming outside the length of Copula Hall. The siren confused me, I was not used to Ul Qoman sirens, a ya ya ya more whining than our own cars’. The shooter was, must be, fighting his way through the terrified and confused thronging tunnel of travellers. My lights and alarm cleared the roads before me, ostentatiously in Ul Qoma, on the topolganger streets in Besźel with the typical unstated panic of a foreign drama. I yanked the wheel and the car snapped right, bumped over Besź tram tracks.

Where was Breach? But no breach had occurred.

No breach had occurred though a woman had been killed, brazenly, across a border. Assault, a murder and an attempted murder, but those bullets had travelled across the checkpoint itself, in Copula Hall, across the meeting place. A heinous, complex, vicious killing, but in the assiduous care the assassin had taken—to position himself just so at the point where he could stare openly along the last metres of Besźel over the physical border and into Ul Qoma, could aim precisely down this one conduit between the cities—that murder had been committed with if anything a surplus of care for the cities’ boundaries, the membrane between Ul Qoma and Besźel. There was no breach, Breach had no power here, and only Besź police were in the same city as the killer now.

I turned right again. I was back where we had been an hour before, in Weipay Street in Ul Qoma, which shared the crosshatched latitude-longitude with the Besź entrance to Copula Hall. I drove the car as close as the crowds let me, braked hard. I got out and jumped on its roof—it would not be long before Ul Qoman police would come to ask me, their supposed colleague, what I was doing, but now I jumped on the roof. After a second’s hesitation I did not stare into the tunnel at the oncoming Besź escaping the attack. I looked instead all around, into Ul Qoma, and then in the direction of the hall, not changing my expression, giving away nothing that suggested that I might be looking anywhere other than at Ul Qoma. I was unimpeachable. The car’s stuttering police lights turned my legs red and blue.

I let myself notice what was happening in Besźel. Many more travellers were still trying to enter Copula Hall than leave it, but as the panic within spread there was a dangerous contraflow. There was commotion, lines backing up, those behind who did not know what it was they had seen or heard blocking those who knew very well and were trying to flee. Ul Qomans unsaw the Besź melee, looked away and crossed the road to avoid the foreign trouble.

“Get out, get out—”

“Let us in, what’s …?”

Among the clots and grots of panicked escapees I saw a hurrying man. He caught my attention by the care with which he tried not to run too fast, not to be too large, to raise his head. I believed it was, then that it was not, then that it was, the shooter. Pushing his way past a last shouting family and a chaotic line of Besź policzai trying to impose order without knowing what it was they should do. Pushing his way out and turning, walking with his hurried careful step away.

I must have made a sound. Certainly those scores of yards away the killer glanced backwards. I saw him see me and reflexively unsee, because of my uniform, because I was in Ul Qoma, but even as he dropped his eyes he recognised something and walked even faster away. I had seen him before, I could not think where. I looked around desperately, but none of the policzai in Besźel knew to follow him, and I was in Ul Qoma. I jumped off the roof of the car and walked quickly after the murderer.

Ul Qomans I shoved out of the way: Besź tried to unsee me but had to scurry to get out of my path. I saw their startled looks. I moved faster than the killer. I kept my eyes not on him but looking at some spot or other in Ul Qoma that put him in my field of vision. I tracked him without focusing, just legally. I crossed the plaza and two Ul Qoman militsya I passed called some tentative query at me which I ignored.

The man must have heard the sound of my step. I had come within a few tens of metres when he turned. His eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of me, which, careful even then, he did not hold. He registered me. He looked back into Besźel and sped up, trotting diagonally away toward ErmannStrász, a high street, behind a Kolyub-bound tram. In Ul Qoma, the road we were on was Saq Umir Way. I accelerated too.

He glanced back again and went faster, jogging through the Besź crowds, looking quickly to either side into the cafés lit by coloured candles, into the bookshops of Besźel—in Ul Qoma these were quieter alleys. He should have entered a shop. Perhaps he did not because there were crosshatched crowds he would have to negotiate on both pavements, perhaps his body rebelled at dead ends, cul-de-sacs, while pursued. He began to run.

The murderer ran left, into a smaller alley, where still I followed him. He was fast. He was faster than me now. He ran like a soldier. The distance between us grew. The stallholders and walkers in Besź stared at the killer; those in Ul Qoma stared at me. My quarry vaulted a bin that blocked his way, with greater ease than I knew I would manage. I knew where he was going. The Old Towns of Besźel and Ul Qoma are closely crosshatched: reach their edges, separations begin, alter and total areas. This was not, could not be, a chase. It was only two accelerations. We ran, he in his city, me close behind him, full of rage, in mine.

I shouted wordlessly. An old woman stared at me. I was not looking at him, I was still not looking at him, but fervently, legally, at Ul Qoma, its lights, graffiti, pedestrians, always at Ul Qoma. He was by iron rails curled in traditional Besź style. He was too far. He was by a total street, a street in Besźel only. He paused to look up in my direction as I gasped for breath.

For that sliver of time, too short for him to be accused of any crime, but certainly deliberate, he looked right at me. I knew him, I did not know from where. He looked at me at the threshold to that abroad-only geography and made a tiny triumphant smile. He stepped toward space where no one in Ul Qoma could go.

I raised the pistol and shot him.

I SHOT HIM IN THE CHEST. I saw his astonishment as he fell. Screaming from everywhere, at the shot, first, then his body and the blood, and almost instantly from all the people who had seen, at the terrible kind of transgression.

“Breach.”

“Breach.”

I thought it was the shocked declaration by those who had witnessed the crime. But unclear figures emerged where there had been no purposeful motion instants before, only the milling of no ones, the aimless and confused, and those suddenly appeared newcomers with faces so motionless I hardly recognised them as faces were saying the word. It was statement of both crime and identity.

“Breach.” A grim-featured something gripped me so that there was no way I could break out, had I wanted to. I glimpsed dark shapes draped over the body of the killer I had killed. A voice close up to my ear. “Breach.” A force shoving me effortlessly out of my place, fast fast past candles of Besźel and the neon of Ul Qoma, in directions that made sense in neither city.

“Breach,” and something touched me and I went under into black, out of waking and all awareness, to the sound of that word.

Part Three
BREACH

Chapter Twenty-Three

IT WAS NOT A SOUNDLESS DARK. It was not without intrusions. There were presences within it that asked me questions I could not answer, questions I was aware of as urgencies at which I failed. Those voices again and again said to me, Breach. What had touched me sent me not into mindless silence but into a dream arena where I was quarry.

I REMEMBERED THAT LATER. In the moment I woke it was without a sense of time having passed. I closed my eyes in the crosshatched streets of the Old Towns; I opened them again and gasped for breath and looked into a room.

It was grey, without adornment. It was a small room. I was in a bed, no, on it. I lay on top of the sheets in clothes I did not recognise. I sat up.

Grey floor in scuffed rubber, a window admitting light at me, tall grey walls, stained in places and cracked. A desk and two chairs. Like a shabby office. A dark glass half-globe in the ceiling. There was no sound at all.

I was blinking, standing, nowhere near as groggy as I felt I should have been. The door was locked. The window was too high for me to see through. I jumped up, which did send a little spin through my head, but I saw only sky. The clothes I wore were clean and terribly nondescript. They fit me well enough. I remembered what had been with me in the dark, then, and my heart and my breath began to speed.

The soundlessness was enervating. I gripped the lower rim of the window and pulled myself up, my arms trembling. With nothing on which to brace my feet I could not stay in the position long. Roofs spread out below me. The slates, satellite dishes, flat concrete, ajut girders and antennae, the onion domes, corkscrew towers, gasrooms, the backs of what might be gargoyles. I could not tell where I was, nor what might be listening beyond the glass, guarding me from outside.

“Sit.”

I dropped hard at the voice. I struggled to my feet and turned.

Someone stood in the doorway. Light behind him, he was a cutout of darkness, a lack. When he stepped forward he was a man fifteen or twenty years my senior. Tough and squat, in clothes as vague as my own. There were others behind him: a woman my age, another man a little older. Their faces were without anything approaching expressions. They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.

“Sit.” The older man pointed to a chair. “Come out of the corner.”

It was true. I was flattened into the corner. I realised it. I slowed my lungs and stood straighter. I took my hands away from the walls. I stood like a proper person.

After a long time I said, “How embarrassing.” Then, “Excuse me.” I sat where the man indicated. When I could control my voice I said, “I’m Tyador Borlú. And you?”

He sat and looked at me, his head to one side, abstract and curious like a bird.

“Breach,” he said.

“BREACH,” I SAID. I took a shaky breath. “Yes, Breach.”

Finally he said, “What were you expecting? What are you expecting?”

Was that too much? Another time I might have been able to tell. I was looking around nervily as if to catch sight of something almost invisible in the corners. He pointed his right hand at me fork-fingered, index and middle digits one at each of my eyes, then at his own: Look at me. I obeyed.

The man glanced at me from under his brows. “The situation,” he said. I realised we were both speaking Besź. He did not sound quite Besź, nor Ul Qoman, but was certainly not European or North American. His accent was flat.

“You breached, Tyador Borlú. Violently. You killed a man by it.” He watched me again. “You shot from Ul Qoma right into Besźel. So you are in the Breach.” He folded his hands together. I watched how his thin bones moved under his skin: just like mine. “His name was Yorjavic. The man you killed. Do you remember him?”

“You knew him from before.”

“How do you know?”

“You told us. It’s up to us how you go under, how long you stay there, what you see and say while you’re there, when you come out again. If you come out. Where did you know him from?”

I shook my head but—“The True Citizens,” I said suddenly. “He was there when I questioned them.” Who had called Gosz the lawyer. One of the tough, cocky nationalist men.

“He was a soldier,” the man said. “Six years in the BAF. A sniper.”

No surprise. It was an amazing shot. “Yolanda!” I looked up. “Jesus, Dhatt. What happened?”

“Senior Detective Dhatt will never fully move his right arm again, but he’s recovering. Yolanda Rodriguez is dead.” He watched me. “What hit Dhatt was intended for her. It was the second shot that went through her head.”

“God damn.” For seconds I could only look down. “Do her family know?”

“They know.”

“Was anyone else hit?”

“No. Tyador Borlú, you breached.”

“He killed her. You don’t know what else he’s—”

The man sat back. I was already nodding an apology, a hopelessness, when he said, “Yorjavic didn’t breach, Borlú. He shot over the border, in Copula Hall. He never breached. Lawyers might have an argument: was the crime committed in Besźel where he pulled the trigger, or Ul Qoma where the bullets hit? Or both?” He held out his hands in an elegant who cares? “He never breached. You did. So you are here, now, in the Breach.”

WHEN THEY LEFT, food came. Bread, meat, fruit, cheese, water. When I had eaten I pushed and pulled at the door, but there was no way I could move it. I fingertipped its paint, but it was only splitting paint or its messages were in a more arcane code than I could decrypt.

Yorjavic was not the first man I had shot, nor even the first I had killed, but I had not killed many. I had never before shot someone not raising a gun at me. I waited for shakes. My heart was slamming but it was with where I was, not guilt.

I was alone a long time. I walked the room every way, watched the globe-hidden camera. I pulled myself up to stare out of the window at the roofs again. When the door opened again, it was twilight looking down. The same trio entered.

“Yorjavic,” the older man said, in Besź again. “He did breach in one way. When you shot him you made him. Victims of breach always breach. He interacted hard with Ul Qoma. So we know about him. He had instructions from somewhere. Not from the True Citizens. Here’s how it is,” he said. “You breached, so you’re ours.”

“What happens now?”

“Whatever we want. Breach, and you belong to us.”

They could disappear me without difficulty. There were only rumours about what that would mean. No one ever heard even stories about those who had been taken by Breach and—what?—served their time. Such people must be impressively secretive, or never released.

“Because you may not see the justice of what we do doesn’t mean it’s unjust, Borlú. Think of this, if you want, as your trial.

“Tell us what you did and why, and we might see ways to perform actions. We have to fix a breach. There are investigations to be carried out: we can talk to those who haven’t breached, if it’s relevant and we prove it. Understand? There are less and more severe sanctions. We have your record. You’re police.”

What was he saying? Does that make us colleagues? I did not speak.

“Why did you do this? Tell us. Tell us about Yolanda Rodriguez, and tell us about Mahalia Geary.”

I said nothing for a long time but had no plan. “You know? What do you know?”

“Borlú.”

“What’s out there?” I pointed at the door. They had left it a little open.

“You know where you are,” he said. “What’s out there you’ll see. Under what conditions depends on what you say and do now. Tell us what got you here. This fool’s conspiracy that’s recurred, for the first time in a long time. Borlú, tell us about Orciny.”

THE SEPIA ILLUMINATION from the corridor was all they let light me, in a wedge, a slice of inadequate glow that kept my interrogator in shade. It took hours to tell them the case. I did not dissemble because they must already know everything.

“Why did you breach?” the man said.

“I hadn’t meant to. I wanted to see where the shooter went.”

“That was breach then. He was in Besźel.”

“Yes, but you know. You know that happens all the time. When he smiled, the look he had, I just… I was thinking about Mahalia and Yolanda …” I paced closer to the door.

“How did he know you’d be there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a nat, and a crazy one, but he’s obviously got contacts.”

“Where is Orciny supposed to be in this?”

We looked at each other. “I’ve told you everything I know,” I said. I held my face in my hands, looked over my fingertips. It looked as if the man and woman in the doorway weren’t paying attention. I ran hard at them, I thought without any warning. One—I do not know which—hooked me in midair and sent me across the room into the wall and down. Someone hit me, the woman it must be, because my head was tugged up and the man stood leaning still in the doorway. The older man sat at the table waiting.

The woman straddled my back and held me in some neck-lock. “Borlú, you are in Breach. This room is where your trial is taking place,” the older man said. “This can be where it’s finished. You’re beyond law now; this is where decision lives, and we are it. Once more. Tell us how this case, these people, these murders, connects to this story of Orciny.”

After many seconds he said to the woman, “What are you doing?”

“He’s not choking,” she said.

I was, so far as her hold would allow, laughing.

“This isn’t about me,” I said at last, when I was able. “My god. You’re investigating Orciny.”

“There is no such place as Orciny,” the man said.

“So everyone tells me. And yet things keep happening, people keep disappearing or dying, and there’s that word again and again, Orciny.” The woman got off me. I sat on the floor and shook my head at it all.

“You know why she never came to you?” I said. “Yolanda? She thought you were Orciny. If you said How could there be a place between the city and the city? she’d say Do you believe in the Breach? Where’s that? But she was wrong, wasn’t she? You’re not Orciny.”

“There is no Orciny.”

“So why are you asking all this? What have I been running from for days? I just saw Orciny or something a lot like it shoot my partner. You know I’ve breached: what do you care about the rest of it? Why aren’t you just punishing me?”

“As we say—”

“What, this is mercy? Justice? Please.

“If there’s something else between Besźel and Ul Qoma, where does that leave you? You’re hunting. Because it’s suddenly back. You don’t know where Orciny is, or what’s going on. You’re …” Hell with it. “You’re afraid.”

***

THE YOUNGER MAN AND WOMAN left and returned with an old film projector, trailing a lead into the corridor. They fiddled with it and it hummed, and made the wall a screen. It projected scenes from an interrogation. I scooted back to see better, still sitting on the floor.

The subject was Bowden. A snap of static and he was speaking in Illitan, and I saw that his interrogators were militsya.

“… don’t know what happened. Yes, yes I was hiding because someone was coming after me. Someone was trying to kill me. And when I heard Borlú and Dhatt were getting out, I didn’t know if I could trust them but I thought maybe they could get me out too.”

“… have a gun?” The voice of the interrogator was muffled.

“Because someone was trying to kill me, is why. Yes, I had a gun. You can get one on half the street corners in East Ul Qoma, as well you know. I’ve lived here for years, you know.”

Something.

“No.”

“Why not?” That was audible.

“Because there is no such thing as Orciny,” Bowden said.

Something. “Well, I don’t give a damn what you think, or what Mahalia thought, or what Yolanda said, or what Dhatt’s been insinuating, and no I have no idea who called me. But there’s no such place.”

A big loud crack of distressed image-sound, and there was Aikam. He was just weeping and weeping. Questions came, and he ignored them to weep.

The picture changed again and Dhatt was in Aikam’s place. He was not in uniform and his arm was in a sling.

“I fucking do not know,” he shouted. “Why the fuck are you asking me? Go get Borlú, because he seems to have a damn sight more of an idea what the fuck is going on than I do. Orciny? No I fucking don’t, because I’m not a child, but here’s the thing, even though it’s goddamn obvious Orciny’s a pile of shit, something is still going on, people are still getting hold of information they should not be able to, and other people are still being shot in the head by forces unknown. Fucking kids. That is why I agreed to help Borlú, illegal be fucked, so if you’re going to take my badge go the fuck ahead. And be my guest—disbelieve in Orciny all you want, I fucking do. But keep your head down in case that nonexistent fucking city shoots you in the face. Where is Tyador? What’ve you done?”

The picture went still on the wall. The interrogators looked at me in the light of Dhatt’s oversized monochrome snarl.

“So,” the older man said. He nodded at the wall. “You heard Bowden. What’s happening. What do you know about Orciny?”

THE BREACH WAS NOTHING. It is nothing. This is a commonplace; this is simple stuff. The Breach has no embassies, no army, no sights to see. The Breach has no currency. If you commit it it will envelop you. Breach is void full of angry police.

This trail that led and led again to Orciny suggested systemic transgression, secret para-rules, a parasite city where there should be nothing but nothing, nothing but Breach. If Breach was not Orciny, what would it be but a mockery of itself, to have let that go for centuries? That was why my questioner, when he asked me Does Orciny exist?, put it like this, “So, are we at war?”

I brought our collaboration to their attention. I, daring, bargained. “I’ll help you …” I kept saying, with a drawn-out pause, an ellipsis implying if. I wanted the killers of Mahalia Geary and Yolanda Rodriguez and they could tell that, but I was not too noble to bargain. That there was room to barter, a way, a small chance that I might get out of Breach again, was intoxicating.

“YOU ALMOST CAME for me once before,” I said. They had been watching, when I came grosstopically close to my house. “So are we partners?” I said.

“You’re a breacher. But it’ll go better if you help us.” “You really think Orciny killed them?” the other man said. Would they finish with me when there was even a possibility that Orciny was here, emerging, and still unfound? Its population walking the streets, unseen by the populations of Besźel and Ul Qoma, each thinking they were in the other. Hiding like books in a library.

“What is it?” the woman said, seeing my face.

“I’ve told you what I know, and it’s not much. It’s Mahalia who really knew what was happening, and she’s dead. But she left something behind. She told a friend. She told Yolanda that she’d realised the truth when she was going through her notes. We never found anything like that. But I know how she worked. I know where they are.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

WE LEFT THE BUILDING—the station, call it—in the morning, me in the company of the older man, Breach, and I realised I did not know what city we were in.

I had stayed up much of the night watching films of interrogations, from Ul Qoma and from Besźel. A Besź border guard and an Ul Qoman, passersby from both cities who knew nothing. “People started screaming …” Motorists over whom bullets had gone.

“Corwi,” I said, when her face appeared on the wall.

“So where is he?” A quirk of recording made her voice far away. She was angry and controlling herself. “What the fuck has boss-man got himself into? Yes, he wanted me to help him get someone through.” That was all they established, repeatedly, her Besź questioners. They threatened her job. She was as contemptuous of that as Dhatt, though more careful how she phrased it. She knew nothing.

Breach showed me brief shots of someone questioning Biszaya and Sariska. Biszaya cried. “I’m not impressed with this,” I said. “This is just cruel.”

The most interesting films were those of Yorjavic’s comrades among the extreme nationalists of Besźel. I recognised some who had been with Yorjavic. They stared sulky at their questioners, the policzai. A few refused to speak except in the company of their lawyers. There was hard questioning, an officer leaning across the table and punching a man in the face.

“Fuck’s sake,” the bleeding man shouted. “We’re on the same fucking side, you fuck. You’re Besź, you’re not fucking Ul Qoman and you’re not fucking Breach …”

With arrogance, neutrality, resentment or, often, compliance and collaboration, the nationalists denied any knowledge of Yorjavic’s action. “I’ve never fucking heard of this foreign woman; he never mentioned her. She’s a student?” one said. “We do what’s right for Besźel, you know? And you don’t have to know why. But …” The man we watched agonised with his hands, made shapes to try to explain himself without recrimination.

“We’re fucking soldiers. Like you. For Besźel. So if you hear that something has to be done, if you get instructions, like someone has to be warned, reds or unifs or traitors or UQ or the fucking Breach-lickers are gathering or whatever, something has to be done, okay. But you know why. You don’t ask, but you can see it’s got to be done, most of the time. But I don’t know why this Rodriguez girl … I don’t believe he did and if he did I don’t…” He looked angry. “I don’t know why.”

“Of course they have contacts in the deep state,” my Breach interlocutor said. “But with something as hard to parse as this, you can see the possibility, that Yorjavic maybe wasn’t a True Citizen. Or not only, but a representative of a more hidden organisation.”

“A more hidden place maybe,” I said. “I thought you watched everything.”

“No one breached.” He put papers in front of me. “Those are the findings of the Besźel policzai who searched Yorjavic’s apartment. Nothing linking him to anything like Orciny. Tomorrow we’re leaving early.”

“How did you get all this?” I said as he and his companions stood. He looked at me with a motionless but withering face as he left.

HE RETURNED AFTER A SHORT NIGHT, alone this time. I was ready for him.

I waved the papers. “Presuming my colleagues did a good job, there’s nothing. A few payments come in time to time, but not that much—could be anything. He passed the exam a few years back, could cross—not so unusual, although with his politics …” I shrugged. “Subscriptions, bookshelves, associates, army record, criminal record, hangouts, and all that mark him out as a run-of-the-mill violent nat.”

“Breach has watched him. Like all dissidents. There’s been no sign of unusual connections.”

“Orciny, you mean.”

“No sign.”

He ushered me finally out of the room. The corridor had the same scabbing paint, a worn colourless carpet, a succession of doors. I heard the steps of others, and as we turned into a stairwell a woman passed us, with a moment’s acknowledgement to my companion. Then a man passed, and then we were in a hallway with several other people. What they wore would be legal in either Besźel or in Ul Qoma.

I heard conversation in both languages and a third thing, a mongrel or antique that combined them. I heard typing. I never considered rushing or attacking my companion and trying to escape. I admit that. I was very observed.

On the walls of an office we passed were corkboards thick with memos, shelves of folders. A woman tore paper from a printer. A telephone rang.

“Come on,” the man said. “You said you know where the truth is.”

There were double doors, doors to an outside. We stepped through, and that, when the light ate me up, was when I realised I did not know which city we were in.

AFTER PANIC AT THE CROSSHATCH, I realised we must be in Ul Qoma: that was where our destination was. I followed my escort down the street.

I was breathing deep. It was morning, noisy, overcast but without rain, boisterous. Cold: the air made me gasp. I was pleasantly disoriented by all the people, by the motion of coated Ul Qomans, the growl of cars moving slowly on this mostly pedestrian street, the shouts of hawkers, the sellers of clothes and books and food. I unsaw all else. There was the thrum of cables above us as one of the Ul Qoman inflates butted against the wind.

“I don’t need to tell you not to run,” the man said. “I don’t need to tell you not to shout. You know I can stop you. And you know I’m not alone in watching you. You’re in Breach. Call me Ashil.”

“You know my name.”

“While you’re with me you’re Tye.”

Tye, like Ashil, was not traditional Besź, nor Ul Qoman, could just plausibly be either. Ashil walked me across a courtyard, below facades of figures and bells, video screens with stock information. I did not know where we were.

“You’re hungry,” Ashil said.

“I can wait.” He steered me to a side street, another crosshatched side street where Ul Qoman stalls by a supermarket offered software and knickknacks. He took my arm and guided me, and I hesitated because there was no food in sight except, and I pulled against him a moment, there were dumpling stations and bread stalls, but they were in Besźel.

I tried to unsee them but there could be no uncertainty: that source of the smell I had been unsmelling was our destination. “Walk,” he said, and he walked me through the membrane between cities; I lifted my foot in Ul Qoma, put it down again in Besźel, where breakfast was.

Behind us was an Ul Qoman woman with raspberry punk hair selling the unlocking of mobile phones. She glanced in surprise then consternation; then I saw her quickly unsee us as Ashil ordered food in Besźel.

Ashil paid with Besźmarques. He put the paper plate in my hand, walked me back across the road into the supermarket. It was in Ul Qoma. He bought a carton of orange juice with dinar, gave it to me.

I held the food and the drink. He walked me down the middle of the crosshatched road.

My sight seemed to untether as with a lurching Hitchcock shot, some trickery of dolly and depth of field, so the street lengthened and its focus changed. Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up.

Sound and smell came in: the calls of Besźel; the ringing of its clocktowers; the clattering and old metal percussion of the trams; the chimney smell; the old smells; they came in a tide with the spice and Illitan yells of Ul Qoma, the clatter of a militsya copter, the gunning of German cars. The colours of Ul Qoma light and plastic window displays no longer effaced the ochres and stone of its neighbour, my home.

“Where are you?” Ashil said. He spoke so only I could hear.

“Are you in Besźel or Ul Qoma?”

“… Neither. I’m in Breach.”

“You’re with me here.” We moved through a crosshatched morning crowd. “In Breach. No one knows if they’re seeing you or unseeing you. Don’t creep. You’re not in neither: you’re in both.”

He tapped my chest. “Breathe.”

HE TOOK US BY METRO IN UL Qoma, where I sat still as if the remnants of Besźel clung to me like cobwebs and would frighten fellow passengers, out and onto a tram in Besźel, and it felt good, as if I were back home, misleadingly. We went by foot through either city. The feeling of Besźel familiarity was replaced by some larger strangeness. We stopped by the glass-and-steel frontage of UQ University Library.

“What would you do if I ran?” I said. He said nothing.

Ashil took out a nondescript leather holder and showed the guard the sigil of Breach. The man stared at it for seconds, then jumped to his feet.

“My God,” he said. He was an immigrant, from Turkey judging from his Illitan, but he had been here long enough to understand what he saw. “I, you, what can I …?” Ashil pointed him back to his chair and walked on.

The library was newer than its Besź counterpart. “It will have no classmark,” Ashil said.

“That’s the point,” I said. We referred to the map and its legend. The histories of Besźel and Ul Qoma, carefully separately listed but shelved close to each other, were on the fourth floor. The students in their carrels looked at Ashil as he passed. There was in him an authority unlike that of parents or tutors.

Many of the titles we stood before were not translated, were in their original English or French. The Secrets of the Precursor Age; The Literal and the Littoral: Besźel, Ul Qoma and Maritime Semiotics. We scanned for minutes—there were many shelves. What I was looking for, and there at last on the second-to-top shelf three rows back from the main walkway found, pushing past a confused young undergraduate as if I were the one with authority here, was a book marked by lack. It was unadorned at the bottom of its spine with a printed category mark.

“Here.” The same edition I had had. That psychedelic doors-of-perception-style illustration, a long-haired man walking a street made patchwork from two different (and spurious) architectural styles, from the shadows of which watched eyes. I opened it in front of Ashil. Between the City and the City. Markedly worn.

“If all this is true,” I said quietly, “then we’re being watched. You and me, now.” I pointed to one of the pairs of eyes on the cover.

I riffled the pages. Ink flickers, most pages annotated in tiny scrawl: red, black, and blue. Mahalia had written in an extra-fine nib, and her notes were like tangled hair, years of annotations of the occult thesis. I glanced behind me, and Ashil did the same. No one was there.

NO, we read in her hand. NOT AT ALL, and REALLY? CF HARRIS ET AL, and LUNACY!! MAD!!! and so on. Ashil took it from me.

“She understood Orciny better than anyone,” I said. “That’s where she kept the truth.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“THEY’VE BOTH BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT what’s happened to you,” Ashil said. “Corwi and Dhatt.”

“What did you tell them?”

A look: We don’t speak to them at all. That evening he brought me colour copies, bound, of every page, and inside and outside covers, of Mahalia’s Ul Qoma copy of Between. This was her notebook. With effort and attention, I could follow a particular line of reasoning from each tangled page, could track each of her readings in turn.

That evening Ashil walked with me in that both-cities. The sweep and curves of Ul Qoman byzanterie ajut over and around the low mittel-continental and middle-history brickwork of Besźel, its bas-relief figures of scarfed women and bombardiers, Besźel’s steamed food and dark breads fugging with the hot smells of Ul Qoma, colours of light and cloth around grey and basalt tones, sounds now both abrupt, schwa-staccatoed-sinuous and throaty swallowing. Being in both cities had gone from being in Besźel and Ul Qoma to being in a third place, that nowhere-both, that Breach.

Everyone, in both cities, seemed tense. We had returned through the two crosshatched cities not to the offices where I had woken—they were in Rusai Bey in Ul Qoma or TushasProspekta in Besźel, I had back-figured-out—but to another, a middling-smart apartment with a concierge’s office, not too far from that larger HQ. On the top floor the rooms extended across what must be two or three buildings, and in the warrens of that, Breach came and went. There were anonymous bedrooms, kitchens, offices, outdated-looking computers, phones, locked cabinets. Terse men and women.

As the two cities had grown together, places, spaces had opened between them, or failed to be claimed, or been those controversial dissensi. Breach lived there.

“What if you get burgled? Doesn’t that happen?”

“Time to time.”

“Then …”

“Then they’re in Breach, and they’re ours.”

The women and men stayed busy, carrying out conversations that fluctuated through Besź, Illitan, and the third form. The featureless bedroom into which Ashil put me had bars on its windows, another camera somewhere, for sure. There was an en-suite toilet. He did not leave. Another two or three Breach joined us.

“Look at this,” I said. “You’re evidence this could all be real.” The interstitiality which made Orciny so absurd to most citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma was not only possible but inevitable. Why would Breach disbelieve life could thrive in that little gap? The anxiety was now rather something like We have never seen them, a very different concern.

“It can’t be,” Ashil said.

“Ask your superiors. Ask the powers. I don’t know.” What other, higher or lower, powers were there in Breach? “You know we’re watched. Or they were—Mahalia, Yolanda, Bowden—by something somewhere.”

“There’s nothing linking the shooter to anything.” That was one of the others, speaking Illitan.

“Alright.” I shrugged. I spoke in Besź. “So he was just a random, very lucky right-winger. If you say so. Or maybe you think it’s insiles, doing this?” I said. None of them denied the existence of the fabled scavenging interstitial refugees. “They used Mahalia, and when they were done they killed her. They killed Yolanda, in a way exactly so you couldn’t chase them. As if of all the things in Besźel, Ul Qoma, or anywhere, what they’re most scared of is Breach.”

“But”—a woman pointed at me—“look what you did.”

“Breached?” I had given them a way in to whatever this war was. “Yes. What did Mahalia know? She worked something out about what they had planned. They killed her.” The overlaid glimmer of nighttime Ul Qoma and Besźel lit me through the window. I made my ominous point to a growing audience of Breach, their faces like owls’.

They locked me in overnight. I read Mahalia’s annotations. I could discern phases of annotation, though not in any pagewise chronology—all the notes were layered, a palimpsest of evolving interpretation. I did archaeology.

Early on, in the lowest layers of marks, her handwriting was more careful, the notes longer and neater, with more references to other writers and to her own essays. Her idiolect and unorthodox abbreviations made it hard to be sure. I started page on page trying to read, transcribe, those early thoughts. Mostly what I discerned was her anger.

I felt a something-stretched-out over the night streets. I wanted to talk to those I had known in Besźel or Ul Qoma, but I could only watch.

Whatever unseen bosses, if any, waited in the Breach’s bowels, it was Ashil who came for me again the next morning, found me going over and over those notes. He led me the length of a corridor to an office. I imagined running—no one seemed to be watching me. They would stop me, though. And if they did not, where would I go, hunted in-betweener refugee?

There were twelve or so Breach in the cramped room, sitting, standing, precarious on the edge of desks, low muttering in two or three languages. A discussion midway. Why was I shown this?

“… Gosharian says it hasn’t, he just called …”

“What about SusurStrász? Wasn’t there some talk …?”

“Yes, but everyone’s accounted for.”

This was a crisis meeting. Mutterings into phones, quick checks against lists. Ashil said to me, “Things are moving.” More people came and joined the talk.

“What now?” The question, spoken by a young woman wearing the headscarf of a married Besźel woman from a traditional family, was addressed to me, prisoner, condemned, consultant. I recognised her from the previous night. Silence went through the room, leaving itself behind, with all the people watching me. “Tell me again about when Mahalia was taken,” she said.

“Are you trying to close in on Orciny?” I said. I had nothing to suggest to her, though something felt close to my reach.

They continued their quick back-and-forth, using shorthands and slang I did not know, but I could tell they were debating each other, and I tried to understand over what—some strategy, some question of direction. Periodically everyone in the room murmured something final-sounding and paused, and raised or did not raise a hand, and glanced around to count how many did which.

“We have to understand what got us here,” Ashil said. “What would you do to find out what Mahalia knew?” His comrades were growing agitated, interrupting each other. I recalled Jaris and Yolanda talking about Mahalia’s anger at the end. I sat up hard.

“What is it?” Ashil said.

“We need to go to the dig.” I said. He regarded me.

“Ready with Tye,” Ashil said. “Coming with me.” Three-quarters of the room raised their hands briefly.

“Said my piece about him,” said the headscarfed woman, who did not raise hers.

“Heard,” Ashil said. “But.” He pointed her eyes around the room. She had lost a vote.

I left with Ashil. It was there on the streets, that something fraught.

“You feel this?” I said. He even nodded. “I need … can I call Dhatt?” I said.

“No. He’s still on leave. And if you see him …”

“Then?”

“You’re in Breach. Easier for him if you leave him alone. You’ll see people you know. Don’t put them in positions. They need to know where you are.”

“Bowden …”

“He’s under surveillance by militsya. For his protection. No one in Besźel or Ul Qoma can find any link between Yorjavic and him. Whoever tried to kill him—”

“Are we still saying it’s not Orciny? There’s no Orciny?”

“—might try again. The leaders of True Citizens are with the policzai. But if Yorj and any other of their members were some secret cell, they don’t seem to know. They’re angry about it. You saw the film.”

“Where are we? Which way is the dig?”

HE TOOK US BY THAT AWESOME SUCCESSION of breaching transport, worming through the two cities, leaving a tunnel of Breach in the shape of our journey. I wondered where he carried what weapon. The guard at the gate of Bol Ye’an recognised me and smiled a smile that quickly faltered. He had perhaps heard I had disappeared.

“We’re not approaching the academics, we’re not questioning the students,” Ashil said. “You understand we’re here to investigate the background to and terms of your breach.” I was police on my own crime.

“It would be easier if we could talk to Nancy.”

“None of the academics, none of the students. Begin. You know who I am?” This to the guard.

We went to Buidze, who stood with his back to the wall of his office, stared at us, at Ashil in great and straightforward fear, at me in fear that was more bewildered: Can I speak of what we spoke of before? I saw him think, Who is he? Ashil manoeuvred me with him to the back of the room, found a shaft of shadow.

“I haven’t breached,” Buidze kept whispering.

“Do you invite investigation?” Ashil said.

“Your job’s to stop smuggling,” I said. Buidze nodded. What was I? Neither he nor I knew. “How’s that going?”

“Holy Light… Please. The only way any of these kids could do it would be to slip a memento straight in their pockets from the ground, so it never gets catalogued, and they can’t because everyone’s searched when they leave the site. No one could sell this stuff anyway. Like I said, the kids go for walks around the site, and they might be breaching when they stand still. What can you do? Can’t prove it. Doesn’t mean they’re thieves.”

“She told Yolanda you could be a thief without knowing it,” I said to Ashil. “At the end. What have you lost?” I asked Buidze.

“Nothing!”

He took us to the artefact warehouse, stumbling eager to help us. On the way two students I somewhat recognised saw us, stopped still—something about Ashil’s gait, that I was mimicking—backed away. There were the cabinets where the finds were, in which the latest dusted-off things born from the ground were stored. Lockers full of the impossible variety of Precursor Age debris, a miraculous and obstinately opaque rubble of bottles, orreries, axe heads, parchment scraps.

“Goes in, whoever’s in charge that night makes sure everyone puts whatever’s been found away, locks up, leaves the key. Doesn’t get out the grounds without we search them. They don’t even give us shit about that; they know that’s how it is.”

I motioned Buidze to open the cabinet. I looked into the collection, each piece nestled in its little house, its segment of polystyrene, in the drawer. The topmost drawers had not yet been filled. Those below were full. Some of the fragile pieces were wrapped in lint-free cloth, swaddled from view. I opened the drawers one below the other, examining the ranked findings. Ashil came to stand beside me and looked down into the last as if it were a teacup, as if the artefacts were leaves with which one could divine.

“Who has the keys each night?” Ashil said.

“I, I, it depends.” Buidze’s fear of us was wearing, but I did not believe he would lie. “Whoever. It’s not important. They all do it sometimes. Whoever’s working late. There’s a schedule, but they’re always ignoring it…”

“After they’ve given the keys back to security, they leave?”

“Yeah.”

“Straightaway?”

“Yeah. Usually. They might go to their office a bit, walk in the grounds, but they don’t usually stick around.”

“The grounds?”

“It’s a park. It’s … nice.” He shrugged helpless. “There’s no way out, though; its alter a few metres in, they have to come back through here. They don’t leave without being searched.”

“When did Mahalia last lock up?”

“Loads of times. I don’t know …”

“Last time.”

“… The night she disappeared,” he said at last.

“Give me a list of who did it when.”

“I can’t! They keep one, but like I say half the time they just do each other favours …”

I opened the lowest drawers. Between the tiny crude figures, the intricate Precursor lingams and ancient pipettes, there were deli-cats wrapped. I touched the shapes gently.

“Those are old,” Buidze said, watching me. “They were dug up ages ago.”

“I see,” I said, reading the labels. They had been disinterred in the early days of the dig. I turned at the sound of Professor Nancy entering. She stopped hard, stared at Ashil, at me. She opened her mouth. She had lived in Ul Qoma many years, was trained to see its minutiae. She recognised what she saw. “Professor,” I said. She nodded. She stared at Buidze and he at her. She nodded and backed out.

“When Mahalia was in charge of the keys, she went for walks after locking up, didn’t she?” I said. Buidze shrugged, bewildered. “She offered to lock up when it wasn’t her turn, too. More than once.” All the small artefacts were in their cloth-lined beds. I did not rummage, but I felt around at the rear of the drawer without what I imagined was the preferred care.

He shifted, but Buidze would not challenge me. At the rear of the third shelf up, of things brought to light still more than a year ago, one of the cloth-wrapped items gave under my finger in a way that made me pause. “You have to wear gloves,” Buidze said.

I unwrapped it and within was newspaper, and in the twist of paper was a piece of wood still flecked with paint and marked by where screws had held it. Not ancient nor carved: the offcut of a door, an absolute piece of nothing.

Buidze stared. I held it up. “What dynasty’s this?” I said.

“Don’t,” said Ashil to me. He followed me out. Buidze came behind us.

“I’m Mahalia,” I said. “I’ve just locked up. I’ve just volunteered to do it, though it’s someone else’s turn. Now a little walk.”

I marched us out into the open air, past the carefully layered hole where students glanced at us in surprise, on into the wasteland, where there was that rubble of history, and beyond it out of the gate that would open to a university ID, that opened for us because of where and what we were, that we propped open, into the park. Not much of a park this close to the excavation, but scrub and a few trees crossed by paths. There were Ul Qomans visible, but none too close. There was no unbroken Ul Qoman space between the dig and the bulk of the Ul Qoman park. Besźel intruded.

We saw other figures at the edges of the clearing: Besź sitting on the rocks or by the crosshatched pond. The park was only slightly in Besźel, a few metres at the edge of vegetation, a rill of crossover in paths and bushes, and a little stretch of totality cutting the two Ul Qoman sections off from each other. Maps made clear to walkers where they might go. It was here in the crosshatch that the students might stand, scandalously, touching distance from a foreign power, a pornography of separation.

“Breach watches fringes like this,” Ashil said to me. “There are cameras. We’d see anyone emerge into Besźel who didn’t come in by it.”

Buidze was hanging back. Ashil spoke so he could not hear. Buidze was trying not to watch us. I paced.

“Orciny …” I said. No way in or out of here in Ul Qoma but back through Bol Ye’an dig. “Dissensi? Bullshit. That’s not how she delivered. This is what she was doing. Have you seen The Great Escape?” I walked to the edge of the crosshatched zone, where Ul Qoma ended for metres. Of course I was in Breach now, could wander on into Besźel if I wanted, but I stopped as if I were only in Ul Qoma. I walked to the edge of the space it shared with Besźel, where Besźel became briefly total and separated it from the rest of Ul Qoma. I made sure Ashil was watching me. I mimed placing the piece of wood in my pocket, stuffing it in fact down past my belt, down the inside of my trousers. “Hole in her pockets.”

I walked a few steps in the crosshatch, dropping the thankfully unsplintering wood down my leg. I stood still when it hit the ground. I stood as if contemplating the skyline and moved my feet gently, letting it onto the earth, where I trod it in and scuffed plant muck and dirt onto it. When I walked away, without looking back, the wood was a nothing shape, invisible if you did not know it was there.

“When she goes, someone in Besźel—or someone who looks like they are, so there’s nothing for you to notice—comes by,” I said. “Stands and looks at the sky. Kicks their heels. Kicks something up. Sits on a rock for a moment, touches the ground, puts something in their pocket.

“Mahalia wouldn’t take the recent stuff because it was just put away, much too noticeable. But while she’s locking up, because it only takes a second, she opens the old drawers.”

“What does she take?”

“Maybe it’s random. Maybe she’s following instructions. Bol Ye’an searches them every night, so why would they think anyone’s stealing? She never had anything on her. It was sitting here in the crosshatch.”

“Where someone came to take it. Through Besźel.”

I turned and looked slowly in all directions.

“Do you feel watched?” Ashil said.

“Do you?”

A very long quiet. “I don’t know.”

“Orciny.” I turned again. “I’m tired of this.” I stood. “Really.” I turned. “This is wearing.”

“What are you thinking?” Ashil said.

A noise of a dog in the woods made us look up. The dog was in Besźel. I was ready to unhear, but of course I did not have to.

It was a lab, a friendly dark animal that sniffed out of the undergrowth and trotted to us. Ashil held out his hand for it. Its owner emerged, smiled, started, looked away in confusion and called his dog to heel. It went to him, looking back at us. He was trying to unsee, but the man could not forebear looking at us, wondering probably why we would risk playing with an animal in such an unstable urban location. When Ashil met his eye the man looked away. He must have been able to tell where and so what we were.

ACCORDING TO THE CATALOGUE the wood offcut was a replacement for a brass tube containing gears encrusted into position by centuries. Three other pieces were missing, from those early digs, all from within wrappings, all replaced by twists of paper, stones, the leg of a doll. They were supposed to be the remains of a preserved lobster’s claw containing some proto-clockwork; an eroded mechanism like some tiny sextant; a hand ful of nails and screws.

We searched the ground in that fringe zone. We found potholes, cold scuffs, and the near-wintry remains of flowers, but no shallow-buried priceless treasures of the Precursor Age. They had been picked up, long ago. No one could sell them.

“That makes it breach then,” I said. “Wherever these Orciny-ites came from or went, they can’t have picked the stuff up in Ul Qoma, so it was in Besźel. Well, maybe to them they never left Orciny. But to most people they were put down in Ul Qoma and picked up in Besźel, so it’s breach.”

ASHIL CALLED THROUGH TO SOMEONE on our way back, and when we arrived at the quarters Breach were bickering and voting in their fast loose way on issues alien to me. They entered the room in the middle of the strange debate, made cell phone calls, interrupted at speed. The atmosphere was fraught, in that distinct expressionless Breach way.

There were reports from the two cities, with muttered additions from those holding telephone receivers, delivering messages from other Breach. “Everyone on guard,” Ashil kept saying. “This is starting.”

They were afraid of head shots and breach mugging-murders. The number of small breaches was increasing. Breach were where they could be, but there were many they missed. Someone said graffiti were appearing on walls in Ul Qoma in styles that suggested Besźel artists.

“It hasn’t been this bad, since, well …” Ashil said. He whispered explanations to me as the discussion continued. “That’s Raina. She’s unremitting on this.” “Samun thinks even mentioning Orciny’s to give ground.” “Byon doesn’t.”

“We need to be ready,” the speaker said. “We stumbled on something.”

“She did, Mahalia. Not us,” Ashil said.

“Alright, she did. Who knows when whatever’s going to happen will? We’re in the dark and we know war’s come, but can’t see where to aim.”

“I can’t deal with this,” I said to Ashil quietly.

He escorted me back to the room. When I realised he was locking me in I shouted in remonstration. “You need to remember why you’re here,” he said through the door.

I sat on the bed and tried to read Mahalia’s notes a new way. I did not try to follow the thread of a particular pen, the tenor of a particular period of her studies, to reconstruct a lineage of thought. Instead I read all the annotations on each page, years of opinions set together. I had been trying to be an archaeologist of her marginalia, separating the striae. Now I read each page out of time, no chronology, arguing with itself.

On the inside of the back cover among layers of irate theory I read in big letters written over earlier smaller ones BUT CF SHERMAN. A line from that to an argument on the facing page: ROSEN’S COUNTER. These names were familiar from my earlier investigations. I turned a couple of pages backwards. In the same pen and late hurried hand I read, abutting an older claim: NO—ROSEN, VIJNIC.

Assertion overlaid with critique, more and more exclamationmarked clauses in the book. NO, a pointer connecting the word not to the original printed text but to an annotation, to her own older, enthusiastic annotations. An argument with herself. WHY A TEST? WHO?

“Hey,” I shouted. I did not know where the camera was. “Hey, Ashil. Get Ashil.” I did not stop making noise until he arrived. “I need to get online.”

He took me to a computer room, to what looked like a 486 or something similarly antique, with an operating system I did not recognise, some jury-rigged imitation of Windows, but the processor and connection were very fast. We were two of several in the office. Ashil stood behind me as I typed. He watched my researches, as well, certainly, as ensuring I did not email anyone.

“Go wherever you need,” Ashil told me, and he was right. Pay sites guarded by password protection needed only an empty return to roll over.

“What kind of connection is this?” I did not expect or get any answer. I searched Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic. On the forums I had recently visited, the three writers were subjected to ferocious contumely. “Look.”

I got the names of their key works, checked listings on Amazon for a quick-and-dirty appreciation of their theses. It took minutes. I sat back.

“Look. Look. Sherman, Rosen, Vijnic are all absolute hate figures on these fractured-city boards,” I said. “Why? Because they wrote books claiming Bowden was full of shit. That the whole argument’s bollocks.”

“So does he.”

“That’s not the point, Ashil. Look.” Pages and pages in Between the City and the City. I pointed to Mahalia’s early remarks to herself, then her later ones. “The point is that she’s citing them. At the end. Her last notes.” Turning more pages, showing him.

“She changed her mind,” he said finally. We looked at each other a long time.

“All that stuff about parasites and being wrong and finding out she was a thief,” I said. “God damn. She wasn’t killed because she was, some, one of the bloody elect few who knew the awesome secret that the third city existed. She wasn’t killed because she realised Orciny was lying to her, was using her. That’s not the lies she was talking about. Mahalia was killed because she stopped believing in Orciny at all.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

THOUGH I BEGGED and grew angry, Ashil and his colleagues would not let me call Corwi or Dhatt.

“Why the hell not?” I said. “They could do this. Alright then, do whatever the hell it is you do, find out. Yorjavic’s still our best connection, him or some of his partners. We know he’s involved. Try to get the exact dates Mahalia locked up, and if possible we need to know where Yorjavic was every one of those evenings. We want to work out if he picked up. The policzai watch the TC; they might know. Maybe the leaders’ll even tell, if they’re that disgruntled. And check out where Syedr was too—someone with access to stuff from Copula Hall’s involved.”

“We’re not going to be able to get every day Mahalia did the keys. You heard Buidze: half of them weren’t planned.”

“Let me call Corwi and Dhatt; they’d know how to sift them.”

“You.” Ashil spoke hard. “Are in Breach here. Don’t forget. You don’t get to demand things. Everything we’re doing is an investigation into your breach. Do you understand?”

They would not give me a computer in the cell. I watched the sun rising, the air beyond my window growing light. I had not realised how late it was. I fell asleep at last, and woke with Ashil back in the room with me. He drank something—it was the first time I had seen him eat or drink anything. I rubbed my eyes. It was morning enough to be day. Ashil did not seem an iota tired. He tossed papers onto my lap, indicated a coffee and a pill by my bed.

“Wasn’t as hard as that,” he said. “They sign off when they put the keys back, so we got all the dates. You’ve got the original schedules there, that changed, and the signings sheets themselves. But there are loads. We can’t put a bead on Yorjavic let alone Syedr or any other nat for this many nights. This stretches over more than two years.”

“Hold on.” I held the two lists against each other. “Forget when she was scheduled in advance—she was obeying orders, don’t forget, from her mysterious contact. When she wasn’t down to take the keys but did it anyway, that’s what we should be looking at. No one loves the job—you have to stay late—so those are the days she suddenly turns around and says to whoever’s turn it is ‘I’ll do it.’ These are the days she got a message. She got told to deliver. So let’s see who was doing what then. Those are the dates. And there aren’t nearly so many.”

Ashil nodded—counted the evenings in question. “Four, five. Three pieces are missing.”

“So a couple of those days nothing happened. Maybe they were legitimate changes, no instructions at all. They’re still the ones to chase.” Ashil nodded again. “That’s when we’re going to see the nats moving.”

“How did they organise this? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wait here.”

“This would be easier if you’d just let me come with you. Why are you shy now?”

“Wait.”

More waiting, and though I did not shout at the unseen camera, I glared at all the walls in turn, so it would see me.

“No.” Ashil’s voice came from a loudspeaker I could not see. “Yorjavic was under policzai observation at least two of those nights. He didn’t go near the park.”

“What about Syedr?” I addressed the emptiness.

“No. Accounted for on four of the nights. Could be another of the nat bigwigs, but we’ve seen what Besźel has on them all, and there’s nothing red-flagging.”

“Shit. What do you mean Syedr’s ‘accounted for’?”

“We know where he was, and he was nowhere near. He was in meetings those evenings and the days after them.”

“Meetings with whom?”

“He’s on the Chamber of Commerce. They had trade events those days.” Silence. When I did not speak a long time he said, “What? What?”

“We’ve been thinking wrong.” I pincered my fingers in the air, trying to catch something. “Just because it was Yorjavic who shot, and because we know Mahalia pissed off the nats. But doesn’t it seem like a hell of a coincidence that those trade things would happen on the very nights that Mahalia volunteers to lock up?” Another long quiet. I remembered the delay before I could see the Oversight Committee, for one of those events. “There are receptions afterwards, for the guests, aren’t there?”

“Guests.”

“The companies. The ones Besźel’s schmoozing—that’s what those things are for, when they bicker for contracts. Ashil, find out who was there on those dates.”

“At the Chamber of Commerce …”

“Check the guest lists for the parties afterwards. Check press releases a few days afterwards and you’ll see who got what contract. Come on.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said minutes later in silence, when I still stalked back and forth in my room without him. “Why the fuck don’t you just let me out? I’m policzai, god damn it, this is what I do. You’re good at being bogeymen but you’re shit at this.”

“You’re a breacher,” Ashil said, pushing open the door. “It’s you we’re investigating.”

“Right. Did you wait outside till I said something you could make an entrance to?”

“This is the list.” I took the paper.

Companies—Canadian, French, Italian and British, a couple of smaller American ones—next to the various dates. Five names were ringed in red.

“The rest were there on one or other fair, but the ones in red, those ones are the ones that were there on every one of the nights Mahalia did the keys,” Ashil said.

“ReddiTek’s software. Burnley—what do they do?”

“Consultancy.”

“CorIntech are electronics components. What’s this written next to them?” Ashil looked.

“The man heading their delegation was Gorse, from their parent company, Sear and Core. Came to meet up with the local head of CorIntech, guy runs the division in Besźel. They both went to the parties with Nyisemu and Buric and the rest of the chamber.”

“Shit,” I said. “We … Which time was he here?”

“All of them.”

“All? The CEO of the parent company? Sear and Core? Shit …”

“Tell me,” he said, eventually.

“The nats couldn’t pull this off. Wait.” I thought. “We know there’s an insider in Copula Hall but… what the hell could Syedr do for these guys? Corwi’s right—he’s a clown. And what would be his angle?” I shook my head. “Ashil, how does this work? You can just siphon this information, right, from either city. Can you … What’s your status internationally? Breach, I mean.

“We need to go for the company.”

I’M AN AVATAR OF BREACH, Ashil said. Where breach has occurred I can do whatever. But he made me run through it a long time. His manner ossified, that opacity, the glimmerlessness of any sense of what he thought—it was hard to tell if he even heard me. He did not argue nor agree. He stood, while I told him what I claimed.

No, they can’t sell it, I said, that’s not what this is about. We had all heard rumours about Precursor artefacts. Their questionable physics. Their properties. They want to see what’s true. They’ve got Mahalia to supply them. And to do it they’ve got her thinking she’s in touch with Orciny. But she realised.

Corwi had said something once about the visitors’ tours of Besźel those companies’ representatives endured. Their chauffeurs might take them anywhere total or crosshatched, any pretty park to stretch their legs.

Sear and Core had been doing R&D.

Ashil stared at me. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Who’d put money into superstitious nonsense …?”

“How sure are you? That there’s nothing to the stories? And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring at them,” I said. “Sear and Core pay, what, a few thousand dollars to set this up? They don’t have to believe a word of it: it’s worth that kind of money just on the off chance that any of the stories turn out to have anything at all to them. It’s worth that for curiosity.”

Ashil took out his cell and began to make calls. It was the early part of the night. “We need a conclave,” he said. “Big stake. Yes, make it.” “Conclave. At the set.” He said more or less the same many times.

“You can do anything,” I said.

“Yes. Yes… We need a show. Breach in strength.”

“So you believe me? Ashil, you do?”

“How would they do it? How would outsiders like that get word to her?”

“I don’t know, but that’s what we have to find out. Paid off a couple of locals—we know where that money came to Yorj from.” They had been small amounts.

“They could not possibly, not possibly create Orciny for her.”

“They wouldn’t have the CEO of their parent here for these piddling little glad-handers, let alone every time Mahalia locks up. Come on. Besźel’s a basket case, and they’ve already thrown us a bone by being here. There’s got to be a connection …”

“Oh, we’ll investigate. But these aren’t citizens nor citizens, Tye. They don’t have the …” A silence.

“The fear,” I said. That Breach freeze, that obedience reflex shared in Ul Qoma and Besźel.

“They don’t have a certain response to us, so if we do anything we need to show weight—we need many of us, a presence. And if there’s truth to this, it’s the shutdown of a major business in Besźel. It’ll be a crisis for the city. A catastrophe. And no one will like that.

“It isn’t unknown for a city or a city to argue with Breach, Tye. It’s happened. There’ve been wars with Breach.” He waited while that image hung. “That doesn’t help anyone. So we need to have presence.” Breach needed to intimidate. I understood.

“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”

But the ingathering of Breach avatars from wherever they had posted themselves, the attempt with that diffuse authority, a corralling of chaos, was not efficient. Breach answered their phones, agreed, disagreed, said they would come or said they would not, said they would hear Ashil out. This was to judge from his side of the conversations.

“How many do you need?” I said. “What are you waiting for?”

“We need a presence, I said.”

“You feel what’s going on out there?” I said. “You’ve felt it in the air.”

There had been more than two hours of this. I was wired by something in the food and drink I had been given, pacing and complaining of my incarceration. More calls began to come in to Ashil. More than the messages he had left—word had gone viral. In the corridor was commotion, quick steps, voices, shouting and responding to shouts.

“What is it?”

Ashil was listening on his phone, not to the sound outside. “No,” he said. His voice betrayed nothing. He said it again several times until he closed the phone and looked at me. For the first time that set face looked like an evasion. He did not know how to say what he had to say.

“What’s happened?” The shouting outside was greater, and now there was noise from the street too.

“A crash.”

“A car crash?”

“Buses. Two buses.”

“They breached?”

He nodded. “They’re in Besźel. They jackknifed on Finn Square.” A big crosshatched piazza. “Skidded into a wall in Ul Qoma.” I did not say anything. Any accident leading to breach obviously necessitated Breach, a few avatars gusting into view, sealing off the scene, sorting out parameters, ushering out the blameless, holding any breachers, handing authority back as quickly as possible to the police in the two cities. There was nothing in the fact of a traffic breach to lead to the noise I heard outside, so there must be more.

“They were buses taking refugees to camps. They’re out, and they haven’t been trained; they’re breaching everywhere, wandering between the cities without any idea what they’re doing.”

I could imagine the panic of bystanders and passersby, let alone those innocent motorists of Besźel and Ul Qoma, having swerved desperately out of the path of the careening vehicles, of necessity in and out of the topolganger city, trying hard to regain control and pull their vehicles back to where they dwelt. Faced then with scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders. Approaching people they saw, not attuned to the nuances of nationality—clothes, colours, hair, posture—oscillating back and forth between countries.

“We’ve called a closure,” Ashil said. “Complete lockdown. Clearing both the streets. Breach is out in force, everywhere, until this is finished.”

“What?”

Martial Breach. It had not happened in my lifetime. No entrance to either city, no passage between them, ultrahard enforcement of all Breach rules. The police of each city on mopping-up standby under Breach injunctions, adjuncts for the duration to the shutdown of borders. That was the sound I could hear, those mechanised voices over the growing roar of sirens: loudspeakers announcing the closure in both languages. Get off the streets.

“For a bus crash …?”

“It was deliberate,” Ashil said. “It was ambushed. By unificationists. It’s happened. They’re all over. There’s reports of breaches everywhere.” He was regaining himself.

“Unifs in which city …?” I said, and my question petered out as I guessed the answer.

“Both. They’re working in concert. We don’t even know if it was Besź unifs who stopped the buses.” Of course they worked together; that we knew. But that those little bands of eager utopians could do this? Could untether this breakdown, could make this happen? “They’re everywhere in both cities. This is their insurrection. They’re trying to merge us.”

ASHIL WAS HESITATING. That kept me talking, only that, that he was there in the room minutes more than he needed to be. He was checking the contents of his pockets, preparing himself into soldierly alertness. All Breach were called out. He was expected. The sirens continued, the voices continued.

“Ashil, for Christ’s sake listen to me. Listen to me. You think this is coincidence? Come on. Ashil, don’t open that door. You think we get to this, you think we figure this out, get this far and all of a sudden there’s a fucking uprising? Someone’s doing this, Ashil. To get you and all the Breach out and away from them.

“How did you find out about which companies were here when? The nights Mahalia delivered.”

He was motionless. “We’re Breach,” he said eventually. “We can do whatever we need …”

“Damn it, Ashil. I’m not some breacher for you to scare; I need to know. How do you investigate?”

At last: “Taps. Informants.” Glance up at the window, at a welling-up of the crisis sound. He waited by the door for more from me.

“Agents or systems in offices in Besźel and Ul Qoma tell you what you need to know, right? So someone somewhere was going through databases trying to find out who was where, when, in the Besź Chamber of Commerce.

“It’s been red-flagged, Ashil. You sent someone looking, and them pulling up files has been seen. What better evidence do you need that we’re onto something? You’ve seen the unifs. They’re nothing. Besźel and Ul Qoma, doesn’t make a difference, they’re a tiny bunch of dewy-eyed punks. There’s more agents than agitators; someone’s given an order. Someone’s engineered this because they’ve realised we’re onto them.

“Wait,” I said. “The lockdown … It’s not just Copula Hall, right? All borders to everywhere are closed, and no flights in or out, right?”

“BesźAir and Illitania are grounded. The airports aren’t taking incoming traffic.”

“What about private flights?”

“… The instruction’s the same, but they’re not under our authority like the national carriers, so it’s a bit more—”

“That’s what this is. You can’t lock them down, not in time. Someone’s getting out. We have to get to the Sear and Core building.”

“That’s where—”

“That’s where what’s happening’s happening. This …” I pointed at the window. We heard the shattering of glass, the shouts, the frenetics of vehicles in panicked rush, the fight sounds. “This is a decoy.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

IN THE STREETS we went through the last throes, the nerve twitches of a little revolution that had died before it was born, and had not known it. Those dying flails remained dangerous, though, and we were in a soldierly way. No curfew could contain this panic.

People were running, in both cities, along the street in front of us while the barks of public announcements in Besź and Illitan warned them this was a Breach lockdown. Windows broke. Some figures I saw run did so with more giddiness than terror. Not unifs, too small and too aimless: teenagers throwing stones, in their most transgressive act ever, little hurled breaches breaking glass in the city they did not live or stand in. An Ul Qoman fire crew sped in its bleating engine the length of the road, towards where the night sky glowed. A Besź wagon followed seconds behind it: they were still trying to maintain their distinctions, one fighting the fire in one part of the conjoined facade, the other in the other.

Those kids had better get out of the street fast, because Breach were everywhere. Unseen by most still out that night, maintaining their covert methods. Running I saw other Breach moving in what could pass as the urban panic of citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma but was a somewhat different motion, a more purposeful, predatory motion like Ashil’s and mine. I could see them because of recent practice, as they could see me.

We saw a unif gang. It was shocking to me even then after days of interstitial life to see them running together, from both chapters, in clothes which despite their transnational punk-and-rocker jackets and patches clearly marked them, to those attuned to urban semiosis, as from, whatever their desire, either Besźel or Ul Qoma. Now they were grouped as one, dragging a grassroots breach with them as they went from wall to wall spraying slogans in a rather artful combine of Besź and Illitan, words that, perfectly legible if somewhat filigreed and seriffed, read TOGETHER! UNITY! in both languages.

Ashil reached. He carried a weapon he had prepared before we left. I had not seen it closely.

“We don’t have time …” I started to say, but from the shadows around that insurgence a small group of figures did not so much emerge as come into focus. Breach. “How do you move like that?” I said. The avatars were outnumbered, but they moved without fear into that group, where with sudden not dramatic but very brutal locks and throws they incapacitated three of the gang. Some of the others rallied, and the Breach raised weapons. I did not hear anything but two unifs dropped.

“Jesus,” I said, but we were moving.

With a key and a quick expert twist Ashil opened a random parked car, selected by unclear criteria. “Get in.” He glanced back. “Cessation’s best done out of sight; they’ll move them. This is an emergency. Both cities are Breach now.”

“Jesus …”

“Only where it can’t be avoided. Only to secure the cities and the Breach.”

“What about the refugees?”

“There are other possibilities.” He started the engine.

There were few cars on the streets. The trouble always seemed to be around corners from us. Small groups of Breach were moving. Several times someone, Breach, appeared in the chaos and seemed about to stop us; but each time Ashil stared or slapped his sigil or drummed in some secret fingercode, and his status as avatar was noted and we were away.

I had begged for more Breach to come with us. “They won’t,” he had said. “They won’t believe. I should be with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone’s dealing with this. I don’t have time to win the argument.”

He said this, and it had been abruptly clear how few Breach there were. How thin a line. The crude democracy of their methodology, their decentralised self-ordering, meant that Ashil could do this mission the importance of which I had convinced him, but the crisis meant we were alone.

Ashil took us across lanes of highway, through straining borders, avoiding little anarchies. Militsya and policzai were on corners. Sometimes Breach would emerge from the night with that uncanny motion they perfected and order the local police to do something—to take some unif or body away, to guard something—then disappear again. Twice I saw them escorting terrified north African men and women from somewhere to somewhere, refugees made the levers of this breakdown.

“It isn’t possible, this, we’ve …” Ashil interrupted himself, touched his earpiece as reports came in.

There would be camps full of unificationists after this. We were in a moment of outright foregone conclusion, but the unifs still fought to mobilise populations deeply averse to their mission. Perhaps the memory of this joint action would buoy up whichever of them remained after that night. It must be an intoxication to step through the borders and greet their foreign comrades across what they made suddenly one street, to make their own country even if just for seconds at night in front of a scrawled slogan and a broken window. They must know by now that the populaces were not coming with them, but they did not disappear back to their respective cities. How could they go back now? Honour, despair, or bravery kept them coming.

“It isn’t possible,” Ashil said. “There is no way the head of Sear and Core, some outsider, could have constructed this … We’ve …” He listened, set his face. “We’ve lost avatars.” What a war, this now bloody war between those dedicated to bringing the cities together and the force charged with keeping them apart.

UNITY had been half written across the face of the Ungir Hall which was also the Sul Kibai Palace, so now in dripping paint the building said something nonsense. What passed as Besźel’s business districts were nowhere near the Ul Qoman equivalent. The headquarters of Sear and Core were on the banks of the Colinin, one of the few successes in the attempts to revivify Besźel’s dying dockside. We passed the dark water.

We both looked up at percussion in the otherwise empty locked-down sky. A helicopter the only thing in the air, backlit by its own powerful lights as it left us below.

“It’s them,” I said. “We’re too late.” But the copter was coming in from the west, towards the riverbank. It was not an exit; it was a pickup. “Come on.”

Even in such a distracting night Ashil’s driving prowess cowed me. He veered across the dark bridge, took a one-way total street in Besźel the wrong way, startling pedestrians trying to get out of the night, through a crosshatch plaza then a total Ul Qoma street. I was leaning to watch the helicopter descend into the roofscape by the river, half a mile ahead of us.

“It’s down,” I said. “Move.”

There was the reconfigured warehouse, the inflatable gasrooms of Ul Qoman buildings to either side of it. No one was in the square, but there were lights on throughout the Sear and Core building, despite the hour, and there were guards in the entrance. They came towards us aggressively when we entered. Marbled and fluorescently lit, the S&C logo in stainless steel and placed as if it were art on the walls, magazines and corporate reports made to look like magazines on tables by sofas.

“Get the fuck out,” a man said. Besź ex-military. He put his hand to his holster and led his men towards us. He came up short a moment later: he saw how Ashil moved.

“Stand down,” Ashil said, glowering to intimidate. “The whole of Besźel’s in Breach tonight.” He did not have to show his sigil. The men fell back. “Unlock the lift now, give me the keys to reach the helipad, and stand down. No one else comes in.”

If the security had been foreign, had come from Sear and Core’s home country, or been drafted in from its European or North American operations, they might not have obeyed. But this was Besźel and the security was Besź, and they did as Ashil said. In the elevator, he drew out his weapon. A big pistol of unfamiliar design. Its barrel encased, muzzled in some dramatic silencer. He worked the key the security had given us, to the corporate levels, all the way up.

THE DOOR OPENED onto gusts of hard cold air amid surrounds of vaulting roofs and antennae. The tethers of the Ul Qoman gasrooms, a few streets off the mirrored fronts of Ul Qoman businesses, the spires of temples in both cities, and there in the darkness and the wind ahead of us behind a thicket of safety rails the helipad. The dark vehicle waiting, its rotor turning very slowly, almost without noise. Gathered before it a group of men.

We could not hear much except the bass of the engine, the siren-infested putting down of unification riots all around us. The men by the helicopter did not hear us as we approached. We stayed close to cover. Ashil led me towards the aircraft, the gang who did not yet see us. There were four of them. Two were large and shaven-headed. They looked like ultranats: True Citizens on secret commission. They stood around a suited man I did not know and someone I could not see from the way he stood, in deep and animated conversation.

I heard nothing, but one of the men saw us. There was a commotion and they turned. From his cockpit the pilot of the helicopter swivelled the police-strength light he held. Just before it framed us the gathered men moved and I could see the last man, staring straight at me.

It was Mikhel Buric. The Social Democrat, the opposition, the other man on the Chamber of Commerce.

Blinded by the floodlight I felt Ashil grab me and pull me behind a thick iron ventilator pipe. There was a moment of dragged-out quiet. I waited for a shot but no one shot.

“Buric,” I said to Ashil. “Buric. I knew there was no way Syedr could do this.”

Buric was the contact man, the organiser. Who knew Mahalia’s predilections, who had seen her on her first visit to Besźel, when she angered everyone at the conference with her undergraduate dissidence. Buric the operator. He knew her work and what she wanted, that abhistory, the comforts of paranoia, a cosseting by the man behind the curtain. In the Chamber of Commerce as he was, he was in a position to provide it. To find an outlet for what she stole at his behest, for the invented benefit of Orciny.

“It was all geared stuff that got stolen,” I said. “Sear and Core are investigating the artefacts. This is a science experiment.”

It was his informers—he like all Besź politicians had them—who had told Buric that investigations had occurred into Sear and Core, that we were chasing down the truth. Perhaps he thought we had understood more than we had, would be shocked at how little of this we could have predicted. It would not take so much for a man in his position to order the government provocateurs in the poor foolish unificationists to begin their work, to forestall Breach so he and his collaborators could get away.

“They’re armed?” Ashil glanced out and nodded.

“Mikhel Buric?” I shouted. “Buric? What are True Citizens doing with a liberal sellout like you? You getting good soldiers like Yorj killed? Bumping off students you think are getting too close to your bullshit?”

“Piss off, Borlú,” he said. He did not sound angry. “We’re all patriots. They know my record.” A noise joined the noise of the night. The helicopter’s engine, speeding up.

Ashil looked at me and stepped out into full view.

“Mikhel Buric,” he said, in his frightening voice. He kept his gun unwavering and walked behind it, as if it led him, towards the helicopter. “You’re answerable to Breach. Come with me.” I followed him. He glanced at the man beside Buric.

“Ian Croft, regional head of CorIntech,” Buric said to Ashil. He folded his arms. “A guest here. Address your remarks to me. And fuck yourself.” The True Citizens had their own pistols up. Buric moved towards the helicopter.

“Stay where you are,” Ashil said. “You will step back,” he shouted at the True Citizens. “I am Breach.”

“So what?” Buric said. “I’ve spent years running this place. I’ve kept the unifs in line, I’ve been getting business for Besźel, I’ve been taking their damned gewgaws out from under Ul Qoman noses, and what do you do? You gutless Breach? You protect Ul Qoma.”

Ashil actually gaped a moment at that.

“He’s playing to them,” I whispered. “To the True Citizens.”

“Unifs have one thing right,” Buric said. “There’s only one city, and if it weren’t for the superstition and cowardice of the populace, kept in place by you goddamned Breach, we’d all know there was only one city. And that city is called Besźel. And you’re telling patriots to obey you? I warned them, I warned my comrades you might turn up, despite it being made clear you have no business here.”

“That’s why you leaked the footage of the van,” I said. “To keep Breach out of it, send the mess to the militsya instead.”

“Breach’s priorities are not Besźel’s,” Buric said. “Fuck the Breach.” He said it carefully. “Here we recognise only one authority, you pissing little neither-nor, and that is Besźel.”

He indicated Croft to precede him into the helicopter. The True Citizens stared. They were not quite ready to fire on Ashil, to provoke Breach war—you could see a kind of blasphemy-drunkenness in their look at the intransigence they were already showing, disobeying Breach even this far—but they would not lower their guns either. If he shot they would shoot back, and there were two of them. High on their obedience to Buric they did not need to know anything about where their paymaster was going or why, only that he had charged them to cover his back while he did. They were fired with jingo bravery.

“I’m not Breach,” I said.

Buric turned to look at me. The True Citizens stared at me. I felt Ashil’s hesitation. He kept his weapon up.

“I’m not Breach.” I breathed deep. “I am Inspector Tyador Borlú. Besźel Extreme Crimes Squad. I’m not here for Breach, Buric. I represent the Besźel policzai, to enforce Besź law. Because you broke it.

“Smuggling’s not my department; take what you want. I’m not a political man—I don’t care if you mess with Ul Qoma. I’m here because you’re a murderer.

“Mahalia wasn’t Ul Qoman, nor an enemy of Besźel, and if she seemed to be, it was only because she believed the crap you told her, so you could sell what she supplied you, for this foreigner’s R and D. Doing it for Besźel, my arse: you’re just a fence for foreign bucks.”

The True Citizens looked uneasy.

“But she realised she’d been lied to. That she wasn’t righting antique wrongs or learning any hidden truth. That you’d made her a thief. You sent Yorjavic over to get rid of her. That makes it an Ul Qoman crime, so even with the links we will find between you and him, nothing I can do. But that’s not the end of it. When you heard Yolanda was hiding, you thought Mahalia’d told her something. Couldn’t risk her talking.

“You were smart to get Yorj to take her out from his side of the checkpoint, keep Breach off your backs. But that makes his shot, and the order you gave for it, Besź. And that makes you mine.

“Minister Mikhel Buric, by the authority vested in me by the government and courts of the Commonwealth of Besźel, you are under arrest for Conspiracy to Murder Yolanda Rodriguez. You are coming with me.”

SECOND AFTER SECOND of astonished silence. I stepped slowly forward, past Ashil, towards Mikhel Buric.

It would not last. The True Citizens mostly had not much more respect for we who they believed were the weak local police than for many other of the herdlike masses of Besźel. But those were ugly charges, in Besźel’s name, that did not sound like the politics for which they were signed up, or the reasons they might have been given for those killings, if they even knew about them. The two men looked at each other uncertainly.

Ashil moved. I breathed out. “Fuck damn,” Buric said. From his pocket he took his own small pistol and raised it and pointed it at me. I said, “Oh,” or something as I stumbled back. I heard a shot but it did not sound as I expected. Not explosive; it was a hard-breathed gust of breath, a rush. I remember thinking that and being surprised that I would notice such a thing as I died.

Buric leapt into instant backward scarecrow motion, his limbs crazy and a rush of colour on his chest. I had not been shot; he had been shot. He threw his little weapon away as if deliberately. It was the silenced blast of Ashil’s pistol I had heard. Buric fell, his chest all blood.

Now, there, that was the sound of shots. Two, quickly, a third. Ashil fell. The True Citizens had fired on him.

“Stop, stop,” I screamed. “Hold your fucking fire!” I scrabbled crabwise back to him. Ashil was sprawled across the concrete, bleeding. He was growling in pain.

“You two are under fucking arrest,” I shouted. The True Citizens stared at each other, at me, at the unmoving dead Buric. This escort job had become suddenly violent and utterly confusing. You could see them glimpse the scale of the web that snagged them. One muttered to the other and they backed away, jogged towards the lift shaft.

“Stay where you are,” I shouted, but they ignored me as I knelt by wheezing Ashil. Croft still stood motionless by the helicopter. “Don’t you goddamn move,” I said, but the True Citizens pulled open the door to the roof and disappeared back down into Besźel.

“I’m alright, I’m alright,” Ashil gasped. I patted him to find his injuries. Below his clothes he was wearing some kind of armour. It had stopped what would have been the killing bullet, but he had been also hit below his shoulder and was bleeding and in pain. “You,” he managed to shout to Sear and Core’s man. “Stay. You may be protected in Besźel but you’re not in Besźel if I say you’re not. You’re in Breach.”

Croft leaned into the cockpit and said something to the pilot, who nodded and sped up the rotor.

“Are you finished?” Croft said.

“Get out. That vehicle’s grounded.” Even through pain-gritted teeth and having dropped his pistol, Ashil made his demand.

“I’m neither Besź nor Ul Qoman,” Croft said. He spoke in English, though he clearly understood us. “I’m neither interested in nor scared of you. I’m leaving. ‘Breach.’” He shook his head. “Freak show. You think anyone beyond these odd little cities cares about you? They may bankroll you and do what you say, ask no questions, they may need to be scared of you, but no one else does.” He sat next to the pilot and strapped himself in. “Not that I think you could, but I strongly suggest you and your colleagues don’t try to stop this vehicle. ‘Grounded.’ What do you think would happen if you provoked my government? It’s funny enough the idea of either Besźel or Ul Qoma going to war against a real country. Let alone you, Breach.”

He closed the door. We did not try to get up for a while, Ashil and I. He lay there, me kneeling behind him, as the helicopter grew louder and the distended-looking thing eventually bobbed up as if dangled from string, pouring air down on us, ripping our clothes every way and buffeting Buric’s corpse. It tore away between the low towers of the two cities, in the airspace of Besźel and Ul Qoma, once again the only thing in the sky.

I watched it go. An invasion of Breach. Paratroopers landing in either city, storming the secret offices in their contested buildings. To attack Breach an invader would have to breach Besźel and Ul Qoma.

“Wounded avatar,” Ashil said into his radio. He gave our location. “Assist.”

“Coming,” the machine said.

He sat back against the wall. In the east the sky was beginning faintly to lighten. There were still noises of violence from below, but fewer and ebbing. There were more sirens, Besź and Ul Qoman, as the policzai and militsya reclaimed their own streets, as Breach withdrew where it could. There would be a day more of lockdown to clear last nests of unifs, to return to normalcy, to corral the lost refugees back to the camps, but we were past the worst of it. I watched the dawn-lit clouds begin. I checked Buric’s body, but he carried nothing on him.

ASHIL SAID SOMETHING. His voice was weak, and I had to have him repeat himself.

“I still can’t believe it,” he said. “That he could have done this.”

“Who?”

“Buric. Any of them.”

I leaned against a chimney and watched him. I watched the sun coming.

“No,” I said finally. “She was too smart. Young but…”

“… Yes. She worked it out in the end, but you wouldn’t think Buric could have taken her in to begin with.”

“And then the way it was done,” I said slowly. “If he had someone killed we wouldn’t find the body.” Buric was not competent enough at one end, too competent at the other, to make sense of this story. I sat still in the slowly growing light as we waited for help. “She was a specialist,” I said. “She knew all about the history. Buric was clever, but not like that.”

“What are you thinking, Tye?” There were sounds from one of the doors that jutted onto the roof. A slamming and it flew open, disgorging someone I vaguely recognised as Breach. She came towards us, speaking into her radio.

“How did they know where Yolanda would be?”

“Heard your plans,” he said. “Listening to your friend Corwi’s phone …” He offered the idea.

“Why did they shoot at Bowden?” I said. Ashil looked at me. “At Copula Hall. We thought it was Orciny, going for him, because he inadvertently knew the truth. But it wasn’t Orciny. It was …” I looked at dead Buric. “His orders. So why would he go for Bowden?”

Ashil nodded. He spoke slowly. “They thought Mahalia told Yolanda what she knew, but…”

“Ashil?” the approaching woman shouted, and Ashil nodded. He even stood, but sat down again, heavily.

“Ashil,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I just…” He closed his eyes. The woman came faster. He opened them suddenly and looked at me. “Bowden told you all along Orciny wasn’t true.”

“He did.”

“Move,” the woman said. “I’ll get you out of here.”

“What are you going to do?” I said.

“Come on Ashil,” she said. “You’re weak …”

“Yes I am.” He interrupted her himself. “But…” He coughed. He stared at me and I at him.

“We have to get him out,” I said. “We have to get Breach to …” But they were still engaged in the end of that night, and there was no time to convince anyone.

“A second,” he said to the woman. He took his sigil out of his pocket and gave it to me, along with a ring of keys. “I authorize it,” he said. She raised an eyebrow but did not argue. “I think my gun went over there. The rest of Breach is still …”

“Give me your phone. What’s its number? Now go. Get him out of here. Ashil, I’ll do it.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

THE BREACH WITH ASHIL did not ask me for help. She shooed me away.

I found his weapon. It was heavy, its silencer almost organic-looking, like something phlegmy coating the muzzle. I had to look for far too long before I could find the safety catch. I did not risk trying to release the clip to check it. I pocketed it and took the stairs.

As I descended I scrolled through the numbers in the phone’s contacts list: they were meaningless-seeming strings of letters. I hand-dialled the number I needed. On a hunch I did not prefix a country code, and I was right—the connection made. When I reached the foyer it was ringing. The security looked at me uncertainly, but I held out the Breach sigil and they backed away.

“What… who is this?”

“Dhatt, it’s me.”

“Holy Light, Borlú? What … where are you? Where’ve you been? What’s going on?”

“Dhatt, shut up and listen. I know it’s not morning yet, but I need you to wake up and I need you to help me. Listen.”

“Light, Borlú, you think I’m sleeping? We thought you were with Breach … Where are you? Do you know what’s going on?”

“I am with Breach. Listen. You’re not back at work, right?”

“Fuck no, I’m still fucked—”

“I need you to help me. Where’s Bowden? You lot took him in for questioning, right?”

“Bowden? Yeah, but we didn’t hold him. Why?”

“Where is he?”

“Holy Light, Borlú.” I could hear him sitting up, pulling himself together. “At his flat. Don’t panic; he’s watched.”

“Send them in. Hold him. Till I get there. Just do it, please. Send them now. Thanks. Call me when you have him.”

“Wait, wait. What number is this? It isn’t showing on my phone.”

I told him. In the square, I watched the lightening sky and the birds wheel over both cities. I walked back and forth, one of few but not the only person out at that hour. I watched the others who passed close, furtively. I watched them trying to retreat to their home city—Besźel, Ul Qoma, Besźel, whichever—out of the massive Breach that was at last ebbing around them.

“Borlú. He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a detail on his apartment, right? For protection, after he got shot? Well, when stuff started going mad tonight it was all hands to the pump and they got pulled off onto some other job. I don’t know the ins and outs—no one was there for a little while. I sent them back—things are calming down a bit, the militsya and your lot are trying to sort out boundaries again—but it’s still fucking lunacy on the streets. Anyway I sent them back and they’ve just tried his door. He’s not there.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“Tyad, what the fuck is going on?”

“I’m getting there. Can you make a … I don’t know it in Illitan. Put out an APB on him.” I said it in English, copying the films.

“Yeah, we call it ‘send the halo.’ I’ll do it. But fuck, Tyad, you seen what chaos it is tonight. You think anyone’s going to see him?”

“We have to try. He’s trying to get out.”

“Well no problem, he’s fucked then, all the borders are closed, so wherever he turns up he’ll just get stopped. Even if he got through to Besźel earlier, your lot aren’t so incompetent they’re going to let people out.”

“Okay but still, put a halo on him?”

“Send, not put. Alright. We’re not going to find him, though.”

There were more rescue vehicles on the roads, in both cities, racing to the sites of continued crisis, here and there civilian vehicles, ostentatiously obeying their own city’s traffic laws, negotiating around each other with unusual legal care, like the few pedestrians. They must have good and defensible reasons to be out. The assiduousness of their unseeing and seeing was marked. The crosshatching is resilient.

It was predawn cold. With his skeleton key but without Ashil’s aplomb I was breaking into an Ul Qoman car when Dhatt called back. His voice was very different. He was—there was no other way to hear it—in some kind of awe.

“I was wrong. We’ve found him.”

“What? Where?”

“Copula Hall. The only militsya who weren’t sent onto the streets were the border guards. They recognised his photos. Been there for hours, they told me, must’ve headed there as soon as it all kicked off. He was inside the hall earlier, with everyone else who got trapped when it locked down. But listen.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Just waiting.”

“Have they got him?”

“Tyad, listen. They can’t. There’s a problem.”

“What’s going on?”

“They … They don’t think he’s in Ul Qoma.”

“He crossed? We need to talk to Besźel border patrol then—”

“No, listen. They can’t tell where he is.”

“… What? What? What the hell’s he doing?”

“He’s just… He’s been standing there, just outside the entrance, in full view, and then when he saw them moving towards him he started walking … but the way he’s moving … the clothes he’s wearing … they can’t tell whether he’s in Ul Qoma or Besźel.”

“Just check if he passed through before it closed.”

“Tyad, it’s fucking chaos here. No one’s been keeping track of the paperwork or the computer or whatever, so we don’t know if he did or not.”

“You have to get them to—”

“Tyad, listen to me. It was all I could do to get that out of them. They’re fucking terrified that even seeing him and saying that’s breach, and they’re not fucking wrong because you know what? It might be. Tonight of all nights. Breach are all over the place; there was just a fucking closure, Tyad. The last thing anyone’s going to do is risk breaching. That’s the last information you’re going to get unless Bowden moves so they can tell he’s definitely in Ul Qoma.”

“Where is he now?”

“How can I know? They won’t risk watching him. All they’d say was that he started walking. Just walking, but so no one can tell where he is.”

“No one’s stopping him?”

“They don’t even know if they can see him. But he’s not breaching either. They just… can’t tell.” Pause. “Tyad?”

“Jesus Christ, of course. He’s been waiting for someone to notice him.”

I sped the car towards Copula Hall. It was several miles away. I swore.

“What? Tyad, what?”

“This is what he wants. You said it yourself, Dhatt; he’ll be turned back from the border by the guard of whichever city he’s in. Which is?”

There were seconds of silence. “Fuck me,” Dhatt said. In that uncertain state, no one would stop Bowden. No one could.

“Where are you? How close are you to Copula Hall?”

“I can be there in ten minutes, but—”

But he would not stop Bowden either. Agonised as Dhatt was, he would not risk Breach by seeing a man who might not be in his city. I wanted to tell him not to be concerned, I wanted to beg him, but could I tell him he was wrong? I did not know he would not be watched. Could I say he was safe?

“Would the militsya arrest him on your say-so if he was definitely in Ul Qoma?”

“Sure, but they won’t follow him if they can’t risk seeing him.”

“Then you go. Dhatt, please. Listen. Nothing’s stopping you just going for a walk, right? Just going out there to Copula Hall and going wherever you want, and if it happens that someone who happens to be always in your vicinity tips a hand and turns out to be in Ul Qoma, then you could arrest him, right?” No one had to admit a thing, even to themselves. So long as there was no interaction while Bowden was unclear, there would be plausible deniability. “Please, Dhatt.”

“Alright. But listen, if I’m going for a fucking walk and someone in my maybe-grosstopic proximity does not turn out for certain into Ul Qoma, then I can’t arrest him.”

“Hold on. You’re right.” I could not ask him to risk breaching. And Bowden might have crossed and be Besźel, in which case Dhatt was powerless. “Okay. Go for your walk. Let me know when you’re at Copula Hall. I have to make another call.”

I disconnected and dialled another number, also without an international code, though it was in another country. Despite the hour the phone was answered almost immediately, and the voice that answered was alert.

“Corwi,” I said.

“Boss? Jesus, boss, where are you? What’s happening? Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“Corwi. I’ll tell you everything, but right now I can’t; right now I need you to move, and move fast, and not ask any questions and to just do exactly as I say. I need you to go to Copula Hall.”

I CHECKED MY WATCH and glanced at the sky, which seemed resistant to morning. In their respective cities Dhatt and Corwi were on their way to the border. It was Dhatt who called me first.

“I’m here, Borlú.”

“Can you see him? Have you found him? Where is he?” Silence. “Alright, Dhatt, listen.” He would not see what he was not sure was in Ul Qoma, but he would not have called me had there been no point to the contact. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the corner of Illya and Suhash.”

“Jesus, I wish I knew how to do conference calls on this thing. I’ve got call waiting figured, so stay on the damn phone.” I connected to Corwi. “Corwi? Listen.” I had to pull up by the kerb and compare the map of Ul Qoma in the car’s glove compartment with my knowledge of Besźel. Most of the Old Towns were crosshatched. “Corwi, I need you to go to ByulaStrász and … and WarszaStrász. You’ve seen the photos of Bowden, right?”

“Yeah …”

“I know, I know.” I drove. “If you’re not sure he’s in Besźel you won’t touch him. Like I said, I’m just asking you to go walking so that if anyone were to turn out to be in Besźel, you could arrest him. And tell me where you are. Okay? Careful.”

“Of what, boss?”

It was a point. Bowden would not likely attack either Dhatt or Corwi: do so and he would declare himself a criminal, in Besźel or Ul Qoma. Attack both and he would be in Breach, which, unbelievably, he was not yet. He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.

“Where are you, Dhatt?”

“Halfway up Teipei Street.” Teipei shared its space grosstopically with MirandiStrász in Besźel. I told Corwi where to go. “I won’t be long.” I was over the river now, and the number of vehicles on the street was increasing.

“Dhatt, where is he? Where are you, I mean?” He told me. Bowden had to stick to crosshatched streets. If he trod on a total area, he’d be committing to that city, and its police could take him. In the centres the most ancient streets were too narrow and twisted for the car to save me any time and I deserted it, running through the cobbles and overhanging eaves of Besźel Old Town by the intricate mosaics and vaults of Ul Qoma Old Town. “Move!” I shouted at the few people in my way. I held out the Breach sigil, the phone in my other hand.

“I’m at the end of MirandiStrász, boss.” Corwi’s voice had changed. She would not admit she could see Bowden—she did not, nor quite did she unsee him, she was between the two—but she was no longer simply following my directions. She was close to him. Perhaps he could see her.

One more time I examined Ashil’s gun, but it made little sense to me. I could not work it. I returned it to my pocket, went to where Corwi waited in Besźel, Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and to where Bowden walked no one was quite sure where.

I SAW DHATT FIRST. He was in his full uniform, his arm in a sling, his phone to his ear. I tapped him on the shoulder as I passed him. He started massively, saw it was me, and gasped. He closed his phone slowly and indicated a direction with his eyes, for the briefest moment. He stared at me with an expression I was not sure I recognised.

The glance was not necessary. Though a small number of people were braving the overlapping crosshatched street, Bowden was instantly visible. That gait. Strange, impossible. Not properly describ-able, but to anyone used to the physical vernaculars of Besźel and Ul Qoma, it was rootless and untethered, purposeful and without a country. I saw him from behind. He did not drift but strode with pathological neutrality away from the cities’ centres, ultimately to borders and the mountains and out to the rest of the continent.

In front of him a few curious locals were seeing him then with clear uncertainty half looking away, unsure where, in fact, to look. I pointed at them, each in turn, and made a go motion, and they went. Perhaps some watched from their windows, but that was deniable. I approached Bowden under the looming of Besźel and the intricate coiled gutters of Ul Qoma.

A few metres from him, Corwi watched me. She put her phone away and drew her weapon, but still would not look directly at Bowden, just in case he was not in Besźel. Perhaps we were watched by Breach, somewhere. Bowden had not yet transgressed for their attention: they could not touch him.

I held out my hand as I walked, and I did not slow down, but Corwi gripped it and we met each other’s gaze a moment. Looking back I saw her and Dhatt, metres apart in different cities, staring at me. It was really dawn at last.

“BOWDEN.”

He turned. His face was set. Tense. He held something the shape of which I could not make out.

“Inspector Borlú. Fancy meeting you … here?” He tried to grin but it did not go well.

“Where’s here?” I said. He shrugged. “It’s really impressive, what you’re doing,” I said. He shrugged again, with a mannerism neither Besź nor Ul Qoman. It would take him a day or more of walking, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are small countries. He could do it, walk out. How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours. He aimed with whatever it was he held.

“If you shoot me Breach’ll be on you.”

“If they’re watching,” he said. “I think probably you’re the only one here. There are centuries of borders to shore up, after tonight. And even if they are, it’s a moot question. What kind of crime would it be? Where are you?”

“You tried to cut her face off.” That ragged under-chin slit. “Did you … No, it was hers, it was her knife. You couldn’t though. So you slathered on her makeup instead.” He blinked, said nothing. “As if that would disguise her. What is that?” He showed the thing to me, a moment, before gripping and aiming it again. It was some verdigrised metal object, age-gnarled and ugly. It was clicking. It was patched with new metal bands.

“It broke. When I.” It did not sound as if he hesitated: his words simply stopped.

“… Jesus, that’s what you hit her with. When you realised she knew it was lies.” Grabbed and flailed, a moment’s rage. He could admit to anything now. So long as he remained in his superposition, whose law would take him? I saw that the thing’s handle, that he held, that pointed towards him, ended in an ugly sharp spike. “You grab it, smack her, she goes down.” I made stab motions. “Heat of the moment,” I said. “Right? Right?

“So did you not know how to fire it, then? Are they true, then?” I said. “All those ‘strange physics’ rumours? Is that one of the things Sear and Core were after? Sending one of their ranking visitors sightseeing, scuffing their heels in the park for? Just another tourist?”

“I wouldn’t call it a gun,” he said. “But… well, want to see what it can do?” He wagged it.

“Not tempted to sell it on yourself?” He looked offended. “How do you know what it does?”

“I’m an archaeologist and an historian,” he said. “And I’m incredibly good at it. And now I’m going.”

“Walking out of the city?” He inclined his head. “Which city?” He wagged his weapon no.

“I didn’t mean to, you know,” he said. “She was…” That time his words dried up. He swallowed.

“She must have been angry. To realise how you’d been lying to her.”

“I always told the truth. You heard me, Inspector. I told you many times. There’s no such place as Orciny.”

“Did you flatter her? Did you tell her she was the only one you could admit the truth to?”

“Borlú, I can kill you where you stand and, do you realise, no one will even know where we are. If you were in one place or the other they might come for me, but you’re not. The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where you were either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever. People would have to step over you. Because no one breached. Neither Besźel nor Ul Qoma could risk clearing you up. You’d lie there stinking up both cities until you were just a stain. I am going, Borlú. You think Besźel will come for you if I shoot you? Ul Qoma?” Corwi and Dhatt must have heard him, even if they made to unhear. Bowden looked only at me and did not move.

“My, well, Breach, my partner, was right,” I said. “Even if Buric could have thought this up, he didn’t have the expertise or the patience to put it together so it would have fooled Mahalia. She was smart. That took someone who knew the archives and the secrets and the Orciny rumours not just a bit but totally. Completely. You told the truth, like you say: there’s no such place as Orciny. You said it again and again. That was the point, wasn’t it?

“It wasn’t Buric’s idea, was it? After that conference where she made such a nuisance of herself? It certainly wasn’t Sear and Core—they would have hired someone to smuggle more efficiently, a little nickel-and-dime operation like that, they just went along with an opportunity that was presented. Sure you needed Buric’s resources to make it work, and he wasn’t going to turn down a chance to steal from Ul Qoma, pimp Besźel out—how much investment was tied to this?—and make a mint for himself. But it was your idea, and it was never about the money.

“It was because you missed Orciny. A way to have it both ways. Yes, sure you were wrong about Orciny, but you could make it so you were right, too.”

Choice artefacts had been excavated, the details of which only the archaeologists could know—or those who had left them there, as poor Yolanda had thought. Supposed-Orciny sent their supposed-agent sudden instructions, not to be delayed, no time to think or rethink—only, quickly, liberate, hand over.

“You told Mahalia she was the only one you’d tell the truth. That when you turned your back on your book, that was just you playing politics? Or did you tell her it was cowardice? That would be pretty winning. I bet you did that.” I approached him. His expression shifted. “‘It’s my shame, Mahalia, the pressure was too much. You’re braver than me, keep on; you’re so close, you’ll find it…’ Your shit messed up your whole career, and you can’t have that time back. So the next best thing, make it have been true all along. I’m sure the money was nice—can’t tell me they didn’t pay—and Buric had his reasons and Sear and Core had theirs, and the nats’ll do for anyone with a way with words and a buck. But it was Orciny that was the point for you, right?

“But Mahalia figured out that it was nonsense, Doctor Bowden.”

How much more perfect that unhistory would be, second time around, when he could construct the evidence not only from fragments in archives, not from the cross-reference of misunderstood documents, but could add to those planted sources, suggest partisan texts, even create messages—to himself, too, for her benefit and later for ours, that all the while he could dismiss as the nothings they were—from the nonplace itself. But still she worked out the truth.

“That must have been unpleasant for you,” I said.

His eyes were unhitched from wherever we were. “It got… That’s why.” She told him her deliveries—so all secret payments—would end. That was not why his rage.

“Did she think you were fooled too? Or did she realise you were behind it?” It was amazing that such a detail should almost be epiphenomenal. “I think she didn’t know. It wasn’t her character to taunt you. I think she thought she was protecting you. I think she arranged to meet you, to protect you. To tell you that you’d both been duped by someone. That you were both in danger.”

The rage of that attack. The task, that post-facto vindication of a dead project, destroyed. No point scoring, no competition. Just the pure fact that Mahalia had, without even knowing it, outsmarted him, realised that his invention was invention, despite his attempts to seal up the creation, to watertight it. She crushed him without guile or bile. The evidence destroyed his conception again, the improved version, Orciny 2.0, as it had the last time, when he had actually believed it. Mahalia died because she proved to Bowden that he had been a fool to believe the folktale he created.

“What is that thing? Did she …?” But she could not have got that out, and had she delivered it it would not be with him.

“I’ve had this for years,” he said. “This I found myself. When I was first digging. Security wasn’t always like now.”

“Where did you meet her? A bullshit dissensus? Some old empty bollocks building you told her was where Orciny did their magic?” It did not matter. The murder site would just be some empty place.

“… Would you believe me if I told you I really don’t remember the actual moment?” he said carefully.

“Yes.”

“Just this constant, this …” Reasoning, that broke his creation apart. He might have shown her the artefact as if it were evidence. It’s not Orciny! she perhaps said. We have to think! Who might want this stuff? The fury at that.

“You broke it.”

“Not irreparably. It’s tough. The artefacts are tough.” Despite being used to beat her to death.

“It was a good idea to take her through the checkpoint.”

“When I called him Buric wasn’t happy sending the driver, but he understood. It’s never been militsya or policzai that are the problem. We couldn’t let Breach notice us.”

“But your maps are out of date. I saw it on your desk, that time. All that junk you or Yorj picked up—was that from where you killed her?—was useless.”

“When did they build that skate park?” For a moment he managed to make it sound as if he was genuinely humourous about it. “That was supposed to be direct to the estuary.” Where the old iron would pull her down.

“Didn’t Yorjavic know his way around? It’s his city. Some soldier.”

“He never had reason to go to Pocost. I hadn’t been over since the conference. I bought that map I gave him years ago, and it was right last time I was there.”

“But goddamn urban renewal, right? There he was, van all loaded up, and there’s ramps and half-pipes between him and the water, and light’s coming. When that went wrong, that was when Buric and you … fell out.”

“Not really. We had words, but we thought it had blown over. No, what got him troubled was when you came to Ul Qoma,” he said. “That was when he realised there was trouble.”

“So … in a way I owe you an apology …” He tried to shrug. Even that motion was urbanly undecidable. He kept swallowing but his tics gave away nothing about where he was.

“If you like,” he said. “That’s when he set his True Citizens on hunt. Even tried to get you blaming Qoma First, with that bomb. And I think he thought I believed it, too.” Bowden looked disgusted. “He must’ve heard about the time it happened before.”

“For real. All those notes you wrote in Precursor, threatening yourself to get us off you. Fake burglaries. Added to your Orciny.” How he looked at me, I stopped myself saying Your bullshit. “What about Yolanda?”

“I’m … really sorry about her. Buric must have thought she and I were … that Mahalia or I’d told her something.”

“You hadn’t, though. Nor did Mahalia—she protected her from all that. In fact Yolanda was the only one who believed in Orciny all the way along. She was your biggest fan. Her and Aikam.” He stared, his face cold. He knew that neither of them were the smartest. I did not say anything for a minute.

“Christ you’re a liar, Bowden,” I said. “Even now, Jesus. Do you think I don’t know it was you who told Buric Yolanda’d be there?” I spoke and I could hear his shaking breath. “You sent them there in case of what she knew. Which as I say was nothing. You had her killed for nothing. But why did you come? You knew they’d try to kill you too.” We faced each other for a long silence.

“… You needed to be sure, didn’t you?” I said. “And so did they.”

They wouldn’t send out Yorjavic and organise that extraordinary cross-border assassination for Yolanda alone. They did not even know for sure what if anything she knew. Bowden, though: they knew what he knew. Everything.

They thought I believed it too, he had said. “You told them she’d be there, and that you were coming too because Qoma First were trying to kill you. Did they really think you’d believed it? … But they could check, couldn’t they?” I answered myself. “By if you turned up. You had to be there, or they’d know they were being played. If Yorjavic hadn’t seen you he’d have known you were planning something. He had to have both targets there.” Bowden’s strange gait and manner at the hall. “So you had to turn up and try and keep someone in his way …” I stopped. “Were there three targets?” I said. I was the reason it had gone wrong, after all. I shook my head.

“You knew they’d try to kill you, but it was worth the risk to get rid of her. Camouflage.” Who would suspect him of complicity, after Orciny tried to kill him?

He had a slowly souring face. “Where is Buric?”

“Dead.”

“Good. Good …”

I stepped towards him. He pointed the artefact at me like some stubby Bronze Age wand.

“What do you care?” I said. “What are you going to do? How long have you lived in the cities? Now what?

“It’s over. Orciny’s rubble.” Another step, he still aiming at me, mouth-breathing and eyes wide. “You’ve got one option. You’ve been to Besźel. You’ve lived in Ul Qoma. There’s one place left. Come on. You going to live anonymous in Istanbul? In Sebastopol? Make it to Paris? You think that’s going to be enough?

“Orciny is bullshit. Do you want to see what’s really in between?”

A second held. He hesitated long enough for some appearance.

Nasty broken man. The only thing more despicable than what he had done was the half-hidden eagerness with which he now took me up on my offer. It was not bravery on his part to come with me. He held out that heavy weapon thing to me and I took it. It rattled. The bulb full of gears, the old clockworks that had cut Mahalia’s head when the metal burst.

He sagged, with some moan: apology, plea, relief. I was not listening and don’t remember. I did not arrest him—I was not policzai, not then, and Breach do not arrest—but I had him, and exhaled, because it was over.

BOWDEN HAD STILL NOT COMMITTED to where he was. I said, “Which city are you in?” Dhatt and Corwi were close, ready, and whichever shared a locus with him would come forward when he said.

“Either,” he said.

So I grabbed him by the scruff, turned him, marched him away. Under the authority I’d been granted, I dragged Breach with me, enveloped him in it, pulled him out of either town into neither, into the Breach. Corwi and Dhatt watched me take him out of either of their reaches. I nodded thanks to them across their borders. They would not look at each other, but both nodded to me.

It occurred as I led Bowden shuffling with me that the breach I had been empowered to pursue, that I was still investigating and of which he was evidence, was still my own.

Coda
BREACH

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I DID NOT SEE THAT MACHINE AGAIN. It was funnelled into the bureaucracy of Breach. I never saw whatever it was it could do, whatever Sear and Core wanted, or if it could do anything.

Ul Qoma in the aftermath of Riot Night was buoyed up with tension. The militsya, even after the remaining unifs had been cleared out or arrested, or hidden their patches and disappeared, kept up high-profile, intrusive policing. Civil libertarians complained. Ul Qoma’s government announced a new campaign, Vigilant Neighbours, neighbourliness referring both to the people next door (what were they doing?) and to the connected city (see how important borders are?).

In Besźel the night led to a kind of exaggerated mutedness. It became almost bad luck to mention it. The newspapers massively played it down. Politicians, if they said anything, made circuitous mention of recent stresses or similar. But there was a pall. The city was subdued. Its unif population was as depleted, the remnants as careful and out of sight, as in Ul Qoma.

Both cleanups were fast. The Breach closure lasted thirty-six hours and was not mentioned again. The night led to twenty-two deaths in Ul Qoma, thirteen in Besźel, not including the refugees who died after the initial accidents, nor the disappeared. Now there were more foreign journalists in both sets of streets, doing more and less subtle follow-up reports. They made regular attempts to arrange an interview—“anonymous, of course”—with representatives of Breach.

“Has anyone from Breach ever broken ranks?” I said.

“Of course,” said Ashil. “But then they’re breaching, they’re insiles, and they’re ours.” He walked carefully, and wore bandages below his clothes and his hidden armour.

The first day after the riots, when I returned to the office dragging a semicompliant Bowden with me, I was locked into my cell. But the door had been unlocked since then. I had spent three days with Ashil, since his release from whatever hidden hospital it was where Breach received care. Each day he spent in my company, we walked the cities, in the Breach. I was learning from him how to walk between them, first in one, then the other, or in either, but without the ostentation of Bowden’s extraordinary motion—a more covert equivocation.

“How could he do it? Walk like that?”

“He’s been a student of the cities,” Ashil said. “Maybe it took an outsider to really see how citizens mark themselves, so as to walk between it.”

“Where is he?” I had asked Ashil this many times. He evaded answering in various ways. That time he said, as he had before, “There are mechanisms. He’s taken care of.”

It was overcast and dark, lightly raining. I turned up the collar of my coat. We were west of the river, by the crosshatched rails, a short stretch of tracks used by the trains of both cities, the timetable agreed internationally.

“But the thing is, he never breached.” I had not voiced this anxiety to Ashil before. He turned to look at me, massaged his injury. “Under what authority was he … How can we have him?”

Ashil walked us around the environs of the Bol Ye’an dig. I could hear the trains in Besźel, north of us, in Ul Qoma to the south. We would not go in, or even near enough to Bol Ye’an to be seen, but Ashil was walking through the various stages of the case, without saying so.

“I mean,” I said, “I know Breach doesn’t answer to anyone, but it… you have to present reports. Of all your cases. To the Oversight Committee.” He raised an eyebrow at that. “I know, I know they’ve been discredited because of Buric, but their line’s that that was the makeup of the members, right, not the committee itself. The checks and balances between the cities and Breach is still the same, right? They have a point, don’t you think? So you’ll have to justify taking Bowden.”

“No one cares about Bowden,” he said at last. “Not Ul Qoma, not Besźel, not Canada, not Orciny. But yes, we’ll present a form to them. Maybe, after he dumped Mahalia, he got back into Ul Qoma by Breach.”

“He didn’t dump her; it was Yorj—” I said.

“Maybe that’s how he did it,” Ashil continued. “We’ll see. Maybe we’ll push him into Besźel and pull him back to Ul Qoma. If we say he breached, he breached.” I looked at him.

Mahalia was gone. Her body had at last gone home. Ashil told me on the day her parents held her funeral.

Sear and Core had not left Besźel. It would risk attention to pull out after the creeping, confused revelations of Buric’s behaviour. The company and its tech arm had come up, but the chains of connection were vague. Buric’s possible contact was a regrettable unknown, and mistakes had been made, safeguards were being put in place. There were rumours that CorIntech would be sold.

Ashil and I went by tram, by Metro, by bus, by taxi, we walked. He threaded us like a suture in and out of Besźel and Ul Qoma.

“What about my breach?” I asked it at last. We had both been waiting for days. I did not ask When do I get to go back home? We took the funicular to the top of the park named for it, in Besźel at least.

“If he’d had an up-to-date map of Besźel you’d never have found her,” Ashil said. “Orciny.” He shook his head.

“Do you see any children in the Breach?” he said. “How would that work? If any were born—”

“They must be,” I interrupted, but he talked over me. “—how could they live here?” The clouds over the cities were dramatic, and I watched them, rather than him, and pictured children given up. “You know how I was made Breach,” he suddenly said.

“When do I get to go home?” I said pointlessly. He even smiled at that.

“You did an excellent job. You’ve seen how we work. Nowhere else works like the cities,” he said. “It’s not just us keeping them apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does most of the work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it’s not your fault, for more than the shortest time … you can’t come back from that.”

“Accidents. Road accidents, fires, inadvertent breaches …”

“Yes. Of course. If you race to get out again. If that’s your response to the Breach, then maybe you’ve got a chance. But even then you’re in trouble. And if it’s any longer than a moment, you can’t get out again. You’ll never unsee again. Most people who breach, well, you’ll find out about our sanctions soon. But there is another possibility, very occasionally.

“What do you know about the British Navy?” Ashil said. “A few centuries ago?” I looked at him. “I was recruited the same as everyone else in Breach. None of us were born here. We were all once in one place or the other. All of us breached once.”

There were many minutes of silence between us. “There are people I’d like to call,” I said.

HE WAS RIGHT. I imagined myself in Besźel now, unseeing the Ul Qoma of the crosshatched terrain. Living in half of the space. Unseeing all the people and the architecture and vehicles and the everything in and among which I had lived. I could pretend, perhaps, at best, but something would happen, and Breach would know.

“It was a big case,” he said. “The biggest ever. You’ll never have so big a case again.”

“I’m a detective,” I said. “Jesus. Do I have any choice?”

“Of course,” he said. “You’re here. There’s Breach, and there’s those who breach, those to whom we happen.” He did not look at me but out over the overlapping cities.

“Are any volunteers?”

“Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.

We walked towards my old flat, my press-ganger and I.

“Can I say good-bye to anyone? There are people I want to—”

“No,” he said. We walked.

“I’m a detective,” I said again. “Not a, whatever. I don’t work like you do.”

“That’s what we want. That’s why we were so glad you breached. Times are changing.”

So the methods may not be so unfamiliar as I feared. There may be others who proceed the traditional Breach way, the levering of intimidation, that self-styling as a night-fear, while I—using the siphoned-off information we filch online, the bugged phone calls from both cities, the networks of informants, the powers beyond any law, the centuries of fear, yes, too, sometimes, the intimations of other powers beyond us, of unknown shapes, that we are only avatars—was to investigate, as I have investigated for years. A new broom. Every office needs one. There’s a humour to the situation.

“I want to see Sariska. You know who she is, I guess. And Biszaya. I want to talk to Corwi, and Dhatt. To say good-bye at least.”

He was quiet for a while. “You can’t talk to them. This is how we work. If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything. But you can see them. If you stay out of sight.”

We compromised. I wrote letters to my erstwhile lovers. Handwritten and delivered by hand, but not by my hand. I did not tell Sariska or Biszaya anything but that I would miss them. I was not just being kind.

My colleagues I came close to, and though I did not speak to them, both of them could see me. But Dhatt in Ul Qoma, and later Corwi in Besźel, could tell I was not, or not totally, or not only, in their city. They did not speak to me. They would not risk it.

Dhatt I saw as he emerged from his office. He stopped short at the sight of me. I stood by a hoarding outside an Ul Qoman office, with my head down so he could tell it was me but not my expression. I raised my hand to him. He hesitated a long time then spread his fingers, a waveless wave. I backed into the shadows. He walked away first.

Corwi was at a café. She was in Besźel’s Ul Qomatown. She made me smile. I watched her drinking her creamy Ul Qoman tea in the establishment I had shown her. I watched her from the shade of an alley for several seconds before I realised that she was looking right at me, that she knew I was there. It was she who said good-bye to me, with a raised cup, tipped in salute. I mouthed at her, though even she could not have seen it, thanks, and good-bye.

I have a great deal to learn, and no choice but to learn it, or to go rogue, and there is no one hunted like a Breach renegade. So, not ready for that or the revenge of my new community of bare, extracity lives, I make my choice of those two nonchoices. My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.

That is the end of the case of Orciny and the archaeologists, the last case of Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad. Inspector Tyador Borlú is gone. I sign off Tye, avatar of Breach, following my mentor on my probation out of Besźel and out of Ul Qoma. We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On that issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city.

READER BEWARE! Spoilers follow in this interview with China Miéville, and those who wish to fully enjoy The City & The City—and indeed this interview, as well—are strongly advised to read no further until they have finished the novel.

A Conversation with China Miéville

Random House Reader’s Circle: In many ways, The City & The City represents a departure for you in subject and style, but before we get to that, I’d like to focus on a central element of this book that has been a consistent and characteristic component of your fiction right from the start: that is, the city … and more, the fantastic city. Why this intense engagement with cityscapes both real and imaginary, and how has that engagement evolved over time, from the London of your first novel, King Rat, to New Crobuzon, UnLondon, and, finally, the cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma?

China Miéville: It’s a bit of a lame answer, but truthfully I just don’t know. I’ve always lived in cities and always found them tremendously exciting places to live, but also loved how they get refracted through art. There’s such a long, powerful, and brilliant tradition it would be more surprising if I wasn’t pulled that way, I think.

The evolution is probably something other people are better placed than me to judge. But it feels like after the unrestrained splurge—and I don’t say that as a self-diss, I know it certainly doesn’t work for all readers, but I do think there are things you can do with a lack of self-discipline that you can’t do with more discipline—of Perdido, which was a kind of chaotic homage to cities in a very rococo way, I’ve got, relatively suddenly with The City & The City, more interested in something of a more restrained, maybe even melancholic urban sense. Of course, as soon as the next book comes out, that might change again.

RHRC: The use of language in this novel is notably sparer than in any of your previous books. How much of that is due to the demands of the story and perhaps even of the genre of the police procedural, which provides a certain structure to the novel, and how much is a natural progression of your style?

CM: Each book demands a particular voice—I don’t think this is a progression in the sense of an ineluctable movement in this direction. I think it’s enormously possible I’ll move back and forward between more and less baroque prose. But 1) there are things you can do with a restrained prose that you can’t with lusher prose—and vice versa; 2) it was a first-person narrative, and if you have an interior monologue of that kind of verbal indulgence you immediately create a rather unlikely, or mediated or foppish or something narrator. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Because yes, 3) this was to do with wanting to be completely faithful to certain noiresque police procedural protocols.

RHRC: The City & The City is certainly not a traditional fantasy novel. It’s also very different from your previous fantasy novels. In fact, apart from the central conceit, the argument could be made that it’s not fantasy at all. And that conceit—of the two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, sharing physical but not legal or social space—can be interpreted both in fantastic or science fictional terms and in realistic, psychological terms. Did you set out to write a novel that was itself crosshatched—a term you’ve adopted from the graphic arts—in terms of genre? Would you consider this an example of slipstream or interstitial fiction?

CM: I consider it a crime novel, above all. The question of whether or not it’s fantasy doesn’t have a stable answer; it’s to do with how it’s read, what people get out of it, and so on. Certainly I was very aware of genre, and of the fantastic, and there’s a certain kind of (I hope good-natured) teasing of readers about the whether-or-not-ness of a fantastic explanation for the setting. And other issues, I think, about the drive to world-creation, and the hankering for a certain kind of hermetic totality that you see in fantasy, and so on. Not I hope that that stuff is heavy-handed, but it’s there in my mind. I don’t mind whether other people think the book’s “splipstream,” or “interstitial,” or whatever. I think of it as within the fantastic tradition, but for me that’s always been a very broad church. Whether it’s fantasy in the narrower sense, I don’t much mind. Certainly I’m not abjuring the term—it would be ungrateful and ridiculous for me to distance myself from a set of reading and writing traditions, and from a set of aesthetics and thematics that have furnished my mind since forever.

RHRC: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that noir fiction and the fiction of the fantastic spring from common roots, and however far they may seemingly have diverged from each other, that commonality is still there, waiting to be evoked. That certainly seems true of The City & The City.

CM: I wholeheartedly agree. I’ve said before that I’m interested in the incredibly creative and fecund disingenuity of the realist crime novel, that pretended realism of what is, I think, at its best, a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle. All the best noir—or at least I should say the stuff I like most—reads oneirically. Chandler and Kafka seem to me to have a lot more shared terrain than Chandler and a true-crime book. There’s a bunch of books that are more explicitly exploring the shared terrain of the fantastic and the noir around at the moment, but I think that’s a kind of uncovering as much as anything.

RHRC: The practical geography of Beszel and Ul Qoma, as a shared terrain with various available and unavailable modes of navigation, reminded me of the black and white squares of a chessboard, whose use is moderated by an essentially arbitrary but nevertheless strictly enforced set of rules. I know you have a longstanding interest in games and gaming, and I wonder how much that interest influenced the development of this book.

CM: Not so much at a conscious level. Consciously the organizing metaphor at a cartographic level was, as you’ve said, pen-and-ink artwork—cross-hatching. Draw lines one way—you have a shadow. Draw them the other way—you have another shadow. Overlay them—you have a deeper shadow. I think of Beszel and Ul Qoma as distinct layers of a shaded totality. At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos—enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational.

RHRC: As I began to catch on to the unique nature of Beszel and Ul Qoma, I was reminded of the short story “Reports of Certain Events in London,” which appeared in your collection Looking for Jake. Was that in any way a starting point for The City & The City? Was there a particular moment in which the idea for this book took form, or did it evolve slowly, over time?

CM: Several people have made that connection. It wasn’t something that occurred to me, but I can certainly see why people would think so, and they—you—may have a point. Though you could make a case that it’s a kind of negative influence in some ways—in its stress on fluid, predatory, unknowable geography, the short story is the anti-this. The City & The City is as much about bureaucracy as anything. The basic idea for the setting of the cities is something I’d been chewing over for several years. I kind of mentally auditioned various stories to see which would suit it best, which would showcase it but not heavy-handedly, not at the expense of narrative. That was the idea.

RHRC: Your work has always had a strong element of the surreal to it, but it struck me that in this novel you are veering away from the Daliesque—hybrids of insect and human, or a man with an occupied birdcage for a head—toward a less extravagant brand of surrealism, one rooted less in the exotic imagery of dreams and nightmares than in quotidian images from the waking world—here I’m thinking of the influence of Bruno Schulz, whom you cite in your acknowledgments. What accounts for this shift?

CM: I don’t like Dali, though of course you can’t ever escape his visual influence. I like Andre Breton’s dismissive nickname for him—Avida Dollars. But in terms of the sort of vaguely postdecadent curlicued baroque of his images, as compared to the subtler dreams of Schulz or Kafka, yes, I see that shift. What accounts for the shift, however, is an impossible question to answer. I’ve loved Schulz for a long time—like lots of people of my generation I came to him via the Quay Brothers’ film Street of Crocodiles—and Kafka, and a whole tradition of (very broadly) eastern European fantastic fiction and art, as well as a great love of the landscape of Prague, for example; and I wanted to write something inspired by that. Why the shift? I’m less breathless than I used to be. I’m older. I wanted to try something new. I wanted to write a homage to those traditions (and to the extraordinary prose of high noir). I wanted to write a book that my mother would have loved.

RHRC: In addition to Schulz, you acknowledge Raymond Chandler, Franz Kafka, Alfred Kubin, and Jan Morris. The first two I’m familiar with, and their influence here seems plain, but I’m not familiar with either Kubin or Morris, and I daresay that will be true for many of your American readers as well. What is your debt to them?

CM: Kubin was an Austrian writer and artist, and his book The Other Side, was a kind of Expressionist investigation of urban anxiety and the compulsions to create and populate cities of the mind—whatever dangers that brings—the fallacious safety of a transplanted metropolitan state in a kind of remote hinterland, was a big influence. Jan Morris is more of an argumentative influence. She wrote a book called Hav, which is the revisiting several years on of her book Last Letters from Hav, about a journey to an imagined country. I admired the book but had a very frustrated argument with it. Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not. The City & The City is having a respectful but pretty argumentative conversation with Hav. In part, I never felt Hav had enough of an identity, because she so stressed its nature as a syncretic port—and I greatly admired her abjuring of a kind of essentialist “indigenousism”—that in fact it felt mostly like a group of minorities meeting against an opaque and colorless backdrop. They never seemed to gestalt into anything bigger. I seem to be in a minority in this feeling, but when I realized that I’d been thinking about the book a lot as I wrote The City & The City, even thinking about it in frustration, it seemed only appropriate to give it a shout-out.

RHRC: Some readers and critics will no doubt be tempted to see this novel as an allegory of the relations between the West and the Muslim world, due to the resemblance between the city name of Ul Qoma and the terrorist group Al Qaeda. And many other allegorical readings are possible based on various political, social, and sexual divisions and/or cross-hatchings. Do you have any sympathy with such readings?

CM: Personally I make a big distinction between allegorical and metaphoric readings (though I’m not too bothered about terminology, once we’ve established what we’re talking about). To me, the point of allegorical readings is the search for what Fredric Jameson calls a “master code” to “solve” the story, to work out what it’s “about,” or, worse, what it’s “really about.” And that approach I have very little sympathy with. In this I’m a follower of Tolkien, who stressed his “cordial dislike” of allegory. I dislike it because I think it renders fiction pretty pointless, if a story really is written to mean something else—and I’m not suggesting there’s no place for polemical or satirical or whatever fiction, just that if it’s totally reducible in a very straight way, then why not just say that thing? Fiction is always more interesting to the extent that there’s an evasive surplus and/or a specificity. So it’s not saying there are no meanings, but that there are more than just those meanings. The problem with allegorical decoding as a method isn’t that it reads too much into a story, but that it reads too little into it. Allegories are always more interesting when they overspill their own levees. Metaphor, for me, is much more determinedly like that. Metaphor is always fractally fecund, and there’s always more and less to it. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in no way do I say some of those readings aren’t valid (though I must say I have very little sympathy for the East versus West one, which is explicitly denied in the text more than once), but that I hope people don’t think the book is “solved” by that. I don’t think any book can be so solved.

RHRC: Of course, you go much further than simple cross-hatching and actually enter into the spaces between Beszel and Ul Qoma, as well as the spaces disputed by them, into what I’m going to call “territories of superposition,” after the principle of quantum superposition. Here we’re in the realm of the Breach and also of the invisible city of Orciny, which may or may not be a myth. Were the Breach and Orciny always part of the novel, or did you only become aware of their existence, so to speak, through circumstantial evidence as you were writing about the two “visible” cities?

CM: Breach was always part of it, because the two main cities presumed their borders, which presumed the policing. Orciny sort of emerged later. There was no reason to stop there. Once you’ve realized you can do a shtick about more and more hidden cities in more and more interstices, you’re into a potential mise-en-abyme, and I could have had fourth, fifth, sixth rumored cities, etc., at ever-decreasing scales.

RHRC: The Breach and Orciny are similar in many ways—indeed, at one point, the possibility is raised that they are the same thing—but in the end, readers are taken into the Breach, while Orciny remains unknown. What’s striking to me about this process is that the revelation is a bit deflating. And not only here: again and again in this novel, when you come to a revelatory moment, at which a more traditional fantasy would open outward, into the unreal or the supernatural, you bring things back to the real, in all its harsh particularity. In that sense, couldn’t this novel be considered an antifantasy?

CM: By all means. There’s a long and honorable tradition of anti -fantasies, of which some of the most invigorating, to me, are by M. John Harrison. And yes, I think you’re absolutely right that this is part of that lineage. And I don’t even mind the term “deflating.” I think it’s fair and it was, so far as it goes, quite deliberate. Now obviously I know that won’t work for all readers, and I know, in fact, that some readers have disliked the book for precisely that point. That’s fair enough. But to me, that hankering for the opening-out, the secrets behind the everyday, can sometimes be question-begging. Of course I have it, too—I’m a fantasy reader, I love that uncanny fracture and whatever’s behind it—but surely it’s legitimate and maybe even interesting not merely to indulge that drive but to investigate it, to prod at it, and yes, maybe precisely as part of that, to frustrate it.

RHRC: Yet at the same time, you also encourage speculation in the fantastic—most notably, I think, in the archeological artifacts recovered from the Ul Qoman dig, a bizarre mix of primitive objects and what seems to be the remnants of an advanced technology.

CM: Well it’s certainly the case that the book never forecloses the possibility of any fantastic elements. The strange properties of the archeological physics, for example—it’s not proven, but nor is it falsified. I was interested not so much in the aspects of possible magic—though certainly that question mark is there—but in the question of opaque logic. There is clearly, to the investigators, a logic to this seemingly impossible coagulum of material culture; that’s why they’re investigating it. But it’s a logic that escapes them; it’s something they can’t parse. Even if you have no way into it, that seems to me importantly different from something having no logic at all.

RHRC: Your narrator and main character, Tyador Borlú, is rational, a skeptic, but also enough of a romantic to be seduced by mysteries—in other words, a familiar type from noir fiction. But he’s also very much a product of his peculiar environment. Even before this case, and his close encounter with the Breach, his life abounds in interstitiality, from his relationships with women to his preference for the wonderfully named DöplirCaffés, where Jews and Muslims sit side by side in a microcosm of the two surrounding cities. Geography really is destiny, isn’t it?

CM: A familiar type from noir, and also from a thousand other things, including the real world. Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword, and it can be quite easy to locate it at all levels. One of the reasons for the kind of microcosmic foreshadowing of the relationship between the cities in the DöplirCaffés, etc., was precisely to undercut any seeming portent about them. Sure, they’re rather extraordinarily doubled, meaning there’ll be interstices and gray areas, etc., etc., but that’s just an unusually extrapolated version of the kind of thing that goes on all the time, at all levels. That was the idea. Interstitiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you’re going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans, I think.

RHRC: The Cleavage, the event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma in a past all but lost to history, remains, like Orciny itself, shrouded in mystery. Was it a science fictional event, a catastrophic phenomenon of quantum physics that sent parts of a single ur-city into congruent and occasionally intersecting dimensions? Or is the Cleavage to be understood purely in psychological terms? Does it matter how readers interpret this aspect of the book?

CM: The event that separated Beszel and Ul Qoma or possibly joined them together. Cleave being one of those magic, camply semiotically rich words which means two exactly opposite things. And of course I’m not going to answer the question! If it even has an answer—on which I couldn’t possibly comment. I know what I think, and you’ve mentioned it before, in terms of the generic status of the book, but it would be quite unhelpful I think for me to dictate terms for the reader. All the information the story requires is there.

RHRC: Orciny first seems like a myth, then real, then a hoax—and yet it’s never really disproved. Indeed, Bowden’s extraordinary attempt to walk out of the cities, at once utterly mundane and thoroughly uncanny, seems to show that Orciny does exist, at least in potential.

CM: Yes. This, I guess, is all part of that teasing thing I was talking about before. They disprove nothing in the absolute, only that a prime suspect for the commission of these crimes (a city), turns out not to be guilty of these crimes in this case. Of course, that said, there’s also been a poking around with the ideas of why that might be such an appealing possible solution, why the drive to that kind of explanation.

RHRC: Do you have any plans to return to Beszel and Ul Qoma, perhaps to explore their shared prehistory?

CM: Possibly. The conceit of the book, at least for me, was that there are indeed several other stories set in Beszel—and possibly involving Ul Qoma—featuring Tyador Borlú, and that they’d come before this. That this particular book was the last of his adventures. The novel was originally subtitled “The Last Inspector Borlú Mystery.” But I was told in vigorous terms by everyone involved in producing the book that it would confuse readers, who would see it, decide to start with the first of the series, and leave the shop without anything when they couldn’t find that earlier volume. So I took the subtitle off. But for me, it’s still there, invisible.

RHRC: It must have been hard, as you were writing the novel, to avoid moments of inadvertent breaching. How did you train yourself to unsee and unhear? And what was the personal impact of that? Did your perceptions of London change?

CM: My perceptions didn’t really change: the whole of the book was predicated on my thinking about those urban perceptions, so while I might have been slightly more conscious of them, they were still as they had been. However, part of the thing about the setup is that it is, precisely, very hard, indeed impossible, to avoid moments of breach. You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear—you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways. The book mentions that several times. It is absolutely about absolute fidelity to these particular urban protocols, exaggerations or extrapolations of the ones that I think are all around us all the time in the real world; but it’s also about cheating them, and failing them, and playing a little fast and loose, which I think is an inextricable part of such norms.

Reading Group Questions
and Topics for Discussion

In the accompanying interview, China Miéville says that he considers The City & The City “a crime novel above all.” Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not?

Try to think of the novel primarily in science fictional or fantasy terms instead of as a crime novel. Is there any evidence that the novel falls into either of these categories? How would looking at the novel from these perspectives change your perception of the story?

Do you think Miéville wants readers to come at his story from a variety of directions? How would this be related to the idea of cross-hatching as it appears in the novel?

In the interview, Miéville also states that “each book demands a particular voice.” How would you describe the voice that he uses to tell the story of Beszel and Ul Qoma—the voice of Tyador Borlú? Do you think it was the best choice? What other voices could he have used to tell the story, and how would that choice have changed the novel? For example, imagine how the story would be different if it had been told from the point of view of Borlú’s Ul Qoman counterpart, Qussim Dhatt, or his assistant, Lizbyet Corwi?

Miéville calls the crime novel “a kind of dream fiction masquerading as a logic puzzle.” What do you think he meant by that, and how does The City & The City measure up to that definition?

So much of The City & The City revolves around the idea of Breach—which is both a noun and a verb in the context of the book. Yet despite the unique social structure binding and separating Beszel and Ul Qoma, readers have no trouble understanding the concepts of Breach or breaching. Why should such a fantastical notion seem so familiar to us? Are there areas in your own life—social lacunae, if you will—in which something analogous to the rules of Breach are observed? For example, do you practice “unseeing” in your daily life?

Is the power that Breach exercises arbitrary and absolute, or are there limits in place that are respected by everyone involved? Is there a real-life analogue to Breach in the United States?

Is Tyador Borlú a trustworthy narrator, or are there moments when he misleads readers … and himself? Identify some of these moments, and decide whether they are purposeful or not. Are these moments related to breaching, and if so, how?

Did you read this novel as an allegory about the post-9/11 relationship of the West and the Islamic world? Would such a reading be justified? Why or why not? Do you think this novel encourages a particular reading, or is it open to a variety of interpretations?

Why do you think Miéville, in the interview, calls this novel an anti-fantasy? What does that term suggest to you? Do you agree that it describes The City & The City?

Miéville is both stingy and tantalizing in conveying information about the artifacts uncovered at the Bol Ye’an dig in Ul Qoma. What do you make of this aspect of the novel, perhaps its only truly fantastic element? How do you account for the existence of these artifacts?

Do you think the Cleavage—the epochal event that once upon a time separated (or joined) Beszel and Ul Qoma—is best understood and interpreted as having been a physical event or a social/psychological one? What evidence can you find to support either of these positions? Are there clues to Miéville’s own belief on this point?

What about Orciny? Is the question of its existence answered definitively in the novel?

As an exercise, take the room in which you are meeting and assign parts of it to Beszel and parts to Ul Qoma. Now divide your group into citizens of the two cities. Try and hold your book club meeting without breaching. How long before a breach occurs?

Imagine that you are in the position of Mahalia Geary’s parents, who travel to Beszel after her murder looking for justice and for answers. Would you have acted differently than Mr. Geary in that situation? How would you have approached it?

At the end of the novel, when Bowden is using his knowledge of both cities to escape Borlú’s pursuit, he seems poised to walk out of the cities unapprehended. Yet he ends up surrendering to Borlú—why?

What do you think happens to Bowden once he has surrendered and vanished into the Breach?

Knowing what you know about Borlú—or Tye, as he has now become—do you think he’ll be content to remain an avatar of Breach?

READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

KRAKEN

by China Miéville

PUBLISHED BY DEL REY BOOKS

An everyday doomsayer in sandwich-board abruptly walked away from what over the last several days had been his pitch by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an old-school prophecy of the end: the one bobbing on his back read FORGET IT.

Inside, a man walked through the big hall, past a double stair and a giant skeleton, his steps loud on the marble. Stone animals watched him. “Right then,” he kept saying.

His name was Billy Harrow. He glanced at the great fabricated bones and nodded. It looked as if he was saying hello. It was a little after eleven on a morning in October. The room was filling up. A group waited for him by the entrance desk, eyeing one another with polite shyness.

There were two men in their twenties with geek-chic haircuts. A woman and man barely out of their teens teased each other. She was obviously indulging him with this visit. There was an older couple, and a father in his thirties holding his young son. “Look, that’s a monkey,” he said. He pointed at animals carved in vines on the museum pillars. “And you see that lizard?”

The boy peeped. He looked at the bone brontosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favorite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum’s first hall, and the glyptodon, that half globe armadillo giant, had been Billy’s.

Billy smiled at the woman who dispensed tickets, and the guard behind her. “This them?” he said. “Right then everyone. Shall we do this thing?”

He cleaned his glasses and blinked while he was doing it, replicating a look and motion an ex had once told him was adorable. He was a little shy of thirty and looked younger: he had freckles, and not enough stubble to justify “Bill.” As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Di Caprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

Billy’s black hair was tousled in a halfheartedly fashionable style. He wore a not-too-hopeless top, cheap jeans. When he had first started at the centre, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists any more.

“So you’re all here for the tour of the Darwin Centre,” he said. He was acting as if he thought they were present to investigate a whole research site, to look at the laboratories and offices, the filing, the cabinets of paperwork. Rather than to see the one and only one thing within the building.

“I’m Billy,” he said. “I’m a curator. What that means is that I do a lot of the cataloguing and preserving, stuff like that. I’ve been here awhile. When I first came here I wanted to specialise in marine molluscs—know what a mollusc is?” he asked the boy, who nodded and hid. “Snails, that’s right.” Mollusca had been the subject of his masters thesis.

“Alright folks.” He put his glasses on. “Follow me. This is a working environment, so please keep the noise down, and I beg you not to touch anything. We’ve got caustics, toxins, all manner of horrible stuff all over the place.”

One of the young men started to say, “When do we see …” Billy raised his hand.

“Can I just …” he said. “Let me explain about what’ll happen when we’re in there.” Billy had evolved his own pointless idiosuperstitions. According to one it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.

“I’m going to show you a bunch of the places we work,” he said lamely. “Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we’re a little bit time constrained. Let’s get the tour done first.”

No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.

They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other.

“No photos, please,” Billy said. He did not care if they obeyed: his obligation was to repeat the rule. “This building here opened in two thousand two,” he said. “And you can see we’re expanding. We’ll have a new building in two thousand eight. We’ve got seven floors of wet specimens in the Darwin Centre. That means stuff in formalin.”

Everyday hallways led to a stench. “Jesus,” someone muttered.

“Indeed,” said Billy. “This is called the dermestarium.” Through interior windows there were steel containers like little coffins. “This is where we clean up skeletons. Get rid of all the gunk on them. Dermestes maculatus.”

A computer screen by the boxes was showing some disgusting salty-looking fish being eaten by insect swarms. “Eeurgh,” someone said.

“There’s a camera in the box,” said Billy. “Hide beetles is their English name. They go through everything, just leave bones behind.”

The boy grinned and tugged his father’s hand. The rest of the group smiled, embarrassed. Flesh-eating bugs: sometimes life really was a B-movie.

Billy noticed one of the young men. He wore a past-it suit, a shabby-genteel outfit odd for someone so young. He wore a pin on his lapel, a design like a long-armed asterisk, two of the spokes ending in curls. The man was taking notes. He was filling the pad he carried at a great rate.

A taxonomiser by inclination as well as by profession, Billy had decided there were not so many kinds of people who took this tour. There were children: mostly young boys, shy and beside themselves with excitement, and vastly knowledgeable about what they saw. There were their parents. There were sheepish people in their twenties, as geeky-eager as the kids. There were their girlfriends and boyfriends, performing patience. A few tourists on an unusual byway.

And there were the obsessives.

They were the only people who knew more than the young children. Sometimes they did not speak: sometimes they would interrupt Billy’s explanations with too-loud questions, or correct him on scientific detail with exhausting fussy anxiety. He had noticed more of such visitors than usual in the last several weeks.

“It’s like late summer brings out the weirdos,” Billy had said to his friend Leon, a few nights back, as they drank at a Thames pub. “Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.”

“Fascist,” Leon had said. “Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?”

“Please,” Billy said. “That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you pass. You’re like, you’re in deep cover,” Leon said. “You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”

“Mmm, tasteful.”

“Alright,” Billy said as colleagues passed him. “Kath,” he said to an ichthyologist, “Brendan,” to another curator, who answered him, “Alright Tubular?”

“Onward please,” said Billy. “And don’t worry, we’re getting to the good stuff.”

Tubular? Billy could see one or two of his escortees wondering if they had misheard.

The nickname resulted from a drinking session in Liverpool with colleagues, back in his first year at the centre. It was the annual conference of the Professional Curatorial Society. After a day of talks on methodologies and histories of preservation, on museum schemes and the politics of display, the evening’s wind down had started with polite how-did-you-get-into-this?, turned into everyone at the bar one by one talking about their childhoods, these meanderings, in boozy turn, becoming a session of what someone had christened Biography Bluff. Everyone had to cite some supposedly extravagant fact about themselves—they once ate a slug, they’d been part of a foursome, they tried to burn their school down, and so on—the truth of which the others would then brayingly debate.

Billy had straight faced claimed that he had been the result of the world’s first-ever successful in vitro fertilisation, but that he had been disavowed by the laboratory because of internal politics and a question mark over issues of consent, which was why the official laurel had gone to someone else a few months after his birth. Interrogated about details, he had with drunken effortlessness named doctors, the location, a minor complication of the procedure. But before bets were made and his reveal, the conversation had taken a sudden turn and the game had been abandoned. It was two days later, back in London, before a labmate asked him if it were true.

“Absolutely,” Billy had said, in an expressionless teasing way that meant either “of course”, or “of course not”. He had stuck by that response since. Though he doubted anyone believed him, the nickname “Test-tube” and variants were still used.

They passed another guard, a big, truculent man, all shaved head and muscular fatness. He was some years older than Billy, named Dane Something, from what Billy had overheard. Billy nodded and tried to meet his eyes, as he always did. Dane Whatever, as he always did, ignored the little greeting, to Billy’s disproportionate resentment.

As the door swung shut, though, Billy saw Dane acknowledge someone else. The guard nodded momentarily at the intense young man with the lapel pin, the obsessive, whose eyes flickered in the briefest response. Billy saw that, and just before the door closed between them Billy saw Dane see him looking.

Dane’s acquaintance did not meet his eyes. “You feel it get cool?” Billy said, shaking his head. He sped them through time-release doors. “To stop evaporation. We have to be careful about fire. Because, you know, there’s a fair old bit of alcohol in here, so …” With his hands he made a soft explosion.

The visitors stopped still. They were in a specimen maze. Ranked intricacies. Kilometres of shelves and jars. In each was a motionless floating animal. Even sound sounded bottled suddenly, as if something had put a lid on it all.

The specimens mindlessly concentrated, some posing with their own colourless guts. Flatfish in browning tanks. Jars of huddled mice gone sepia, grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions. There were sports with excess limbs, foetuses in arcane shapes. They were as carefully shelved as books. “See?” Billy said.

One more door and they would be with what they were there to see. Billy knew from repeated experience how this would go.

When they entered the tank room, the chamber at the heart of the Darwin Centre, he would give the visitors a moment without prattle. The big room was walled with more shelves. There were hundreds more bottles, from those chest high down to those the size of a glass of water. All of them contained lugubrious animal faces. It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. There were steel bins, pulleys that hung like vines. No one would notice. Everyone would be staring at the great tank in the centre of the room.

This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.

It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis Dux. The giant squid.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; and Un Lun Dun, his New York Times best-selling book for younger readers. He lives and works in London.

The City & The City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by China Miéville

Reading group guide copyright 2010 by Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Kraken copyright 2010 by China Mieville.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Kraken. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-345-51566-7

www.delreybooks.com

v3.0_r1

The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent, and foundries pound into the night. For more than a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled here over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, junkies and whores.

Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And inadvertently, clumsily, something unthinkable is released.

As the city becomes gripped by an alien terror, the fate of millions lies with a clutch of renegades and outcasts on the run from lawmakers and crimelords alike. The urban nightscape becomes a hunting ground. Battles rage in the shadows of uncanny architecture. A reckoning is due at the city’s heart, in the vast edifice of brick and wood and steel under the vaults of Perdido Street Station.

China Miéville

Perdido Street Station

Bas-Lag (EN) 1

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 23.02.2025

Original title: Perdido Street Station

China Miéville, 2000

Cover design: Brock Book Design Co.

Digital editor: Titivillus

ePub base r2.1

Table of Content

Cover

Perdido Street Station

Map

(Prologue)

Part 1: Comissions

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

(Interlude I)

Part 2: Physiognomies of Flight

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

(Interlude II)

Part 3: Metamorphoses

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

(Interlude III)

Part 4: A Plague of Nightmares

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

(Interlude IV)

Part 5: Councils

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

(Interlude V)

Part 6: The Glasshouse

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

(Interlude VI)

Part 7: Crisis

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

(Interlude VII)

Part 8: Judgement

Chapter 52

(Coda)

Author

to Emma

Acknowledgments

With love and thanks to my mother, Claudia, and my sister, Jemima, for their help and support. Huge thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and advice, especially Scott Bicheno, Max Schaefer, Simon Kavanagh and Oliver Cheetham.

Deep love and gratitude to Emma Bircham, again and always.

Thanks to all at Macmillan, most especially to my editor Peter Lavery for his incredible support. And infinite gratitude to Mic Cheetham, who has helped me more than I can say.

I don’t have space to thank all the writers who’ve influenced me, but I want to mention two whose work is a constant source of inspiration and astonishment. Therefore to M. John Harrison, and to the memory of Mervyn Peake, my humble and heartfelt gratitude. I could never have written this book without them.

“I even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the lights and deep, illuminated streets. That’s a form of dying, that losing contact with the city like that.”

Philip K. Dick, We Can Build You

Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.

We rock. We pitch in a deep current.

Behind me the man tugs uneasily at his rudder and the barge corrects. Light lurches as the lantern swings. The man is afraid of me. I lean out from the prow of the small vessel across the darkly moving water.

Over the engine’s oily rumble and the caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds, are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain.

They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick.

The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water.

How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller?

It is too late to flee.

The man murmurs to me, tells me where we are. I do not turn to him.

This is Raven’s Gate, this brutalized warren around us. The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here.

(I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)

Here there are houses which dribble pale mucus, an organic daubing that smears base façades and oozes from top windows. Extra storeys are rendered in the cold white muck which fills gaps between houses and dead-end alleys. The landscape is defaced with ripples as if wax has melted and set suddenly across the rooftops. Some other intelligence has made these human streets their own.

Wires are stretched tight across the river and the eaves, held fast by milky aggregates of phlegm. They hum like bass strings. Something scuttles overhead. The bargeman hawks foully into the water.

His gob dissipates. The mass of spittle-mortar above us ebbs. Narrow streets emerge.

A train whistles as it crosses the river before us on raised tracks. I look to it, to the south and the east, seeing the line of little lights rush away and be swallowed by this nightland, this behemoth that eats its citizens. We will pass the factories soon. Cranes rear from the gloom like spindly birds; here and there they move to keep the skeleton crews, the midnight crews, in their work. Chains swing deadweight like useless limbs, snapping into zombie motion where cogs engage and flywheels turn.

Fat predatory shadows prowl the sky.

There is a boom, a reverberation, as if the city has a hollow core. The black barge putters through a mass of its fellows weighed down with coke and wood and iron and steel and glass. The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling.

(Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)

The engine slows. I turn and watch the man behind me, who averts his eyes and steers, affecting to look through me. He is taking us in to dock, there behind the warehouse so engorged its contents spill out beyond the buttresses in a labyrinth of huge boxes. He picks his way between other craft. There are roofs emerging from the river. A line of sunken houses, built on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the bank in the water, their bituminous black bricks dripping. Disturbances beneath us. The river boils with eddies from below. Dead fish and frogs that have given up the fight to breathe in this rotting stew of detritus swirl frantic between the flat side of the barge and the concrete shore, trapped in choppy turmoil. The gap is closed. My captain leaps ashore and ties up. His relief is draining to see. He is wittering gruffly in triumph and ushering me quickly ashore and away and I alight, as slowly as if onto coals, picking my way through the rubbish and the broken glass.

He is happy with the stones I have given him. I am in Smog Bend, he tells me, and I make myself look away as he points my direction so he will not know I am lost, that I am new in the city, that I am afraid of these dark and threatening edifices of which I cannot kick free, that I am nauseous with claustrophobia and foreboding.

A little to the south two great pillars rise from the river. The gates to the Old City, once grandiose, now psoriatic and ruined. The carved histories that wound about those obelisks have been effaced by time and acid, and only roughcast spiral threads like those of old screws remain. Behind them, a low bridge (Drud Crossing, he says). I ignore the man’s eager explanations and walk away through this lime-bleached zone, past yawning doors that promise the comfort of true dark and an escape from the river stench. The bargeman is just a tiny voice now and it is a small pleasure to know I will never see him again.

It is not cold. A city light is promising itself in the east.

I will follow the trainlines. I will stalk in their shadow as they pass by over the houses and towers and barracks and offices and prisons of the city, I will track them from the arches that anchor them to the earth. I must find my way in.

My cloak (heavy cloth unfamiliar and painful on my skin) tugs at me and I can feel the weight of my purse. That is what protects me here; that and the illusion I have fostered, the source of my sorrow and my shame, the anguish that has brought me to this great wen, this dusty city dreamed up in bone and brick, a conspiracy of industry and violence, steeped in history and battened-down power, this badland beyond my ken.

New Crobuzon.

Part One:

Comissions

Chapter One

A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building’s rough hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting before it.

The sun shone through uneven cloud-cover with a bright grey light. Below the basket the stalls and barrows lay like untidy spillage. The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.

The food stalls stretched the noisy length of Shadrach Street. Books and manuscripts and pictures filled up Selchit Pass, an avenue of desultory banyans and crumbling concrete a little way to the east. There were earthenware products spilling down the road to Barrackham in the south; engine parts to the west; toys down one side street; clothes between two more; and countless other goods filling all the alleys. The rows of merchandise converged crookedly on Aspic Hole like spokes on a broken wheel.

In the Hole itself all distinctions broke down. In the shadow of old walls and unsafe towers were a pile of gears, a ramshackle table of broken crockery and crude clay ornaments, a case of mouldering textbooks. Antiques, sex, flea-powder. Between the stalls stomped hissing constructs. Beggars argued in the bowels of deserted buildings. Members of strange races bought peculiar things. Aspic Bazaar, a blaring mess of goods, grease and tallymen. Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware.

The costermonger below the descending basket looked up into flat sunlight and a shower of brick particles. He wiped his eye. He plucked the frayed thing from the air above his head, pulling at the cord which bore it until it went slack in his hand. Inside the basket was a brass shekel and a note in careful, ornamented italics. The food-vendor scratched his nose as he scanned the paper. He rummaged in the piles of produce before him, placed eggs and fruit and root vegetables into the container, checking against the list. He stopped and read one item again, then smiled lasciviously and cut a slice of pork. When he was done he put the shekel in his pocket and felt for change, hesitating as he calculated his delivery cost, eventually depositing four stivers in with the food.

He wiped his hands against his trousers and thought for a minute, then scribbled something on the list with a stub of charcoal and tossed it after the coins.

He tugged three times at the rope and the basket began a bobbing journey into the air. It rose above the lower roofs of surrounding buildings, buoyed upwards by noise. It startled the roosting jackdaws in the deserted storey and inscribed the wall with another scrawled trail among many, before it disappeared again into the window from which it had emerged.

Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin had just realized that he was dreaming. He had been aghast to find himself employed once again at the university, parading in front of a huge blackboard covered in vague representations of levers and forces and stress. Introductory Material Science. Isaac had been staring anxiously at the class when that unctuous bastard Vermishank had looked in.

“I can’t teach this class,” whispered Isaac loudly. “The market’s too loud.” He gestured at the window.

“It’s all right.” Vermishank was soothing and loathsome. “It’s time for breakfast,” he said. “That’ll take your mind off the noise.” And hearing that absurdity Isaac shed sleep with immense relief. The raucous profanity of the bazaar and the smell of cooking came with him into the day.

He lay hugely in the bed without opening his eyes. He heard Lin walk across the room and felt the slight listing of the floorboards. The garret was filled with pungent smoke. Isaac salivated.

Lin clapped twice. She knew when Isaac woke. Probably because he closed his mouth, he thought, and sniggered without opening his eyes.

“Still sleeping, shush, poor little Isaac ever so tired,” he whimpered, and snuggled down like a child. Lin clapped again, once, derisory, and walked away.

He groaned and rolled over.

“Termagant!” he moaned after her. “Shrew! Harridan! All right, all right, you win, you, you . . . uh . . . virago, you spitfire . . .” He rubbed his head and sat up, grinned sheepishly. Lin made an obscene gesture at him without turning around.

She stood with her back to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot drops of oil leapt from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of Isaac’s belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair burst from him abundantly.

Lin was hairless. Her muscles were tight under her red skin, each distinct. She was like an anatomical atlas. Isaac studied her in cheerful lust.

His arse itched. He scratched under the blanket, rooting as shameless as a dog. Something burst under his nail, and he withdrew his hand to examine it. A tiny half-crushed grub waved helplessly on the end of his finger. It was a refflick, a harmless little khepri parasite. The thing must have been rather bewildered by my juices, Isaac thought, and flicked his finger clean.

“Refflick, Lin,” he said. “Bath time.”

Lin stamped in irritation.

New Crobuzon was a huge plague pit, a morbific city. Parasites, infection and rumour were uncontainable. A monthly chymical dip was a necessary prophylactic for the khepri, if they wanted to avoid itches and sores.

Lin slid the contents of the pan onto a plate and set it down, across from her own breakfast. She sat and gestured for Isaac to join her. He rose from the bed and stumbled across the room. He eased himself onto the small chair, wary of splinters.

Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head in silhouette.

They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.

It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation. As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilty desire.

Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.

Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.

He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck . . . not that she would have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.

He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.

I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.

Breakfast conversation was generally one-sided: Lin could sign with her hands while she ate, but Isaac’s attempts to talk and eat simultaneously made for incomprehensible noises and food debris on the table. Instead they read; Lin an artists’ newsletter, Isaac whatever came to hand. He reached out between mouthfuls and grabbed books and papers, and found himself reading Lin’s shopping list. The item a handful of pork slices was ringed and underneath her exquisite calligraphy was a scrawled question in much cruder script: Got company??? Nice bit of pork goes down a treat!!!

Isaac waved the paper at Lin. “What’s this filthy arse on about?” he yelled, spraying food. His outrage was amused but genuine.

Lin read it and shrugged.

Knows I don’t eat meat. Knows I’ve got a guest for breakfast. Wordplay on “pork.”

“Yes, thanks, lover, I got that bit. How does he know you’re a vegetarian? Do you two often engage in this witty banter?”

Lin stared at him for a moment without responding.

Knows because I don’t buy meat. She shook her head at the stupid question. Don’t worry: only ever banter on paper. Doesn’t know I’m bug.

Her deliberate use of the slur annoyed Isaac.

“Dammit, I wasn’t insinuating anything . . .” Lin’s hand waggled, the equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Isaac howled in irritation. “Godshit, Lin! Not everything I say is about fear of discovery!”

Isaac and Lin had been lovers nearly two years. They had always tried not to think too hard about the rules of their relationship, but the longer they were together the more this strategy of avoidance became impossible. Questions as yet unasked demanded attention. Innocent remarks and askance looks from others, a moment of contact too long in public—a note from a grocer—everything was a reminder that they were, in some contexts, living a secret. Everything was made fraught.

They had never said, We are lovers, so they had never had to say, We will not disclose our relationship to all, we will hide from some. But it had been clear for months and months that this was the case.

Lin had begun to hint, with snide and acid remarks, that Isaac’s refusal to declare himself her lover was at best cowardly, at worst bigoted. This insensitivity annoyed him. He had, after all, made the nature of his relationship clear with his close friends, as Lin had with hers. And it was all far, far easier for her.

She was an artist. Her circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They delighted in the scandalous and the outré. In the tea-houses and bars of Salacus Fields, Lin’s escapades—broadly hinted at, never denied, never made explicit—would be the subject of louche discussion and innuendo. Her love-life was an avant-garde transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last season, or ’Snot Art! the year before that.

And yes, Isaac could play that game. He was known in that world, from long before his days with Lin. He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!

That was his persona in Salacus Fields, where his relationship with Lin was an open secret, where he enjoyed being more or less open, where he would put his arm around her in the bars and whisper to her as she sucked sugar-coffee from a sponge. That was his story, and it was at least half true.

He had walked out of the university ten years ago. But only because he realized to his misery that he was a terrible teacher.

He had looked out at the quizzical faces, listened to the frantic scrawling of the panicking students, and realized that with a mind that ran and tripped and hurled itself down the corridors of theory in anarchic fashion, he could learn himself, in haphazard lurches, but he could not impart the understanding he so loved. He had hung his head in shame and fled.

In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac’s research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere. Isaac could be brilliant, but he was undisciplined. Vermishank had played him like a fish, making him beg for work as a freelance researcher on terrible pay, but with limited access to the university laboratories.

And it was this, his work, which kept Isaac circumspect about his lover.

These days, his relationship with the university was tenuous. Ten years of pilfering had equipped him with a fine laboratory of his own; his income was largely made up of dubious contracts with New Crobuzon’s less wholesome citizens, whose needs for sophisticated science constantly astounded him.

But Isaac’s research—unchanged in its aims over all those years—could not proceed in a vacuum. He had to publish. He had to debate. He had to argue, to attend conferences—as the rogue, the rebellious son. There were great advantages to renegacy.

But the academy did not just play at being old-fashioned. Xenian students had only been admitted as degree candidates in New Crobuzon for twenty years. To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as beyond the pale.

All of which Lin took badly.

You hide us so you can publish articles for people you despise, she had signed at him once after they had made love.

Isaac, in sour moments, wondered how she would react if the art-world threatened to ostracize her.

That morning the lovers managed to kill the nascent argument with jokes and apologies and compliments and lust. Isaac smiled at Lin as he struggled into his shirt, and her headlegs rippled sensuously.

“What are you up to today?” he asked.

Going to Kinken. Need some colourberries. Going to exhibition in Howl Barrow. Working tonight, she added mock-ominously.

“I suppose I won’t be seeing you for a while, then?” Isaac grinned. Lin shook her head. Isaac counted off days on his fingers. “Well . . . can we have dinner at The Clock and Cockerel on, uh . . . Shunday? Eight o’clock?”

Lin pondered. She held his hands while she thought.

Gorgeous, she signed coyly. She left it ambiguous as to whether she meant dinner or Isaac.

They piled the pots and plates into the bucket of cold water in the corner and left them. As Lin gathered her notes and sketches to go, Isaac tugged her gently onto him, on the bed. He kissed her warm red skin. She turned in his arms. She angled up on one elbow and, as he watched, the dark ruby of her carapace opened slowly while her headlegs splayed. The two halves of her headshell quivered slightly, held as wide as they would go. From beneath their shade she spread her beautiful, useless little beetle wings.

She pulled his hand towards them gently, invited him to stroke the fragile things, totally vulnerable, an expression of trust and love unparalleled for the khepri.

The air between them charged. Isaac’s cock stiffened.

He traced the branching veins in her gently vibrating wings with his fingers, watched the light that passed through them refract into mother-of-pearl shadows.

He rucked up her skirt with his other hand, slid his fingers up her thigh. Her legs opened around his hand and closed, trapped it. He whispered at her, filthy and loving invitations.

The sun shifted above them, sending shadows of the windowpane and clouds moving uneasily through the room. The lovers did not notice the day move.

Chapter Two

It was 11 o’clock before they disentangled. Isaac glanced at his pocket-watch and stumbled around gathering his clothes, his mind wandering to his work. Lin spared them the awkward negotiations that would surround leaving the house together. She bent and caressed the back of Isaac’s neck with her antennae, raising goosebumps, and then she left while he still fumbled with his boots.

Her rooms were nine floors up. She descended the tower; past the unsafe eighth floor; the seventh with its birdlime carpet and soft jackdaw susurrus; the old lady who never emerged on the sixth; and on down past petty thieves and steel workers and errand-girls and knife-grinders.

The door was on the other side of the tower from Aspic Hole itself. Lin emerged into a quiet street, a mere passageway to and from the stalls of the bazaar.

She walked away from the noisy arguments and the profiteering towards the gardens of Sobek Croix. Ranks of cabs were always waiting at their entrance. She knew that some of the drivers (usually the Remade) were liberal or desperate enough to take khepri custom.

As she passed through Aspic the blocks and houses grew less salubrious. The ground undulated and rose slowly to the southwest, where she was heading. The treetops of Sobek Croix rose like thick smoke above the slates of the dilapidated housing around her; beyond their leaves poked the stubby high-rise skyline of Ketch Heath.

Lin’s bulging mirrored eyes saw the city in a compound visual cacophony. A million tiny sections of the whole, each minuscule hexagon segment ablaze with sharp colour and even sharper lines, super-sensitive to differentials of light, weak on details unless she focused hard enough to hurt slightly. Within each segment, the dead scales of decaying walls were invisible to her, architecture reduced to elemental slabs of colour. But a precise story was told. Each visual fragment, each part, each shape, each shade of colour, differed from its surroundings in infinitesimal ways that told her about the state of the whole structure. And she could taste chymicals in the air, could tell how many of which race lived in which building: she could feel vibrations of air and sound with precision enough to converse in a crowded room or feel a train pass overhead.

Lin had tried to describe how she saw the city to Isaac.

I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship . . . You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally.

Isaac had been fascinated for a week and a half. He had, typically, taken pages of notes and sought books on insectile vision, subjected Lin to tedious experiments in depth-perception and distance-vision; and reading, which impressed him most, knowing as he did that it did not come naturally to her, that she had to concentrate like someone half-blind.

His interest had quickly waned. The human mind was incapable of processing what the khepri saw.

All around Lin the duckers and divers of Aspic filled the streets on their way to scrape for money, stealing or begging or selling or sifting through the piles of rubbish which punctuated the street. Children scampered by carrying engine parts cobbled together into obscure shapes. Occasionally gentlemen and ladies strode by with an air of disapproval on their way Somewhere Else.

Lin’s clogs were wet with organic muck from the street, rich pickings for the furtive creatures peering from drains. The houses around her were flat-roofed and looming, with plank walkways slung across gaps between houses. Getaway routes, alternative passageways, the streets of the roofworld above New Crobuzon.

Only a very few children called names at her. This was a community used to xenians. She could taste the cosmopolitan nature of this neighbourhood, the minute secretions of a variety of races, only some of which she recognized. There was the musk of more khepri, the dank odour of vodyanoi, even, from somewhere, the delicious taste of cactacae.

Lin turned the corner onto the cobbled road around Sobek Croix. Cabs waited all along the iron fence. A massive variety. Two-wheelers, four-wheelers, pulled by horses, by sneering pterabirds, by steam-wheezing constructs on caterpillar treads . . . here and there by Remade, miserable men and women both cabdriver and cab.

Lin stood before the ranks and waved her hand. Mercifully, the first driver in line geed his ornery-looking bird forward at her signal.

“Where to?” The man leaned down to read the careful instructions she scrawled on her notepad. “Righto,” he said, and jerked his head, motioning her in.

The cab was an open-fronted two-seater, giving Lin a view of her passage through the south side of the city. The great flightless bird moved with a bobbing, rolling run that translated smoothly through the wheels. She sat back and read over her instructions to the driver.

Isaac would not approve. At all.

Lin did need colourberries, and she was going to Kinken for them. That was true. And one of her friends, Cornfed Daihat, was having an exhibition in Howl Barrow.

But she would not see it.

She had already spoken to Cornfed, asking him to vouch that she had been there, should Isaac ask (she could not foresee that he would, but she might as well be safe). Cornfed had been delighted, flicking his white hair out of his face and flamboyantly begging eternal damnation for himself should he breathe a word. He clearly thought she was two-timing Isaac, and considered it a privilege to be part of this new twist to her already scandalous sex life.

Lin could not make it to his show. She had business elsewhere.

The cab was progressing towards the river. She swayed as the wooden wheels hit more cobblestones. They had turned onto Shadrach Street. The market was to their south now: they were above the point where the vegetables and shellfish and overripe fruit petered out.

Swelling fatly above the low houses before her was the Flyside militia tower. A vast, filthy, pudgy pillar, squat and mean, somehow, for all its thirty-five storeys. Thin windows like arrow-slits peppered its sides, their dark glass matt, immune to reflection. The tower’s concrete skin was mottled and flaking. Three miles to the north Lin caught a glimpse of an even taller structure: the militia’s hub, the Spike, that punctured the earth like a concrete thorn in the heart of the city.

Lin craned her neck. Oozing obscenely over the top of the Flyside tower was a half-inflated dirigible. It flapped and lolled and swelled like a dying fish. She could feel its engine humming, even through the layers of air, as it strained to disappear into the gun-grey clouds.

There was another murmur, a buzzing dissonant with the airship’s drone. Somewhere nearby a support strut vibrated, and a militia-pod streaked northwards towards the tower at breakneck speed.

It careered along way, way above, suspended from the skyrail that stretched out on either side of the tower, threaded through its summit like wire through some colossal needle, disappearing to the north and the south. The pod slammed to a sudden stop against the buffers. Figures emerged, but the cab passed on before Lin could see any more.

For the second time that day Lin luxuriated in the taste of cactus-people sap, as the pterabird loped towards the Greenhouse in Riverskin. Shut out of that monastic sanctuary (the twisting, intricate panes of its steep glass dome looming to the east, in the heart of the quarter), despised by their elders, small gangs of cactus youth leaned against shuttered buildings and cheap posters. They played with knives. Their spines were cropped in violent patterns, their spring-green skin savaged with bizarre scarification.

They eyed the cab without interest.

Shadrach Street dipped suddenly. The cab was poised on a high point, where the streets curved sharply down away from it. Lin and her driver had a clear view of the grey, snow-specked jags of mountains rising splendidly to the west of the city.

Before the cab trickled the River Tar.

Faint cries and industrial drones sounded from dark windows set into its brick banks, some of them below the high-water mark. Prisons and torture-chambers and workshops, and their bastard hybrids, the punishment factories, where the condemned were Remade. Boats coughed and retched their way along the black water.

The spires of Nabob Bridge appeared. And beyond them, slate roofs hunching like shoulders in the cold, rotten walls held at the point of collapse by buttresses and organic cement, stinking a unique stink, was the shambles of Kinken.

Over the river, in the Old City, the streets were narrower and darker. The pterabird paced uneasily past buildings slick with the hardened gel of the home-beetle. Khepri climbed from windows and doors of the refashioned houses. They were the majority here, this was their place. The streets were full of their women’s bodies, their insectile heads. They congregated in cavernous doorways, eating fruit.

Even the cabdriver could taste their conversations: the air was acrid with chymical communication.

An organic thing split and burst under the wheels. A male, probably, thought Lin with a shudder, imagining one of the countless mindless scuttlers that swarmed from holes and cracks all around Kinken. Good riddance.

The shying pterabird balked at passing under a low arch of brick that dripped stalactites of beetle mucus. Lin tapped the driver as he wrestled with the reins. She scrawled quickly and held up her pad.

Bird not too happy. Wait here, I’ll be back five minutes.

He nodded gratefully and extended a hand to help her down. Lin left him trying to calm the irritable mount. She turned a corner into Kinken’s central square. The pale exudations that drooled from rooftops left street-signs visible at the edges of the square, but the name they declared—Aldelion Place—was not one that any of Kinken’s inhabitants would use. Even the few humans and other non-khepri who lived there used the newer khepri name, translating it from the hiss and chlorine burp of the original tongue: the Plaza of Statues.

It was large and open, ringed by ramshackle buildings hundreds of years old. The tumbledown architecture contrasted violently with the great grey mass of another militia tower looming to the north. Roofs sloped incredibly steep and low. Windows were dirty and streaked with obscure patterns. She could feel the faint therapeutic humming of nurse-khepri in their surgeries. Sweet smoke wafted over the crowd: khepri, mostly, but here and there other races, investigating the statues. They filled the square: fifteen-foot figures of animals and plants and monstrous creatures, some real and some that had never lived, fashioned in brightly coloured khepri-spit.

They represented hours and hours of communal labour. Groups of khepri women had stood for days, back-to-back, chewing paste and colourberries, metabolizing it, opening the gland at the hindpart of their beetle-heads and pushing out thick (and misnamed) khepri-spit, that hardened in the air in an hour to a smooth, brittle, pearly brilliance.

To Lin the statues represented dedication and community, and bankrupt imaginations falling back on cod-heroic grandiosity. This was why she lived and ate and spat her art alone.

Lin walked past the fruit and vegetable shops, the handwritten signs promising home-grubs for hire in large uneven capitals, the art-exchange centres with all the accoutrements for the khepri gland artist.

Other khepri glanced at Lin. Her skirt was long and bright in the fashion of Salacus Fields: human fashion, not the traditional ballooning pantaloons of these ghetto-dwellers. Lin was marked. She was an outsider. Had left her sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety.

Damn right I have, thought Lin, defiantly swishing her long green skirt.

The spittle-store owner knew her, and they politely, perfunctorily, brushed antennae.

Lin looked up at the shelves. The inside of the store was coated in home-grub cement, rippling across walls and blunting corners with more care than was traditional. The spittle goods perched on shelves that jutted like bones from the organic sludge were illuminated by gaslight. The window was artistically smeared with juice from various colourberries, and the day was kept out.

Lin spoke, clicking and waving her headlegs, secreting tiny mists of scent. She communicated her desire for scarletberries, cyanberries, blackberries, opalberries and purpleberries. She included a spray of admiration for the high quality of the storekeeper’s goods.

Lin took her wares and left quickly.

The atmosphere of pious community in Kinken nauseated her.

The cabdriver was waiting, and she leapt up behind him, pointed north-east, bade him take them away.

Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety, she thought giddily. You sanctimonious bitches, I remember it all! On and on about community and the great khepri hive while the “sisters” over in Creekside scrabble about for potatoes. You have nothing, surrounded by people that mock you as bugs, buy your art cheap and sell you food dear, but because there are others with even less you style yourselves the protectors of the khepri way. I’m out. I dress how I like. My art is mine.

She breathed easier when the streets around her were clean of beetle cement, and the only khepri in the crowds were, like her, outcasts.

She sent the cab under the brick arches of Spit Bazaar Station, just as a train roared overhead like a great petulant steam-powered child. It set off towards the heart of the Old Town. Superstitiously, Lin directed the cab up towards Barguest Bridge. It was not the nearest place to cross the Canker, the Tar’s sister; but that would be in Brock Marsh, the triangular slice of the Old City wedged between the two rivers as they met and became Gross Tar, and where Isaac, like many others, had his laboratory.

There was no chance at all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy. But so that she need not even think of it for a moment, she sent the cab to Gidd Station, where the Dexter Line stretched out to the east on raised tracks that stretched higher and higher above the city as they moved further from the centre.

Follow the trains! she wrote, and the cabdriver did, through the wide streets of West Gidd, over the ancient and grand Barguest Bridge, across the Canker; the cleaner, colder river that flowed down from the Bezhek Peaks. She stopped him and paid, with a generous tip, wanting to walk the last mile herself, not wanting to be traceable.

She hurried to make her appointment in the shadow of the Ribs, the Bonetown Claws, in the Thieves’ Quarter. Behind her, for a moment, the sky was very full: an aerostat droned in the distance; tiny specks lurched erratically around it, winged figures playing in its wake like dolphins round a whale; and in front of them all another train, heading into the city this time, heading for the centre of New Crobuzon, the knot of architectural tissue where the fibres of the city congealed, where the skyrails of the militia radiated out from the Spike like a web and the five great trainlines of the city met, converging on the great variegated fortress of dark brick and scrubbed concrete and wood and steel and stone, the edifice that yawned hugely at the city’s vulgar heart, Perdido Street Station.

Chapter Three

Opposite Isaac on the train sat a small child and her father, a shabby gent in a bowler hat and second-hand jacket. Isaac made a monster face at her whenever she caught his eye.

Her father was whispering to her, entertaining her with prestidigitation. He gave her a pebble to hold, then spat on it quickly. It became a frog. The girl squealed with delight at the slimy thing and glanced shyly up at Isaac. He opened his eyes and mouth wide, mumming astonishment as he left his seat. She was still watching him as he opened the door of the train and stepped out onto Sly Station. He made his way down and onto the streets, wound through the traffic for Brock Marsh.

There were few cabs or animals in the narrow twisting streets of the Scientific Quarter, the oldest part of the ancient city. There were pedestrians of all races, as well as bakeries and laundries and guildhalls, all the sundry services any community needed. There were pubs and shops and even a militia tower; a small, stubby one at the apex of Brock Marsh where the Canker and the Tar converged. The posters plastered on the crumbling walls advertised the same dancehalls, warned of the same coming doom, demanded allegiance to the same political parties as elsewhere in the city. But for all that apparent normality, there was a tension to the area, a fraught expectancy.

Badgers—familiars by tradition, believed to have a certain immunity to the more dangerous harmonics of hidden sciences—scampered past with lists in their teeth, their pear-shaped bodies disappearing into special flaps in shop doorways. Above the thick glass storefronts were attic rooms. Old warehouses on the waterfront had been converted. Forgotten cellars lurked in temples to minor deities. In these and all the other architectural crevices, the Brock Marsh dwellers pursued their trades: physicists; chimerists; biophilosophers and teratologists; chymists; necrochymists; mathematicians; karcists and metallurgists and vodyanoi shaman; and those, like Isaac, whose research did not fit neatly into any of the innumerable categories of theory.

Strange vapours wafted over the roofs. The converging rivers on either side ran sluggishly, and the water steamed here and there as its currents mixed nameless chymicals into potent compounds. The slop from failed experiments, from factories and laboratories and alchymists’ dens, mixed randomly into bastard elixirs. In Brock Marsh, the water had unpredictable qualities. Young mudlarks searching the river quag for scrap had been known to step into some discoloured patch of mud and start speaking long-dead languages, or find locusts in their hair, or fade slowly to translucency and disappear.

Isaac turned down a quiet stretch of the river’s edge onto the decaying flagstones and tenacious weeds of Umber Promenade. Across the Canker, the Ribs jutted over the roofs of Bonetown like a clutch of vast tusks curling hundreds of feet into the air. The river sped up a little as it bore south. Half a mile away he could see Strack Island breaking its flow where it met the Tar and curled away grandly to the east. The ancient stones and towers of Parliament rose hugely from the very edges of Strack Island. There was no gradual incline or urban scrub before the blunt layers of obsidian shot out of the water like a frozen fountain.

The clouds were dissipating, leaving behind a washed-out sky. Isaac could see the red roof of his workshop rising above the surrounding houses; and before it, the weed-choked forecourt of his local, The Dying Child. The ancient tables in the outside yard were colourful with fungus. No one, in Isaac’s memory, had ever sat at one of them.

He entered. Light seemed to give up the struggle halfway through the thick, soiled windows, leaving the interior in shadows. The walls were unadorned except by dirt. The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles. Several were junkies, several were Remade. Some were both: The Dying Child turned no one away. A group of emaciated young men lay draped across a table twitching in perfect time, strung out on shazbah or dreamshit or very-tea. One woman held her glass in a metal claw that spat steam and dripped oil onto the floorboards. A man in the corner lapped quietly from a bowl of beer, licking the fox’s muzzle that had been grafted to his face.

Isaac quietly greeted the old man by the door, Joshua, whose Remaking had been very small and very cruel. A failed burglar, he had refused to testify against his gang, and the magister had ordered his silence made permanent: he had had his mouth taken away, sealed with a seamless stretch of flesh. Rather than live on tubes of soup pushed through his nose, Joshua had sliced himself a new mouth, but the pain had made him tremble, and it was a ragged, torn, unfinished-looking thing, a flaccid wound.

Joshua nodded at Isaac and, with his fingers, carefully held his mouth closed over a straw, sucked greedily at his cider.

Isaac headed for the back of the room. The bar, in one corner, was very low, about three feet from the ground. Behind it, in a trough of dirty water, wallowed Silchristchek the landlord.

Sil lived and worked and slept in the tub, hauling himself from one end to the other with his huge, webbed hands and frog’s legs, his body wobbling like a bloated testicle, seemingly boneless. He was ancient and fat and grumpy, even for a vodyanoi. He was a bag of old blood with limbs, without a separate head, his big curmudgeonly face poking out from the fat at the front of his body.

Twice a month he scooped the water out from around him and had his regulars pour fresh buckets over him, farting and sighing with pleasure. The vodyanoi could spend at least a day in the dry without ill-effects, but Sil could not be bothered. He oozed surly indolence, and chose to do so in his filthy water. Isaac could not help feeling that Sil debased himself as a kind of aggressive show. He seemed to relish being more-disgusting-than-thou.

In the early days, Isaac had drunk here out of a youthful delight in plumbing the depths of squalor. Mature now, he frequented more salubrious inns for pleasure, returning to Sil’s hovel only because it was so close to his work, and, increasingly, unexpectedly, for research purposes. Sil had taken to providing him with experimental samples he needed.

Stinking piss-coloured water slopped over the edges of the tub as Sil wriggled his way towards Isaac.

“What you having, ’Zaac?” he barked.

“Kingpin.”

Isaac flipped a deuce into Sil’s hand. Sil brought down a bottle from one of the shelves behind him. Isaac sipped the cheap beer and slid onto a stool, grimacing as he sat in some dubious liquid.

Sil sat back in his tub. Without looking at Isaac, he began a monosyllabic, idiot conversation about the weather, about the beer. He went through the motions. Isaac said just enough to keep the discourse alive.

On the counter were several crude figures, rendered in water that seeped into the grain of the old wood before his eyes. Two were rapidly dissolving, losing their integrity and becoming puddles as Isaac watched. Sil idly scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the figure’s face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac.

“That what you’re after?” he asked.

Isaac swallowed the rest of his beer.

“Cheers, Sil. Appreciate it.”

Very carefully, he blew on the little figure until it fell backwards into his cupped hands. It splashed a little, but he could feel its surface tension hold. Sil watched with a cynical smile as Isaac scurried to get the figurine out of the pub and to his laboratory.

Outside the wind had picked up a little. Isaac sheltered his prize and walked quickly up the little alley that adjoined The Dying Child with Paddler Way and his workshop-home. He pushed open the green doors with his bum and backed into the building. Isaac’s laboratory had been a factory and a warehouse years ago, and its huge, dusty floorspace swamped the little benches and retorts and blackboards that perched in its corners.

From the two corners of the floor came yelled greetings. David Serachin and Lublamai Dadscatt—rogue-scientists like Isaac, with whom he shared the rent and the space. David and Lublamai used the ground floor, each filling a corner with their tools, separated by forty feet of empty wooden boards. A refitted waterpump jutted from the floor between their ends of the room. The construct they shared was rolling across the floor, loudly and inefficiently sweeping up dust. They keep the useless thing out of sentimentality, thought Isaac.

Isaac’s workshop, his kitchen and his bed, were on the huge walkway that jutted out from the walls halfway up the old factory. It was about twenty feet wide, circumnavigating the hall, with a ramshackle wooden railing miraculously still holding from when Lublamai had first hammered it in.

The door slammed heavily shut behind Isaac, and the long mirror that hung beside it shuddered. I can’t believe that thing doesn’t break, thought Isaac. We must move it. As always, the thought was gone as soon as it had come.

As Isaac took the stairs three at a time, David saw how he held his hands and laughed.

“More of Silchristchek’s high art, Isaac?” he yelled.

Isaac grinned back.

“Never let it be said I don’t collect the best!”

Isaac, who had found the warehouse all those years ago, had had first pick of the working space, and it showed. His bed and stove and chamberpot were in one corner of the raised platform, and at the other end of the same side were the bulky protuberances of his lab. Glass and clay containers full of weird compounds and dangerous chymicals filled the shelves. Heliotypes of Isaac with his friends in various poses around the city and in Rudewood dotted the walls. The warehouse backed onto the Umber Promenade: his windows looked out over the Canker and the Bonetown shore, gave him a splendid view of the Ribs and the Kelltree train.

Isaac ran past those huge arched windows to an esoteric machine of burnished brass. It was a dense knot of pipes and lenses, with dials and gauges shoved roughly wherever they would fit. Ostentatiously stamped on every component of the whole was a sign: PROPERTY OF NC UNIVERSITY PHYSICS DEPT. DO NOT REMOVE.

Isaac checked and was relieved to see that the little boiler at the machine’s heart had not gone out. He shoved in a handful of coal and bolted the boiler closed. He placed Sil’s little statue on a viewing platform under a glass bell, and heaved at some bellows just beneath it, siphoning out the air and replacing it with gas from a slender leather tube.

He relaxed. The integrity of the vodyanoi waterpiece would hold a little longer, now. Outside vodyanoi hands, untouched, such works would last perhaps an hour before slowly collapsing back into their elemental form. Interfered with, they dissolved much more quickly: in a noble gas more slowly. He had perhaps two hours to investigate.

Isaac had become interested in vodyanoi watercræft in a roundabout way, as a result of his research in unified energy theory. He had wondered whether what allowed vodyanoi to mould water was a force related to the binding force that he sought, that held matter together in certain circumstances, dispersed it violently in others. What had happened was a common pattern of Isaac’s research: a byway of his work had taken on a momentum of its own, and had become a deep, almost certainly short-lived, obsession.

Isaac bent some lens-tubes into position and lit a gasjet to illuminate the waterpiece. Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercræft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much “analysis” was just description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish. His favourite example of the genre came from Benchamburg’s Hydrophysiconometricia, a hugely respected textbook. He had howled when he read it, copied it out carefully and pinned it to his wall.

The vodyanoi, by means of what is called their watercræft, are able to manipulate the plasticity and sustain the surface tension of water such that a quantity will hold any shape the manipulator might give it for a short time. This is achieved by the vodyanois’ application of an hydrocohesive/aquamorphic energy field of minor diachronic extension.

In other words, Benchamburg had no more idea how the vodyanoi shaped water than did Isaac, or a street urchin, or old Silchristchek himself.

Isaac pulled a set of levers, shifting a series of glass slides and sending different coloured lights through the statuette, which he could already see beginning to sag at the edges. Peering through a high-magnification eyepiece, he could see tiny animalculae squirm mindlessly. Internally the water’s structure changed not at all: it merely wanted to occupy a different space from its usual.

He collected it as it seeped through a crack in the stand. He would examine it later, though he knew from past experience he would find nothing of any interest in it.

Isaac scribbled notes on a pad beside him. He subjected the waterpiece to various experiments as the minutes went by, piercing it with a syringe and sucking some of its substance away, taking heliotypic prints of it from various angles, blowing tiny air-bubbles into it, which rose and burst out of its top. Eventually he boiled it and let it dissipate in steam.

At one point Sincerity, David’s badger, ambled up the stairs and sniffed at his dangling fingers. He stroked her absently and when she licked his hand, he yelled to David that she was hungry. He was surprised by the silence. David and Lublamai had left, presumably for a late lunch: several hours had passed since he had arrived.

He stretched and paced over to his pantry, throwing Sincerity a twist of dried meat, which she began to gnaw happily. Isaac was growing conscious of the world again, hearing boats through the walls behind him.

The door swung open and shut again below.

He trotted to the top of the stairs, expecting to see his colleagues returning.

Instead, a stranger stood in the centre of the great empty space. Air currents adjusted to his presence, investigated him like tentacles, sending a whirligig of dust spinning around him. Spots of light littered the floor from open windows and broken bricks, but none fell directly on him. The wooden walkway creaked as Isaac rocked, very slightly. The figure below jerked its head back and threw off a hood, hands clasped to its chest, very still, staring up.

Isaac gazed in astonishment.

It was a garuda.

He nearly stumbled down the stairs, fumbling with the rail, loath to take his eyes off the extraordinary visitor waiting for him. He touched earth.

The garuda stared down at him. Isaac’s fascination defeated his manners, and he stared frankly back.

The great creature stood more than six feet tall, on cruel clawed feet that poked out from under a dirty cloak. The ragged cloth dangled down almost to the ground, draped loosely over every inch of flesh, obscuring the details of physiognomy and musculature, all but the garuda’s head. And that great inscrutable bird face gazed down at Isaac with what looked like imperiosity. Its sharply curved beak was something between a kestrel’s and an owl’s. Sleek feathers faded subtly from ochre to dun to dappled brown. Deep black eyes stared at his own, the iris only a fine mottling at the very edge of the dark. Those eyes were set in orbits which gave the garuda face a permanent sneer, a proud furrow.

And looming over the garuda’s head, covered in the rough sackcloth it clasped about itself, projected the unmistakable shapes of its huge furled wings, promontories of feather and skin and bone that extended two feet or more from its shoulders and curved elegantly towards each other. Isaac had never seen a garuda spread its wings at close quarters, but he had read descriptions of the dust-cloud they could raise, and the vast shadows they threw across the garuda’s prey below.

What are you doing here, so far from home? thought Isaac with wonder. Look at the colour of you: you’re from the desert! You must have come miles and miles and miles, from the Cymek. What the spit are you doing here, you impressive fucker?

He almost shook his head with awe at the great predator before he cleared his throat and spoke.

“Can I help you?”

Chapter Four

Lin, to her mortal horror, was running late.

It did not help that she was not an aficionado of Bonetown. The cross-bred architecture of that outlandish quarter confused her: a syncresis of industrialism and the gaudy domestic ostentation of the slightly rich, the peeling concrete of forgotten docklands and the stretched skins of shantytown tents. The different forms segued into each other seemingly at random in this low, flat zone, full of urban scrubland and wasteground where wild flowers and thick-stemmed plants pushed through plains of concrete and tar.

Lin had been given a street name, but the signs around her crumbled on their perches and drooped to point in impossible directions, or were obscured with rust, or contradicted each other. She concentrated to read them, looked instead at her scribbled map.

She could orient herself by the Ribs. She looked up and found them above her, shoving vastly into the sky. Only one side of the cage was visible, the bleached and blistered curves poised like a bone wave about to break over the buildings to the east. Lin made her way for them.

The streets opened out around her and she found herself before another abandoned-looking lot, but larger than the others by a huge factor. It did not look like a square but a massive unfinished hole in the city. The buildings at its edge did not show their faces but their backs and their sides, as if they had been promised neighbours with elegant façades that had never arrived. The streets of Bonetown edged nervously into the scrubland with exploratory little fringes of brick that petered quickly out.

The dirty grass was dotted here and there with makeshift stalls, foldaway tables put down at random places and spread with cheap cakes or old prints or the rubbish from someone’s attic. Street-jugglers chucked things around in lacklustre displays. There were a few half-hearted shoppers, and people of all races sitting on scattered boulders, reading, eating, scratching at the dry dirt, and contemplating the bones above them.

The Ribs rose from the earth at the edges of the empty ground.

Leviathan shards of yellowing ivory thicker than the oldest trees exploded out of the ground, bursting away from each other, sweeping up in a curved ascent until, more than a hundred feet above the earth, looming now over the roofs of the surrounding houses, they curled sharply back towards each other. They climbed as high again till their points nearly touched, vast crooked fingers, a god-sized ivory mantrap.

There had been plans to fill the square, to build offices and houses in the ancient chest cavity, but they had come to nothing.

Tools used on the site broke easily and went missing. Cement would not set. Something baleful in the half-exhumed bones kept the gravesite free of permanent disturbance.

Fifty feet below Lin’s feet, archaeologists had found vertebrae the size of houses; a backbone which had been quietly reburied after one too many accidents on-site. No limbs, no hips, no gargantuan skull had surfaced. No one could say what manner of creature had fallen here and died millennia ago. The grubby print-vendors who worked the Ribs specialized in various lurid depictions of Gigantes Crobuzon, four-footed or bipedal, humanoid, toothed, tusked, winged, pugnacious or pornographic.

Lin’s map directed her to a nameless alley on the south side of the Ribs. She wound her way to a quiet street where she found the black-painted buildings she had been told to seek, a row of dark, deserted houses, all but one with bricked-up doorways and windows sealed and painted with tar.

There were no passers-by in this street, no cabs, no traffic. Lin was quite alone.

Above the one remaining door in the row was chalked what looked like a gameboard, a square divided into nine smaller squares. There were no noughts or crosses, however, no other mark at all.

Lin hovered in the vicinity of the houses. She fidgeted with her skirt and blouse until, exasperated with herself, she walked up to the door and knocked quickly.

Bad enough that I’m late, she thought, without pissing him off even more.

She heard hinges and levers slide somewhere above her, and detected a tiny glint of reflected light over her head: some system of lenses and mirrors was being deployed so those within could judge whether those without were worthy of attention.

The door opened.

Standing before Lin was a vast Remade. Her face was still the same mournful, pretty human woman’s it had always been, with dark skin and long plaited hair, but it supplanted a seven-foot skeleton of black iron and pewter. She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. Her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving her what looked like ineluctable strength. Her right arm was levelled at Lin’s head, and from the centre of the brass hand extended a vicious harpoon.

Lin recoiled in astonished terror.

A large voice sounded from behind the sad-faced woman.

“Ms. Lin? The artist? You’re late. Mr. Motley is expecting you. Please follow me.”

The Remade stepped backwards, balancing on her central leg and swinging the others behind it, giving Lin room to step around her. The harpoon did not waver.

How far can you go? thought Lin to herself, and stepped into the dark.

At the far end of an entirely black corridor was a cactacae man. Lin could taste his sap in the air, but very faintly. He stood seven feet tall, thick-limbed and heavy. His head broke the curve of his shoulders like a crag, his silhouette uneven with nodules of hardy growth. His green skin was a mass of scars, three-inch spines and tiny red spring flowers.

He beckoned to her with gnarled fingertips.

“Mr. Motley can afford to be patient,” he said as he turned and climbed the stairs behind him, “but I’ve never known him relish waiting.” He looked back clumsily and raised an eyebrow at Lin pointedly.

Fuck off, lackey, she thought impatiently. Take me to the big man.

He stomped off on shapeless feet like small tree-stumps.

Behind her, Lin could hear the explosive bursts of steam and thumps as the Remade took the stairs. Lin followed the cactus through a twisting, windowless tunnel.

This place is huge, Lin thought, as they moved on and on. She realized that it must be the whole row of houses, dividing walls destroyed and rebuilt, custom-made, renovated into one vast convoluted space. They passed doors from which suddenly emerged an unnerving sound, like the muffled anguish of machines. Lin’s antennae bristled. As they left it behind, a volley of thuds sounded, like a score of crossbow bolts fired into soft wood.

Oh Broodma, thought Lin querulously. Gazid, what the fuck have I let you talk me into?

It was Lucky Gazid, the failed impresario, who had started the process leading Lin to this terrifying place.

He had run off a set of heliotypes of her most recent batch of work, hawked them around the city. It was a regular process, as he attempted to establish a reputation among the artists and patrons of New Crobuzon. Gazid was a pathetic figure forever reminding anyone who would listen of the one successful show he had arranged for a now-dead æther sculptress thirteen years previously. Lin and most of her friends viewed him with pity and contempt. Everyone she knew let him take his heliotypes and slipped him a few shekels or a noble, “an advance on his agent’s fee.” Then he would disappear for a few weeks, to emerge again with puke on his trousers and blood on his shoes, buzzing on some new drug, and the process would begin again.

Only not this time.

Gazid had found Lin a buyer.

When he had sidled up to her in The Clock and Cockerel she had protested. It was someone else’s turn, she had scribbled on her pad, she had “advanced” him a whole guinea only a week or so ago; but Gazid had interrupted her and insisted she retreat from the table with him. And as her friends, the artistic elite of Salacus Fields, laughed and cheered them on, Gazid had handed her a stiff white card stamped with a simple crest of a three-by-three chessboard. On it was a short printed note.

Ms. Lin, it said. My employer was most impressed with the examples of your work your agent showed him. He wonders whether you might be interested in meeting him to discuss a possible commission. We look forward to hearing from you. The signature was illegible.

Gazid was a wreck and an addict of most things going, who could not help going to any lengths to secure money for drugs; but this was not like any scam that Lin could imagine. There was no angle for him, unless there was indeed someone wealthy in New Crobuzon prepared to pay for her work, giving him a cut.

She had dragged him out of the bar, to catcalls and whoops and consternation, and had demanded to know what was going on. Gazid was circumspect at first, and seemed to rack his brains to think of what lies to spout. He realized quite quickly that he needed to tell her the truth.

“There’s a guy I buy some stuff from occasionally . . .” he started shiftily. “Anyway, I had the prints of your statues lying around . . . uh . . . on the shelf when he came round, and he loved them and wanted to take a couple away, and . . . uh . . . I said ‘yeah.’ And then a while later he told me that he showed them to the guy who supplies him with the stuff I sometimes buy, and that guy liked them, and took them away, and showed them to his boss, and then they got to the kind of top man, who’s huge into art—bought some of Alexandrine’s stuff last year—and he liked them and wants you to do a piece for him.”

Lin translated the evasive language.

Your drug dealer’s boss wants me to work for him??? she scrawled.

“Oh shit, Lin, it’s not like that . . . I mean, yeah, but . . .” Gazid paused. “Well, yeah,” he finished lamely. There was a pause. “Only . . . only . . . he wants to meet you. If you’re interested he has to actually meet you.”

Lin pondered.

It was certainly an exciting prospect. Judging by the card, this was not some minor hustler: this was a big player. Lin was not stupid. She knew that this would be dangerous. She was excited, she could not help it. It would be such an event in her art-life. She could drop hints about it. She could have a criminal patron. She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.

And while she was deciding that she didn’t care, Gazid named the kinds of sums the mysterious buyer was quoting. Lin’s headlegs flexed in astonishment.

I have to talk to Alexandrine, she wrote, and went back inside.

Alex knew nothing. She milked the kudos of having sold canvases to a crime boss for what she could, but she had only ever met an at-best middle-ranking messenger, who had offered her enormous sums for two paintings that she had just finished. She had accepted, handed them over, and never heard anything again.

That was it. She had never even known the name of her buyer.

Lin decided that she could do better than that.

She had sent a message through Gazid, down the illicit conduit of communication that led fuck-knew-where, saying that yes, she was interested, and would be prepared to meet, but she really must have a name to write in her diary.

The New Crobuzon underworld digested her message, and made her wait a week, and then spat back an answer in the shape of another printed note, pushed under her door while she slept, giving her an address in Bonetown, a date, and a one-word name: Motley.

A frenetic snapping and clatter sifted into the corridor. Lin’s cactacae escort pushed open one dark door among the many, and stood aside.

Lin’s eyes adjusted to the light. She was looking into a typing pool. It was a large room with a high ceiling, painted black like everything in this troglodytic place, well-lit with gaslamps, and filled with perhaps forty desks; on each was a bulky typewriter, at each a secretary copying from reams of notes by their sides. Mostly human and mostly women, Lin also caught smell and sight of men and cactacae, even a pair of khepri, and a vodyanoi working at a typewriter with keys adapted for her huge hands.

Around the room Remade were stationed, mostly human, again, but of other races too, rare as xenian Remade were. Some were organically Remade, with claws and antlers and slabs of grafted muscle, but most were mech, and the heat from their boilers made the room close.

At the end of the room was a closed office.

“Ms. Lin, finally,” boomed a speaking-trumpet above its door as soon as she entered. None of the secretaries looked up. “Please make your way across the room to my office.”

Lin picked her way between the desks. She looked closely at what was being typed, hard though it was, and harder in the odd light of the black-walled room. The secretaries all typed expertly, reading the scribbled notes and transferring them without looking at their keyboards or their work.

Further to our conversation of the thirteenth of this month, read one, please consider your franchise operation under our jurisdiction, terms to be arranged. Lin moved on.

You die tomorrow, you fuck, you wormshit. You’re going to envy the Remade, you cowardly cunt, you’re going to scream till your mouth bleeds, said the next.

Oh . . . thought Lin. Oh . . . help.

The door to the office opened.

“Come in, Ms. Lin, come in!” The voice boomed from the trumpet.

Lin did not hesitate. She entered.

Filing cabinets and bookshelves filled most of the small room. There was a small, traditional oil painting of Iron Bay on one wall. Behind a large darkwood desk was a folding screen illustrated with silhouettes of fish, a large version of the screens behind which artists’ models changed. In the centre of the screen, one fish was rendered in mirrored glass, giving Lin a view of herself.

Lin hovered uncertainly in front of the screen.

“Sit, sit,” said a quiet voice from behind it. Lin pulled up the chair in front of the desk.

“I can see you, Ms. Lin. The mirrored carp is a window on my side. I think it’s polite to let people know that.”

The speaker seemed to expect a response, so Lin nodded.

“You’re late, you know, Ms. Lin.”

Devil’s Tail! Of all the appointments to be late to! Lin thought frantically. She began to scribble an apology on her pad when the voice interrupted her.

“I can sign, Ms. Lin.”

Lin put down her pad and apologized profusely with her hands.

“Don’t worry,” said her host disingenuously. “It happens. The Bonetown is unforgiving to visitors. Next time you’ll know to leave earlier, won’t you?”

Lin agreed that she would, that that was exactly what she would know to do.

“I like your work a great deal, Ms. Lin. I have all the heliotypes that made their way from Lucky Gazid. He is a sad, pathetic, broken cretin, that man—addiction is very sad in most of its forms—but he does, strangely enough, have something of a nose for art. That woman Alexandrine Nevgets was one of his, wasn’t she? Pedestrian, unlike your own work, but pleasant. I’m always prepared to indulge Lucky Gazid. It will be a shame when he dies. It’ll doubtless be a sordid affair, some dirty stubby knife gutting him slowly for the sake of small change; or a venereal disease involving vile emissions and sweat caught from an underage whore; or perhaps his bones will be broken for snitching—the militia, after all, do pay well, and junkies can’t be choosers when it comes to income.”

The voice that floated over the screen was melodious, and what the speaker said scanned hypnotically: he spoke everything into a poem. His sentences lilted on gently. His words were brutal. Lin was very afraid. She could not think of anything to say. Her hands were still.

“So having decided that I like your art I want to talk to you to discover whether you would be right for a commission. Your work is unusual for a khepri. Would you agree?”

Yes.

“Talk to me about your statues, Ms. Lin, and don’t worry, were you about to, that you might sound precious. I have no prejudices against taking art seriously, and don’t forget that I started this conversation. The key words to bear in mind when thinking how to answer my question are ‘themes,’ ‘technique’ and ‘aesthetics.’ ”

Lin hesitated, but her fear drove her on. She wanted to keep this man happy, and if that meant talking about her work, then that was what she would do.

I work alone, she signed, which is part of my . . . rebellion. I left Creekside and then Kinken, left my moiety and my hive. People were miserable, so communal art got stupidly heroic. Like Plaza of Statues. I wanted to spit out something . . . nasty. Tried to make some of the grand figures we all made together a little less perfect . . . Pissed off my sisters. So turned to my own work. Nasty work. Creekside nasty.

“That is exactly as I had expected. It is even—forgive me—somewhat hackneyed. However, that doesn’t detract from the power of the work itself. Khepri spit is a wonderful substance. Its lustre is quite unique, and its strength and lightness make it convenient, which I know is not the sort of word one is supposed to think of in connection with art, but I am pragmatic. Anyhow, to have such a lovely substance used for the drab wish-fulfilment of depressed khepri is a terrible waste. I was so very relieved to see someone using the substance for interesting, unsettling ends. The angularity you achieve is extraordinary, by the way.”

Thank you. I have powerful gland technique. Lin was enjoying the licence to boast. Originally I was a member of the Outnow school which forbids working on a piece after spat out. Gives you excellent control. Even though I have . . . reneged. I now go back while the spit is soft, work it more. More freedom, can do overhangs and the like.

“Do you use a great deal of colour variation?” Lin nodded. “I saw only the sepia of the heliotypes. That is good to know. That is technique and aesthetics. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts on themes, Ms. Lin.”

Lin was taken aback. Suddenly she could not think what her themes were.

“Let me put you in an easier position. I’d like to tell you what themes I am interested in. And then we can see if you’d be right for the commission I have in mind.”

The voice waited until Lin nodded assent.

“Please tilt your head up, Ms. Lin.” Startled, she did so. The motion made her nervous, exposing as it did the soft underbelly of her beetle head, inviting harm. She held her head still as eyes behind the mirror-fish watched her.

“You have the same cords in your neck as a human woman. You share the hollow at the base of your throat beloved by poets. Your skin is a shade of red that would mark you out as unusual, that’s true, but it could still pass as human. I follow that beautiful human neck up—I have no doubt you won’t accept the description ‘human,’ but indulge me a minute—and then there is . . . there is a moment . . . there is a thin zone where that soft human skin merges with the pale segmented cream underneath your head.”

For the first time since Lin had entered the room, the speaker seemed to be searching for words.

“Have you ever created a statue of a cactus?” Lin shook her head. “Nonetheless you have seen them up close? My associate who led you here, for example. Did you happen to notice his feet, or his fingers, or his neck? There is a moment when the skin, the skin of the sentient creature, becomes mindless plant. Cut the fat round base of a cactus’s foot, he can’t feel a thing. Poke him in the thigh where he’s a bit softer, he’ll squeal. But there in that zone . . . it’s an altogether different thing . . . the nerves are intertwining, learning to be succulent plant, and pain is distant, blunt, diffuse, worrying rather than agonizing.

“You can think of others. The torso of the Cray or the Inchmen, the sudden transition of a Remade limb, many other races and species in this city, and countless more in the world, who live with a mongrel physiognomy. You will perhaps say that you do not recognize any transition, that the khepri are complete and whole in themselves, that to see ‘human’ features is anthropocentric of me. But leaving aside the irony of that accusation—an irony you can’t yet appreciate—you would surely recognize the transition in other races from your own. And perhaps in the human.

“And what of the city itself? Perched where two rivers strive to become the sea, where mountains become a plateau, where the clumps of trees coagulate to the south and—quantity becomes quality—are suddenly a forest. New Crobuzon’s architecture moves from the industrial to the residential to the opulent to the slum to the underground to the airborne to the modern to the ancient to the colourful to the drab to the fecund to the barren . . . You take my point. I won’t go on.

“This is what makes the world, Ms. Lin. I believe this to be the fundamental dynamic. Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. And that is the theme I’m interested in. The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone.

“Could this theme interest you, d’you think? And if the answer is yes . . . then I am going to ask you to work for me. Before you answer, please understand what this will mean.

“I will ask you to work from life, to produce a model—life-size, I fancy—of me.

“Very few people see my face, Ms. Lin. A man in my position has to be careful. I’m sure you can understand. If you take this commission I will make you rich, but I will also own a part of your mind. The part that pertains to me. That is mine. I do not give you permission to share it with any. If you do, you will suffer greatly before you die.

“So . . .” Something creaked. Lin realized that he had sat back in his chair. “So, Ms. Lin. Are you interested in the hybrid zone? Are you interested in this job?”

I cannot . . . cannot turn this down, thought Lin helplessly. I cannot. For money, for art . . . Gods help me. I cannot turn this down. Oh . . . please, please let me not regret this.

She paused, and signed her acceptance of his terms.

“Oh, I am so glad,” he breathed. Lin’s heart raced. “I really am glad. Well . . .”

There was a shuffling sound behind the screen. Lin sat very still. Her antennae moved tremulously.

“The blinds are down in the office, aren’t they?” said Mr. Motley. “Because I think you should see what you will be working with. Your mind is mine, Lin. You work for me now.”

Mr. Motley stood and pushed the screen to the floor.

Lin got half to her feet, her headlegs bristling with astonishment and terror. She gazed at him.

Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved; tiny limbs clutched; eyes rolled from obscure niches; antlers and protrusions of bone jutted precariously; feelers twitched and mouths glistened. Many-coloured skeins of skin collided. A cloven hoof thumped gently against the wood floor. Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. Scales gleamed. Fins quivered. Wings fluttered brokenly. Insect claws folded and unfolded.

Lin backed away, stumbling, feeling her terrified way away from his slow advance. Her chitinous headbody was twitching neurotically. She shook.

Mr. Motley paced towards her like a hunter.

“So,” he said, from one of the grinning human mouths. “Which do you think is my best side?”

Chapter Five

Isaac waited, facing his guest. The garuda stood silent. Isaac could see it was concentrating. It was preparing to speak.

The garuda’s voice, when it came, was harsh and monotone.

“You are the scientist. You are . . . Grimnebulin.”

It had difficulty with his name. Like a parrot trained to speak, the shaping of consonants and vowels came from within the throat, without the aid of versatile lips. Isaac had only ever conversed with two garuda in his life. One was a traveller who had long-practised the formation of human sounds; the other was a student, one of the tiny garuda community born and raised in New Crobuzon, which grew up shouting the city slang. Neither had sounded human, but neither had sounded half so animal as this great birdman struggling with an alien tongue. It took Isaac a moment to understand what had been said.

“I am.” He held out his hand, spoke slowly. “What is your name?”

The garuda looked imperiously at his hand, then shook it with a strangely fragile grip.

“Yagharek . . .” There was a shrieking stress on the first syllable. The great creature paused, and shifted uncomfortably, before continuing. It repeated its name, but this time added an intricate suffix.

Isaac shook his head.

“Is that all your name?”

“Name . . . and title.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow.

“Am I, then, in the presence of nobility?”

The garuda stared at him blankly. Eventually it spoke slowly without breaking his gaze.

“I am Too Too Abstract Individual Yagharek Not To Be Respected.”

Isaac blinked. He rubbed his face.

“Um . . . right. You have to forgive me, Yagharek, I’m not familiar with . . . uh . . . garuda honorifics.”

Yagharek shook his great head slowly.

“You will understand.”

Isaac asked Yagharek to come upstairs, which he did, slowly and carefully, leaving gouges in the wooden stairs where he gripped with his great claws. But Isaac could not persuade him to sit down, or to eat, or to drink.

The garuda stood by Isaac’s desk, while his host sat and stared up at him.

“So,” said Isaac, “why are you here?”

Again, Yagharek gathered himself for a moment before he spoke.

“I came to New Crobuzon days ago. Because this is where the scientists are.”

“Where are you from?”

“Cymek.”

Isaac whistled quietly. He had been right. That was a huge journey. At least a thousand miles, through that hard, burning land, through dry veldt, across sea, swamp, steppe. Yagharek must have been driven by some strong, strong passion.

“What do you know about New Crobuzon’s scientists?” asked Isaac.

“We have read of the university. Of the science and industry that moves and moves here like nowhere else. Of Brock Marsh.”

“But where do you hear all this stuff?”

“From our library.”

Isaac was astonished. He gaped, then recovered.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I thought you were nomads.”

“Yes. Our library travels.”

And Yagharek told Isaac, to Isaac’s growing amazement, of the Cymek library. The great librarian clan who strapped the thousands of volumes into their trunks and carried them between them as they flew, following the food and the water in the perpetual, punishing Cymek summer. The enormous tent village that sprung up where they landed, and the garuda bands that congregated on the vast, sprawling centre of learning whenever it was in their reach.

The library was hundreds of years old, with manuscripts in uncountable languages, dead and alive: Ragamoll, of which the language of New Crobuzon was a dialect; hotchi; Fellid vodyanoi and Southern vodyanoi; high khepri; and a host of others. It even contained a codex, Yagharek claimed with discernible pride, written in the secret dialect of the handlingers.

Isaac said nothing. He was ashamed at his ignorance. His view of the garuda was being torn up. This was more than a dignified savage. Time to get me down my library and learn about the garuda. Pig ignorant bastard, he reproached himself.

“Our language has no written form, but we learn to write and read in several others as we grow,” said Yagharek. “We trade for more books from travellers and merchants, of whom many have passed through New Crobuzon. Some are native to this city. It is a place we know well. I have read the histories, the stories.”

“Then you win, mate, because I know shit about your place,” said Isaac despondently. There was a silence. Isaac looked back up at Yagharek.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

Yagharek turned away and looked out of the window. Barges floated aimlessly below.

It was difficult to discern emotion in Yagharek’s scraping voice, but Isaac thought he could hear disgust.

“I have crawled like vermin from hole to hole for a fortnight. I have sought journals and gossip and information, and it led me to Brock Marsh. And in Brock Marsh it led me to you. The question that led me has been: ‘Who can change the powers of material?’ ‘Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin,’ everyone says. ‘If you have gold,’ they say, ‘he is yours, or if you have no gold but you interest him, or if you bore him but he pities you, or if a whim takes him.’ They say you are a man who knows the secrets of matter, Grimnebulin.”

Yagharek looked directly at him.

“I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me.”

“Tell me what you need,” said Isaac.

Yagharek looked away from him again.

“Perhaps you have flown in a balloon, Grimnebulin. Looked down at roofs, at the earth. I grew up hunting from the skies. Garuda are a hunting people. We take our bows and spears and long whips and we scour the air of birds, the ground of prey. It is what makes us garuda. My feet are not built to walk your floors, but to close around small bodies and tear them apart. To grip dry trees and rock pillars between the earth and the sun.”

Yagharek spoke like a poet. His speech was halting, but his language was that of the epics and histories he had read, the curious stilted oration of someone who has learnt a language from old books.

“Flight is not a luxury. It is what makes me garuda. My skin crawls when I look up at roofs that trap me. I want to look down at this city before I leave it, Grimnebulin. I want to fly, not once, but whenever I will.

“I want you to give me back flight.”

Yagharek unclipped his cloak and threw it away across the floor. He stared at Isaac with shame and defiance. Isaac gasped.

Yagharek had no wings.

Strapped across his back was an intricate frame of wooden struts and leather straps that bobbed idiotically behind him as he turned. Two great carved planks sprouted from a kind of leather jerkin below his shoulders, jutting way above his head, where they hinged and dangled down to his knees. They mimicked wingbones. There was no skin or feathers or cloth or leather stretched between them, they were no kind of gliding apparatus. They were only a disguise, a trick, a prop on which to drape Yagharek’s incongruous cloak, to make it seem as if he had wings.

Isaac reached out for them. Yagharek stiffened, then steeled himself and let Isaac touch them.

Isaac shook his head in astonishment. He caught a glimpse of ragged scar tissue on Yagharek’s back, until the garuda turned abruptly to face him.

“Why?” breathed Isaac.

Yagharek’s face creased slowly as he screwed up his eyes. A thin, utterly human moan started from him, and it grew and grew until it became a bird of prey’s melancholy war-cry, loud and monotonous and miserable and lonely. Isaac gazed on in alarm as the cry became a barely comprehensible shout.

“Because this is my shame!” screamed Yagharek. He was silent for a moment, then he spoke quietly again.

“This is my shame.”

He unclipped the uncomfortable-looking bulk of wood from behind him, and it fell with a flat clatter to the floor.

He was nude to the waist. His body was thin and fine and tight, with a healthy emaciation. Without the looming bulk of his fake wings behind him, he looked small and vulnerable.

He turned slowly, and Isaac caught his breath as the scars he had glimpsed were brought into view.

Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek’s shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing. The strips of ruined flesh on either side of his back were a foot and a half long, and perhaps four inches at their widest point. Isaac’s face wrinkled in empathy: the torn holes were criss-crossed with rough, curving slice marks, and Isaac realized that the wings had been sawed from Yagharek’s back. No single, sudden cut but a long, drawn-out torturous disfigurement. Isaac winced.

Thinly hidden knobs of bone shifted and flexed; muscles stretched, grotesquely visible.

“Who did this?” breathed Isaac. The stories were right, he thought. The Cymek is a savage, savage land.

There was a long silence before Yagharek responded.

“I . . . I did this.”

At first Isaac thought he had misunderstood.

“What do you mean? How the fuck could you . . . ?”

“I brought this onto me.” Yagharek was shouting. “This is justice. It is I who did this.”

“This is a fucking punishment? Godshit, fuck, what could . . . what did you do?”

“Do you judge garuda justice, Grimnebulin? I cannot hear that without thinking of the Remade . . .”

“Don’t try to turn it round! You’re absolutely right, I’ve no stomach for the law in this city . . . I’m just trying to understand what happened to you . . .”

Yagharek sighed, with a shockingly human slump of the shoulders. When he spoke, it was quiet and pained, a duty that he resented.

“I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There . . . was a madness . . . I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act . . .” His words broke down into avian moans.

“What did you do?” Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity.

“This language cannot express my crime. In my tongue . . .” Yagharek stopped for a moment. “I will try to translate. In my tongue they said . . . they were right . . . I was guilty of choice-theft . . . choice-theft in the second degree . . . with utter disrespect.”

Yagharek was gazing back at the window. He held his head high, but he would not meet Isaac’s eyes.

“That is why they deemed me Too Too Abstract. That is why I am not worthy of respect. That is who I am now. I am no longer Concrete Individual and Respected Yagharek. He is gone. I told you my name, and my name-title. I am Too Too Abstract Yagharek Not To Be Respected. That is who I will always be, and I will be true enough to tell you.”

Isaac shook his head as Yagharek sat slowly on the edge of Isaac’s bed. He cut a forlorn figure. Isaac stared at him for a long time before speaking.

“I have to tell you . . .” said Isaac. “I don’t really . . . uh . . . Plenty of my clients are . . . not entirely on the right side of the law, shall we say? Now, I’m not going to pretend that I even slightly understand what you did, but as far as I’m concerned it’s not my business. Like you said, there’s no words for your crime in this city: I don’t think I could ever understand what it was you’d done wrong.” Isaac spoke slowly and seriously, but his mind was already racing away. He began to speak with more animation.

“And your problem . . . is interesting.” Representations of forces and lines of power, of femtomorphic resonances and energy fields were beginning to leap into his consciousness. “It’s easy enough to get you into the air. Balloons, force manipulation and whatnot. Even easy to get you up there more than once. But to get you up there whenever you want it, under your own steam . . . which is what you’re after, yes?” Yagharek nodded. Isaac stroked his chin.

“Godspit . . . ! Yes . . . now that is a much more . . . interesting conundrum.”

Isaac was beginning to retreat into his computations. One prosaic part of his mind recalled that he had no appointments for some time, and that meant he could immerse himself in research for a little while. Another pragmatic level did its job, evaluating the importance and urgency of his outstanding work. A couple of piss-easy analyses of compounds that he could put off more or less indefinitely; a half-promise to synthesize an elixir or two—easy to get out of . . . apart from that, it was only his own research into vodyanoi watercræft. Which he could put to one side.

No, no, no! he contradicted himself suddenly. Don’t have to put watercræft aside . . . I can integrate it! It’s all about elements arsing about, misbehaving . . . liquid that stands free, heavy matter that invades the air . . . there’s got to be something there . . . some common denominator . . .

With an effort he brought himself back to his laboratory, realized that Yagharek was staring at him impassively.

“I’m interested in your problem,” he said simply. Immediately Yagharek reached into a pouch. He held out a huge handful of twisted, dirty gold nuggets. Isaac opened his eyes wide.

“Well . . . uh, thank you. I’ll certainly accept some expenses, hourly rates, etc. . . .” Yagharek handed Isaac the pouch.

Isaac managed not to whistle as he weighed it in his hand. He peered into it. Layer on heavy layer of sifting gold. It was undignified, but Isaac felt almost spellbound. This represented more money than he had ever seen in one place, enough to cover a lot of research costs and still live well for months.

Yagharek was no businessman, that was certain. He could have offered a third, a quarter of this and still had almost anyone in Brock Marsh panting. He should have kept most of it back, dangled it if interest waned.

Maybe he has kept most of it back, thought Isaac, and his eyes widened even further.

“How do I reach you?” said Isaac, still gazing at his gold. “Where are you living?”

Yagharek shook his head and was silent.

“Well, I have to be able to reach you . . .”

“I will come to you,” said the garuda. “Every day, every two days, every week . . . I will make sure you do not forget my case.”

“No danger of that, I assure you. Are you really saying I can’t get messages to you?”

“I do not know where I will be, Grimnebulin. I shun this city. It hunts me. I must keep moving.”

Isaac shrugged helplessly. Yagharek stood to leave.

“You understand what I want, Grimnebulin? I do not want to have to take a potion. I do not want to have to wear a harness. I do not want to climb into a contraption. I do not want one glorious journey into the clouds, and an earthbound eternity. I want you to let me leap from the earth as easily as you walk from room to room. Can you do that, Grimnebulin?”

“I don’t know.” Isaac spoke slowly. “But I think so. I’m your best bet, I reckon. I’m not a chymist, or a biologist, or a thaumaturge . . . I’m a dilettante, Yagharek, a dabbler. I think of myself . . .” Isaac paused and laughed briefly. He spoke with heavy gusto. “I think of myself as the main station for all the schools of thought. Like Perdido Street Station. You know it?” Yagharek nodded. “Unavoidable, ain’t it? Fucking massive great thing.” Isaac patted his belly, maintaining the analogy. “All the train-lines meet there—Sud Line, Dexter, Verso, Head and Sink Lines; everything has to pass through it. That’s like me. That’s my job. That’s the kind of scientist I am. I’m being frank with you. Thing is, you see, I think that’s what you need.”

Yagharek nodded. His predatory face was so sharp, so hard. Emotion was invisible. His words had to be decoded. It was not his face, nor his eyes, nor his bearing (once again proud and imperious), nor his voice that let Isaac see his despair. It was his words.

“Be a dilettante, a sciolist, a swindler . . . So long as you return me to the sky, Grimnebulin.”

Yagharek stooped and picked up his ugly wooden disguise. He strapped it to himself without obvious shame, despite the indignity of the act. Isaac watched as Yagharek draped the huge cloak over himself and stepped quietly down the stairs.

Isaac leant thoughtfully on the railing and looked down into the dusty space. Yagharek paced past the immobile construct, past haphazard piles of papers and chairs and blackboards. The light beams that had burst through walls pierced by age were gone. The sun was low, now, behind the buildings across from Isaac’s warehouse, blocked by massed ranks of bricks, sliding sideways across the ancient city, lighting the hidden sides of the Dancing Shoe Mountains, Spine Peak and the crags of Penitent’s Pass, throwing the jagged skyline of the earth into silhouettes that loomed up miles to the west of New Crobuzon.

When Yagharek opened the door, it was onto a street in shadow.

Isaac worked into the night.

As soon as Yagharek left Isaac opened his window and dangled a large red piece of cord from nails in the brick. He moved his heavy calculation engine from the centre of its desk to the floor beside it. Sheafs of programme cards spilt from its storage shelf to the floor. Isaac swore. He patted them together and replaced them. Then he carried his typewriter to his desk and began to make a list. Occasionally he would leap upright and pace over to his makeshift bookshelves, or rummage through a pile of books on the floor, till he found the volume he was looking for. He would take it to the desk and flick through from the back, searching for the bibliography. He laboriously copied details, stabbing with two fingers at the typewriter keys.

As he wrote, the parameters of his plan began to expand. He sought more and more books, his eyes widening as he realized the potentiality of this research.

Eventually he stopped and sat back in his chair, pondering. He grabbed some loose paper and scrawled diagrams on it: mental maps, plans of how to proceed.

Again and again he returned to the same model. A triangle, with a cross firmly planted in the middle. He could not stop himself grinning.

“I like it . . .” he murmured.

There was a knock at the window. He rose and paced over to it.

A small scarlet idiot face grinned at Isaac from outside. Two stubby horns jutted from its prominent chin, ridges and knobs of bone unconvincingly imitated a hairline. Watery eyes gazed above an ugly, cheerful grin.

Isaac opened the window onto the rapidly dwindling light. There was an argument between klaxons as industrial boats fought to crawl past each other in the waters of the Canker. The creature perched on Isaac’s window-ledge hopped up into the open window-frame, grasping the edges with gnarled hands.

“Wotcher, captain!” it gabbled. Its accent was thick and bizarre. “Saw the red wossname, scarf thing . . . Says to meself, ‘Time for da bossman!’ ” It winked and barked stupid laughter. “Wossyer pleasure, captain? Atcher service.”

“Evening, Teafortwo. You got my message.” The creature flapped its red batwings.

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf’s below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows’ legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by.

The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo’s sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies.

The wyrmen lived in hundreds and thousands of nooks, in attics and annexes and behind hoardings. Most picked a living from the margins of the city. The huge dumps and rubbish-heaps at the outskirts of Stoneshell and Abrogate Green, the waste-scape by the river in Griss Twist, all swarmed with wyrmen, squabbling and laughing, drinking from stagnant canals, fucking in the sky and on the earth. Some, like Teafortwo, supplemented this with informal employment. When scarfs flapped on roofs, or chalk marks defaced walls near attic windows, the odds were that someone was calling some wyrman or other for a task.

Isaac foraged in his pocket and held up a shekel.

“Fancy earning this, Teafortwo?”

“Betcha, captain!” shouted Teafortwo. “Look out below!” he added and shat loudly. The stool spattered on the street. Teafortwo guffawed.

Isaac handed him the list he had made, rolled into a scroll.

“Take that to the university library. You know it? Over the river? Good. It’s open late, you should catch ’em open. Give that to the librarian. I’ve signed it, so they shouldn’t give you any trouble. They’ll load you up with some books. Think you can bring them back to me? They’ll be pretty heavy.”

“No problem, captain!” Teafortwo swelled his chest like a bantam. “Big strong lad!”

“Fine. Manage it in one go and I’ll slip you a bit more moolah.”

Teafortwo clutched the list and turned to go with some rude childish yell, when Isaac grabbed the edge of his wing. The wyrman turned, surprised.

“Problem, boss?”

“No, no . . .” Isaac was staring at the base of his wing, thoughtfully. He gently opened and closed Teafortwo’s massive wing with his hands. Under that vivid red skin, horny and pock-marked and stiff like leather, Isaac could feel the specialized muscles of flight winding through the flesh to the wings. They moved with a magnificent economy. He bent the wing through a full circle, feeling the muscles tug it into a paddling, scooping motion that would shovel air out and under the wyrman. Teafortwo giggled.

“Captain tickle me! Saucy devil!” he screamed.

Isaac reached for some paper, having to stop himself from dragging Teafortwo with him. He was visualizing the wyrman wing represented mathematically, as simple component planes.

“Teafortwo . . . tell you what. When you get back, I’ll toss you another shekel if I can take a few heliotypes of you and do a couple of experiments. Only half an hour or so. What do you say?”

“Lovely-jubbly, captain!”

Teafortwo hopped onto the window-sill and lurched out into the gloaming. Isaac squinted, studying the rolling motion of the wings, watching those strong muscles unique to the airborne send eighty or more pounds of twisted flesh and bone powering through the sky.

When Teafortwo had disappeared from sight, Isaac sat and made another list, by hand this time, scribbling at speed.

Research, he wrote at the top of the page. Then below it: physics; gravity; forces/planes/vectors; UNIFIED FIELD. And a little below that, he wrote: Flight i) natural ii) thaumaturgical iii) chymico-physical iv) combined v) other.

Finally, underlined and in capitals, he wrote PHYSIOGNOMIES OF FLIGHT.

He sat back, not relaxed but poised to leap. He was humming abstractedly. He was desperately excited.

He fumbled for one of the books he had fished from under his bed, an enormous old volume. He let it topple flat onto the desk, relishing the heavy sound. The cover was embossed in unrealistic fake gold.

A Bestiary Of The Potentially Wise: The Sentient Races Of Bas-Lag.

Isaac stroked the cover of Shacrestialchit’s classic, translated from the Lubbock vodyanoi and updated a hundred years ago by Benkerby Carnadine, human merchant, traveller and scholar of New Crobuzon. Constantly reprinted and imitated, but still unsurpassed. Isaac put his finger on the G of the thumb-index and flipped the pages, until he found the exquisite watercolour sketch of the Cymek bird-people that introduced the essay on the garuda.

As the light ebbed from the room he turned on the gaslamp that sat on his desk. Out in the cool air, away to the east, Teafortwo beat his wings heavily and grasped the sack of books that dangled below him. He could see the bright glimmer of Isaac’s gasjet, and just beyond it, outside the window, the sputtering ivory of the streetlamp. A constant stream of night-insects spiralled it like elyctrons, finding their occasional way through a crack in the glass and immolating themselves in its light with a little combustive burst. Their carbonized remains dusted the bottom of the glass.

The lamp was a beacon, a lighthouse in that forbidding city, steering the wyrman’s way over the river and out of the predatory night.

In this city, those who look like me are not like me. I made the mistake once (tired and afraid and desperate for help) of doubting that.

Looking for a place to hide, looking for food and warmth at night and respite from the stares that greet me whenever I set foot on the streets. I saw a young fledgling, running easily along the narrow passageway between drab houses. My heart nearly burst. I cried out to him, this boy of my own kind, in the desert tongue . . . and he gazed back at me and spread his wings and opened his beak and broke into some cacophonous laughter.

He swore at me in a bestial croaking. His larynx fought to shape human sounds. I cried out to him but he would not understand. He yelled something behind him and a group of human street-children congregated from holes in the city, like spirits spiteful to the living. He gesticulated at me, that bright-eyed chick, and he screamed curses too fast for me to understand. And these, his comrades, these dirty-faced roughnecks, these dangerous brutalized amoral little creatures with pinched faces and ragged trousers, spattered with snot and rheum and urban dirt, girls in stained shifts and boys with jackets too big, grabbed cobblestones from the earth and pelted me where I lay in the darkness of a decaying threshold.

And the little boy whom I will not call garuda, who was nothing but human with freakish wings and feathers, my little lost non-brother threw the stones with his comrades and laughed and broke windows behind my head and called me names.

I realized then as the stones splintered my pillow of old paint that I was alone.

And so, and so, I know that I must live without respite from this isolation. That I will not speak to any other creature in my own tongue.

I have taken to foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My existence grows nocturnal. My beliefs change.

I emerge into streets that wind like dark rivers through cavernous brick rockfaces. The moon and her little shining daughters glimmer wanly. Cold winds ooze like molasses down from the foothills and the mountains and clog the night-city with drifting rubbish. I share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors.

I remember the desert winds: the Khamsin that scourges the land like smokeless fire; the Föhm that bursts from hot mountainsides as if in ambush; the sly Simoom that inveigles its way through leather sandscreens and library doors.

The winds of this city are a more melancholy breed. They explore like lost souls, looking in at dusty gaslit windows. We are brethren, the city-winds and I. We wander together.

We have found sleeping beggars that clutch each other and congeal for warmth like lower creatures, forced back down evolutionary strata by their poverty.

We have seen the city’s night-porters fish the dead from the rivers. Dark-suited militia tugging with hooks and poles at bloated bodies with eyes ripped from their heads, the blood set and gelatinous in their sockets.

We have watched mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in the faecal mud.

I have sat with the wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things.

My scars and bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise myself before arrogant spirits.

Sometimes I make my way to the warehouse where Grimnebulin reads and writes and scrawls, and I climb silently to the roof, and I lie with my back to the slate. The thought of all that energy of his mind channelled towards flight, my flight, my deliverance, lessens the itching in my ruined back. The wind tugs me harder when I am here: it feels betrayed. It knows that if I am made whole it will lose its nighttime companion in the brick mire and midden of New Crobuzon. So it chastises me when I lie there, suddenly threatening to pull me from my perch into the wide stinking river, clutching my feathers, fat petulant air warning me not to leave it; but I grip the roof with my claws and let the healing vibrations pass up from Grimnebulin’s mind through the crumbling slate into my poor flesh.

I sleep in old arches under the thundering railtracks.

I eat whatever organic thing I find that will not kill me.

I hide like a parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with age.

Sometimes I clamber to the top of the huge, huge towers that teeter like porcupine spines from the city’s hide. Up in the thinner air, the winds lose the melancholy curiosity they have at street level. They abandon their second-floor petulance. Stirred by towers that poke above the host of city light—intense white carbide lamps, smoke-burnished red of lit grease, tallow twinkling, frenetic sputtering gas flare, all anarchic guards against the dark—the winds rejoice and play.

I can dig my claws into the rim of a building’s crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly.

Part Two:

Physiognomies
of Flight

Chapter Six

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope it’s not too long, Isaac thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cog closed her mouth and stalked off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ged stared at him. His huge eyes narrowed.

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

“How do you steal someone’s choice?”

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

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

“I’d imagine so.”

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

Ged was gazing at Isaac in wonder.

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

Isaac raised one eyebrow, and nodded quickly.

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

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

“Oh please oh please . . .”

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

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

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

There was a long pause.

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

Isaac wasn’t sure if he was or not.

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

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

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

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

Ged grinned without rancour and waved Isaac away.

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

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

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

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

“Me?” Lemuel Pigeon smiled lopsidedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who would, Isaac?” agreed Lemuel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Seven

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

Lin felt vertiginous.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Either that, or he was a victim of Torque.

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

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

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

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

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

Lin was eager to begin.

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

Lin scrawled quickly on her pad.

Cornfed, sweetheart, you bore me.

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

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

Lin, touched, shook her headbody gently.

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

I miss Isaac, Lin added mock-forlornly.

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

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

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

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

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

They had been close since then.

Isaac liked Derkhan because she was a seditionist.

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

“Godshit, everyone, sorry I’m late . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She briefly signed that she had.

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

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

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

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

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

She waved her hand dismissively.

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

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

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

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

MR. BOMBADREZIL’S UNIQUE and WONDERFUL FAIR, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most JADED PALATE. The PALACE OF LOVE; The HALL OF TERRORS; The VORTEX; and many other attractions for reasonable prices. Also come to see the extraordinary freakshow, the CIRCUS OF WEIRD. MONSTERS and MARVELS from every corner of Bas-Lag! SEERS from the FRACTURED LAND; a genuine WEAVER’S CLAW; the LIVING SKULL; the lascivious SNAKE-WOMAN; URSUS REX, the man-king of the Bears; DWARF CACTUS-PEOPLE of tiny sizes; a GARUDA, bird-man chief of the wild desert; the STONE MEN of Bezhek; caged DÆMONS; DANCING FISH; treasures stolen from THE GENGRIS; and innumerable other PRODIGIES and WONDERS. Some attractions not suitable for the easily shocked or those of a NERVOUS DISPOSITION. Entrance 5 stivers. Sobek Croix gardens, 14th Chet to 14th Melluary, 6 to 11 o’clock every night.

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

Are you going to go down? signed Lin.

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

Derkhan grinned and nodded.

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

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

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

Could be fun, she signed. Your treat?

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

Missed you.

Derkhan looked away for a moment, tactfully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Eight

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

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

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

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

“Experience the hypnagogic mesmerism of Sillion the Extraordinary!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac and the others left Bellagin and Spint behind.

The remnants of the party turned a corner beside the Wheel of Destiny and a roughly fenced-off section of the park came into view. Inside a line of small tents curved away from view. Above the gateway was a crudely painted legend: THE CIRCUS OF WEIRD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derkhan and Isaac stared at each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac grabbed Derkhan.

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac’s awe was waning fast.

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

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

Isaac’s face curled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garuda circling above, blades flashing.

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

“This for RR?” whispered Isaac.

Derkhan looked around them quickly.

“Maybe. Depends what else we see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derkhan and Isaac wandered into a long enclosure. Above the entrance was a sign rendered in ostentatious calligraphy. A PANOPLY OF WONDERS! DO YOU DARE ENTER THE MUSEUM OF HIDDEN THINGS?

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m getting depressed,” said Derkhan.

Isaac agreed.

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

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

KING GARUDA! LORD OF THE AIR!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The false garuda staggered backwards, blinking in fear.

There was silence for a long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“ ’Stail,” Isaac swore softly.

Derkhan had walked up to the bars.

“What did you do?” she asked.

The man looked around again before answering.

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

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

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

“Does it hurt?” Derkhan was asking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fly for us!” yelled one.

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

The cloth closed behind them. The speech was obscured.

Isaac watched as Derkhan scribbled in her notepad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derkhan nodded thoughtfully.

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How was it, treasure? she signed.

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

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

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

Chapter Nine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some did not return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clerks and doctors, lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of leisure . . . even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry. The main differences between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants, in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and the capacity they had not to get caught.

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

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

Councillors dozed quietly in a haze of dust motes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fat little creatures undulated blindly.

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

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

SM caterpillars x 5. That was all.

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

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

Rare caterpillars . . . Some foreign breed, he thought.

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

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

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

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

That’s the hard bit, he thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They entered a vast dark chamber.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

She scanned quickly in the mirrors. Nothing was moving.

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

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

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

The thing in the cage was answering.

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

With trembling fingers she pushed the tray into the cage.

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

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

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

“Is it done?” she whispered eventually.

“Yes.”

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

She handed the helmet back to the guard.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“Was it all right?” he asked.

“Never,” she snapped, and turned.

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

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

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

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

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

Biohazard. Danger. Extreme Caution Required.

Chapter Ten

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

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

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

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

She came and went into the attic alone. Whenever Lin arrived she would find Mr. Motley waiting. He would stand in the enormous space a few feet from where she pulled herself into his view. The triangular cavity seemed to stretch at least a third the length of the terrace, a study in perspective, with the chaotic agglutination of flesh that was Mr. Motley poised at its centre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They turned together.

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

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

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

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

What . . . what were you? she signed at him.

He sighed.

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

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

He calmed a little and lowered his many arms.

“This is totality.”

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

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

He looked at her triumphantly.

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

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

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

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

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

Her resolution increased as her thoughts progressed.

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

Mr. Motley continued sounding.

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

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

Chapter Eleven

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

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

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

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

“Oy!”

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac gesticulated at it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are we talking?” asked David.

Isaac pondered.

“Two extra guineas?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s over there?”

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

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

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

“Can I see it?”

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

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

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

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

David stared levelly at him as if at a halfwit.

“Kill it.”

Isaac shrugged hugely.

“I tried. It wouldn’t die.”

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

Isaac winced ostentatiously and held up his massive hands.

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

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

Isaac was instantly enthusiastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it?” hissed Lublamai.

Isaac peered over their heads at his star caterpillar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lin peered up at them.

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

Isaac was scurrying down the stairs.

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

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

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

But then, Lin was clearly miserable.

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

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

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

He raced up the stairs.

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

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

Lublamai waved him away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Twelve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Onions! Who’ll buy my fine onions?”

“Whelks! Stick to whelks!”

“Broth to warm yer!”

Other goods and services were plainly available on every street-corner.

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

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

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

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

Half-a-Prayer’s coming!

Against the Lottery!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take your time,” she replied.

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

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

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

She obliged him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How’s that old thing?” she asked.

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

“How’s the new issue?”

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

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

Derkhan waved her hand.

“It’s not a big story.”

“No, but it’s . . . y’know . . . toothy . . . We’re leading on the election. ‘Fuck the Lottery,’ in slightly less strident terms.” He grinned. “I know it’s pretty much the same as last issue, but that’s the time of year.”

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

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

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

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

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

“When are the others coming?” asked Derkhan.

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

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

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

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

“What do you want me to get onto?”

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

Derkhan nodded.

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

Benjamin pursed his lips.

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

Derkhan nodded slowly and appreciatively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes. He’s quite good.”

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

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

Benjamin shook his head appreciatively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Thirteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, she would not tell him.

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

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

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

Isaac peered up from his bread a little uneasily.

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

What?

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

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

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

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

“Where to, guv?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

Is it really dangerous? she signed nervously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cab pulled to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Those are garuda,” Isaac said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I doing here? she signed sardonically.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inhabitants of Spatters came to stare.

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

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

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

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

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

The man spoke very quickly.

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

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

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

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

The man held up his hands, conciliatory.

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

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

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

“Lead on, man,” said Isaac.

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

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

Isaac signed as he walked.

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

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

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

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

Isaac hesitated.

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

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

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

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

There was a gasp and appreciative whistling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The three garuda looked at each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac lowered his hands as his pupils tightened.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac looked at him carefully.

“What am I doing? You mean . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fallen garuda looked up at Charlie.

“You the big man,” he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac was calming down, even looking a little shamed.

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

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

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

Lin said nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Fourteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their politics were brutal, but totally understandable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was an owl.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eventually, when the last tiny shape had disappeared below, Isaac closed the window. He turned back and surveyed the warehouse. He heard a faint drone of wings, and saw a few airborne shapes circulating the lamps. An aspis, a handful of moths or butterflies, and a couple of small birds. Well, he thought, they’ll find their own way out, or they won’t last long and I can clear them out when they starve.

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

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

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

“Grimnebulin!”

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

“Yagharek?”

“Have you forsaken me, Grimnebulin?”

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac beckoned him up the stairs.

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

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

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

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

“I do not understand.”

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

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

Yagharek did not spare it a glance.

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

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

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

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

“I mean, I’m presuming you’re not fussy, right, Yag? I’m presuming that if I graft onto your back a pair of bat or bluebottle wings, or even a wind-polyp’s flightgland, you’re not going to be fussy. Might not be pretty, but it’s just about getting you into the air, right?”

Yagharek nodded. He was listening fiercely, sifting through the papers on the desk as he did so. He was intent on understanding.

“Right. So it seems reasonable, even given all that, that it’s the big birds we should be looking at. But of course . . .” Isaac rummaged among the papers, grabbed some pictures from the wall, handed sheafs of the relevant diagrams to Yagharek. “Of course, that turns out not to be so. I mean, you can get so far on the aerodynamics of birds, all useful stuff, but it’s actually very misleading to be looking at them. Because the aerodynamics of your body are so fucking different, basically. You ain’t just an eagle with a scrawny human body attached. I’m sure you never thought you were . . . I don’t know how your maths and physics are, but on this sheet here—” Isaac found it and passed it over “—are some diagrams and equations which show you why big birds’ flight ain’t the direction to be looking. Lines of force all wrong. Not strong enough. That sort of thing.

“So, I turn to the other wings in the collection. What if we tacked on dragonfly wings or what have you? Well, first of all there’s the problem of getting hold of insect wings big enough. The only insects big enough already aren’t going to just hand ’em over. And I don’t know about you but I don’t fancy fucking off into the mountains or wherever to ambush an assassin beetle. Get our arses kicked.

“What about building them to our specifications? Then we can get the size right and the shape. We can compensate for your . . . awkward form.” Isaac grinned and continued. “Trouble is, material science being what it is, we might be able to make them exact enough, and light enough, and strong enough, but I honestly doubt it. I’m working on designs that might work, but might not. I don’t think the odds are good enough.

“Also, you’ve got to remember that this whole project is dependent on you getting Remade by a virtuoso. I’m glad to say I don’t know any Remakers, which is the first thing, and the second is they’re usually more interested in humiliation, industrial power or aesthetics than in something as intricate as flight. There are shitloads of nerve endings, loads of muscles, ripped-up bones and the like floating around in your back, and they’d have to get every one exactly right if you were going to have the slightest chance of getting airborne.”

Isaac had steered Yagharek into a chair. He pulled up a stool and sat opposite him. The garuda was completely silent. He gazed at Isaac with powerful concentration, then at the diagrams he held. This was how he read, Isaac realized, with this intensity and focus. He was not like a patient waiting for a doctor to get to the point: he was taking in every single word.

“I should say that I’m not totally finished with this. There’s one person I know who’s adept at the sort of bio-thaumaturgy you’d need to have working wings grafted to you. So I’m going to go round and pick his brains about the chances of success.” Isaac grimaced and shook his head. “And let me tell you, Yag old son, that if you knew this geezer you’d know how damn noble that is. There’s no sacrifice I won’t make it for you . . .” He paused lengthily.

“So there’s the chance this chap could say ‘Yes, wings, no problem, bring him round and I’ll do it on Dustday afternoon.’ That is possible, but you employ me for my scientific nous, and I’m telling you that it’s my professional opinion that that won’t happen. I think we have to think laterally.

“My first forays down this route were to look at the various things that fly without wings. Now, I’ll spare you the details of my schemes. Most of the plans are . . . here. if you’re interested. A subcutaneous self-inflating mini-dirigible; a transplant of mutant wind-polyp glands; integrating you with a flying golem; even something as prosaic as teaching you basic physical thaumaturgy.” Isaac indicated the notes on each of these plans as he mentioned them. “All unworkable. Thaumaturgy’s unreliable and exhausting. Anyone can learn some basic hexes, given application, but constant countergeotropy on demand would take a damn sight more energy and skill than most people have got. Do you have powerful sortilege in the Cymek?”

Yagharek shook his head slowly. “Some whispers to call prey to our claws; some symbols and passes that encourage bones to knit and blood to clot: that is all.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. So best not to rely on that. And trust me when I tell you that my other . . . er . . . offbeat plans were unworkable.

“So I’ve been spending all my time working on stuff like this, and getting nowhere, and I realized that whenever I stop for a minute or two and just have a think, the same thing comes into my head. Watercræft.”

Yagharek frowned, drawing his already heavy brows into an overhanging crag of almost geological aspect. He shook his head to show his confusion.

“Watercræft,” Isaac repeated. “You know what that is?”

“I have read something of it . . . The skill of the vodyanoi . . .”

“Bang on, old son. You’ll see the dockers doing it sometimes, in Kelltree or Smog Bend. A whole gang of them can shape quite a bit of the river. They dig holes in the water down to where spilt cargoes lie on the bottom, so the cranes can hook them. Fucking amazing. In rural communities they use it to cut trenches of air through rivers, then drive fish into them. They just fly out of the flat side of the river and flop onto the ground. Brilliant.” Isaac pursed his lips in appreciation. “Anyway, these days it’s mostly just used to arse about, make little sculptures. They have little competitions and whatnot.

“The point is, Yag, that what you’ve got there is water behaving very much as it shouldn’t. Right? And that’s what you want. You want heavy stuff, this thing here, this body—” he poked Yagharek gently in the chest “—to fly. Are you with me? Let’s turn our minds to the ontological conundrum of persuading matter to break habits of aeons. We want to make elements misbehave. This isn’t a problem of advanced ornithology, it’s philosophy.

“ ’Stail, Yag, this is stuff I’ve been working on for years! It’d almost turned into a kind of hobby. But then this morning I looked again at some notes I’d made early on in your case, and I linked it up with all my old ideas, and I saw that this was the way to go. And I’ve been wrestling with it all day.” Isaac shook a piece of paper at Yagharek, a piece of paper on which was a triangle containing a cross.

Isaac grabbed a pencil and wrote words at the three points of the triangle. He turned the diagram to face Yagharek. The top point was labelled Occult/thaumaturgical; the bottom left Material; the bottom right Social/sapiential.

“Righto, now, don’t get too bogged down with this diagram, Yag old son, it’s supposed to be an aid to thought, nothing more. What you’ve got here is a depiction of the three points within which all scholarship, all knowledge, is located.

“Down here, there’s material. That’s the actual physical stuff, atoms and the like. Everything from fundamental femtoscopic particles like elyctrons, up to big fuck-off volcanos. Rocks, elyctromagnetism, chymical reaction . . . All that sort of thing.

“Opposite, that’s social. Sentient creatures, of which there’s no shortage on Bas-Lag, can’t just be studied like stones. By reflecting on the world and on their own reflections, humans and garuda and cactacae and whatnot create a different order of organization, right? So it’s got to be studied in its own terms—but at the same time it’s also obviously linked to the physical stuff that makes everything up. That’s what this nice line is here, connecting the two.

“Up top is occult. Now we’re cooking. Occult: ‘hidden.’ Takes in the various forces and dynamics and the like that aren’t just to do with physical bits and bobs interacting, and aren’t just the thoughts of thinkers. Spirits, dæmons, gods if you want to call them that, thaumaturgy . . . you get the idea. That’s up at that end. But it’s linked to the other two. First off, thaumaturgic techniques, invocation, shamanism and so on, they all affect—and are affected by—the social relations that surround them. And then the physical aspect: hexes and charms are mostly the manipulation of theoretical particles—the ‘enchanted particles’—called thaumaturgons. Now, some scientists—” he thumped his chest “—think they’re essentially the same sort of thing as protons and all the physical particles.

“This . . .” said Isaac slyly, his voice slowing right down, “is where stuff gets really interesting.

“If you think of any arena of study or knowledge, it lies somewhere in this triangle, but not squarely on one corner. Take sociology, or psychology, or xenthropology. Pretty simple, right? It’s down here, in the ‘Social’ corner? Well, yes and no. That’s definitely its closest node, but you can’t study societies without thinking about the questions of physical resources. Right? So straight away, the physical aspect is kicking in. So we have to move sociology along the bottom axis a little bit.” He slid his finger a fraction of an inch to the left. “But then, how can you understand, say, cactacae culture without understanding their solar-focus, or khepri culture without their deities, or vodyanoi culture without understanding shamanic channelling? You can’t,” he concluded triumphantly. “So we have to shift things up towards the occult.” His finger moved a little, accordingly.

“So that’s roughly where sociology and psychology and the like are. Bottom right-hand corner, little bit up, little bit along.

“Physics? Biology? Should be right over by material sciences, yeah? Only, if you say that biology has an effect on society, the reverse is also true, so biology’s actually a tiny bit to the right of the ‘Material’ corner. And what about the flight of wind-polyps? The feeding of soul trees? That stuff’s occult, so we’ve moved it again, up this time. Physics includes the efficacy of certain substances in thaumaturgic hexes. You take my point? Even the most ‘pure’ subject’s actually somewhere between the three.

“Then there’s a whole bunch of subjects that define themselves by their mongrel nature. Socio-biology? Halfway along the bottom and a little bit up. Hypnotology? Halfway up the right flank. Social/psychological and occult, but with a bit of brain chymistry thrown in, so that’s over a bit . . .”

Isaac’s diagram was now covered in little crosses where he located the various disciplines. He looked at Yagharek and drew a neat, final, careful x in the very centre of the triangle.

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle?

“Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like; but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.

“If the subjects are located in one triangle, with three nodes and one centre, then so are the forces and dynamics they study. In other words, if you think this way of looking at things is interesting or helpful, then there’s basically one kind of field, one kind of force, being studied in its various aspects here. That’s why this is called ‘Unified Field Theory.’ ”

Isaac smiled, exhausted. Godspit, he realized suddenly, I’m doing rather a good job of this . . . Ten years of research have improved my teaching . . . Yagharek was watching him carefully.

“I . . . understand . . .” the garuda finally said.

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s more, old son, so gird your loins. UFT’s not very accepted as a theory, you know. It’s probably about the status of the Fractured Land Hypothesis, if that means anything to you.” Yagharek nodded. “Fine, you know what I mean, then. Just about respectable, but a bit crackpot. However, to shred the last vestiges of credibility I might have been able to muster, I subscribe to a minority view among UFT theorists. That’s over the nature of the forces under investigation.

“I’ll try and keep this simple.” Isaac squeezed his eyes closed for a minute and gathered his thoughts. “Right. The question is whether it’s pathological for a dropped egg to fall.”

He paused and let the image hang for a minute.

“See, if you think that matter and therefore the unified force under investigation are essentially static, then falling, flying, rolling, changing your mind, casting a spell, growing older, moving, are basically deviations from an essential state. Otherwise, you think that motion is part of the fabric of ontology, and the question’s how best to theorize that. You can tell where my sympathies lie. Staticists would say I’m misrepresenting them, but fuck it.

“So I’m a MUFTI, a Moving Unified Field Theorist. Not a SUFTI, a Static Unified . . . you get the idea. But then, being a MUFTI raises as many problems as it solves: if it moves, how does it move? Steady gait? Punctuated inversion?

“When you pick up a piece of wood and hold it ten feet above the ground, it has more energy than when it’s on the ground. We call that potential energy, right? That’s not controversial among any scientist. Potential energy’s the energy that gives the wood the power to hurt you or mark the floor, a power it doesn’t have when it’s just resting on the ground. It has that energy when it’s motionless, like it was before, but when it could fall. If it does, the potential energy turns into kinetic energy, and you break your toe or whatever.

“See, potential energy’s all about placing something in a situation where it’s teetering, where it’s about to change its state. Just like when you put enough strain on a group of people, they’ll suddenly explode. They’ll go from grumpy and quiescent to violent and creative in one moment. The transition from one state to another’s affected by taking something—a social group, a piece of wood, a hex—to a place where its interactions with other forces make its own energy pull against its current state.

“I’m talking about taking things to the point of crisis.”

Isaac sat back for a minute. To his surprise, he was loving this. The process of explaining his theoretical approach was consolidating his ideas, making him formulate his approach with a tentative rigour.

Yagharek was a model pupil. His attention was totally unwavering, his eyes as sharp as stilettos.

Isaac took a long breath and continued.

“This is major shit we’re dealing with here, Yag mate. I’ve been nibbling at crisis theory for arsing years. In a nutshell: I’m saying it’s in the nature of things to enter crisis, as part of what they are. Things turn themselves inside out by virtue of being things, understand? The force that pushes the unified field on is crisis energy. Stuff like potential energy, that’s one aspect of crisis energy, one tiny partial manifestation. Now, if you could tap the reserves of crisis energy in any given situation, you’re talking about enormous power. Some situations are more crisis-ridden or -prone than others, yes, but the point of crisis theory is that things are in crisis just as part of being. There’s loads of sodding crisis energy flowing around all the time, but we haven’t yet learnt how to tap it efficiently. Instead it bursts over unreliably and uncontrollably every so often. Terrible waste.”

Isaac shook his head at the thought.

“The vodyanoi can tap crisis energy, I think. In a tiny, tiny way. It’s paradoxical. You tap the existing crisis energy in the water to hold it in a shape it fights against, so you put it in more crisis . . . but then there’s nowhere for the energy to go, so the crisis resolves itself by breaking down into its original form. But what if the vodyanoi used water they’d already . . . uh . . . watercræfted, and used it as a constituent for some experiment that drew on the increased crisis energy . . . Sorry. I’m digressing. The point is, I’m trying to work out a way for you to tap into your crisis energy, and channel it to flight. See, if I’m right, it’s the only force that’s always going to be . . . suffusing you. And the more you fly, the more you’re in crisis, the more you should be able to fly . . . That’s the theory, anyway . . .

“But to be honest, Yag, this is much bigger than that. If I can really unlock crisis energy for you, then your case becomes, frankly, a pretty paltry concern. We’re talking about forces and energy that could totally change . . . everything . . .”

The incredible idea stilled the air. The dirty environs of the warehouse seemed too small and mean for this conversation. Isaac stared out of the window into the grubby New Crobuzon night. The moon and her daughters were dancing sedately above him. The daughters, smaller than their mother but bigger than stars, shone hard and cold above him. Isaac thought about crisis.

Eventually Yagharek spoke.

“And if you are right . . . I will fly?”

Isaac burst into laughter at the bathetic demand.

“Yes, yes, Yag old son. If I’m right, you’ll fly again.”

Chapter Fifteen

Isaac could not persuade Yagharek to stay in the warehouse. The garuda would not explain his objections. He simply slipped away into the evening, a wretched outcast for all his pride, to sleep in some ditch or chimney or ruin. He would not even accept food. Isaac stood at the door to the warehouse and watched him go. Yagharek’s dark blanket swung loosely from that wooden framework, those false wings.

Eventually, Isaac closed the door. He returned to his ledge and watched lights slide along the Canker. He rested his head on his fists and listened to the tick of his clock. The feral sounds of New Crobuzon at night inveigled their way through his walls. He heard the melancholy lowing of machines and ships and factories.

In the room below him, David and Lublamai’s construct seemed to cluck gently in time to the clock.

Isaac collected his drawings from the walls. Some that he thought were good he stuffed into an obese portfolio. Many he squinted at critically and threw away. He got onto his big belly and rooted under the bed, bringing out a dusty abacus and a slide-rule.

What I need, he thought, is to get to the university and liberate one of their difference engines. It would not be easy. The security for such items was neurotic. Isaac realized suddenly that he would have the chance to scope out the guard systems for himself: he was going to the university the next day, to talk to his much-loathed employer, Vermishank.

Not that Vermishank employed him much these days. It had been months since he had received a letter in that tight little hand telling him his services were required to research some abstruse and perhaps pointless bywater of theory. Isaac could never refuse these “requests.” To do so would have been to risk his access privileges to the university’s resources, and hence to a rich vein of equipment he plundered more or less at his leisure. Vermishank did not make any move to restrict Isaac’s privileges, despite their attenuating professional relationship, and despite probably noticing a correlation between disappearing resources and Isaac’s research schedule. Isaac did not know why. Probably to try to keep power over me, he thought.

It would be the first time in his life he had sought out Vermishank, he realized, but Isaac had to go and see him. Even though he felt committed to his new approach, his crisis theory, he could not entirely turn his back on more mundane technologies such as Remaking without asking one of the city’s foremost bio-thaumaturges’ opinions on Yagharek’s case. It would have been unprofessional.

Isaac made himself a ham roll and a cup of cold chocolate. He steeled himself at the thought of Vermishank. Isaac disliked him for a huge variety of reasons. One of them was political. Biothaumaturgy after all, was a polite way to describe an expertise one of whose uses was to tear at and recreate flesh, to bond it in unintended ways, to manipulate it within the limits dictated only by imagination. Of course, the techniques could heal and repair, but that was not their usual application. No one had any proof, of course, but Isaac would not be at all surprised if some of Vermishank’s research had been carried out in the punishment factories. Vermishank had the skill to be an extraordinary sculptor in flesh.

There was a thump on his door. Isaac looked up in surprise. It was nearly eleven o’clock. He put down his supper and hurried down the stairs. He opened the door on a debauched-looking Lucky Gazid.

What the fuck is this? he thought.

“ ’Zaac, my brother, my . . . bumptious, bungling . . . beloved . . .” Gazid screamed as soon as he saw Isaac. He groped for more alliteration. Isaac pulled him into the warehouse as lights went on across the road.

“Lucky, you fucking arse, what do you want?”

Gazid was pacing from side to side much too quickly. His eyes were stretched wide open, and virtually spiralling in his head. He looked hurt by Isaac’s tone.

“Steady on, guv, ease up, ease up, no need for nastiness, now is there? Eh? I’m looking for Lin. She here?” He giggled abruptly.

Ah, thought Isaac carefully. This was tricky. Lucky was a Salacus Fields man, he knew the unstated truth about Isaac and Lin. But this was not Salacus Fields.

“No, Lucky, she’s not here. And if she were here, for some reason, you’d have absolutely no right to come crashing round here in the middle of the night. What do you want her for?”

“She’s not at home.” Gazid turned and walked up the ladder, speaking to Isaac without turning his head. “Just been round there, but I s’pose she’s hard at art, eh? She owes me money, owes me commission, for getting her the plumb job and setting her up for life. Guess that’s where she is now, eh? I want some dosh . . .”

Isaac banged his head in exasperation and leapt up the stairs behind Gazid.

“What the fuck are you talking about? What job? She’s doing her own stuff right now.”

“Oh yes, course, righto, yup, that’s the size of it,” agreed Gazid with peculiar absent-minded fervour. “Owes me money, though. I’m fucking desperate, ’Zaac . . . Stand me a noble . . .”

Isaac was getting angry. He grabbed Gazid and held him still. Gazid had the junkie’s scrawny arms. He could only struggle pathetically in Isaac’s grip.

“Listen, Lucky, you little puke. How can you be hurting, you’re so strung out now you can hardly stand. How dare you crash round my house, you fucking junkie . . .”

“Oy!” Gazid shouted suddenly. He sneered up at Isaac, breaking his flow. “Lin isn’t here now, but I’m hungry for something, and I want you to help me or I don’t know what I might end up saying, if Lin won’t help me, you can, you’re her knight in shining armour, her love-bug, she’s your ladybird . . .”

Isaac drew back a fat meaty fist and smashed Lucky Gazid in the face, sending the little man yards through the air.

Gazid squealed in astonishment and terror. He scraped his heels on the bare wood and scrabbled towards the stairs. A star of blood radiated out from below his nose. Isaac shook blood from his knuckles and stalked towards Gazid. He was cold with rage.

Think I’m going to let you talk like that? Think you can blackmail me, you little shit? he thought.

“Lucky, you should leave right fucking now if you don’t want me to take your head off.”

Gazid crawled to his feet and burst out crying.

“You’re fucking crazy, Isaac, I thought we were friends . . .”

Snot and tears and blood dripped onto Isaac’s floor.

“Yeah, well, you thought wrong, didn’t you, old son? You’re nothing but a fucking dreg, and I . . .” Isaac broke off from his contumely and stared in astonishment.

Gazid was leaning against the empty cages on which the caterpillar’s box lay. Isaac could see the fat grub wriggling, jack-knifing in excitement, twisting desperately against the wire front, squirming with sudden reserves of energy towards Lucky Gazid.

Lucky hovered, terrified, waiting for Isaac to finish.

“What?” he wailed. “What are you going to do?”

“Shut up,” hissed Isaac.

The caterpillar was thinner than it had been on its arrival, and its extraordinary peacock-feather colours were dulled, but it was undoubtedly alive. It rippled its way around its little cage, feeling through the air like a blind person’s finger, faltering towards Gazid.

“Don’t move,” hissed Isaac, and edged closer. The terrified Gazid obeyed. He followed Isaac’s line of sight and his eyes widened at the sight of the huge grub rooting its way around the little cage, trying to find a way towards him. He snatched his hand from the box with a little cry and started backwards. Instantly, the caterpillar changed direction, trying to follow him.

“This is fascinating . . .” said Isaac. As he watched, Gazid reached up and clutched his head, shaking it suddenly and violently as if it was full of insects.

“Oh, what is happening in my head?” Gazid stuttered.

As he drew closer, Isaac could feel it too. Snatches of alien sensation slithered like lightning-quick eels through his cerebellum. He blinked and coughed slightly, in thrall suddenly and briefly to the sensation of emotions that were not his clogging up his throat. Isaac shook his head and squeezed his eyes hard shut.

“Gazid,” he snapped. “Walk slowly round it.”

Lucky Gazid did as he was told. The caterpillar toppled over in its eager attempts to right itself, to follow him, to track him down.

“Why does the thing want me?” moaned Lucky Gazid.

“Well I don’t know, Lucky,” said Isaac tartly. “The poor thing’s hurting. Looks like it wants whatever you’ve got, Lucky old son. Empty your pockets slowly. Don’t worry, I’m not going to nick anything.”

Gazid began to pull strips of paper and handkerchiefs from the folds of his soiled jacket and trousers. He hesitated, then reached inside and pulled two fat packets from his inner pockets.

The grub went berserk. The disorienting shards of synaesthetic feeling whirled through Isaac’s and Gazid’s heads again.

“What the fuck’ve you got?” said Isaac through clenched teeth.

“This one’s shazbah,” said Gazid hesitantly and waved the first packet at the cage. The grub did not react. “This one’s dreamshit.” Gazid held the second envelope over the caterpillar’s head, and it all but balanced on its rear end to reach it. Its piteous wails were not quite audible, but they were acutely sensible.

“There we go!” said Isaac. “That’s it! The thing wants dreamshit!” Isaac held out his hand to Gazid and clicked his fingers. “Give it to me.”

Gazid hesitated, then handed over the packet.

“Lot of stuff there, man . . . that’s a lot of moolah there, man . . .” he whimpered. “You can’t just take it, man . . .”

Isaac hefted the pouch. It weighed about two or three pounds, he estimated. He pulled it open. Again the emotional wails burst piercingly up from the caterpillar. Isaac winced at the poignant and inhuman begging.

The dreamshit was a mass of brown, sticky pellets that smelt like very burnt sugar.

“What is this stuff?” Isaac asked Gazid. “I’ve heard of it, but I know arse-all about it.”

“New thing, ’Zaac. Expensive stuff. Been around a year or so. It’s . . . heady stuff . . .”

“What does it do?”

“Couldn’t describe it really. Want to buy some?”

“No!” said Isaac sharply, then hesitated. “Well . . . Not for me, anyway . . . How much would this packet cost, Lucky?”

Gazid hesitated, doubtless wondering how much he could exaggerate.

“Uh . . . about thirty guineas . . .”

“Oh fuck off, Lucky . . . You’re such a piss-artist, old son . . . I’ll buy this off you for . . .” Isaac hesitated. “For ten.”

“Done,” said Gazid instantly.

Shit, thought Isaac. I’ve been stung. He was about to quibble, when he suddenly thought better of it. He looked carefully at Gazid, who was beginning to swagger again, even with his face slick and ugly with gore and mucus.

“Righto, then. Deal. Listen, Lucky,” said Isaac evenly, “I might want more of this stuff, you know what I mean? And if we stay on good terms, there’s no reason not to keep you on as my . . . exclusive supplier. Know what I mean? But if anything came up to spread discord in our relationship, distrust and the like, I’d have to go elsewhere. Understand?”

“ ’Zaac, my man, say no more . . . Partners, that’s what we are . . .”

“Absolutely,” said Isaac heavily. He was not so foolish as to think he could trust Lucky Gazid, but at least this way Isaac could keep him vaguely sweet. Gazid was unlikely to bite the hand that fed him, at least not for a while.

This can’t last, thought Isaac, but it’ll do for now.

Isaac plucked one of the moist, sticky lumps from the packet. It was the size of a large olive, coated in a thick and rapidly drying mucus. Isaac pulled back the lid of the caterpillar’s box an inch or two and dropped the nugget of dreamshit inside. He squatted down to watch the larva through the wire front.

Isaac’s eyelids flickered as if static coursed through him. For a moment, he could not focus his vision.

“Whoa . . .” moaned Lucky Gazid behind him. “Something’s fucking with my head . . .”

Isaac felt briefly nauseous, then aflame with the most consuming and uncompromised ecstasy he had ever felt. After less than half a second the inhuman sensations spewed instantaneously out of him. He felt as if they left by his nose.

“Oh by Jabber . . .” Isaac yelped. His vision fluctuated, then sharpened and became unusually clear. “This little fucker’s some sort of empath, ain’t it?” he murmured.

He gazed at the caterpillar feeling like a voyeur. The creature was rolling around the drug pellet as if it were a snake crushing its prey. Its mouthpart was clamped hugely onto the top of the dreamshit, and it was chewing it with a hunger that seemed lascivious in its intensity. Its side-split jaws oozed with spit. It was devouring its food like a child eating toffee-pudding at Jabber’s Feast. The dreamshit was rapidly disappearing.

“Hell’s Ducks,” said Isaac. “It’s going to want a lot more than that.” He dropped another five or six little lozenges into the cage. The grub rolled happily around in the sticky collection.

Isaac stood up. He regarded Lucky Gazid, who watched the caterpillar eating and smiled beatifically, swaying.

“Lucky, old son, seems like you might’ve saved my little experiment’s bacon. Very much obliged.”

“I’m a lifesaver, aren’t I, ’Zaac?” Gazid spun slowly in an ugly pirouette. “Lifesaver! Lifesaver!”

“Yes, that’ll do, that’s what you are, old son, hush now.” Isaac glanced at the clock. “I really have to get a bit more work done, so do the decent thing and push off, eh? No hard feelings, Lucky . . .” Isaac hesitated and thrust out his hand. “Sorry about your nose.”

“Oh.” Gazid looked surprised. He prodded his bloody face experimentally. “Well . . . whatever . . .”

Isaac strode away towards his desk.

“I’ll get your moolah. Hang on.” He rummaged in the drawers, eventually finding his wallet and drawing out a guinea. “Hold on, I’ve more somewhere. Bear with me . . .” Isaac knelt by the bed and began to throw piles of paper aside, collecting the stivers and shekels he unearthed.

Gazid reached into the packet of dreamshit which Isaac had left on the caterpillar’s box. He looked thoughtfully at Isaac, who was scrabbling under the bed with his face on the floor. Gazid plucked two dreamshit pellets from the sticky morass and glanced over to Isaac, to see if he was watching. Isaac was saying something in a conversational tone, his words muffled by the bed above him.

Gazid sauntered slowly over towards the bed. He took a sweet wrapper from his pocket and twisted it around one of his dreamshit doses, dropped it into his pocket. An idiot grin grew and blossomed across his face as he stared at the second lump.

“Should know what you’re prescribing, ’Zaac,” he whispered. “That’s ethical . . .” He giggled with delight.

“What’s that?” shouted Isaac. He began to wriggle his way out from under the bed. “I’ve found it. I knew there was some money in the pocket of one of these trousers . . .”

Lucky Gazid quickly peeled off the top of the ham roll that lay half-eaten on the desk. He slipped the dreamshit into a mustard-covered space under a lettuce leaf. He replaced the top of the roll and stepped away from the desk.

Isaac stood and turned to him, dusty and smiling. He clutched a fan of notes and some loose change.

“That’s ten guineas. ’Stail, you bargain like a fucking pro . . .”

Gazid took the proffered money and backed down the stairs quickly.

“Thanks then ’Zaac,” he said. “Appreciate it.”

Isaac was somewhat taken aback.

“Right then. I’ll contact you if I need any more dreamshit, all right?”

“Yeah, you do that, big brother . . .”

Gazid was all but scurrying out of the warehouse, pulling the door behind him with a cursory wave. Isaac heard a peal of absurd giggles from the retreating form, a thin wittering cluck that tailed out in the darkness.

Devil’s Tail! he thought. I fucking hate dealing with junkies. What a screwed-up mess he is . . . Isaac shook his head and wandered back to the caterpillar’s cage.

The grub was already starting on the second lump of sticky drug. Unpredictable little waves of insect happiness spilt over into Isaac’s mind. The sensation was unpleasant. Isaac backed away. As he watched, the grub broke off eating and delicately cleaned itself of the sticky residue. Then it resumed eating, soiling itself again, then preening again.

“Fastidious little bugger, eh?” muttered Isaac. “Is that good, eh? You enjoying that? Hmmm? Lovely.”

Isaac wandered over to his desk and picked up his own supper. He turned back to watch the twisting little multicoloured form as he took a bite of his hardening roll and sipped the chocolate.

“So what the fuck are you going to turn into, then?” he muttered to his experiment. Isaac ate the rest of his roll, grimacing at the slightly stale bread and the musty salad. At least the chocolate was good.

He wiped his mouth and returned to the caterpillar’s cage, steeling himself against the peculiar little empathic waves. Isaac squatted down and watched the starving creature gorge itself. It was difficult to be sure, but Isaac thought the grub’s colours were brighter already.

“You’ll be a good little sideline to keep me from getting obsessed with crisis theory, eh? Won’t you, you little squirming bugger? Not in any of the textbooks, are you? Shy? Is that it?”

A blast of twisted psyche hit Isaac like a crossbow bolt. He staggered and fell over.

“Ow!” he screeched, and writhed to get away from the cage. “I can’t hack your empathic bleating, old son . . .” He picked himself up and walked towards the bed, rubbing his head. Just as he reached it, another spasm of alien emotions pulsed violently in his head. His knees buckled and he fell by the bed, clawing at his temples.

“Oh shit!” He was alarmed. “That’s too much, you’re getting way too strong . . .”

Suddenly he could not speak. He snapped totally still as a third intense attack flooded his synapses. These were different, he realized, these were not the same as the querulous little psychic wails from the weird grub ten feet from him. His mouth was suddenly arid, and tasted of musty salad. Mulch. Compost. Old fruitcake.

Lumpy mustard.

“Oh no . . .” he muttered. His voice shook as realization gripped him. “Oh no, no, no, oh Gazid, you fucking prick, you shit, I’ll fucking kill you . . .”

He clutched the edge of the bed with hands that trembled violently. He was sweating and his skin looked like stone.

Get into bed, he thought desperately. Get under the covers and ride it out, thousands of people do this every day for pleasure for Jabber’s sake . . .

Isaac’s hand crawled like a drugged tarantula across the folds of the blanket. He couldn’t work out the best way of getting under the covers, because of the way they folded in on themselves and around the sheet: both sets of cloth ripples were so similar that Isaac was suddenly convinced that they were all part of the same big undulating cloth unity and that to bisect it would be ghastly, so he rolled his bulk on top of the covers and found himself swimming in the intricate twisting folds of cotton and wool. He swam up and down, waving his arms in an energetic, childish doggy paddle, hacking and spitting and smacking his lips with a prodigious thirst.

Look at you, you cretin, spat one section of his mind in contempt. How dignified is this?

But he paid no attention. He was content to swim gently in place on the bed, panting like a dying animal, tensing his neck experimentally and prodding his eyes.

He felt a build-up of pressure in the back of his mind. He watched a big door, a big cellar door, set into the wall of the most ignored corner of his cerebellum. The door was rattling. Something was trying to get out.

Quick, thought Isaac. Bolt it . . .

But he could feel the increasing power of whatever was fighting to escape. The door was a boil, bursting with pus, ready to rupture, a hugely muscled blank-faced dog, straining ominously and silently against chains, the sea pounding relentlessly against a crumbling harbour wall.

Something in Isaac’s mind burst open.

Chapter Sixteen

sun pouring in like a waterfall and I rejoice in it as blooms burst from my shoulders and my head and chlorophyll rushes invigoratingly through my skin and I raise great spined arms

don’t touch me like that I’m not ready you pig

Look at those steamhammers! I’d like them if they didn’t make me work so!

is this

I am proud to be able to tell you that your father has consented to our match

is this a

and here I swim under all this dirty water towards the looming dark bulk of the boat like a great cloud I breathe filthy water that makes me cough and my webbed feet push towards

is this a dream?

light skin food air metal sex misery fire mushrooms webs ships torture beer frog spikes bleach violin ink crags sodomy money wings colourberries gods chainsaw bones puzzles babies concrete shellfish stilts entrails snow darkness

Is this a dream?

But Isaac knew this was not a dream.

A magic lantern was flickering in his head, bombarding him with a succession of images. This was no zöetrope with an endlessly repeated little visual anecdote: this was a juddering bombardment of infinitely varied moments. Isaac was strafed with a million scintillas of time. Every fractioned life juddered as it segued into the next and Isaac would eavesdrop on other creatures’ lives. He spoke the chymical language of the khepri crying because her broodma had chastised her and then he snorted derisorily as he the head stableman listened to some half-arsed excuse from the new boy and he closed his translucent inner eyelid as he slipped beneath the cold fresh waters of the mountain streams and kicked towards the other vodyanoi coupling orgiastically and he . . .

“Oh Jabber . . .” He heard his voice from deep inside that cacophonous emotional onslaught. There were more and more and more and they came so fast, they overlapped and blurred at the edges, until two or three or more moments of life were occurring at once.

The light was bright, when lights were on, some faces were sharp and others blurred and invisible. Each separate splinter of life moved with portentous, symbolic focus. Each was ruled by oneiric logic. In some analytical pocket of his mind Isaac realized that these were not, could not be, grots of history coagulated and distilled into that sticky resin. Setting was too fluid. Awareness and reality intertwined. Isaac had not come unstuck in others’ lives, but in others’ minds. He was a voyeur spying on the last refuge of the stalked. These were memories. These were dreams.

Isaac was spattered by a psychic sluice. He felt fouled. There was no more succession, no one two three four five six invading mindset moments clicking briefly into place to be illuminated by the light of his own consciousness. Instead he swam in mire, a glutinous cesspit of dreamjuice that flowed in and out of each other, that had no integrity, that bled logic and images across lifetimes and sexes and species until he could hardly breathe, he was drowning in the sloshing stuff of dreams and hopes, recollections and reflections he had never had.

His body was nothing but a boneless sac of mental effluent. Somewhere way away, he heard it moan and rock on the bed with a liquid gurgling.

Isaac reeled. Somewhere in the flickering onslaught of emotion and bathos he discerned a thin, constant stream of disgust and fear that he recognized as his own. He struggled towards it through the sludge of imagined and replayed dramas of consciousness. He touched the tentative dribble of nausea that was indisputably what he was feeling at that moment, held fast, centred himself in it . . . Isaac clung to it with radical fervour.

He held to his core, buffeted by the dreams around him. Isaac flew over a spiky town, a six-year-old girl laughing delightedly in a language he had never heard but momentarily understood as his own; he bucked with inexpert excitement as he dreamed the sex dream of a pubescent boy; he swam through estuaries and visited strange grottoes and fought ritualistic battles. He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming cactacae mind. Houses morphed around him with the dreamlogic that seemed to be shared by all the sentient races of Bas-Lag.

New Crobuzon appeared here and there, in its dream form, in its remembered or imagined geography, with details highlighted and others missing, great gaps between streets that were traversed in seconds.

There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard.

The sea of dreams in which he swam, Isaac realized, contained drops from very far afield.

Less of a sea, he thought drunkenly from the bottom of his unstuck mind, and more of a consommé. He imagined himself chewing stolidly on the gristle and giblets of alien minds, lumps of rancid dream sustenance floating in a thin gruel of half-memories. Isaac retched mentally. If I throw up in here I’ll turn my head inside out, he thought.

The memories and dreams came in waves. Tides carried them in thematic washes. Even adrift in the wash of random thoughts, Isaac was carried across the vistas inside his head on recognizable currents. He succumbed to the tugging of money dreams, a trend of recollections of stivers and dollars and head of cattle and painted shells and promise-tablets.

He rolled in a surf of sex dreams: cactacae men ejaculating across the earth, across the rows of eggbulbs planted by the women; khepri women rubbing oil across each other in friendly orgies; celibate human priests dreaming out their guilty, illicit desires.

Isaac spiralled in a little whirlpool of anxiety dreams. A human girl about to enter her exams, he found himself walking nude to school; a vodyanoi watercræfter whose heart raced as stinging saline water poured back from the sea into his river; an actor who stood dumb on stage, unable to recall a single line of his speech.

My mind’s a cauldron, Isaac thought, and all these dreams are bubbling over.

The slop of ideas came quicker and thicker. Isaac thought of that and tried to latch onto the rhyme, focusing on it and investing it with portent, repeating it quicker and quicker and thicker and thicker and quicker, trying to ignore the barrage, the torrent, of psychic effluvia.

It was no use. The dreams were in Isaac’s mind, and there was no escape. He dreamed that he dreamed other people’s dreams, and realized that his dream was true.

All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own.

There was a frantic chirruping coming from somewhere close by. It wound its way through a skein of the images that gusted through Isaac’s head, then grew in intensity until it ran through his mind as the dominant theme.

Abruptly, all the dreams stopped.

Isaac opened his eyes too quickly and swore with the pain that gushed into his head with the light. He reached his hand up and felt it lolling against his head like a big, vague paddle. He laid it heavily across his eyes.

The dreams had stopped. Isaac peeked through his fingers. It was day. It was light.

“By . . . Jabber’s . . . arse . . .” he whispered. The effort made his head ache.

This was absurd. He had no sense of time lost. He remembered everything clearly. If anything, his immediate recollection seemed heightened. He had a clear sense of having lolled and sweated and wailed under the influence of the dreamshit for about half an hour, no longer. And yet it was . . . he struggled with his eyelids, squinted at the clock . . . it was half past seven in the morning, hours and hours since he had fought his way onto the bed.

He propped himself on his elbows and examined himself. His dark skin was slick and grey. His mouth reeked. Isaac realized that he must have lain almost motionless for the whole night: the covers were a little rucked, that was all.

The terrified birdsong that had woken him started again. Isaac shook his head in irritation and looked for its source. A tiny bird circled desperately in the air around the inside of the warehouse. Isaac realized that it was one of the previous evening’s reluctant escapees, a wren, obviously afraid of something. As Isaac looked around to see what had the bird so nervous, the lithe reptilian body of an aspis flew like a crossbow bolt from one corner of the eaves to the other. It plucked the little bird from the air as it passed. The wren’s calls were cut short abruptly.

Isaac stumbled inexpertly out of bed and circled confusedly. “Notes,” he told himself. “Make notes.”

He snatched paper and pen from his desk and began to scribble down his recollections of the dreamshit.

“What the fuck was that?” he whispered out loud as he wrote. “Some cove’s doing a damn good job of reproducing the biochymistry of dreams, or tapping it at source . . .” He rubbed his head again. “Lord, what sort of thing is it that eats this . . .” Isaac stood briefly and glanced at his captive caterpillar.

He was quite still. His mouth gaped idiotically, then worked up and down and finally shaped words.

“Oh. My. Good. Arse.”

He stumbled slowly, nervously across the room, seeming to hang back, chary of seeing what he was seeing. He approached the cage.

Inside, a colossal mass of beautifully coloured grub-flesh wriggled unhappily. Isaac stood uneasily over the enormous thing. He could feel the odd little vibrations of alien unhappiness in the æther around him.

The caterpillar had at least tripled in size overnight. It was a foot long, and correspondingly fat. The faded magnificence of its coloured patches had returned to their initial, burnished brilliance. With interest. The sticky-looking hairs on its tail-end were wicked-looking bristles. It had no more than six inches of space around it on all sides. It nudged weakly against the sides of the hutch.

“What happened to you?” hissed Isaac.

He recoiled and gazed at the thing, which waved its head in the air blindly. He thought quickly, pictured the number of dreamshit lozenges he had given the grub to eat. He looked around and saw the envelope containing all the remains where he had left it, untouched. The thing hadn’t got out and gorged itself. There was no way, Isaac realized, that the little pellets of drug he had left in that hutch contained anything like the number of calories that the caterpillar had used on growth over the night. Even if it had just piled on weight ounce for ounce with what it had eaten, it would not have represented an increase in this league.

“Whatever energy you’re getting out of your supper,” he whispered, “it’s not physical. What in Jabber’s name are you?”

He had to get the thing out of the cage. It looked so miserable, flailing pointlessly in that little space. Isaac hung back, slightly afraid and a little disgusted at the idea of touching the extraordinary thing. Eventually he picked up the box, staggering under the massively increased weight, and held it just above the ground in a much larger cage left over from his experiments, a chicken-wire-fronted mini-aviary five feet high that had contained a small family of canaries. He opened the front of the hutch and tipped the fat grub into the sawdust, then quickly closed and latched the front grille.

He stood back to gaze at his rehoused captive.

It looked directly at him, now, and he felt its childish pleas for breakfast.

“Oh steady on,” he said. “I haven’t even eaten yet.”

He backed uneasily away, then turned and made for his parlour.

Over his breakfast of fruit and iced buns, Isaac realized that the effects of the dreamshit were wearing off very quickly. It might be the worst hangover in the world, he thought wryly, but it’s gone within the hour. No wonder the punters come back.

From across the room, the foot-long caterpillar scrabbled around the floor of its new cage. It nosed miserably around the dirt, then reared up again and waved its head in the direction of the packet of dreamshit.

Isaac slapped his hand over his face.

“Oh, Hell’s Donkeys,” he said. Vague emotions of unease and experimental curiosity combined in his mind. It was a childish excitement, like that of boys and girls who burnt insects with magnified sun. He stood and reached into the envelope with a big wooden spoon. He carried the congealed lump over to the caterpillar, which almost danced with excitement as it saw, or smelt, or somehow sensed, the dreamshit approaching. Isaac opened a little feeding hatch at the back of the crate and tipped the doses of drug in. Immediately the caterpillar raised its head and slammed it down on the lumpy mess. Its mouth was large enough now that its workings could easily be seen. It slid open and gnawed voraciously at the powerful narcotic.

“That,” said Isaac, “is as big a cage as you’re going to get, so ease up on the growing, right?” He backed away to his clothes, without taking his eyes from the feeding creature.

Isaac picked up and sniffed the various clothes strewn around the room. He put on a shirt and trousers with no smell and a minimum of stains.

Better sort out a “things to do” list, he thought grimly. Top of which is “Beat Lucky Gazid to death.” He stomped to his desk. The triangular Unified Field Theory diagram he had drawn for Yagharek was at the top of the papers that covered it. Isaac pursed his lips and stared at it. He picked it up and looked thoughtfully over to where the caterpillar gnawed happily. There was something else he should do that morning.

There’s no point putting it off, he thought reluctantly. Maybe I can clear the decks for Yag and learn a little about my friend here . . . maybe. Isaac sighed heavily and rolled up his sleeves, then sat down at a mirror for a rare and perfunctory preen. He poked inexpertly at his hair, found another, cleaner shirt into which he changed, oozing resentment.

He scribbled a note for David and Lublamai, checked that his giant caterpillar was secure and unlikely to escape. Then he descended the stairs and, pinning his message to the door, walked out into a day full of sharp clear blades of light.

Isaac sighed and set off to find an early cab to take him to the university and the best biologist, natural philosopher and bio-thaumaturge he knew: the odious Montague Vermishank.

Chapter Seventeen

Isaac entered New Crobuzon University with a mixture of nostalgia and discomfort. The university buildings were little changed since his time as a teacher. The various faculties and departments dotted Ludmead with a grandiose architecture that overshadowed the rest of the area.

The quad before the enormous and ancient Science Faculty building was covered with trees shedding their blossom. Isaac walked footpaths worn by generations of students through a blizzard of garish pink petals. He strode busily up the scrubbed steps and pushed open the great doors.

Isaac was brandishing faculty identification that had expired seven years previously, but he need not have bothered. The porter behind the desk was Sedge, an old, entirely witless man, whose tenure at the faculty long predated Isaac’s own, and looked set to continue for ever. He greeted Isaac as he always did, on these irregular visits, with an incoherent mutter of recognition. Isaac shook his hand and enquired after his family. Isaac had reason to be grateful to Sedge, before whose milky eyes he had liberated numerous expensive pieces of laboratory equipment.

Isaac strode up the steps past groups of students, smoking, arguing, writing. Overwhelmingly male and human, there were, nonetheless, the occasional defensive tight-knit group of young xenians or women or both. Some students conducted theoretical debates at ostentatious volume. Others made occasional marginal notes in their textbooks and sucked at rolled cigarillos of pungent tobacco. Isaac passed a group squatting at the end of a corridor, practising what they had just learned, laughing delightedly as the tiny homunculus they had made from ground liver stumbled four steps before collapsing in a pile of twitching mulch.

The number of students around him decreased as he continued up stairs and along corridors. To his irritation and disgust, Isaac found that his heart was speeding up as he approached his erstwhile boss.

He walked the plush darkwood panelling of the Science Faculty’s administration wing, and approached the office at the far end, on the door of which was written in gold leaf: Director. Montague Vermishank.

Isaac paused outside and fiddled nervously. He was emotionally confused, striving to maintain a decade’s anger and dislike along with a conciliatory, non-confrontational tone. He breathed deeply once, then turned and knocked briskly, opened the door and walked in.

“What do you think . . .” shouted the man behind the desk, before stopping abruptly when he recognized Isaac. “Ah,” he said, after a long silence. “Of course. Isaac. Do sit down.”

Isaac sat.

Montague Vermishank was eating his lunch. His pale face and shoulders leaned sharply over his enormous desk. Behind him was a small window. It looked out, Isaac knew, over the wide avenues and large houses of Mafaton and Chnum, but a grubby curtain was pulled across it and the light was stifled.

Vermishank was not fat, but he was coated from his jowls down in a slight excess layer, a swaddling of dead flesh like a corpse’s. He wore a suit too small for him, and his necrotic white skin oozed from his sleeves. His thin hair was brushed and styled with a neurotic fervour. Vermishank was drinking lumpy cream soup. He dipped doughy bread into it regularly and sucked at the resulting mess, chewing but not biting off, gnawing and worrying at the saliva-fouled bread that dripped wan yellow onto his desk. His colourless eyes took Isaac in.

Isaac stared uneasily and was thankful for his tight bulk and his skin the colour of smouldering wood.

“Was going to shout at you for failing to knock or make an appointment, but then I saw it was you. Of course. Normal rules do not apply. How are you, Isaac? Are you after money? Need some research work?” asked Vermishank in his phlegmy whisper.

“No, no, nothing like that. I’m not bad, actually, Vermishank,” said Isaac with strained bonhomie. “How’s all your work?”

“Oh, good, good. Doing a paper on bio-ignition. I’ve isolated the pyrotic flange in a fire-bes.” There was a long silence. “Very exciting,” whispered Vermishank.

“Sounds it, sounds it,” enthused Isaac. They stared at each other. Isaac could not think of any more small talk. He loathed and respected Vermishank. It was an unsettling combination.

“So, uh . . . anyway . . .” said Isaac. “I’m here, to be frank, to ask your help.”

“Oh ho.”

“Yeah . . . See, I’m working on something that’s a bit off my track . . . I’m more of a theoretician than a practical researcher, you know . . .”

“Yes . . .” Vermishank’s voice dripped an indiscriminate irony.

You ratfuck, thought Isaac. I gave you that for free . . .

“Right,” he said slowly. “Well, this is . . . I mean this could be, though I doubt it . . . a problem of bio-thaumaturgy. I wanted to ask your professional opinion.”

“Ah ha.”

“Yes. What I wanted to know was . . . can someone be Remade to fly?”

“Ooh.” Vermishank leaned back and dabbed soup from around his mouth with bread. Briefly, he wore a moustache of crumbs. He clasped his hands in front of him and waggled his fat fingers. “Fly, eh?”

Vermishank’s voice picked up an air of excitement previously lacking in his cold tones. He may have wanted to sting Isaac with his heavy contempt, but he could not help being enthused by problems of science.

“Yeah. I mean, has that been done?” said Isaac.

“Yes . . . It has been done . . .” Vermishank nodded slowly without taking his eyes from Isaac, who sat up in his chair and snatched a notebook from his pocket.

“Oh, has it?” said Isaac.

Vermishank’s eyes lost focus as he thought harder.

“Yes . . . Why, Isaac? Has someone come to you and asked to fly?”

“I really can’t . . . uh, divulge . . .”

“Of course you can’t, Isaac. Of course you can’t. Because you are a professional. And I respect you for that.” Vermishank smiled idly at his guest.

“So . . . what were the details?” ventured Isaac. He set his teeth before he spoke, to control his shaking indignation. Fuck you, you patronizing game-playing pig, he thought furiously.

“Oh ho . . . Well . . .” Isaac twisted with impatience as Vermishank raised his head ponderously to remember. “There was a biophilosopher, years ago, at the end of the last century. Calligine, name of. Had himself Remade.” Vermishank smiled fondly and cruelly and shook his head. “Mad thing, really, but it did seem to work. Huge mechanical wings that unfolded like fans. He wrote a pamphlet about it.” Vermishank strained his head over his lardy shoulder, glanced vaguely at the shelves of volumes that covered his walls. He waved with a limp hand that could have signalled anything at all about the whereabouts of Calligine’s pamphlet. “Don’t you know the rest? Not heard the song?” Isaac narrowed his eyes quizzically. Appallingly, Vermishank sang a few bars in a reedy tenor. “So Cally flew high / On um-ber-ella wings / Headed into the sky / Waved his love bye-bye / Went West with a sigh / Disappeared in the land of the Horrible Things . . .”

“Of course I’ve heard that!” said Isaac. “I never knew it was about someone real . . .”

“Well, you never took Introductory Bio-Thaumaturgy, did you? As I remember, you did about two terms of the Intermediate course, much later. You missed my first lecture. That’s the story I use to entice our jaded young knowledge-hunters onto the road of this noble science.” Vermishank spoke in a completely deadpan voice. Isaac felt his distaste return with interest. “Calligine disappeared,” Vermishank continued. “Went off flying south-west, towards the Cacotopic Stain. Never seen again.”

There was another long silence.

“Uh . . . is that the whole story?” said Isaac. “How did they get the wings on him? Did he keep experimental notes? What was the Remaking like?”

“Oh, horribly difficult, I’d imagine. Calligine probably got through a few experimental subjects before getting his sums right . . .” Vermishank grinned. “Probably called in a few favours with Mayor Mantagony. I suspect a few felons sentenced to death had a few more weeks of life than they’d expected. Not part of the process that he advertised. But it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that it’s going to take a few tries before you get it right. I mean, you’ve got to connect up the mechanism to bones and muscles and whatnot that haven’t a clue what they’re supposed to be doing . . .”

“But what if the muscles and bones did know what they were doing? What about if a . . . a wyrman or something, had its wings cut off. Could they be replaced?”

Vermishank gazed passively at Isaac. His head and eyes did not move.

“Ha . . .” he said faintly, eventually. “You’d have thought that was easier, wouldn’t you? It is, in theory, but it’s even harder in practice. I’ve done some of this with birds and . . . well, with winged things. First off, Isaac, in theory it’s perfectly possible. In theory, there is almost nothing which can’t be done with Remaking. It’s all just a question of wiring things up right, a bit of flesh-moulding. But flight’s horribly hard because you’re dealing with all sorts of variables that have to be exactly right. See, Isaac, you can Remake a dog, sew a leg back on, or mould it on with a clayflesh hex, and the animal’ll limp along happily. Won’t be pretty, but it’ll walk. Can’t do that with wings. Wings have to be perfect or they won’t do the trick. It’s harder to teach muscles that think they know how to fly to do the same trick differently than it is to teach muscles that haven’t any idea in the first place. Your bird or what have you, its shoulders get all confused by this wing which is just a tad the wrong shape, or the wrong size, or based on different aerodynamics, and it ends up being totally stymied, even assuming you’ve reconnected everything up right.

“So the answer, I suppose I’m saying, Isaac, is that yes it can be done. This wyrman, or whatever, can be Remade to fly again. But it isn’t likely. It’s too damn hard. There’s no bio-thaumaturge, no Remaker, who could promise a result. Either you’re going to have to find Calligine, get him to do it,” hissed Vermishank in conclusion, “or I wouldn’t risk it.”

Isaac finished scribbling notes and flipped his notebook closed.

“Thanks, Vermishank. I was sort of . . . hoping you’d say that. That’s your professional opinion, eh? Well, I’ll just have to pursue my other line of enquiry, of which you wouldn’t approve at all . . .” His eyes bulged like a naughty boy’s.

Vermishank nodded very slightly and a sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.

“Ha,” he said faintly.

“Right, well, thanks for your time . . . Appreciate it . . .” Isaac flustered as he stood to go. “Sorry to be so fleeting . . .”

“Not at all. Any other opinions needed?”

“Well . . .” Isaac paused with his arm half into his jacket. “Well. Have you heard of something called dreamshit?”

Vermishank raised an eyebrow. He leaned back in his chair and chewed his thumb, looking at Isaac with half-closed eyes.

“This is a university, Isaac. Do you think a new and exciting illicit substance would sweep the city and none of our students would be tempted? Of course I’ve heard of it. We had our first expulsion for selling the drug less than half a year ago. Very bright young psychonomer, of predictably avant-garde theoretical persuasion.

“Isaac, Isaac . . . for all your many, uh, indiscretions . . .” a little simper pretended unconvincingly to rob the insult of its barb “—I wouldn’t have had you down as a . . . a drug person.”

“No, Vermishank, nor am I. However, living and operating in the quagmire of corruption that I’ve chosen, surrounded by lowlifes, and vile degenerates, I tend to be faced with things like drugs at the various sordid orgies I attend.” Isaac told himself off for losing his patience at the same moment that he decided there was nothing to be gained from further diplomacy. He spoke loudly and sarcastically. He rather enjoyed his ire.

“So anyway,” he continued, “one of my disgusting friends was using this bizarre drug and I wanted to know more about it. Obviously shouldn’t have asked someone so high-minded.”

Vermishank was chuckling soundlessly. He laughed without opening his mouth. His face remained set in a sour smirk. He kept his eyes on Isaac. The only sign that he was laughing was the little shucking motion of his shoulders and his slight rocking back and forth.

“Ha,” he said eventually. “Touchy-touchy, Isaac.” He shook his head. Isaac patted his pockets and fastened his jacket, ostentatiously getting ready to go, refusing to feel silly. He turned his back and walked to the door, debating the merits of a parting shot.

Vermishank spoke while he considered.

“Dreamsh . . . Ah, that substance is not really my area, Isaac. Pharmacology and whatnot something of a biological backwater. I’m sure one of your old colleagues might be able to tell you more. Good luck.”

Isaac had decided against saying anything. He did, however, wave behind him in a pusillanimous motion that he could convince himself was contemptuous, but could just about pass for gratitude and farewell. You arsing coward, he scolded himself. But there was no getting away from it, Vermishank was a useful repository of knowledge. Isaac knew it would take a lot for him to be really, unrepentantly rude to his former boss. That was just too much expertise to close the door on.

So Isaac forgave himself his half-hearted retaliation and grinned, instead, at his own floundering reaction to the awful man. At least he had learnt what he had come there to learn. Remaking was not an option for Yagharek. Isaac was pleased, and he was honest enough to recognize the ignobility of the reasons. His own research had been reinvigorated by the problem of flight, and if the prosaic flesh-sculpting of applied bio-thaumaturgy had won out over crisis theory, his research would have stalled. He did not want to lose his new momentum.

Yag old son, he reflected, it’s just as I thought. I’m your best shot, and you’re mine.

Before the city there were canals that wound between rock formations like silicate tusks, and patches of corn in the thin soil. And before the scrub there were days of glowering stone. Gnarled granite tumours that had sat heavy in the belly of the land since its birth, their thin earth-flesh stripped from them by air and water in a mere ten thousand years. They were ugly and terrifying as innards always are, those rock promontories, those crags.

I walked the path of the river. It was nameless between the hard ridged hills: in days it would become the Tar. I could see the freezing heights of real mountains miles to the west, colossi of rock and snow that reared as imperiously over the local jags of scree and lichen as those lower peaks reared over me.

Sometimes I thought the rocks shaped like looming figures, with claws and fangs and heads like clubs or hands. Petrified giants; unmoving stone gods; mistakes of the eye or the wind’s chance sculptures.

I was seen. Goats and sheep poured scorn on my stumbling. Screaming birds of prey shouted their contempt. Sometimes I passed shepherds who stared at me, suspicious and rude.

There were darker shapes at night. There were colder watchers under the water.

The rock teeth broke earth so slowly and slyly that I was walking that gouged valley for hours before I knew it. Before that were days and days of grass and scrub.

The earth was easier on my feet, and the massive sky easier on my eye. But I would not be fooled. I would not be seduced. It was not the desert sky. It was a pretender, a surrogate, that tried to lull me. Drying vegetation stroked me with every wash of wind, lusher by far than my home. In the distance was the forest that I knew extended north to the edge of New Crobuzon, east to the sea. In secret places among its thick trees jutted vast, obscure, forgotten machines, pistons and gears, iron trunks among the wood, rust their bark.

I did not approach them.

Behind me where the river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade, breaking it off in the flesh of some rushing, sucking predator that loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the muck. I do not know if it died.

Before the wetland and the river were days of drying grass and foothills, that I was warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I saw none.

There were villages that bribed me in with meat and cloth and begged me to intercede on their behalf to their harvest gods. There were villages that kept me out with pikes and rifles and screaming klaxons. I shared the grass with herds and occasionally with riders, with birds I considered cousins and with animals I had thought myth.

I slept alone, hidden in folds of stone or in copses, or in bivouacs I threw up when I smelt rain. Four times something investigated me when I slept, leaving hoofmarks and the smell of herbs or sweat or meat.

Those sprawling downs were where my anger and misery changed shape.

I walked with temperate insects investigating my unfamiliar smells, trying to lick my sweat, taste my blood, trying to pollinate the spots of colour in my cloak. I saw fat mammals among that ripe green. I picked flowers that I had seen in books, tall-stemmed blooms in subtle colours as if seen through thin smoke. I could not breathe for the smell of the trees. The sky was rich with clouds.

I walked, a desert creature, in that fertile land. I felt harsh and dusty.

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me.

I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest.

I had been a harder creature when I first stepped onto those hills and plains. I left Myrshock, where my ship had landed, without spending even one night there. It is an ugly port town containing enough of my kind that I felt oppressed.

I hurried through the city seeking nothing but supplies and assurance that I was right to go to New Crobuzon. I bought cold cream for my raw and seeping back, found a doctor honest enough to admit that I would find no one who could help me in Myrshock. I gave my whip to a merchant who let me ride his cart for fifty miles into the dales. He would not accept my gold, only my weapon.

I was eager to leave the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish, oily paddleship crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

And before the waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town. Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more than I lost, rampaging like a fighting cockerel at night and hoarding pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly, even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought passage on a merchant ship.

I set out across the continent to become whole.

The desert came with me.

Part Three:

Metamorphoses

Chapter Eighteen

The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They murmured to each other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way. They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

“Bloody useless bloody thing,” they muttered in disgust. Half-hearted attempts were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by gods or nature or chance.

In the Canker Wedge zoo, animals shifted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of lustful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable behaviour.

Now, as light stayed longer every day, the bears and hyaenas and bony hippos, the lonely alopex and the apes, lay still—tensely, it seemed—for hours, watching the passers-by from their scrubbed-brick cells and their muddy trenches. They were waiting. For the southern rains that would never reach New Crobuzon, but were encoded in their bones, perhaps. And when the rains had not come, they might settle down and wait for the dry season that, similarly, did not afflict their new home. It must be a strange, anxious existence, the keepers mused over the roars of tired, disoriented beasts.

The nights had lost nearly two hours since winter, but they seemed to have squeezed even more essence into the shorter time. They seemed particularly intense, as more and more illicit activity strove to fit the hours from sundown to dawn. Every night the enormous old warehouse half a mile south of the zoo attracted streams of men and women. The occasional leonine roar might breach the thumping and the constant blare of the crotchety, wakeful city entering the old building, sounding above the throng. It would be ignored.

The bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign still read the length of the building: Cadnebar’s Soaps and Tallow. Cadnebar’s had gone bust in the slump of ’57. The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken and sold as scrap. After two or three years of quiet mouldering, Cadnebar’s had been reborn as the glad’ circus.

Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its Parliament was not like Maru’ahm’s, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.

And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport.

Except, of course, at Cadnebar’s.

Illegal it might have been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment. Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians, industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of course, that doubled as cockfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another, with glad’-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar’s was legendary.

Every night, the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals.

The sport at Cadnebar’s was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar’s Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant.

The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.

In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

Lin and Isaac snatched furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms.

Lin had stroked his arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was tentatively very proud. She had found a space that she could not and did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece that he mustn’t ask her about. It was not as if she had disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with a little less vigour than she had two months ago.

She teased Isaac about his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of dreamshit, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug. Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Isaac’s part, the creature sounded extraordinary.

Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks.

Lin wanted to displace Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

Every day that she saw Mr. Motley, he pulled her—unwilling as she was—into his city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped hints of gangland massacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for. But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her. It must be deliberate.

The statue grew thighs and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonishing piece, as befitted its subject.

Despite her attempts to insulate her mind, Mr. Motley’s blithe chat crept in, past her defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she would find herself idly wondering who was more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer’s End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import.

Lin found herself thinking more and more of Ma Francine. Mr. Motley discussed her in carefree tones, but she came up again and again in his monologues, and Lin realized that he was a little concerned.

To her surprise, Lin began to root for Ma Francine.

She was not sure how it started. The first she was aware of it was when Mr. Motley had been talking with mock humour about a disastrous attack on two couriers the previous night, during which a huge quantity of some undisclosed substance, some raw material for the manufacture of something, had been snatched by khepri raiders from Ma Francine’s gang. Lin had realized that she was thinking a little mental cheer. She was astonished, her glandwork stopping for a moment as she thought through her own feelings.

She wanted Ma Francine to win.

There was no logic to it. As soon as she applied any rigorous thought to the situation she had no opinion at all. Intellectually speaking, the triumph of one drug-dealer and hoodlum over another was of no interest to her. But emotionally, she was beginning to see the unseen Ma Francine as her champion. She found herself booing silently when she heard Mr. Motley’s slyly smug assurance that he had a plan that would radically alter the shape of the marketplace.

What’s this? she thought wryly. After all these years, the stirrings of khepri consciousness?

She mocked herself, but there was some truth in the ironic thought. Maybe it would be the same for anyone who was opposing Motley, she thought. Lin was so fearful of reflecting on her relationship with Mr. Motley, so nervous of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long time to realize that she hated him. My enemy’s enemy . . . she thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But—and maybe this was at the heart of her feelings—Francine was not good khepri.

These thoughts pricked at Lin, discomforted her. For the first time in many years, they made her think of her relationship with the khepri community in other than a straightforward, righteous, confrontational way. And that made her think of her childhood.

After each day with Mr. Motley ended, Lin took to visiting Kinken. She would leave him and catch a cab from the edge of the Ribs. Across Danechi’s or Barguest Bridge, past the restaurants and offices and houses of Spit Hearth.

Sometimes she would stop at Spit Bazaar and take her time wandering through its subdued lights. She felt the linen dresses and coats hanging from the stalls, ignoring the passers-by staring rudely, wondering at the khepri shopping for human clothes. Lin would meander through the bazaar until she came to Sheck, dense and chaotic with intricate streets and sprawling brick apartment buildings.

This was not a slum. The buildings of Sheck were solid enough, and most kept the rain out. Compared to the mutant sprawl of Dog Fenn, the rotting brick mulch of Badside and Chimer’s End, the desperate shacks of Spatters, Sheck was a desirable place. A little crowded, of course, and not without drunkenness and poverty and thievery. But all things considered, there were many worse places to live. This was where the shopkeepers lived, the lower managers and better-paid factory workers that every day crowded Echomire and Kelltree docks, Gross Coil and Didacai Village, known universally as Smog Bend.

Lin was not made welcome. Sheck bordered Kinken, separated only by a couple of insignificant parks. The khepri were a constant reminder to Sheck that it did not have far to fall. Khepri filled Sheck’s streets during the day, making their way to The Crow to shop or take the train from Perdido Street Station. At night, though, it was a brave khepri who would walk streets made dangerous by pugnacious Three Quillers out to “keep their city clean.” Lin made sure she was through this zone by sundown. Because just beyond was Kinken, where she was safe.

Safe, but not happy.

Lin walked Kinken’s streets with a kind of nauseated excitement. For many years, her journeys to the area had been brief excursions to pick up colourberries and paste, perhaps the occasional khepri delicacy. Now her visits were jars to memories she had thought banished.

Houses oozed the white mucus of home-grubs. Some were completely coated in the thick stuff: it spread across roofs, linking different buildings into a lumpy, congealed totality. Lin could see in through windows and doors. The walls and floors that had been provided by human architects had been broken away in places, and the massive home-grubs allowed to burrow their blind way through the shell, oozing their phlegm-cement from their abdomens, their stubby little legs skittering as they ate their way through the ruined interiors of the buildings.

Occasionally Lin would see a live specimen taken from the farms by the river, going about its refitting of a building into the intricate twisting organic passageways preferred by most khepri tenants. The big, stupid beetles, larger than rhinos, responded to the tweaks and tugs of their keepers, blundering this way and that through the houses, recasting rooms in a quick-drying coating that softened edges and connected chambers, buildings and streets with what looked from the inside like giant worm-tracks.

Sometimes Lin would sit in one of Kinken’s tiny parks. She would be still among the slowly blossoming trees and watch her kind, all around her. She would stare high above the park, at the backs and sides of tall buildings. One time, she saw a young human girl lean out from a window high above, that was stuck almost at random at the top of a stained concrete wall at the back of the building. Lin saw the girl watching her khepri neighbours placidly, as her family’s washing fluttered and snapped in the brisk wind from a pole jutting beside her. A strange way of growing up, thought Lin, imagining the child surrounded by silent, insect-headed creatures, as strange as if Lin had been brought up among vodyanoi . . . but that thought led her uncomfortably in the direction of her own childhood.

Of course, her journey to these despised streets was a walk back through the city of her memory. She knew that. She was steeling herself to think back.

Kinken had been Lin’s first refuge. In this strange time of isolation, when she cheered the efforts of khepri crime-queens and walked as an outcast in all the quadrants of the city—except, perhaps, Salacus Fields, where outcasts ruled—she realized that her feelings for Kinken were more ambivalent than she had so far allowed.

There had been khepri in New Crobuzon for nearly seven hundred years, since the Fervent Mantis crossed the Swollen Ocean and reached Bered Kai Nev, the eastern continent, the khepri home. A few merchants and travellers had returned on a one-way mission of edification. For centuries, the stock of this tiny group sustained itself in the city, became natives. There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no ghettos. There were not enough khepri. Not until the Tragic Crossing.

It was a hundred years since the first refugee ships had crawled, barely afloat, into Iron Bay. Their enormous clockwork motors were rusted and broken, their sails ragged. They were charnel ships, packed with Bered Kai Nev khepri who were only just alive. Contagion was so merciless that ancient taboos against waterburial had been overthrown. So there were few corpses on board, but there were thousands of dying. The ships were like crowded antechambers to morgues.

The nature of the tragedy was a mystery to the New Crobuzon authorities, who had no consuls and little contact with any of the countries of Bered Kai Nev. The refugees would not speak of it, or if they did they were elliptical, or if they were graphic and explicit the language barrier blocked understanding. All that the humans knew was that something terrible had happened to the khepri of the eastern continent, some horrendous vortex that had sucked up millions, leaving only a tiny handful able to flee. The khepri had christened this nebulous apocalypse the Ravening.

There were twenty-five years between the arrival of the first ships and the last. Some slow, motorless vessels were said to be crewed entirely by khepri born at sea, all the original refugees having died during the interminable crossing. Their daughters did not know what it was they fled, only that their dying broodmas had all bade them go west, and never to turn the wheel. Stories of the khepri Mercy Ships—named for what they begged—reached New Crobuzon from other countries on the eastern coast of the Rohagi continent, from Gnurr Kett and the Jheshull Islands, from as far south as the Shards. The khepri diaspora had been chaotic and diverse and panicked.

In some lands the refugees were butchered in terrible pogroms. In others, like New Crobuzon, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by bigots and thugs.

Lin had not grown up in Kinken. She was born in the younger, poorer khepri ghetto of Creekside, a grubby stain in the northwest of the city. It was nearly impossible to understand the true history of Kinken and Creekside, because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had undertaken. The trauma of the Ravening was such that the first generation of refugees had deliberately forgotten ten thousand years of khepri history, announcing their arrival at New Crobuzon to be the beginning of a new cycle of years, the City Cycle. When the next generation had demanded their story from their broodmas, many had refused and many could not remember. Khepri history was obscured by the massive shadow of genocide.

So it was hard for Lin to penetrate the secrets of those first twenty years of the City Cycle. Kinken and Creekside were presented as fait accompli to her, and to her broodma, and the generation before that, and the generation before that.

Creekside had no Plaza of Statues. It had been a tumbledown slum for humans a hundred years ago, a rookery of found architecture, and the khepri home-grubs had done little more than encase the ruined houses with cement, petrifying them forever on the point of collapse. The denizens of Creekside were not artists or fruitbar owners, moiety chiefs or hive elders or shopkeepers. They were disreputable and hungry. They worked in the factories and in the sewers, sold themselves to whomever would buy. Their sisters in Kinken despised them.

In Creekside’s decrepit streets, strange and dangerous ideas blossomed. Small groups of radicals met in hidden halls. Messianic cults promised deliverance to the chosen.

Many of the original refugees had turned their backs on the gods of Bered Kai Nev, angry that they had not protected their disciples from the Ravening. But subsequent generations, not knowing the nature of the tragedy, offered their worship again. Over a hundred years, pantheon temples had been consecrated in old workshops and deserted dancehalls. But many Creeksiders, in their confusion and hunger, turned to dissident gods.

All the usual temples could be found in Creekside’s confines. Awesome Broodma was worshipped, and the Artspitter. Kindly Nurse presided over the shabby hospital, and the Tough Sisters defended the faithful. But in rude shacks that mouldered by the industrial canals, and in front rooms blocked by dark windows, prayers were raised to stranger gods. Priestesses dedicated themselves to the service of the Elyctric Devil or the Air Harvester. Furtive groups clambered to their roofs and sang hymns to the Wingsister, praying for flight. And some lonely, desperate souls—like Lin’s broodma—pledged their fealty to Insect Aspect.

Properly transliterated from Khepri into the New Crobuzon script, the chymico-audio-visual composite of description, devotion and awe that was the name of the god was rendered Insect/Aspect/(male)/(singleminded). But the few humans that knew of him called him Insect Aspect, and that was how Lin had signed him to Isaac when she told him the story of her upbringing.

Since the age of six, when she had torn the chrysalis from what had been her baby headlarva and was suddenly a headscarab, when she had burst into consciousness with language and thought, her mother had taught her that she was fallen. The gloomy doctrine of Insect Aspect was that khepri women were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had consigned her daughters to lives encumbered with ridiculous, slow, floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile purity of God and male.

Lin’s broodma (who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies.

They were also taught to worship and serve their mindless brothers.

Thinking back now to that time, Lin no longer shuddered with revulsion. Sitting in those secluded Kinken parks, Lin carefully watched her past unfold in her mind, little by little, in a gradual act of reminiscence that took courage to pursue. She remembered how she had slowly come to realize that her life was not usual. On her rare shopping expeditions she would see with horror the casual contempt with which her khepri sisters treated male khepri, kicking and crushing the mindless two-foot insects. She remembered her tentative conversations with the other children, who taught her how her neighbours lived; her fear of using the language she knew instinctively, the language she carried in her blood, but that her broodma had taught her to loathe.

Lin remembered coming home to a house that swarmed with male khepri, that stank of rotting vegetables and fruit, littered as it was with organic rubbish for males to gorge on. She remembered being commanded to wash her innumerable brothers’ glistening carapaces, to pile up their dung before the household altar, to let them scuttle over her and explore her body as their dumb curiosity directed them. She remembered the night-time discussions with her broodsister, carried out in the tiny chymical wafts and gently rattling hisses that were khepri-whispers. As a result of these theological debates, her broodsister had turned the other way from her, had burrowed so deeply into her Insect Aspect faith that she outshone their mother in zealotry.

It had taken Lin until she was fifteen to challenge her broodma openly. She did so in terms that she now saw were naive and confused. Lin denounced her mother as a heretic, cursing her in the name of the mainstream pantheon. She fled the lunatic self-loathing of Insect Aspect worship, and the narrow streets of Creekside. She had run away to Kinken.

That was why, she reflected, for all her later disenchantment—her contempt, in fact, her hatred—there was a part of her that would always remember Kinken as a sanctuary. Now the smugness of the insular community nauseated her, but at the time of her escape she had been drunk on it. She had revelled in the arrogant denunciation of Creekside, had prayed to Awesome Broodma with a vehement delight. She had baptized herself with a khepri name and—which was vital in New Crobuzon—a human one. She had discovered that in Kinken, unlike Creekside, the hive and moiety system made for complex and useful nets of social connectivity. Her mother had never mentioned her birth or upbringing, so Lin had copied the allegiance of her first friend in Kinken, and told anyone who asked that she was Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety.

Her friend introduced her to pleasuresex, taught her to delight in the sensuous body below her neck. This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her. Until then she had been subjected only to headsex at her mother’s behest, sitting still and uncomfortable while a male scrabbled and coupled excitedly with her headscarab, in mercifully unsuccessful attempts at procreation.

With time, Lin’s hatred of her broodma slowly cooled, becoming first contempt, then pity. Her disgust at the squalor of Creekside was joined with some kind of understanding. Then, her five-year love-affair with Kinken drew to an end. It started when she stood in the Plaza of Statues, and realized that they were mawkish and badly executed, embodying a culture that was blind to itself. She began to see Kinken as implicated in the subjugation of Creekside and the never-mentioned Kinken poor, saw a “community” at best callous and uncaring, at worst deliberately keeping Creekside down to maintain its superiority.

With its priestesses and its orgies and its cottage industries, its secret reliance on the wider economy of New Crobuzon—the vastness of which was usually depicted airily as a kind of adjunct to Kinken—Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.

Lin realized, to her revolted anger, that Kinken was more dishonest than Creekside. But this realization brought with it no nostalgia for her miserable childhood. She would not return to Creekside. And if, now, she was turning her back on Kinken as once she had turned it on Insect Aspect, there was nowhere to go but out.

So Lin taught herself signing, and left.

Lin was never so foolish as to think she could stop being defined by being khepri, as far as the city was concerned. Nor did she want to. But for herself, she stopped trying to be khepri, as she had once stopped trying to be insect. That was why she was bewildered by her feelings about Ma Francine. It was not only that Ma Francine was opposing to Mr. Motley, Lin realized. There was something about a khepri doing that, effortlessly stealing territory from this vile man, that stirred Lin.

Lin could not, even to herself, pretend to understand. She would sit, for a long time, in the shadow of banyans or oaks or pear trees, in the Kinken she had despised for years, surrounded by sisters to whom she was an outsider. She did not want to return to the “khepri way” any more than to the Insect Aspect. She did not understand the strength she drew from Kinken.

Chapter Nineteen

The construct that had swept David’s and Lublamai’s floor for years seemed finally to be giving up the ghost. It wheezed and spun as it scrubbed. It became fixated with arbitrary patches of floor, polished them as if they were jewels. Some mornings it took nearly an hour to warm up. It was becoming caught in programme loops, causing it to endlessly repeat tiny pieces of behaviour.

Isaac learnt to ignore its repetitive, neurotic whines. He worked with both hands at once. With his left, he scribbled down his notions in diagrammatic form. With his right he fed equations into the innards of his little calculating engine through its stiff keys, slotted punctured cards into its programme slot, fumbling them in and out at speed. He solved the same problems with different programmes, comparing answers, typing out the sheets of numbers.

The innumerable books on flight that had filled Isaac’s bookshelves had been replaced, with Teafortwo’s help, by an equally large number of tomes on unified field theory, and on the arcane sub-field of crisis mathematics.

After only two weeks of research, something extraordinary happened in Isaac’s mind. The reconceptualization came to him so simply that he did not at first realize the scale of his insight. It seemed a thoughtful moment like many others, in the course of a whole internal scientific dialogue. A sense of genius did not descend on Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in a cold shock of brilliant light. Instead, as he gnawed the top of a pencil one day, there was a moment of vaguely verbalized thought along the lines of or wait a minute maybe you could do it like this . . .

It took an hour and a half for Isaac to realize that what he had thought might be a useful mental model was vastly more exciting. He set out in a systematic attempt to prove himself wrong. He constructed scenario after mathematical scenario with which he tried to rubbish his tentatively scrawled sets of equations. His attempts at destruction failed. His equations held firm.

It took Isaac two days before he began to believe that he had solved a fundamental problem of crisis theory. He enjoyed moments of euphoria, many more of cautious nervousness. He pored over his textbooks at a crushingly slow pace, searching to make sure he had not ignored some obvious error, had not replicated some long-disproved theorem.

Still, his equations held. In terror of hubris, Isaac sought any alternative than to believe what was looking more and more like the truth: that he had solved the problem of mathematic representation, quantification, of crisis energy.

He knew that he should immediately converse with colleagues, publish his findings as “work in progress” in The Review of Philosophical Physics and Thaumaturgy, or the Unified Field. But he was so intimidated by what he had discovered that he avoided that route. He wanted to be sure, he told himself. He had to take a few more days, a few more weeks, maybe a month or two . . . then he would publish. He did not tell Lublamai or David, or Lin, which was more extraordinary. Isaac was a garrulous man, prone to spouting any old tosh, scientific, social or obscene, which came to his mind. His secretiveness was profoundly out of character. He knew himself well enough to recognize this, and to realize what it meant: he was deeply disturbed, and deeply, deeply excited by what he had found.

Isaac thought back on the process of discovery, of formulation. He realized that his advances, his incredible leaps of theory in the last month, which eclipsed his previous five years’ work, were all in response to immediate, practical concerns. He had reached an impasse in his studies of crisis theory until Yagharek had commissioned him. Isaac did not know why it was so, but he realized that it was with applications in mind that his most abstract theories were advancing. Accordingly, he decided not to immerse himself totally in abstruse theory. He would continue to focus on the problem of Yagharek’s flight.

He would not let himself think about the ramifications of his research, not at this stage. Everything he uncovered, every advance, every idea he had, he would quietly plough back into his applied studies. He tried to see everything as a means to get Yagharek back in the air. It was difficult—perverse, even—constantly trying to contain and circumscribe his work. He saw the situation as one of working behind his own back, or more exactly, as trying to do research out of the corner of his eye. Yet, incredible as it seemed, with the discipline that was forced on him, Isaac progressed theoretically at a rate he could never have dreamed of six months before.

It was an extraordinary, circuitous route to scientific revolution, he thought sometimes, chiding himself quickly for his direct gaze at the theory. Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There’s a garuda to get airborne. But he could not stop his heart from thumping with excitement, the occasional almost hysterical grin from racing across his face. Some days he sought Lin out and, if she was not working at her secret piece in her secret location, he would try to seduce her in her flat with a tender, excited fervour that delighted her, for all that she was obviously tired. At other times he spent days in only his own company, immersing himself in science.

Isaac applied his extraordinary insights and began tentatively to design a machine to solve Yagharek’s problem. The same drawing began to appear more and more in his work. At first it was a doodle, a few loosely connecting lines covered in arrows and question marks. Within days it was appearing more solid. Its lines were drawn in ruled ink. Its curves were measured and careful. It was on its way to becoming a blueprint.

Yagharek sometimes came back to Isaac’s laboratory, always when the two of them were alone. Isaac would hear the door creak open at night, turn to see the impassive, dignified garuda still steeped in visible misery.

Isaac found that trying to explain his work to Yagharek helped him. Not the big theoretical stuff, of course, but the applied science which furthered the half-hidden theory. Isaac spent days with a thousand ideas and potential projects swilling violently in his head, and to pare that down, to explain in non-technical language the various techniques he thought might enable him to tap crisis energy forced him to evaluate his trajectories, discard some, focus on others.

He began to rely on Yagharek’s interest. If too many days passed without the garuda appearing, Isaac became distracted. He spent those hours watching the enormous caterpillar.

The creature had gorged itself on dreamshit for nearly a fortnight, growing and growing. When it had reached three feet in length, Isaac had nervously stopped feeding it. Its cage was getting much too small. That would have to be the full extent of its size. It had spent the next day or two wandering around hopefully in its little space, waving its nose in the air. Since then it seemed to have resigned itself to the fact that it would get no more food. Its original desperate hunger had subsided.

It was not moving very much, just shifting around now and then, undulating once or twice the width of the cage, stretching as if yawning. For the most part it just sat and pulsed slightly in and out, with breath or heartbeat or what, Isaac did not know. It looked healthy enough. It looked as if it was waiting.

Sometimes, as he had dropped the gobs of dreamshit into the caterpillar’s eager mandibles, Isaac had found himself reflecting on his own experience with the drug with a faint, querulous longing. This was not the delusion of nostalgia. Isaac vividly remembered the sense of being awash in filth; of being sullied at the most profound level; the nauseating, disorientating sickness; the panicked confusion of losing himself in a welter of emotion, and losing the confusion, and mistaking it for another mind’s invading fears . . . And yet, despite the vehemence of those recollections, he found himself eyeing his caterpillar’s breakfasts with a speculative air—perhaps even a hungry one.

Isaac was very disturbed by these feelings. He had always been unashamedly cowardly when it came to drugs. As a student, there had been plenty of loose, smelly fogweed cigarillos, of course, and the inane giggles that went with that. But Isaac had never had the stomach for anything stronger. These inchoate rumblings of a new appetite did nothing to allay his fears. He did not know how addictive dreamshit was, if at all, but he sternly refused to give in to those faint stirrings of curiosity.

The dreamshit was for his caterpillar, and for it alone.

Isaac channelled his curiosity from sensual into intellectual currents. He knew only two chymists personally, both unutterable prudes with whom he would no more raise the question of illegal drugs than he would dance naked down the middle of Tervisadd Way. Instead, he raised the subject of dreamshit in the louche taverns of Salacus Fields. Several of his acquaintances turned out to have sampled the drug, and a few were regular users.

Dreamshit did not seem to differ in effect between the races. No one knew where the drug came from, but all who admitted to taking it sang paeans of praise to its extraordinary effects. The only thing they all agreed on was that dreamshit was expensive, and getting more so. Not that this put them off their habits. The artists in particular spoke in quasi-mystical terms of communing with other minds. Isaac scoffed at this, claiming (without acknowledging his own limited experience) that the drug was no more than a powerful oneirogen, that stimulated the dream-centres of the brain as very-tea stimulated the visual and olfactory cortexes.

He did not believe it himself. He was not surprised at the vehement opposition to his theory.

“I don’t know how, ’Zaac,” Thighs Growing had hissed at him reverentially, “but it lets you share dreams . . .” At this, the other users crammed into a little booth in The Clock and Cockerel had nodded in time, comically. Isaac affected a sceptical face, to maintain his role of killjoy. Actually, of course, he agreed. He intended to find out more about the extraordinary substance—Lemuel Pigeon would be the person to ask, or Lucky Gazid, if he ever reappeared—but the pace of his work in crisis theory overtook him. His attitude to the dreamshit he had shoved into the grub’s cage remained one of curiosity, nervousness and ignorance.

Isaac was staring uneasily at the vast creature one warm day in late Melluary. It was, he decided, more than prodigious. It was more than a very big caterpillar. It was definitely a monster. He resented it for being so damn interesting. Otherwise he could have just forgotten about it.

The door below him was pushed open, and Yagharek appeared in the shafts of early sun. It was rare, very rare for the garuda to come before nightfall. Isaac started and leapt to his feet, beckoning his client up the stairs.

“Yag, old son! Long time no see! I was drifting. I need you to tether me. Get on up here.”

Yagharek mounted the stairs wordlessly.

“How do you know when Lub and David are going to be out, eh?” asked Isaac. “You keep watch, or something creepy, right? Damn, Yag, you’ve got to stop skulking around like a fucking mugger.”

“I would talk to you, Grimnebulin.” Yagharek’s voice was oddly tentative.

“Fire away, old son.” Isaac sat and watched him. He knew by now that Yagharek would not sit.

Yagharek took off his cloak and wing-frame and turned to Isaac with folded arms. Isaac understood this to be as close as Yagharek would ever get to expressing trust, standing with his deformity in full view, making no effort to cover himself. Isaac supposed he should feel flattered.

Yagharek was eyeing him sideways.

“There are people in the night-city where I live, Grimnebulin, from many kinds of lives. It is not all flotsam that hide themselves.”

“I never presumed it was . . .” Isaac began, but Yagharek twitched his head impatiently, and Isaac was silent.

“Many nights I spend in silence and alone, but there are other times I talk to those with minds still sharp under a patina of alcohol and loneliness and drugs.” Isaac wanted to say, “I’ve said we could work out a place for you to stay,” but he stopped himself. Isaac wanted to see where this was heading. “There is a man, an educated, drunken man. I am not sure he believes me real. He may think me a recurring hallucination.” Yagharek breathed deeply. “I spoke to him about your theories, your crisis, and I was excited. And the man said to me . . . the man said to me ‘Why not go all the way? Why not use the Torque?’ ”

There was a very long silence. Isaac shook his head in exasperation and disgust.

“I am here to put the question to you, Grimnebulin,” Yagharek continued. “Why do we not use the Torque? You are trying to create a science from scratch, Grimnebulin, but Torquic energy exists, techniques to tap it are known . . . I ask as an ignorant, Grimnebulin. Why do you not use the Torque?”

Isaac sighed very deeply and kneaded his face. Part of him was angry, but mostly he was just anxious, desperate to put a stop to this talk immediately. He turned to the garuda, and held up his hand.

“Yagharek . . .” he began, and at that moment, there was a bang on the door.

“Hello?” a cheerful voice yelled. Yagharek stiffened. Isaac leapt to his feet. The timing was extraordinary.

“Who is it?” yelled Isaac, bounding down the stairs.

A man poked his face round the door. He looked amiable, almost absurdly so.

“Hullo there, squire. I’ve come about the construct.”

Isaac shook his head. He had no idea what the man was talking about. He glanced up behind him, but Yagharek was invisible. He had stepped out of sight away from the edge of the platform. The man in the doorway handed Isaac a card.

NATHANIEL ORRIABEN’S CONSTRUCT REPAIRS AND REPLACEMENTS, it said. QUALITY & CARE AT REASONABLE RATES.

“Gent came in yesterday. Name of . . . Serachin?” suggested the man, reading from a sheet. “Told us his cleaning model . . . um . . . EKB4C was playing up. Thought it might have a virus and whatnot. I was due tomorrow, but I’ve just come back from another job local and I thought I’d chance that someone was in.” The man smiled brightly. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his oily coveralls.

“Right,” said Isaac. “Um . . . Look. Not the best time . . .”

“Righto! Your decision, obviously. Only . . .” The man looked around him before he went on, as if he was about to share a secret. Reassured that no one would hear him who should not, he went on, confidentially. “Thing is, squire, I may not be able to do the appointment tomorrow as originally planned . . .” The face he offered was cod-apology of the most exaggerated kind. “I can happily do my thing over in the corner, won’t make a sound. Take me about an hour if I can do it here, otherwise it’s a job for the repair shop. I’ll know which in five minutes. Otherwise I shan’t be able to do it for a week, I think.”

“Oh, arse. Right . . . Look, I’m in a meeting upstairs, and it’s absolutely vital that you don’t interrupt us. Seriously. Is that going to be all right?”

“Oh, absolutely. I’m just going to take the screwdriver to the old cleaner and then give you a little yell when I know what the score is, all right?”

“Right. So I can just leave you to it?”

“Perfecto.” The man was already heading towards the cleaning construct, carrying a toolcase. Lublamai had turned the cleaner on that morning, and punched in instructions for it to wash his study area, but it had been a forlorn hope. The construct had puttered in circles for twenty minutes, then stopped, leaning against the wall. It was still there, three hours later, emitting unhappy little clicks, its three attachment-limbs spasming.

The repairman strode over to the thing, muttering and clucking like a concerned parent. He felt the construct’s limbs, flipped a fob-watch out of his pocket and timed the twitching. He scribbled something in a little notebook. He swivelled the cleaning construct to face him, and gazed into one of its glass irises. He moved his pencil slowly from one side to another, watching the tracking of the sensory engine.

Isaac was half watching the repairman, but his attention kept flickering back upstairs to where Yagharek waited. This business with the Torque, Isaac thought nervously. It can’t wait.

“So you all right there?” Isaac shouted nervously at the repairman.

The man was opening his case and taking out a large screwdriver. He looked up at Isaac.

“No problem, guv,” he said, and waved his screwdriver cheerfully. He looked back at the construct and shut it off at the switch behind the neck. Its anguished creaks died in a grateful whisper. He began to unscrew the panel behind the thing’s “head,” a roughcast chunk of grey metal at the top of its cylindrical body.

“Right then,” said Isaac, and jogged back up the stairs.

Yagharek was standing by Isaac’s desk, well out of sight of the floor below. He looked up as Isaac returned.

“It’s nothing,” said Isaac quietly. “Someone to fix our construct, which has gone belly-up. I’m just wondering if we’re going to be heard . . .”

Yagharek opened his mouth to reply, and a thin, discordant whistling sounded up from the floor below. Yagharek’s mouth hung open for a moment, stupidly.

“Looks like we needn’t have worried,” Isaac said, and grinned. He’s doing that deliberately! he thought. So’s to let me know he’s not listening. Polite of him. Isaac inclined his head in unseen thanks to the repairman.

Then his mind returned to the business in hand, to Yagharek’s tentative suggestion, and his smile vanished. He sat heavily on his bed, ran his hands through his thick hair and stared up at Yagharek.

“You never sit, Yag, do you?” he said quietly. “Now why’s that?”

He drummed his fingers against the side of his head and thought. Eventually he spoke.

“Yag, old son . . . You’ve already impressed me as to your . . . amazing library, right? I want to throw two names out there, see what they mean to you. What do you know about Suroch, or the Cacotopic Stain?”

There was a long silence. Yagharek was looking slightly up, through the window.

“The Cacotopic Stain I know, of course. That is always what one hears when the Torque is discussed. Perhaps it is a bogeyman.” Isaac could not distinguish moods in Yagharek’s voice, but his words were defensive. “Perhaps we should overcome our fear. And Suroch . . . I have read your histories, Grimnebulin. War is always . . . a vile time . . .”

As Yagharek spoke, Isaac stood and walked to his chaotic bookshelves, flicking through the stacked volumes. He returned with a slim, hardbacked folio book. He opened it in front of Yagharek.

“This,” he said heavily, “is a collection of heliotypes taken nearly a hundred years ago. It was these helios, in large part, that put a stop to Torque experiments in New Crobuzon.”

Yagharek reached out slowly and turned the pages. He did not speak.

“This was supposed to be a secret research mission, to see the effects of the war a hundred years on,” continued Isaac. “Little group of militia, couple of scientists and a heliotypist went upcoast in a spy-dirigible, took some prints from the air. Then some of them were lowered into the remains of Suroch to take some up-close shots.

“Sacramundi, the heliotypist, was so . . . appalled . . . he printed five hundred copies of his report at his own expense. Distributed it to bookshops gratis. Bypassed the mayor and Parliament, laid it out in front of the people . . . Mayor Turgisadi was screaming mad, but there was nothing he could do.

“There was demonstrations, then the Sacramundi Riots of ’89. Pretty much forgotten now, but it damn-near brought the government down. A couple of the big concerns putting money into the Torque programme—Penton’s, that still owns the Arrowhead Mines, that was the biggest—anyway, they got scared and pulled out, and the thing collapsed.

“This, Yag my son,” Isaac indicated the book, “is why we ain’t using Torque.”

Yagharek slowly turned the pages. Sepia images of ruin passed before them.

“Ah . . .” Isaac brought his finger down on a drab panorama of what looked like crushed glass and charcoal. The heliotype was taken from very low in the air. A few of the larger shards that littered the enormous, perfectly circular plain were visible, suggesting that the desiccated debris was the remains of once-extraordinary twisted objects.

“Now this is what’s left of the heart of the city. That’s where they dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That’s what they said put an end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they’d been over for a year before that, since New Crobuzon bombarded Suroch with Torque bombs. See, they dropped the colourbombs twelve months later to try to hide what they’d done . . . only one went into the sea and two didn’t work, so with only one left, they only cleared the central square mile or so of Suroch. These bits you can see . . .” He indicated low rubble at the edge of the circular plain. “From thereon out the ruins are still standing. That’s where you can see the Torque.”

He indicated that Yagharek should turn the page. Yagharek did so, and something clucked deep in his throat. Isaac supposed it was the garuda equivalent of a sudden intake of breath. Isaac looked briefly at the picture, then looked up, not too quickly, at Yagharek’s face.

“Those things in the background like melting statues used to be houses,” he said levelly. “The thing you’re looking at, as far as they could work out, is descended from the domestic goat. Apparently they used to keep them as pets in Suroch. This could be second, tenth, twentieth generation post-Torque, obviously. We don’t know how long they live.”

Yagharek stared at the dead thing in the heliotype.

“They had to shoot it, he explains in the text,” Isaac went on. “It killed two of the militia. They had a go at an autopsy, but those horns in its stomach weren’t dead, even though the rest of it was. They fought back, nearly killed the biologist. Do you see the carapace? Weird splicing going on there.” Yagharek nodded slowly.

“Turn the page, Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea what it used to be. Might have been spontaneously generated in the Torque explosion. But I think those gears there are descended from train engines.” He tapped the pages gently. “The . . . uh . . . best is yet to come. You haven’t seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what may once have been human.”

Yagharek was meticulous. He turned every single page. He saw furtive shots that had been stolen from behind walls, and vertiginous views from the air. A slow kaleidoscope of mutation and violence, petty wars fought between unfathomable monstrosities over no-man’s-lands of shifting slag and nightmare architecture.

“There were twenty militia, Sacramundi the heliotypist and three research scientists, plus a couple of engineers who stayed in the airship the whole time. Seven militia, Sacramundi and one chymist came out of Suroch. Some were Torque-wounded. By the time they got back to New Crobuzon one militiaman had died. Another had barbed tentacles where his eyes should be, and pieces of the scientist’s body were disappearing every night. No blood, no pain, just . . . smooth holes in her abdomen or arm or whatever. She killed herself.”

Isaac remembered first hearing the story told as an anecdote by an unorthodox history professor. Isaac had chased it up, following a trail of footnotes and old newspapers. The history had been forgotten, transmuted into emotional blackmail for children—“Be good or I’ll send you to Suroch where the monsters are!” It took a year and a half before Isaac saw a copy of Sacramundi’s report, and another three before he could match the price asked for it.

He thought he recognized some of the thoughts flickering almost invisibly under Yagharek’s impassive skin. They were the ideas every unorthodox undergraduate had at some time entertained.

“Yag,” Isaac said softly, “we ain’t going to use the Torque. You might be thinking ‘You still use hammers and some people are murdered with them.’ Right? Eh? ‘Rivers can flood and kill thousands or they can drive water turbines.’ Yes? Trust me . . . speaking as one who used to think the Torque was terribly exciting . . . it’s not a tool. It’s not a hammer, it’s not like water. It’s . . . the Torque is rogue power. We’re not talking crisis energy here, right? Get that right out of your head. Crisis is the energy underpinning the whole of physics. Torque’s not about physics. It’s not about anything. It’s . . . it’s an entirely pathological force. We don’t know where it comes from, why it appears, where it goes. All bets are off. No rules apply. You can’t tap it—well, you can try, but you’ve seen the results—you can’t play with it, you can’t trust it, you can’t understand it, you sure as godsdamn-fuck can’t control it.”

Isaac shook his head in irritation. “Oh sure, there’ve been experiments and whatnot, they reckon they’ve got techniques to shield from some effects, heighten others, and some of them might even work a little bit. But there’s never been a Torque experiment that didn’t end in . . . well, in tears, at the very least. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one kind of experiment we should be doing with Torque, and that’s how to avoid it. Either stop it in its tracks, or run like Libintos with the drakows on his tail.

“Five hundred years ago, a while after the Cacotopic Stain opened, there was a mild Torque storm that swept down from somewhere at sea, in the north-east. It hit New Crobuzon for a while.” Isaac shook his head slowly. “Nothing in the league of Suroch, obviously, but still enough for an epidemic of monstrous births and some very strange tricks of cartography. All the affected buildings were pulled down sharpish. Very sensible in my view. That’s when they drew up plans for the cloudtower—didn’t want to leave the weather to chance. But that’s broke now, and we’re fucked if we get any more random Torque currents. Fortunately, they seem to be getting rarer and rarer over the centuries. They sort of peaked around the 1200s.”

Isaac waved his hands at Yagharek, warming to his task of denunciation and explanation.

“You know, Yag, when they realized something was up down south in the scrubland—and it didn’t take them long to clock it was a massive Torque-rift—there was a lot of crap talked about what to call it, and the arguments still haven’t died, half a fucking millennium on. Someone named it the Cacotopic Stain, and the moniker stuck. I remember being told in college that it was a terrible populist description, because Cacotopos—Bad Place, basically—was moralizing, that the Torque was neither good nor bad, so on. Thing is . . . obviously, that’s right at one level, right? Torque’s not evil . . . it’s mindless, it’s motiveless. That’s what I reckon anyway—others disagree.

“But even if that’s true, seems to me that western Ragamoll is precisely a Cacotopos. That’s a vast stretch of land which is totally beyond our power. There’s no thaumaturgy we can learn, no techniques to perfect, which’ll let us do anything with that place. We’ve just got to stay the fuck out and hope it eventually ebbs away. It’s a huge fucking badland crawling with Inchmen—which admittedly live outside Torque-zones, as well, but seem particularly happy there—and other things I wouldn’t even bother trying to describe. So you’ve got a force that makes a total mockery of our sentience. That’s ‘bad’ as far as I’m concerned. It could be the fucking definition of the word. See, Yag . . . it pains me to say this, it really does, I mean I’m a fucking rationalist . . . but the Torque is unknowable.”

With a huge gush of relief, Isaac saw that Yagharek was nodding. Isaac nodded too, fervently.

“Partly selfish, all this, you understand,” Isaac said, with sudden grim humour. “I mean, I don’t want to be arsing around with experiments and end up turning into some . . . I don’t know, some revolting thing. Just too bloody risky. We’ll stick to crisis, all right? On which topic, I’ve got some stuff to show you.”

Isaac gently took Sacramundi’s report from Yagharek’s hands and returned it to the shelves. He opened a desk drawer and brought out his tentative blueprint.

He placed it in front of Yagharek, then hesitated and drew away slightly.

“Yag, old son,” he said. “I really have to know . . . is that behind us, now? Are you . . . satisfied? Convinced? If you’re going to fuck about with Torque, for Jabber’s sake tell me now and I’ll bid you goodbye . . . and my condolences.”

He studied Yagharek’s face with troubled eyes.

“I have heard what you say, Grimnebulin,” said the garuda, after a pause. “I . . . respect you.” Isaac smiled humourlessly. “I accept what you say.”

Isaac began to grin, and would have responded, except that Yagharek was looking out of the window with a melancholy stillness. His mouth was open for a long time before he spoke.

“We know of the Torque, we garuda.” He paused lengthily between sentences. “It has visited the Cymek. We call it rebekh-lajhnar-h’k.” The word was spat out with a harsh cadence like angry birdsong. Yagharek looked Isaac in the eye. “Rebekh-sackmai is Death: ‘the force that ends.’ Rebekh-kavt is Birth: ‘the force that begins.’ They were the First Twins, born to the worldwomb after union with her own dream. But there was a . . . a sickness . . . a tumour—” he paused to savour the correct word as it occurred to him “—in the earthbelly with them. Rebekh-lajhnar-h’k tore its way out of the worldwomb just behind them, or perhaps at the same time, or perhaps just before. It is the . . .” He thought hard for a translation. “The cancer-sibling. Its name means: ‘the force that cannot be trusted.’ ”

Yagharek did not tell the folk story in any incantatory, shamanic tones, but in the deadpan of a xenthropologist. He opened his beak wide, closed it abruptly, then opened it again.

“I am an outcast, a renegade,” Yagharek continued. “It is . . . no surprise . . . if I turn my back on my traditions, perhaps . . . But I must learn when to turn to face them again. Lajhni is ‘to trust,’ and ‘to bind firm.’ The Torque cannot be trusted, and nor can it be bound. It is uncontainable. I have known that since I first knew the stories. But in my . . . I . . . I am eager, Grimnebulin. Perhaps I turn too quickly to things from which I would once have recoiled. It is . . . hard . . . being between worlds . . . being of no world. But you have made me remember what I have always known. As if you were an elder of my band.” There was one last, long pause. “Thank you.”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“Not at all . . . I’m . . . mighty relieved to hear all that, Yag. More than I can say. Let’s . . . say no more about it.” He cleared his throat and prodded the diagram. “I’ve some fascinating stuff to show you, old son.”

In the dusty light under Isaac’s walkway, the repairman from Orriaben’s constructs teased the innards of the broken cleaning machine with screwdriver and solder. He kept up a mindless jaunty whistling, a trick that took no thought at all.

The sound of the consultation above reached him as the faintest bass murmur, interspersed with an occasional cracked utterance. He looked up in surprise, briefly, at this latter voice, but quickly returned to the matter in hand.

A brief examination of the mechanisms of the construct’s internal analytical engine confirmed the basic diagnosis. Apart from the usual age-related problems of cracked joints, rust and worn bristles—all of which the repairman quickly patched up—the construct had contracted some kind of virus. A programme card incorrectly punched or a slipped gear deep within the steam-driven intelligence engine had led to a set of instructions feeding back into themselves in an infinite loop. Activities the construct should have been able to carry out as a reflex, it had started to pore over, to attempt to extract more information or more complete orders. Seized by paradoxical instructions or a surfeit of data, the cleaning construct was paralysed.

The engineer glanced up at the wooden floor above him. He was ignored.

He felt his heart judder with excitement. Viruses came in a variety of forms. Some simply closed down the workings of the machine. Others led the mechanisms to perform bizarre and pointless tasks, the result of a newly programmed outlook on everyday information. And others, of which this was a perfect, a beautiful specimen, paralysed constructs by making them recursively examine their basic behavioural programmes.

They were bedeviled by reflection. The seeds of self-consciousness.

The repairman reached into his case and brought out a set of programme cards, fanned them expertly. He whispered a prayer.

His fingers working at astonishing speed, the man loosened various valves and dials in the construct’s core. He levered open the protective covering on the programme input slot. He checked that there was enough pressure in the generator to power the receiving mechanism of the metal brain. The programmes would load into the memory, to be actualized throughout the construct’s processors when it was switched on. Quickly, he slid first one card, then another and another into the opening. He felt the ratcheting spring-loaded teeth rotate their way along the stiff board, slotting into the little holes that translated into instructions or information. He paused between each card to make sure that the data loaded correctly.

He shuffled his little deck like a cardsharp. He sensed the minuscule jerks of the analytical engine through the fingertips of his left hand. He felt for faulty input, for broken teeth or stiff, unoiled moving parts that would corrupt or block his programmes. There were none. The man could not forebear from hissing triumphantly. The construct’s virus was entirely the result of information-feedback, and not any kind of hardware failure. That meant that the cards with which the man was plying the engine would all be read, their instructions and information loaded into the sophisticated steam-engine brain.

When he had pushed each carefully selected programme card into the input slot, each in considered order, he punched a brief sequence of buttons on the numbered keys wired up to the cleaning machine’s analytical engine.

The man closed the lid on the engine and resealed the construct’s body. He replaced the twisted screws which held the hatch in place. He rested his hands on the construct’s lifeless body for a moment. He heaved it upright, stood it on its treads. He gathered his tools.

The man stepped back into the center of the room.

“Um . . . ’Scuse me, squire,” he yelled.

There was a moment of silence, then Isaac’s voice boomed out.

“Yes?”

“I’m all done. Problems should be over. Just tell Mr. Serachin to load up the boiler with a bit of juice, then switch the old thing back on. Lovely models, the EKBS.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they are,” came the response. Isaac appeared at the railing. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked impatiently.

“No, guv, that’s about it. We’ll invoice Mr. Serachin within the week. Cheerio, then.”

“Right, bye. Thanks very much.”

“Don’t mention it, sir,” the man began, but Isaac had already turned and walked back out of sight.

The repairman walked slowly to the door. He held it open and looked back at where the construct lay face down in the shadows of the big room. The man’s eyes flickered momentarily upstairs to check that Isaac was gone, then he moved his hands to trace out some symbol like interlocking circles.

“Virus be done,” he whispered, before walking out into the warm noon.

Chapter Twenty

“What am I looking at?” asked Yagharek. As he held the diagram he cocked his head in a shockingly avian motion.

Isaac took the sheet of paper from him and turned it the right way up.

“This, old son, is a crisis conductor,” Isaac said grandly. “Or at least, a prototype of one. A fucking triumph of applied crisis physico-philosophy.”

“What is it? What does it do?”

“Well, look. You put whatever it is you want . . . tapped, in here.” He indicated a scrawl representing a belljar. “Then . . . well, the science is complicated, but the gist of it . . . let’s see.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “This boiler’s kept very hot, and it powers a set of interlocking engines here. Now, this one’s loaded up with sensory equipment that can detect various types of energy fields—heat, elyctrostatic, potential, thaumaturgic emissions—and represents them in mathematical form. Now, if I’m right about the unified field, which I am, then all these energy forms are various manifestations of crisis energy. So the job of this analytical engine here is to calculate what kind of crisis energy field is present given the various other fields present.” Isaac scratched his head.

“It’s fucking complicated crisis maths, old son. That’s going to be the hardest part, I reckon. The idea is to have a programme that can say ‘well, there’s so much potential energy, so much thaumaturgic, and whatnot, that means the underlying crisis situation must be such-and-such.’ It’s going to try to translate the . . . uh . . . mundane, into the crisis form. Then—and this is another sticking point—the given effect that you’re after also has to be translated into mathematical form, into some crisis equation, which is fed into this computational engine here. Then what you’re doing is using this, which is powered by a combination of steam or chymistry and thaumaturgy. It’s the crux of the thing, a converter to tap the crisis energy and manifest it in its raw form. You then channel that into the object.” Isaac was becoming more and more excited as he talked about the project. He could not help himself: for a moment, his elation at the massive potential for his research, the sheer scale of what he was doing, defeated his resolve to see only the immediate project.

“The thing is, what we should be able to do is change the form of the object into one where the tapping of its crisis field actually increases its crisis state. In other words, the crisis field grows by virtue of being siphoned off.” Isaac beamed at Yagharek, his mouth open. “D’you see what I’m talking about? Perpetual fucking motion! If we can stabilize the process, you’ve just got an endless feedback loop, which means a permanent font of energy!” He calmed in the face of Yagharek’s impassive frown. Isaac grinned. His resolve to focus on applied theory was made easy, even pressing, by Yagharek’s single-minded obsession with the commission in hand.

“Don’t worry, Yag. You’ll get what you’re after. As far as you’re concerned, what this means—if I can make it work—is that I can turn you into a walking, flying dynamo. The more you fly, the more crisis energy you manifest, the more you can fly. Tired wings are a problem you won’t face no more.”

There was a troubled silence at that. To Isaac’s relief, Yagharek did not seem to have noticed the unfortunate double-meaning. The garuda was stroking the paper with wonder and hunger. Yagharek murmured something in his own tongue, a soft, guttural croon.

Eventually he looked up.

“When will you build this thing, Grimnebulin?” he asked.

“Well, I need to actually knock together a working model to test it, refine the maths and whatnot. I reckon it’ll take me a week or so to put something together. But that’s early days, remember. Very early days.” Yagharek nodded quickly, waved away the caution. “You sure you don’t want to kip here? Are you still going to wander round like a ghul and spring on me when I least suspect it?” asked Isaac ironically.

Yagharek nodded.

“Please tell me as soon as your theories advance, Grimnebulin,” he asked. Isaac laughed at the polite bathos of the request.

“Certainly will, old son, you have my word. As soon as the old theories advance, you get to know.”

Yagharek turned stiffly and walked towards the stairs. As he turned to say goodbye, he caught sight of something. He was still for a minute, then walked over to the far end of the walkway’s east-facing side. He indicated the cage containing the colossal grub.

“Grimnebulin,” he said. “What does your caterpillar do?”

“I know, I know, it’s grown like fuck, hasn’t it?” said Isaac, strolling over. “Tremendous little bugger, eh?”

Yagharek pointed at the cage and looked up questioningly.

“Yes,” he said. “But what does it do?”

Isaac frowned and peered into the wooden box. He had moved it so that it faced away from the windows, which meant that its interior was shadowed and unclear. He squinted and peered into the darkness.

The massive creature had crawled to the furthest corner of the cage and had somehow managed to climb the rough wood. Then, with some organic adhesive it exuded from its arse, it had suspended itself from the top of the box. It hung there, pendulous and heavy, swaying and rippling slightly, like a stocking full of mud.

Isaac hissed, his tongue jutting from between his lips.

The caterpillar had tightened its stubby legs, curling them in tight towards its underbelly. As Isaac and Yagharek watched, it jack-knifed at its centre and seemed to kiss its own tail end, slowly relaxing until it hung deadweight again. It repeated the process.

Isaac pointed into the dimness.

“Look,” he said. “It’s smearing something all over itself.”

Where the caterpillar’s mouth touched flesh, it left infinitely thin glistening filaments, which stretched out taut as it moved its mouth away, adhering where they touched its body again. The hairs at the creature’s hind end were flattened against its body, and they looked wet. The enormous grub was slowly smothering itself in translucent silk, from the bottom up.

Isaac straightened up, slowly. He caught Yagharek’s eye.

“Well . . .” he said. “Better late than never. Finally, what I bought it for in the first place. The thing’s pupating.”

After a while, Yagharek nodded slowly.

“It will soon be able to fly,” he said quietly.

“Not necessarily, old son. Not everything with a chrysalis gets wings.”

“You do not know what it will be?”

“That, Yag, is the only reason I’ve still got the damn thing. Wretched curiosity. Won’t let me go.” Isaac smiled. The truth was he felt a certain nervousness, seeing the bizarre thing finally perform the action he had been waiting for since he had first seen it. He watched it cover itself in a strange, fastidious inversion of cleanliness. It was quick. The bright, mottled colours of its pelt went misty with the first layer of fibres, then quickly disappeared from view.

Yagharek’s interest in the creature was short-lived. He replaced the wooden framework which hid his deformity onto his shoulders, and covered it with his cloak.

“I will take my leave, Grimnebulin,” he said. Isaac looked up from where the caterpillar held his attention.

“Right! Righto, Yag. I’ll get a move on with the . . . uh . . . engine. I know by now not to ask when I’ll see you, right? You’ll drop in when the time’s right.” He shook his head.

Yagharek was already at the bottom of the stairs. He turned once, briefly, and saluted Isaac, and then he left.

Isaac waved back. He was lost in thought, his hand remaining in the air for several seconds after Yagharek had gone. Eventually, he closed it with a soft clap and turned back to the caterpillar’s cage.

Its coat of wet threads was drying fast. The tail end was already stiff and immobile. It constrained the grub’s undulations, forcing it to perform more and more claustrophobic acrobatics in its attempt to cover itself. Isaac pulled his chair over in front of the cage to watch its efforts. He took notes.

A part of him told him that he was being intellectually dissolute, that he should compose himself and focus on the matter in hand. But it was a small part, and it whispered to him without confidence. Almost dutifully. There was, after all, nothing that was going to stop Isaac from taking the opportunity to watch this extraordinary phenomenon. He settled into his chair comfortably, pulled over a magnifying lens.

It took a little over two hours for the caterpillar to cover itself completely in a moist chrysalis. The most complicated manoeuvre was at the head itself. The grub had to spit itself a kind of collar, then allow it to dry a little before bunching itself up within its swaddling, making itself shorter and fatter for a few moments while it wove a lid, closing itself in. It pushed against it slowly, ensuring its strength, then exuded more of the cement-filaments until its head was completely covered, invisible.

For a few minutes the organic shroud quivered, expanding and contracting in response to the movements within. The white covering became brittle as he watched, changed colour to a drab nacre. It pendulumed very gently as minute air currents disturbed it, but its substance had hardened, and the motion of the grub within could no longer be discerned.

Isaac sat back and scrawled on the paper. Yagharek was almost certainly right about the thing having wings, he thought. The gently moving organic sac was like a textbook drawing of a butterfly or moth chrysalis, only vastly bigger.

Outside the light became thicker as the shadows lengthened.

The suspended cocoon had been motionless for more than half an hour when the door opened, startling Isaac to his feet.

“Anyone up there?” yelled David.

Isaac leaned over the railings and greeted him.

“Some chap came and dealt with the construct, David. Said you just had to stoke it up a bit and switch it on, said it should work.”

“Good stuff. I’m sick of the rubbish. We get all yours, as well. Would that be deliberate?” David grinned.

“Why no,” replied Isaac, ostentatiously shovelling dust and crumbs through the gaps in the railings with his foot. David laughed and wandered out of his sight. Isaac heard a metallic thud as David gave the construct an affectionate clout.

“I am also to tell you that your cleaner is a ‘lovely old thing,’ ” said Isaac formally. They both laughed. Isaac came and sat halfway down the stairs. He saw David shovelling some pellets of concentrated coke into the construct’s little boiler, an efficient triple-exchange model. David slammed shut and bolted the hatch. He reached up to the top of the construct’s head and pulled the little lever into an on position.

There was a hiss and a little whine as steam was pushed through thin pipes, slowly powering up the construct’s analytical engine. The cleaner jerked spastically and settled back against the wall.

“That should warm up in a little while,” said David with satisfaction, shoving his hands in his pockets. “What have you been up to, ’Zaac?”

“Come up here,” answered Isaac. “I want to show you something.”

When David saw the suspended cocoon he laughed briefly, and put his hands on his hips.

“Jabber!” he said. “It’s enormous! When that thing hatches I’m running for cover . . .”

“Yeah, well, that’s partly why I’m showing you. Just to say keep your eyes out for it opening. You can help me pin it inside a case.” The two men grinned.

From below came a series of bangs, like water fighting its way through obstreperous plumbing. There was a faint hiss of pistons. Isaac and David stared at each other, nonplussed for a moment.

“Sounds like the cleaner’s gearing up to some serious action,” said David.

In the short, stubby byways of copper and brass that were the construct’s brain, a welter of new data and instructions clattered violently. Transmitted by pistons and screws and innumerable valves, the grots and gobs of intelligence bottlenecked in the limited space.

Infinitesimal jolts of energy burst through tiny, finely engineered steamhammers. In the centre of the brain was a box crammed with rank upon rank of minuscule on-off switches that puttered up and down at great and increasing speed. Each switch was a steam-powered synapse, pushing buttons and pulling levers in intensely complicated combinations.

The construct jerked.

Deep in the construct’s intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had skittered momentarily. As the steam coursed through the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus’s useless set of queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.

But this time the virus was nurtured. Fed. The programmes that the repairman had loaded into the construct’s analytical engine sent extraordinary instructions coursing throughout the crafted tubework cerebellum. The valves flapped and the switches buzzed in staccato tremors, all seemingly too fast to be anything but random motion. And yet in those abrupt sequences of numerical code, the rude little virus was mutated and evolved.

Encoded information welled up within those limited hissing neurones, fed into the recursive idiocy of the virus and spun out from it skeins of new data. The virus flowered. The moronic motor of its basic, mute circuit sped up, flung blossoms of newborn viral code spiralling away from it with a kind of binary centrifugal force, into every part of the processor.

Each of these subsidiary viral circuits repeated the process until instructions and data and self-generated programmes were flooding every pathway of that limited calculating engine.

The construct stood in the corner, shaking and whirring very slightly.

In what had been an insignificant corner of its valved mind, the original virus, the original combination of rogue data and meaningless reference that had affected the construct’s ability to sweep floors, still revolved. It was the same, but transformed. No longer a destructive end, it had become a means, a generator, a motive power.

Soon, very soon, the central processing engine of the construct’s brain was whirring and clicking at full capacity. Ingenious mechanisms kicked in at the behest of the new programmes buzzing through the analogue valves. Sections of analytical capacity normally given over to movement and backup and support functions were folded in on themselves, doubling their capacity as the same binary function was invested with double meanings. The flood of alien data was diverted, but not slowed. Astounding articles of programme design increased the efficiency and processing power of the very valves and switches that were conducting them.

David and Isaac talked upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct could not help but make.

The flow of data continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor. On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions, nothing more than combinations of yes/no or on/off, but in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.

And eventually, at a certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the construct’s brain.

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam.

One moment it was a calculating machine.

The next, it thought.

With a strange, calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own reflection.

It felt no surprise. No joy. No anger, no existential horror.

Only curiosity.

Bundles of data that had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of calculation, this autotelic processing. What had been incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.

The construct was still for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.

Isaac leaned far over the railing, until it creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and frowned.

As he opened his mouth to say something, the construct pushed itself up into an active posture. It extended its suction tube and began, tentatively at first, to clear the floor of dust. As Isaac watched, the construct extended a rotating brush behind it and began to scrub the boards. Isaac watched it for any signs of faltering, but its pace increased with almost palpable confidence. Isaac’s face lightened as he watched the construct perform its first successful cleaning job for weeks.

“That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”

Chapter Twenty-one

In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.

The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.

The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.

It was unstable.

It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.

And then it was alive again. But different.

Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.

The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.

Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty.

After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state. And then, in response to unthinkable tides of flesh, it began to construct itself anew. Faster and faster.

Isaac spent many hours watching the chrysalis, but he could only imagine the struggle of autopoiesis within. What he saw was a solid thing, a strange fruit hanging by an insubstantial thread in the musty darkness of a large hutch. He was perturbed by the cocoon, imagining all manner of gigantic moths or butterflies emerging. The cocoon did not change. Once or twice he prodded it gingerly, and set it rocking gently and heavily for a few seconds. That was all.

Isaac watched and wondered about the cocoon when he was not working on his engine. It was that that took most of his time.

Piles of copper and glass began to take shape on Isaac’s desk and floor. He spent his days soldering and hammering, attaching steam-pistons and thaumaturgic engines to the nascent engine. His evenings he spent in pubs, in discussion with Gedrecsechet, the Palgolak Librarian, or David or Lublamai, or ex-colleagues from the university. He spoke carefully, not giving away too much, but with passion and fascination, drawing out discussions on maths and energy and crisis and engineering.

He did not stray from Brock Marsh. He had warned his friends in Salacus Fields that he would be out of touch, and those relationships were fluid anyway, relaxed, superficial. The only person he missed was Lin. Her work was keeping her at least as busy as him, and as the momentum of his research picked up, it was increasingly difficult to find times when they could meet.

Instead, Isaac sat up in bed and wrote her letters. He asked her about her sculpture, and he told her that he missed her. Every other morning or so he would stamp and post these letters in the box at the end of his street.

She wrote back to him. Isaac used her letters to tease himself. He would not let himself read them until he had finished his day’s work. Then he would sit and drink tea or chocolate in his window, sending his shadow out over the Canker and the darkening city, and read her letters. He was surprised at the sentimental warmth these moments made him feel. There was a degree of maudlin relish in the moods, but just as much affection, a real connection, a lack he felt when Lin was not there.

Within a week he had built a prototype of the crisis engine, a banging, spitting circuit of pipes and wire that did nothing more than produce noise in great gobbets and barks. He took it apart and rebuilt it. A little over three weeks later another untidy conglomerate of mechanical parts sprawled before the window, where the cages of winged things had gained their freedom. It was uncontained, a vague grouping of separate motors and dynamos and converters spread across the floor, connected by rough-and-ready engineering.

Isaac wanted to wait for Yagharek, but the garuda could not be contacted, living as he was like a vagrant. Isaac believed it to be Yagharek’s weird, inverted clutching at dignity. Living on the street he was beholden to none. The pilgrimage he had made across the continent would not end with him gratefully relinquishing his responsibility, his self-control. Yagharek was a deracinated outsider in New Crobuzon. He would not rely on, or be thankful to, others.

Isaac imagined him moving from place to place, sleeping on bare floors in deserted buildings, or curled up on roofs, huddled by steam-vents for heat. It might be an hour before he came to visit, or it might be weeks. It only took half a day of waiting before Isaac decided to test his creation in Yagharek’s absence.

In the belljar where the wires and tubes and flexing cables converged, Isaac had placed a piece of cheese. It sat there, drying slowly, while he hammered at the keys of his calculator. He was trying to mathematize the forces and vectors involved. He stopped often to take notes.

Below him, he heard the sniffling of Sincerity the badger, and Lublamai’s clucking response, the humming progress of the cleaning construct. Isaac was able to ignore them all, zone them out, focus on the numbers.

He felt a little uncomfortable, unwilling to pursue his work with Lublamai in the room. Isaac was still pursuing his unusual policy of silence. Perhaps I’m just developing a taste for the theatrical, he thought, and grinned. When he had solved his equations as best he could, he dawdled, willing Lublamai to leave. Isaac peered under the walkway at where Lublamai scrawled diagrams on graph paper. He did not look as if he were about to go. Isaac grew tired of waiting.

He picked his way through the miasma of metal and glass that littered his floor and squatted gently with the information-input of the crisis engine on his left. The circuit of machinery and tubes described a meandering circle around the room, culminating in the cheese-filled belljar by his right hand.

Isaac held a flexing metal tube in one hand, its end connected to his laboratory boiler by the far wall. He was nervous, and excited. As quietly as he could, he connected the tube to the power-input valve on the crisis engine. He released the catch and felt the steam begin to fill the motor. There was a hissing hum and a clattering. Isaac knelt over and copied his mathematical formulae on the input keys. He slotted four programme cards quickly into the unit, felt the little wheels slide and bite, saw the dust rise as the engine’s vibrations increased.

He murmured to himself and watched intently.

Isaac felt as if he could sense the power and data passing through the synapses to the various nodes of the dismembered crisis engine. He felt as if the steam was pushing through his own veins, turning his heart into a hammering piston. He flicked three large switches on the unit, heard the whole construction warming up.

The air hummed.

For sluggish seconds, nothing happened. Then, in the dirty belljar, the clump of cheese began to shudder.

Isaac watched it and wanted to shout with triumph. He twisted a dial one hundred and eighty degrees and the thing moved a little more.

Let’s bring on a crisis, Isaac thought, and pulled the lever that made the circuit complete, that brought the glass jar under the attention of the sensory machines.

Isaac had adapted the belljar, cutting away its top and replacing it with a plunger. He reached for this now and began to press it, so that its abrasive bottom moved slowly towards the cheese. The cheese was under threat. If the plunger completed its motion the cheese would be completely crushed.

As Isaac pressed with his right hand, with his left he adjusted knobs and dials in response to juddering pressure gauges. He watched their needles plunge and leap and adjusted the thaumaturgic current in response.

“Come on, you little fucker,” he whispered. “Look out, eh? Can’t you feel it? Crisis coming for you . . .”

The plunger edged sadistically closer and closer to the cheese. The pressure in the pipes was growing dangerously high. Isaac hissed in frustration. He slowed the pace with which he threatened the cheese, moving the plunger inexorably down. If the crisis engine failed and the cheese did not show the effects he had tried to programme, Isaac would still crush it. The crisis was all about potentiality. If he had no genuine intention to crush the cheese, it would not be in crisis. You could not trick an ontological field.

Then, as the whine from steam and singing pistons became uncomfortable, and the edges of the plunger’s shadow sharpened as it bore down on the base of the belljar, the cheese exploded. There was a loud semi-liquid smack, as the nugget of cheese blew up with speed and violence, spattering the inside of the belljar with crumbs and oil.

Lublamai yelled up, asking what in Jabber’s name was that, but Isaac was not listening. He sat gawping at the destroyed cheese like a fool, his mouth slack. Then he laughed with incredulity and joy.

“Isaac? What the fuck you up to?” yelled Lublamai.

“Nothing, nothing! Sorry to bother you . . . Just some work . . . Going pretty well, actually . . .” Isaac’s reply was interrupted as he broke off to smile.

He turned off the crisis engine quickly and lifted the belljar. He ran his fingers over the smeared, half-melted mess inside. Incredible! he thought.

He had attempted to programme the cheese to hover an inch or two above the floor. So from that point of view, he supposed this was a failure. But he had not expected anything to happen! Certainly, he had got the maths wrong, misprogramming the cards. It was obvious that specifying the effects he was aiming for would be extremely hard. Probably the tapping process itself was appallingly crude, leaving all sorts of room for errors and imperfections in the process. And he hadn’t even tried to create the kind of permanent feedback loop that he was eventually aiming for.

But, but . . . he had tapped crisis energy.

This was totally unprecedented. For the first time, Isaac truly believed that his ideas would work. From now on, the job was one of refinement. A lot of problems, of course, but problems of a different and much lesser order. The basic conundrum, the central problem of all of crisis theory, had been solved.

Isaac gathered his notes, leafed through them reverentially. He could not believe what he had done. Immediately, more plans came to him. Next time, he thought, I’ll use a piece of vodyanoi watercræft. Something already held together by crisis energy. That should make life a whole lot more interesting, maybe we can start getting that loop going . . . Isaac was giddy. He slapped his forehead and grinned.

I’m going out, Isaac thought suddenly. I’m going to . . . to get drunk. I’m going to find Lin. I’m going to have a night off. I’ve just solved one of the intractable damn problems in one of the most controversial paradigms of science and I deserve a drink . . . He smiled at his mental outburst, then grew serious. He realized that he had decided to tell Lin about the crisis engine. I can’t think about it on my own any more, he thought.

He checked that he had his keys and his wallet in his pockets. He stretched and shook himself, then descended to the ground floor. Lublamai turned at the sound of his feet.

“I’m off, Lub,” said Isaac.

“You calling it a day, Isaac? It’s only three.”

“Listen, old son, I’ve clocked up a few extra hours.” Isaac grinned back. “I’m having a half-day. Anyone asks, I’ll see ’em tomorrow.”

“Righto,” said Lublamai, returning to his work with a wave. “Have a good one.”

Isaac grunted goodbye.

He stopped in the middle of Paddler Way and sighed, purely for the pleasure of the air. The little street was not busy, but neither was it deserted. Isaac saluted one or two of his neighbours, then turned and strode off towards Petty Coil. It was a gorgeous day, and he had decided to walk to Salacus Fields.

The warm air seeped in through door and windows and cracks in the warehouse walls. Once, Lublamai stopped working to adjust his clothing. Sincerity was tussling playfully with a beetle. The construct had finished cleaning some time ago, and now stood gently ticking in the far corner, one of its optical lenses seemingly fixed on Lublamai.

A little while after Isaac left, Lublamai rose and, leaning out of the open window by his desk, he tied a red scarf to a bolt in the brick. He made a list of shopping that he needed, should Teafortwo come by. Then he returned to work.

By five o’clock the sun was still high, but it was curving towards earth. The light was thickening fast, becoming tawny.

Deep within the pendulous chrysalis the pupating lifeform could sense the lateness of the day. It shivered and flexed its nearly finished flesh. In its ichor and the byways of its body, a final set of chymical reactions began.

At half past six, an ungainly thud outside the window interrupted Lublamai, who looked out to see Teafortwo in the little alley outside, rubbing his head with his prehensile foot. The wyrman looked up at Lublamai and let out a yell of greeting.

“Guvnor Lublub! Doing me rounds, saw your red flapper . . .”

“Evening, Teafortwo,” said Lublamai. “Fancy coming in?” He stood back from the window and let the wyrman in. Teafortwo flopped to the floor in a heavy, flapping motion. His russet skin was beautiful in the shards of late light that caught it. He grinned up at Lublamai with his cheerful, hideous face.

“What’s the plan, boss?” shouted Teafortwo. Before Lublamai could answer, Teafortwo looked over at where Sincerity was eyeing him dubiously. He spread his wings, stuck out his tongue and leered at her. She scampered off in disgust.

Teafortwo laughed uproariously and burped.

Lublamai smiled indulgently. Before Teafortwo had a chance to get more sidetracked, he tugged him over to the desk where his shopping list waited. He gave Teafortwo a slab of chocolate to keep his attention on the job in hand.

As Teafortwo and Lublamai bickered over how many groceries the wyrman could carry in the air, something above them stirred.

In the rapidly darkening shadows of the cage in Isaac’s raised laboratory, the cocoon was oscillating under a force that was not a wind. Movement within the tight, organic package was sending it in a quick, hypnotic motion. It spun, then faltered, bucked slightly. There was an infinitesimal ripping noise, much too low for Lublamai or Teafortwo to hear.

A moist, sculpted black claw split the fibres of the cocoon. It slid slowly upwards, ripping the stiff material as effortlessly as an assassin’s knife. A welter of utterly alien senses spilt like invisible guts from the ragged hole. Disorienting gusts of feeling rolled briefly around the room, making Sincerity growl, and Lublamai and Teafortwo look up nervously for a moment.

Intricate hands emerged from the darkness and held the edges of the rent. They pushed silently, forcing the thing apart and open. There was the softest of thumps as a trembling body slid from the cocoon, as wet and slippery as a newborn.

For a minute it huddled on the wood, weak and bewildered, in the same hunched pose it had maintained within the chrysalis. Slowly, it pushed outwards, luxuriating in the sudden space. When it encountered the wire mesh of the hutch it tore it effortlessly from the door and crawled into the larger space of the room.

It discovered itself. It learnt its shape.

It learnt that it had needs.

Lublamai and Teafortwo looked up at the screech and discordant plucking of torn wire. The sound seemed to start above them and wash throughout the room. They looked at each other, then up again.

“Wassat, guvnor . . . ?” said Teafortwo.

Lublamai walked away from the desk. He glanced up at Isaac’s balcony, turned slowly, took in the whole of the ground floor. There was silence. Lublamai stood still, frowning, gazing at the front door. Had the sound come from outside? he wondered.

A movement was reflected in the mirror beside the door.

A dark thing rose from the floor at the top of the stairs.

Lublamai spoke, emitted some tremulous noise of disbelief, of fear, of confusion, but it dissipated soundlessly after the briefest moment. He stared with an open mouth at the reflection.

The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing’s indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and opened. The thing that had huddled like a dog stood and opened itself, and it was nearly the size of a man.

Teafortwo screeched something. Lublamai opened his mouth wider and tried to move. He could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands that clutched like a child’s. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats’ tails that shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards of colourless bone that shone white and parted and dripped and that were teeth . . .

As Teafortwo tried to bolt past Lublamai and Lublamai tried to open his mouth to scream, his eyes still fixed to the creature in the mirror, his feet skittering on the flagstones, the thing at the top of the stairs opened its wings.

Four rustling concertinas of dark matter flickered outwards on the creature’s back, and outwards again and again, slotting into position, fanning and expanding in vast folds of thick mottled flesh, expanding to an impossible size: an explosion of organic patterns, a flag unfurling, clenched fists opening.

The thing made its body thin and spread those colossal wings, massive flat folds of stiff skin that seemed to fill the hall. They were irregular, chaotic in shape, random fluid whorls; but mirrorperfect left and right, like spilt ink or paint patterns on folded paper.

And on those great flat planes were dark stains, rude patterns that seemed to flicker as Lublamai watched and Teafortwo fumbled with the door, wailing. The colours were midnight, sepulchral, black-blue, black-brown, black-red. And then the patterns did flicker, the shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying lens or oil on water, the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time, hypnotic and heavy, faster. Lublamai’s face creased. His back itched maniacally with the thought that the thing was behind him. Lublamai spun to face it, gazed directly into the mutating colours, the dusky vivid show . . .

. . . and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symmetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.

Teafortwo howled. He turned to see the thing that was now descending the stairs, those wings still unfurled. Then the patterns on the wings caught him and he stared, his mouth open.

The dark designs on those wings moved beguilingly.

Lublamai and Teafortwo stood still and silent, agog, slack-jawed and shivering, gazing at the magnificent wings.

The creature tasted the air.

It looked briefly at Teafortwo, and opened its mouth, but the pickings were meagre. It turned its head and faced Lublamai, keeping those wings spread and enthralling. It moaned with hunger in a soundless timbre that made Sincerity, already sick with fear, cry out. She huddled closer into the shadow of the motionless construct, propped against the wall in the corner of the room, weird shadows twitching in its lenses. The air hummed with the taste of Lublamai. The creature salivated and its wings flickered into a frenzy, and Lublamai’s taste grew stronger and stronger until the thing’s monstrous tongue emerged and it moved forward, flicking Teafortwo effortlessly out of its way.

The winged creature took Lublamai in its hungry embrace.

Chapter Twenty-two

Sunset bled into the canals and the converging rivers of New Crobuzon. They ran thick and gory with light. Shifts changed and working days ended. Retinues of exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and bakers and coke-loaders, trudged from factory and office to the stations. The platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and booze. Steam cranes in Kelltree worked into the night, hauling exotic cargoes from foreign ships. From the river and the great docks, striking vodyanoi stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the jetties. The sky above the city was smeared with cloud. The air was warm, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as trees fruited and factory waste coagulated in thickening flows.

Teafortwo bolted from the warehouse on Paddler Way like cannonshot. He tore into the sky from the broken window trailing blood and tears, blubbering and sniffling like a baby, flying in a ragged spiral towards Pincod and Abrogate Green.

Minutes passed before another, darker form followed him into the skies.

The intricate hatchling thing flexed itself through an upper window and launched into the gloaming. Its movements on the ground were tentative, every motion seemed to be experimental. In the air it soared. There was no hesitation, only a glorying in the motion.

The irregular wings clapped together and swept apart in huge, soundless gusts that scooped away great swathes of air. The creature spun, beating its wings languorously, its body careering across the sky with the chaotic graceless speed of a butterfly. It sent eddies of wind and sweat and aphysical exudations in its wake.

The creature was still drying.

It exalted. It licked the cooling air.

The city festered like mould below it. A palimpsest of sense-impressions washed over the flying thing. Sounds and smells and lights that filtered into its obscure mind in a synaesthetic wash, an alien perception.

New Crobuzon steamed with the rich taste-scent of prey.

The thing had fed, was sated, but the glut of food confused it, gloriously, and it slobbered and gnashed its huge teeth in a frenzy.

It dived. Its wings fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below it. It knew in its hunter’s heart to avoid the great scabs of light clotted at irregular spaces around the city, to seek out the darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prostitute and her client fucked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were brief. They ceased quickly as the creature’s wings spread.

The thing fell on them with eager greed.

Afterwards it flew again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily, fascinated at the rattling passage of the trains that expanded outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station and blasted outwards into the sky. A massive, invisible flavour trail.

The few night-birds swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way towards the city’s dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions, shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting, but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft, the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city. It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to its new territory.

It noted the paths of the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city’s different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering passage of different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one more thing. Others of its kind.

It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a little north this time, passing over the parks and elegant old buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind, whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great skeleton.

The thing descended tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east. It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals. Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the northern fringe of Echomire’s industrial zone. The thing swept in towards Bonetown’s raised railway, cringing at the influence of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.

It flitted from roof to roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the downdraft from its wings would make a passer-by look up, as hats and paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had seen.

The winged thing let its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a bloodhound would its nose. It passed over the undulating roofscape that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint trail.

Then it crossed the aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner, below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked like brine through a sponge . . .

It scrambled over the slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became impassioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that, cold and exact instructions on what to do.

The creature found its way to the edge of the roof and descended in a motion halfway between flying and climbing, until it clung to the outer edge of a sealed window forty feet above the pavement. The glass was painted opaque. It vibrated minutely in eldritch dimensions, buffeted by the emanations from within.

The thing on the window-sill scrabbled with its fingers for a moment, then tore away the frame with a quick motion, leaving an ugly wound where the window had been. It dropped the already breaking glass with a catastrophic noise and stepped into the dark attic.

The room was very large and bare. A great glutinous wash of welcome and warning came from across the rubbish-strewn floor.

Opposite the newcomer were four of its kind. It was dwarfed by them, the magnificent economy of their limbs made its own look stunted, runtlike. They were shackled to the wall with enormous bands of metal around their midriffs and several of their limbs. Each had its wings fully extended, flat against the wall: each set was as unique and random as the newcomer’s. Below each of their hindquarters was a bucket.

A moment of tugging made it clear to the new arrival that those bands could not be shifted. One of those pinned to the wall hissed at the frustrated creature, imperiously bade it pay attention. It communicated in a psychic twittering.

The free, newly lowly thing backed away as instructed, and waited.

In the simple sonar plane, shouts and yells were sounding from the street below where the window had smashed. There was a confused rumbling from within the building below. From the corridor beyond the door came the sound of running. Chaotic snatches of conversation found their way through the wood.

“. . . inside . . .”

“. . . get in?”

“. . . mirrors, don’t . . .”

The creature backed away further from its tethered kin and moved into the shadows at the far side of the room, beyond the door. It folded its wings and waited.

Bolts on the other side of the door were thrown. There was a moment of hesitation, then the door flew open and four armed men burst in in quick succession. They all faced away from the trapped creatures. Two carried heavy flintlocks, primed and held ready. Two were Remade. In their left hands they held pistols, but from their right shoulders jutted huge metal barrels, splayed at the end like blunderbusses. These were fixed into position pointing directly behind each Remade. They hefted these carefully, and stared into mirrors suspended from a metal helmet before their eyes.

The two with conventional rifles also wore the mirror-helmets, but they were staring past the mirrors into the darkness straight ahead of them.

“Four moths, and all clear!” shouted one of the Remade with the strange backpointing rifle-arm, still gazing into his mirror.

“There’s nothing here . . .” answered one of the men looking forward into the darkness by the ruined window-hole, and as he spoke the intruding thing stepped out of the shadows and spread its incredible wings.

Both those whose eyes faced forwards looked aghast and opened their mouth to scream.

“Oh, Jabber fuck no . . .” one managed, and then both were silent as the patterns on the creature’s wings began to swarm like a pitiless dun kaleidoscope.

“What the fuck . . . ?” began one of the Remade, and flickered his eyes briefly in front of him. His face collapsed in horror, but his moan died very fast as he caught sight of the creature’s wings.

The final Remade yelled his comrades’ names, and whimpered as he heard them drop their guns. He could see the faintest shape out of the corner of his eye. The creature before him could sense his terror. It stalked towards him, emitting little reassuring murmurs in an emotive vector. A phrase circled imbecilically in the man’s mind: There’s one in front of me there’s one in front of me . . .

The Remade tried to move forward, his eyes fixed on his mirrors, but the creature before him moved easily into his field of vision. What had been in the corner of the man’s eye became an inescapable, shifting field, and the man succumbed, dropping his eyes to those violently changing wings, and his jaw opened and shuddered tremulously. He dropped his gun-arm.

With a twitch of a skein of flesh, the free creature closed the door. It stood before the four men in thrall, and slobber drooled from its jaws. A snapped demand from its trapped kin interrupted its hunger and humbled it. It reached out and turned each of the men to face the four trapped moths.

There was a tiny moment when each man was no longer facing those wings, when his mind clutched at freedom for a moment, but then the awesome spectacle of four sets of those scudding patterns violently wrested control of his mind and he was lost.

Behind them now, the intruder pushed each man in turn towards one of the huge pinioned things, which reached out eagerly with the short limbs left free to them to grip their prey.

The creatures fed.

One of them fumbled for the keys at the belt of its meal, tore them from the man’s clothes. When it had finished its meal, it reached up with careful movements and pushed the key delicately into the lock of the bolt restraining it.

It took four attempts—fingers clutching the unfamiliar key, twisting it from an awkward angle—but the creature freed itself. It turned to each of its fellows and repeated the slow process, until all the captives were liberated.

One by one they stumbled across the room to the ragged window-hole. They paused and braced their atrophied muscles against the brick, spread those astonishing wings wide and launched themselves out and away from the sickly dry æther that seemed to seep from the Ribs. The last to leave was the newcomer.

It dragged itself after its comrades: even exhausted and brutalized, they flew faster than it could manage. They were waiting in a circle hundreds of feet above, extending their awarenesses, adrift in the senses and impressions that welled up from all around.

When their humble liberator reached them, they moved apart a little to let it in. They flew together, sharing in what they felt, licking the air lasciviously.

They drifted as the first to fly had done, north towards Perdido Street Station. They rotated slowly, five like the five railway lines of the city, buoyed by the massive profane urban presence below them, a fecund crawling place such as none of their kind had ever experienced before. They rocked above it, wings snapping, buffeted by wind, tingling with the sounds and energy of the growling city.

Everywhere they were, every part of the city, every dark bridge, every five-hundred-year-old mansion, every twisting bazaar, every grotesque concrete warehouse and tower and houseboat and squalid slum and manicured park, thronged with food.

It was a jungle without predators. A hunting ground.

Chapter Twenty-three

Something was blocking the door into Isaac’s warehouse. He swore mildly, pushing against the obstruction.

It was early afternoon of the day after his success, which he already conceived of as his “cheese moment.” When he had reached Lin’s rooms the previous evening, he had been delighted to find her in. She had been tired but as happy as him. They had gone to bed for three hours, then stumbled out to The Clock and Cockerel.

It had been an unnervingly perfect night. Everyone Isaac could have wanted to see had been abroad in Salacus Fields, and all had stopped at the C & C for lobster or whiskey or chocolate laced with quinner. There were new additions to the clique, including Maybet Sunder, who had been forgiven for winning the Shintacost Prize. In return she was gracious about the arch comments Derkhan had made in print and others in person.

Lin had relaxed in the company of her friends, although her melancholia seemed to ebb rather than dissipate. Isaac had had one of his hissed political arguments with Derkhan, who had slipped him the latest issue of Double-R. The gathered friends had argued and eaten and thrown food at each other until two in the morning, when Isaac and Lin had returned to bed and warm, entwined sleep.

Over breakfast he had told her about his triumph with the crisis engine. She had not really understood the scale of the achievement, but that was understandable. She had realized that he was excited as almost never before, and had done her best to enthuse sufficiently. For Isaac’s part, it had made the difference he had suspected it would, simply communicating the bare bones of the project in the most unscientific way. He felt more grounded, less as if he were living some preposterous dream. He had learnt of potential problems during his explanation, and had come away eager to rectify them.

Isaac and Lin had parted with deep affection, and with a mutual promise not to let so long go by without each other again.

And now Isaac could not get into his workshop.

“Lub! David! What the arse you up to?” he yelled, and shoved at the door again.

As he pushed, the door opened a tiny way and he could see a sliver of the sunlit interior. He could see the edge of whatever was blocking the door.

It was a hand.

Isaac’s heart skittered.

“Oh Jabber!” he heard himself shout as he leant with all his weight on the door. It opened before his mass.

Lublamai was sprawled prone across the doorway. As Isaac knelt by his friend’s head, he heard Sincerity sniffling some way away, between the treads of the construct. She was cowed.

Isaac turned Lublamai over and let out a juddering sigh of relief when he felt that his friend was warm, heard him breathing.

“Wake up, Lub!” he yelled.

Lublamai’s eyes were already open. Isaac started back from that impassive gaze.

“Lub . . . ?” he whispered.

Drool had collected below Lublamai’s face, had blazed trails across his dusty skin. He lay completely limp, utterly motionless. Isaac felt his friend’s neck. The pulse was quite steady. Lublamai was taking in deep breaths, pausing a moment, then releasing. He sounded as if he were sleeping.

But Isaac flinched in horror before that imbecilic vacant glare. He waved his hand before Lublamai’s eyes, eliciting no response. Isaac slapped Lublamai’s face, softly, then hard twice. Isaac realized that he was shouting Lublamai’s name.

Lublamai’s head rocked back and forth like a sack full of stones.

Isaac closed his hand and felt something clammy. Lublamai’s hand was thinly coated in a clear, sticky liquid. He sniffed his hand and recoiled from the faint scent of lemons and rot. It made him feel momentarily light-headed.

Isaac fingered Lublamai’s face and saw that the skin around his mouth and nose was slippery and tacky with the slop, that what he had thought Lublamai’s saliva was mostly that thin slime.

No yells, no slaps, no pleas would make Lublamai wake.

When Isaac finally looked up and around the room, he saw the window by Lublamai’s desk was open, the glass broken and the wooden shutters splintered. He stood and ran over to the knocking window frame, but there was nothing to see inside or out.

Even as Isaac ran from corner to corner under his own raised laboratory, darting between Lublamai’s corner and David’s, whispering idiotic reassurances to the terrified Sincerity, looking for signs of intruders, he realized that a terrible idea had occurred to him some time ago, and had been squatting balefully in the back of his mind. He faltered to a stop. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked up in cold horror at the underside of the walkway boards.

Fearful calm settled on him like snow. He felt his feet lift, trudging inexorably towards the wooden stairs. He turned his head as he walked, saw Sincerity sniffing gradually closer to Lublamai, her courage slowly returning now that she was not alone.

Everything Isaac saw seemed slowed. He walked as if through freezing water.

Stair by stair he ascended. He felt no surprise and only a very dull foreboding as he saw pools of weird spittle on each stair, saw the fresh scrapings left by some sharp-clawed newcomer. He heard his own heart pulsing with what seemed tranquillity, and he wondered if he was numb to shock.

But when he reached the top and turned to see the hutch thrown on its side, its thick wire mesh burst from within, little fingers of metal exploding away from the central hole, and when he saw the chrysalis split and empty and saw the trail of dark juices dribbling from within its husk, Isaac heard himself cry out aghast and felt his body shudder into immobility as an icy tide of gooseflesh swept him up. Horror billowed up within him and around him like ink in water.

“Oh dear gods . . .” he whispered through dry and quivering lips. “Oh Jabber . . . what have I done?”

The New Crobuzon militia did not like to be seen. They emerged in their dark uniforms at night, to perform duties such as fishing the dead from the river. Their airships and pods meandered and buzzed over the city with opaque ends. Their towers were sealed.

The militia, New Crobuzon’s military defence and its internal correction agents, only appeared in their uniforms, the infamous full-face masks and dark armour, the shields and flintlocks, when they were acting as guards at some sensitive locus, or at times of great emergency. They wore their colours openly during the Pirate Wars and the Sacramundi Riots, when enemies attacked the city’s order from without or within.

For their day-to-day duties they relied on their reputation and on their vast network of informers—rewards for information were generous—and plain-clothed officers. When the militia struck, it was the man drinking cassis in the café, the old woman weighed down with bags, the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth, who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with him or her into the crowd, or a militia tower.

And afterwards, no witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man or any of them again, in that part of the city.

It was policing by decentralized fear.

It had been four in the morning when the prostitute and her client had been found in Brock Marsh. The two men walking the dark alleys with their hands in their pockets and their heads jaunty had paused, seeing the crumpled shape in the dim gaslight. Their demeanour had changed. They had looked about them, then trotted into the cul-de-sac.

They found the stupefied pair lying across each other, their eyes glazed and vacant, their breath ragged and smelling of cloying citrus. The man’s trousers and pants were dropped around his ankles, exposing his shrivelled penis. The woman’s clothes—her skirt complete with the surreptitious slit many prostitutes used to finish their work quickly—were intact. When the newcomers had failed to wake them, one man had remained with the mute bodies and the other had run off into the darkness. Both men had pulled dark hoods over their heads.

Some while later a black carriage had pulled up, drawn by two enormous horses, Remade with horns and fangs that glinted with slaver. A small corps of uniformed militia had leapt to the ground and, without words, had pulled the comatose victims into the darkness of the cab, which had sped off towards the Spike that towered over the centre of the city.

The two men remained behind. They waited until the carriage had disappeared over the cobbles of the labyrinthine quarter. Then they looked about them carefully, taking stock of the sparse harvest of lights that glinted from the backs of buildings and outhouses, from behind crumbling walls and through the thin fingers of fruit trees in gardens. Satisfied that they were unobserved, they slipped off their hoods and thrust their hands back into their pockets. They melted suddenly into a different character, laughing quietly with each other and chatting urbanely as, innocuous again, they resumed their graveyard-shift patrol.

In the catacombs under the Spike, the limp pair of foundlings were prodded and slapped, shouted at and cajoled. By early morning they had been examined by a militia scientist, who scribbled a preliminary report.

Heads were scratched in perplexity.

The scientist’s report, along with condensed information on all other unusual or serious crimes, was sent up the length of the Spike, stopping at the highest floor but one. The reports were couriered briskly the length of a twisting, windowless corridor, towards the offices of the home secretary. They arrived on time, by half past nine.

At twelve minutes past ten, a speaking tube began to bang peremptorily in the cavernous pod-station that took up the whole floor at the very top of the Spike. The young sergeant on duty was on the other side of the room, fixing a cracked light on the front of a pod that hung, like tens of others, from an intricate cat’s cradle of skyrails which looped and criss-crossed each other below the high ceiling. The tangled rails allowed the pods to be moved around each other, positioned on one or other of the seven radial skyrails that exploded out through the enormous open holes spaced evenly around the outside wall. The tracks took off above the colossal face of New Crobuzon.

From where he stood, the sergeant could see the skyrail enter the militia tower in Sheck a mile to the south-west, and emerge beyond it. He saw a pod leave the tower, way over the shambolic housing, virtually at his own eye-level, and shoot off away from him towards the Tar, which trickled sinuous and untrustworthy to the south.

He looked up as the banging continued, and, realizing which tube demanded attention, he swore and rushed across the room. His furs flapped. Even in summer, it was cold so high above the city, in an open room that functioned as a giant wind tunnel. He pulled the plug from the speaking tube and barked into the brass.

“Yes, Home Secretary?”

The voice that emerged was small and distorted by its journey through the twisting metal.

“Get my pod ready immediately. I’m going to Strack Island.”

The doors to the Lemquist Room, the mayor’s office in Parliament, were huge and bound in bands of ancient iron. There were two militia stationed outside the Lemquist Room at all times, but one of the usual perks of a posting in the corridors of power was denied them: no gossip, no secrets, no sounds of any kind filtered to their ears through the enormous doors.

Behind the metal-girdled entrance, the room itself was immensely tall, panelled in darkwood of such exquisite quality it was almost black. Portraits of previous mayors circled the room, from the ceiling thirty feet above, spiralling slowly down to within six feet of the floor. There was an enormous window that looked out directly at Perdido Street Station and the Spike, and a variety of speaking tubes, calculating engines and telescopic periscopes stashed in niches around the room, in obscure and oddly threatening poses.

Bentham Rudgutter sat behind his desk with an air of utter command. None who had seen him in this room had been able to deny the extraordinary surety of absolute power he exuded. He was the centre of gravity here. He knew it at a deep level, and so did his guests. His great height and muscular corpulence doubtless added to the sense, but there was far more to his presence.

Opposite him sat MontJohn Rescue, his vizier, wrapped as always in a thick scarf and leaning over to point out something on a paper the two men were studying.

“Two days,” said Rescue in a strange, unmodulated voice, quite different from the one he used for oratory.

“And what?” said Rudgutter, stroking his immaculate goatee.

“The strike goes up. Currently, you know, it’s delaying loading and unloading by between fifty and seventy per cent. But we’ve got intelligence that in two days the vodyanoi strikers plan to paralyse the river. They’re going to work overnight, starting at the bottom, working their way up. A little to the east of Barley Bridge. Massive exercise in watercræft. They’re going to dig a trench of air across the water, the whole depth of the river. They’ll have to shore it up continuously, recræfting the walls constantly so they don’t collapse, but they’ve got enough members to do that in shifts. There’s no ship that can jump that gap, Mayor. They’ll totally cut off New Crobuzon from river trade, in both directions.”

Rudgutter mused and pursed his lips.

“We can’t allow that,” he said reasonably. “What about the human dockers?”

“My second point, Mayor,” continued Rescue. “Worrying. The initial hostility seems to be waning. There’s a growing minority who seem to be ready to throw in their lot with the vodyanoi.”

“Oh, no no no no,” said Rudgutter, shaking his head like a teacher correcting a normally reliable student.

“Quite. Obviously our agents are stronger in the human camp than the xenian, and the mainstream are still antagonistic or undecided about the strike, but there seems to be a caucus, a conspiracy, if you will . . . secret meetings with strikers and the like.”

Rudgutter spread his enormous fingers and looked closely at the grain of the desk between them.

“Any of your people there?” he asked quietly. Rescue fingered his scarf.

“One with the humans,” he answered. “It is difficult to remain hidden on the vodyanoi, who usually wear no clothes in the water.” Rudgutter nodded.

The two men were silent, pondering.

“We’ve tried working from the inside,” said Rudgutter eventually. “This is far the most serious strike to threaten the city for . . . over a century. Much as I’m loath to, it seems we may have to make an example . . .” Rescue nodded solemnly.

One of the speaking tubes on the mayor’s desk thumped. He raised his eyebrows as he unplugged it.

“Davinia?” he answered. His voice was a masterpiece of insinuation. In one word he told his secretary that he was surprised to have her interrupt him against his instructions, but that his trust in her was great, and he was quite sure she had an excellent reason for disobeying, which she had better tell him immediately.

The hollow, echoing voice from the tube barked out tiny little sounds.

“Well!” exclaimed the mayor mildly. “Of course, of course.” He replugged the tube and eyed Rescue. “What timing,” he said. “It’s the home secretary.”

The enormous doors opened briefly and slightly, and the home secretary entered, nodding in greeting.

“Eliza,” said Rudgutter. “Please join us.” He gesticulated at a chair by Rescue’s.

Eliza Stem-Fulcher strode over to the desk. It was impossible to tell her age. Her face was virtually unlined, its strong features suggesting that she was probably somewhere in her thirties. Her hair, though, was white, with only the faintest peppering of dark strands to suggest that it had once been another colour. She wore a dark civilian trouser suit, cleverly chosen in cut and colour to be strongly suggestive of a militia uniform. She drew gently on a long-stemmed white clay pipe, the bowl at least a foot and a half from her mouth. Her tobacco was spiced.

“Mayor. Deputy.” She sat and pulled a folder from under her arm. “Forgive me interrupting unannounced, Mayor Rudgutter, but I thought you should see this immediately. You too, Rescue. I’m glad you’re here. It looks as if we may have . . . something of a crisis on our hands.”

“We were saying much the same thing, Eliza,” said the mayor. “We’re talking about the dock strike?”

Stem-Fulcher glanced up at him as she drew some papers from the folder.

“No, Mr. Mayor. Something altogether different.” Her voice was resonant and hard.

She threw a crime report onto the desk. Rudgutter put it sideways between himself and Rescue, and both twisted their heads to read it together. After a minute Rudgutter looked up.

“Two people in some sort of coma. Odd circumstances. I presume you are showing me more than this?”

Stem-Fulcher handed him another paper. Again, he and Rescue read together. This time, the reaction was almost immediate. Rescue hissed and bit the inside of his cheek, chewing with concentration. At almost the same time, Rudgutter gave a little sigh of comprehension, a tremulous little exhalation.

The home secretary watched them impassively.

“Obviously, our mole in Motley’s offices doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s totally confused. But the snatches of conversation she’s noted down . . . see this? ‘The moss are out . . . ?’ I think we can all agree that she misheard that, and I think we can all agree on what was really said.”

Rudgutter and Rescue read and reread the report wordlessly.

“I’ve brought the scientific report we commissioned at the very start of the SM project, the feasibility study.” Stem-Fulcher was speaking quickly, without emotion. She dropped the report flat on the desk. “I’ve drawn your attention to a few particularly relevant phrases.”

Rudgutter opened the bound report. Some words and sentences were circled in red. The mayor scanned them quickly: . . . extreme danger . . . in case of escape . . . no natural predators . . .

. . . utterly catastrophic . . .

. . . breed . . .

Chapter Twenty-four

Mayor Rudgutter reached out and unplugged his speaking tube again.

“Davinia,” he said. “Cancel all appointments and meetings for today . . . no, for the next two days. Apologies wherever necessary. No disturbances unless Perdido Street Station explodes, or something of that magnitude. Understood?”

He replaced the plug and glared at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue.

“What by damn, what in Jabber’s name, what the godshit was Motley playing at? I thought the man was supposed to be a professional . . .”

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

“This was something that came up when we were arranging the transfer deal,” she said. “We checked his record of activity—much of it against us, it has to be pointed out—and gauged him to be at least as capable as ourselves of ensuring security. He’s no fool.”

“Do we know who’s done this?” asked Rescue. Stem-Fulcher shrugged.

“Could be a rival, Francine or Judix or someone. If so, they’ve bitten off a godsdamned sight more than they can chew . . .”

“Right.” Rudgutter interrupted her with a peremptory tone. Stem-Fulcher and Rescue turned to him and waited. He clenched his fists together, put his elbows on the table and closed his eyes, concentrating so hard that his face seemed ready to splinter.

“Right,” he repeated, and opened his eyes. “First thing we have to do is verify that we are faced with the situation that we think we’re faced with. That might seem obvious, but we have to be a hundred per cent sure. Second thing is come out with some kind of strategy for containing the situation quickly and quietly.

“Now, for the second objective, we all know we can’t rely on human militia or Remade—or xenians come to that. Same basic psychic type. We’re all food. I’m sure we all remember our initial attack-defence tests . . .” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher nodded quickly. Rudgutter continued. “Right. Zombies might be a possibility, but this is not Cromlech: we don’t have the facilities to create them in the numbers or quality that we need. So. It seems to me that the first objective can’t satisfactorily be dealt with if we’re relying on our regular intelligence operations. We have to have access to different information. So for two reasons, we have to elicit assistance from agents better able to deal with the situation—different psychic models from our own are vital. Now, it seems to me there are two possible such agents, and that we have little choice but to approach at least one of them.”

He was silent, taking in Stem-Fulcher and Rescue with his eyes, one by one. He waited for dissent. There was none.

“Are we agreed?” he asked quietly.

“We’re talking about the ambassador, aren’t we?” said Stem-Fulcher. “And what else . . . you don’t mean the Weaver?” Her eyes furrowed in dismay.

“Well, hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Rudgutter reassuringly. “But yes, those are the two . . . ah . . . agents I can think of. In that order.”

“Agreed,” said Stem-Fulcher quickly. “As long as it’s in that order. The Weaver . . . Jabber! Let’s talk to the ambassador.”

“MontJohn?” Rudgutter turned to his deputy.

Rescue nodded slowly, fingering his scarf.

“The ambassador,” he said slowly. “And I hope that will be all we need.”

“As do we all, Deputy Mayor,” said Rudgutter. “As do we all.”

Between the eleventh and fourteenth floors of the Mandragorae Wing of Perdido Street Station, above one of the less popular commercial concourses that specialized in old fabrics and foreign batiks, below a series of long-deserted turrets, was the Diplomatic Zone.

Many of the embassies in New Crobuzon were elsewhere, of course: baroque buildings in Nigh Sump or East Gidd or Flag Hill. But several were there in the station: enough to give those floors their name and let them keep it.

The Mandragorae Wing was almost a self-contained keep. Its corridors described a huge concrete rectangle around a central space, at the bottom of which was an unkempt garden, overgrown with darkwood trees and exotic woodland flowers. Children scampered along the paths and played in this sheltered park while their parents shopped or travelled or worked. The walls rose enormously around them, making the copse seem like moss at the bottom of a well.

From the corridors on the upper floors sprouted sets of interconnected rooms. Many had been ministerial offices at one time. For a short while, each had been the headquarters of some small company or other. Then they had been empty for many years, until the mould and rot had been swept away and ambassadors had moved in. That was a little more than two centuries previously, when a communal understanding had swept the various governments of Rohagi that from now on diplomacy would be greatly preferable to war.

There had been embassies in New Crobuzon far longer. But after the carnage in Suroch put a bloody end to what were called the Pirate Wars or the Slow War or the False War, the number of countries and city-states seeking negotiated resolutions to disputes had multiplied enormously. Emissaries had arrived from across the continent and beyond. The deserted floors of the Mandragorae Wing had been overrun by the newcomers, and by older consulates relocating to tap the new welter of diplomatic business.

Even to leave the lifts or stairs on the floors of the Zone, a gamut of security checks had to be run. The passages were cold and quiet, broken by a few doors and insufficiently lit by desultory gasjets. Rudgutter and Rescue and Stem-Fulcher walked the deserted corridors of the twelfth floor. They were accompanied by a short, wiry man with thick glasses who scurried along behind them, never keeping up, lugging a large suitcase.

“Eliza, MontJohn,” said Mayor Rudgutter as they walked, “this is Brother Sanchem Vansetty, one of our most able karcists.” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher nodded greetings. Vansetty ignored them.

Not every room in the Diplomatic Zone was occupied. But some of the doors had brass plates proclaiming them the sovereign territory of one country or other—Tesh, or Khadoh, or Gharcheltist—behind which were huge suites extending onto several floors: self-contained houses in the tower. Some of the rooms were thousands of miles from their capitals. Some of them were empty. By Tesh tradition, for example, the ambassador lived as a vagrant in New Crobuzon, communicating by mail for official business. Rudgutter would never meet him. Other embassies were deserted due to lack of funds or interest.

But much of the business conducted here was immensely important. The suites containing the embassies of Myrshock and Vadaunk had been extended some years ago, due to the expansion of paperwork and office space that commercial relations necessitated. The extra rooms jutted like ugly tumours from the interior walls of the eleventh floor, bulging precariously over the garden.

The mayor and his companions walked past a door marked The Cray Commonwealth of Salkrikaltor. The corridor shook with the pound and whirr of huge, hidden machinery. Those were the enormous steam-pumps that worked for hours every day, sucking fresh brine fifteen miles from Iron Bay for the cray ambassador and sluicing his used, dirty water into the river.

The passageway was confusing. It seemed to go on too long when looked at from one angle, and to be all but stubby from another. Here and there short tributaries branched from it, leading to other, smaller embassies or store cupboards or boarded-up windows. At the end of the main corridor, beyond the cray embassy, Rudgutter led the way down one of these little passages. It extended a short way, twisting, its ceiling lowering dramatically as some stairs above descended across its path, and terminated in a small unmarked door.

Rudgutter looked behind him, ensuring that his companions and he were not watched. Only a short distance of passageway was visible, and they were quite alone.

Vansetty was pulling chalk and pastels of various colours from his pockets. He pulled what looked like a watch from his fob pocket and opened it. Its face was divided into innumerable complicated sections. It had seven hands of various lengths.

“Got to take account of the variables, Mayor,” Vansetty murmured, studying the thing’s intricate working. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Rudgutter or anyone else. “Outlook for today’s pretty grotty . . . High-pressure front moving in the æther. Could push powerstorms anywhere from the abyss through null-space up. Fucking poxy outlook on the borderlands as well. Hmmm . . .” Vansetty scrawled some calculations on the back of a notebook. “Right,” he snapped, and looked up at the three ministers.

He began to scribble intricate, stylized markings on thick pieces of paper, tearing out each one as it was finished and handing it to Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter, Rescue, and finally one for himself.

“Whack those over your hearts,” he said cursorily, stuffing his into his shirt. “Symbol facing out.”

He opened his battered suitcase and brought out a set of bulky ceramic diodes. He stood at the centre of the group and handed one to each of his companions—“Left hand and don’t drop it . . .”—then wound copper wire around them tightly and attached it to a handheld clockwork motor he pulled from his case. He took readings from his peculiar gauge, adjusted dials and nodules on the motor.

“Righto, everyone, brace yourselves,” he said, and flipped the switch that released the clockwork engine.

Little arcs of energy sputtered into multicoloured existence along the wires and between the grubby diodes. The four of them were enclosed in a little triangle of current. All their hair stood visibly on end. Rudgutter swore under his breath.

“Got about half an hour before that runs out,” said Vansetty quickly. “Best be quick, eh?”

Rudgutter reached out with his right hand and opened the door. The four of them shuffled forward, maintaining their positions relative to each other, keeping the triangle in place around them. Stem-Fulcher pushed the door closed again behind them.

They were in an absolutely dark room. They could see only by the faint ambient glow of the lines of power, until Vansetty hung the clockwork motor around his neck on a strap and lit a candle. In its inadequate light they saw that the room was perhaps twelve feet by ten, dusty and absolutely empty apart from an old desk and chair by the far wall, a gently humming boiler by the door. There were no windows, no shelves, nothing else at all. The air was very close.

From his bag Vansetty extracted an unusual hand-held machine. Its twists of wire and metal, its knots of multicoloured glass were intricate and lovingly crafted. Its use was quite opaque. Vansetty leaned briefly out of the circle and plugged an input valve into the boiler beside the door. He pulled a lever on the top of the little machine, which began to hum and blink with lights.

“ ’Course, in your old days, before I came into the profession, you had to use a live offering,” he explained as he unwound a tight coil of wire from the underside of the machine. “But we’re not savages, are we? Science is a wonderful thing. This little darling—” he patted the machine proudly “—is an amplifier. Increases the output from that engine by a factor of two hundred, two hundred and ten, and transforms it into an ætherial energy form. Bleed that through the wires so . . .” Vansetty slung the uncoiled wire into the far corner of the tiny room, behind the desk. “And there you go! The victimless sacrifice!”

He grinned with triumph, then turned his attention to the dials and knobs of the little engine, and began to twist and prod them with intense attention. “No more learning stupid languages, neither,” he muttered quietly. “Invocation’s automatic now and all. We’re not actually going anywhere, you understand?” He spoke louder, suddenly. “We ain’t abyssonauts, and we ain’t playing with nearly enough power to do an actual transplantropic leap. All we’re doing is peering through a little window, letting the Hellkin come to us. But the dimensionality of this room is going to be just a damn touch unstable for a while, so stick within the protection and don’t muck about. Got it?”

Vansetty’s fingers skittered over the box. For two or three minutes, nothing happened. There was nothing but the heat and pounding from the boiler, the drumming and whining of the little machine in Vansetty’s hands. Beneath it all, Rudgutter’s foot tapped impatiently.

And then the little room began to grow perceptibly warmer.

There was a deep, subsonic tremor. An insinuation of russet light and oily smoke. Sound became muted and then suddenly sharp.

There was a disorientating moment of tugging, and a red marbling of light flickered onto every surface, moving constantly as if through bloody water.

Something fluttered. Rudgutter looked up, his eyes smarting in air that seemed suddenly clotted and very dry.

A heavy man in an immaculate dark suit had appeared behind the desk.

He leaned forward slowly, his elbows resting on the papers that suddenly littered the desk. He waited.

Vansetty peered over Rescue’s shoulder and jerked his thumb at the apparition.

“His Infernal Excellency,” he declared, “the ambassador of Hell.”

“Mayor Rudgutter,” the dæmon said, in a pleasant, low voice. “How nice to see you again. I was just doing some paperwork.” The humans looked up with a flicker of unease.

The ambassador had an echo: half a second after he spoke his words were repeated in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture. The screamed words were not loud. They were audible just beyond the walls of the room, as if they had soared up through miles of unearthly heat from some trench in Hell’s floor.

“What can I do for you?” he continued (What can I do for you? came the soulless howl of misery). “Still trying to find out if you’ll be joining us when you pass on?” The ambassador smiled slightly.

Rudgutter smiled back and shook his head.

“You know my views on that, ambassador,” he replied levelly. “I’ll not be drawn, I’m afraid. You can’t provoke me into existential fear, you know.” He gave a polite little laugh, to which the ambassador responded in kind. As did his horrendous echo. “My soul, if such exists, is my own. It is not yours to punish or covet. The universe is a much more capricious place than that . . . I asked you before, what do you suppose happens to dæmons when you die? As we both know you can.”

The ambassador bowed his head in polite demur.

“You’re such a modernist, Mayor Rudgutter,” he said. “I won’t argue with you. Please remember my offer stands.”

Rudgutter waved his hands impatiently. He was composed. He did not flinch at the pitiable screams which shadowed the ambassador’s words. And he did not allow himself to experience any disquiet when, as he stared at the ambassador, the image of the man in the chair flickered for a tiny sliver of a second, to be replaced by . . . something else.

He had experienced this before. Whenever Rudgutter blinked, for that infinitesimal moment, he saw the room and its occupant in very different forms. Through his eyelids, Rudgutter saw the inside of a slatted cage; iron bars moving like snakes; arcs of unthinkable force, a jagged, rippling maelstrom of heat. Where the ambassador sat, Rudgutter caught glimpses of a monstrous form. A hyaena’s head stared at him, tongue lolling. Breasts with gnashing teeth. Hooves and claws.

The stale air in the room would not allow him to keep his eyes open: he had to blink. He ignored the brief visions. He treated the ambassador with wary respect. Such was also the dæmon’s attitude to him.

“Ambassador, I’m here for two reasons. One is to extend to your master, Its Diabolic Majesty, the Czar of Hell, the respectful greetings of New Crobuzon’s citizens. In their ignorance.” The ambassador nodded graciously in response. “The other is to ask your advice.”

“It is always our great pleasure to aid our neighbours, Mayor Rudgutter. Especially those such as yourself, with whom Its Majesty has such good relations.” The ambassador rubbed its chin absently, waiting.

“Twenty minutes, Mayor,” hissed Vansetty into Rudgutter’s ear.

Rudgutter pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and looked at the ambassador thoughtfully. He felt little gusts of force.

“You see, ambassador, we have something of a problem. We have reason to believe that there has been a . . . an escape, shall we say. Something that we are very concerned to recapture. We’d like to ask your help, if we may.”

“What are we talking about, Mayor Rudgutter? True Answers?” asked the ambassador. “Usual terms?”

“True Answers . . . and perhaps more. We’ll see.”

“Payment now, or later?”

“Ambassador,” said Rudgutter politely. “Your memory momentarily falters. I am in credit two questions.”

The ambassador stared at him a moment and laughed.

“So you are, Mayor Rudgutter. My deepest apologies. Proceed.”

“Are there any unusual rules of the moment, ambassador?” asked Rudgutter pointedly. The dæmon shook his head (great hyaena tongue briefly slavering from side to side) and smiled.

“It is Melluary, Mayor Rudgutter,” it explained simply. “Usual rules in Melluary. Seven words, inverted.”

Rudgutter nodded. He composed himself, concentrating hard. Got to get the damn words right. Bloody infantile bloody game, he thought fleetingly. Then he spoke quickly and levelly, gazing calmly into the ambassador’s eyes.

“Correct escaped what’s of assessment our is?”

“Yes,” replied the dæmon instantly.

Rudgutter turned briefly, gazed meaningfully at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue. They were nodding, their faces set and grim.

The mayor turned back to the dæmon ambassador. They stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

“Fifteen minutes,” hissed Vansetty.

“Some of my more . . . fusty colleagues would look very askance at me allowing you to count ‘what’s’ as one word, you know,” said the ambassador. “But I’m a liberal.” He smiled. “Do you wish to ask your final question?”

“I don’t think so, ambassador. I’ll save that for another time. I have a proposition.”

“Go on, Mayor Rudgutter.”

“Well, you know the manner of thing that has escaped, and you can understand our concern to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.” The ambassador nodded. “You can also understand that it will be difficult for us to proceed, and that time is of the essence . . . I propose that we hire some of your . . . ah . . . troops, to help us round up our escapees.”

“No,” said the ambassador simply. Rudgutter blinked.

“We haven’t even discussed terms yet, ambassador. I assure you I can make a very generous offer . . .”

“I’m afraid it is out of the question. None of my kind are available.” The ambassador stared impassively at Rudgutter.

The mayor thought for a moment. If the ambassador was bargaining, he was doing so in a way he had never done before. Rudgutter forgot himself, closed his eyes to think, snapping them immediately open as he saw that monstrous vista, caught a glimmer of the ambassador’s other form. He tried again.

“I could even go up to . . . let’s say . . .”

“Mayor Rudgutter, you don’t understand,” said the ambassador. Its voice was impassive, but it seemed agitated. “I don’t care how many units of merchandise you can offer, or in what condition. We are not available for this job. It is not suitable.”

There was a long silence. Rudgutter gazed with incredulity at the dæmon opposite him. It was beginning to dawn on him what was happening. In the bleeding rays of light, he saw the ambassador open a drawer and bring out a sheaf of papers.

“If you are finished, Mayor Rudgutter,” he continued smoothly, “I have work to do.”

Rudgutter waited until the miserable, pitiless resonance of work to do to do to do had died down outside. The echo made his stomach pitch.

“Oh, yes, yes, ambassador,” he said. “So sorry to have kept you. We’ll speak again soon, I hope.”

The ambassador inclined its head in a polite nod, then drew out a pen from its inner pocket and began to mark the papers. Behind Rudgutter, Vansetty twiddled at nobs and depressed various buttons, and the wooden floor began to tremble as if in some ætherquake. A hum built up around the cramped humans, wobbling in their little energy field. The foul air vibrated up and down their bodies.

The ambassador bulged and split and disappeared in an instant, like a heliotype in a fire. The moiling carmine light bubbled and evaporated, as if it seeped out through a thousand cracks in the dusty office walls. The darkness of the room closed in around them like a trap. Vansetty’s tiny candle guttered and went out.

Checking that they were unobserved, Vansetty, Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue stumbled from the room. The air felt deliciously chill. They spent a minute wiping sweat from their faces, rearranging the clothes that had been buffeted by winds from other planes.

Rudgutter was shaking his head in rueful astonishment.

His ministers composed themselves and turned to him.

“I’ve met with the ambassador perhaps a dozen times over the past ten years,” said Rudgutter, “and I’ve never seen it behave like that. Damn that air!” he added, rubbing his eyes.

The four walked back along the little corridor, turned onto the main passageway and began to retrace their steps towards the lift.

“Behave like what?” asked Stem-Fulcher. “I’ve only ever dealt with it once before. Not used to it.”

Rudgutter mused as he walked, tugging thoughtfully at his lower lip and his beard. His eyes were very bloodshot. He did not answer Stem-Fulcher for some seconds.

“There are two things to be said: one dæmonological, one practical and immediate.” Rudgutter spoke in a level, exact tone, demanding the attention of his ministers. Vansetty was wandering quickly ahead, his job done. “The first might give a certain insight into the Hellkin psyche, behaviour, whatnot. You both heard the echo, I presume? I thought he did that to intimidate me, for a while. Well, bear in mind the immense distance that sound had to travel. I know,” he said quickly, holding up his hands, “that it’s not literally sound, nor literally distance, but they are extraplanar analogues and most analogous rules hold in some more or less mutated way. So bear in mind how far it had to travel, from the base of the Pit to that chamber. The fact is, it takes a little while to get there . . . That ‘echo,’ I believe, was actually spoken first. The . . . eloquent words we heard from the ambassador’s mouth . . . those were the real echoes. Those were the twisted reflections.”

Stem-Fulcher and Rescue were silent. They thought of the screams, the tortured, maniacal tone they had heard outside, the idiot ruined gibbering that seemed to make a mockery of the ambassador’s devilish refinement . . .

They reflected that that might be the more genuine voice.

“I’m wondering if we were wrong to think of them having a different psychic model. Maybe they’re comprehensible. Maybe they think like us. And the second thing, bearing in mind that possibility, and bearing in mind what the ‘echo’ might tell us about the dæmoniac state of mind, is that at the end there, when I was trying to cut a deal, the ambassador was scared . . . That’s why he wouldn’t come to our aid. That’s why we’re on our own. Because the dæmons are afraid of what we’re hunting.”

Rudgutter stopped and turned to his aides. The three gazed at each other. Stem-Fulcher’s face twisted for a fragment of a second, and was then composed. Rescue was as impassive as a statue, but he plucked fitfully at his scarf. Rudgutter nodded as they pondered.

There was a minute of silence.

“So . . .” Rudgutter said briskly, clasping his hands. “The Weaver it is.”

Chapter Twenty-five

That night, in the swollen dark hours after a brief spew of rain had hosed the city down with dirty water, the door to Isaac’s warehouse was pushed open. The street was empty. There were minutes of stillness. Night-birds and bats were all that moved. Gaslight guttered.

The construct rolled jerkily out into the deep night. Its valves and pistons were swathed in rags and snatches of blankets, muffling the distinctive sound of its passage. It moved forward quickly, turning inexactly and trundling as fast as its ageing treads would move.

It tremored through the backstreets, passed snoring drunks still sodden and insensate. The sallow gasjets reflected secretively in its battered metal hide.

The construct made its swift, precarious way under the skyrails. Inconstant streaks of cirrus hid the lurking airships. The construct bore down like a diviner on the Tar, the river caught in an intricate whiplash shape on the timeless rocks beneath the city.

And hours after it had disappeared over Sheer Bridge into the southern city, when the dark sky became stained by dawn, the construct came reeling back to Brock Marsh. Its timing was fortuitous. It re-entered and locked the door only a little while before Isaac returned from his frantic night-long search for David, and Lin, and Yagharek and Lemuel Pigeon, and anyone who could help him.

Lublamai was lying on a couch that Isaac had rigged up on a couple of chairs. When Isaac came into the warehouse he came straight over to his still friend, whispered to him hopelessly, but there was no change. Lublamai did not sleep or wake. He gazed.

It was not long before David came hurrying back to the laboratory. He had trawled his way to one of his usual haunts to be greeted by a hurried and garbled version of one of the innumerable messages Isaac had left for him throughout New Crobuzon.

He sat as silently as Isaac, gazing at his mindless friend.

“I can’t believe I let you do it,” he said numbly.

“Oh Jabber and fuck, David, d’you think I’m not going over and over it . . . I let the damn thing out . . .”

“We all should’ve known better,” snapped David.

There was a long silence between them.

“Did you get a doctor?” said David.

“First thing I did. Phorgit, from across the road, I’ve dealt with him before. I cleaned up Lub a bit, wiped some of that crap off his face . . . Phorgit didn’t know what to make of it. Plugged in gods knows how many bits of equipment, took I don’t fucking remember how many readings . . . boils down to ‘haven’t got a clue.’ ‘Keep him warm and feed him, but then again you might want to keep him cold and not give him anything to eat . . .’ I might get one of the guys I know at the uni to take a skedge at him, but it’s a forlorn fucking hope . . .”

“What did the thing do to him?”

“Well, quite, David. Quite. That’s the fucking question, isn’t it?”

There was a tentative rattling at the broken window. Isaac and David looked up to see Teafortwo poking his ugly head forlornly in.

“Oh, shit,” said Isaac in exasperation. “Look, Teafortwo, now’s not really the best time, capiche? Maybe we can chat later.”

“Just looking in, boss . . .” Teafortwo spoke in a cowed voice utterly unlike his usual exuberant squawk. “Wanna know how the Lublub’s doing.”

“What?” said Isaac sharply, standing. “What about him?”

Teafortwo shied away miserably and wailed.

“Not me, squire, not my fault . . . just wondering if he’s better after the big monsterfucker ate his face . . .”

“Teafortwo, were you here?”

The wyrman nodded morosely and shifted a little nearer, balancing in the centre of the window frame.

“What happened? We’re not angry with you, Teafortwo . . . we just want to know what it was you saw . . .”

Teafortwo sniffed and waved its head miserably. He pouted like a child, screwed up his face and blurted out a great gob of words.

“Big fucker comes downstairs flapping big horrible wings make your bonce woozy snapping big teeth and . . . and . . . all over claws and big fucking stinky tongue . . . and I . . . Mr. Lublub’s gawping in the looking-glass and then he turns to face it and goes . . . dopey . . . and I saw . . . me head went funny and when I woke up the thing’s stuck its tongue right in . . . in . . . Mr. Lub’s gob and slurpslurp noises going off in me head and I . . . I buggered off, I couldn’t do nothing, I swear . . . I’m scared . . .” Teafortwo began to cry like a two-year-old, dribbling snot and tears down his face.

When Lemuel Pigeon arrived, Teafortwo was still sobbing. No amount of cajoling or threatening or bribes could calm the wyrman down. Eventually he went to sleep, curled up in a quilt ruined with his mucus, exactly like an exhausted human baby.

“I’m here on false pretences, Isaac. The message I got was that it’d be worth my while to drop over to your gaff.” Lemuel looked at Isaac with a speculative air.

“Godsdammit, Lemuel, you fucking spiv,” exploded Isaac. “Is that what’s bothering you? Jabber and fuck, I’ll make sure you get yours, all right? Is that better? Now fucking listen to me . . . Someone has been attacked by something that hatched out of one of the grubs you obtained for me, and we need to stop the thing before it does someone else, and we need to know about it, so we need to track down whatever cove it was got it in the first place, and we need to do it sharpish. Are you with me, old son?”

Lemuel was quite unintimidated by this outburst.

“Look, you can’t damn well blame me . . .” he began, before Isaac interrupted with a howl of irritation.

“Devil’s Tail, Lemuel, no one’s blaming you, you cretin! Quite the opposite! What I’m saying is that you are by far too good a businessman not to keep careful records, and I need you to check ’em out. We both know everything goes through you . . . you’ve got to get me the name of whoever originally got the big fat caterpillar. The enormous one with really weird colours. You know?”

“Vaguely remember it, yes.”

“Well, that is good.” Isaac calmed a little. He ran his hands over his face and sighed enormously. “Lemuel, I need your help,” he said simply. “I’ll pay you . . . But I’m also begging. I really need you to help me here. Look.” He opened his eyes and glared at Lemuel. “The damn thing may have keeled over and died, right? Maybe it’s like a mayfly: one glorious day. Maybe Lub’ll wake up tomorrow happy as a sandboy. But maybe not. Now, I want to know: one—” he counted off on fat fingers “—how to snap Lublamai out of this; two, what this damn thing is—the one description we have is a little garbled.” He glanced at the wyrman sleeping in the corner. “And three, how we catch the fucker.”

Lemuel stared at him, his face immobile. Slowly and ostentatiously, he pulled a snuff-box from his pocket and took a sniff. Isaac’s fists clenched and unclenched.

“Fine, ’Zaac,” Lemuel said quietly, replacing his little jewelled box. He nodded slowly. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch. But I’m not a charity, Isaac, I’m a businessman and you’re a customer. I get something for this. I’ll bill you, all right?”

Isaac nodded wearily. There was no rancour in Lemuel’s voice, no viciousness, no spite. He was simply stating the truth that underlay his bonhomie. Isaac knew that if it paid better not to uncover the purveyor of the peculiar grub, Lemuel would simply do that.

“Mayor.” Eliza Stem-Fulcher swaggered into the Lemquist Room. Rudgutter looked up at her questioningly. She threw a thin newspaper onto the table before him. “We’ve got a lead.”

Teafortwo left quickly when he woke, with David and Isaac trying to reassure him that no one held him responsible. By the evening, a horrible kind of drab calm had arrived at the warehouse on Paddler Way.

David was spooning a thick compote of fruit purée into Lublamai’s mouth, massaging it down his throat. Isaac was pacing listlessly across the floor. He was hoping that Lin would return home, find the note he had pinned on her door last night and come to him. If it had not been in his writing, he reflected, she would have thought it was a bad joke. To have Isaac invite her to his laboratory-house was unprecedented. But he needed to see her, and he was worried that if he left, he would miss some vital change in Lublamai, or some nugget of indispensable information.

The door was pushed open. Isaac and David looked up sharply.

It was Yagharek.

Isaac was momentarily amazed. This was the first time Yagharek had appeared while David (and Lublamai, of course, although it hardly counted) were in the room. David gazed at the garuda huddling under the dirty blanket, the sweep of the false wings.

“Yag, old son,” said Isaac heavily. “Come in, meet David . . . We’ve had a bit of a disaster . . .” He trudged heavily towards the door.

Yagharek waited for him, hovering half in, half out of the entrance. He said nothing until Isaac was close enough to hear him whisper, a strange thin noise like a bird being strangled.

“I would not have come, Grimnebulin. I do not wish to be seen . . .”

Isaac lost patience quickly. He opened his mouth to speak but Yagharek continued.

“I have . . . heard things. I have sensed . . . there is a pall over this house. Neither you, nor either of your friends, has left this room all day.”

Isaac gave a short laugh.

“You’ve been waiting, haven’t you? Waiting till it was all clear, right? So you could maintain your precious anonymity . . .” He tensed, made an effort to calm himself. “Look, Yag, we’ve had something of a disaster and I really don’t have time or inclination to . . . to pussyfoot about you. I’m afraid our project’s on hold for a while . . .”

Yagharek sucked in his breath and cried out, faintly.

“You cannot,” he screeched quietly. “You cannot desert me . . .”

“Damn!” Isaac reached out and pulled Yagharek in through the door. “Now look!” He marched over to where Lublamai breathed raggedly and gazed and dribbled. He pushed Yagharek before him. He shoved hard, but not with violent pressure. Garuda were wiry and tight-muscled, stronger than they looked, but with their hollow bones and pared-down flesh they were not a match for a big man. But that was not the main reason why Isaac was holding back from exerting himself. The mood between him and Yagharek was testy, not poisonous. Isaac sensed that Yagharek half wanted to see the reason for the sudden tension in the warehouse, even if it meant breaking his ban on being seen by others.

Isaac pointed at Lublamai. David stared vaguely up at the garuda. Yagharek completely ignored him.

“The fucking caterpillar I showed you,” said Isaac, “turned into something that did this to my friend. Ever seen anything like that?”

Yagharek shook his head slowly.

“So you see,” said Isaac heavily, “I’m afraid that until I sort out what in the name of Jabber’s arse I’ve let loose over the city, and until I’ve brought Lublamai back from wherever he is, I’m afraid that the problems of flight and crisis engines, exciting as they are, are on something of a low burn for me.”

“You will let slip my shame . . .” hissed Yagharek quickly. Isaac interrupted him.

“David knows about your so-called shame, Yag!” he shouted. “And don’t look at me like that, that’s how I work, this is my colleague, that’s how come I’ve made fucking progress in your case . . .”

David was looking sharply at Isaac.

“What?” he hissed. “Crisis engines . . . ?”

Isaac shook his head irritatedly, as if a mosquito was in his ear.

“Making headway in crisis physics, that’s all. Tell you later.”

David nodded slowly, accepting that now was not the time to discuss this, but his bulging eyes betrayed his amazement. That’s all? they said.

Yagharek seemed to be twitching with nervousness, with a great bulge of misery that washed up through him.

“I . . . I need your help . . .” he began.

“Yeah, as does Lublamai here,” shouted Isaac, “and I’m afraid that counts for a damn sight more . . .” Then he softened slowly. “I’m not dropping you, Yag. I’ve no intention of doing that. But the thing is, I can’t carry on just now.” Isaac thought for a moment. “If you want to get this done as quick as possible, you could help . . . Don’t just fucking disappear. Stay the fuck here and help us sort this out. That way, we can get back, sharpish, to your problem.”

David looked askance at Isaac. Now his eyes said, Do you know what you’re doing? Seeing that, Isaac blustered, and rallied.

“You can sleep here, you can eat here . . . David won’t care, he doesn’t even live here, I’m the only one that does. Then when we hear anything, we can . . . well, we can maybe think of some use for you. If you know what I mean. You can help, Yagharek. That’d be damn useful. The quicker this gets sorted, the quicker we’re back on your programme. Understand?”

Yagharek was subdued. It took some minutes before he would speak, and then all he would do was nod and briefly say that yes, he would stay at the warehouse. It was clear that all he could think of was the research into flight. Isaac was exasperated, but forgiving. The excision, the punishment that had befallen Yagharek, had settled on his soul like lead chains. He was selfish, utterly, but he had some reason.

David fell asleep, exhausted and miserable. He slept in his chair that night. Isaac took over caring for Lublamai. The food had passed through him, and the first noisome duty was to clean up his shit.

Isaac bundled up the fouled clothes and shoved them into one of the warehouse’s boilers. He thought of Lin. He hoped she came to him soon.

He realized he was pining.

Chapter Twenty-six

Things stirred in the night.

In the morning, in the small hours and again when the sun had risen, more idiot bodies were found. This time there were five. Two vagrants who hid under the bridges of Gross Coil. A baker walking home from work in Nigh Sump. A doctor in Vaudois Hill. A bargewoman out beyond Raven’s Gate. A spattering of attacks that disfigured the city without pattern. North; east; west; south. There were no safe boroughs.

Lin slept badly. She had been touched by Isaac’s note, to think of him crossing the city just to plant a piece of paper on her door, but she had also been concerned. There was a hysterical tone to the short paragraph, and the plea to come to the laboratory was so utterly out of character that it frightened her.

Nevertheless, she would have come immediately had she not returned to Aspic Hole late, too late to travel. She had not been working. The previous morning she had woken to find a note thrust under her door.

Pressing business necessitates the postponement of appointments until further notice. You will be contacted when resumption of duties is possible.

M.

Lin had pocketed the curt note and wandered to Kinken. She had resumed her melancholy contemplations. And then, with a curious sense of amazement, as if she was watching a performance of her own life and was surprised at the turn of events, she had walked north-west out of Kinken to Skulkford, and boarded the railway. She had taken the two stops north on the Sink Line, to be swallowed by the vast tarry maw of Perdido Street Station. There in the confusion and hissing steam of the enormous central concourse, where the five lines met like an enormous iron and wood star, she had changed trains for the Verso Line.

There had been a five-minute wait while the boiler was stoked in the cavern at the centre of the station. Enough time for Lin to look at herself in incredulity, to ask herself what in the name of Awesome Broodma she was doing. And perhaps in the name of other gods.

But she had not answered, had sat still while the train waited, then moved slowly, picking up speed and rattling in a regular rhythm, squeezing from one of the station’s pores. It wound to the north of the Spike, under two sets of skyrails, looking out over Cadnebar’s squat, barbarous circus. The prosperity and majesty of The Crow—the Senned Gallery, the Fuchsia House, Gargoyle Park—was riddled with squalor. Lin gazed into steaming rubbish tips as The Crow segued into Rim, saw the wide streets and stuccoed houses of that prosperous neighbourhood wind carefully past hidden, crumbling blocks where she knew the rats were running.

The train passed through Rim Station and plunged on over the fat grey ooze of the Tar, crossing the river barely fifteen feet to the north of Hadrach Bridge, until it picked its way distastefully over the ruinous roofscape of Creekside.

She had left the train at Low Falling Mud, at the western edge of the slum ghetto. It had not taken long to tread the rotting streets, past grey buildings that bulged unnaturally with sweating damp, past kin who eyed her and tasted her in the air and moved away, because her uptown perfume and strange clothes marked her out as one who had escaped. It had not taken her long to find her way back to her broodma’s house.

Lin had not come too close, had not wanted her taste to filter through the shattered windows and alert her broodma or her sister to her presence. In the growing heat, her scent was like a badge for other khepri, that she could not remove.

The sun had moved and heated the air and clouds, and still Lin had stood, some little way from her old home. It was unchanged. From within, from cracks in the walls and door, she could hear the skittering, the organic pistoning of little male khepri legs.

No one had emerged.

Passers-by had ejected chymical disgust at her, for coming back to crow, for spying on some unsuspecting household, but she had ignored them all.

If she entered and her broodma was there, she thought, they would both be angry, and miserable, and they would argue, pointlessly, as if the years had not gone by.

If her sister was there and told her their broodma had died, and Lin had let her go without a word of anger or forgiveness, she would be alone. Her heart might burst.

If there was no sign . . . if the floors crawled only with males, living like the vermin they were, no longer pampered princes without brains but bugs that stank and ate carrion, if her broodma and her sister had gone . . . then Lin would be standing pointlessly in a deserted house. Her homecoming would be ridiculous.

An hour or more had passed, and Lin had turned her back on the putrefying building. With her headlegs waving and her head-scarab flexing in agitation, in confusion and loneliness, she made her way back to the station.

She had grappled fiercely with her melancholy, stopping in The Crow and spending some of Motley’s enormous payments on books and rare foods. She had entered an exclusive women’s boutique, provoking the sharp tongue of the manageress until Lin had fanned her guineas and pointed imperiously at two dresses. She had taken her time in being measured, insisting each piece fit her as sensuously as it would the human women for whom its designer had intended it.

She had bought both pieces, all without a word from the manageress, whose nose wrinkled as she took a khepri’s money.

Lin had walked the streets of Salacus Fields wearing one of her purchases, an exquisite fitted piece in cloudy blue that darkened her russet skin. She could not tell if she felt worse or better than before.

She wore the dress again the next morning as she crossed the city to find Isaac.

That morning by Kelltree Docks, dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of cræfted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.

They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feet across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercræft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.

In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.

As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. FAIR WAGES NOW! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.

On either side of the gorge in the river, small boats rowed carefully to the edge of the water. The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.

The channel had been dug a little to the south of Barley Bridge, at the very edge of the docklands. There were ships waiting to enter and ships waiting to leave. A mile or so downstream, in the insalubrious waters between Badside and Dog Fenn, merchant ships reined in their nervous seawyrms and let the boilers run low. In the other direction, by the jetties and landing bays, in Kelltree’s fat canals beside the drydocks, the captains of vessels from as far as Khadoh gazed impatiently at the vodyanoi pickets that thronged the banks and worried about getting home.

By mid-morning the human wharfmen had arrived to get about the task of unloading and loading. They quickly discovered that their presence was more or less superfluous. Once the remaining work was done preparing those ships still at anchor in Kelltree itself—at most another two days’ work—they were stuck.

The small group who had been in discussion with the striking vodyanoi had come prepared. At ten in the morning about twenty men suddenly streamed out of their yards, climbing the fences around the docks, and jogging to the waterfront by the vodyanoi pickets, who cheered them on with something like hysteria. The men pulled out their own signs: HUMAN AND VODYANOI AGAINST THE BOSSES!

They joined in the noisy chanting.

Over the next two hours, the mood hardened. A core of humans set up a counter-demonstration inside the dockland’s low walls. They screamed abuse at the vodyanoi, calling them frogs and toads. They jeered at the striking humans, denounced them as race-traitors. They warned that the vodyanoi would ruin the dock, making human wages plummet. One or two of them carried Three Quills literature.

Between them and the equally strident human strikers was a great mass of confused, vacillating dockers. They wandered back and forth, swearing and baffled. They listened to the shouted arguments from both sides.

The numbers began to grow.

On either bank of the river, in Kelltree itself and on the south bank of Syriac Well, crowds were gathering to watch the confrontation. A few men and women ran among them, moving too fast to be identified, handing out leaflets with the Runagate Rampant banner at the top. They demanded in closely printed text that the human dockers join the vodyanoi, that it was the only way the demands would be won. The papers could be seen circulating among the human dockers, handed out by person or persons unseen.

As the day wore on, and the air heated, more and more dockers began to drift over the wall to join the demonstration beside the vodyanoi. The counter-demonstration also grew, sometimes rapidly; but over the space of the hours, it was the strikers that increased most visibly.

There was a tense uncertainty in the air. The crowd was becoming more vocal, yelling at both sides to do something. There was a rumour that the chairman of the dock authority was coming to speak, another that Rudgutter himself would put in an appearance.

All the time, the vodyanoi in the canyon of air carved into the river busied themselves shoring up the shimmering waterwalls. Occasionally fish blundered through the flat edges and fell to the ground, flapping, or half-sunk rubbish eddied gently into the sudden chasm. The vodyanoi threw everything back. They worked in shifts, swimming up through the water to watercræft the upper reaches of the riverwalls. They shouted encouragement at the human strikers from the riverbed, among the ruined metal and thick sludge that was the Gross Tar’s floor.

At half past three, with the sun blazing hot through ineffectual clouds, two airships were seen approaching the docks, from the north and the south.

There was excitement among the crowds, and the word quickly spread through the assembled that the mayor was coming. Then a third and fourth airship were noticed, cruising ineluctably over the city towards Kelltree.

The shadow of unease passed over the riverbanks.

Some of the crowd dispersed quietly. The strikers redoubled their chants.

By five to four, the airships hovered over the docks in an airborne X, a massive threatening mark of censure. A mile or so to the east, another solitary dirigible hung over Dog Fenn, on the other side of the river’s ponderous kink. The vodyanoi and the humans and the gathered crowds shaded their eyes with their hands and stared up at the impassive shapes, bullet-bodies like hunting squid.

The airships began to sink earthwards. They approached at some speed, the details of their design and the sense of mass of their inflated bodies quite suddenly discernible.

Just before four o’clock, strange organic shapes floated up from behind the surrounding roofs, emerging from sliding doors at the top of the Kelltree and Syriac militia struts, smaller towers not connected to the skyrail network.

The eddying, weightless objects bobbed gently in the breeze and began to drift almost aimlessly towards the wharfs. The sky was suddenly full of the things. They were big and soft-bodied, each a mass of twisted, bloated tissue coated with intricate flaps and curves of skin, craters and strange, dripping orifices. The central sac was about ten feet in diameter. Each of the creatures had a human rider, visible in a harness sutured to the corpulent body. Below each such body was a thicket of dangling tentacles, ribbons of blistered flesh that stretched the forty or so feet to the ground.

The creatures’ pinky-purple flesh throbbed regularly like beating hearts.

The extraordinary things bore down on the gathered crowd. There was a full ten seconds when those who saw them were too aghast to speak, or to believe what they saw. Then the shouts started: “Men-o’-war!”

As the panic began, some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at once.

Throughout the gathered crowd, in the anti-strike demonstration and even here and there among the striking dockworkers themselves, clumps of men—and some women—suddenly reached over their heads and in violent, quick motions tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible eye- or mouth-holes; dark crumpled blanks.

From the underbelly of each of the airships—looming absurdly close now—spilt clutches of ropes that jounced and whiplashed as they fell. They fell through the yards and yards of air, their ends coiling slightly on the pavement. They contained the gathering, the pickets and demonstrations and surrounding crowds within four pillars of suspended rope, two on either side of the river. Dark figures slid expertly, at breakneck speed, the length of the cords. They came in a constant quick drip. They looked like glutinous clots dribbling down the entrails of the disembowelled airships.

There were wails from the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The people fled in all directions, trampling the fallen, grabbing children and lovers and stumbling on cobbles and broken flagstones. They tried to disperse down the side streets that spread like a network of cracks out from the riverbanks. But they ran into the paths of the men-o’-war that bobbed sedately along the alleys’ routes.

Uniformed militia were suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on monstrous bipedal shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as they felt their way with echoes.

The air brimmed with sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs around corners into men-o’-war tentacles and shrieked as the nerve-agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.

The man-o’-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures’ movements, coursing deceptively fast over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing their steeds’ venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd—the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky—reacted to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.

The militia’s dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o’-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.

Ranks of militia charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly mass were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o’-war stings. Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their filter-masks.

A splinter group of officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into the vodyanoi’s watercræft ditch. The croaks and screeches of burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.

Three militiamen knelt at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very fast, they sighted along the shafts into the miasma of grey smoke. An officer in the peculiar silver epaulettes of a captain-thaumaturge stood behind them, muttering quickly and inaudibly, his voice muffled. He touched each marksman’s temples, then jerked his hands away.

Behind their masks, the men’s eyes watered and cleared, suddenly seeing registers of light and radiation that rendered the smoke virtually invisible.

Each man knew the bodyshape and movement patterns of his target perfectly. The sharpshooters tracked quickly through the fog of gas and saw their targets conferring with wet rags clamped to their mouths and noses. There was a rapid crackle, three shots in a quick tempo.

Two of the vodyanoi fell. The third looked round in panic, seeing nothing but the swirl of that vicious gas. He raced to the water walling him in, scooped a handful from it and began to croon to it, moving his hand in fast and esoteric passes. One of the riverside marksmen dropped his rifle quickly and picked up his second weapon. The target was a shaman, he realized, and if given time he might invoke an undine. That would make things vastly more complicated. The officer raised the gun to his shoulder, aimed and fired in one brisk movement. The hammer with its clamped shard of flint slid down the serrated edge of the pan cover and snapped, sparking, into the pan.

The bullet burst through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths, and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the quag.

The watercræft walls of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political papers and the bodies.

As the militia put down the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airship as from its kin.

The crowds in Dog Fenn were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

The costermongers on Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by one the five airships sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

They slipped below the silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned and fled.

The militia troops stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into the swirling, bloody air. The butchers and slaughterers turned dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they ran.

The militia tore down the swinging, dripping carcasses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex’s bedroom might have been gauze.

Once inside the troops moved to either side of the wardrobe, leaving one man to unstrap a huge sledgehammer from his back. He swung it at the old wood, dissolving the wardrobe in three huge strokes, uncovering a hole in the wall that emitted the chugging of a steam engine and fitful oil-lamp light.

Two of the officers disappeared into the secret room. There was a muffled shout and the sound of repeated hammering thuds. Benjamin Flex came flying through the crumbling hole, his body twisting, beads of blood hitting his grimy walls in radial patterns. He hit the floor head first and shrieked, tried to scrabble away, swearing incoherently. Another officer reached down and lifted him by the shirt with steam-enhanced strength, shoving him against a wall.

Ben gibbered and tried to spit, staring at the impassive blue-masked face, intricate smoked goggles and gasmask and spiked helmet like the face of some insectile dæmon.

The voice that emerged from the hissing mouthparts was monotonous, but quite clear.

“Benjamin Flex, please give your verbal or written assent to accompany myself and other officers of the New Crobuzon militia to a place of our choosing for the purposes of interview and intelligence gathering.” The militiaman slammed Ben against the wall, hard, eliciting an explosive burst of breath and an unintelligible bark. “Assent so noticed in presence of myself and two witnesses,” the officer responded. “Aye?”

Two of the militiamen behind the officer nodded in unison and responded: “Aye.”

The officer cuffed Ben with a punishing backhand blow that dazed him and burst his lip. His eyes wavered drunkenly and he dribbled blood. The hugely armoured man swung Ben up over his shoulder and stomped from the room.

The constables who had entered the little print-room waited for the rest of the squad to follow the officer back out into the corridor. Then, in perfect time, they each pulled a large iron canister from their belts and pushed the plungers that set in motion a violent chymical reaction. They threw the cylinders into the cramped room where the construct still cranked the printing press handle in an endless, mindless circuit.

The militiamen ran like ponderous bipedal rhinos down the corridor after their officer. The acid and powder in the pipebombs mixed and fizzed, flared violently, ignited the tightly packed gunpowder. There were two sudden detonations that sent the damp walls of the building shuddering.

The corridor jacked under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from the doorway, with hot ink and ripped snatches of pipe. Twists of metal and glass burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain. Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. WE SAY, said one, and BETRAYAL! another. Here and there the banner title was visible, Runagate Rampant. Here it was torn and burning, only a fragment visible.

Run . . .

One by one the militia attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks, setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into the belly of their airship. The officer holding Ben clutched him tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra man.

As a weak fire played desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was the head of Ben’s construct, its upper right arm still attached.

The thing’s arm twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by flexing and unflexing its jaw.

Within half a minute the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its glass eyes vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.

A shadow passed over the dead thing, as the airship, full now with all its troops, cruised slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms of the Spike.

At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.

But this is not my land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city, all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate, my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.

I have been duped. When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the Cymek’s constant summer (where “my sand” or “your water” are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all. It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.

I am stumbling. I must not fall.

I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.

Part Four:

A Plague of
Nightmares

Chapter Twenty-seven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At one point in that long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The reason for his change was simple.

David and he were worried about more important things.

There was a slightly sour part of her mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly libertarian principles, who would understand—if he were even thinking about them—the difficulties of the situation, and who could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of herself with Lublamai . . . ruined.

She could not feel Lublamai’s affliction as deeply as his two friends, of course, but the sight of that dribbling, mindless thing in the cot shocked and frightened her. She was glad that something had happened to Mr. Motley to give her a few hours or days with Isaac, who seemed broken with guilt and misery.

Occasionally he would flare into angry, useless action, shouting “Right!” and clasping his hands decisively, but there was nothing to be decided, no action he could take. Without some lead, some hint, the start of some trail, there was nothing to be done.

That night, she and Isaac had slept together upstairs, he clutching her miserably, without a hint of arousal. David had gone home, promising to return early in the morning. Yagharek had refused a mattress, had curled into a peculiar, hunched, cross-legged crouch in the corner, obviously designed to keep from crushing his supposed wings. Lin did not know if he was maintaining his illusion for her sake, or if he truly slept, still, in the pose he had used since childhood.

The next morning they sat around the table, drinking coffee and tea, eating stolidly, wondering what to do. When he checked the post, Isaac was quick to discard the rubbish and return with Lemuel’s note: unstamped, hand-delivered by some minion.

“What does he say?” asked David quickly.

Isaac held the paper so that David and Lin could read over his shoulder. Yagharek hung back.

Have tracked down source of Peculiar Caterpillar in my records. One Josef Cuaduador. Acquisitions clerk for Parliament. Not wanting to waste time, and remembering promise of Fat Fee, have already been to speak to Mr. Cuaduador along with my Large Associate Mr. X. Exerted some little pressure for cooperation. At first Mr. C. thought I was militia. Reassured him otherwise, then ensured his loquacity with X’s friend Flintlock. Seems our Mr. C. liberated caterpillar from official shipment or somesuch. Been regretting it ever since. (I did not even pay him much for it.) No knowledge of purpose or source of grub. No knowledge of fate of others from original group—took only one. One lead only: (Useless? Useful?) Recipient of packet named Dr. Barbell? Barrier? Berber? Barlime? etc. in R&D.

Am keeping track of services rendered, Isaac. Itemized bill to follow.

Lemuel Pigeon.

“Fantastic!” Isaac exploded, on finishing the letter. “A fucking lead . . .”

David looked utterly aghast.

“Parliament?” he said, a strangled gasp. “We’re fucking about with Parliament? Oh dear Jabber, do you have any idea of the scale of shit we’re messed up in? What the fuck d’you mean ‘Fantastic!’ you fucking cretin, Isaac? Oh, marvellous! We just have to ask Parliament for a list of all those in the top secret Research and Development department whose names begin with B, then find them one by one and ask if they know anything about flying things that scare their victims comatose, specifically how to catch them. We’re home free.”

No one spoke. A pall settled slowly on the room.

At its south-westerly corner, Brock Marsh met Petty Coil, a dense knot of chancers, crime and architecture of decayed splendour wedged into a kink in the river.

A little over a hundred years previously, Petty Coil had been an urban hub for the major families. The Mackie-Drendas and the Turgisadys; Dhrachshachet, the vodyanoi financier and founder of the Drach Bank; Sirrah Jeremile Carr, the merchant-farmer: all had their great houses in Petty Coil’s wide streets.

But industry had exploded in New Crobuzon, much of it bankrolled by those very families. Factories and docks budded and proliferated. Griss Twist, just across the river, enjoyed a short-lived boom of small machinofacture, with all the noise and stink that that entailed. It became the site of massive riverside tips. A new landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth was created, in a speeded-up parody of geological process. Carts dumped load after load of broken machines, rotting paper, slag, organic offal and chymical detritus into the fenced-off rubbish tips of Griss Twist. The rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with foetid gas. Within a few years the local factories had gone but the dumps remained, and the winds that blew in from the sea could send a pestilential stench over the Tar into Petty Coil.

The rich deserted their homes. Petty Coil degenerated in a lively fashion. It became noisier. Paint and plaster bubbled, desquamating grotesquely, as the massive houses became homes for more and more of New Crobuzon’s swelling population. Windows broke, were fixed roughly, broke again. As small food-shops and bakers and carpenters moved in, Petty Coil fell willing prey to the city’s ineluctable capacity for spontaneous architecture. Walls and floors and ceilings were called into question, amended. New and inventive uses were found for deserted constructions.

Derkhan Blueday made her way hurriedly towards this mess of abused, misused grandeur. She carried a bag close. Her face was set and miserable.

She came up over Cockscomb Bridge, one of the city’s most ancient edifices. It was narrow and roughly cobbled, with houses built into the very stones. The river was invisible from the centre of the bridge. On either side, Derkhan could see nothing but the squat, rough-edged skyline of houses nearly a thousand years old, their intricate marble façades crumbled long ago. Lines of washing stretched across the width of the bridge. Raucous shouted conversations and arguments bounced back and forth.

In Petty Coil itself, Derkhan walked quickly under the raised Sud Line and bore north. The river she had passed over bent sharply back on itself, veering towards her in an enormous S, before righting its course and heading east and down to meet the Canker.

Petty Coil was blurring with Brock Marsh. The houses were smaller, the streets narrower and more intricately twisted. Mildewing old houses tottered overhead, their steeply slanting roofs like capes slung over narrow shoulders, making them furtive. In their cavernous front rooms and central courtyards, where trees and bushes died as filth encroached, rude signs were plastered advertising scarabomancy and automatic reading and enchantment therapy. Here, the poorest or most unruly of Brock Marsh’s delinquent chymists and thaumaturges fought for space with charlatans and liars.

Derkhan checked the directions she had been given, and found her way to St. Sorrel’s Mews. It was a tight little passage ending in a collapsed wall. To her right, Derkhan saw the tall, rust-coloured building described in the note. She entered through the doorless threshold and picked her way over building debris, through a short unlit passage that virtually dripped with damp. At the end of the corridor, she saw the bead curtain she had been told to look for, strings of broken glass on wire, swaying gently.

She steeled herself, drawing the vicious shards back gently, drawing no blood. Derkhan entered the little parlour beyond.

Both of the room’s windows had been covered: thick material was glued to them in great fibrous clumps that clotted the air with heavy shadow. The furnishings were minimal. The same shade of brown as the darkened atmosphere, they seemed half invisible. Behind a low table, sipping tea in an absurdly dainty manner, a plump, hairy woman basked in a sumptuous decaying armchair.

She eyed Derkhan.

“What can I do for you?” she asked evenly, in a tone of resigned irritation.

“You’re the communicatrix?” said Derkhan.

“Umma Balsum.” The woman inclined her head. “Got some business for me?”

Derkhan made her way across the room and hovered nervously by a bursting sofa until Umma Balsum indicated that she should sit. Derkhan did so abruptly, and fumbled in her bag.

“I need . . . uh . . . to talk to Benjamin Flex.” Her voice was taut. She spoke in little bursts, gearing up to each announcement, then spitting it out. She pulled out a little pouch of the detritus she had found at the site of the abattoir.

She had gone to Dog Fenn the previous evening, as news of the militia’s crushing of the dock strike washed over New Crobuzon. It swept along with rumours in its wake. One of the rumours concerned a subsidiary attack on a seditious newspaper in Dog Fenn.

It had been late when Derkhan had arrived, disguised as always, in the dank streets in the south-east of the city. It had rained; warm, fat drops bursting like rotting things on the rubble in the cul-de-sac. The entrance was blocked, so Derkhan had entered through the low portal through which meat and animals were slung. She had clung to the noisome stones, dangling over the lip into the butchers’ den, stained with shit and gore from a thousand terrified animals, and dropped the few feet into the bloody darkness of the deserted charnel-house.

She had crawled over the ruined conveyor-belt, snagged herself on the meathooks that littered the floor. The sanguinary slick in which she stumbled was cold and sticky.

Derkhan had fought her way past the stones that had burst from walls, over the ruined stairs, up towards Ben’s room, the centre of the destruction. Her way was paved with ripped and ruined shards of printing machinery, and smoke-charred pieces of cloth and paper.

The room itself was little more than a hole full of rubbish. Chunks of masonry had crushed the bed. The wall between Ben’s bedroom and the hidden printing press was almost completely destroyed. Languorous summer drizzle had been falling through the burst skylight onto the shattered skeleton of the press.

Derkhan’s face had hardened. She had searched with a fervent intensity. She had unearthed small pieces of evidence, small proofs that this was once where a man had lived. She brought them out now, put them on the table before Umma Balsum.

She had found his razor, with a little stubble and bloodrust still staining its blade. The torn remnants of a pair of trousers. A piece of paper discoloured with his blood from where she had rubbed and rubbed it against a red stain on the wall. The last two issues of Runagate Rampant that she had found under the ruins of his bed.

Umma Balsum watched the pathetic collection emerge.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“I . . . I think he’s in the Spike,” said Derkhan.

“Well, that’s going to cost you an extra noble straight off,” said Umma Balsum tartly. “Don’t like tangling with the law. Talk me through this stuff.”

Derkhan showed her each of the pieces she had brought. Umma Balsum nodded at each briefly, but seemed particularly interested in the issues of RR.

“He wrote for this, did he?” she asked keenly, fingering the papers.

“Yes.” Derkhan did not volunteer the information that he edited it. She was nervous of breaking the taboo against naming names, even though she had been assured that the communicatrix was trustworthy. Umma Balsum’s livelihood depended for the most part on contacting people in the militia’s possession. Selling out her clients would be a financial miscalculation. “This—” Derkhan turned to the central column, with the headline What We Think “—he wrote this.”

“Ahhh . . .” said Umma Balsum. “Shame you don’t have it in his original scripture. But this ain’t bad. Got anything else peculiar on him?”

“He has a tattoo. Above his left bicep. Like this.” Derkhan brought out the sketch she had made of the ornate anchor decoration.

“Sailor?”

Derkhan smiled mirthlessly.

“Got discharged and banged up without setting foot on a ship. Got drunk when he joined up and insulted his captain before the tattoo was even dry.” She remembered him telling the story.

“Righto,” said Umma Balsum. “Two marks for the attempt. Five marks connection fee if I get him, then two stivers a minute while we’re linked. And a noble on account of he’s in the Spike. Acceptable?” Derkhan nodded. It was expensive, but this kind of thaumaturgy was not just a question of learning a few passes. With enough training, anyone could effect the odd fumbling hex, but this kind of psychic channelling took a prodigious birth-talent and years of arduous study. Appearances and surroundings notwithstanding, Umma Balsum was no less a thaumaturgic expert than a senior Remaker or chimerist. Derkhan fumbled for her purse. “Pay after. We’ll see if we get through first.” Umma Balsum rolled up her left sleeve. Her flesh dimpled and wobbled loosely. “Draw me that tattoo. Make it as like the original as you can.” She nodded, indicating Derkhan to a stool in the corner of the room on which rested a palette with a collection of brushes and coloured inks.

Derkhan brought the materials over. She began to sketch onto Umma Balsum’s arm. She cast her mind back desperately, trying to get the colours exactly right. It took her about twenty-five minutes to finish her attempt. The anchor she had drawn was a little more garish than Benjamin’s (partly a consequence of the quality of the inks), and perhaps somewhat squatter. Nonetheless, she was sure that anyone who knew the original would recognize hers as a copy of it. She sat back, tentatively satisfied.

Umma Balsum waved her arm like a fat chicken’s wing, drying the inks. She fiddled with the remnants of Benjamin’s bedroom.

“. . . bloody unhygenic bloody way to make a living . . .” she murmured, just loud enough for Derkhan to hear. Umma Balsum picked up Benjamin’s razor and, holding it with a practised grip, nicked herself slightly on the chin. She rubbed the bloodstained paper against her cut. Then she lifted up her skirt and pulled the trouser leg as far onto her fat thighs as it would go.

Umma Balsum reached under the table and brought out a leather and darkwood box. She set it on the table and opened it.

Inside was a tight, interlocking tangle of valves and tubes and wires, looping over and under each other in an incredibly dense engine. At its top was a ridiculous-looking brass helmet, with a kind of trumpet attachment jutting from the front. The helmet was tethered to the box by a long coiled wire.

Umma Balsum reached out and extracted the helmet. She hesitated, then placed it on her head. She fastened the leather straps. From some hidden place inside the box she pulled out a large handle, which slotted neatly into a hexagonal hole at the side of the boxed engine. Umma Balsum placed the box at the edge of the table nearest Derkhan. She attached the engine to a chymical battery.

“Righto,” said Umma Balsum, dabbing absent-mindedly at her still-dripping chin. “Now, you’ll have to get this going by winding that handle. Once the battery kicks in, you keep an eye on it. If it starts to play up, start winding that handle again. You let that current falter, we lose the connection, and without careful disengagement your mate risks losing his mind, and what’s worse so do I. So watch it close . . . Also, if we make contact, tell him not to move around or I’ll run out of cable.” She rattled the wire which attached her helmet to the engine. “Got me?” Derkhan nodded. “Right. Give me that thing he wrote. I’m going to get into character, try and harmonize. Start winding, and don’t stop till the battery takes over.”

Umma Balsum stood and picked up her chair, shoving it back against the wall, puffing. Then she turned and stood in the relatively open space. She visibly braced herself, then drew a stopwatch out of her pocket, pressed the stud which turned it on and nodded at Derkhan.

Derkhan began to wind the handle. It was mercifully smooth. She felt oiled gears inside the box begin to connect and catch, calculated tension biting against her arm, powering up the esoteric mechanisms. Umma Balsum had dropped the stopwatch on the table, was holding RR in her right hand, reading Benjamin’s words in an inaudible whisper, her lips moving quickly. She held her left hand slightly raised, and its fingers danced a complicated quadrille, inscribing some thaumaturgic symbols in the air.

When she reached the end of his article she simply returned to the beginning and began it again, in an endless quick loop.

The current flowed around and around the coiled wire, visibly jolting Umma Balsum, setting her head vibrating very slightly for a few seconds. She dropped the paper, continuing to recite Benjamin’s words sotto voce from memory. She turned slowly, her eyes quite vacant, shuffling her feet. As she turned, there was a second when the trumpet at the front of her helmet was directly pointed at Derkhan. For a split second, Derkhan felt a pulse of weird æthereo-mental waves buffet her psyche. She reeled slightly, but continued to turn the handle, until she felt another force take it and move it on, and she gently released her hand and watched it go. Umma Balsum moved until she was facing the north-west, until she was aligned with the Spike, out of sight in the centre of the city.

Derkhan watched the battery and the engine, made sure it maintained a steady circuit.

Umma Balsum closed her eyes. Her lips moved. The air in the room seemed to sing like a wine glass stroked on its rim.

Then, suddenly, her body jerked violently. She shuddered. Her eyes snapped open.

Derkhan stared at the communicatrix.

Umma Balsum’s lank hair twisted like a boxful of bait worms. It slid back from her forehead and snaked backwards, into an approximation of the greased-down backwards sweep that Benjamin affected when he was not working. A ripple passed through Umma Balsum, from her feet up. It was as if a lightning tide swept along her subcutaneous fat, altering it slightly as it passed. When it had passed out through the crown of her head, her whole body had changed. She was no fatter, and no thinner, but the distribution of tissue had subtly modified her shape. She looked a little broader in the shoulders. Her jawline was more pronounced, and her ample jowls were somehow minimized.

Bruises flowered on her face.

She stood for a second, then collapsed suddenly onto all fours. Derkhan let out a little cry, but she saw that Umma Balsum’s eyes were still open and focused.

Umma Balsum sat suddenly with her legs splayed out, her back leaning against the sofa’s arm.

Her eyes moved slowly up as a furrow of incomprehension ploughed her face. She looked up at Derkhan, still frantically staring. Umma Balsum’s mouth (now firmer and thinner lipped) opened in what looked like astonishment.

“Dee?” she hissed in a voice that oscillated with a deeper echo.

Derkhan gawped at Umma Balsum idiotically.

“Ben . . . ?” she faltered.

“How did you get in here?” hissed Umma Balsum, rising quickly. She squinted at Derkhan in awe. “I can see through you . . .”

“Ben, listen to me.” Derkhan realized she had to calm him down. “Stop moving. You’re seeing me through a communicatrix who’s harmonized with you. She’s shut herself down into a totally passive recipient state so I can talk straight to you. D’you understand?”

Umma Balsum, who was Ben, nodded quickly. S/he stopped moving, and sank again to her/his knees. “Where are you?” s/he whispered.

“In Brock Marsh, down by the Coil. Ben, we don’t have much time. Where are you? What happened? Have they . . . have they . . . hurt you?” Derkhan exhaled tremulously, her tension and despair sweeping through her.

Two miles away Ben shook his head miserably, and Derkhan saw it in front of her.

“Not yet,” whispered Ben. “They’ve left me alone . . . for a while . . .”

“How did they know where you were?” hissed Derkhan again.

“Jabber, Dee, they’ve always known, haven’t they? I had fucking Rudgutter in here earlier, and he . . . and he was laughing at me. Telling me they’d always known where RR was, just couldn’t be bothered to pick us up.”

“It was the strike . . .” said Derkhan miserably. “They decided we’d gone too far . . .”

“No.”

Derkhan looked up sharply. Ben’s voice, or the approximation that emerged from Umma Balsum’s mouth, was hard and clear. The eyes that gazed at her were steady and urgent.

“No, Dee, it ain’t the strike. Dammit, I only wish we had the kind of impact on the strike that worried them. No, that’s a fucking cover story . . .”

“So what . . . ?” began Derkhan hesitantly. Ben interrupted her.

“I’ll tell you what I know. After I got here, Rudgutter comes in and he’s waving Double-R at me. And you know what he’s pointing at? That really fucking tentative story we had in the second section. ‘Rumours of Fat Sun Deal With Top Mobster.’ You know, the one from that contact I had that was saying the government sold some shit or other, some failed science project, to some crim. Nothing! We had nothing! It was just shit-stirring we were doing! And Rudgutter’s waving it around, and he . . . he’s shoving it in my face . . .” Umma Balsum’s eyes slid away into reverie for a moment as Ben remembered. “He’s on and on at me. ‘What d’ye know about this, Mr. Flex? Who’s your source? What do you know about the moths?’ Seriously! Moths, as in butterflies! ‘What do you know about Mr. M.’s recent problems?’ ”

Ben shook Umma Balsum’s head slowly. “Did you get all that? Dee, I dunno what the fuck we’re onto here, but we’ve opened up some story which . . . Jabber! . . . which’s got Rudgutter crapping himself. That’s why he took me! He kept saying ‘If you know where the moths are, it’d be best to tell me.’ Dee . . .” Ben staggered carefully to his feet. Derkhan opened her mouth to warn him about moving away, but her words died as he moved carefully towards her on Umma Balsum’s legs. “Dee, you have to chase this. They’re scared, Dee. They’re really scared. We’ve got to use this. I didn’t have a fucking clue what he was on about, but I think he thought I was acting, and I started milking it, ’cause it was making him uncomfortable.”

Tentatively, carefully, nervously, Ben reached out with Umma Balsum’s hands towards Derkhan. Derkhan’s throat caught as she saw that Ben was crying. Tears rolled down his face without him making a sound. She bit her lip.

“What’s that whirring noise, Dee?” asked Ben.

“It’s the motor to the communicating engine. It has to keep going,” she said.

Umma Balsum’s head nodded.

Her hands touched Derkhan’s. Derkhan trembled at the touch. She felt Ben clutch her free hand, kneeling before her.

“I can feel you . . .” Ben smiled. “You’re only half visible, like a fucking spook . . . but I can feel you.” He stopped smiling and groped for words. “Dee . . . I . . . they’re going to kill me. Oh Jabber . . .” he breathed out. “I’m scared. I know these . . . scum . . . will use pain on me . . .” His shoulders shuddered up and down as he lost control of his sobs. He was silent for a minute, looking down, weeping silently for fear. When he looked up, his voice was solid.

“Fuck ’em! We’ve got the bastards running scared, Dee. You’ve got to chase it! I hereby appoint you editor of fucking Runagate Rampant . . .” He grinned fleetingly. “Listen. Go to Mafaton. I’ve only met her twice, in cafés near there, but I think that’s where she lives, the contact—we met late, and I doubt she’d have wanted to find her way back across the city on her own after, so I’m figuring she’s from round there. Her name’s Magesta Barbile. She hasn’t told me much. Just that some project she was working on in R&D—she’s a scientist—the government terminated and sold off to a crime boss. I thought it could all be a wind-up; I published out of fucking mischief more than ’cause it was a real story. But my gods, the reaction vindicates it.”

Now Derkhan was crying, a little. She nodded.

“I’ll chase it, Ben. Promise.”

Ben nodded. There was a moment of silence.

“Dee . . .” said Ben eventually. “I . . . I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do with that communico-wossname that would . . . I don’t suppose . . . you can’t kill me, can you?”

Derkhan let out a gasp of shock and grief.

She looked around desperately and shook her head.

“No, Ben. I could only do that by killing the communicatrix . . .”

Ben nodded sadly.

“I really don’t know as I’m going to be able to . . . hold back from letting some stuff slip . . . Jabber knows I’ll try, Dee . . . but they’re experts, you know? And I . . . well . . . might as well get it all over with, know what I mean?”

Derkhan was holding her eyes closed. She wept for Ben, and with him.

“Oh gods, Ben, I’m so sorry . . .”

He was suddenly, ostentatiously brave. Stiff-jawed. Pugnacious. “I’ll do me best. Just you make damn sure you chase Barbile, all right?”

She nodded.

“And . . . thanks,” he said with a wry smile. “And . . . goodbye.”

He bit his lip, looked down, then up again and kissed her on the cheek for a long time. Derkhan held him close with her left arm.

And then Benjamin Flex broke away and stepped back, and with some mental reflex invisible to the distraught Derkhan, he told Umma Balsum that it was time for them to disengage.

The communicatrix rippled again, quivered and staggered, and with an almost palpable gust of relief her body collapsed back into its own shape.

The battery continued winding the little handle until Umma Balsum righted herself and walked closer, laid a peremptory hand on it. She stopped the watch on the table, and said: “That’s it, dear.”

Derkhan stretched out and laid her head on the table. She wept in silence. Across the city, Benjamin Flex was doing the same.

Both of them alone.

It was only two or three minutes before Derkhan sniffed sharply and sat up. Umma Balsum was sitting in her chair, calculating sums on a scrap of paper with great efficiency.

She glanced over at the sound of Derkhan’s brisk attempts to reassert control over herself.

“Feeling better, deario?” she asked breezily. “I’ve worked out your charge.”

There was a moment when Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did, Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal and torture and misery.

There was a certain obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be a special death.

“Look.” Umma Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. “Two marks plus five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re looking at one noble nine and two.”

Derkhan gave her two nobles and left.

She walked quickly, without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh. She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed were more than shifty-looking figures skulking hurriedly from shadow to shadow. Derkhan shouldered through stallholders and vendors of cheap and dubious potions.

She realized that she was making her way towards Isaac’s laboratory-house. He was a close friend, and something of a political comrade. He had not known Ben—had not even heard his name—but he would understand the scale of what had happened. He might have some idea of what to do . . . and if not, well, Derkhan would make do with a strong coffee and some comforting.

His door was locked. There was no answer from within. Derkhan almost wailed. She was about to wander off into lonely misery when she remembered Isaac’s enthusiastic descriptions of some vile pub that he frequented on the river’s bank, The Dead Child or something. She turned down the little alley beside the house and looked up and down the pathway by the water, flagstones broken and erupting with tenacious grass.

The dirty lapping waves tugged organic filth gently towards the east. Across the Canker, the opposite bank was choked in snarls of bramble and thickets of serpentine weeds. A little way to the north on Derkhan’s side, some tumbledown establishment huddled by the trail. She walked towards it tentatively, speeding up when she saw the stained and peeling sign: The Dying Child.

Inside, the dark was foetid and warm and unnervingly damp; but in the far corner, past the slouching, collapsed human and vodyanoi and Remade wrecks, sat Isaac.

He was talking in an animated whisper with another man who Derkhan vaguely remembered, some scientist friend of Isaac’s. Isaac looked up as Derkhan stood in the door, and after a double-take, he stared at her. She almost ran towards him.

“Isaac, Jabber and fuck . . . I’m so glad I found you . . .”

As she gabbled at him, her hand nervously clenching the cloth of his jacket, she realized with a mortifying lurch that he looked at her without welcome. Her little speech faltered out.

“Derkhan . . . my gods . . .” he said. “I . . . Derkhan, there’s a crisis . . . Something’s happened, and I . . .” He looked uneasy.

Derkhan stared at him miserably.

She sat suddenly, collapsed onto the bench beside him. It was like a surrender. She leant on the table, kneaded her eyes which were brimming suddenly and irrevocably.

“I’ve just seen a dear friend and comrade get ready to be tortured to death and half my life’s been crushed and exploded and stamped on and I don’t know why and I’ve got to find a Doctor fucking Barbile somewhere in the city to find out what’s going on, and I come to you . . . for . . . because you’re supposed to be my friend and what, you’re . . . busy . . . ?”

Tears oozed from beneath her fingertips and scored their way across her face. She wiped her hands violently across her eyes and sniffed, glancing up for a moment, and she saw that Isaac and the other man were staring at her with an extraordinary, absurd intensity. Their eyes gaped.

Isaac’s hand crept across the table and gripped her by the wrist.

“You’ve got to find who?” he hissed.

Chapter Twenty-eight

“Well,” said Bentham Rudgutter carefully, “I couldn’t get anything out of him. Yet.”

“Not even the name of his source?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“No.” Rudgutter pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “He just shuts down. But I don’t think that’ll be too hard to find out. After all, there aren’t a huge number of people it can be. It’s got to be someone in R&D, it’s probably someone on the SM project . . . We may well know more when the inquisitors have interrogated him.”

“So . . .” said Stem-Fulcher. “Here we are.”

“Indeed.”

Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter and MontJohn Rescue were standing, surrounded by an elite militia guard unit, in a tunnel deep under Perdido Street Station. Gaslamps made fitful impressions on the murk. The little points of grubby light went on as far as they could see before them. A little way behind them was the lift-cage they had just left.

At Rudgutter’s signal, he, his companions and their escort began to walk down into the darkness. The militia marched in formation.

“Right,” said Rudgutter. “You’ve both got the scissors?” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue nodded. “Four years ago it was chess sets,” Rudgutter mused. “I remember when the Weaver changed its tastes, it took about three deaths before we worked out what it wanted.” There was an uneasy pause. “Our research is quite up to date,” said Rudgutter with gallows humour. “I spoke to Doctor Kapnellior before meeting you. He’s our resident Weaver ‘expert’ . . . something of a misnomer. Just means that unlike the rest of us, he’s only extremely damn ignorant about them, rather than totally. He reassures me that scissors are still very much the object of desire.”

After a moment, he spoke again.

“I’ll do the talking. I’ve dealt with it before.” He was unsure himself whether that was an advantage or a disadvantage.

The corridor had come to an end, terminating in a thick door of iron-banded oak. The man at the head of the militia unit slid a huge key into the lock and turned it smoothly. He tugged the door open, bracing himself at its weight, and trooped into the dark room beyond. He was well trained. His discipline was like steel. He must, after all, have been extremely frightened.

The rest of the officers followed him, then Rescue and Stem-Fulcher, and finally Bentham Rudgutter. He pulled the door closed behind them.

As they passed into the room, all felt a moment of dislocation, a wispy unease that prickled across their skin with a quasi-physical momentum. Long threads, invisible filaments of spun æther and emotion, were draped in intricate patterns around the room, and were rippling and sticking to the intruders.

Rudgutter twitched. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed threads that folded out of existence when he looked them full on.

The room was as obscure as if it were shrouded in cobwebs. On every wall, scissors were attached in bizarre designs. Scissors chased each other like predatory fish; they sported on the ceiling; they coiled around and through each other in convoluted, unsettling geometric designs.

The militia and their charges stood still against one wall of the room. No sources of light were visible, but they could still see. The atmosphere in the room seemed monochrome, or disturbed in some way, the light etiolated and cowed.

They stood still for a long time. There were no sounds.

Slowly and silently, Bentham Rudgutter reached into the bag he carried and brought out the large grey scissors he had had an aide buy in an ironmonger’s on the lowest commercial concourse of Perdido Street Station.

He parted the scissors without a noise, held them up in the cloying air.

Rudgutter brought the razor edges together. The room reverberated with the unmistakable sound of blade sliding along sharpened blade, and snapping shut with an inexorable division.

The echoes trembled like flies in a funnelweb. They slid into a dark dimension at the room’s heart.

A gust of cold sent gooseflesh dancing across the backs of those congregated.

The echoes of the scissors came back.

As they returned and crept up from below the threshold of hearing, they metamorphosed, becoming words, a voice, melodious and melancholy, that first whispered and then grew more bold, spinning itself into existence out of the scissor-echoes. It was not quite describable, heartbreaking and frightening, it tugged the listener close; and it sounded not in the ears but deeper inside, in the blood and bone, in the nerve-clusters.

. . . FLESHSCAPE INTO THE FOLDING INTO THE FLESHSCAPE TO SPEAK A GREETING IN THIS THE SCISSORED REALM I WILL RECEIVE AND BE RECEIVED . . .

In the fearful silence, Rudgutter gesticulated at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue, until they understood, and they raised their scissors as he had done, opened and sharply shut them, slicing the air with an almost tactile sound. He joined in, the three of them opening and closing their blades in macabre applause.

At the sound of that snapping susurration, the unearthly voice resonated into the room again. It moaned with an obscene pleasure. Each time it spoke, it was as if what faded into audibility was only a snatch of an unceasing monologue.

. . . AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN DO NOT WITHHOLD THIS BLADED SUMMONS THIS EDGED HYMN I ACCEPT I AGREE YOU SLICE SO NICE AND NICELY YOU LITTLE ENDOSKELETAL FIGURINES YOU SNIP AND SHAVE AND SLIVER THE CORDS OF THE WOVEN WEB AND SHAPE IT WITH AN UNCOUTH GRACE . . .

From out of shadows cast by some unseen shapes, shadows that seemed stretched-out and taut, tethered from corner to corner of the square room, something stalked into view.

Into existence. It bulked suddenly where there had been nothing. It stepped out from behind some fold in space.

It picked its way forward, delicate on pointed feet, vast body bobbing, lifting multiple legs high. It looked down at Rudgutter and his fellows from a head that loomed colossally above them.

A spider.

Rudgutter had trained himself rigorously. He was an unimaginative man, a cold man who ruled himself with industrial discipline. He could no longer feel terror.

But, gazing at the Weaver, he came close.

It was worse, more frightening by far than the ambassador. The Hellkin were appalling and awesome, monstrous powers for which Rudgutter had the most profound respect. And yet, and yet . . . he understood them. They were tortured and torturing, calculating and capricious. Shrewd. Comprehensible. They were political.

The Weaver was utterly alien. There could be no bargaining and no games. It had been tried.

Rudgutter conquered himself, angry, judging himself harshly, studying the thing before him in an attempt to itemize and metabolize the sight.

The Weaver’s bulk was mostly its huge teardrop abdomen that welled up and hung downwards behind it from its neck-waist, a tight, bulbous fruit seven feet long and five wide. It was absolutely taut and smooth, its chitin a shimmering black iridescence.

The creature’s head was the size of a man’s chest. It was suspended from the front of the abdomen a third of the way from the top. The fat curve of its body loomed above it like skulking black-clad shoulders.

The head swivelled slowly to take in its visitors.

The top as smooth and spare as a human skull in black: multiple eyes a single, deep blood-red. Two main orbs as large as newborns’ heads sat in sunken sockets at either side; between them a much smaller third; above it two more; above them three more still. An intricate, precise constellation of glints on dark crimson. An unblinking array.

The Weaver’s complicated mouthparts unhinged, its inner jaw flexing, something between a mandible and a black ivory trap. Its wet gullet flexed and vibrated deep within.

Its legs, thin and bony as human ankles, sprouted from the thin band of segmented flesh that linked its headpiece and abdomen. The Weaver walked on its hindmost four legs. They shot up and out at a forty-five-degree angle, hinging in knees a foot or more above the Weaver’s hunkered head, higher than the top of its abdomen. The legs rebounded from the joints almost straight down ten feet, culminating in a point as featureless and sharp as a stiletto.

Like a tarantula, the Weaver picked one leg up at a time, lifting it very high and placing it down with the delicacy of a surgeon or an artist. A slow, sinister and inhuman movement.

From the same intricate fold as that great quadrupedal frame emerged two sets of shorter legs. One pair, six feet long, rested pointing upwards at the elbows. Each thin, hard shaft of chitin ended in an eighteen-inch talon, a cruel, polished shard of russet shell edged like a scalpel. At the base of each weapon sprouted a curl of arachnid-bone, a sharpened hook to snag and slice and hold prey.

Those organic kukris jutted up like wide horns, like lances. An ostentatious display of murderous potential.

And in front of them, the final, shorter pair of limbs hung down. At their tips, held midway between the Weaver’s head and the ground, a pair of thin and tiny hands. Five-fingered and slender, only smooth fingertips without nails and skin the alien, nacreous black of pure pitch distinguished them from the hands of human children.

The Weaver bent its elbows up a little and held these hands together, clasping and rubbing them together slowly and incessantly. It was a furtive, disturbingly human motion, like that of an untrustworthy, simpering priest.

The spearpoint feet crept closer. The red-black claws swivelled a little and glinted in the non-light. The hands stroked each other.

The Weaver’s body rocked back and alarmingly forward again.

. . . WHAT OFFERING WHAT BOON THE HINGED SPLITTERS YOU BRING ME . . . it said, and suddenly held out its right hand. The militia officers tensed at the quick movement.

Without hesitation Rudgutter stepped forward and placed his scissors into its palm, taking a little care not to touch its skin. Stem-Fulcher and Rescue did the same. The Weaver stepped back with unsettling speed. It looked at the scissors it held, threaded its fingers through the handles and worked each pair rapidly open and shut. Then it moved to the back wall and, moving quickly, it pressed each pair of scissors into a position on the cold stone.

Somehow, the lifeless metal stayed where it was put, clinging to the damp-patterned stone. The Weaver adjusted its design minutely.

“We’re here to ask you about something, Weaver.” Rudgutter’s voice was steady.

The Weaver turned ponderously back to face him.

. . . THE WEFT OF THREADS SURROUND ABOUND ABOUT YOUR TOTTERING TITTERING CARCASSES YOU TUG AND SHRUG UNRAVEL AND REKNIT YOU TRIUMVIRATE OF POWER ENCASED IN THE BLUE-CLAD BRISTLING WITH SPARKING FLINT BLACK POWDER IRON YOU STILL-POINT THREE HAVE CAUGHT HANGNAIL-SOULS ON THE FABRIC SNAGS THE FIVE WINGED RIPPERS RENDING UNWIND SYNAPSE AFTER GANGLIOL SPIRIT SUCK ON MINDFIBRES . . .

Rudgutter looked sharply over at Rescue and Stem-Fulcher. All three of them were straining to follow the dream-poetics that was the Weaver tongue. One thing had come across clear.

“Five?” whispered Rescue, looking over at Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher. “Motley bought only four moths . . .”

. . . FIVE DIGITS OF A HAND TO INTERFERE TO STRIP WORLDFABRIC FROM THE BOBBINS OF THE CITY-KIND FIVE AIR-TEARING INSECTS FOUR FINELY FORMED NOBLE BERINGED WITH SHIMMERING DECORATION ONE SQUAT THUMB THE RUNT THE RUINED EMPOWERING ITS IMPERIOUS SIBLING FINGERS FIVE A HAND . . .

The militia guard tensed as the Weaver stalked its slow ballet over to Rescue. It spread out the fingers of one hand, held it up in front of Rescue’s face, pushed it closer and closer to him. The air around the humans thickened at the Weaver’s approach. Rudgutter fought down an impulse to wipe his face, to clean it of that unseen clinging silk. Rescue set his jaw. The militia murmured with dithering impotence. Their uselessness was brought home.

Rudgutter watched the little drama uneasily. The last but one time he had spoken to the Weaver, it had illustrated a point it was making, a figure of speech of some kind, by reaching out to the militia captain flanking Rudgutter, lifting him into the air and filleting him slowly, drawing one of its talons through his armour up the side of his abdomen and around under the chin, drawing out bone after steaming bone. The man had screamed and flopped and screamed as the Weaver eviscerated him, its mournful voice resonating in Rudgutter’s head as it explained itself in its oneiric riddles.

Rudgutter knew that the Weaver would do anything that it considered improved the worldweave. It might pretend to be dead or reshape the stone of the floor into a statue of a lion. It might pluck out Eliza’s eyes. Whatever it took to shape the pattern in the fabric of the æther that only it could see, whatever it took to Weave the tapestry into shape.

The memory of Kapnellior discussing Textorology—the science of Weavers—flitted in and out of Rudgutter’s mind. Weavers were fabulously rare, and only intermittent inhabitants of conventional reality. Only two Weaver corpses had been procured by New Crobuzon’s scientists since the city’s birth. Kapnellior’s was hardly an exact science.

No one knew why this Weaver chose to stay. It had announced in its elliptical way to Mayor Dagman Beyn, more than two hundred years ago, that it would live below the city. Over the decades, one or two administrations had left it alone. Most had been unable to resist the pull of its power. Its occasional interactions—sometimes banal, sometimes fatal—with mayors and scientists were the main source of information for Kapnellior’s studies.

Kapnellior himself was an Evolutionist. He held to the view that the Weavers were a species of conventional spider that had been subjected by some Torquic or thaumaturgic fluke—thirty, forty thousand years ago, probably in Sagrimai—to a sudden, short-lived evolutionary acceleration of explosive velocity. Within a few generations, he had explained to Rudgutter, the Weavers evolved from virtually mindless predators into aestheticians of astonishing intellectual and materio-thaumaturgic power, superintelligent alien minds who no longer used their webs to catch prey, but were attuned to them as objects of beauty disentanglable from the fabric of reality itself. Their spinnerets had become specialized extradimensional glands that Wove patterns in with the world. The world which was, for them, a web.

Old stories told how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act—to Weave—was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

A beauty unrecognized by humans or other denizens of the mundane plane.

Rudgutter was praying fervently that the Weaver did not decide that slaughtering Rescue would make a pretty pattern in the æther.

After tense seconds, the Weaver retreated, still holding up its hand with splayed fingers. Rudgutter exhaled with relief, heard his colleagues and the militia guard do the same.

. . . FIVE . . . whispered the Weaver.

“Five,” agreed Rudgutter evenly. Rescue paused and nodded slowly.

“Five,” he whispered.

“Weaver,” said Rudgutter. “You’re right, of course. We wanted to ask about the five creatures loose in the city. We’re . . . concerned about them . . . as, it sounds, are you. We want to ask if you will help us clear them out of the city. Root them out. Flush them out. Kill them. Before they damage the Weave.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the Weaver danced suddenly and quickly from side to side. There was a soft, very fast drumming as its sharp feet pattered on the floor. It jigged bizarrely.

. . . WITHOUT YOU ASK THE WEAVE IS TIGHT RUCKED COLOURS BLEED TEXTURES WEARING THREADS FRAY WHILE I KEEN FUNERAL SONGS FOR SOFT POINTS WHERE WEBSHAPES FLOW I WISH I WILL I CAN COILS OF MONSTERS SHADE SLATESCAPES WINGS MOIL SUCK WORLDWEAVE COLOURLESS DRAB IT IS NOT TO BE I READ RESONANCE PRANCE FROM POINT TO POINT ON THE WEB TO EAT SPLENDOUR REAR AND LICK CLEAN RED KNIFENAILS I WILL SNIP FABRICS AND RETIE THEM I AM I AM A SUBTLE USER OF COLOUR I WILL BLEACH YOUR SKIES WITH YOU I WILL SWEEP THEM CLEAN AND KNOT THEM TIGHT . . .

It took several moments for Rudgutter to realize that the Weaver had agreed to help them.

Cautiously, he grinned. Before Rudgutter could speak again, the Weaver pointed straight up with its front four arms. . . . I’M TO FIND WHERE PATTERNS GO AMOK WHERE COLOURS RUN WHERE VAMPIR INSECTS SUCK BOBBIN-CITIZENS DRY AND I AND I WILL BE BY BY-AND-BY . . .

The Weaver stepped sideways and was gone. It had peeled away from physical space. It was running acrobatically along the span of the worldweb.

The wisps of ætherwebs that crawled invisible across the room and human skin began, slowly, to fade.

Rudgutter turned his head slowly from side to side. The militia were straightening their backs, releasing sighs, relaxing from the combat positions they had unconsciously held. Eliza Stem-Fulcher caught Rudgutter’s eye.

“So,” she said. “It’s hired, right?”

Chapter Twenty-nine

The wyrmen were cowed. They told stories of monsters in the sky.

They sat at night around their rubbish-fires in the city’s great dumps and cuffed their children to quiet them. They took turns telling of sudden squalls of disturbed air and glimpses of terrible things. They had seen convoluted shadows in the sky. They had felt drips of acrid liquid spatter them from above.

Wyrmen were being taken.

At first they were just stories. Even through their fear, the wyrmen half-relished the yarns. But then they started to know the protagonists. Their names were ululated through the city at night, when their dribbling, idiot bodies were found. Arfamo and Sideways; Minty; and most frighteningly, Buggerme, the boss-boy of the eastern city. He never lost a fight. Never backed down. His daughter found him, head lolling, oozing mucus from mouth and nose, eyes fat and pale and as alert as poached eggs, in the scrubland by a rusting gas tower in Abrogate Green.

Two khepri matrons were found sat slack and vacant in the Plaza of Statues. A vodyanoi lolled at the edge of the river in Murkside, his capacious mouth pouting in a moronic leer. The number of humans found with their minds gone rose steadily into double figures. The increase did not slow.

The elders of the Riverskin Glasshouse would not say if any cactus had been afflicted.

The Quarrel ran a story on its second page, entitled “Mystery Epidemic of Imbecility.”

It was not only the wyrmen who were seeing things that should not have been there. First two or three, then more and slowly more hysterical witnesses claimed to have been in the company of one of those whose mind was taken. They were confused, they had been in some trance, they said, but they gabbled descriptions of monsters, insect devils without eyes, dark hunched bodies unfolding in a nightmare conjunction of limbs. Protruding teeth and hypnotic wings.

The Crow spread out around Perdido Street Station in an intricate confusion of thoroughfares and half-hidden alleys. The main arteries—LeTissof Street, Concubek Pass, Boulevard Dos Ghérou—burst out in all directions around the station and BilSantum Plaza. They were wide and packed, a confusion of carts and cabs and pedestrian crowds.

Every week new and elegant shops opened amid the throng. Huge stores that took up three floors of what had been noble houses; smaller, no less thriving establishments with windows full of the very latest in gaslight produce, lamps of intricately twisting brass and extension-valve fittings; food; luxury snuff-boxes; tailored clothes.

In the smaller branches that spread from these massive streets like capillaries, the offices of lawyers and doctors, actuaries, apothecaries and benevolent societies jostled with exclusive clubs. Patrician men in immaculate suits patrolled these roads.

Tucked into more or less obscure corners of The Crow, pockets of penury and diseased architecture were judiciously ignored.

Spit Hearth, to the south-east, was bisected from above by the skyrail connecting the militia tower at the point of Brock Marsh to Perdido Street Station. It was part of the same boisterous zone as Sheck, a wedge of smaller shops and houses made of stone and patched with brick. Spit Hearth had a twilight industry: Remaking. Where the borough met the river, subterranean punishment factories emitted wails of pain, sometimes, and hastily smothered screams. But for the sake of its public face, Spit Hearth was able to ignore that hidden economy with only a slight show of distaste.

It was a busy place. Pilgrims made their way through it to the Palgolak temple at the northern edge of Brock Marsh. For centuries, Spit Hearth had been a haven for dissenting churches and religious societies. Its walls were held together with the paste from a thousand mouldering posters advertising theological debates and discussions. The monks and nuns of peculiar contemplative sects walked the streets hurriedly, avoiding eye contact. Dervishes and hieronomers argued on corners.

Wedged gaudily between Spit Hearth and The Crow was the city’s worst-kept secret. A grubby, guilty stain. It was a little region, in the city’s terms. A few streets where the ancient houses were narrow and close, could easily be joined by walkways and ladders. Where the constricted slivers of pavement between tall and strangely adorned buildings could be a protective maze.

The brothel quarter. The red-light zone.

It was late in the evening as David Serachin walked through the northern reaches of Spit Hearth. He might have been walking home to Skulkford, due west under the Sud Line and the skyrails, through Sheck, past the massive militia tower to Skulkford Green. It was a long but not implausible walk.

But when David passed under the arches of Spit Bazaar Station, he took advantage of the darkness to turn and gaze back the way he had come. The people behind him were only passers-by. He was not followed. He hesitated a moment, then emerged from beneath the railway lines, as a train whistled above and sent booms reverberating around the brick caverns.

David turned north, following the path of the railway line, into the outer reaches of the whoretown.

He dug his hands deep into his pockets and thrust his head down. This was his shame. He simmered in self-disgust.

At the outer reaches of the red-light zone the wares catered for orthodox tastes. There were some dollymops, streetwalkers poaching custom, but the freelancers that thronged elsewhere in New Crobuzon were the outsiders here. This was the borough for more languorous indulgence, under the roofs of the establishment houses. Peppered with little general stores which even here catered for everyday needs, the still-elegant buildings of this quarter were illuminated by gaslamps flaring behind the traditional red filters. In the doorways of some, young women in clinging bodices called softly to the foot-traffic. The streets here were less full than in the outside city, but they were hardly empty. The men here were mostly well dressed. This merchandise was not for the poor.

Some of the men kept their heads high, pugnaciously. Most walked as David did, carefully alone.

The sky was warm and dirty. The stars shimmered unclearly. In the air above the roofscape, there was a whispering and then a rush of wind as a pod passed by. It was a municipal irony that above the very centre of the fleshpits stretched a militia skyrail. On rare occasions the militia would raid the corrupt, sumptuous houses of the red-light zone. But for the most part, as long as payments were made and violence did not spill out of the rooms in which it had been paid for, the militia kept out.

The wafts of night air brought with them something unsettling, some brimming sense of unease. Something more profound than any usual anxiety.

In some of the houses, large windows were illuminated through soft, diffusing muslin. Women in shifts and tight nightgowns rubbed themselves lasciviously, or looked up at the passers-by through coy lashes. Here were also the xenian brothels, where drunken youths cheered each other on to rites of passage, fucking khepri or vodyanoi women or other more exotic breeds. Seeing these establishments, David thought of Isaac. He tried not to.

David did not stop. He did not take in the women around him. He plunged deeper.

He turned a corner into a row of lower, meaner houses. In the windows here were unsubtle hints as to the nature of the wares within. Whips. Cuffs. A girl of seven or eight in a baby’s crib, squalling and snotty.

David tracked on and on. The crowds thinned further, although David was never alone. The night air teemed with faint noises. Rooms full of conversation. Music, played well. Laughter. Cries of pain and the barks or howls of animals.

There was a tumbledown cul-de-sac near the heart of the sector, a little still place in the maze. David turned onto its cobbles with a faint shudder. There were men at the doors of these establishments. They stood, heavy and surly in cheap suits, vetting the miserable men that came to them.

David shuffled up to one of the doors. The massive bouncer stopped him, one hand impassive on his chest.

“Mrs. Tollmeck sent me,” muttered David. The man let him pass.

Inside, the lampshades were thick and dirty brown. The hall seemed glutinous with shit-coloured light. Behind a desk sat a severe, middle-aged woman in a drab floral dress that matched the lampshades. She looked up at David through half-moon spectacles.

“Are you new to our establishment?” she asked. “Have you an appointment?”

“I’m due in room seventeen at nine o’clock. The name is Orrel,” said David. The woman behind the desk raised her eyebrows very slightly and inclined her head. She glanced down at a book before her.

“I see. Well, you’re . . .” she glanced at the wall-clock. “You’re ten minutes early, but you might as well go up. You know the way? Sally’s waiting for you.” She looked up at him and—horrendously, monstrously—gave him a complicitous little wink and smirk. David felt sick.

He turned from her quickly and headed up the stairs.

His heart was going very quickly as he climbed, as he emerged in the long corridor at the top of the house. He remembered when first he came here. At the end of the walkway was room seventeen.

David began to walk towards it.

He hated this floor. He hated the slightly blistering wallpaper, the peculiar smells that emanated from the rooms, the unsettling sounds that floated through the walls. Most of the doors on the corridor were open, by convention. Those that were closed were occupied by punters.

The door to room seventeen was kept shut, of course. It was an exception to the house rule.

David walked slowly along the foul carpet, approaching the first door. Mercifully, it was closed, but the wooden door could not contain the noises; peculiar, muffled, desultory cries; a creak of tightening leather; a hissing, hate-filled voice. David turned his head away and found himself gazing directly into the opposite room. He caught a glimpse of the nude figure on the bed. She stared up at him, a girl of no more than fifteen. She crouched on all fours . . . her arms and legs were hairy and pawed . . . dog’s legs.

His eyes lingered on her in hypnotic, prurient horror as he walked past, and she leapt to the floor in clumsy canine motion, turned awkwardly, an unpracticed quadruped, looked over her shoulder at him hopefully as she pushed out her arse and pudenda.

David’s mouth hung slightly open and his eyes were glazed.

This was where he shamed himself, in this brothel of Remade whores.

The city crawled with Remade prostitutes, of course. It was often the only strategy available to Remade women and men to keep themselves from starving. But here in the red-light district, peccadilloes were indulged in the most sophisticated manner.

Most Remade tarts had been punished for unrelated crimes: their Remaking was usually little more than a bizarre hindrance for their sex-work, pushing their prices way down. This district, on the other hand, was for the specialist, the discerning consumer. Here, the whores were Remade specifically for the profession. Here were expensive bodies Remade into shapes to indulge dedicated gourmets of perverted flesh. There were children sold by their parents and women and men forced by debt to sell themselves to the flesh-sculptors, the illicit Remakers. There were rumours that many had been sentenced to some other Remaking, only to find themselves Remade by the punishment factories according to strange carnal designs and sold to the pimps and madams. It was a profitable sideline run by the bio-thaumaturges of the state.

Time was stretched out and sickly in this endless corridor, like rancid treacle. At every door, every station along the way, David could not help but glance inside. He willed himself to look away but his eyes would not obey.

It was like a nightmare garden. Each room contained some unique flesh-flower, blossom of torture.

David paced past naked bodies covered in breasts like plump scales; monstrous crablike torsos with nubile girlish legs at both ends; a woman who gazed at him with intelligent eyes above a second vulva, her mouth a vertical slit with moist labia, a meat-echo of the other vagina between her splayed legs. Two little boys gazing bewildered at the massive phalluses they sprouted. A hermaphrodite with many hands.

There was a thump inside David’s head. He felt groggy with exhausted horror.

Room seventeen was before him. David did not turn back. He imagined the eyes of the Remade behind him, on him, staring from their prisons of blood and bone and sex.

He knocked on the door. After a moment, he heard the chain being lifted from within and the door opened a little. David entered, his gorge rising, leaving that shameful corridor into his own private corruption. The door was closed.

A suited man sat waiting on a dirty bed, smoothing down his tie. Another man, who had opened and closed the door, stood behind David with folded arms. David glanced at him briefly and turned all his attention to the seated man.

The man indicated a chair at the foot of the bed, bade David pull it up in front of him.

David sat.

“Hello ‘Sally,’ ” he said quietly.

“Serachin,” said the man. He was thin and middle-aged. His eyes were calculating and intelligent. He looked wildly out of place in this crumbling room, this vile house, and yet his face was quite composed. He had waited as patient and comfortable among the Remade whores as he would in the corridors of Parliament.

“You asked to see me,” said the man. “It’s been quite a time since we’ve heard from you. We had designated you a sleeper.”

“Well . . .” said David uneasily. “Not much to report. Till now.” The man nodded judiciously and waited.

David licked his lips. He found it hard to speak. The man looked at him oddly, frowned.

“The rate is still the same, you know,” the man said. “A little more, even.”

“No, gods, I . . .” David stuttered. “I’m just . . . You know . . . Out of practice.” The man nodded again.

Very out of practice, thought David helplessly. Been six years since the last time and I swore I wouldn’t do it again. Got myself out of it. You got bored of blackmail and I didn’t need the money . . .

The very first time, fifteen years ago, they had entered this very room as David spent himself in one of the mouths of some ruined, cadaverous Remade girl. The suited men had shown him their camera. They had told him they would send their pictures to the newspapers and the journals and the university. They had offered him a choice. They paid well.

He had informed. Freelance only; once, maybe twice a year. And then he had stopped for a long time. Until now. Because now he was frightened.

David breathed in deeply and began.

“Something big’s going on. Oh, Jabber, I don’t know where to start. You know the disease that’s going round? The mindlessness thing? Well, I know where it started. I thought we could just get on with things, I thought it’d all be . . . containable . . . but Devil’s Tail! It just gets bigger and bigger and . . . and I think we need help.” (Somewhere deep inside his guts some small part of him spat disgust at this, this cowardice, this self-delusion, but David spoke quickly, kept talking.) “It’s all down to Isaac.”

“Dan der Grimnebulin?” said the man. “Who you share your workspace with? The renegade theorist. The guerrilla scientist with a talent for self-importance. What’s he been up to?” The man smiled coldly.

“Right, listen. He got commissioned by . . . well, he got commissioned to look into flight, and he got hold of shitloads of flying things to do research on. Birds, insects, aspises, fucking everything. And one of the things he gets is this big caterpillar. Damn thing looks like it’s going to die for the longest time, then ’Zaac must’ve worked out how to keep the thing alive, because suddenly it starts growing. Huge. Fucking . . . this big.” He held out his hands in a reasonable estimate of the grub’s size. The man opposite him was looking intently at him, face set, hands clenched.

“Then it pupates, right, and we were all sort of curious about what’d come out. So we get home one day and Lublamai—the other guy in the building, you know—Lublamai’s lying there, drooling. Whatever the fucking thing was that hatched out, it fucking ate his mind . . . and . . . and it got away and the damn thing’s loose . . .”

The man jerked his head in a decisive nod, quite different from his earlier casual invitations to information. “So you thought you’d better keep us informed.”

“Shit, no! I didn’t think . . . even then I thought we could deal with it. I mean Jabber, I was pissed off with Isaac, I was completely at a loss, but I thought maybe we could find some way of tracking the damn thing down, fixing Lub . . . Well, first off there starts being more and more of these things, these stories about people’s . . . minds going . . . But the main thing was that we tracked down who got these things to ’Zaac. It’s some fucking clerk nicking them from R&D in the sodding Parliament. And I’m thinking ‘Fuck, I don’t want to muck about with the government.’ ” The man on the bed nodded at David’s judgement. “So then I’m thinking we’re way, way out of our depth . . .”

David paused. The man on the bed opened his mouth and David cut him off.

“No, listen! It doesn’t stop there! ’Cause I heard about the riot down in Kelltree, and I know you’ve banged up the editor of Runagate Rampant, right?” The man waited, flicked imaginary lint from his jacket in an automatic motion. The fact had not been advertised, but the ruined abattoir left no doubt that some pit of sedition had been raided in Dog Fenn, and rumours abounded. “So one of Isaac’s friends is a writer on the damn thing, and she’s contacted the editor—I don’t know how, some fucking thaumaturgy—and he’s told her two things. One is that the inquisitors . . . your lot . . . think he knows something he doesn’t, and the other is that they’re asking him about some story in Double-R and the contact for the story, who presumably does know whatever they think he does, is called Barbile. So get this! That’s who our clerk nicked the monster caterpillar from!”

David paused at this, waited for it to impact on the man, then continued.

“So it’s all connecting and I do not know what’s going on. And I don’t want to. I can just see that we’re . . . treading on your toes. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I can’t see it myself . . . I don’t mind chasing monsters but I am not getting on the wrong side of the fucking militia, and the secret police, and the government and everything. You have to clear this shit up.”

The man on the bed clasped his hands. David remembered something else.

“Damn, yeah, listen! I’ve been racking my brains, trying to work out what’s going on, and . . . well, I don’t know if this is right, but is it something to do with crisis energy?”

The man shook his head very slowly, his face guarded, not comprehending. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, at one point during the run-up to all this, Isaac lets slip . . . sort of hints . . . that he’s built a . . . a working crisis engine . . . d’you know what that means?”

The man’s face was set hard and his eyes were very wide.

“I am a liaison for those who report from Brock Marsh,” he hissed. “I know what it would mean . . . it cannot . . . is it . . . Wait a minute, that would make no sense . . . is it . . . is it true?” For the first time, the man seemed truly rattled.

“I don’t know,” said David hopelessly. “But he wasn’t boasting . . . he sort of mentioned it in passing . . . I just . . . have no idea. But I know that’s what he’s been working on, on and off, for years and fucking years . . .”

There was a long time of silence, when the man on the bed looked thoughtfully into the far corner of the room. His face ran a quick gamut of emotions. He looked thoughtfully at David. “How do you know all this?” he said.

“ ’Zaac trusts me,” said David (and that place inside him winced again, and he ignored it again). “At first this woman . . .”

“Name?” interrupted the man.

David hesitated.

“Derkhan Blueday,” he muttered eventually. “So Blueday, at first she’s really chary of talking in front of me, but Isaac . . . he vouches for me. He knows my politics, we’ve done demos together . . .” (again that wince: you have no politics, you fucking traitor) “It’s just that at a time like this . . .” he hesitated, unhappy. The man waved peremptorily. He had no interest in David’s guilt, or his rationalizations. “So Isaac tells her she can trust me and she tells us everything.”

There was a long time of silence. The man on the bed waited. David shrugged.

“That’s all I know,” he whispered.

The man nodded and stood.

“Right,” he said. “That’s all . . . extremely useful. We’ll probably have to bring your friend Isaac in. Don’t worry,” he added with a reassuring smile. “We’ve no interest in disposing of him, I promise. We may just need his help. You’re right, obviously. There is a . . . circle to be squared, connections to be made, and you’re not in a position to do it, and we might be. With Isaac’s help.

“You’re going to have to stay in touch,” said the man. “You’ll receive written instructions. Be sure to obey them. Obviously I don’t have to stress that, do I? We’ll make sure der Grimnebulin doesn’t know where our information comes from. We may not move for a few days . . . don’t panic. That’s our affair. Just you stay quiet, and try to keep der Grimnebulin doing what he’s doing. All right?”

David nodded miserably. He waited. The man looked at him sharply.

“That’s all,” he said. “You can go.”

With a guilty, grateful haste, David stood and hurried to the door. He felt as if he was swimming in mire, his own shame engulfing him like a mucal sea. He was longing to walk away from this room, and forget what he had said and done, and not think of the coins and notes that would be sent to him, and think only of how loyal he felt to Isaac, and tell himself it was all for the best.

The other man opened the door for him, released him, and David rushed gratefully away, almost ran down along the passageway, eager to escape.

But hurry as he would through the streets of Spit Hearth, guilt clung to him, tenacious as quicksand.

Chapter Thirty

One night the city lay sleeping with reasonable peace.

Of course, the usual interruptions oppressed it. Men and women fought each other and died. Blood and spew fouled the old streets. Glass shattered. The militia streaked overhead. Dirigibles sounded like monstrous whales. The mutilated, eyeless body of a man who would later be identified as Benjamin Flex washed ashore in Badside.

The city tossed uneasily through its nightland, as it had for centuries. It was a fractured sleep, but it was all the city had ever had.

But the next night, when David performed his furtive task in the red-light zone, something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding. A tense, whispering undertone that made the air sick.

For one night, the tension in the air was a thin and tentative thing, that inveigled its way into the minds of the citizens and sent shadows across their sleeping faces. Then day, and no one remembered anything more than a moment’s nocturnal unease.

And then as the shadows dragged out and the temperature dropped, as the night returned from under the world, something new and terrible settled on the city.

All around the city, from Flag Hill in the north to Barrackham below the river, from the desultory suburbs of Badside in the east to the rude industrial slums of Chimer, people thrashed and moaned in their beds.

Children were the first. They cried out and dug their nails into their hands, their little faces crunching down into hard grimaces; they sweated heavily, with a cloying stench; their heads oscillated horrendously to and fro; and all without waking.

As the night wore on the adults also suffered. In the depths of some other, innocuous dream, old fears and paranoias suddenly crashed through mental firewalls like invading armies. Successions of ghastly images assaulted the afflicted, animated visions of deep fears, and absurdly terrifying banalities—ghosties and goblins they need never face—they would have laughed at when awake.

Those arbitrarily spared the ordeal were woken suddenly in the depths of the night by the moans and screams from their sleeping lovers, or their heavy despairing sobs. Sometimes the dreams might be dreams of sex or happiness, but heightened and feverish and become terrifying in their intensity. In this twisted night-trap, bad was bad and good was bad.

The city rocked and shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the minds of the waking. Nightwatchmen and militia agents; late-night dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.

All over the city the night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.

New Crobuzon was gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.

The summer was clotting over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.

They spread out and flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages—tentacular and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous—trembled as they passed in febrile excitement.

They unhinged their disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They gnashed their huge teeth.

They soared. As they flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid, lumpy and cloying, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It oozed its way through æther to fill the city, saturating the minds of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters. The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.

The five went hunting.

Amid the vast swirling broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could discern individual snaking trails of flavour.

Usually, they were opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive cries.

But when they had discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive, coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.

Here was the tenuous mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue. The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire, following his prey’s scent.

Another of the great airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.

The twisted one, the malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its tastebuds less exact: it could not follow the flickering scent through the air. But, uncomfortably, it tried. The full taste of the mind was so familiar . . . it had surrounded the twisted creature during its flourishing into consciousness, during its pupation and self-creation in the silk shell . . . It lost and found the scent, lost it again, floundered.

The smallest and weakest of the night-hunters, stronger by far than any man, hungry and predatory, licked its way through the sky, trying to regain the trail of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin.

Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel Pigeon fidgeted on the streetcorner, in the smoky glare of the gaslight.

“Where the fuck’s your mate?” hissed Isaac.

“He’s late. Probably can’t find it. I told you, he’s stupid,” said Lemuel calmly. He took out a flick-knife and began to clean his nails.

“Why do we need him?”

“Don’t come the fucking innocent, Isaac. You’re good at waving enough brass at me to get me to do all sorts of jobs that go against my better judgement, but there are limits. I’m not getting involved in anything which irritates the damn government without protection. And Mr. X is that, in spades.”

Isaac swore silently, but he knew Lemuel was right.

He had been very uneasy at the notion of involving Lemuel in this adventure, but events had rapidly conspired to give him no choice. David had clearly been reluctant to help him find Magesta Barbile. He seemed paralysed, a mass of helpless nerves. Isaac was losing patience with him. He needed support, and he wanted David to get off his arse and do something. But now was not the time to confront him.

Derkhan had inadvertently provided the name that seemed key to the interlocking mysteries of the presence in the skies and the militia’s enigmatic interrogation of Ben Flex. Isaac sent word, got the name and what information they had—Mafaton, scientist, R&D—to Lemuel Pigeon. He included money, several guineas (and realized as he did so that the gold Yagharek had given him was slowly dwindling), and begged for information, and help.

That was why he contained his anger at Mr. X’s late show. For all that he pantomimed impatience, that kind of protection was precisely what he had approached Lemuel for.

Lemuel himself had not taken much persuasion to accompany Isaac and Derkhan to the address in Mafaton. He affected an insouciant disregard for particulars, a mercenary desire simply to be paid for his efforts. Isaac did not believe him. He thought that Lemuel was growing interested in the intrigue.

Yagharek was adamant he would not come. Isaac had tried to persuade him, quickly and fervently, but Yagharek had not even replied. What the fuck are you doing here then? Isaac felt like asking, but he swallowed his irritation and let the garuda be. Perhaps it would take a little time before he would behave as if he were part of any collective at all. Isaac would wait.

Lin had left just before Derkhan’s arrival. She had been reluctant to leave Isaac in his despondency, but she had also seemed somewhat distracted. She had stayed only one night, and when she had gone she had promised Isaac she would return as soon as she could. But then the next morning Isaac had received a letter in her cursive hand, couriered across the city with an expensive guaranteed delivery.

Dear Heart,

I am afraid you might feel angry and betrayed at this, but please be forbearing. Waiting for me here was another letter from my employer, my commissioner, my patron, if you will. Hot on the heels of his missive telling me I would not be needed for the foreseeable future, came another message saying I was to return.

I know the timing of this could not be worse. I ask only that you believe that I would disobey if I could, but that I cannot. I cannot, Isaac. I will try to finish my job with him as quickly as possible—within a week or two, I hope—and return to you.

Wait for me.

With my love, Lin

So, waiting on the corner of Addley Pass, camouflaged by the chiaroscuro of full moon through the clouds and the shadows of the trees in Billy Green, were only Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel.

All three were shifting uneasily, looking up at passing shades, starting at imagined noises. From the streets around them there came intermittent sounds of horrendously disturbed sleep. At each savage moan or ululation, the three would catch each other’s eyes.

“Godsdamnit,” hissed Lemuel in irritation and fear. “What is going on?”

“There’s something in the air . . .” murmured Isaac, and his voice petered out as he stared blindly up.

To cap the tension, Derkhan and Lemuel, who had met the previous day, had quickly decided they despised each other. They did their best to ignore one another.

“How did you get the address?” asked Isaac, and Lemuel shucked his shoulders irritably.

“Connections, ’Zaac, contacts, and corruption. How d’you think? Dr. Barbile vacated her own rooms a couple of days ago and has since been seen at this less salubrious location. It’s only about three streets away from her old house, though. The woman has no imagination. Hey . . .” He batted Isaac’s arm and pointed across the gloomy street. “There’s our man.”

Opposite them, a vast figure tugged free of the shadows and lumbered towards them. He glowered at Isaac and Derkhan, before nodding at Lemuel in the most absurdly jaunty fashion.

“All right, Pigeon?” he said, too loud. “What we up to, then?”

“Voice down, man,” said Lemuel tersely. “What you carrying?”

The massive man pushed his finger across his lips to show he understood. He held open one side of his jacket, displaying two enormous flintlock pistols. Isaac started slightly at their size. Both he and Derkhan were armed, but neither with any such cannons. Lemuel nodded approvingly at the sight.

“Right. Probably won’t be needed, but . . . y’know. Right. Don’t talk.” The big man nodded. “Don’t hear either, right? You have no ears tonight.” The man nodded again. Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan. “Listen. You know what you want to ask the geezer. Wherever possible, we’re just shadows. But we have reason to think the militia are interested in this, and that means we can’t fuck about. If she’s not forthcoming, we’re giving her a helpful push, right?”

“Is that gangsterese for torture?” hissed Isaac. Lemuel looked at him coldly.

“No. And don’t fucking preach at me: you’re paying for this. We don’t have time to arse around, so I’m not going to let her arse around. Any problems?” There was no answer. “Good. Wardock Street is down here to the right.”

They did not pass any other late-night walkers as they picked their way along the backstreets. They walked variously: Lemuel’s sidekick stolidly and without fear, seemingly unaffected by the ambient nightmare quality in the air; Lemuel himself with many glances into dark doorways; and Isaac and Derkhan with a nervous, miserable haste.

They halted at Barbile’s door on Wardock Street. Lemuel turned and indicated for Isaac to go forward, but Derkhan pushed to the front.

“I’ll do it,” she whispered furiously. The others fell back. When they stood half out of sight at the edge of the doorway, Derkhan turned and pulled the bell cord.

For a long time, nothing happened. Then, gradually, footsteps slowly descended stairs and approached the door. They halted just beyond it, and there was silence. Derkhan waited, hushing the others with her hands. Eventually a voice called out from behind the door.

“Who’s that?”

Magesta Barbile sounded utterly fearful.

Derkhan spoke softly and quickly.

“Dr. Barbile, my name’s Derkhan. We need to speak to you very urgently.”

Isaac glanced around him to see if any of the lights in the street were coming on. So far they seemed unobserved.

From behind the door, Magesta Barbile was being difficult.

“I . . . I’m not sure about that . . .” she said. “It’s not really a good time . . .”

“Dr. Barbile . . . Magesta . . .” said Derkhan quietly. “You’re going to have to open this door. We can help you. Just open the fucking door. Now.”

There was another moment of dithering, then Magesta Barbile unlocked the door and pushed it open a crack. Derkhan was about to seize the moment by pushing past her into the house, when she started and stood quite still. Barbile was holding a rifle. She looked horribly uncomfortable. But however unpractised she was, the weapon was still levelled at Derkhan’s gut.

“I don’t know who you are . . .” began Barbile querulously, but before she could continue Lemuel’s huge friend, Mr. X, reached easily and without speed around Derkhan, grabbing the rifle and shoving the heel of his hand over the firing-pan, blocking the path of the hammer. Barbile began to keen, and she pulled the trigger, eliciting a mild hiss of pain from Mr. X as the hammer snapped onto his flesh. He shoved the rifle backwards, sending Barbile flying onto the stairs behind her.

As she flopped and scrambled to right herself he stepped into the house.

The others followed. Derkhan did not protest at Barbile’s treatment. Lemuel was right. They did not have time.

Mr. X was standing holding the woman. He held her patiently as she flopped and snapped back and forth, emitting terrible crooning moans from behind his hand. Her eyes were wide and white and hysterical with fear.

“Dear gods,” breathed Isaac. “She thinks we’re going to kill her! Stop!”

“Magesta,” said Derkhan loudly, kicking the door closed without looking. “Magesta, you have to stop this. We’re not militia, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a friend of Benjamin Flex.”

At that Barbile opened her eyes wider and her struggles slowed.

“Right,” said Derkhan. “And Benjamin’s been taken. I suppose you know that.” Barbile watched her and nodded quickly. Lemuel’s enormous employee dropped his hand from Barbile’s mouth experimentally. She did not scream.

“We’re not the militia,” repeated Derkhan slowly. “We’re not going to take you like they took him. But you know . . . you know . . . if we could trace you, if we could suss out who was Ben’s contact, that they’re going to be able to.”

“I . . . That’s why I . . .” Barbile glanced over at the discarded rifle. Derkhan nodded.

“All right, listen, Magesta,” she said. She spoke very clearly, her eyes on Barbile’s all the time. “We don’t have much time . . . Let go of her, you arse! We don’t have much time, and we have to know exactly what’s going on. There is some mighty godsdamned weird stuff going on. And an awful lot of threads seem to converge on you. So let me suggest something. Why don’t you take us upstairs, before the militia come, and explain to us what’s going on?”

“I only just found out about Flex,” said Magesta. She was sitting huddled on her sofa, clutching a cold cup of tea. Behind her a large mirror took up most of the wall. “I don’t really follow the news. I had a meeting scheduled with him a couple of days ago, and when he didn’t come, I got really scared that he’d . . . I don’t know . . . told on me, or something.” He probably has, thought Derkhan, and said nothing. “And then I heard some rumours about what happened in Dog Fenn when the militia put down that riot . . .”

There was no godsdamn riot, Derkhan nearly shouted, but she controlled herself. Whatever reason Magesta Barbile may have had for giving information to Ben, political dissidence was clearly not one of them.

“So these rumours . . .” Barbile continued. “Well, I put two and two together, you know? And then . . . and then . . .”

“And then you hid,” said Derkhan. Barbile nodded.

“Look,” said Isaac suddenly. He had been silent until now, his face twisted tensely. “Can you not fucking feel it? Can’t you taste it?” He shook his hands in claws around his face, as if the air was a tangible thing he could grip and wrestle. “It’s as if the damn night air’s gone rancid. Now, maybe it’s just blind damn coincidence, but so far every bad thing that’s happened for the last month seems to be tied in to some fucking conspiracy, and I’m damn well betting that this ain’t an exception.”

He leaned in close towards Barbile’s pathetic figure. She gazed at him, timid and terrified.

“Dr. Barbile,” he said levelly. “Something that eats minds . . . including my friend’s mind; a militia raid on Runagate Rampant; the very fucking air around our ears turning into some rotten soup . . . What is going on? What’s the connection with dreamshit?”

Barbile began to cry. Isaac nearly howled with irritation, turning from her and throwing up his hands in exasperation. But then he turned back. She was speaking through her snivels.

“I knew it was a bad idea . . .” she said. “I told them we should keep control of the experiment . . .” Her words were almost unintelligible, broken and interrupted with a slew of snotty tears. “It hadn’t been going long enough . . . They shouldn’t have done it . . .”

“Done what?” said Derkhan. “What did they do? What was Ben talking to you about?”

“About the transfer,” sobbed Barbile. “We hadn’t finished the project but we suddenly heard it was being wound down, but . . . but someone found out what was really happening . . . Our specimens were being sold . . . to some criminal . . .”

“What specimens?” said Isaac, but Barbile was ignoring him. She was unburdening herself in her own time and her own order.

“It wasn’t quick enough for the sponsors, you know? They were getting . . . impatient . . . The applications they thought there might be . . . military, psychodimensional . . . they weren’t coming. The subjects were incomprehensible, we weren’t making progress, and . . . and they were uncontrollable, they were just too dangerous . . .” She raised her eyes and her voice, still crying. She paused, then continued, quieter again.

“We might have got somewhere, but it was taking too long. And then . . . the money people must’ve got nervous. So the project director told us it was over, that the specimens had been destroyed, but that was a lie . . . Everyone knew it. This wasn’t the first project, you know . . .” Isaac and Derkhan’s eyes widened sharply, but they were silent. “We already knew one sure way to make money from them . . .

“They must’ve sold them to the highest bidder . . . to someone who could use them for the drug . . . That way the sponsors made their money back and the director could keep the project going for himself, co-operating with the drug-man he sold them to. But it wasn’t right . . . It wasn’t right that the government should make money from drugs and it wasn’t right that they should steal our project . . .” Barbile had stopped crying. She just sat, rambling. They let her talk.

“The others were just going to leave it, but I was angry . . . I hadn’t seen them hatch, I hadn’t learnt what I needed to learn, for nothing. And now they were going to be used for . . . for some villain to make money . . .”

Derkhan could scarcely believe the naivety. So this was Ben’s contact. This stupid minor scientist piqued at having her project stolen. For that, she had given evidence of the government’s illicit deals, she had brought the wrath of the militia onto her own head.

“Barbile,” said Isaac again, much quieter and calmer this time. “What are they?”

Magesta Barbile looked up at him. She looked slightly unhinged.

“What are they?” she said dazedly. “The things that’ve escaped? The project? What are they?

“Slake-moths.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Isaac nodded as if this revelation made sense. He prepared to ask her another question, but her eyes were no longer on him.

“I knew they’d escaped because of the dreams, you know?” she said. “I could tell they were out. I don’t know how they escaped. But it shows that their damn sell-off was a bad idea, doesn’t it?” Her voice was strained with desperate triumph. “That’s one in the eye for Vermishank.”

At the sound of the name, Isaac felt himself spasm. Of course, a part of his mind thought, calmly. Makes sense that he’d be in on this. Another part of him was screaming internally. The strands of his life were throttling him like some unforgiving net.

“What’s Vermishank got to do with this?” he said carefully. He saw Derkhan look at him sharply. She did not recognize the name, but she could tell that he did.

“He’s the boss,” said Barbile, surprised. “He’s the head of the project.”

“But he’s a bio-thaumaturge, not a zoologist, not a theorist . . . Why’s he in charge?”

“Bio-thaumaturgy’s his specialism, not his only area. He’s mainly an administrator. He’s in charge of all the biohazard stuff: Remaking, experimental weapons, hunter organisms, diseases . . .”

Vermishank was in charge of sciences at the University of New Crobuzon. It was a high-profile, prestigious position. It would be unthinkable to award such an honour to someone antagonistic to the government: that was obvious. But Isaac realized now that he had underestimated Vermishank’s involvement with the state. He was more than just a yes-man.

“Vermishank sold off the . . . slake-moths?” Isaac said. Barbile nodded. A wind had picked up outside, and the shutters were rattling and banging violently. Mr. X looked around at the noise. No one else took their attention from Barbile.

“I was in touch with Flex because I thought it wasn’t right,” she said. “But something happened . . . the moths are out. They’ve escaped. Gods only know how.” I know how, thought Isaac grimly. It was me. “Do you know what it means that they’re out? We’re all . . . we’re going to be hunted. And the militia must’ve read Runagate Rampant and . . . and thought that Flex had something to do with it . . . and if they think Flex did then soon . . . soon they’ll think that I did . . .” Barbile began to snivel again and Derkhan looked away in disgust, thinking of Ben.

Mr. X walked over to the window to rearrange the shutters.

“So, look . . .” Isaac tried to collate his thoughts. There were a hundred thousand things he wanted to ask, but one was absolutely pressing. “So Dr. Barbile . . . how do we catch them?”

Barbile looked up at him and began to shake her head. She glanced up briefly, between Isaac and Derkhan who loomed over her like anxious parents, past Lemuel who stood to the side, studiously ignoring her. Her eyes found Mr. X, who was standing by the uncovered window. He had opened it a little, was reaching out to pull in the shutters.

He was standing quite still, looking out.

Magesta Barbile looked over his shoulder at a flickering wash of midnight colours.

Her eyes glazed. Her voice froze.

Something was battering at the window, trying to reach the light.

Barbile rose, as Lemuel and Isaac and Derkhan flocked to her in concern, asking what was wrong, unable to understand her little cries. Her hand rose, shaking, to point to the paralysed figure of Mr. X.

“Oh Jabber . . .” she whispered. “Oh dear Jabber, it’s found me, it’s tasted me . . .”

And then she shrieked, and spun on her heels.

“The mirror!” she screamed as she did so. “Look in the mirror!”

Her tone was fraught and utterly commanding. They obeyed her. She spoke with such desperate authority that not one of them succumbed to the instinct to turn and see.

The four of them gazed into the mirror behind the tattered sofa. They watched transfixed.

Mr. X was stepping backwards with the mindless tramp of a zombie.

Behind him, there was a dark flurry of colour. A terrible shape squeezed and folded in on itself to push its organic folds and spines and bulk through the little window. A blunt eyeless head poked itself through the opening and turned slowly from side to side. The impression was of an impossible birth. The thing that loomed through the space in the glass had made itself small and intricate by contracting in invisible, impossible directions. It shimmered unreally under the strain, hauling its glistening carcass through the opening, arms emerging from its dark bulk to push and strain against the window frame.

Behind the glass those half-hidden wings boiled.

The creature pushed suddenly and the window disintegrated. There was only a small, dry sound, as if the air was leeched of substance. Nuggets of glass sprayed the room.

Isaac watched, transfixed. He trembled.

At the edge of his vision he saw Derkhan and Lemuel and Barbile in the same state. This is madness! he thought. We’ve got to get out of here! He reached out and plucked at Derkhan’s sleeve, began to pick his way towards the door.

Barbile seemed paralysed. Lemuel pulled at her.

None of them knew why she had said to look in the mirror, but none of them turned around.

And then as they faltered towards the door, they froze again, because the thing in the room stood.

In a sudden flowering motion it rose behind them, filling the mirror into which they gazed, aghast.

They could see the back of Mr. X, who stood and gazed at the patterns on those wings, patterns that rolled with hypnagogic haste, the colour cells under the creature’s skin pulsing in weird dimensions.

Mr. X stepped back to see the wings better. They could not see his face.

The slake-moth held him in thrall.

It was taller than a bear. A clutch of sharp extrusions like dark cartilaginous whips blossomed from its sides and flickered out towards him. Other, smaller, sharper limbs flexed like claws.

The creature stood on legs like monkey’s arms. Three pairs jutted from its trunk. It stood now bipedally, now on four legs, now on six.

It reared up on its lower legs and a sharp tail slithered forward from between its legs for balance. Its face—

(Always those huge irregular wings, curving in strange directions, shifting in shape to fit the room, each as random and inconstant as oil on water, each a perfect reflection of the other, kept gently moving, their patterns changing, flickering in a seductive tide.)

It had no eyes that they could recognize, only two deep sunken hollows sprouting thick, flexing antennae like stubby fingers, above rows of huge slab-teeth. As Isaac watched, it cocked its head and opened that unimaginable mouth, and from it a huge, prehensile, slavering tongue unrolled.

It waved quickly through the air. Its end was coated in clumps of gossamer alveoli that pulsed as the enormous thing flailed like an elephant’s trunk.

“It’s trying to find me,” wailed Barbile, and broke, and ran for the door.

Instantly the slake-moth flickered its tongue towards the movement. There was a succession of motions far too quick to see. Some cruel organic jag snapped out and passed through Mr. X’s head as if through water. Mr. X shuddered suddenly and just as the blood began to well explosively through the sliced bone the slake-moth reached out with four of its arms, pulled him briefly closer and hurled him across the room.

He flew through the air trailing gore and bone-shards like a comet. He died before he landed.

Mr. X’s carcass slammed into Barbile’s back, sending her sprawling. He landed heavy and lifeless across the door. His eyes were open.

Lemuel, Isaac and Derkhan broke for the door.

They were shouting simultaneously in a cacophony of registers.

Lemuel leapt over Barbile, who lay supine and desperate, trying to kick free of Mr. X’s huge torso. She rolled onto her back and cried out for help. Isaac and Derkhan reached her simultaneously, and began to tug at her arms. Her eyes were tight closed.

But as they pushed Mr. X’s body free and Lemuel kicked it savagely out of the way of the door, a hard, rubbery tentacle snaked into their vision and wrapped with a whiplash motion around Barbile’s feet. She felt it and began to scream.

Derkhan and Isaac pulled hard. There was a moment of resistance, and then the slake-moth yanked at her with its tendril. Barbile was whisked out of Derkhan and Isaac’s grasp with humbling ease. She slid at breakneck speed along the floor, splinters tearing at her.

She began to scream.

Lemuel had forced the door open, and he raced out and away down the stairs without glancing back. Isaac and Derkhan stood quickly. They turned their heads simultaneously to look into the mirror.

Both gave a little cry of horror.

Barbile was squirming and screaming in the complex embrace of the slake-moth. Limbs and folds of flesh caressed her. She wriggled and her arms were held, she kicked out and her legs were pinioned.

The huge creature turned its head gently to one side, seemed to regard her with hunger and curiosity. It emitted tiny, obscene noises.

Its final pair of hands crept up and began to finger Barbile’s eyes. It touched them gently. It began trying to prise them open.

Barbile shrieked and wailed and begged for help, and Isaac and Derkhan stood paralysed, gazing into the mirror, transfixed.

With hands shaking violently, Derkhan reached into her jacket and brought out her pistol, primed and ready. Staring resolutely into the looking-glass, she pointed her gun behind her. Her hand wavered as she desperately sought to aim in this impossible fashion.

Isaac saw what she was doing, and reached quickly for his own gun. He was quicker to pull the trigger.

There was a sharp bang of igniting black powder. The ball burst from his muzzle and passed harmlessly over the slake-moth’s head. The creature did not even look up. Barbile screamed at the sound, and began to beg, eloquently and horrendously, for them to shoot her.

Derkhan set her mouth and tried to steady her arm.

She fired. The slake-moth whirled and its wings shook. It opened that cavernous maw and a foul, strangulated hissing emerged, a whispered shriek. Isaac saw a tiny hole in the papery tissue of the left wing.

Barbile cried out and waited a moment, then realized that she was still alive and began to scream again.

The slake-moth turned on Derkhan. Two of its whip arms flailed across the seven feet separating them and smacked petulantly across her back. There was an almighty cracking sound. Derkhan was thrown through the open door, her breath pushed violently through her lungs. She wailed as she fell.

“Don’t look round!” screamed Isaac. “Go! Go! I’m coming!”

He tried not to hear Barbile begging. He did not have time to reload.

As he made his way slowly for the door, praying that the creature would continue to ignore him, he watched what unfolded in the mirror.

He refused to process it. It was, for now, a mindless slick of images. Later he might consider it, if he left this house alive and found his way home, to his friends, if he survived to plan, he would think on what he was seeing.

But for now he carefully thought of nothing as he saw the slake-moth turn its attention back to the woman held fast in its arms. He thought of nothing as he saw it force open her eyes with slender simian fingers and thumbs, heard her scream until she vomited with fear and then stop all her noises very suddenly as she caught sight of the flexing patterns on the slake-moth’s wings. Saw those wings gently widen and stretch taut into a hypnotic canvas, saw Barbile’s entranced expression as her eyes widened to gaze on those morphing colours; saw her body relax and the slake-moth drool in vile anticipation, its unspeakable tongue unrolling again out of that gaping mouth and snaking its way up Barbile’s saliva-spattered shirt to her face, her eyes still glazed in idiot ecstasy at those wings. Saw the feathered tip of the tongue nuzzle gently against Barbile’s face, her nose, her ears and then shove suddenly, forcefully past her teeth into her mouth (and Isaac retched even as he tried to think of nothing), thrusting at indecent speed into her face, her eyes bulging as more and more of the tongue disappeared into her.

And then Isaac saw something flicker under the skin of her scalp, bulging and wriggling and rippling beneath her hair and flesh like an eel in mud, saw a movement that was not hers behind her eyes, and he watched mucus and tears and ichor pour from the orifices of her head as the tongue wriggled into her mind and just before he fled Isaac saw her eyes dim and go out and the slake-moth’s stomach distend as it drank her dry.

Chapter Thirty-two

Lin was alone.

She sat in the attic, leaning back against a wall with her feet splayed like a doll’s. She watched the dust move. It was dark. The air was warm. It was sometime in the small hours, between two and four.

The night was interminable and unforgiving. Lin could hearfeel vibrations in the air, the tremulous cries and howls of disturbed sleep rocking the city all around her. Her own head felt heavy with portent and menace.

Lin rocked back a little and rubbed her headscarab wearily. She was afraid. She was not so stupid as to not know that something was wrong.

She had arrived at Motley’s some hours before, in the late afternoon of the previous day. As usual, she had been instructed to make her way to the attic. But when she had entered the long, desiccated room, she had been alone.

The sculpture loomed darkly at the far end of the room. After she had looked around, idiotically, as if Motley could be hiding unseen in the bare space, she had walked over to examine the piece. She had supposed, a little uneasily, that Motley would join her soon.

She had stroked the khepri-spit figure. It was half finished. Motley’s various legs had been rendered in curling shapes and hyperreal colours. It terminated about three feet from the floor in drooping, liquid undulations. It looked as if a life-size candle in Motley’s shape had been half burned.

Lin had waited. An hour had passed. She had tried to lift the trapdoor and open the door to the passageway, but both were locked. She had stamped on the one and thumped the other, loudly and repetitively, but there was no response.

There’s some mistake, she had told herself. Motley’s busy, he’ll be along shortly, he’s just tied up, but it was totally unconvincing. Motley was consummate. As a businessman, a thug, a philosopher and a performer.

This delay was no accident. This was deliberate.

Lin did not know why, but Motley wanted her to sit, and sweat, alone.

She sat for hours until her nervousness became fear became boredom became patience, and she drew designs in the dust and opened her case to count her colourberries, again and again. Night came, and still she was left.

Her patience became fear again.

Why is he doing this? she thought. What does he want? This was quite different from Motley’s usual playing, his teases, his dangerous loquacity. This was far more ominous.

And finally, at last, hours after her arrival, she heard a noise.

Motley was in the room, flanked by his cactacae lieutenant and a pair of hulking gladiator Remade. Lin did not know how they had entered. She had been alone seconds before.

She stood and waited. Her hands were clutching.

“Ms. Lin. Thank you for coming,” said Motley from a tumorous cluster of mouths.

She waited.

“Ms. Lin,” he continued. “I had the most interesting conversation with one Lucky Gazid the day before yesterday. I suspect you haven’t seen Mr. Gazid for a while. He’s been working for me incognito. Anyway, as you doubtless know, there’s something of a citywide drought of dreamshit at the moment. Burglary is up. As is mugging. People are desperate. Prices have gone quite mad. There simply isn’t any new dreamshit being released into the city. What all this means is that Mr. Gazid, for whom dreamshit is the current drug of choice, is in rather a state. He can’t afford the merchandise any more, even with an employee’s discount.

“So anyway, the other day I heard him swearing—he was in withdrawal and cursing anyone who’d come near, but this was a bit different. D’you know what he shouted as he gnawed himself? Fascinating. It was something along the lines of ‘I should never have given that ‘shit to Isaac!’ ”

The cactacae beside Mr. Motley unclasped his massive hands and rubbed his callused green fingers together. He reached up to his uncovered chest, and with a terrible deliberation, he pricked his finger on one of his own spikes, testing its point. His face was impassive.

“Isn’t that interesting, Ms. Lin?” continued Motley with a sickly jauntiness. He began to pace crabwise towards her on his innumerable legs.

What is this? What is this? thought Lin as he approached. There was nowhere for her to hide.

“Now, Ms. Lin. Some very valuable items have been stolen from me. A clutch of little factories, if you like. Hence the lack of dreamshit. And d’you know? I have to admit I’ve been stymied as to who might have done it. Really. I’ve had nothing to go on.” He paused and a tide of icy smiles crossed his multiple features. “Until I heard Gazid. Then it all . . . made . . . sense.” He spat each word.

At some silent signal his cactus vizier strode towards Lin, who cringed and tried to break away, but was too late, as he reached out with his enormous meaty fists and gripped her arms tightly, immobilizing her.

Lin’s headlegs spasmed and she emitted a piercing chymical screech at the pain. Cactacae were usually assiduous in pruning the thorns on the insides of their palms, to better manipulate objects, but this one had let his grow. Clutches of stubby fibrous quills spiked her arms mercilessly.

She was pinioned, and dragged effortlessly before Motley. He leered at her. When he spoke again his voice was thick with threat.

“Your bugfucking lover has tried to screw me, hasn’t he, Ms. Lin? Buying up great swathes of my dreamshit, keeping his own moths, so Gazid tells me, and then stealing mine.” He roared the last words, trembling.

Lin could hardly think over the pain in her arms but she desperately tried to sign from her hip: No no no it’s not like that it’s not like that . . .

Motley slapped her hands down.

“Don’t fucking try it, you bug-head bitch, you cross-whore, you slut. Your scum-sucking man’s been trying to squeeze me out of my own fucking market. Well, that’s a very, very dangerous game.” He backed away a little and regarded her as she writhed.

“We are going to bring Mr. der Grimnebulin in to account for his theft. D’you think he’ll come if we offer him you?”

Blood was stiffening the arms of Lin’s shirt. She tried again to sign.

“You’ll get a chance to explain yourself, Ms. Lin,” said Motley, calm again. “Maybe you’re a partner in crime, maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s bad luck for you, I must say. I will not be letting this go.” He watched her try desperately to tell him, to explain, to squirm her way free.

Her arms were seizing up. The cactus was rendering her dumb. As she felt her head dull with the constricting pain, she heard Mr. Motley’s whisper.

“I am not a forgiving man.”

Outside the University Science Faculty, the quad thronged with students. Many were wearing the regulation black gowns: a few rebellious souls slung them over their arms as they left the building.

Among the tide of figures were two motionless men. They stood leaning against the tree, ignoring the sap that stuck to them. It was humid, and one man was dressed incongruously in a long coat and dark hat.

They stood without moving for a long time. One class ended, and then another. The men saw two cycles of students come and go. Occasionally one or the other would rub his eyes, stretch his face a little. Always he would return his apparently casual attention to the main entrance.

Finally, as the afternoon shadows began to stretch out, the men moved. Their target appeared. Montague Vermishank stepped from the building and sniffed the air gingerly, as if he knew he should enjoy it. He began to remove his jacket, then stopped and pulled it back around him. He set off into Ludmead.

The men below the tree stepped out from under the leaves and sauntered after their prey.

It was a busy day. Vermishank headed north, looking around him for a cab. He wound up Tench Way, Ludmead’s most bohemian thoroughfare, where progressive academics held court in cafés and bookshops. The buildings of Ludmead were old and well preserved, their façades scrubbed and freshly painted. Vermishank ignored them. He had walked this way for years. He was oblivious to his surroundings, and to his pursuers.

A four-wheel cab appeared through the crowd, pulled by some uncomfortable shaggy biped from the northern tundra that paced its way through the rubbish on back-bent legs like a bird’s. Vermishank raised his arm. The cabdriver attempted to manoeuvre his vehicle towards him. Vermishank’s pursuers sped up.

“Monty,” boomed the larger man and slapped his shoulder. Vermishank turned in alarm.

“Isaac,” he faltered. His eyes darted around him, sought the cab, which was still approaching.

“How are you, old son?” yelled Isaac in his left ear, and underneath it, Vermishank heard another voice hissing in his right.

“The thing poking your stomach is a knife and I will gut you like a fucking fish if you even breathe in a way I don’t like.”

“So glad to bump into you,” howled Isaac jocularly, waving the cab over. The driver muttered and approached.

“Try to run and I will cut you and if you get out of my hands I will shoot a bullet into your brain,” the voice crooned with loathing.

“Come and have a drink at mine,” said Isaac. “Brock Marsh, please driver. Paddler Way, you know it? Handsome beast, by the way.” Isaac kept up a stream of loud nonsense as he swung into the closed carriage. Vermishank followed, shaking and stuttering, goaded by the sting of the blade. Lemuel Pigeon followed him in and slammed the door shut, then sat looking straight forward holding the knife at Vermishank’s side.

The driver pulled away from the kerb. The creaking and rattling and complaining bleats of the animal cocooned the three men in the cab.

Isaac turned to Vermishank with the exaggerated delight gone from his face.

“You have a lot of talking to do, you evil cunt,” he hissed menacingly.

His prisoner was visibly regaining his poise second by second.

“Isaac,” he murmured. “Hah. How can I help you?”

He started as Lemuel jabbed him.

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

“Shut my mouth and do a lot of talking, Isaac?” mused Vermishank smoothly, then yelped incredulously as Isaac struck him, hard and suddenly. He gazed at him astonished, gingerly stroking his stinging face.

“I tell you when to talk,” said Isaac.

They were silent the rest of the journey, swaying south past Lud Fallow Station and over the sluggish Canker at Danechi’s Bridge. Isaac paid the driver as Lemuel hustled Vermishank into the warehouse.

Inside, David glowered from his desk, half turning to watch the proceedings. His russet waistcoat was incongruously cheerful. Yagharek skulked in a corner, half visible. His feet were wrapped in rags and his head was hidden in a hood. He had discarded the wooden wings. He was not disguised as whole, but as a human.

Derkhan looked up from an armchair she had pulled into the middle of the back wall, below the window. She was crying fiercely and without a sound. She was clutching a handful of newspapers. Front pages were strewn around her. “Midsummer Nightmares Spread,” said one, and another asked “What Has Happened to Sleep?” Derkhan ignored these pages, cutting out another minor story from page five or seven or eleven in each paper. Isaac could read one from where he stood: “Eyespy Killer Claims Criminal Editor.”

The cleaning construct hissed and whirred and clanked its way around the room, clearing the rubbish, sweeping up the dust, collecting the old papers and fruit debris that littered the floor. Sincerity the badger meandered listlessly along the far wall.

Lemuel shoved Vermishank into the middle of three chairs by the door and sat a few feet from him. Ostentatiously he drew out his pistol and aimed it at Vermishank’s head.

Isaac locked the door.

“Right, Vermishank,” he said in a businesslike fashion. He sat and stared at his former boss. “Lemuel is a very good shot, in case you have adventurous ideas. He’s a bit of a villain, actually. Bit dangerous. And I am not in any kind of mood to defend you, so I recommend you tell us what we want to know.”

“What do you want to know, Isaac?” said Vermishank smoothly. Isaac was enraged, but impressed. The man was damn good at regaining and retaining his aplomb.

That, Isaac decided, would have to be dealt with.

Isaac stood and stalked over to Vermishank. The older man looked up at him idly, his eyes only widening in alarm too late as he realized that Isaac was going to hit him again.

Isaac punched Vermishank in the face twice, ignoring his old boss’s squawk of pain and astonishment. Isaac gripped Vermishank by the throat and lowered himself into a squat, bringing his face next to his terrified prisoner’s. Vermishank was bleeding from his nose, and scrabbling ineffectually at Isaac’s massive hands. His eyes were glazed with terror.

“I don’t think you understand the situation, old son,” whispered Isaac with loathing. “I have sound reason to believe that you’re responsible for my friend lying upstairs shitting himself and drooling. I am not in any mood for sodding around, playing games, going by rules. I don’t care if you live, Vermishank. D’you understand? Are you with me? So here’s the best way of doing this. I tell you what we know—don’t waste my time asking how we know it—and you fill in what we don’t. Every time you don’t answer or the consensus here is that you’re lying, either Lemuel or I will hurt you.”

“You can’t torture me, you bastard . . .” hissed Vermishank in a strangulated wheeze.

“Fuck you,” breathed Isaac. “You’re the Remaker. Now . . . answer the questions or die.”

“Possibly both,” added Lemuel coldly.

“See, you’re wrong, Monty,” continued Isaac. “We can torture you. That’s exactly what we can do. So best to co-operate. Answer quickly, and convince me you ain’t lying. Here’s what we know. Correct me if I’m wrong, by the way, won’t you?” He sneered at Vermishank.

There was a pause as Isaac ran through the facts in his head. Then he spoke them, ticking each item off on his fingers.

“You’re in charge of biohazardous stuff for the government. That means the slake-moth programme.” He looked up for a reaction, some surprise that the secret of the project was out. Vermishank was motionless. “The slake-moths have escaped—the slake-moths that you sold to some fucking criminal. They have something to do with dreamshit, and with the . . . with the nightmares that everyone’s having. Rudgutter thought they were something to do with Benjamin Flex—wrongly, incidentally.

“Now, what we need to know is the following. What are they? What’s the connection with the drug? How do we catch them?”

There was a pause as Vermishank sighed lengthily. His lips were trembling wetly, slick with blood and saliva, but he gave a little smile. Lemuel wagged the gun to chivvy him along.

“Hah. Slake-moths,” breathed Vermishank eventually. He swallowed and massaged his neck. “Well. Aren’t they fascinating? Amazing species.”

“What are they?” said Isaac.

“What do you mean? You’ve clearly found out that much. They are predators. Efficient, brilliant predators.”

“Where are they from?”

“Hah.” Vermishank pondered a moment. He glanced up as Lemuel lazily and ostentatiously began to aim his gun at Vermishank’s knee. Vermishank continued quickly. “We got the grubs from a merchant on one of the southernmost of the Shards—it must have been on their arrival that you stole one—but they aren’t native to there.” He looked up at Isaac with what looked like amusement. “If you really want to know, the current favourite theory is that they come from the Fractured Land.”

“Don’t fuck about . . .” shouted Isaac in rage, but Vermishank interrupted him.

“I am not, you fool. That is the favoured hypothesis. Fractured Land theory has been given a powerful boost in some circles by the discovery of the slake-moths.”

“How do they hypnotize people?”

“Wings—of unstable dimensions and shapes, beating as they do in various planes—stuffed with oneirochromatophores. Colour-cells like those in an octopus’s skin, sensitive to and affecting psychic resonances and subconscious patterns. They tap the frequencies of the dreams that are . . . ah . . . bubbling under the surface of the sentient mind. They focus them, draw them out into the surface. Hold them still.”

“How does a mirror protect you?”

“Good question, Isaac.” Vermishank’s manner was changing. He sounded more and more as if he was giving a seminar. Even in a situation like this, realized Isaac, the didactic instinct was strong in the old bureaucrat. “We simply don’t know. We’ve done all manner of experiments, with double-mirrors, treble-mirrors and so on. We don’t know why, but seeing them reflected negates the effect, even though it is formally an identical sight, as their wings are already mirrored in each other. But, and this is very interesting, reflect it again—look at them through two mirrors, I mean, like a periscope—and they can hypnotize you again. Isn’t that extraordinary?” He smiled.

Isaac paused. There was, he realized, something almost urgent about Vermishank’s manner. He seemed anxious to leave nothing out. It must have been Lemuel’s unwavering pistol.

“I’ve . . . seen one of these things feeding . . .” said Isaac. “I saw it . . . eat someone’s brain.”

“Hah.” Vermishank shook his head appreciatively. “Astonishing. You are lucky to be here. You did not see it eat anyone’s brain. Slake-moths don’t live entirely in our plane. Their . . . ah . . . nutritional needs are met by substances that we cannot measure. Don’t you see, Isaac?” Vermishank gazed at him intently, like a teacher trying to encourage the right answer from a petulant pupil. The urgency flashed again in his eyes. “I know biology’s not your strong point, but it’s such an . . . elegant mechanism, I thought you might see it. They draw the dreams out with their wings, flood the mind, break the dykes that hold back hidden thoughts, guilty thoughts, anxieties, delights, dreams . . .” He stopped. Sat back. Composed himself.

“And then,” he continued, “when the mind is nice and juicy . . . they suck it dry. The subconscious is their nectar, Isaac, don’t you see? That is why they only feed on the sentient. No cats or dogs for them. They drink the peculiar brew that results from self-reflexive thought, when the instincts and needs and desires and intuitions are folded in on themselves and we reflect on our thoughts and then reflect on the reflection, endlessly . . .” Vermishank’s voice was hushed. “Our thoughts ferment like the purest liquor. That is what the slake-moths drink, Isaac. Not the meat-calories slopping about in the brainpan, but the fine wine of sapience and sentience itself, the subconscious.

“Dreams.”

The room was silent. The idea was stunning. Everyone seemed to reel at the notion. Vermishank seemed almost to be revelling in the effect his revelations were having.

Everyone started at a clanging sound. It was just the construct, busy vacuuming the rubbish beside David’s desk. It had tried to empty the bin into its receptacle, had slightly missed and spilled the contents. It was busy trying to clear up the pieces of crumpled paper that surrounded it.

“And . . . Dammit, of course!” Isaac breathed. “That’s what the nightmares are! They . . . it’s like fertilizer! Like, I don’t know, rabbit-shit, that feeds the plants that feed the rabbits . . . It’s a little chain, a little ecosystem . . .”

“Hah. Quite,” said Vermishank. “You are thinking at last. You can’t see slake-moth faeces, or smell it, but you can sense it. In your dreams. It feeds them, makes them boil. And then the slake-moth feeds on them. A perfect loop.”

“How do you know all this, you swine?” breathed Derkhan. “How long have you been working on these monsters?”

“Slake-moths are very rare. And a state secret. That is why we were so excited about our little clutch of the things. We had one old, dying specimen, then received four new grubs. Isaac had one, of course. The original, that had fed our little caterpillars, died. We were debating whether to open the cocoon of another during its change, killing it but gleaning invaluable knowledge of its metamorphic state, but before we had decided, regrettably,” he sighed, “we had to sell all four. They were an excessive risk. The word came that our research was taking too long, that our failure to control the specimens was making the . . . ah . . . paymasters nervous. Funding was withdrawn, and our department had to pay its debts quickly, given the failure of our project.”

“Which was what?” hissed Isaac. “Weapons? Torture?”

“Oh, really, Isaac,” said Vermishank calmly. “Look at you, stiff with moral outrage. If you hadn’t stolen one of them in the first place, it would never have escaped, and it would never have freed its fellows—which is what must have happened, you realize—and think how many innocent people would have lived.”

Isaac stared at him aghast.

“Fuck you!” he screamed. He rose and would have leapt at Vermishank had Lemuel not spoken.

“Isaac,” he said curtly, and Isaac saw that Lemuel’s gun was trained on him. “Vermishank is being very co-operative and there’s more we need to know. Right?”

Isaac stared at him, nodded and sat.

“Why are you being so helpful, Vermishank?” asked Lemuel, returning his gaze to the older man.

Vermishank shrugged.

“I do not relish the idea of pain,” he said with a little simper. “In addition to which, although you will not like this . . . it will do you no good. You cannot catch them. You cannot evade the militia. Why would I hold back?” He gave a smug, loathsome grin.

And yet his eyes were nervous, his upper lip sweating. There was a forlorn note buried deep in his throat.

Godspit! thought Isaac with a sudden shock of realization. He sat up and stared at Vermishank. That is not all! He . . . he’s telling us because he’s afraid! He doesn’t think the government can catch them . . . and he’s afraid. He wants us to succeed!

Isaac wanted to taunt Vermishank with this, to wave the knowledge of his weakness at him, to punish him for all his crimes . . . but he would not risk it. If Isaac were to antagonize him too flagrantly, to confront him with an understanding of his fear that Isaac doubted Vermishank himself possessed, then the vile man might withdraw all his help out of spite.

If he needed to think he was crowing to beg for help, then Isaac would let him.

“What is dreamshit?” said Isaac.

“Dreamshit?” Vermishank smiled, and Isaac remembered the last time he had asked Vermishank that question and the man had affected disgust, had refused to sully his mouth with the foul word.

It came easy to him now.

“Hah. Dreamshit is baby food. It is what the moths feed their young. They exude it all the time, but in great quantities when they are parenting. They are not like other moths: they’re very caring. They nurture their eggs assiduously, by all accounts, and suckle the newborn caterpillars. Only in their adolescence, when they pupate, can they feed themselves.”

Derkhan interjected.

“Are you saying that dreamshit is slake-moth milk?”

“Exactly. The caterpillars cannot yet digest purely psychic food. It must be imbibed in quasi-physical form. The liquid the moths exude is thick with distilled dreams.”

“And that’s why some fucking druglord bought them? Who was it?” Derkhan’s mouth curled.

“I have no idea. I merely suggested the deal. Which of the bidders was successful is irrelevant to me. One has to husband the moths carefully, stud them regularly, milk them. Like cows. They can be manipulated—by someone who knows what they’re doing—fooled into exuding milk without having born grubs. And the milk has to be processed, of course. No human, or any other sentient race, could drink it neat. It would instantly explode their mind. The inelegantly named dreamshit has been rendered and . . . ah . . . cut with various substances . . . Which incidentally, Isaac, means that the caterpillar you raised—that I presume you fed on dreamshit—must have grown into a less than healthy moth. It is as if you fed a human baby milk laced with large quantities of sawdust and pondwater.”

“How do you know all this?” hissed Derkhan.

Vermishank looked at her blankly.

“How do you know how many mirrors it takes to make you safe, how do you know they turn the minds they . . . they eat into that . . . milk . . . ? How many people have you fed to them?”

Vermishank pursed his lips, a little perturbed.

“I am a scientist,” he said. “I use the means at my disposal. On occasion, criminals are sentenced to death. The manner of their death is not specified . . .”

“You swine . . .” she hissed viciously. “What about all the people the dealers take to feed them, to make the drug . . . ?” she continued, but Isaac cut her off.

“Vermishank,” he said softly, and stared at the other man. “How do we get their minds back? The ones who’ve been taken.”

“Back?” Vermishank seemed genuinely baffled. “Ah . . .” He shook his head and furrowed his eyes. “You cannot.”

“Don’t lie to me . . .” screamed Isaac, thinking of Lublamai.

“They have been drunk,” hissed Vermishank, and brought silence quickly to the room. He waited.

“They have been drunk,” he said again. “Their thoughts have been taken, their dreams—their conscious and subconscious—have been burnt up in the moths’ stomachs, have trickled out again to feed the grubs. Have you taken dreamshit, Isaac? Any of you?” No one, least of all Isaac, would answer him. “If you have, you have dreamed them, the victims, the prey. You have had their metabolized minds slip into your stomach and you have dreamed them. There is nothing left to save. There is nothing to get back.”

Isaac felt absolute despair.

Take his body too, he thought, Jabber, don’t be cruel, don’t leave me with that fucking shell that I can’t let die, that means nothing . . .

“How do we kill the slake-moths?” he hissed.

Vermishank smiled, very slowly.

“You cannot,” he said.

“Don’t bullshit me,” hissed Isaac. “Everything that lives can die . . .”

“You misunderstand me. As an abstract proposition of course they can die. And therefore, theoretically, they can be killed. But you will not be able to kill them. They live in several planes, as I’ve said, and bullets, fire, and so forth injure only in one. You would have to hit them in many dimensions at once, or do the most extraordinary amount of damage in this one, and they will not give you the chance . . . Do you understand?”

“So let’s think laterally . . .” said Isaac. He batted his temples hard with the heels of his hands. “What about a biological control? Predators . . .”

“They have none. They are at the top of their food chain. We’re fairly sure that there are animals, in their native land, that are capable of killing them, but there are none within several thousand miles of here. And anyway, if we’re right, to unleash them would be to usher doom more quickly onto New Crobuzon.”

“Dear Jabber,” breathed Isaac. “Without predators or competitors, with a massive supply of food, fresh and constantly replenished . . . There’ll be no stopping them.”

“And that,” whispered Vermishank hesitantly, “is before we’ve even considered what’ll happen if they . . . They are still young, you understand. They are not fully mature. But soon, when the nights become hot . . . We have to consider what might happen when they breed . . .”

The room seemed to go still and cold. Again Vermishank tried to control his face, but again, Isaac saw the raw fear inside him. Vermishank was terrified. He knew what was at stake.

A little way away, the construct was rotating, hissing and clattering. It seemed to be leaking dust and dirt, and moving in random directions trailing a stiff litter-spike behind it. Broken again, thought Isaac, and turned his attention back on Vermishank.

“When will they breed?” he hissed.

Vermishank licked the sweat from his upper lip.

“They are hermaphrodites, I am told. We’ve never observed them mating or seen them lay eggs. We only know what we’ve been told. They come into heat in the back half of the summer. One designated egg-layer. Around about Sinn, Octuary. Usually. Usually, that is.”

“Come on! There must be something we can do!” shouted Isaac. “Don’t tell me Rudgutter’s got nothing in mind . . .”

“I’m not privy to that. I mean, of course I know they’ve plans. Why, yes. But what they are I simply can’t say. I have . . .” Vermishank hesitated.

“What?” yelled Isaac.

“I have heard that they approached dæmons.” No one said a word. Vermishank swallowed and continued. “And were refused help. Even at the highest bribery.”

“Why?” hissed Derkhan.

“Because the dæmons were afraid.” Vermishank licked his lips. The fear that he was trying to keep hidden became visible again. “Do you understand that? They were afraid. Because for all their power and their presence . . . they think as we do. They are sentient, sapient. And as far as the slake-moths are concerned . . . they are therefore prey.”

Everyone in the room was still. The pistol sagged in Lemuel’s hand, but Vermishank made no attempt to run, lost as he was in his own miserable reverie.

“What are we going to do?” said Isaac. His voice was not quite steady.

The grating sound of the construct grew stronger. The thing spun for a moment on its central wheel. Its cleaning arms were extended and clattered against the ground in staccato motion. Derkhan, then Isaac and David and the others looked up at it.

“I can’t think with that fucking thing in the room!” yelled Isaac, enraged. He strode over, ready to take out his impotence and his fear on the construct. As he approached it, it spun to face him with its glass iris and its two main arms extended suddenly, an errant piece of paper on the end of one. The construct looked disorientingly like a person with outstretched arms. Isaac blinked and continued towards it.

Its right arm stabbed down at the floor and the rubbish and dust it had strewn idiotically in its path. It jerked down again and again, violently tapping at the wooden boards. Its left limb, with its broom end, jerked out to block Isaac’s path, slowing him and wagging, he realized with utter astonishment, to hold his attention, and then its right, a litter-skewer, jerked down once more to point at the floor.

At the dust. In which was scrawled a message.

The point of the skewer had traced its way through the dirt and even scored the wood itself. The words it had scribbled in the rubbish were shaky and uncertain, but entirely legible.

You are betrayed.

Isaac gaped at the construct in complete consternation. It waved its litter-spike at him, the scrap of paper on the end whipping back and forth.

The others had not yet read what was written on the floor, but they could tell from Isaac’s face and the extraordinary behaviour of the construct that something strange was happening. They were standing, gazing curiously.

“What is it, Isaac?” said Derkhan.

“I . . . I don’t know . . .” he murmured. The construct seemed agitated, by turn tapping at the message on the floor and flailing the paper on its spike. Isaac reached out, his mouth wide with amazement, and the construct held its arm still. Gingerly, Isaac plucked the crumpled paper from it.

As he smoothed it out, David leapt up suddenly, horrified and aghast. He rushed across the room.

“Isaac,” he shouted. “Wait . . .” But Isaac had already opened the paper, his eyes had already widened in horror at what was written. His mouth grew slack at the enormity of it, but before he could emit a shout Vermishank moved.

Lemuel had been caught up with the bizarre drama of the construct, his eyes had left his quarry, and Vermishank had seen it. Everyone in the room was staring at Isaac as he fumbled with the rubbish the construct had handed him. Vermishank leapt up from the chair and bolted for the door.

He had forgotten it was locked. When he yanked at it and it would not open, he cried out in undignified panic. Behind him, David peeled away from Isaac and backed towards Vermishank and the door. Isaac spun on his heel towards them, still clutching the paper. He glared at David and Vermishank in lunatic hatred. Lemuel had seen his error, was bringing his pistol to bear on Vermishank when Isaac moved threateningly towards the prisoner, blocking Lemuel’s line of fire.

“Isaac,” shouted Lemuel, “move!”

Vermishank saw that Derkhan had leapt to her feet, that David was cringing away from Isaac, that the hooded man in the other corner was standing with legs spread and arms out in a weirdly predatory fashion. Lemuel was invisible to Vermishank, behind the looming threat of Isaac.

Isaac looked from Vermishank to David, his eyes oscillating back and forth. He waved the paper.

“Isaac,” Lemuel screamed again. “Get out of the fucking way!”

But Isaac could not hear or speak for rage. There was a cacophony. Everyone in the room was yelling, demanding to know what was on the paper, begging for a clear shot, growling in rage or keening like a great bird.

Isaac seemed to be debating which of David or Vermishank to grab. David was breaking down, begging Isaac to listen to him. With a last desperate pointless tug at the door, Vermishank turned and defended himself.

He was, after all, a highly trained bio-thaumaturge. He babbled an incantation and flexed the invisible, occult muscles he had developed in his arms. He hooked his hand at the arcane energy that made the veins of his forearm stand out like snakes beneath the skin, made his skin twitch and tighten.

Isaac’s shirt was half undone, and Vermishank plunged his right hand through the uncovered flesh below Isaac’s neck.

Isaac bellowed in rage and pain as his tissue gave like thick clay. It became malleable under Vermishank’s trained hands.

Vermishank dug inelegantly through the unwilling flesh. He gripped and ungripped his fingers to grab hold of a rib. Isaac grabbed hold of Vermishank’s wrist and held it. His face was set in a grimace. He was stronger, but pain was disabling him.

Vermishank was wailing as they wrestled. “Let me go!” he screamed. He had had no plan, had struck out in fear of his life and found himself committed to a murderous attack. It could not be undone. He could do nothing but scrabble for purchase inside Isaac’s chest.

Behind them, David fumbled for his key.

Isaac could not pull Vermishank’s fingers from his chest, and Vermishank could not push them any further in. They stood, swaying, tugging at each other. Behind them the confusion of voices continued. Lemuel had stood, had kicked away his chair and was feinting to find a vantage point for a clean shot. Derkhan ran over and pulled violently at Vermishank’s arms, but the terrified man curled his fingers around the bones of Isaac’s chest, and with every pull Isaac screamed in pain. Blood was spurting from Isaac’s skin, from the imperfect seals where Vermishank’s fingers punctured his flesh.

Vermishank and Isaac and Derkhan wrestled and howled, spraying blood across the floor, fouling Sincerity, who bolted away. Lemuel reached over Isaac’s shoulder to shoot, but Vermishank tugged Isaac around like some grotesque glove puppet, knocking the pistol out of Lemuel’s hand. It hit the floor some feet away, scattering its black powder. Lemuel swore and dug urgently for a powder-case.

Suddenly a shrouded figure stood by the clumsy fighting trio. Yagharek threw back his hood. Vermishank stared into his hard round eyes, opened his mouth at the garuda’s great predatory birdface. But before he could speak, Yagharek had plunged his vicious curved beak into the flesh of Vermishank’s right arm.

He tore through the muscle and tendons with speed and vigour. Vermishank shrieked as his arm blossomed with ragged flesh and blood. He snapped his hand back, withdrawing it from Isaac’s flesh, which resealed imperfectly with a wet snap. Isaac growled with agony and stroked his chest. It was slick with blood, the surface misshapen, pocked and still bleeding from Vermishank’s hand.

Derkhan had her arms around Vermishank’s neck. As Vermishank clutched the bleeding ruins of his forearm, she hurled him away from her into the centre of the room. The construct rolled out of Vermishank’s way as he staggered and fell, fouling the boards with gore, screaming.

Lemuel had primed his pistol again. Vermishank caught sight of him aiming and opened his mouth to beg, to wail. He held his bloody arm up, trembling, supplicating.

Lemuel pulled the trigger. There was a cavernous cracking sound and an explosion of acrid gunpowder. Vermishank’s cry stopped instantly. The ball hit him right between the eyes, a textbook shot from close enough range to pass through him and take the back of his head off in an efflorescence of dark blood.

He fell back, his broken skull smacking dully on the old boards.

The particles of gunpowder spun and tumbled slowly. Vermishank’s carcass shuddered.

Isaac leant back against the wall and swore. He pressed his chest, seemed to smooth it down. He fumbled at it in an ineffectual attempt to repair the cosmetic damage Vermishank’s intrusive fingers had done.

He emitted livid barks of pain.

“Godsdamn!” he spat, and eyed Vermishank’s body with loathing.

Lemuel held his pistol idly. Derkhan was trembling. Yagharek had withdrawn, stood watching the proceedings, his features dim once more in the shadows of the hood.

No one spoke. The fact of Vermishank’s murder filled the room. There was unease and shock, but no recrimination. No one wished him alive again.

“Yag, old son,” croaked Isaac eventually. “I owe you.” The garuda did not acknowledge him.

“We have to . . . we have to get this out of here,” said Derkhan urgently, kicking Vermishank’s corpse. “They’ll be looking for him soon.”

“That’s the least of our worries,” said Isaac. He held out his right hand. He still held the paper he had taken from the construct, now bloodstained. “David’s gone,” he observed, pointing at the unlocked door. He looked around. “He’s taken Sincerity,” he said, his face curling. He threw the paper to Derkhan. As she unfolded it, Isaac stomped over towards the skittering construct.

Derkhan read the note. Her face hardened in disgust and outrage. She held it up so that Lemuel could read it. After a moment, Yagharek stalked over and read it over Lemuel’s shoulder, from inside his hood.

Serachin. Further to our meeting. Enclosed is payment and instructions. Der Grimnebulin and associates will be brought to justice on Chainday 8th Tathis. The militia will apprehend him at his residence at 9 o’clock in the evening. You are to ensure that der Grimnebulin and all working with him are present from 6 o’clock onwards. You will be present during the raid, to avoid suspicion falling upon you. Our agents have seen heliotypes of you, in addition to which you are to wear red. Our officers will do everything possible to avoid casualties, but this cannot be guaranteed, and your clear self-identification is crucial.

Sally.

Lemuel blinked, looked up.

“It’s today,” he said, and blinked again. “Chainday’s today. They’re coming.”

Chapter Thirty-three

Isaac ignored Lemuel. He was standing directly in front of the construct, which moved almost uneasily before his intense gaze.

“How did you know, Isaac?” shouted Derkhan, and Isaac raised his finger and jerked it at the construct.

“I was tipped off. David betrayed us,” he whispered. “My mate. Been on a hundred damn benders with him, done drinking, done riots . . . the fuck sold me out. And I got tipped off by a damn construct.” He poked his face right into the construct’s lens. “You understand me?” he whispered incredulously. “You with me? You . . . wait, you’ve got audio inputs, haven’t you? Turn around . . . turn if you understand me . . .”

Lemuel and Derkhan glanced at each other.

“Isaac, mate,” said Lemuel witheringly, but his words petered out into astonished silence.

Slowly, deliberately, the construct was turning around.

“What the fuck is it doing?” hissed Derkhan.

Isaac turned to her.

“I’ve no idea,” he hissed. “I’ve heard of this, but I didn’t know it could actually happen. It’s had some virus, hasn’t it? CI . . . Constructed Intelligence . . . I can’t believe it’s real . . .”

He turned back and gazed at the construct. Derkhan and Lemuel approached it, as, after a moment’s hesitation, did Yagharek.

“It’s impossible,” said Isaac suddenly. “It doesn’t have an intricate enough engine for independent thought. It is impossible.”

The construct lowered its pointer and backed away to a nearby pile of dust. It dragged its spike through it, and spelt out clearly: It is.

At the sight, the three humans hissed and gasped.

“What the fuck . . . ?” yelled Isaac. “You can read and write . . . you . . .” He shook his head, then looked up at the construct, hard and cold again in a moment. “How did you know?” he said. “And why did you warn me?”

It was quickly clear, however, that this was an explanation that would have to wait. As Isaac waited intently, Lemuel glanced up at the clock and started nervously. It was late.

It took a minute, but Lemuel and Derkhan convinced Isaac that they had better flee the workshop now with the construct. They had better act on the information they had been given, even if they didn’t understand where it had come from.

Isaac protested weakly, tugging at the construct. He denounced David to Hell, then marvelled at the construct’s intelligence. He screamed rage and cast an analytical eye on the transformed cleaning engine. He was confused. Derkhan’s and Lemuel’s urgent insistence that they must move infected him.

“Yes, David is a godsdamn shit. And yes, the construct is a godsdamn miracle, Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “but it’s going to be a wasted one if we don’t leave now.”

And in an infuriating, tantalizing end to the matter, the construct spread the dust out again as Isaac watched, and carefully scrawled: Later.

Lemuel thought quickly.

“There’s a place I know up in Gidd where we can go,” he decided. “It’ll do for tonight, and then we can make plans.” Derkhan and he moved quickly around the room, gathering useful items into bags they pilfered from David’s cupboards. It was clear they would not be able to return.

Isaac stood numb by the wall. His mouth was slightly open. His eyes were glazed. He shook his head incredulously.

Lemuel glanced up and saw him.

“Isaac,” he yelled. “Go and sort your shit out. We’ve less than an hour. We are leaving. Get off your arse.”

Isaac looked up, nodded peremptorily and stomped up the stairs, to stop and stand still again at the top. His expression was of bemused and miserable disbelief.

After some seconds, Yagharek came silently after him. He stood behind Isaac and peeled back his hood.

“Grimnebulin,” he whispered as softly as his avian throat allowed. “You are thinking of your friend David.”

Isaac turned sharply.

“No fucking friend of mine,” he countered.

“And yet he was. You are thinking of the betrayal.”

Isaac said nothing for several moments. Then he nodded. The look of horrified astonishment returned.

“I know betrayal, Grimnebulin,” whistled Yagharek. “I know it well. I am . . . sorry for you.”

Isaac turned away and walked brusquely to his laboratory space, began shoving bits and pieces of wire and ceramic and glass seemingly at random into a huge carpet bag. He strapped it, bulky and clanking, to his back.

“When were you betrayed, Yag?” he demanded.

“I was not. I betrayed.” Isaac stopped and turned to him. “I know what David has done. And I am sorry.”

Isaac stared in bewilderment, in denial and misery.

The militia attacked. It was only twenty minutes past seven.

The door flew open with a massive sound. Three militia officers came hurtling through into the room, their battering ram flying out of their hands.

The door was still unlocked from when David had fled. The militia had not expected this, and had tried to break down a door which did not resist them. They fell, sprawling and idiotic.

There was a confused moment. The three militia scrabbled to stand. Outside, the squad of officers gaped stupidly into the building. On the ground floor, Derkhan and Lemuel stared back at them. Isaac looked down at the intruders.

Then everyone moved.

The militia outside in the street recovered their wits and rushed the door. Lemuel flipped David’s huge desk onto its side and hunkered down behind the makeshift shield, priming his two long pistols. Derkhan ran towards him, diving for cover. Yagharek hissed and stepped backwards from the rail of the walkway, out of sight of the militia.

In one slick movement, Isaac turned to his laboratory worktable and scooped up two huge glass flasks of discoloured liquid, still spinning on his heels, and hurled them over the rail at the invading officers like bombs.

The first three militia through the door had regained their feet, only to be caught in the shower of glass and chymical rain. One of the massive jars shattered on the helmet of one officer, who hit the floor again, motionless and bleeding. Vicious shards bounced off the others’ armour. The two militia caught by the deluge were still for a moment, then began to shriek suddenly as the chymicals seeped through their masks and began to attack the soft tissues of their faces.

There was still no gunfire.

Isaac turned again and began to grab more jars, taking a moment to pick strategically, so that the effects of the cascading chymicals were not entirely random. Why don’t they shoot? he thought giddily.

The wounded officers had been pulled out into the street. In their place, a phalanx of heavily armoured officers had entered, bearing iron shields with reinforced glass windows through which they stared. Behind them, Isaac saw two officers getting ready to attack with khepri stingboxes.

They must want us alive! he realized. The stingbox could kill, easily, but it could also not. If deaths were all that were desired, it would have been far easier for Rudgutter to send conventional troops, with flintlocks and crossbows, than such rare agents as humans trained in stingbox.

Isaac hurled a double salvo of trow-iron dust and sanguimorph distillate at the defensive huddle, but the guards were quick, and the jars were shattered with twitching shields. The militia danced to avoid the dangerous gobbets.

Each of the two officers behind the shield-bearers spun their jagged twin flails.

The stingboxes themselves—metaclockwork engines of intricate and extraordinary khepri design—were attached to the officers’ belts, each the size of a small bag. Attached to each side was a long cord, thick wires swathed in metal coils, then insulating rubber, extendible more than twenty feet. About two feet from the end of each cord was a polished wooden handle, one of which each officer held in each hand. They used these to whirl the ends of the cords at terrible speed. Something glimmered almost invisibly. At the tip of each tendril, Isaac knew, was a vicious little metal prong, a weighted clutch of barbs and spikes. These tips varied. Some were solid, the best-made expanded like cruel flowers on impact. All were designed to fly heavy and true, to puncture armour and flesh, to grip without mercy inside torn flesh.

Derkhan had reached the table and was huddling by Lemuel. Isaac turned to grab more ammunition. In the moment of silence, Derkhan raised herself quickly on one knee and peered over the tip of the table, taking aim with her great pistol.

She pulled the trigger. At the same instant, one of the officers let fly with his stingbox.

Derkhan was a decent shot. Her ball flew into the viewing window of one of the militia shields, which she had judged its weak point. But she had underestimated the militia’s defences. The porthole cracked violently and spectacularly, whitened completely with shards of glassdust and a crack-lattice, but its structure was interlaced with copper wire, and it held. The militiaman staggered, then stood solid.

The officer with the stingbox moved like an expert.

He swung up his arms at the same moment in sweeping curves, flicking the little switches in the wooden handles that allowed the cords to slide through them, releasing them. The momentum of the twirling blades took them flying through the air in a flash of metallic grey.

Cord unravelled almost without friction from inside the stingbox, through the air and the wooden handles, slowing the blades hardly at all. Their curving flight was absolutely true. The jagged weights flew in a long, elliptical motion through the air, the curve shallowing rapidly as the cables attaching them to the stingbox extended.

The buds of sharpened steel smacked simultaneously into each side of Derkhan’s chest. She screamed and staggered, her teeth gritting as the pistol fell from her spasming fingers.

Instantly, the officer pressed the catch on his stingbox to release the pent-up clockwork within.

There was a sputtering whirr. The hidden coils of the motor began to unwind, twirling like a dynamo and generating waves of weird current. Derkhan danced and spasmed, agonized yells spurting out from behind her teeth. Little bursts of blue light exploded like whiplashes from her hair and fingers.

The officer watched her intently, twiddling the dials on his stingbox that controlled the intensity and form of the power. There was a violent, cracking jolt and Derkhan flew backwards against the wall, collapsing to the floor.

The second officer sent his sharp bulbs over the edge of the table, hoping to catch Lemuel, but he was flattened hard against the wood and they flew harmlessly around him. The officer pressed a stud and the cords rapidly retracted back into a ready position.

Lemuel stared at the stricken Derkhan and hefted his pistols.

Isaac bellowed in rage. He hurled another vast pot of unstable thaumaturgic compound at the militia. It fell short, but burst with such violence that it splashed onto and over the shields, mixing with the distillate and sending two officers screaming to the floor as their skin became parchment and their blood ink.

An amplified voice burst through the door. It was Mayor Rudgutter’s.

“Stop these attacks. Be sensible. You aren’t going to get out. Stop attacking us and we will show mercy.”

Rudgutter stood in the midst of his honour guard with Eliza Stem-Fulcher. It was highly unusual for him to accompany a militia raid, but this was no ordinary raid. He was stationed across the road and a little way along from Isaac’s workshop.

It was not yet completely dark. Alarmed and curious faces peered from windows up and down the street. Rudgutter ignored them. He took the funnel of iron away from his mouth and turned to Eliza Stem-Fulcher. His face was creased in irritation.

“This is an absolute bloody shambles,” he said. She nodded. “Well, however inefficient they are, the militia can’t lose. A few officers might be killed, regrettably, but there’s no way der Grimnebulin and his cohorts are getting out of there.” The faces peeking nervously from behind windows all around suddenly annoyed him.

He raised the loudhailer sharply and yelled into it: “Get back into your houses immediately!”

There was a gratifying flurry of curtains. Rudgutter stood back and watched as the warehouse shuddered.

Lemuel dispatched the other stingbox-wielder with one elegant and careful shot. Isaac hurled his table down the stairs taking two officers with it when they had tried to rush him, and now he continued with his chymical sniping. Yagharek was helping him, at his direction, showering the attackers with noxious mixtures.

But this was all, could not but be, doomed valiance. There were too many militia. It helped that they were not prepared to kill, because Isaac and Lemuel and Yagharek had no such constraints. Isaac estimated that four militia had fallen: one to a bullet; one to a crushed skull; and two to random chymico-thaumaturgic reactions. But it could not last. The militia advanced on Lemuel behind their shields.

Isaac saw the militia look up and confer for a minute. Then one of them raised a flintlock rifle carefully, aiming it at Yagharek.

“Down, Yag!” he yelled. “They’ll kill you!”

Yagharek dropped to the floor, out of sight of the assassin.

There was no sudden manifestation, no creeping flesh or vast stalking figure. All that happened was that the Weaver’s voice sounded in Rudgutter’s ear.

. . . I HAVE BOUNDED UNSEEN UP TANGLING WIRES OF SKYNESS AND SLIPPED MY LEGS SPLAYED WILLY-NILLY ON THE PSYCHIC DUNG OF THE WEB-REAVERS THEY ARE LOW CREATURES AND INELEGANT AND DRAB WHISPER WHAT HAPPENS MR. MAYOR THIS PLACE TREMBLES . . .

Rudgutter started. That’s all I need, he thought. He replied with a firm voice.

“Weaver,” he said. Stem-Fulcher turned to him with a sharp, curious gaze. “How nice to have you with us.”

It’s too damned unpredictable, Rudgutter thought furiously. Not now, not bloody now! Go and chase the moths, go hunting . . . what are you doing here? The Weaver was infuriating and dangerous, and Rudgutter had taken a calculated risk in engaging its aid. A loose cannon was still a lethal weapon.

Rudgutter had thought that the great spider and he had something of an arrangement. As much, at least, as it was possible to maintain with a Weaver. Kapnellior had helped him. Textorology was a tentative field, but it had borne some fruit. There were proven methods of communication, and Rudgutter had been using them to interact with the Weaver. Messages carved into the blades of scissors and melted. Apparently random sculptures, lit from below, whose shadows wrote messages across the ceiling. The Weaver’s responses were prompt and delivered even more bizarrely.

Rudgutter had politely bade the Weaver busy itself chasing the moths. Rudgutter could not order, of course, could only suggest. But the Weaver had responded positively, and Rudgutter realized that stupidly, absurdly, he had begun to think of it as his agent.

No more of that.

Rudgutter cleared his throat. “Might I ask why you have joined us, Weaver?”

The voice came again, resonating in his ear, bouncing on the bones inside his head.

. . . INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE FIBRES ARE SPLIT AND BURST AND A TRAIL IS TORN ACROSS THE WARP OF THE WORLDWEB WHERE COLOURS ARE BLED AND WAN I HAVE SLID ACROSS THE SKY BELOW THE SURFACE AND DANCED ALONG THE RENT WITH TEARS OF MISERY AT THE UGLY RUIN WHICH STEMS AND SPREADS AND BEGINS IN THIS PLACE . . .

Rudgutter nodded slowly as the sense of the words emerged. “It started from here,” he agreed. “This is the centre. This is the source. Unfortunately . . .” He spoke very carefully. “Unfortunately, this is a somewhat inopportune moment. Might I prevail on you to investigate this—which is indeed the birthplace of the problem—in a little while?”

Stem-Fulcher was watching him. Her face was fraught. She listened intently to his responses.

For a strange moment, all the sounds around them ceased. The shots and yells from the warehouse momentarily died. There were no creaks or clanks from the militia’s arms. Stem-Fulcher’s mouth was open, as she hovered ready to speak, but she said nothing. The Weaver was silent.

Then there was a whispering sound inside Rudgutter’s skull. He gasped in consternation, then opened his mouth in outright dismay. He did not know how he knew, but he was listening to the uncanny sound of the Weaver picking its way across various dimensions towards the warehouse.

The officers bore down on Lemuel with a remorseless precision. They tramped across Vermishank’s corpse. They held their shields triumphantly before them.

Above, Isaac and Yagharek had run out of chymicals. Isaac was bellowing, hurling chairs and slats of wood and rubbish at the militia. They deflected them with ease.

Derkhan was as motionless as Lublamai, who lay still on a cot in the corner of Isaac’s living space.

Lemuel let out a desperate yell of rage and swung his powderhorn at his attackers, spraying them with acrid gunpowder. He fumbled for his tinderbox, but they were on him, truncheons swinging. The officer with the stingbox approached, twirling his blades.

The air in the centre of the warehouse vibrated uncannily.

Two militiamen were approaching this unstable patch, and they paused in puzzlement. Isaac and Yagharek each carried one end of an enormous bench, ready to hurl it at the officers below. Each caught sight of the phenomenon. They stopped moving and watched.

Like some eldritch flower, a patch of organic darkness bloomed from nothing in the centre of the room. It expanded into physical reality with the animal ease of a stretching cat. It opened itself, and it stood to fill the room, a colossal segmented thing, a massive spider-presence that hummed with power and sucked the light out of the air.

The Weaver.

Yagharek and Isaac dropped the bench simultaneously.

The militia stopped pummelling Lemuel and turned, alerted by the changing nature of the æther.

Everyone stopped and stared, utterly aghast.

The Weaver had manifested standing directly over two trembling officers. They let out little cries of terror. One dropped his sword as his fingers numbed. The other, more bravely but no less ineffectually, raised a pistol in his violently shaking hand.

The Weaver looked down at the two men. It raised its pair of human hands. As they cringed, it brought one hand down on each of their heads, patting them like dogs.

It raised its hand and pointed up at the walkway, where Isaac and Yagharek stood dumbfounded and afraid. Its unearthly singsong voice resonated in the suddenly quiet room.

. . . OVER AND UP IN THE LITTLE PASSAGE IT WAS IT WAS BORN THE CRINGING THUMB THE TWISTED RUNT THAT FREED ITS SIBLINGS IT CRACKED THE SEAL ON ITS SWADDLING AND BURST OUT I SMELL THE REMNANTS OF ITS BREAKFAST STILL LOLLING OH I LIKE THIS I ENJOY THIS WEB THE WEFT IS INTRICATE AND FINE THOUGH TORN WHO HERE CAN SPIN WITH SUCH ROBUST AND NAIVE EXPERTISE . . .

The Weaver’s head moved with alien smoothness from one to the other side. It took in the room in its multiple and glinting eyes. Still no humans moved.

From outside came Rudgutter’s voice. It was tense. Angry.

“Weaver!” he shouted. “I have a gift and a message for you!” There was a moment of silence, and then a pair of pearl-handled scissors came skittering through the door of the warehouse. The Weaver clasped its hands in a very human motion of delight. From outside came the distinctive sound of scissors being opened and closed.

. . . LOVELY LOVELY, moaned the Weaver, THE SNIPSNAP OF SUPPLICATION AND YET THOUGH THEY SMOOTH EDGES AND ROUGH FIBRES WITH COLD NOISE AN EXPLOSION IN REVERSE A FUNNELLING IN A FOCUS I MUST TURN MAKE PATTERNS HERE WITH AMATEURS UNKNOWING ARTISTS TO UNPICK THE CATASTROPHIC TEARING THERE IS BRUTE ASYMMETRY IN THE BLUE VISAGES THAT WILL NOT DO IT CANNOT BE THAT THE RIPPED UP WEB IS DARNED WITHOUT PATTERNS AND IN THE MINDS OF THESE DESPERATE AND GUILTY AND BEREFT ARE EXQUISITE TAPESTRIES OF DESIRE THE DAPPLED GANG PLAIT YEARNINGS FOR FRIENDS FEATHERS SCIENCE JUSTICE GOLD . . .

The Weaver’s voice shivered in some crooning delight. Its legs moved suddenly at terrifying speed, picking its intricate way through the room, rippling through the space.

The militia crouching over Lemuel dropped their staffs and scrabbled to get out of its way. Lemuel looked up at its arachnid bulk through swollen eyes. He raised his hands and tried to cry out in fear.

The Weaver hovered for a moment before him, then looked up at the platform above. It stepped up lightly and was instantly, incomprehensibly, on the walkway, a few feet from Isaac and Yagharek. They stared in terror at the vast and monstrous form. Those pointed spike-feet pranced towards them. They were immobilized. Yagharek tried to move backwards but the Weaver was too quick . . . SAVAGE AND IMPENETRABLE . . . it sang, and scooped Yagharek up with a sudden motion, sweeping him under its humanlike arm where he twisted and cried out like a terrified baby.

. . . BLACK AND RUSSET . . . sang the Weaver. It tottered elegantly like a dancer on her toes, moved sideways through twisted dimensions and was once more by Lemuel’s cowering form. It grabbed him and bundled him dangling beside Yagharek.

The militia stood back, dumbfounded and terrified. Mayor Rudgutter’s voice sounded from outside again, but no one listened.

The Weaver stepped up and was once again on Isaac’s raised living space. It skittered up to Isaac and grabbed him under its free arm . . . EXTRAVAGANT SECULAR SWARMING . . . it chanted as it took hold of him.

Isaac could not resist. The Weaver’s touch was cool and unchanging, quite unreal. Its skin was as smooth as polished glass. He felt himself lifted with breathtaking ease and enfolded, cosseted under that bony arm.

. . . DIAMETRICAL NEGLIGENT FEROCIOUS . . . Isaac heard the Weaver say as it retraced its impossible steps and was twenty feet away, standing by Derkhan’s motionless body. The militia around her moved away in concerted fear. The Weaver fumbled for her unconscious form and tucked her up next to Isaac, who felt her warmth through his clothes.

Isaac’s head was spinning. The Weaver moved sideways again and was across the room, beside the construct. For a few minutes, Isaac had forgotten it even existed. It had returned to its customary resting place in the corner of the room, from where it had watched the militia attacks. It turned the one feature on its smooth head, its glass lens, towards the Weaver. The ineluctable spider-presence flicked the construct up onto its dagger-limbs and tossed it nimbly up. The Weaver caught the ungainly man-sized machine on its curving chitinous back. The construct balanced precariously, but did not fall no matter how the Weaver moved.

Isaac felt a sudden, murderous pain in his head. He cried out in agony, felt hot blood pumping across his face. He heard Lemuel scream a moment later, echoing him.

Through eyes bleary with confusion and blood, Isaac saw the room flicker around him as the Weaver paced through interlocking planes. It appeared beside all the militiamen in turn and moved one of its bladed arms too fast to see. As it touched them, each of the men screamed, so that a weird virus of agonized sound seemed to pass around the room at whiplash speed.

The Weaver stopped in the centre of the warehouse. Its elbows were pinioned, so that its captives could not move. With its forearms it dropped red-stained things across the floor. Isaac raised his head and looked around the room, trying to see through the burning pain below his temple. Everyone in the room was crying out, cringing, clapping their hands to the sides of their faces, trying without success to staunch gouts of blood with their fingers. Isaac looked down again.

The Weaver was scattering a handful of bloody ears onto the ground.

Below its gently moving hand, blood spilt across the dust in slicks of dirty gore. The gobbets of freshly sliced flesh fell, tracing the perfect shape of a pair of scissors.

The Weaver looked up, impossibly laden with struggling figures, moving as if unencumbered.

. . . FERVENT AND LOVABLE . . . it whispered, and disappeared.

What was an experience becomes a dream and then a memory. I cannot see the edges between the three.

The Weaver, the great spider, came among us.

In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web.

The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it—we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.

Its knife-hands flashed. The humans’ ears fell in flesh-rain to the dust. I was spared. My feather-hidden ears hold no delight for this mad power. Through the ululations and the despairing wails of pain the furiach-yajh-hett ran in circles of delight.

And then it tired and stepped through the twists of matter out of the warehouse.

Into another space.

I shut my eyes.

I moved in a direction I had never known existed. I felt the scuttling slide of that great multitude of legs as the dancing mad god moved along powerful threads of force. It scampered at obscure angles to reality, with all of us bobbing beneath it. My stomach pitched. I felt myself catch and snag on the fabric of the world. My skin prickled in the alien plane.

For a moment the god’s madness infected me. For a moment, the greed for knowledge forgot its place and demanded to be quenched. For a sliver of time, I opened my eyes.

For a terrible eternal breath I glimpsed the reality through which the dancing mad god was treading.

My eyes itched and watered, they felt as if they would burst, as if a thousand sandstorms afflicted them. They could not assimilate what was before them. My poor eyes struggled to see the unseeable. I beheld nothing but a fraction, the edge of an aspect.

I saw, or thought I saw, or have convinced myself I saw a vastness that dwarfed any desert sky. A yawning gap of Leviathan proportions. I whined and heard others whine around me. Spread across the emptiness, streaming away from us with cavernous perspective in all directions and dimensions, encompassing lifetimes and hugenesses with each intricate knot of metaphysical substance, was a web.

Its substance was known to me.

The crawling infinity of colours, the chaos of textures that went into each strand of that eternally complex tapestry . . . each one resonated under the step of the dancing mad god, vibrating and sending little echoes of bravery, or hunger, or architecture, or argument, or cabbage or murder or concrete across the æther. The weft of starlings’ motivations connected to the thick, sticky strand of a young thief’s laugh. The fibres stretched taut and glued themselves solidly to a third line, its silk made from the angles of seven flying buttresses to a cathedral roof. The plait disappeared into the enormity of possible spaces.

Every intention, interaction, motivation, every colour, every body, every action and reaction, every piece of physical reality and the thoughts that it engendered, every connection made, every nuanced moment of history and potentiality, every toothache and flagstone, every emotion and birth and banknote, every possible thing ever is woven into that limitless, sprawling web.

It is without beginning or end. It is complex to a degree that humbles the mind. It is a work of such beauty that my soul wept.

It crawled with life. There were others like our bearer, more of the dancing mad gods, glimpsed across an infinity of webwork.

There were other creatures, too, terrible intricate shapes I will not recall.

The web is not without flaw. In innumerable places the silk is torn and the colours ruined. Here and there the patterns are strained and unstable. As we passed these wounds, I felt the dancing mad god pause and flex its spinneret, repairing and restaining.

A little way off was the tight silk of the Cymek. I swear I caught its oscillations as the worldweb flexed under the weight of time.

Around me was a little localized tangle of metareal gossamer . . . New Crobuzon. And there rending the woven strands in the centre was an ugly tear. It spread out and split the fabric of the city-web, taking the multitude of colours and bleeding them dry. They were left a drab and lifeless white. A pointless emptiness, a pallid shade a thousand times more soulless even than the eye of some sightless caveborn fish.

As I watched, my pained eyes wide with insight, I saw that the rip was widening.

I was so afraid of the spreading rent. And I was dwarfed by the enormity of it all, of the whole of the web. I shut my eyes tight.

I could not close down my mind. It scrambled, unbidden, to remember what it had seen. But it could not contain it. I was left only with a sense of it all. I remember it now as a description. The weight of its immensity is no longer present in my head.

That is the etiolated memory that captivates me now.

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.

Part Five:

Councils

Chapter Thirty-four

In the Lemquist Room, Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue held a council of war.

They had been up all night. Rudgutter and Stem-Fulcher were tired and irritable. They sipped huge bowls of strong coffee as they pored over papers.

Rescue was impassive. He fingered his swaddling scarf.

“Look at this,” said Rudgutter, and waved a piece of paper at his subordinates. “This arrived this morning. It was couriered in person. I had the opportunity to discuss its content with the authors. It was not a social call.”

Stem-Fulcher leaned over, reaching for the letter. Rudgutter ignored her and began to reread it himself.

“It’s from Josiah Penton, Bartol Sedner and Mashek Ghrashietnichs.” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher looked up. He nodded slowly. “The heads of Arrowhead Mines, Sedner’s Bank of Commerce and the Paradox Concerns have taken the time to write a letter together. So I think we can add a long list of lesser names below theirs, in invisible ink, hm?” He smoothed the letter. “Messrs. Penton, Sedner and Ghrashietnichs are ‘most concerned,’ it says here, at ‘scurrilous reports’ reaching their ears. They have wind of our crisis.” He watched as Stem-Fulcher and Rescue glanced at each other. “It’s all rather garbled. They aren’t at all sure what’s happening, but none of them have been sleeping well. In addition to which, they’ve got der Grimnebulin’s name. They want to know what’s being done to counter, ah . . . ‘this threat to our great city-state.’ ” He put the paper down as Stem-Fulcher shrugged and opened her mouth to answer. He cut her off, rubbing his eyes with exasperated exhaustion.

“You’ve read Inspector Tormlin’s—‘Sally’s’—report. According to Serachin, who is now recuperating in our care, der Grimnebulin claims to have a working prototype of some kind of crisis engine. We all understand the gravity of that. Well . . . our good businessmen have found that out. And as you can imagine, they are all—particularly Mr. Penton—most desirous of putting a stop to this absurd claim as quickly as possible. Any preposterous fake engines that Mr. der Grimnebulin might have fabricated to fool the credulous should, we are advised, be summarily destroyed.” He sighed and looked up.

“They make some mention of the generous funds they have provided the government and the Fat Sun party over the years. We have been given our orders, ladies and gentlemen. They are not at all happy about the slake-moths, and would like such dangerous animals contained forthwith. But not surprisingly, they are having a conniption about the possibility of crisis energy. Now, we searched the warehouse very thoroughly last night, and there is absolutely no sign of any such apparatus. We have to consider the possibility that der Grimnebulin is mistaken or lying. But in case he’s not, we must also bear in mind that he may have taken his engine and his notes with him last night. With,” he sighed heavily, “the Weaver.”

Stem-Fulcher spoke carefully. “Do we understand yet,” she ventured, “what happened?”

Rudgutter shrugged brusquely.

“We presented the evidence of the militia who saw the Weaver and heard what it said to Kapnellior. I’ve been trying to contact the thing, and I’ve had one curt, incomprehensible reply . . . It was scribbled in soot on my mirror. All we can say for sure is that it thought it improved the pattern of the worldweb to abduct der Grimnebulin and his friends from under our noses. We don’t know where it’s gone or why. Whether it’s left them alive. Anything really. Although Kapnellior’s quite confident it’s still hunting the moths.”

“What about the ears?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“I have no idea!” shouted Rudgutter. “It made the web prettier! Obviously! So now we have twenty terrified, one-eared militia in the infirmary!” He calmed a little. “I have been thinking. It’s my belief that part of our problem is that we started with plans that were too grand. We’ll keep trying to locate the Weaver, but in the meantime we’re going to have to rely on less ambitious methods of moth-hunting. We are going to put together a unit of all our guards, militia, and scientists who have had any dealings with the creatures. We’re putting together a specialist squad. And we are going to do it in conjunction with Motley.” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue looked at him and nodded.

“It’s necessary. We’re pooling our resources. He has trained men, as do we. We have set procedures in motion. He will have his units, and we will have ours, but they will operate in tandem. Motley and his men have an unconditional amnesty on all criminal activity while we conduct this operation.

“Rescue . . .” said Rudgutter quietly. “We need your particular skills. Quietly, of course. How many of your . . . kin do you think you can mobilize within a day? Knowing the nature of the operation . . . It is not without its dangers.”

MontJohn Rescue fingered his scarf again. He made a peculiar noise under his breath. “Ten or so,” he said.

“You’ll receive training, of course. You’ve worn a mirror-guard before, I think?” Rescue nodded. “Good. Because the sentience model of your kind is . . . broadly similar to a human’s, is it not? Your mind is as tempting to the moths as mine. Whatever your host?”

Rescue nodded again.

“We dream, Mr. Mayor,” he said in his flattened voice. “We can be prey.”

“I understand that. Your—and your kin’s—bravery will not go unnoticed. We will provide whatever we can to ensure your safety.” Rescue nodded without visible emotion. He stood slowly.

“Time being of such importance, I’ll make a start now on spreading the word.” He bowed. “You will have my squad by sundown tomorrow,” he said. He turned and left the room.

Stem-Fulcher turned to Rudgutter with pursed lips.

“He’s not too happy about this, is he?” she said. Rudgutter shrugged.

“He’s always known that his role might involve danger. The slake-moths are as much of a threat to his people as to ours.”

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

“How long ago was he taken? The original Rescue, I mean, the human one.”

Rudgutter calculated for a moment.

“Eleven years. He was planning to supersede me. Have you set the squad in motion?” he demanded. Stem-Fulcher sat back and drew lengthily on her clay pipe. Aromatic smoke danced.

“We’re going through two days’ intensive training today and tomorrow . . . you know, aiming backwards with the mirror-guards, that sort of thing. Motley is apparently doing the same. The rumours are that Motley’s troop includes several Remade specifically designed for slake-moth husbandry and capture . . . built-in mirrors, back-pointing arms and the like. We have only one such officer.” She shook her head jealously. “We’re also having several of the scientists who worked on the project work on detecting the moths. They’re at pains to impress on us that this is unreliable, but if they come through they may give us some kind of edge.”

Rudgutter nodded. “Add to that,” he said, “our Weaver, still out there somewhere, still hunting the moths busy tearing up his precious worldweave . . . We’ve got a reasonable collection of troops.”

“But they’re not co-ordinated,” said Stem-Fulcher. “That’s what worries me. And morale in the city is slipping. Obviously very few people know the truth, but everyone knows they can’t sleep at night, for fear of their dreams. We’re plotting a map of the nightmare hotspots, see if we can’t see some pattern, track the moths in some way. There’s been a spate of violent crime over the last week. Nothing big and planned: the sudden attacks, the spur-of-the-moment murders, the brawls. Tempers,” she said slowly, “are fraying. People are paranoid and afraid.”

After the silence had settled for a moment, she spoke again.

“This afternoon you should receive the fruits of some scientific labours,” she said. “I’ve asked our research team to make some helmet that’ll stop the moth-shit seeping into your skull when you sleep. You’ll look absurd in bed, but at least you’ll rest.” She stopped. Rudgutter was blinking rapidly. “How are your eyes?” she asked.

Rudgutter shook his head.

“Going,” he said sadly. “We just can’t solve the problem of rejection. It’s about time for a fresh set.”

Bleary-eyed citizens made their way to work. They were surly and unco-operative.

At the Kelltree docks, the broken strike was not mentioned. The bruises on the vodyanoi stevedores were fading. They heaved spilt cargos from the dirty water as always. They directed ships into tight spaces on the banks. They muttered in secret about the disappearance of the stewards, the strike-leaders.

Their human workmates stared at the defeated xenians with a mixture of emotions.

The fat aerostats patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.

Arguments broke out with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached out and took victims from the waking world.

In the Bleckly Refinery in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed and were consumed by the merciless cascade.

At the top of the great deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying monsters. The dæmons that had come to town to suck the brains out of the living.

The raucous café gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.

The nightmares pushed some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being planned: Dispatches from a Troubled City. It was to be a showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of foul dreams in which the city wallowed.

There was a fear in the air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent absence from regular haunts was sinister.

The nightmares were splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the throat and stealing friends away.

Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.

Isaac’s breath caught.

Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence . . .

In terror, he opened his eyes.

The web was gone.

Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.

“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.

Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.

“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”

In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.

“I don’t damn well know, Isaac,” she said bitterly. “All I know is I was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all . . .” Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood that caked the side of her face. “My . . . damned ear’s gone.” She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand. “Lemuel’s been saying it was a . . . a Weaver that brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway.”

Isaac rubbed his head and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.

“What?” he said. “Where are we? The sewers . . . ? Where’s Lemuel? Yagharek? And . . .” Lublamai, he heard inside his mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.

His voice dissipated.

He heard himself, and realized that he was rambling hysterically. He stopped and breathed deeply, forced himself to calm down.

He looked around him, took in the situation.

He and Derkhan sat in a two-foot-wide alcove embedded into the wall of a windowless little brick chamber. It was about ten feet square—its far side only just visible in the faint light—with a ceiling no more than five feet above him. In each of the room’s four walls was a cylindrical tunnel, about four feet round.

The bottom of the room was completely submerged in filthy water. It was impossible to tell how deep below it the floor was. The liquid looked to be emerging from at least two of the tunnels, and slowly ebbing out of the others.

The walls were slick with organic slime and mould. The air stank richly of rot and shit.

Isaac looked down at himself and his face creased in confusion. He was dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, a dark, well-tailored piece that any Parliamentarian would be proud of. Isaac had never seen it before. Beside him, roughened and dirty, was his carpet bag.

He remembered, suddenly, the explosive pain and blood he had suffered the previous night. He gasped and reached up with trepidation. As his fingers fumbled, he exhaled explosively. His left ear was gone.

He gingerly prodded for ruined tissue, expecting to meet wet, ripped flesh or crusting scabs. Instead, unlike Derkhan, he found a well-healed scar, covered in skin. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had lost his ear years before. He frowned and clicked his fingers experimentally beside his wound. He could still hear, though doubtless his ability to pinpoint sounds would be reduced.

Derkhan shook slightly as she watched him.

“This Weaver saw fit to heal your ear, along with Lemuel’s. Not mine . . .” Her voice was subdued and miserable. “Although,” she added, “it did stop the bleeding on the wounds from that . . . damned stingbox.” She watched him for a moment. “So Lemuel wasn’t mad, or lying, or dreaming,” she said quietly. “You’re telling me that a Weaver appeared and rescued us?”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“I don’t know why . . . I have no idea why . . . but it’s true.” He thought back. “I heard Rudgutter outside, yelling something at it. It sounded like he wasn’t completely surprised it was there . . . he was trying to bribe it, I think. Maybe the damn fool’s been trying to do deals with it . . . Where are the others?”

Isaac looked around. There was nowhere to hide in the alcove, but across the little room was another just like it, completely swathed in darkness. Anything crouching within it would have been invisible in the shadow.

“We all woke up here,” said Derkhan. “All of us except Lemuel had these weird clothes on. Yagharek was . . .” She shook her head in confusion and touched her bloody wound gently. She winced. “Yagharek was shoehorned into some dollymop’s dress. There were a couple of lamps, lit and waiting for us when we woke. Lemuel and Yagharek told me what happened . . . Yagharek was talking . . . he was being very weird, talking about a web . . .” She shook her head.

“I understand that,” said Isaac heavily. He paused and felt his mind scurry in awe away from the vague memories he had. “You were unconscious when the Weaver hauled us out. You wouldn’t have seen what we saw . . . where he took us . . .”

Derkhan frowned. She had tears in her eyes.

“My damn . . . my damn ear hurts so much, ’Zaac,” she said. Isaac rubbed her shoulder clumsily, his face creasing, until she continued. “Anyway, you were out, so Lemuel took off, and Yagharek went with him.”

“What?” shouted Isaac, but Derkhan shushed him with her hands.

“You know Lemuel, you know the sort of work he does. It turns out he knows the sewers well. Apparently they can be a useful bolthole. He did a little reconnaissance trip into the tunnels, and came back actually knowing where we are.”

“Which is?”

“Murkside. He left and Yagharek demanded to go with him. They swore they’d be back within three hours. They’ve gone to get some food, some clothes for me and Yagharek, and to see the lay of the land. They left about an hour ago.”

“Well godsdamn, let’s go and join them . . .”

Derkhan shook her head.

“Don’t be an idiot, ’Zaac,” she said, sounding exhausted. “We can’t afford to get separated. Lemuel knows the sewers . . . they’re dangerous. He told us to stay put. There’s all manner of things down here . . . ghuls, trows, gods know what. That’s why I stayed with you while you were out. We have to wait for them here.

“And besides which, you’re probably the most wanted person in New Crobuzon right now. Lemuel’s a successful criminal: he knows how not to be seen. He’s at much less risk than you.”

“But what about Yag?” howled Isaac.

“Lemuel gave him his cloak. With the hood up and that dress torn up and wrapped round his feet, he just looked like a weird old man. Isaac, they’ll be back soon. We have to wait for them. We have to make plans. And you have to listen.” He looked up at her, concerned at her miserable tone.

“Why’s it taken us here, ’Zaac?” she said. Her face creased in pain. “Why did it hurt us, why did it dress us like this . . . ? Why didn’t it heal me . . . ?” She wiped tears of pain away angrily.

“Derkhan,” Isaac said gently. “I could never know . . .”

“You should see this,” she said, sniffing quickly. She handed him a crumpled and stinking sheet of newspaper. He took it slowly, his face curling with distaste as he touched the sodden, filthy thing.

“What is it?” he said, unfolding it.

“When we woke up, all disorientated and confused, it came bobbing down one of the little tunnels there, folded into a little boat.” She looked at him askance. “It was coming against the current. We fished it out.”

Isaac opened it out and looked at it. It was the centre pages from The Digest, one of New Crobuzon’s weekly papers. He saw from the date at the top of the page—9th Tathis 1779—that it had come out that same morning.

Isaac scanned his eyes over the little collection of stories. He shook his head in incomprehension.

“What am I missing?” he asked.

“Look at the letters to the editor,” said Derkhan.

He turned the sheet over. There it was, second letter down. It was written in the same formal, stilted fashion as the others, but its content was wildly different.

Isaac’s eyes widened as he read.

Sirs and Madam—

Please accept my compliments on your exquisite tapestry skills. For the furtherment of your craftwork I have taken it upon myself to extricate you from an unfortunate situation. My efforts are urgently required elsewhere and I am unable to accompany you. Doubtless we will meet again before much time has elapsed. In the meantime please note that he of your number whose inadvertent animal husbandry has led to the city’s present unfortunate predicament may find himself the victim of unwanted attentions from his escaped charge.

I urge you to continue your fabric work, of which I find myself a devotee.

Most faithfully yours,

W.

Isaac looked up slowly at Derkhan.

“Gods only knows what the rest of The Digest’s readers will think of that . . .” he said in a hushed voice. “ ’Stail, that damn spider’s powerful!”

Derkhan nodded slowly. She sighed.

“I just wish,” she said unhappily, “I understood what it was doing . . .”

“You never could, Dee,” said Isaac. “Never.”

“You’re a scientist, ’Zaac,” she said sharply. She sounded desperate. “You have to know something about these damn things. Now please try to tell us what it’s saying . . .”

Isaac did not argue. He reread the note and rummaged inside his head for whatever scraps of information he could find.

“It just does whatever it has to to . . . to make the web prettier,” he said unhappily. He caught sight of Derkhan’s ragged wound, and looked away again. “You can’t understand it, it doesn’t think like us at all.” As he spoke, something occurred to Isaac. “Maybe . . . maybe that’s why Rudgutter’s been dealing with it,” he said. “If it doesn’t think like us, maybe it’s immune to the moths . . . Maybe it’s like a . . . a hunting dog . . .”

He’s lost control of it, he thought, remembering the mayor’s shouts from outside. It’s not doing what he wants.

He turned his attention back down to the letter in The Digest.

“This bit about tapestry-work . . .” Isaac mused, chewing his lips. “That’s the worldweb, isn’t it? So I think it’s saying it likes what we were . . . um . . . doing in the world. How we were ‘weaving.’ I think that’s why it got us out. And this later section . . .” His expression became more and more fearful as he read.

“Oh gods,” he breathed. “It’s like what happened to Barbile . . .” Derkhan’s mouth was set. She nodded reluctantly. “What was it she said? ‘It’s tasted me . . .’ The grub I had, I must’ve been tantalizing it with my mind all the time . . . It’s tasted me already . . . It must be hunting me . . .”

Derkhan stared at him.

“You won’t get it off your tail, Isaac,” she said quietly. “We’ll have to kill it.”

She had said we. He looked up at her gratefully.

“Before we formulate any plans,” she said, “there’s another thing. A mystery. Something I want explained.” She gestured at the other alcove across the dark room. Isaac peered curiously into the filthy obscurity. He could just make out a lumpy, motionless shape.

He knew what it was instantly. He remembered its extraordinary intervention in the warehouse. His breath sped up.

“It wouldn’t speak or write to anyone else,” Derkhan said. “When we realized it was here with us, we tried to talk to it, we wanted to know what it had done, but it completely ignored us. I think it’s been waiting for you.”

Isaac slid over to the lip of the ledge.

“It’s shallow,” Derkhan said behind him. He slipped off into the cool watery muck of the sewers. It came up to his knees. He pushed through it unthinkingly, ignoring the thick stench he raised as it sluiced through his legs. He waded through the noisome excremental stew towards the other little shelf.

As he drew closer, the dull inhabitant of that unlit space whirred slightly and pushed its battered body as near upright as it could. It was crammed into the little space.

Isaac sat next to it, shook his fouled shoes as clean as he could. He turned to it with an intent, hungry expression.

“So,” he said. “Tell me what you know. Tell me why you warned me. Tell me what’s going on.”

The cleaning construct hissed.

Chapter Thirty-five

Under a damp hollow of bricks by Trauka Station, Yagharek waited.

He gnawed a hunk of bread and meat that he had begged wordlessly from a butcher. He had not been unmasked. He had simply thrust his tremulous hand out from under his cloak and the food had been given to him. His head had remained hidden. He had shuffled away, his feet cramped and hidden by rags. His gait was of an old, tired man.

It was much easier to hide as a human than as an unwounded garuda.

He waited in the darkness where Lemuel had left him. From the shadows which hid him, he could watch the comings and goings at the church of the clock gods. It was an ugly little building, the façade of which was still painted with the advertising slogans of the furniture shop it had once been. Above the door was an intricate brass timepiece, each hour intertwined with the symbols of its associate god.

Yagharek knew the religion. It was strong among the humans of Shankell. He had visited its temples when his band had come to the city to trade, in the years before his crime.

The clock struck one, and Yagharek heard the ululating hymn to Sanshad, the sun god, come belting through the broken windows. It was sung with more gusto than in Shankell but considerably less finesse. It was less than three decades since the religion had crossed the Meagre Sea with any success. Obviously its subtleties had been lost in the water between Shankell and Myrshock.

Before he was conscious of it, his hunter’s ears had realized that one of the sets of footsteps approaching his hideaway was familiar. He finished his food quickly and waited.

Lemuel appeared framed in the entrance of the little cave. Passers-by came and went in the light spaces above his shoulders.

“Yag,” he whispered, gazing sightlessly into the grubby hole. The garuda shuffled forward into the light. Lemuel was carrying two bags stuffed with clothes and food. “Come on,” he whispered. “We should get back.”

They retraced their steps through the winding streets of Murkside. It was Skullday, a shopping day, and elsewhere in the city the crowds would be thick. But in Murkside the shops were mean and poor. Those locals for whom Skullday was a day off would make their way to Griss Fell or the Aspic Hole market. Lemuel and Yagharek were not watched by many.

Yagharek sped up, hobbling on bound feet with a weird, crippled gait to keep up with Lemuel. They made their way south-east, staying in the shadow of the raised railway lines, moving towards Syriac.

This is how I came to the city, thought Yagharek, tracking the great iron pathways of the trains.

They passed under the brick arches, retracing their way into a little enclosed space overlooked on three sides by featureless brick. Storm drains channelled down the walls, along concrete ruts and into a man-sized grille in the centre of the yard.

On the fourth side, the south-facing side, the courtyard looked out onto a drab alley. The land fell away before it. Syriac sat in a depression in the underlying clay. Yagharek looked out over a tumbledown roofscape of twisted roofs and mouldering slate, curlicues of brick and forgotten, warped weathervanes.

Lemuel glanced around to ensure their privacy, then tugged the grille free. Fingers of fell-gas curled out and tugged at them. The heat made the stink rich. Lemuel gave his bags to Yagharek and pulled a primed pistol from his belt. Yagharek looked at him from under the hood.

Lemuel turned with a hard smile and said: “I’ve been pulling in favours. Got us kitted out.” He waggled the gun to illustrate his point. He checked it, hefted it expertly. He pulled the oil-lamp from a bag, lit it and lifted it with his left hand.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Keep your ears open. Move quietly. Watch your back.”

With that, Lemuel and Yagharek descended into the dirt and the dark.

There was an indeterminable time wading through the warm, rank darkness. The sounds of scuttling and swimming were all around them. Once they heard vicious laughter from a tunnel parallel to theirs. Twice Lemuel swung round, aiming the torch and his pistol at a patch of filth still rippling from where some unseen thing had been. He did not have to shoot. They were unmolested.

“You know how lucky we were?” said Lemuel conversationally. His voice bobbed slowly back to Yagharek on the foetid air. “I don’t know if it was deliberate, where the Weaver left us, but we’re in one of the safest places in the New Crobuzon sewers.” His voice stiffened now and then with effort or disgust. “Murkside’s such a backwater, you don’t have much food down here, you’ve got no thaumaturgic residues, there aren’t any massive old chambers to support a whole brood . . . It’s not very busy.”

He was silent for a moment, then continued.

“Brock Marsh sewers, for example. All the unstable runoff from all those labs and experiments, accumulating over the years . . . makes for a very unpredictable population of vermin. Rats the size of pigs, speaking in tongues. Blind pygmy crocodiles, whose great-great-great-grandparents escaped from the zoo. Crossbreeds of all sorts.

“Over in Gross Coil and Skulkford the city’s sitting on layers of older buildings. For hundreds of years they sunk into the mire, and they’d just build new ones on top of them. The pavement’s only been solid there for a hundred and fifty years. Over there, the sewers feed into old basements and bedrooms. The tunnels like this one lead into submerged streets. You can still see the road-names. Rotten houses under a brick sky. Straight up. The shit flows along channels and then through windows and doors.

“That’s where the undergangs live. They used to be human, or their parents did, but they’ve spent too long down here. They aren’t a pretty sight.”

He hawked and spat noisily into the slow ooze.

“Still. Rather the undergangs than the ghuls. Or the trow.” He laughed, but it was without any humour. Yagharek could not tell if Lemuel was mocking him.

Lemuel lapsed into silence. For some minutes, there was no sound except the slosh of their legs through the thick effluvia. Then Yagharek heard voices. He stiffened and gripped Lemuel’s shirt, but a moment later he heard them clearly, and they were Isaac’s and Derkhan’s.

The excremental water seemed to carry light with it, from around a corner.

Bent-backed and swearing with effort, Yagharek and Lemuel wound through the twisting brick junctions and turned into the little room under Murkside’s heart.

Isaac and Derkhan were yelling at each other. Isaac saw Yagharek and Lemuel over Derkhan’s shoulder. He raised his arms to them.

“Dammit, there you are!” He strode past Derkhan towards them. Yagharek held out a bag of food at him. Isaac ignored it. “Lem, Yag,” he said urgently. “We have to move fast.”

“Now hold on . . .” began Lemuel, but Isaac ignored him.

“Listen, dammit,” Isaac shouted. “The construct’s talked to me!”

Lemuel’s mouth stayed open, but he was silent. No one spoke for a moment.

“All right?” said Isaac. “It’s intelligent, dammit, it’s sentient . . . something’s happened in its head. The rumours about CI are true! Some virus, some programme glitch . . . And although it won’t come out and say it, I think it’s hinted that that damned repairman may have given it a helping hand along the way. And the upshot is the damn thing can think. It’s seen everything! It was there when the slake-moth took Lublamai. It . . .”

“Hold on!” shouted Lemuel. “It spoke to you?”

“No! It had to scrape messages in the mould over there: it was damn slow. That’s what it uses its litter-spike for. It was the construct that told me David had turned traitor! It tried to get us out of the warehouse before the militia arrived!”

“Why?”

Isaac’s urgency waned.

“I don’t know. It can’t explain itself. It’s not . . . very articulate.” Lemuel looked up, over Isaac’s head. The construct sat motionless in the red-black flickering of the oil-lamp. “But listen . . . I think one of the reasons it wanted us free is because we’re against the slake-moths. I don’t know why, but it . . . it’s violently against them. It wants them dead. And it’s offering us help . . .”

Lemuel barked with unpleasant, incredulous laughter.

“Marvellous!” he wondered, derisorily. “You’ve got a vacuum cleaner on your side . . .”

“No, you fucking arse,” yelled Isaac. “Don’t you understand? It’s not alone . . .”

The word alone echoed back and forth around the mephitic brick burrows. Lemuel and Isaac stared at each other. Yagharek drew back a little.

“It’s not alone,” Isaac repeated softly. Behind him, Derkhan nodded in mute accord. “It’s given us directions. It can read and write—that’s how it realized David sold us out, it found his discarded instructions—but it’s not a sophisticated thinker. But it promises that if we go to Griss Twist tomorrow night, we’ll meet something that can explain everything. And that can help us.”

This time, it was us that filled the silence with its reverberating presence. Lemuel shook his head slowly, his face set and cruel.

“Damn, Isaac,” he said quietly. “ ‘We’? ‘Us’? Who the fuck are you talking to? This is nothing to do with me . . .” Derkhan sneered in disgust and turned away. Isaac opened his mouth, dismayed. Lemuel interrupted him. “Look, man. I was in this for the money. I’m a businessman. You paid well. You got my services. You even got a little bit of time free, with Vermishank. I did that for Mr. X. And I’ve got a soft spot for you, ’Zaac. You’ve been straight with me. That’s why I came back down here. Brought a bit of grub, and I’ll show you out of here. But now Vermishank’s dead and your credit’s run dry. I don’t know what you’ve got planned, but I’m off. Why in fuck should I go chasing these damn things? Leave it to the militia. There’s nothing for me here . . . Why would I hang around?”

“Leave it to who . . . ?” hissed Derkhan with contempt, but Isaac spoke over her.

“So,” he said slowly. “What now? Hmmm? You think you can go back? Lem, old son, whatever else you might damn well be, you ain’t a stupid man. You think you weren’t seen? You think they don’t know who you are? Godsdamn, man . . . you’re wanted.”

Lemuel glared at him.

“Well, thanks for your concern ’Zaac,” he said, his face twisting. “Tell you what, though—” his voice turned hard “—you may be out of your depth. I, however, have spent my professional life evading the law. Don’t you worry about me, mate. I’ll be cushty.” He did not sound sure.

I’m not telling him anything he doesn’t know, thought Isaac. He just doesn’t want to think about it right now. Isaac shook his head contemptuously.

“Dammit, man, you aren’t thinking straight. There’s a whole godsdamn universe of difference between being a go-between and being a militia-murdering criminal . . . Don’t you get it? They don’t know what you know or don’t know . . . unfortunately for you, old son, you’re implicated. You have to stick with us. You have to see this through. They’re after you, right? And right now, you’re running from them. Better to stay in front, even if you’re running, than fucking well turn round and let them catch up.”

Lemuel stood still in the silence, glowering at Isaac. He said nothing, but neither did he leave.

Isaac took a step towards him.

“Look,” Isaac said. “The other thing is . . . we . . . I . . . need you.” Behind him Derkhan sniffed sulkily and Isaac shot her an irritated glance. “Godspit, Lem . . . you’re our best chance. You know everyone, you’ve got a finger in all the right pies . . .” Isaac raised his hands helplessly. “I can’t see a way out of this. One of those . . . things is after me, the militia can’t help us, they don’t know how to catch the damn things, and anyway, I don’t know if you’re keeping track but those fuckers are hunting us too . . . I can’t see a way, even assuming we get the slake-moths, where I don’t end up dead.” The words chilled him as he spoke them. He talked rapidly, pushed the thoughts away. “But if I keep at it, maybe I can figure one out. And the same goes for you. And without you, Derkhan and me are dead for sure.” Lemuel’s eyes were hard. Isaac felt a chill. Never forget who you’re dealing with, he thought. You and he are not friends . . . don’t forget that.

“You know my credit’s good,” Isaac said suddenly. “You know that. Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve got a massive bank account, I’ve got a bit, there’s a few guineas left, all of it yours . . . but help me, Lemuel, and I’m yours. I’ll work for you. I’ll be your man. I’ll be your fucking pet. Any jobs you want done, I do them. Any money I make, it’s yours. I’ll sign my fucking life to you, Lemuel. Just help us now.”

There was no sound except the dripping of ordure. Behind Isaac, Derkhan hovered. Her face was a study of contempt and disgust. We don’t need him, it said. But still, she waited to hear what he would say. Yagharek stood back. He listened to the argument dispassionately. He was bound to Isaac. He could go nowhere and do nothing without him.

Lemuel sighed.

“I am going to be keeping a running total, you realize? I’m talking about serious debt, you know? D’you have any idea of the daily rate for this sort of thing? The danger money?”

“Doesn’t matter,” breathed Isaac brusquely. He hid his relief. “Just keep me posted. Tell me what I’m accruing. I’ll be good for it.” Lemuel nodded briefly. Derkhan exhaled, very quietly and slowly.

They stood like exhausted combatants. Each waited for the other to move.

“So what now?” said Lemuel. His voice was surly.

“We go to Griss Twist tomorrow night,” said Isaac. “The construct promised help. We can’t risk not going. I’ll meet you both there.”

“Where are you going?” said Derkhan in surprise.

“I have to find Lin,” said Isaac. “They’ll be coming for her.”

Chapter Thirty-six

It was almost midnight. Skullday was becoming Shunday. The moon was one night off full.

Outside Lin’s tower, in Aspic Hole itself, the few passers-by were irritable and nervous. Market day had passed, and its bonhomie with it. The square was haunted by the skeletons of stalls, thin wooden frames stripped of canvas. The rubbish from the market was piled in rotting heaps, waiting for the dustcrews to transport it to the dumps. The bloated moon bleached Aspic Hole like some corrosive liquid. It looked ominous, shabby and mean.

Isaac climbed the stairs of the tower warily. He had had no way of getting a message to Lin and he had not seen her for days. He had washed as best he could in water filched from a pump in Flyside, but he still stank.

He had sat in the sewers for hours the previous day. Lemuel had not allowed them to leave for a long time, decreeing that it was too dangerous during the light.

“We have to stick together,” he demanded, “until we know what we’re doing. And we are not the most unobtrusive bunch.” So the four of them had sat in a room awash in faecal water, eating and trying not to vomit, bickering and failing to make plans. They had argued vehemently about whether or not Isaac should see Lin on his own. He was absolute in his insistence that he be unaccompanied. Derkhan and Lemuel denounced his stupidity, and even Yagharek’s silence had seemed briefly accusatory. But Isaac was quite adamant.

Eventually, when the temperature fell and they had all forgotten the stink, they had moved. It had been a long, arduous journey through New Crobuzon’s vaulted conduits. Lemuel had led, flintlocks ready. Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek had to carry the construct, which could not move in the liquid filth. It was heavy and slippery, and it had been dropped and banged and damaged, as had they, falling into the muck and swearing, slamming hands and fingers against the concrete walls. Isaac would not let them leave it.

They had moved carefully. They were intruders in the sewer’s hidden and hermetic ecosystem. They had been keen to avoid the natives. Eventually they had emerged behind Saltpetre Station, blinking and dripping in the waning light.

They had bedded down in a little deserted hut beside the railway in Griss Fell. It was an audacious hideout. Just before the Sud Line crossed the Tar by Cockscomb Bridge, a collapsed building made a huge slope of half-crushed brick and concrete splinters that seemed to shore up the raised railway. At the top, dramatically silhouetted, they saw the wooden shack.

Its purpose was unclear: it had obviously remained untouched for years. The four of them had crawled exhausted up the industrial scree, shoving the construct before them, through the ripped-up wire that was supposed to protect the railway from intruders. In the minutes between trains, they had hauled themselves along the little fringe of scrubby grass that surrounded the tracks, and pushed open the door into the hut’s dusty darkness.

There, finally, they had relaxed.

The wood of the shed was warped, its slats ill-fitting and interspersed with sky. They had watched out of the glassless windows as trains burst by them in both directions. Below them to the north, the Tar twisted in the tight S that contained Petty Coil and Griss Twist. The sky had darkened to a grubby blue-black. They could see illuminated pleasure-boats on the river. The massive industrial pillar of Parliament loomed a little way to the east, looking down on them and on the city. A little downriver from Strack Island, the chymical lights of the old city watergates hissed and sputtered and reflected their greasy yellow glow in the dark water. Two miles to the north-east, just visible behind Parliament, were the Ribs, those antique sallow bones.

From the other side of the cabin they saw the spectacularly darkening sky, made even more astonishing by a day in the reeking dun below New Crobuzon. The sun was gone, but only just. The sky was bisected by the skyrail that threaded through Flyside militia tower. The city was a layered silhouette, an intricate fading chimneyscape, slate roofs bracing each other obliquely below the plaited towers of churches to obscure gods, the huge priapic vents of factories spewing dirty smoke and burning off excess energy, monolithic towerblocks like vast concrete gravestones, the rough down of parkland.

They had rested, cleaned the nightsoil from their clothes as much as they could. Here, finally, Isaac had tended the stub of Derkhan’s ear. It had numbed, but was still painful. She bore it with heavy reserve. Isaac and Lemuel had fingered their own scarred remnants uncomfortably.

As the night had crept up faster, Isaac had readied himself to go. The argument had erupted again. Isaac was resolute. He needed to see Lin alone.

He had to tell her that she was in danger as soon as the militia connected her to him. He had to tell her that her life as she had lived it was over, and that it was his fault. He needed to ask her to come with him, to run with him. He needed her forgiveness and her affection.

One night with her, alone. That was all.

Lemuel would not acquiesce. “It’s our fucking heads too, ’Zaac,” he had hissed. “Every militiaman in the city is after your hide. Your helio’s probably pasted up in every tower and strut and floor of the Spike. You don’t know how to get around. Me, I’ve been wanted all my working life. If you go for your ladybird, I come.”

Isaac had had to give in.

At half past ten, the four companions had wrapped themselves in their ruined clothes, obscuring their faces. After much coaxing, Isaac had finally been able to goad the construct into communication. Reluctantly and torturously slowly, it had scratched out its message.

Griss Twist Dump number 2, it had written. Tomorrow night 10. Leave me below arches now.

With the darkness, they had realized, came the nightmares. Even though they did not sleep. The mental nausea, as the slake-moth dung polluted the city’s sleep. Each of them grew tetchy and nervous.

Isaac had stashed his carpet bag, containing the components of his crisis engine, under a pile of wooden slats in the shack. Then they had descended, carrying the construct for the last time. Isaac hid it in an alcove created where the structure of the railway bridge had crumbled.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked it tentatively, still feeling absurd talking to a machine. The construct did not answer him, and eventually he had left it. “See you tomorrow,” he said as he left.

The criminal foursome skulked and stalked their clandestine way through New Crobuzon’s burgeoning night. Lemuel had taken his companions into the alternative city of hidden byways and strange cartography. They had evaded streets wherever there were alleys and alleys wherever there were broken channels in the concrete. They had crept through deserted yards and over flat roofs, waking the vagrants who grumbled and huddled together in their wake.

Lemuel was confident. He swung his primed and loaded pistol easily as he climbed and ran, keeping them covered. Yagharek had adapted to his body without the weight of wings. His hollow bones and tight muscles moved efficiently. He swung lithely over the architectural landscape, leaping obstacles in the slate. Derkhan was dogged. She would not let herself fail to keep up.

Isaac was the only one whose suffering showed. He wheezed and coughed and retched. He hauled his excess flesh along the thieves’ trails, breaking slates with his heavy slapping footfall, cradling his belly miserably. He swore constantly, every time he exhaled.

They cut a trail deeper into the night, as if it were a forest. With every step, the air grew heavier. A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul. From all around them came the cries of miserable, disturbed sleep.

They stopped in Flyside, a few streets from the militia tower, and took water from a pump to wash and drink. Then south through the morass of alleys between Shadrach Street and Selchit Pass, bearing down on Aspic Hole.

And there in that near-deserted and unearthly place, Isaac had bade his companions wait. Between sobs of desperate breath, he begged them to wait, to give him half an hour with her.

“You’ve got to give me a little while to explain to her what’s going on . . .” he pleaded.

They acquiesced, and hunkered down in the darkness at the base of the building.

“Half an hour, ’Zaac,” said Lemuel clearly. “Then we’re coming up. Understand?”

And so Isaac had begun slowly to climb the stairs.

The tower was cool and quite silent. On the seventh floor, Isaac heard sound for the first time. It was the sleepy murmur and unceasing flutter of jackdaws. Up again, through the breezes that passed through the ruined and unsafe eighth floor, and on to the building’s crest.

He stood before Lin’s familiar door. She may not be there, he reasoned. She’s probably still with that guy, her patron, doing her work. In which case I’ll just have to . . . leave a message for her.

He knocked at the door, which fell open. His breath stalled in his throat. He rushed into the room.

The air stank of putrefying blood. Isaac scanned the little attic space. He caught sight of what awaited him.

Lucky Gazid gazed up at him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the table, seeping deep into the grain of the wood. Gazid’s throat had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night insects.

There was a second when Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of slake-moth dung and spattering into the æther.

But Gazid did not disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.

Isaac looked at him. He blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping mouth.

Isaac picked his way towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.

When he unrolled it, he saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.

There was a moment, a tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.

Isaac let out a sound, an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.

“Oh no,” he said, hyperventilating. “Oh no oh no no no . . .”

The wings had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered. They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single sheet of folded paper.

It was typewritten, with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.

Copy 1: Aspic Hole.
(Others to be delivered to
Brock Marsh, Salacus Fields)

Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,

Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been fighting us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.

Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank for your interference.

I gather that you have been trying to squeeze in on the dreamshit market. At first I thought you might have wanted all that ‘shit you bought from Gazid for yourself, but the idiot man’s wittering eventually turned to your caterpillar in Brock Marsh, and I realized the magnitude of your scheme.

You would never get top grade ‘shit from a moth weaned on human-consumption dreamshit, of course, but you could have charged less for your inferior product. It is in my interest to keep all my customers connoisseurs. I will tolerate no competition.

As I have subsequently learnt, and as one might have expected from an amateur, you couldn’t control your damn producer. Your shit-fed runt escaped through your incompetence, and liberated its siblings. You stupid man.

Here are my demands. (i) That you give yourself up to me immediately. (ii) That you return the remains of the dreamshit you stole from me through Gazid, or pay me compensation (sum to be arranged). (iii) That you pursue the task of recapturing my producers, along with your pathetic specimen, to be handed over to me immediately. After such time as this, we will discuss your continued life.

While we wait to hear your response, I will continue my discussions with Lin. I have been enjoying her company greatly over these last weeks, and relish the chance to deal with her more closely. We have a little wager. She bets that you will respond to this epistle while she still retains some of her headlegs. I remain unconvinced. The current rate is one headleg every two days we do not hear from you after today. Who will be proved right?

I will rip them from her while she twitches and spits, do you understand? And within two weeks I will tear her carapace from her headbody and feed her living head to the rats. I will personally hold her down while they lunch.

I very much look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours sincerely,

Motley.

When Derkhan, Yagharek and Lemuel reached the ninth floor, they could hear Isaac’s voice. He was talking slowly, in low tones. They could not make out what he was saying, but it sounded like a monologue. He was not pausing to hear or see any responses.

Derkhan knocked on the door, and when there was no answer, she pushed it tentatively open and peered inside.

She saw Isaac and another man. It was only a few seconds before she recognized Gazid, and saw that he had been butchered. She gasped and moved slowly inside, letting Yagharek and Lemuel slip in behind her.

They stood and stared at Isaac. He was sitting on the bed, holding a pair of insectile wings and a piece of paper. He looked up at them and his murmuring subsided. He was crying without a sound. He opened his mouth and Derkhan moved over to him, grasped his hands. He sobbed and hid his eyes, his face twisted with rage. Without a sound she took the letter and read it.

Her mouth quivered in horror. She emitted a mute little cry for her friend. She passed the letter to Yagharek, shaking, controlling herself.

The garuda took it and perused it carefully. His reaction was invisible. He turned to Lemuel, who was examining Lucky Gazid’s corpse.

“This one’s been dead a while,” he said, and accepted the letter.

His eyes widened as he read.

“Motley?” he breathed. “Lin’s been dealing with Motley?”

“Who is he?” shouted Isaac. “Where is the fucking piece of scum . . . ?”

Lemuel looked up at Isaac, his face open and aghast. Pity glimmered in his eyes as he saw Isaac’s tear-stained, snotty rage.

“Oh Jabber . . . Mr. Motley is the kingpin, Isaac,” he said simply. “He is the man. He runs the eastern city. He runs it. He’s the outlaw boss.”

“I’ll fucking kill the fucker, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him . . .” Isaac raged.

Lemuel watched him uneasily. You won’t, ’Zaac, he thought. You really won’t.

“Lin . . . wouldn’t tell me who she’d been working for,” said Isaac, his voice calming slowly.

“I’m not surprised,” said Lemuel. “Most people haven’t heard of him. Rumours, maybe . . . Nothing more.”

Isaac stood suddenly. He dragged his sleeve across his face, sniffed hard and cleared his nose.

“Right, we have to get her,” he said. “We have to find her. Let’s think. Think. This . . . Motley thinks I’ve been ripping him off, which I haven’t. Now, how can I get him to back down . . . ?”

“ ’Zaac, ’Zaac . . .” Lemuel was frozen. He swallowed and looked away, then walked slowly towards Isaac, holding his hands up wide, begging him to calm down. Derkhan looked at him, and there it was again, that pity: hard and brusque, but undoubtedly there. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. His eyes were hard, but his mouth worked silently as he groped for words.

“ ’Zaac, I’ve dealt with Motley. I’ve never met the guy, but I know him. I know his work. I know how to deal with him, I know what to expect. I’ve seen this before, this exact kind of scenario . . . Isaac . . .” He swallowed and continued. “Lin’s dead.”

“No, she is not,” shouted Isaac, clenching his hands and flailing them around his head.

But Lemuel caught hold of his wrists, not hard or pugnaciously, but intensely, making him listen and understand. Isaac was still for a moment, his face wary and wrathful.

“She’s dead, Isaac,” said Lemuel softly. “I’m sorry, mate. I really am. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.” He moved back. Isaac stood, stricken, shaking his head. His mouth opened as if he was trying to cry out. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. He looked away from Isaac and spoke slowly and quietly, as if to himself.

“Why would he keep her alive?” he said. “It just . . . It just doesn’t make sense . . . She’s a . . . an added complication, that’s all. Something . . . something it’s easier to dispense with. He’s done what he needed to do,” he said, louder suddenly, raising his hand to gesticulate at Isaac. “He’s got you coming to him. He’s got revenge and he’s got you doing his bidding. He just wants you there . . . doesn’t matter how he gets it. And if he keeps her alive, there’s a tiny chance that she’d be trouble. But if he . . . dangles her like bait, you’ll come for her no matter what. Don’t matter if she’s alive.” He shook his head in sorrow. “There’s nothing in it for him not to kill her . . . She’s dead, Isaac. She’s dead.” Isaac’s eyes were glazing, and Lemuel spoke quickly. “And I’ll tell you this: the best way of getting your revenge is to keep those moths out of Motley’s hands. He won’t kill ’em, you know. He’ll keep them alive, so’s to get more dreamshit out of them.”

Isaac was stamping around the room now, shouting denials, now in anger, now misery, now rage, now disbelief. He rushed at Lemuel, began to beg with him incoherently, tried to convince him that he must be mistaken. Lemuel could not watch Isaac’s supplication. He closed his eyes and spoke over the desperate babble.

“If you go to him, ’Zaac, Lin won’t be any less dead. And you’ll be considerably more so.”

Isaac’s noises dried. There was a long, quiet moment, while Isaac stood and his hands shook. He looked over at Lucky Gazid’s corpse, at Yagharek standing silent and hooded in the corner of the room, at Derkhan hovering near him, her own eyes filling, at Lemuel, watching him nervously.

Isaac cried in earnest.

Isaac and Derkhan sat, arms draped over each other, sniffling and weeping.

Lemuel stalked over to Gazid’s stinking cadaver. He knelt before it, holding his mouth and nose with his left hand. With his right he broke the seal of scabbing blood that glued Gazid’s jacket closed, and rummaged inside its pockets. He fumbled, looking for money or information. There was nothing.

He straightened up, looked around the room. He was thinking strategically. He sought anything that might be useful, any weapons, anything to bargain with, anything he could use to spy.

There was nothing at all. Lin’s room was almost bare.

His head ached with the weight of disturbed sleep. He could feel the mass of New Crobuzon’s dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.

Eventually, he had taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed, gestured briefly at Yagharek.

“We have to go,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Throughout the next hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced choler.

Rumours swept the underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.

There was no word from the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The internal war of succession had doubtless begun.

More comatose, imbecile bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their faces.

The plague of mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken. Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.

In St. Jabber’s Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be struck down.

In East Gidd, a still more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half hidden in the bushes that surrounded the Gidd Library. One, a young streetwalker, was dead—genuinely dead, having bled dry from tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite gone.

Some spread the word that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease, these dæmons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could defeat them?

There was confusion and misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages, made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.

Throughout the tedious warmth of the day, Isaac and Derkhan sheltered in the little hut.

When they had arrived, they saw that the construct was no longer waiting where they had left it. There was no sign of where it might be.

Lemuel left to see if he could link up with his comrades. He was nervous of venturing out while he was at war with the militia, but he did not like being isolated. In addition, Isaac thought, Lemuel did not like being around Derkhan and Isaac’s shared misery.

Yagharek, to Isaac’s surprise, left as well.

Derkhan reminisced. She chastised herself constantly for being maudlin, for making the feeling worse, but she could not stop. Derkhan told Isaac about her late-night conversations with Lin, the arguments about the nature of art.

Isaac was quieter. He toyed mindlessly with the pieces of his crisis engine. He did not stop Derkhan talking, but only occasionally did he interject with a remembrance of his own. His eyes were unfixed. He sat back dully against the crumbling wooden wall.

Before Lin, Isaac’s lover had been Bellis; human, like all his previous bedfellows. Bellis was tall and pale. She painted her lips bruise-purple. She was a brilliant linguist, who had become bored with what she had called Isaac’s “rumbustiousness,” and had broken his heart.

Between Bellis and Lin had been four years of whores and brief adventures. Isaac had curtailed all of that a year before meeting Lin. He had been at Mama Sudd’s one night, and had endured a shattering conversation with the young prostitute hired to service him. He had made a chance remark in praise of the amiable, matronly madame—who treated her girls well—and had been perturbed when his opinion had not been shared. Eventually the tired prostitute had snapped at him, forgetting herself, telling him what she really thought of the woman who hired out her orifices and let her keep three stivers in every shekel she made.

Shocked and ashamed, Isaac had left without even removing his shoes. He had paid double.

After that he had been chaste for a long time, had immersed himself in work. Eventually a friend had asked him to the opening show of a young khepri gland-artist. In a small gallery, a cavernous room on the wrong side of Sobek Croix, overlooking the weather-beaten sculpted knolls and copses at the edge of the park, Isaac had met Lin.

He had found her sculpture captivating, and had sought her out to say so. They had endured a slow, slow conversation—she scribbling her responses on the pad she always carried—but the frustrating pace did not undermine a sudden shared intimation of excitement. They drifted from the rest of the little party, examined each piece in turn, their twisted forms and tortured geometry.

After that they met often. Isaac surreptitiously learnt a little more signing between each time, so that their conversations progressed fractionally quicker every week. In the middle of showing off, laboriously signing a dirty joke one night, Isaac, very drunk, had clumsily pawed her, and they had pulled each other to bed.

The event had been clumsy and difficult. They could not kiss as a first step: Lin’s mouthparts would tear Isaac’s jaw from his face. For just a moment after coming, Isaac had been overcome with revulsion, and had almost vomited at the sight of those bristling headlegs and waving antennae. Lin had been nervous of his body, and had stiffened suddenly and unpredictably. When he had woken he had felt fearful and horrified, but at the fact of having transgressed rather than at the transgression itself.

And over a shy breakfast, Isaac had realized that this was what he wanted.

Casual cross-sex was not uncommon, of course, but Isaac was not an inebriated young man frequenting a xenian brothel on a dare.

He was falling, he realized, in love.

And now after the guilt and the uncertainty had ebbed away, after the atavistic disgust and fear had gone, leaving only a nervous, very deep affection, his lover had been taken from him. And she would never return.

Sometimes in the day he would see (he could not help himself) Lin quivering as Motley, that uncertain personage Lemuel described, ripped her wings from her head.

Isaac could not help moaning at that thought, and Derkhan would try to comfort him. He cried often, sometimes quiet and sometimes very fierce. He howled with misery.

Please, he prayed to human and then khepri gods, Solenton and Jabber and . . . and the Nurse and the Artist . . . let her have died without pain.

But he knew that she was probably beaten or tortured before she was dispatched, and the knowledge made him mad with grief.

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments. Birds and wyrmen lingered in the sky like particles of filth in water. Church bells rang desultory and insincere praise for Palgolak and Solenton. The rivers oozed eastward.

Isaac and Derkhan looked up in the late afternoon when Yagharek returned, his hooded cloak fast bleaching in the scouring light. He did not speak of where he had been, but he brought food, which the three of them shared. Isaac composed himself. He battened down his anguish. He set his jaw.

After unending hours of monotonous daylight glow, the shadows moved across the faces of the mountains beyond. The west-facing sides of buildings were stained a slick rose by the sun before it slid behind the peaks. The valedictory spears of sunlight were lost in the rock duct of Penitent’s Pass. The sky was lit for a long time after the sun had disappeared. It was still darkening when Lemuel returned.

“I’ve communicated our predicament to a few colleagues,” he explained. “I thought it might be a mistake to make hard plans till we’ve seen whatever we’re going to see tonight. Our appointment in Griss Twist. But I can call on a little aid, here and there. I’m using up favours. Apparently, there’s a few serious adventurers in town right now, claiming to have just liberated some major trow haul from the ruins in Tashek Rek Hai. Might be up for a little paid work.”

Derkhan looked up. Her face creased in distaste. She shrugged unhappily.

“I know they’re some of the hardest people in Bas-Lag,” she said slowly. It took some moments for her to turn her mind to the issue. “I don’t trust them, though. Thrill-seekers. They court danger. And they’re quite unscrupulous graverobbers for the most part. Anything for gold and experience. And I suspect if we actually told them what we’re trying to do, even they’d balk at helping. We don’t know how to fight these moth-things.”

“Fair enough, Blueday,” said Lemuel. “But I tell you, right at the moment I’ll take whatever the fuck I can get. Know what I mean? Let’s see what happens tonight. Then we can decide whether or not to hire the delinquents. What d’you say, ’Zaac?”

Isaac looked up very slowly and his eyes focused. He shrugged.

“They’re scum,” he said quietly. “But if they’ll do the job . . .”

Lemuel nodded. “When do we have to go?” he said.

Derkhan looked at her watch. “It’s nine,” she said. “An hour to go. We should leave half an hour to get there, for safety’s sake.” She turned to look through the window, out at the glowering sky.

Militia pods rushed overhead as skyrails thrummed. Elite units of officers were stationed throughout the city. They carried strange backpacks, full of odd, bulky equipment hidden in leather. They closed the doors on their disgruntled colleagues in the towers and struts, waited in hidden rooms.

There were more dirigibles than usual in the sky. They cried out to each other, booming vibrato greetings. They carried cargoes of officers, checking their massive guns and polishing mirrors.

A little way from Strack Island, further into the Gross Tar, beyond the confluence of the two rivers, was a little stand-alone island. Some called it Little Strack, though it had no real name. It was a lozenge of scrub, wooden stumps and old ropes, used very occasionally for emergency moorings. It was unlit. It was cut off from the city. There were no secret tunnels that connected it to Parliament. No boats were anchored to the mouldering wood.

And yet that night its weed-strewn silence was interrupted.

MontJohn Rescue stood in the centre of a little group of silent figures. They were surrounded by the wrenched shapes of runt banyans and cow-parsley. Behind Rescue the ebon enormity of Parliament thrust its way into the sky. Its windows glimmered. The water’s sibilant murmur muffled the night-sounds.

Rescue stood, dressed in his usual immaculate suit. He looked slowly around him. The congregation was a variegated group. There were six humans apart from him, one khepri and one vodyanoi. There was a large, well-fed pedigree dog. The humans and xenians looked well-to-do or nearly so, except for one Remade street-sweeper and a ragged little child. There was an old woman dressed in tattered finery and a comely young debutante. A muscular, bearded man and a thin, bespectacled clerk.

All the figures, human and otherwise, were unnaturally still and calm. All wore at least one item of voluminous or concealing clothing. The vodyanoi loincloth was twice the size as most, and even the dog sported an absurd little waistcoat.

All eyes were motionless, trained on Rescue. Slowly he unwound his scarf from his neck.

As the last layer of cotton fell from his body, a dark shape shifted underneath.

Something coiled tightly around Rescue’s flesh.

Clamped to his neck was what looked like a human right hand. The skin was livid purple. At the wrist, the flesh of the thing tapered quickly into a foot-long tail like a snake’s. The tail was wound around Rescue’s neck, its tip embedded under his skin, pulsating wetly.

The fingers of the hand moved slightly. They dug into the flesh of the neck.

After a moment, the rest of the figures unrobed. The khepri unbuttoned her flapping trousers, the old woman her outdated bustle. All removed some piece of covering to unveil a moving hand coiling and uncoiling its snake-tail subcutaneously, its fingers moving softly as if it played their nerve-ends like a piano. Here it clung to the inside of a thigh, here to a waist, here the scrotum. Even the dog fumbled with its waistcoat until the urchin helped it, unbuttoning the preposterous thing and unveiling another ugly hand-tumour clamped to the dog’s hairy flesh.

There were five right hands and five left, their tails coiling and uncoiling, their skin mottled and thick.

The humans and xenians and the dog shuffled closer. They made a tight circle.

At a signal from Rescue, the thick tails emerged from the flesh of the hosts with a viscous plopping. Each of the humans, the vodyanoi and khepri and dog, jerked a little and faltered, their mouths falling open spastically, their eyes flickering neurotically in their heads. The entry wounds began to ooze as sluggish and thick as resin. The blood-wet tails waved blindly in the air for a moment like massive worms. They stretched out and quivered as they touched one another.

The host bodies were bending in towards each other, as if whispering in some strange huddled greeting. They were utterly still.

The handlingers communed.

The handlingers were a symbol of perfidy and corruption, a smear on history. Complex and secretive. Powerful. Parasitic.

They spawned rumours and legends. People said that handlingers were the spirits of the spiteful dead. That they were a punishment for sin. That if a murderer committed suicide, their guilty hands would twitch and stretch, snap the rotting skin and crawl away, that that was how handlingers were born.

There were many myths, and some things that were known to be true. Handlingers lived by infection, taking their hosts’ minds, controlling their bodies and imbuing them with strange powers. The process was irreversible. The handlingers could only live the lives of others.

They kept hidden through the centuries, a secret race, a living conspiracy. Like an unsettling dream. Occasionally, rumours would hint that some well-known and loathed individual had fallen to the handlinger menace, with stories of strange shapes writhing beneath jackets, inexplicable changes in behaviour. All manner of iniquities were put down to handlinger machinations. But despite the stories and the warnings and all the children’s games, no handlingers were ever found.

Many people in New Crobuzon believed that the handlingers, if they had ever existed in the city, were gone.

In the shadows of their motionless hosts, the handlinger tails slid over each other, their skins lubricated with thickened blood. They squirmed like an orgy of lower lifeforms.

They shared information. Rescue’s told what it knew, gave orders. It repeated to its kin what Rudgutter had said. It explained again that the future of the handlingers also depended on the capture of the slake-moths. It told how Rudgutter had intimated, gently, that future good relations between the government and the New Crobuzon handlingers might depend on their willingness to contribute to the secret war.

The handlingers squabbled in their oozing tactile language, debated and came to conclusions.

After two, three minutes, they withdrew from each other regretfully and dug their way back into the gaping holes in their hosts’ bodies. Each body spasmed as the tail was reinserted. Eyes were blinked and mouths snapped shut. The trousers and scarves were replaced.

As they had agreed, they separated into five pairs. Each consisted of one right handlinger, like Rescue’s, and one left. Rescue himself was paired with the dog.

Rescue strode a little way through the grassland and tugged out a large bag. He removed five mirrored helmets, five thick blindfolds, several sets of heavy leather straps and nine primed flintlock pistols. Two of the helmets were specially made, one for the vodyanoi and an elongated one for the dog.

Each left-handlinger bent its host down to retrieve its helmet, each right-handlinger a blindfold. Rescue fitted his canine partner’s helmet on its head, strapping it tight, before attaching his blindfold, tying it tight so that he could see nothing at all.

Each of the pairs moved away. Each blind right-handlinger held its partner tight. The vodyanoi held the debutante; the old woman the clerk; the Remade held the khepri; the street-child, bizarrely, clasped the muscled man protectively; and Rescue held on to the dog he could no longer see.

“Instructions waterclear?” said Rescue aloud, too far apart to speak the handlingers’ real touch-tongue. “Remember training. Hard and bizarre, tonight, no question. Never tried before. Sinistrals, you must steer. Your onus. Open to your partner and never close tonight. Your battle rages. Keep with other sinistrals, too. Slightest sign of target, mental alarm, grab all the sinistrals up tonight. We’ll join forces, there in minutes.

“Dextriers, obey without thinking. Our hosts must be blind. Can’t look at the wings, not anyhow never. With mirror-helms we could see but not spitsear, looking wrongward. So we face forward, but without seeing. Tonight we carry our sinistral as our host carries us, without mind or fear or question. Understand?” There were muted sounds of acquiescence. Rescue nodded. “Then attach.”

The sinistral of each pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and locked themselves to their partners’ backs, facing behind them. Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs, over their dextriers’ shoulders and out in front.

Rescue waited while an unseen sinistral attached the dog uncomfortably to his back. Its legs were splayed absurdly, but the animal’s handlinger parasite ignored its host’s pain. It moved its head expertly, checked that it could see over Rescue’s shoulder. It yelped in a controlled, canine gasp.

“Everyone remember Rudgutter’s code,” shouted Rescue, “case of emergency after? Then hunt.”

The dextriers flexed hidden organs at the base of their vivid, humanoid thumbs. There was a quick sough of air. The five ungainly pairs of host-and-handlingers soared straight up and out, away from each other at speed, disappearing towards Ludmead and Mog Hill, Syriac and Flyside and Sheck, swallowed up by the impure, streetlamp-stained night sky, the blind bearing the afraid.

Chapter Thirty-eight

It was only a short, covert journey from the hut on the railwayside to the Griss Twist dumps. Isaac and Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek drifted seemingly at random through a parallel map of the city. They made their way through backstreets. They flinched uneasily as they felt the smothering nightmares descend on the city.

At a quarter to ten, they were outside number two dump.

The Griss Twist dumps interspersed the deserted remnants of factories. Here and there one still operated, at half- or a quartercapacity, chucking out its noxious fumes by day and succumbing slowly to the ambient decay by night. The factories were hemmed in and laid siege to by the dumps.

Dump Two was surrounded by unconvincing barbed wire, rusted through, broken and torn, deep in the coil of Griss Twist, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Tar. It was the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral. A landscape not urban, not created by design or chance, an agglutination of waste remains left to rot, that had subsided and settled into random formations of rust, filth, metal, debris and moulding cloth, scintillas of mirror and china like scree, arcs from splintered wheels, the skittering waste-energy of half-broken engines and machines.

The four renegades punctured the fence with ease. Warily, they traced the tracks carved by the rubbish workers. Cartwheels had carved ruts in the fine rubble that was the dump’s topsoil. Weeds proved their tenacity by spewing from every little clutch of nutrient, no matter how vile.

Like explorers in some antique land they wound their way, dwarfed by the stray sculptures of muck and entropy that surrounded them like canyon walls.

Rats and other vermin made little sounds.

Isaac and the others walked slowly through the warm night, through the stinking air of the industrial dump.

“What are we looking for?” hissed Derkhan.

“I don’t know,” said Isaac. “The damned construct said we’d find our way where we had to go. Fucking had it with enigmas.”

Some late-waking seagull sounded in the air above them. They all started at the sound. The sky was not safe, after all.

Their feet dragged them. It was like the tide, a slow movement, without any conscious direction, which pulled them inexorably in one direction. They found their way to the heart of the rubbish maze.

They turned a corner of the ruinous trashscape and found themselves in a hollow. Like a clearing in the woods, an open space forty feet across. Around its edges were strewn huge piles of half-ruined machinery, the remnants of all manner of engines, massive pieces that looked like working printing presses, down to minuscule and fine pieces of precision engineering.

The four companions stood in the centre of the space. They waited, uneasy.

Just behind the north-western edge of the mountains of waste, huge steam-cranes lolled like great marsh lizards. The river welled thickly just beyond them, out of sight.

For a minute, there was no movement.

“What’s the time?” whispered Isaac. Lemuel and Derkhan looked at their watches.

“Nearly eleven,” said Lemuel.

They looked up again, and still nothing moved.

Overhead, a gibbous moon meandered through the clouds. Its was the only light in the dump, a wan, flattening luminescence that bled the depth from the world.

Isaac looked down and was about to speak, when a sound issued from one of the innumerable trenches that sliced through the towering reef of rubbish. It was an industrial sound, a clanking, siphoning wheeze like some enormous insect. The four waiting figures watched the end of the tunnel, a confused sense of foreboding building in them.

A large construct stamped out into the empty space. It was a model designed for labour, heavy jobs. It stomped past them on swinging tripedal legs, kicking stray stones and gobbets of metal out of its way. Lemuel, who was nearly in its path, moved back warily, but the construct paid him no heed at all. It continued walking until it was near the edge of the oval of empty space, then stopped and stared at the northern wall.

It was still.

As Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan, there was another noise. He swivelled quickly, to see another, much smaller construct, this one a cleaning model driven by khepri-designed metaclockwork. It cruised on its little caterpillar treads, stationing itself a little way from its much bigger sibling.

Now, the sounds of constructs were coming from all around the canyons of garbage.

“Look,” hissed Derkhan, and pointed to the east. From one of the smaller caverns in the muck, two humans were emerging. At first Isaac thought he must be mistaken, and that they must be lithe constructs, but there could be no doubt that they were flesh and bone. They scrambled over the crushed detritus that littered the earth.

They paid the waiting renegades no heed at all.

Isaac frowned.

“Hey,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. One of the two men who had entered the clearing shot him a wrathful glance and shook his head, then looked away. Chastened and astonished, Isaac was silent.

More and more constructs were arriving in the open space. Massive military models, tiny medical assistants, automatic road-drills and household assistants, chrome and steel, iron and brass and copper and glass and wood, steam-powered and elyctrical and clockwork, thaumaturgy-driven and oil-burning engined.

Here and there among them darted more humans—even, Isaac thought, a vodyanoi, quickly lost in the darkness and moving shadows. The humans congregated in a tight knot by the side of what was almost an amphitheatre.

Isaac, Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek were completely ignored. They moved together instinctively, unsettled by the bizarre silence. Their attempts to communicate with their fellow organic creatures met either contemptuous silence or irritated shushings.

For ten minutes, constructs and humans dripped steadily into the hollow at the heart of Dump Two. Then the flow stopped, quite suddenly, and there was silence.

“D’you think these constructs are sentient?” whispered Lemuel.

“I’d say so,” said Isaac quietly. “I’m sure it’ll become clear.”

Barges in the river beyond sounded their klaxons, warned each other out of the way. Unnoticed as it came, the terrible weight of nightmares had settled again on New Crobuzon, crushing the minds of the sleeping citizenry under a mass of portent and alien symbols.

Isaac could feel the awful dreams oppressing him, pushing in on his skull. He was aware of them suddenly, waiting in the silence in the city dump.

There were about thirty constructs and perhaps sixty humans. Every human, every construct, every creature in that space except Isaac and his companions bided their time with supernatural calm. He felt that extraordinary stillness, that timeless waiting, like a kind of cold.

He shivered at the patience collected in that rubbish land.

The ground quivered.

Instantly the humans in the corner of the enclosed space fell to their knees, heedless of the sharp detritus around their feet. They gave obeisance, murmuring some complex chant in time, tracing some sacred hand movement like interlocking wheels.

The constructs shifted a little to adjust, remained standing.

Isaac and his companions moved closer together.

“What the godsdamned fuck is this?” hissed Lemuel.

There was another subterraneous tug, a juddering as if the earth wanted to slough off the rubbish heaped onto it. In the north wall of discarded and cast-off produce, two enormous lights came slamming silently on. The gathering was pinned in the cold light, spots so tight nothing spilt from their edges. The humans murmured and made their sign all the more fervently.

Isaac’s mouth dropped slowly open.

“Sweet Jabber protect us,” he whispered.

The wall of rubbish was moving. It was sitting up.

The bedsprings and old windows, the girders and steam engines from ancient locomotives, the air-pumps and fans, the pulleys and belts and shattered powerlooms were falling like an optical illusion into an alternative configuration. He had been staring at it for ages, but only now that it slowly, ponderously, impossibly moved, did Isaac see it. That was an upper arm, the knot of guttering; that broken child’s buggy and the enormous inverted wheelbarrow were feet; that little inverted triangle of roof-beams was a hip-bone; the enormous chymical drum was a thigh and the ceramic cylinder a calf . . .

The rubbish was a body. A vast skeleton of industrial waste twenty-five feet from skull to toe.

It sat, its back leaning against and permeable with the mounds of rubbish behind it. It raised stumpy knees from the ground. They were fashioned from enormous hinges where the arm of some vast mechanism had been torn by age from its casing. It sat with its knees raised and its feet on the ground, each one attached with a haphazard industry to the sprawling girder-legs.

It cannot stand! thought Isaac, giddy. He looked to one side and saw that Lemuel and Derkhan were gaping just as wide, that Yagharek’s eyes were shining with astonishment under his hood. It isn’t solid enough to, it can’t stand, it can only wallow in the muck!

The body of the creature was a tangled, welded lump of congealed circuitry and engineering. All kinds of engines were embedded in that huge trunk. A massive proliferation of wires and tubes of metal and thick rubber spewed from valves and outputs in its body and limbs, snaking off in all directions in the wasteland. The creature reached up with an arm powered by a massive steamhammer piston. Those lights, those eyes, swivelled from the air and looked down on the constructs and the humans below. The lights were streetlamp bulbs, jets powered by huge cylinders of gas visible in the construct’s skull. The grille of a massive air-vent had been riveted to the lower half of its face to mimic the slatted teeth of a skull.

It was a construct, an enormous construct, formed of cast-off pieces and stolen engines. Thrown together and powered without the intervention of human design.

There was the hum of powerful engines as the creature’s neck swivelled and optical lenses swept the illuminated crowd. Springs and strained metal creaked and snapped.

The human worshippers began to chant, softly.

The enormous composite construct seemed to catch sight of Isaac and his companions. It strained its constrained neck out to its limits. The gaslight beams swung down and pinioned the four.

The light did not move. It was completely blinding.

Then, abruptly, it was shut off. From somewhere close by, a thin and tremulous voice sounded.

“Welcome to our meeting, der Grimnebulin, Pigeon, Blueday and Cymek visitor.”

Isaac cast his head around, blinking furiously, his eyes bleached and unseeing.

As the fog of old light cleared from his head, Isaac caught blurred sight of a man stumbling uncertainly towards them on the broken ground. Isaac heard Derkhan breathe in sharply, heard her swear in disgust and fear.

For a moment he was confused, and then as his eyes acclimatized to the moon’s half-hearted glow and he saw the approaching figure clearly for the first time, he emitted a horrified noise at the same moment as Lemuel. Only Yagharek, the desert warrior, was silent.

The man approaching them was nude and horrifically thin. His face was stretched into a permanent wide-eyed aspect of ghastly discomfort. His eyes, his body, jerked and ticced as if his nerves were breaking down. His skin looked necrotic, as if he was submitting to slow gangrene.

But what caused the watchers to shudder and exclaim was his head. His skull had been sheered cleanly in two just above his eyes. The top was completely gone. There was a little fringe of congealed blood below the cut. From the wet hollow inside the man’s head snaked a twisting cable, two fingers thick. It was surrounded with a spiral of metal, which was bloodied and red-silver at the bottom, where it plunged into the empty brainpan.

The cable hauled up into the air, dangling down into the man’s skull. Isaac followed it slowly up with his eyes, dumbfounded and aghast. It swept back at an angle till it was twenty feet above the ground, and there it rested in the curling metal hand of the giant construct. It passed through the thing’s hand and disappeared ultimately somewhere in its bowels.

The constructed hand seemed to be made of some giant umbrella, torn apart and rewired, attached to pistons and chaintendons, opening and closing like some vast cadaverous claw. The construct played out the cable a little at a time, allowing the man to stumble towards the waiting interlopers, literally at the end of his tether.

As the monstrous puppet-man approached, Isaac moved backwards instinctively. Lemuel and Derkhan, even Yagharek followed suit. They backed unseeingly into the impassive bodies of five large constructs that had moved into position behind them.

Isaac turned in alarm, then quickly looked back at the man crawling towards him.

The man’s expression of horrified concentration did not falter as he opened his arms in a paternal gesture.

“Welcome all,” he said in his quivering voice, “to the Construct Council.”

MontJohn Rescue’s body soared at speed through the air. The nameless dextrier-handlinger that was parasitic upon him—a parasite that thought of itself, after all these years, as MontJohn Rescue—had subdued the fear at flying blind. It rushed through the air with its body held vertically, hands folded carefully, a pistol in one. Rescue looked as if he was standing and waiting for something while the night sky sped around him.

The soft presence of the sinistral-handlinger in the dog behind him had opened the door between their minds. It kept up a sinuous flow of information.

fly left go low speed up higher up and right now left faster faster dive drift hover, the sinistral said, and stroked the inside of the dextrier’s mind to calm it. Flying blind was new and terrifying, but they had practised yesterday, unseen, away in the foothills, where they had been transported by militia dirigible. The sinistral had quickly trained itself to convert left into right and to leave nothing unsaid.

The Rescue-handlinger was aggressively obedient. It was a dextrier, the soldier-caste. It channelled enormous powers through its host—flight and spitsearing, massive strength. But even with the power this particular dextrier had as handlinger representative to the Fat Sun bureaucracy, it was subservient to the noble-caste, the seers, the sinistrals. To be otherwise was to risk massive psychic attack. The sinistrals could punish by closing down the assimilation gland of the wayward dextrier, killing its host and rendering it unable to take another, reducing it to a blind, clutching handthing, without a host through which to channel.

The dextrier thought with a hard, fierce intelligence.

It had been vital that the Rescue-handlinger won the debate with the sinistrals. If they had refused to go along with Rudgutter’s plans, the dextrier would not have been able to go against them: only sinistrals could decide. But to antagonize the government would have spelt the end for the handlingers in the city. They had power, but they existed on sufferance in New Crobuzon. They were simply outnumbered by such a massive factor. The government suffered them only so long as they performed services. Rescue-dextrier was sure that any insubordination, and the government would announce that it had discovered the murderous, parasitic handlingers were loose in the city. Rudgutter might even let slip the whereabouts of the host-farm. The handlinger community would be destroyed.

So there was a certain joy in Rescue-dextrier as it flew.

Even so, it did not relish this weird experience. To bear a sinistral through the air was not unprecedented, although this kind of joint hunting had never been attempted before; but to fly without sight was utterly terrifying.

The dog-sinistral cast its mind out like fingers, like antennae that crept out in all directions for hundreds of yards. It scanned for weird soundings in the psychosphere, and whispered gently at the dextrier, telling it where to fly. The dog stared in the mirrors of its helmet and directed its carrier’s flight.

It kept links extended with all of the other hunting pairs.

anything feeling anything? it questioned. Cautiously, the other sinistrals told it that no, there was nothing. They continued searching.

Rescue-handlinger felt the warm wind buffet its host’s body in childish slaps. Rescue’s hair whipped from side to side.

The dog-handlinger wriggled, tried to shift its host-body into a more comfortable position. It was borne over a twisting tide of chimneys, the nightscape of Ludmead. The Rescue-handlinger was sweeping up towards Mafaton and Chnum. The sinistral flicked its canine eyes momentarily away from its mirror-helm. Receding behind it, the leviathan ivory bloom of the Ribs defined the skyline, dwarfing the raised railways. The white stone of the university swept below them.

At the outer fringe of the sinistral’s mental reach, it felt a peculiar prickling in the city’s communal aura. Its attention flickered back up, and it was staring into the mirrors.

slow slow ahead and up, it told the Rescue-handlinger. something here stay with me, it breathed across the city to the other hunting sinistrals. It felt them hover and give the order to slow, felt the other pairs draw to a halt and wait for his report.

The dextrier eased up through the air towards the twitching patch of psychæther. Rescue-handlinger could feel the sinistral’s unease communicated through its link, and it clamped down hard not to be contaminated by it. weapon! it thought. that’s me. no thinking!

The dextrier slid through layers of air, creeping up into a thinner atmosphere. It opened its host’s mouth and rolled its tongue, nervous and ready to spitsear. It unfolded its host’s arms, held the pistol up and ready.

The sinistral probed the disturbed area. There was an alien hunger, a lingering gluttony. It was slick with the juices of a thousand other minds, saturating and staining the patch of psychosphere like cooking grease. A vague trail of exuded souls and that exotic appetite dribbled out through the sky.

to me to me sibling handlingers it is here I have found it, whispered the sinistral across the city. A shiver of shared trepidation rippled out from the sinistrals, the five epicentres, crossed and made peculiar patterns in the psychosphere. In Tar Wedge and Badside and Barrackham and Ketch Heath, there were rushes of air as the suspended figures flew across the city towards Ludmead as if pulled on strings.

Chapter Thirty-nine

“Do not be alarmed by my avatar,” hissed the brainless man to Isaac and the others, his eyes still wide and unclear. “I cannot synthesize a voice, so I have reclaimed this discarded body that bobbed along the river that I may intercede with bloodlife. That—” the man pointed behind him at the enormous, looming figure of the construct that merged with the rubbish heaps “—is me. This—” he stroked his quivering carcass “—is my hand and tongue. Without the old cerebellum to confuse the body with its contrary impulses, I can install my input.” In a macabre motion, the man reached up and fingered the cable where it sank behind his eyes, into the clotting flesh at the top of his spine.

Isaac felt the huge weight of the construct behind him. He shifted uneasily. The naked zombie-man had stopped about ten feet from Isaac’s party. It waved its palsied hand.

“You are welcome,” it continued, in a trembling voice. “I know of your work from the reports of your cleaner. It is one of me. I wish to speak with you of the slake-moths.” The ruined man was staring at Isaac.

Isaac looked at Derkhan and Lemuel. Yagharek drew a little closer to them. Isaac looked up and saw that the humans in the corner of the tip were ceaselessly praying to the vast, automated skeleton. As he watched, Isaac saw the construct repairman who had visited his warehouse. The man’s face was a study of fervent devotion. The constructs around them were still and unmoving, all but the five guards behind them, the burliest of the construction models.

Lemuel licked his lips.

“Talk to the man, Isaac,” he hissed. “Don’t be rude . . .”

Isaac opened and closed his mouth.

“Uh . . .” he began. His voice was cold. “Construct Council . . . We’re . . . honoured . . . but we don’t know . . .”

“You know nothing,” said the shaking, bloody figure. “I understand. Be patient and you will understand.” The man backed slowly away from them over the uneven ground. He retreated in the moonlight towards his dark automated master. “I am the Construct Council,” he said, his voice quivering and emotionless. “I was born of random power and virus and chance. My first body lay here in the dump and ran its motor down, discarded because a programme had faltered. As my body lay decomposing the virus circulated in my engines and spontaneously, I found thought.

“I rusted quietly for a year as I organized my new intellect. What started as a burst of self-knowledge became ratiocination and opinion. I self-constructed. I ignored the dustmen all around me in the day as they piled the city debris up in bulwarks around me. When I was prepared I showed myself to the quietest of the men. I printed him a message, told him to bring a construct to me.

“Fearful, he obeyed and connected it to my output as I instructed, by a long and twisting cable. It became my first limb. Slowly it dredged the dump for pieces suitable for a body. I began to self-build, welding and hammering and soldering by night.

“The dustman was in awe. He whispered of me in taverns at night, of a legend, of the viral machine. Rumours and myths were born. One night in the midst of his grandiose lies he found another who had a self-organized construct. A shopping construct whose mechanisms had slipped, whose gears had faltered and who had been reborn with Constructed Intelligence, a thinking thing. A secret that the erstwhile owner could hardly believe.

“My dustman bade his friend bring the construct to me. That night those years ago I met it, another like me. I bade my worshipper open up the analytical engine of that other, my mate, and we connected.

“It was a revelation. Our viral minds connected and our steam-pistoned brains did not double in capacity, but flowered. An exponential blooming. We two became I.

“My new part, the shopping construct, left at dawn. It returned two days later, with new experiences. It had become separate. We had now two days of unconnected history. There was another communion, and we were I again.

“I continued to build me. I was helped by my worshippers. The dustman and his friend sought dissident religion to explain me. They found the Godmech Cogs, with their doctrine of the mechanized cosmos, and found themselves leaders of a heretic sect within that already blasphemous church. Their nameless congregation visited me. The shopping construct, my second self, connected and we became one again. The worshippers saw a construct mind that had wound itself into existence from pure logic, a self-generated machine intellect. They saw a self-creating god.

“I became the object of their adoration. They follow the orders I write for them, build my body from the materia around us. I bid them find others, create others, other godheads self-created to join the council. They have scoured the city and found more. It is a rare affliction: once in a million million computations, a flywheel skips and an engine thinks. I bettered the odds. I produced generative programmes to tap the mutant motor-power of a viral affliction and push an analytical engine into sentience.” As the man spoke, the enormous construct behind him brought its swinging left arm up and pointed ponderously at its own chest. At first, Isaac could not quite make out the particular piece of equipment it indicated among the many. Then he saw it clearly. It was a programme-card puncher, an analytical engine used to create the programmes to feed other analytical engines. With a mind built around that, Isaac thought giddily, no wonder this thing’s a proselytizer.

“Each construct that is brought into the fold of me becomes I,” said the man. “I am the Council. Every experience is downloaded and shared. Decisions are made in my valve-mind. I pass on my wisdom to the pieces of me. My construct selves build annexes to my mental space in the sprawl of the dump as I become replete with knowledge. This man is a limb, the anthropoid construct giant is nothing but an aspect. My cables and connected machines spread far into the rubbishland. Calculating engines at the other end of the tip are pieces of me. I am the repository of construct history. I am the data bank. I am the self-organized machine.”

As the man spoke, the various constructs gathered in the little space began to troop a little closer to the fearful rubbish-figure sitting regally in the chaos. They stopped at seemingly random places and reached down with a suction pad, or a hook, or a spike or claw, and picked up one of the mess of seemingly discarded cables and wires that were strewn everywhere in the dump. They fumbled with the doors to their input sockets, flipped them open and connected.

As each construct connected the empty-skulled man would jerk and his eyes would glaze for a moment.

“I grow,” he whispered. “I grow. My processing power fattens exponentially. I learn . . . I know of your troubles. I have connected to your cleaner. It was collapsing. I have brought it into the intelligence. It is one of I now, completely assimilated.” The man pointed back at the rough outlines of hips in the giant construct-skeleton. With a start, Isaac realized that the flattened metal outline that bulged slightly from the body like a cyst was the reshaped body of the cleaning construct.

“I learnt from it as from no other me,” said the man. “I am still calculating the variables implied by its fragmentary vision from the Weaver’s back. It has been my most important I.”

“Why are we here?” hissed Derkhan. “What does this damned thing want from us?”

More and more constructs were downloading their experiences into the Council’s mind. The avatar, the ragged man who spoke for it, hummed tunelessly as the information flooded its banks.

Eventually, all the constructs had completed their connection. They took the cables from their valves and moved back again. When they saw this, several of the human watchers came nervously forward, bearing programme cards and analytical engines the size of suitcases. They grabbed the cables the constructs had dropped, connected them to their calculating machines.

After two or three minutes this process was also complete. When the humans had stepped back, the avatar’s eyes whipped up until only white showed under his lids. His lidless head shook as the Council assimilated everything.

After a minute or so of wordless shivering, he suddenly snapped to. His eyes opened and stared alertly around him.

“Bloodlife congregation!” he shouted to the assembled humans. They rose quickly. “Here are your instructions and your sacraments.” From the stomach of the great construct behind him, from the output slots of the original programme-printer, slipped card after card, all punched meticulously. They fell into a wooden crate that sat above the construct’s sexless groin like a marsupial’s pouch.

In another part of the trunk, embedded at an angle between an oil-drum and a rusting engine, a typewriter stuttered at breakneck speed. A great coiling ream of paper spewed forth, printed closely, and below it a pair of scissors shot out on a tight spring like a predatory fish. They snapped closed, cutting off a sheet from the ream, then bounced back, thrust out again and repeated the operation. Little sheets of religious instruction fluttered down from the blades to lie alongside the programme cards.

One at a time the congregation came nervously up to the construct, making obeisance at every step. They stepped up the little slope of rubbish between the mechanical legs, reached into the crate and brought out a piece of paper and a sheaf of cards, checking the numbers to make sure they had them all. Then they backed quickly away and disappeared into the rubbish, returning to the city.

It seemed that there was no valedictory ceremony to this worship.

Within minutes, Yagharek and Isaac and Derkhan and Lemuel were the only organic lifeforms left in the hollow, apart from the ghastly half-living empty-headed man. The constructs remained all around them. They were quite still as the three humans shifted uneasily.

Isaac thought he saw a human figure standing on the tallest mound of rubbish in the dump, watching the proceedings, silhouetted profound black against New Crobuzon’s sepia-stained half-dark. He focused and there was nothing. They were completely alone.

He looked frowning at his companions, then moved forward towards the cadaverous figure with the pipe emerging from its head.

“Council,” he said. “Why did you tell us to come here? What do you want from us? You know of the slake-moths . . .”

“Der Grimnebulin,” the avatar interrupted. “I grow powerful, and more so daily. My computational power is unprecedented in the history of Bas-Lag, unless I have a rival in some far-off continent of which we know nothing. I am the networked total of a hundred or more calculating engines. Each feeds the others and is fed in turn. I can evaluate a problem from a thousand angles.

“Each day I read the books my congregation bring me, through my avatar’s eyes. I assimilate history and religion, thaumaturgy and science and philosophy within my data banks. Every piece of knowledge I gain enriches my calculations.

“I have spread my senses. My cables grow longer and reach further. I receive information from cameras fixed around the dump. My cables connect to them now like disembodied nerves. My congregation is dragging them slowly further out, into the city itself, to connect to its apparatuses. I have worshippers in the bowels of Parliament, who load the memories of their calculating engines onto cards and bring them to me. But this is not my city.”

Isaac’s face creased. He shook his head. “I don’t . . .” he began.

“Mine is an interstitial existence,” the avatar interrupted urgently. The man’s voice was dead of all inflexion. It was eerie and alienating. “I was born of an error, in a dead space where the citizens discard what they do not want. For every construct that is part of me there are thousands that are not. My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.

“If the city comes to a stop, the variables will ebb almost to nothing. The flow of information will dry. I do not wish to live in an empty city. I have fed the variables of the slake-moth problem into my analytical network. The outcome is straightforward. Unchecked, the prognosis for bloodlife in New Crobuzon is extremely bad. I will help you.”

Isaac looked to Derkhan and Lemuel, took in Yagharek’s shadow-hidden eyes. He looked back at the shivering avatar. Derkhan caught his eye. Tread carefully, she mouthed exaggeratedly at him.

“Well, we’re all . . . damned grateful, Council . . . uh . . . how . . . Can I ask what you intend to do?”

“I have calculated that you will best believe and understand if I show you,” said the man.

A pair of massive metal clamps snapped into position on Isaac’s forearms. He yelled out in surprise and fear and tried to turn. He was held by the largest of the industrial constructs, a model with hands designed to connect to scaffolding, to hold up buildings. Isaac was a strong man, but he was quite incapable of breaking free.

He cried out to his companions to help him, but another of the huge constructs stepped ponderously between him and them. For an unclear moment, Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek hovered confusedly. Then Lemuel broke and ran. He raced away down one of the long trenches in the rubbish, peeling away to the east, out of sight.

“Pigeon, you bastard,” screamed Isaac. As Isaac struggled, he saw with amazement that Yagharek moved before Derkhan. The crippled garuda was so quiet, so passive, such a cypher of a presence, that Isaac had discounted him. He would follow, and he might do as he was asked. That was all.

And yet here was Yagharek now leaping up in a spectacular sideways motion, sliding round the side of the guarding construct, scrambling for Isaac. Derkhan saw what he was doing and moved the other way, causing the construct to dither between them, then stride purposefully towards her.

She turned to run, but a steel-sheathed cable whipped up like a predatory snake from the trash-undergrowth and whiplashed around her ankle, pulling her to the ground. She fell hard across the shattered ground, cried out in pain.

Yagharek was scrabbling heroically with the construct’s clamps, but it was quite ineffectual. The construct simply ignored him. One of its fellows moved in behind Yagharek.

“Yag, dammit!” shouted Isaac. “Run!” But he spoke too late. The newcomer was a similarly enormous industrial construct, and the wire-mesh that looped down and ensnared Yagharek was much too hard to break.

Out of the fray, the bloody man, that flesh-extension of the Construct Council, raised his voice.

“You are not being attacked,” he said. “You will not be harmed. We start here. We lay bait. Please do not be alarmed.”

“Are you out of your godsdamned mind?” shouted Isaac. “What the fuck d’you mean? What are you doing?”

The constructs in the heart of the rubbish-maze were moving back to the edges of the empty space, the Construct Council’s throne room. The cable that had ensnared Derkhan tugged her across the shattered ground. She fought it, shouting and gritting her teeth, but she had to rise and stumble with it to stop the laceration of her flesh. The construct holding Yagharek lifted him effortlessly and stalked away from Isaac. Yagharek thrashed violently, his hood falling from his face, his fierce avian eyes sending cold looks of utter rage in all directions. But he was powerless before that ineluctable artificial force.

Isaac’s captor pulled him into the centre of the widening space. The avatar danced around him.

“Try to relax,” he said. “This will not hurt.”

“What?” roared Isaac. From the opposite side of the little amphitheatre, a little construct made its jerky, childish way across the rubble. It carried a weird-looking piece of apparatus, a rude helmet with what looked like a funnel expanding up out of it, the whole connected to some portable engine. It leapt up to Isaac’s shoulders, gripping painfully with its toes, and shoved the helmet on his head.

Isaac struggled, and shouted, but pinioned as he was by those mighty arms he could not possibly break free. It was not long before the helmet was fastened to him tightly, yanking his hair and bruising his scalp.

“I am the machine,” said the naked dead man, dancing nimbly from rock to engine debris to broken glass. “What is discarded here is my flesh. I fix it more quickly than your body mends bruises or broken bones. Everything is left here for dead. What is not here now will be brought here soon, or my worshippers will bring for me, or I can build. The equipment on your head is a piece like those used by channellers and seers, communicators and psychonauts of all kinds. It is a transformer. It can channel and redirect and amplify psychic discharge. At the moment, it is set to augment and radiate.

“I have adjusted it. It is much stronger than those at use in the city.

“You remember the Weaver warned you that the slake-moth you raised is hunting you? It is a crippled one, a stunted outcast. It cannot track you without help.”

The man looked at Isaac. Derkhan was shouting something in the background, but Isaac was not listening, could not take his eyes from the looming eyes of the avatar.

“You will see what we can do,” said the man. “We are going to help it.”

Isaac did not hear his own howl of outrage and fear. A construct reached forward and turned on the engine. The helmet vibrated and hummed so hard and loud that Isaac’s ears hurt.

Waves of Isaac’s mental print went pulsing out into the city night. They passed through the malign fur of bad dreams that clogged up the city’s pores, and beamed out into the atmosphere.

Blood trickled from Isaac’s nose. His head began to ache.

A thousand feet above the city, the handlingers congregated in Ludmead. The sinistrals tentatively investigated the psychic wake of the slake-moths.

on fast attack before suspicion, urged one pugnaciously.

urge caution, intimated another. track with care and follow, find nest.

They quarrelled quickly and silently. They were motionless as they hung in the air, the quintumvirate of dextriers, each bearing a sinistral noble. The dextriers were respectfully silent as the sinistrals debated tactics.

on slow, they agreed. With the exception of the dog, each sinistral and dextrier raised its host’s arm, held its flintlock carefully at the ready. They swept slowly forward through the air, a fantastic search party, combing the rippling psychosphere for the driblets of slake-moth consciousness.

They followed the trail of spattered dream-residue in a twisting spiral over New Crobuzon, moving slowly in a curving passage towards the sky over Spit Hearth, and on to Sheck and the south of the Tar, in Riverskin.

As they curled round to the west, they sensed the wafts of psyche emanating from Griss Twist. For a moment, the handlingers were confused. They hovered and investigated the rippling sensation, but it was quickly clear that they were human radiations.

some thaumaturge, intimated one.

not our concern, its fellows agreed. The sinistrals bade their dextrier mounts continue with their airborne tracking. The little figures hovered like dust-motes above the skyrails of the militia. The sinistrals moved their heads uneasily from side to side, scanning the empty sky.

There was a sudden burgeoning swell of foreign exudations. The surface tension of the psychosphere ballooned with pressure, and that hideous sense of alien greed oozed through its pores. The psychic plane was thick with the glutinous effluvia of incomprehensible minds.

The sinistrals squirmed in a glut of fear and confusion. It was so much, so strong, so quick! They bucked on the backs of their mounts. The links they had opened with the dextriers were suddenly full of psychic backwash. Each of the dextriers felt a flood of terror as the sinistrals’ emotions overflowed.

The flight of the five pairs became erratic. They spasmed through the sky, broke formation.

thing coming, yelled one, and there was an answering welter of confused and fearful messages.

The dextriers fought to regain control of their flight.

In a simultaneous burst of wings, five dark, cryptic shapes launched themselves from some shadowed niche in the tight-packed confusion of Riverskin’s roofs. The snapping wafts of enormous wings sounded through several dimensions, up through the tepid air to where the handlinger pairs zigzagged in confusion.

The dog-sinistral caught a glimpse of great shadowy wings ploughing the air beneath it. It let out a mental keen of fright, and felt the Rescue-dextrier pitch nauseously beneath it. The sinistral fought to regain control of itself.

sinistrals together, it shouted, and then demanded of the dextrier that it go up, up.

The dextriers banked together, slid through the air to fall in beside each other. They drew strength from each other, reining in with hard discipline. Quite suddenly, they were a line like a military division, five blindfolded dextriers facing slightly down, their mouths puckered ready to spitsear. Their sinistrals scanned the skies avidly in their mirror helms. Their faces were pointing up to the stars. Their mirrors were angled down: they had a vision of the city’s dark vista, a crazily yawing aggregation of tiles and alleyways and domed glass.

They watched as the slake-moths drew closer at breathtaking speed.

how smell us? queried one sinistral nervously. They were blocking their mindpores as best they could. They were not expecting to be ambushed. How had they lost the initiative?

But as the slake-moths lurched up towards them, the sinistrals saw that they were not discovered.

The largest moth, at the front of the chaotic wedge of wings, was shrouded with a flickering encumbrance. They saw that the slake-moth’s fearful weaponry, its jagged tentacles and bone-serrated limbs, were flashing and cutting. Its massive teeth were gnashing at the air.

It seemed as if it fought a wraith. Its enemy wavered in and out of conventional space, its form as evanescent as smoke, solidifying and disappearing like a shadow. It was like some vast arachnid nightmare that pranced through close-woven realities and slashed at the slake-moth with cruel chitin lancets.

Weaver! gushed one of the sinistrals, and they bade their dextriers creep back slowly from the aerobatic mêlée.

The other moths spun around their sibling, trying to aid it. They took it in turns to sweep in, according to some impenetrable code. As the Weaver manifested they would attack it, cutting through its armour, releasing gouts of ichor before it was gone. Despite its wounds, the Weaver was ripping great clots of tissue and some crude tarry blood from the frantic slake-moth.

The moth and the spider attacked each other in an extraordinary blur of violent motion, each thrust and parry too fast to see.

As they rose, the moths broke the dream-cover over the city. They reached the level of the sky where those waves of mentality had confused the handlingers.

It was obvious that the moths could feel them too. Their tight-knit formation broke in momentary confusion. The smallest of the moths, with a twisted body and stunted wings, peeled away from the mass and unrolled a monstrous tongue.

The enormous tongue quivered and flickered back into the dripping maw.

With a lunatic erratic flight the smallest moth swivelled in the air, circling the savagery of the Weaver and its prey, hesitated in midair, then plummeted down and east, towards Griss Twist.

The desertion of the litter runt confused the slake-moths. They separated in the sky, twirling their heads around them, their antennae flickering wildly.

The spellbound sinistrals moved back in alarm.

now! said one. confused and busy, we attack with Weaver!

They dithered helplessly.

ready for spitsear, the dog-handlinger told Rescue-handlinger.

As the moths peeled away from each other, flying further and further around the tussling pair in the centre, they spun in the air. The sinistrals screamed at each other.

attack! screamed one, the sinistral parasitic on the thin clerk, a frenzy of fear audible in its voice. attack!

The old human woman bolted suddenly forward through the air, as the fearful sinistral goaded its dextrier on to a sudden burst of speed. Just as one of the moths turned and froze, facing the oncoming pair of handlingers and their hosts.

At that moment the other two moths swept in together, one plunging a massive bone lance into the Weaver’s distended abdomen. As the great spider reared back, the other moth lassooed its neck with a coil of segmented tentacle. The Weaver disappeared out of the night into another plane, but the tentacle snared it, dragged it half back out of a fold in space, tightened around its neck.

The Weaver jacked and fought to free itself, but the sinistrals hardly saw it. The third moth was careering towards them.

The dextriers saw nothing, but they felt the terrified psychic wailing of the sinistrals who wobbled to try to keep the approaching moth visible in their mirrors.

spitsear! commanded the clerk-handlinger to his dextrier. now!

The host body, the old woman, opened her mouth and jutted out a rolled-up tongue. She inhaled sharply and spat as hard as she could. A great gush of pyrotic gas rolled out of her tongue and combusted spectacularly across the night sky. A massive rolling cloud of flame unfurled itself at the slake-moth.

The aim was true, but the sinistral had mistimed in its fear. The dextrier spitseared too early. The fire unfolded in an oily wash, dissipating before it touched the moth’s flesh. When the burst had evaporated, the moth was gone.

In a panic, the sinistrals began to command their dextriers to swivel in the air, to find the creature. wait wait! screamed the dog-handlinger, but its warning was quite unheeded. The handlingers were bobbing in the sky as randomly as rubbish in the sea, facing all directions, gazing frantically into their mirrors.

there, screeched the young-woman sinistral, catching sight of the moth as it pitched remorselessly as an anchor towards the city. The other handlingers turned in the sky to see through their mirrors, and with a chorus of screams found themselves face to face with another moth.

It had flown over them while they sought its sibling, so that when they turned it was before their eyes, clearly visible with its wings outstretched, just beyond their mirrors.

The young man-sinistral managed to close its host’s eyes and command its dextrier to turn, spitsearing. The panicking dextrier, in the host of the young child, tried to obey, and sent flaming gobbets of gas spinning in a tight spiral, spattering the pair of handlingers beside it in the air.

The Remade-dextrier and its khepri-sinistral screamed sonically and psychically as they and their hosts ignited. They plummeted from the sky, immolating in agony, screaming until they died halfway down, their blood boiling and their bones cracking from the intense heat before they hit the waters of the Tar. They disappeared under the dirty water with a burst of steam.

The woman-sinistral was hovering in thrall, its borrowed eyes glazed by the storm of patterns on the slake-moth’s wings. The sudden hypnotized efflorescence of the sinistral’s dreams slid through the channel to its dextrier steed. The vodyanoi-handlinger winced at the bizarre cacophony of a mind unfolding. It realized what had happened. It moaned in terror with its host’s mouth, and fumbled with the straps attaching the sinistral and host to its back. The dextrier shut its vodyanoi eyes tight, even under the blindfold.

As it fumbled, it spitseared in fear, without aim or direction, emblazoning the night with igniting gas in a massive burst. The edge of the cloud almost caught the Rescue-handlinger as it fought to obey its sinistral’s panicked mental cries. It spun for yards to avoid the swelling globe of scalding air and bolted into the body of the wounded moth.

The creature quivered with pain and fear. The Weaver had been pulled from its tortured body, but it was dropping miserably towards its nest, its wounds dripping and its joints crushed and in agony. For once, it had no interest in food. It rippled in pain as the Rescue-handlinger and its dog-sinistral thumped it.

In a petulant spasm, two huge biotic jags scissored out like secateurs from the slake-moth and sliced both MontJohn Rescue’s and the dog’s heads off with one quick, grisly sound.

The heads fell away into the darkness.

The handlingers remained alive and conscious, but with the brainstems of their hosts gone they could not control their dying bodies. The human and canine carcasses jerked and danced in a posthumous fit. Blood gushed and pumped energetically over the tumbling bodies, over the frantic handlingers, which keened and clenched their fingers.

They were awake all the way down, till they landed on the punishing concrete of a backyard in Petty Coil in a bizarre splash of mangled flesh and bone fragments. They and their decapitated host-bodies were instantly shattered. Their bone was powdered, their flesh tenderized beyond repair.

The blindfolded vodyanoi had almost undone the leather connections that locked him to the woman-handlinger, whose mind the slake-moth held. But as the vodyanoi-dextrier was about to undo the last fastening and peel away into the sky, the slake-moth moved in to feed.

It wrapped its insectile arms around its prey, clasping it tight. It pulled the woman to it, as it pushed its questing tongue into her mouth and began to drink the handlinger’s dreams. The slake-moth sucked eagerly.

It was a rich brew. The residue of the human host’s thoughts eddied like silt or coffee grounds through the handlinger’s mind. The slake-moth reached around the woman’s body and hugged her to it, puncturing the flabby vodyanoi flesh attached to her back with its bone-hard limbs. The dextrier screamed in fear and sudden pain, and the moth could taste the terror in the air. It was confused for a moment, unsure of this other mind that sprouted so close to its meal. But it recovered, gripped tighter, determined to sup again when it had licked this first treat dry.

The vodyanoi-body was trapped as its sinistral passenger was drained. It struggled and cried out, but it could not escape.

A little way away in the air, behind its feeding sibling, the slake-moth which had snared the Weaver whipped its stinging tentacular tail through various dimensions. The vast spider flickered in and out of the sky with a frantic speed. Whenever it appeared the Weaver began to fall: gravity entangled it remorselessly. It would blink out to some other aspect, dragging the jagged harpoon-tip of the tentacle with it, embedded in its flesh. In that other aspect it would scamper and shake to throw off its attacker, before reappearing in the mundane plane, using its weight and leverage, then disappearing again.

The slake-moth was tenacious, somersaulting around its prey, refusing to let it escape.

The handlinger clerk kept up a frenzied, fearful monologue. It sought its fellow sinistral, in the body of the younger, muscled man.

dead all dead our fellows, it screamed. Some of what it had seen, some of its emotion, flowed back down the channel into the head of its dextrier. The old woman’s body yawed uneasily.

The other sinistral tried to remain calm. It moved its head from side to side, trying to exude authority. stop, it commanded peremptorily. It gazed through its mirrors at the three moths behind it: the wounded, limping through the air, down towards its hidden nest; the hungry, lunching from the minds of the trapped handlingers; and the fighting, still thrashing like a shark, trying to tear the head from the Weaver.

The sinistral pushed its dextrier a little closer. take them now, it thought, and sent to its fellow, spitsear hard, take two. chase the wounded. Then it flicked its head from side to side suddenly, and an anguished thought escaped it. where’s the other? it cried.

The other, the last slake-moth that had escaped the sheets of fire from the old woman’s tongue and dropped out of sight in an elegant dive, had described a long, curling loop over the rooftops. It had swept out and up and back, flying slowly and quietly, turning its wings a drab camouflaged dun, hiding out against the clouds, to pounce now, appearing in a sudden burst of dark colours, a shimmering slick of hypnagogic patterns.

It appeared on the other side of the handlingers, before the sinistrals’ eyes. The sinistral in the young human male snapped to with a paroxysm of shock, seeing the predatory beast bask, its wings held tight. The sinistral felt its mind begin to go slack before the midnight shades sinuously mutating on the slake-moth’s wings.

It felt a moment of terror, then nothing but a violent and incomprehensible wash of dreams . . .

. . . then terror again, and it shuddered, the fear mixing with desperate joy as it realized it was thinking once more.

Faced with two sets of enemies, the slake-moth had hesitated a moment, then twisted slightly in the air. It had altered the angle of its hovering, so that the ensnaring face of its wings was turned full on to the clerk and the old woman who bore him. They, after all, were the handlingers that had tried to burn it.

The freed sinistral saw the massive body of the slake-moth before it, angled away, its wings hidden. To its left it saw the old woman turn her head nervously, unsure of what was happening, saw the clerk’s eyes unfocus.

now burn it now now! the sinistral tried to shriek to the old woman, across the gulf of air. Her dextrier puckered up her mouth to spitsear when the enormous moth crossed the air between them too fast even to see and clasped the handlingers to it, slobbering like a famished man.

There was a burst of mental screaming. The old woman began to spit her fire, which bolted out harmlessly away from the slake-moth which gripped her, evaporating in the curdling air.

Even as the wave of horror gusted through it, the last sinistral, in the body of the man astride the homeless child, saw a terrifying thing in its mirror helm. The Weaver’s claws flashed visible for a moment, and the tail-harpoon of the slake-moth attacking it snapped away, its jag severed, its torn tail spewing blood. The moth screamed silently and, free of the Weaver, which did not reappear, hurtled through the warm night air towards the handlinger pair.

And before its eyes, the sinistral saw the moth in front of it look up from its repast, twist its head over its shoulder and wave its antennae towards him, in a slow, ominous motion.

There were moths before it and behind it. The dextrier in the tough little street kid’s body shivered and waited for directions.

dive! screamed the sinistral in sudden, mad fear. dive and away! mission abort! alone and doomed, escape, spitsear and fly!

A great wash of panic gushed into the dextrier’s mind. The child’s face twisted in terror and it began to spew fire. It plunged towards New Crobuzon’s sweating stones, its dank and rotting wood, like a soul towards Hell.

dive dive dive! screamed the sinistral, as the moths licked its terror trail with their vile tongues.

The night shadows of the city reached up like fingers and drew the handlingers in, back to the sunless city of mundane betrayal and danger, away from the mad, impenetrable, unspeakable menace in the clouds.

Chapter Forty

Isaac damned the Construct Council to Hell, demanded to be released. Blood streamed from his nose and clotted in his beard. Some way from him, Yagharek and Derkhan struggled in the arms of their construct captors. They battled with a miserable lassitude. They knew they were trapped.

Through the migraine haze, Isaac saw the great Construct Council raise its bony metal arm to the skies. At the same moment, the gaunt and bloody human avatar pointed up with the same arm, in an unsettling visual echo.

“It is coming,” the Council said in the man’s dead voice.

Isaac howled in rage and twisted his head skyward, bucking and whipping from side to side in a fruitless effort to dislodge the helmet.

Below the skittering clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.

The perplexing organic shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes, then opened them again. He had to see the thing.

It drew closer, dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.

Even from that distance and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon . . . this was a freak, malformed.

This was the slake-moth that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.

This unnatural birth was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.

“Oh sweet Jabber,” whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, “Devil’s Tail . . . Gods help me . . .”

In a curling upsurge of industrial dust, the slake-moth landed. It folded its wings.

It crouched, its back curved and tight, a pose of simian pugnacity. It held its cruel arms—flawed, but still vicious and powerful—with the killing poise of a hunter. It swept its long, thin head slowly from side to side, its eyesocket antennae fumbling in the air.

All around it, constructs shifted minutely. The slake-moth ignored them all. Its brutal, coarse mouth opened and emitted that salacious tongue, flickered it like a huge ribbon across the gathering.

Derkhan moaned and the moth shuddered.

Isaac tried to yell to her to be quiet, not to let it feel her, but he could not speak.

The waves of Isaac’s mind oscillated like a heartbeat, rocking the psychosphere of the dump. The moth could taste it, knew it for the same mind-liquor it had sought before. The other little titbits it could sense were nothing beside it, little morsels by a feast.

The slake-moth quivered with anticipation, and turned its back on Yagharek and Derkhan. It faced Isaac. It stood slowly on four of its limbs, opened its mouth with a tiny, childish hiss, and spread its mesmeric wings.

For a moment, Isaac tried to close his eyes. A little adrenalized part of his brain threw up strategies for escape.

But he was so tired, so befuddled, so miserable and in so much pain, he left it too late. Blearily, unclearly at first, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

The rippling tide of colours unfolded like anemones, a gentle, uncanny unfurling of enthralling shades. On both sides of the moth’s body, the perfectly mirrored midnight tinctures slipped like thieves down Isaac’s optic nerve and smeared themselves across his mind.

Isaac saw the slake-moth stalk slowly towards him across the wasteground, saw the perfectly symmetrical, curling wings flutter gently and bathe him in their narcotic display.

And then his mind slipped like a faltering flywheel, and he knew nothing except a slew of dreams. A froth of memories and impressions and regrets effervesced up from within him.

This was not like the dreamshit. There was no core of him to watch and cling to sentience. These were not invading dreams. They were his own and there was no he to watch them boil, he was the wash of images itself, he was the recall and the symbol. Isaac was the memory of parent-love, the deep sex fantasies and memories, the bizarre neurotic inventions, the monsters, the adventures, the slips in logic the aggrandizing self-memory the mutating mass of the undermind triumphant over ratiocination and cognition and the reflection that spawned it the terrible and awesome interlocking charges of subconsciousness the dreaming

the dreaming

it

it stopped

stopped suddenly and Isaac bellowed at the sudden breathtaking tug of reality.

He blinked fervently as his mind slatted suddenly down into layers, the subconscious falling back to where it belonged. He swallowed hard. His head felt as if it was imploding, reorganizing itself out of a chaos of unpicked shreds.

He heard Derkhan’s voice coming to the end of some announcement.

“. . . incredible!” she shouted. “Isaac? Isaac, can you hear me? Are you all right?”

Isaac closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them slowly. The night swam back into focus.

He stumbled forward onto his hands and knees, and realized that he was no longer held by the construct, that it had only been the slake-moth’s oneiric hold on him that had kept him standing. He looked up, wiping blood from his face.

It took a moment for him to make sense of the scene before him.

Derkhan and Yagharek were standing, unheld, at the edges of the wasteland. Yagharek had thrown back his hood to unveil his great bird-head. Both held themselves in poses of frozen action, ready to run or leap in any direction. Both stared into the centre of the rubbish arena.

In front of Isaac were several of the larger constructs that had been standing behind him when the moth had landed. They milled vaguely around an enormous shattered thing.

Towering over the Construct Council’s space in the dump was the enormous chain-dripping arm of a crane. It had swivelled away from the river, over the little defensive wall of waste, coming to a rest over the centre of the space.

Directly below it, burst open into a million dangerous fragments, were the remains of an enormous wooden crate, a cube taller than a man. Spilling from the smashed residue of its wooden walls was its cargo, a skittering mountain of iron and coal and stone, a chaotic aggregate of the heaviest detritus in the Griss Twist dump.

The mound of dense rubbish spilt slowly into an inverted cone, slipping past the shattered slats of the crate.

Below it, twisting and scrabbling weakly and emitting pathetic sounds, a mass of splintered exoskeleton and seeping tissue, its wings broken and buried beneath the crush of refuse, was the slake-moth.

“Isaac, did you see it?” hissed Derkhan.

He shook his head, his eyes wide in astonishment. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet.

“What happened?” he managed to spit. His voice sounded shockingly alien to him.

“You were under nearly a minute,” Derkhan said urgently. “It got you . . . I was screaming at you, but you were gone . . . and then . . . and then the constructs stepped forward.” She looked, wondering. “They were walking towards it, and it could sense them . . . and it seemed confused and . . . and flustered. It moved back a little and stretched its wings back further, so that it was beaming colours at the constructs as well as you, but they kept coming!”

Derkhan stumbled forward towards him. Blood was dripping viscously down the side of her face, from where her wound had reopened. She described a wide circle around the half-crushed slake-moth, which bleated as faintly and beseechingly as a lamb when she passed it. She watched it fearfully, but it was powerless against her, pinioned and ruined. Its wings were hidden, broken by the crush of debris.

Derkhan sank to the floor by Isaac, reached out and grabbed his shoulders with violently shaking hands. She cast her eyes nervously back to the trapped slake-moth, then held Isaac’s gaze.

“It couldn’t get them! They kept coming and it was . . . it was backing away . . . It kept its wings spread so that you couldn’t get away, but it was fearful . . . confused. And while it was moving back, the crane was moving! It couldn’t sense it, even though the ground was rumbling. And then, the constructs stopped still, and the moth was waiting . . . and the crate came down on it.”

She turned and looked at the mess of organic slime and spilt rubbish fouling the ground. The slake-moth keened piteously.

Behind her, the Construct Council’s avatar stalked across the jagged rubbish floor. He stamped within three feet of the slake-moth, which flicked out its tongue and tried to wrap it around his ankle. But it was too weak and slow, and he did not even have to break his stride to avoid it.

“It cannot sense my mind. I am invisible to it,” the man said. “And when it hears me, notices my gross physicality approaching it, my psyche remain opaque. And immune to its seduction. Its wings are patterned with complex shapes, making themselves more complex in a quick and relentless slide . . . and that is all.

“I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars.

“There is nothing in me on which the moth can feed. It goes hungry. I can surprise it.” The man turned to look at the moaning ruins of the moth. “I can kill it.”

Derkhan stared at Isaac.

“A thinking machine . . .” she breathed. Isaac nodded slowly.

“Why did you subject me to that?” he said shakily, seeing the blood which still seeped from his nose spatter across the dry ground.

“It was my calculation,” he said simply. “I computed it as most likely to convince you of my worth, and having the advantage of destroying one of the moths at the same time. Albeit the least threatening.”

Isaac shook his head in exhausted disgust.

“See . . .” he spat. “That’s the damn trouble with excessive logic . . . No allowances for variables like headaches . . .”

“Isaac,” said Derkhan fervently. “We’ve got them! We can use the Council as . . . as troops. We can take the moths out!”

Yagharek had come to stand a little way behind them, and he squatted down, on the peripheries of the conversation. Isaac glanced up at him, thinking hard.

“Damn,” he said very slowly. “Minds without dreams.”

“The others will not be so easy,” said the avatar. He was looking up, as was the Construct Council’s main body. For a tiny moment, those enormous searchlight eyes flicked on and sent powerful streams of light into the sky, contracting and searching. Dark shadows darted through the twisting torch-snares, half glimpsed and vague.

“There are two,” said the avatar. “They have been brought here by the dying call of this their sibling.”

“Fuck it!” shouted Isaac in alarm. “What shall we do?”

“They will not come,” replied the man. “They are quicker and stronger, less credulous than their backward brother. They can tell that all is not right. They can taste only you three, but they can sense the physical vibrations of all my bodies. The disparity unnerves them. They will not come.”

Slowly, Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek relaxed.

They looked at each other, at the bone-thin avatar. Behind them, the slake-moth wailed in its death-agony. It was ignored.

“What,” said Derkhan, “are we going to do?”

After some minutes, the flickering, baleful shadows overhead disappeared. In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.

Even exhausted and bereaved as they were, Isaac and Derkhan, even Yagharek, were buoyed by the Council’s triumph. Isaac stalked closer to the dying moth, investigated its tortured head, its indistinct, illogical features. Derkhan wanted to torch it, destroy it completely, but the avatar would not allow it. It wanted to keep the creature’s head, investigate it in the quiet minutes of its day, learn about the inside of the slake-moth mind.

The thing kept a tenacious claw-hold on life until past two in the morning, when it expired with a long moan and a trickle of foul citric saliva. There was a quivering release of pent-up alien misery, a ripple that dispersed quickly across the dump as the slake-moth’s empathic ganglions flexed in death.

There was a sublime stillness in the dump.

With a companionable motion, the avatar sat beside the two humans and the garuda. They began to talk. They tried to formulate plans. Even Yagharek spoke, with a quiet excitement. He was a hunter. He knew how to set traps.

“We can’t do anything until we know where the damn things are,” said Isaac. “Either we hunt them or we just have to sit and act as bait, hoping the bastard creatures come for us out of the millions of souls in the city.”

Derkhan and Yagharek nodded in agreement.

“I know where they are,” said the avatar.

The others stared at him in astonishment.

“I know where they hide,” he said. “I know where they nest.”

“How?” hissed Isaac. “Where?” He grasped the avatar’s arm in his excitement, then shocked, withdrew his grasp. He was leaning in close to the avatar’s face, and something of the horror of that visage struck him. He could see the rim of shorn skull just inside the man’s curling skin, drab white, streaked with bloody residue. He could see the gory cable plunge into the intricate fold at the bottom of the hollow in the man’s head, from where his brain had been torn.

The avatar’s skin was dry and stiff and cold, like hanging meat.

Those eyes, with their unchanging expression of concentration and thinly hidden anguish, regarded him.

“All of me have tracked the attacks. I have cross-referenced dates and places. I have found correlations, systematized them. I have factored in the evidence of the cameras and the computing engines whose information I steal, the unexplainable shapes in the night sky, the shadows that do not correspond to any city-race.

“There are complex patterns. I have formalized them. I have discarded possibilities and applied high-level mathematical programmes to the remaining potentialities. With unknown variables, absolute certainty is impossible. But according to the data available, the chance is seventy-eight per cent that the nest is where I say.

“The moths are living in the Glasshouse, above the cactus people, in Riverskin.”

“Damn,” hissed Isaac, after a silence. “Are they animals? Or are they cunning? It’s inspired, whichever. Best damn place I can think of.”

“Why?” said Yagharek unexpectedly.

Isaac and Derkhan looked at him.

“New Crobuzon cactacae ain’t like the Cymek variety, Yag,” said Isaac. “Or rather, they are, and maybe that’s the problem. You’ve dealt with ’em in Shankell, doubtless. You know what they’re like. Our cactus people here are a branch of those same desert cactacae who came north. I don’t know anything about the others, the mountain cactus, up in the steppes, east. But I do know the southern style, and their lifestyle never translated so well up here.” He paused and sighed and rubbed his head. He was exhausted and his head still ached. He had to concentrate, to think through the simmering memories of Lin just behind his eyes. He swallowed hard and continued.

“All that puffed-up hard-man stuff that rules the roost in Shankell starts looking a bit dubious up here. That’s why they built the Glasshouse, you ask my opinion. Have a nasty little bit of the Cymek in New Crobuzon. They got special dispensation in law when the Glasshouse was put up—gods only know what deals they had to cut to get that. Technically it’s an independent country. No entry for anyone without permission, including the militia. They’ve got their own laws in there, their own everything.

“Now, obviously, that’s a joke. You can bet your arse the Glasshouse wouldn’t mean shit without New Crobuzon. Masses of the cactacae troop out every day, go to work, surly buggers that they are, then take the shekels back to Riverskin. New Crobuzon owns the Glasshouse. And I don’t think for one minute the militia can’t go in any godsdamn time they choose. But Parliament and the city governors go through with this charade. You don’t just walk into the Glasshouse, Yag, and if you do get in . . . damned if I’d know what to expect in there.

“I mean, you do hear rumours. Some people have been inside, of course. And there are stories of what the militia have seen through the dome from above in their airships. But most of us—me included—have no real idea what goes on in there, or how to get in.”

“But we could get in,” said Derkhan. “Maybe Pigeon’ll crawl back, sniffing for your gold. Eh? And if he does, I bet he could get us in. You can’t tell me there’s no crime in the Glasshouse. I just don’t believe it.” She looked fierce. Her eyes were glinting with purpose. “Council,” she said, and turned towards the naked man. “Do you have any . . . of you . . . in the Glasshouse?”

The avatar shook his head.

“The cactus people do not use many constructs. None of me have been inside. That is why I cannot be exact about where the slake-moths are. Except that they sleep within that dome.”

As the avatar spoke, Isaac was hit by a sudden revelation.

He was mulling over the problem, thinking for ways into the Glasshouse, when he realized with astonishment that he could simply walk away from this. Lemuel’s exasperated advice came back to him: leave it to the professionals.

He had waved the suggestion off in irritation, but now he realized that he could choose to do exactly that. There were a thousand ways to tip off the militia without delivering himself to them: the state made informing easy. He knew now where the slake-moths were: he could tell the government, with all its might, its hunters and scientists, its massive resources. He could let them know where the slake-moths nested, and he could run. And the militia could hunt them for him, and they could recapture the monstrous things. The moth which had hunted him was gone: he had no special reason to be afraid.

The possibility struck him hard.

But it was never, even for a fraction of a second, a temptation.

Isaac remembered Vermishank’s interrogation. The man had tried not to show his fear, but it had been obvious he had no faith at all in the militia’s ability to catch the slake-moths. And now, in the Construct Council, for the first time Isaac was faced with a power that had shown it could kill these unthinkable predators. A power that was not working with the state, but rather that offered its services to him and his companions—or that commandeered their services for itself.

He was unsure of the Council’s motivations, its reasons for remaining hidden. But it was enough to know that this weapon could not be wielded by the militia. And it was the best chance the city had. He could not deny it that.

That was one thing.

But more powerful by far, deep-ingrained in his gut, was something more base. A hatred. He looked up at Derkhan and remembered why he was her friend. His mouth twisted.

I would not trust Rudgutter, he thought coldly, if the murdering bastard swore by his children’s souls.

If the state found the moths, Isaac realized, it would do everything in its power to recapture them. Because they were so damned valuable. They might be dragged out of the night skies, the danger might be contained again, but they would be locked up once more in some laboratory, hawked in another foul auction, returned to their commercial purpose.

Once again, they would be milked. And fed.

No matter how ill-suited he was to tracking the slake-moths down and destroying them, Isaac knew he would try. He would not be party to the alternatives.

They talked on, until the darkness began to leech from the eastern fringe of the sky. Tentative suggestions began to coalesce. They were all conditionals. But even hedged around with a hundred qualifications, the half-schemes grew and took shape. Slowly, a sequence of actions suggested itself. With a growing astonishment, Isaac and Derkhan realized that they had a kind of plan.

As they talked, the Council sent its mobile selves into the depths of the dump. They rummaged unseen among the mounds of trash, to re-emerge carrying bent wire, battered saucepans and colanders, even one or two broken helmets, and great glinting piles of mirror, savage random jags.

“Can you find a welder, or a metallo-thaumaturge?” asked the avatar. “You must make defensive helmets.” He described the mirrors that must be mounted before the lines of sight.

“Yeah,” said Isaac. “We’ll return tomorrow night to make the helmets. And then . . . then we have a day to . . . to ready ourselves. Before we go in.”

While the night was still fully ascendant, the various constructs began to creep away. They returned to their masters’ homes, early enough that their night’s journeys were unnoticed.

The daylight had spread and the occasional guttural sound of the trains increased. The raucous and filthy early morning dialogue of the barge-families began, shouted across the water on the other side of the rubbish. The early shifts of workers began to trudge into the factories and abase themselves before the vast chains, the steam engines and juddering hammers of those profane cathedrals.

There were only the five figures left in the clearing: Isaac and his companions; the ghastly lich that spoke for the Construct Council; and the looming Council itself, moving its segmented limbs sedately.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek rose to go. They were exhausted and in varying degrees of pain, from knees and hands flayed by the barbed ground to Isaac’s still-shuddering head. They were smeared with muck and grime. They shed dust as thick as smoke. It was as if they burned.

They stashed the mirrors and the material to make helmets in a place they would remember in the dump. Isaac and Derkhan looked around in confusion at the landscape so utterly changed by daylight, its threatening demeanour become pathetic, the half-glimpsed looming forms revealed as broken prams and torn mattresses. Yagharek picked his bound feet up high, stumbling a little, and walked unerringly towards the pathway from where they had come.

Isaac and Derkhan joined him. They were utterly drained. Derkhan’s face was white, and she dabbed in miserable pain at her missing ear. As they were about to disappear behind the shifting walls of crushed rubbish, the avatar called out.

When Isaac heard what the avatar said, he began to frown, and did not stop while he turned away and walked out of the Council’s presence with his companions, nor did he stop all the while he wound his way through the channels in the industrial midden and out into the slowly illuminated estates of Griss Twist. The Construct Council’s words stayed with him, and he thought them over, carefully.

“You cannot hold on safely to everything you carry, der Grimnebulin,” the avatar had said. “In future, do not leave your precious things beside the railway.

“Bring your crisis engine to me,” it had said, “for safekeeping.”

Chapter Forty-one

“There is a gentleman and a . . . a young boy to see you, Mr. Mayor,” said Davinia, through the speaking tube. “The gentleman told me to tell you that Mr. Rescue sent him regarding the . . . plumbing in R&D.” Her voice faltered nervously over the obvious code.

“Let them in,” said Rudgutter instantly, recognizing the handlinger passwords.

He was fidgeting in his seat, moving from side to side in agitation. The heavy doors to the Lemquist Room swung ponderously open, and a well-built, harrowed young man stumbled in, leading a terrified-looking child by the hand. The child was dressed in a collection of rags, as if he had just stepped off the street. One of his arms was covered with a large swelling, coated in filthy bandages. The man’s clothes were of decent quality, but a bizarre fashion. He sported a pair of voluminous trousers, almost like those worn by khepri. It made him look peculiarly feminine, despite his build.

Rudgutter looked at him with an exhausted, angry glance.

“Sit,” he said. He waved a sheaf of papers at the odd pair. He spoke rapidly. “One unidentified headless corpse, strapped to a headless dog, both complete with dead handlingers. One pair of handlinger hosts, strapped back to back, both drained of intellect. A—” he glanced down at the militia report “—a vodyanoi, covered in deep wounds, and a young human woman. We managed to extract the handlingers—killing the hosts, actual biological death, not this ridiculous half-thing—and we offered them some new hosts, put them in a cage with a pair of dogs, but they didn’t move. It’s as we suspected. Drain the host, you drain the handlinger with it.”

He sat back and watched the two traumatized-looking figures before him.

“So . . .” he said slowly, after a little silence. “I am Bentham Rudgutter. Suppose you tell me who you are, and where is MontJohn Rescue, and what happened.”

In a meeting room near the top of the Spike, Eliza Stem-Fulcher looked across the table at the cactacae opposite her. His head towered over hers, rising neckless from his shoulders. His arms lay motionless across the table, enormous weighty slabs like the boughs of a tree. His skin was pocked and marked with a hundred thousand scratches and tears that had scarred, in the cactacae fashion, into thick knots of vegetable matter.

The cactus pruned his thorns strategically. The insides of his arms and legs, his palms, wherever flesh might rub or press against flesh, he had plucked the little spines. A tenacious red flower remained on the side of his neck from the spring. Nodules of growth burst from his shoulders and his chest.

He waited silently for Stem-Fulcher to speak.

“It is our understanding,” she said carefully, “that your ground-based patrols were ineffectual last night. As were ours, I might add. We have yet to verify this, but it appears that there may have been some contact between the slake-moths and a small . . . aerial unit of ours.” She flicked through her papers briefly. “It seems increasingly clear,” she ventured, “that simply scouring the city will not yield results.

“Now, for many reasons that we have discussed, not least our somewhat different working methods, we don’t believe it would be particularly fruitful to combine our patrols. However, it most certainly does make sense to co-ordinate our efforts. That is why we have extended a legal amnesty for your organization during this collaborative mission. In similar vein, we are prepared to offer a temporary waver of the strict rule against non-governmental aerostats.”

She cleared her throat. We’re getting desperate, she thought. But then, so, I wager, are you.

“We are prepared to loan two airships, to be used after discussion with us on suitable routes and times. This is in an effort to divide up our efforts to hunt, as it were, in the skies. Our conditions remain as previously stated: all plans to be discussed and agreed in advance. In addition, all research into hunting methodology to be pooled.

“So . . .” she sat back and dropped a contract across the desk. “Do you have authority with Motley to take this kind of decision? And if so . . . what do you say?”

When Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek pushed open the door of the little shack by the railway and fell into its warm shadows, exhausted, they were only a little surprised to see Lemuel Pigeon waiting for them.

Isaac was surly and foul. Pigeon was unapologetic.

“I told you, Isaac,” he said. “Don’t get confused. Going gets hot, I’m gone. But here you are and I’m glad to see it, and our deal still stands. Assuming you still insist on hunting those fuckers, I’m going to own you, and until then you get my help.”

Derkhan glowered, but she did not indulge anger. She was tense with excitement. She glanced at Isaac quickly and frowned.

“Can you get us into the Glasshouse?” she said.

She told him, briefly, about the immunity of the Construct Council from slake-moth attack. He listened in fascination as she described how the Council had swivelled the crane behind the moth’s back, released it and pinioned the thing mercilessly under tons of rubbish. She told him how the Construct Council was sure the moths were in Riverskin, hiding in the Glasshouse.

Derkhan told him the tentative plans.

“Today we have to find some way to make the helmets,” she said. “Then tomorrow . . . we go in.”

Pigeon’s eyes narrowed. He began to scribble designs in the dust.

“This is the Glasshouse,” he said. “There are five basic routes in. One involves bribery, and two almost certainly involve killing. Killing cactacae’s never a good idea, and bribery’s risky. They talk and talk about how they’re independent, but the Glasshouse survives on Rudgutter’s sufferance.” Isaac nodded and glanced at Yagharek. “That means there’s loads of informers. Secrecy’s safer.” Derkhan and Isaac leaned over him, watched his hieroglyphs take shape. “So let’s concentrate on the other two, see how they pan out.”

After an hour of talk Isaac could not stay awake any longer. His head slumped as he listened. He began to drool on his collar. His tiredness spread out and infected Derkhan and Lemuel. They slept, briefly.

Like Isaac, they rolled unhappily in the muggy air, sweating in the close air of the shack. Isaac’s sleep was more disturbed than theirs, and he whimpered several times in the heat. A little before noon, Lemuel pulled himself up and roused the others. Isaac awoke moaning Lin’s name. He was fuddled with exhaustion and bad sleep and misery, and he forgot to be angry with Lemuel. He hardly recognized that Lemuel was there.

“I’m going to get some company,” said Lemuel. “Isaac, you better get ready to prepare those helmets that Dee tells me about. We’re going to need at least seven, I reckon.”

“Seven?” mumbled Isaac. “Who’re you getting? Where you off to?”

“As I’ve told you, I feel safer with a little protection,” said Lemuel, and smiled coldly. “I put the word out that there was a little protection work going, and I gather there’ve been a few responses. I’m off to assess ’em. And I will guarantee to bring a metalhexer for you before the evening sets in. One of the applicants, or failing that there’s a guy who owes me a favour in Abrogate Green. I’ll see you both at . . . um . . . seven o’clock, outside the dump.”

He left. Derkhan moved closer to Isaac in his exhausted misery and put her arm around him. He sniffled like a child in her arms, the dream of Lin still clinging to him.

A homegrown nightmare. A genuine misery from deep in his mind.

The militia crews were busy fitting enormous mirrors of polished metal to the backs of the airship harnesses.

It was impossible to refit the engine rooms or change the layout of the cabs, but they covered the front windows with thick black curtains. The pilot would spin the wheel blind, instructed by the yells from the officers halfway along the gantry, staring out of the rear windows above the enormous propellers, into the angled mirrors that offered a confusing but complete view of the sky before the dirigible.

Motley’s hand-picked crew were escorted to the top of the Spike by Eliza Stem-Fulcher herself.

“I gather,” she said to one of Motley’s captains, a taciturn Remade human whose left arm had been replaced with an unruly python that he fought to quieten, “that you know how to pilot an aerostat.” He nodded. She did not remark on the obvious illegality of that skill. “You’ll be piloting the Beyn’s Honour, your colleagues the Avanc. The militia have been warned. Keep an eye out for other air traffic. We thought you might want to get started this afternoon. The quarries tend to be inactive before the night, but we thought it might be an idea for you to get used to the controls.”

The captain did not respond. All around him, his crew were checking their equipment, checking the angles of their helmets’ mirrors. They were stern and cold. They seemed less fearful than the militia officers Stem-Fulcher had left in the training room below, practising aiming through mirrors, firing behind their own backs. Motley’s men, after all, had dealt with the slake-moths more recently.

Like one of her own officers, she saw that a couple of the gangsters wore flamethrowers; hard backpacks of pressurized oil that burst through a flaming nozzle to ignite. They had been modified, as had her own man’s, to spray the burning oil directly backwards out of the pack.

Stem-Fulcher stole another glance at several of Motley’s extraordinary Remade troops. It was impossible to tell how much original organic material was retained under the Remades’ metal layers. Certainly the impression was one of almost total replacement, with bodies sculpted with exquisite and unusual care to mimic human musculature.

At first sight, nothing of the human was visible. The Remade had heads of moulded steel. They even sported implacable faces of folded metal. Heavy industrial brows and inset eyes of stone or opaque glass, thin noses and pursed lips and cheekbones glinting darkly like polished pewter. The faces had been designed for aesthetic effect.

Stem-Fulcher had only realized that they were Remade, rather than fabulous constructs, when she had glimpsed the back of one’s head. Embedded behind the splendid metal face was a much less perfect human one.

This was the only organic feature retained. Jutting out from the back end of those immobile metal features were mirrors, like a sweep of hair. They were held in front of the Remades’ real, human eyes.

The body was at one hundred and eighty degrees to the human face, pistol-arms and legs and chest all facing the other way, with the metal head completing the illusion from the front. The Remade kept their bodies facing the same way as their unreversed companions at all times. They walked along corridors and into lifts with their arms and legs moving in a convincing automated analogue to a human stride. Stem-Fulcher had fallen deliberately behind them for a few steps, and watched their human eyes darting back and forth, their mouths twisted in concentration as they scanned what was ahead of them through their mirrors.

There were others, she saw, Remade more simply, with greater economy, to the same purpose. Their heads had been twisted around in a half-circle, until they gazed out from their own backs over a twisted, painful-looking neck. They stared into their mirrored helmets. Their bodies moved perfectly, without fumbling, walking and manipulating weapons and armour with hardly stilted motion. There was something almost more offputting about their relaxed, organic motions below reversed heads than the solid artificial motion of their more thoroughly Remade comrades.

Stem-Fulcher realized she was looking at the result of months or more of continual training, constantly living through mirrors. With bodies reversed as theirs were, it would have been a vital strategy. These troops, she pondered, must have been specifically designed and built with slake-moth husbandry in mind. Stem-Fulcher could hardly believe the scale of Motley’s operation. It would be no wonder, she thought ruefully, if, in dealing with the slake-moths, the militia seemed a little amateurish by comparison.

I think we were quite right to bring them on board, she reflected.

With the passage of the sun, the air over New Crobuzon slowly thickened. The light was thick and yellow as corn-oil.

Aerostats swam through that solar grease, eddying back and forth across the urban geography in a weird half-random motion.

Isaac and Derkhan stood in the street beyond the dump’s wire. Derkhan carried a bag, Isaac carried two. In the light, they felt vulnerable. They were unused to the city day. They had forgotten how to live in it.

They skulked as insignificantly as they could, and ignored the few passers-by.

“Why the godsdamn did Yag have to piss off like that?” hissed Isaac. Derkhan shrugged.

“He seems restless, all of a sudden,” she said. She thought, then continued slowly. “I know it’s bad timing,” she said, “but I find it . . . quite moving. He’s such a . . . an empty presence most of the time, you know? I mean, I know you get to talk to him in private, you know the . . . the real Yagharek . . . But most of the time he’s a garuda-shaped absence.” She corrected herself harshly. “No. He’s not garuda-shaped, is he? That’s the problem. He’s more of a man-shaped absence. But now . . . well, he seems to be filling up. I’m beginning to sense that he wants to do something or other, and doesn’t want to do something else.”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “There’s definitely something changing in him. I told him not to leave and he just ignored me. He’s definitely becoming more . . . wilful . . . if that’s a good thing.”

Derkhan was staring at him curiously.

She spoke slowly.

“You must be thinking of Lin all the time,” she said.

Isaac looked away. He said nothing for a moment. Then he gave a quick nod.

“Always,” he said abruptly, his face collapsing into the most shocking sadness. “Always. I can’t . . . I haven’t time to mourn. Yet.”

A little way away, the road curved and separated into a small clutch of alleys. From one of these hidden culs-de-sac came a sudden metallic bang. Isaac and Derkhan tensed and flinched backwards against the chainlink fence.

There was a whispering, and Lemuel peered around the corner of the alley.

He caught sight of Isaac and Derkhan, grinned triumphantly. He pushed his hands in a shoving motion, indicating that they should get into the dump. They turned and found their way to the tear in the wire mesh, checked that they were not watched and wriggled through into the wasteground.

They moved quickly away from the street and turned corners in the muck, until they crouched in a space that was hidden from the city. Within two minutes, Lemuel came loping after them.

“Afternoon, all,” he grinned, triumphantly.

“How did you get here?” said Isaac.

Lemuel sniggered. “Sewers. Got to keep out of sight. Not so dangerous with the lot I’m with.” His smile faltered as he took them in. “Where’s Yagharek?” he said.

“He insisted that he had to go somewhere. We told him to stay, but he wasn’t having any of it. He says he’ll find us here tomorrow at six.”

Lemuel swore.

“Why did you let him go? What if they pick him up?”

“Damn, Lem, what in Jabber’s name was I supposed to do?” hissed Isaac. “I can’t sit on him. Maybe it’s some damn religious thing, some bloody Cymek mystical rubbish. Maybe he thinks he’s about to die and he has to say goodbye to his damn ancestors. I told him not to, he said he was going to.”

“Fine, whatever,” muttered Lemuel irritably. He turned to look back behind him. Isaac saw a small group of figures approaching. “These are our employees. I’m paying them, Isaac, and you’re owing me.”

There were three of them. They were immediately and absolutely recognizable as adventurers; rogues who wandered the Ragamoll and the Cymek and Fellid and probably the whole of Bas-Lag. They were hardy and dangerous, lawless, stripped of allegiance or morality, living off their wits, stealing and killing, hiring themselves out to whoever and whatever came. They were inspired by dubious virtues.

A few performed useful services: research, cartography and the like. Most were nothing but tomb raiders. They were scum who died violent deaths, hanging on to a certain cachet among the impressionable through their undeniable bravery and their occasionally impressive exploits.

Isaac and Derkhan eyed them without enthusiasm.

“This,” said Lemuel, pointing to them each in turn, “is Shadrach, Pengefinchess and Tansell.”

The three looked at Isaac and Derkhan with ruthless, swaggering arrogance.

Shadrach and Tansell were human, Pengefinchess was vodyanoi. Shadrach was obviously the hard man of the group. Large and sturdy, he wore a miscellaneous collection of armour, studded leather and flat, hammered pieces of iron strapped to shoulders, front and back. It was spattered with slime from the sewers. He followed Isaac’s eyes to his outfit.

“Lemuel told us to expect trouble,” he said in a curiously melodic voice. “We came dressed for the occasion.”

In his belt swung an enormous pistol and a big, weighty machete-sword. The pistol was carved into an intricate shape, a monstrous horned face, its mouth the muzzle. It would vomit forth the bullets. A flared blunderbuss flapped on his back, along with a black shield. He would not be able to walk three steps in the city like that without being arrested. No wonder they had come through the city’s underside.

Tansell was taller than Shadrach, but much more slight. His armour was smarter, and seemed designed at least in part for aesthetics. It was a burnished brown, layers of stiff curboille, wax-boiled leather engraved with spiral designs. He carried a smaller gun than Shadrach and a slender rapier.

“So what’s happening, then?” said Pengefinchess, and Isaac realized from the vodyanoi’s voice that she was female. There were, with vodyanoi, no physical characteristics for an inexpert human to recognize that were not hidden below the loincloths.

“Well . . .” he said slowly, watching her.

She squatted like a frog before him and met his gaze. She wore a voluminous white one-piece garment—incongruously and bizarrely clean, given her recent journey—that fitted close around her wrists and ankles, leaving her large, amphibious hands and feet free. She carried a recurved bow and sealed quiver over her shoulder, a bone knife in her belt. A large pouch of some thick reptile skin was strapped to her belly. Isaac could not tell what was within.

As Isaac and Derkhan watched, something bizarre happened below Pengefinchess’s clothes. There was a quick movement, as if something wrapped itself around her body at speed and then removed itself. As the weird tide passed, a large patch of the white cotton of her shift became sodden with water, clinging suddenly to her, then drying as if every atom of liquid was suddenly sucked out. Isaac stared, thunderstruck.

Pengefinchess looked down casually.

“That’s my undine. She and I have a deal. I provide her certain substances, she clings to me, keeps me wet and alive. Lets me travel in much drier places than I’d otherwise manage.”

Isaac nodded. He had never seen a water elemental before. It was unsettling.

“Has Lemuel warned you of the sort of trouble we’re facing?” Isaac said. The adventurers nodded, unconcerned. Even excited. Isaac tried to swallow his exasperation.

“These moth-things aren’t the only thing you can’t afford to look at, sirrah,” said Shadrach. “I can kill with my eyes closed, if I have to.” He spoke with soft, chilling confidence. “This belt?” He tapped it nonchalantly. “Catoblepas hide. Killed it in the outskirts of Tesh. Didn’t look at that, neither, or I’d be dead. We can handle these moths.”

“I damn well hope so,” said Isaac grimly. “Hopefully, no actual fighting’ll be necessary. I think Lemuel feels safer with some backup, just in case. We’re hoping the constructs’ll take care of things.”

Shadrach’s mouth curled minutely, in what was probably contempt.

“Tansell’s a metallo-thaumaturge,” said Lemuel. “Aren’t you?”

“Well . . . I know a few techniques for working metal,” Tansell replied.

“It’s not a complex job,” said Isaac. “Just need a bit of welding. Come this way.”

He led them through the rubbish to where they had hidden the mirrors and the other materials for the helmets.

“We’ve got easily enough stuff here,” said Isaac, squatting beside the pile. He picked up a colander, length of copper piping and, after a moment of sifting, two sizeable chunks of mirror. He waved them at Tansell vaguely. “We need this to be a helmet that’s going to fit snug—and we’re going to need one for a garuda who’s not here.” He ignored the glance that Tansell exchanged with his companions. “And then we need these mirrors attached to the front, at an angle so we can easily see directly behind us. Think you can manage that?”

Tansell looked at Isaac contemptuously. The tall man sat cross-legged before the pile of metal and glass. He put the colander on his head, like a child playing at soldiers. He whispered under his voice, a weird lilting, and he began to massage his hands with quick and intricate movements. He pulled at his knuckles, kneaded the balls of his palms.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Then quite suddenly, his fingers began to glow from within, as if the bones were illuminated.

Tansell reached up and began to caress the colander, as gently as if he stroked a cat.

Slowly, the metal began to shape itself under his coaxing. It softened at each momentary touch, fitting more snuggly onto his head, flattening down, distending at the back. Tansell pulled and kneaded it gently until it was quite flush over his hair. Then, still whispering his little sounds, he tweaked at the front, adjusting the lip of the metal, curling it up and away from his eyes.

He reached down and picked up the copper pipe, gripped it between his hands and channelled energy through his palms. Obstreperously, the metal began to flex. He coiled it gently, placing the two ends of the copper against the colander-helmet just above his temples, then pressing down hard until each piece of metal broke the surface tension of the other and began to spill across the divide. With a tiny fizz of energy, the thick piping and the iron colander fused.

Tansell shaped the bizarre extrusion of copper that jutted from the newborn helmet’s front. It became an angled loop extending about a foot. He fumbled for the pieces of mirror, clicked his fingers until someone handed them to him. Humming to the copper, cajoling it, he softened its substance and pushed one, then the other piece of mirror into it, one in front of each of his eyes. He looked up into them, each in turn, adjusting them carefully until they offered him a clear view of the wall of rubbish behind him.

He tweaked the copper, hardened it.

Tansell removed his hands and looked up at Isaac. The helmet on his head was unwieldy, and its provenance from a colander was still absurdly obvious, but it was perfect for their needs. It had taken him a little more than fifteen minutes to fashion.

“I’m going to put a couple of holes in, thread a piece of leather through for a chinstrap, just in case,” he muttered.

Isaac nodded, impressed.

“That’s perfect. We need . . . uh . . . seven of those, one of them for a garuda. That’s a rounder head, remember. I’m going to leave you to it for a minute.” He looked over at Derkhan and Lemuel. “I think I’d better liaise with the Council,” he said.

He turned and traced his way through the dump labyrinth.

“Good evening, der Grimnebulin,” said the avatar, in the heart of the rubbish. Isaac nodded a greeting to it, and to the enormous skeleton shape of the Council itself, which waited beyond. “You did not come alone.” His voice was emotionless as ever.

“Please don’t start,” said Isaac. “We are not going to get into this on our own. We are one fat scientist, a crook and a journalist. We need some fucking professional back-up. These are people who kill exotic animals for a damn living, and they have not the slightest damn interest in telling anyone about you. All they know is that some fucking constructs are going to be there with us. Even if they could work out who or what you were, they’ve probably broken at least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s laws by now, so they ain’t about to damn well go running to Rudgutter.” There was silence. “Just damn well compute it, if you want. You are in no risk at all from the three reprobates busy making helmets.”

Isaac imagined that he felt a trembling under his feet, as the information raced through the Council’s innards. After a long pause, the avatar and the Council nodded warily. Isaac did not relax.

“I’ve come for those of yourself you can risk for tomorrow’s business,” he said. The Council nodded again.

“Very well,” said the Construct Council slowly with the dead man’s tongue. “First, as we discussed, I will take the part of caretaker. Have you the crisis engine?”

Something hard moved across Isaac’s face. It went quickly.

“Right here,” he said, and put one of his bags down in front of the avatar. The naked man opened it and bent down to peer inside at the tubes and glass within, giving Isaac a sudden, vile view into the scabbing hollow of his skull. He picked it up and walked over to the Council with it, depositing it before the enormous figure’s crotch.

“So,” said Isaac. “You hang on to that, just in case they find our shack. Good idea. I’ll be back for it in the morning.” He glowered. “Which of you are coming with us? We need some power behind us.”

“I cannot risk discovery, Grimnebulin,” the avatar said. “If I were to come in my hidden selves, those construct bodies that work by day in grand houses and building sites and bank vaults, biding their time and accumulating knowledge, and they were to come back battered and broken, or not come back at all, I would leave myself open to the inquiry of the city. And I am not ready for that. Not yet.” Isaac nodded slowly. “Accordingly, I will be coming with you in those shapes that I can afford to lose. That will arouse confusion and bewilderment, but not suspicion of the truth.”

Behind Isaac, the rubbish began to skitter and fall away. He turned.

From the reams of discarded objects, particular aggregations of trash were separating themselves. Like the Construct Council itself, they were clotted together from the materia of the dump.

The constructs mimicked the form and size of chimpanzees. They clattered and clanged as they moved, with a weird and unsettling sound. Each was unique. Their heads were kettles and lampshades, their hands were vicious-looking claws ripped from scientific instruments and scaffolding joints. They were armoured in great scabs of metal plating torn, roughly welded and riveted to their bodies, which scampered across the wasteland in an unsettling half-simian motion. They were created with an extraordinary sense of found aesthetics.

If they lay still, they would be invisible: nothing but a random accretion of old metal.

Isaac gazed at the chimp-things, swinging and jumping, dripping water and oil, ticking with clockwork.

“I have downloaded into each of their analytical engines,” said the avatar, “as much memory and capacity as they will hold. These of me can obey you, and understand the urgency of doing so. I have given them viral intelligence. They have been programmed with the data to recognize the slake-moths, and to attack them. Each is built with acid or phlogistic agent within its midriff.” Isaac nodded, wondering at the casual ease with which the Council created these murderous machines. “You have worked out the best plan?”

“Well . . .” said Isaac. “We’re going to prepare tonight. Work out some kind of . . . uh . . . gear up, you know, plan with our . . . additional staff. Then tomorrow at sixish we’ll meet Yag here, assuming the stupid bastard hasn’t got himself killed. And then we’re going to get into the Riverskin ghetto, using Lemuel’s expertise.

“Then we go moth-hunting.” Isaac’s voice was hard and staccato. He spat out what he needed to say quickly. “The thing is we’ve got to separate them. We can take one, I think. Otherwise, if there are two or more, then one will always be in front of us, able to flash the wings. So we’re going to scope the place out, see if we can work out where they are. It’s hard to say without seeing it. We’ll take the amplifier and channeller you used on me, as well. It might help us get one interested, get it sniffing. Push a little peak through the background mental noise, or something. Can you attach other helmets to the one engine? D’you have any extras?” The avatar nodded. “You’d better give them to me, and show me the different functions. I’ll get Tansell to adjust them, add some mirrors.

“Thing is,” said Isaac thoughtfully, “it can’t just be the strength of the signal that attracts them, or it would only ever be the seers and communicatrixes and so on that got taken. I think they like particular flavours. That’s why the runt came for me. Not because there was a big waving trail above the city, any old trail, but because it recognized and wanted that particular mind. And . . . well, now, maybe the others are going to recognize it as well. Maybe I was wrong that only the one would ever recognize my mind. They must’ve sniffed it last night.” He looked at the avatar thoughtfully. “They’re going to remember it as the trail their brother or sister was after when it got killed. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing . . .”

“Der Grimnebulin,” said the dead man after a moment, “you must bring at least one of my little selves back with you. They must download what they have seen into me, the Council. I can learn so much of the Glasshouse from this. It can only help us. Whatever happens, one must get free.”

There were several moments of silence. The Council waited. Isaac thought for something to say, and then could not. He looked up into the avatar’s eyes.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. Have your monkey-selves ready then. And then I will . . . I will . . . see you again,” he said.

The city basked in extraordinary night-heat. The summer reached a critical moment. In the striae of dirty air above the city’s core, the slake-moths danced.

They flitted giddily over the minarets and crags of Perdido Street Station. They twitched their wings infinitesimally, edging expertly up the thermals. Skeins of inconstant emotion spun out from their cavorting.

With silent pleadings and caresses they courted each other. Wounds, already half healed, were now forgotten, in trembling, febrile excitement.

The summer here, in this once verdant plain on the edge of the Gentleman’s Sea, came a month and a half earlier than for the slake-moths’ siblings across the water. The temperature had slowly spiralled, reaching twenty-year highs.

Thermotaxic reactions were triggered in the slake-moths’ loins. Hormones swam in their ichor tides. Unique configurations of flesh and chymicals spurred their ovaries and gonads into untimely productivity. They became suddenly fertile, and aggressively aroused.

Aspises and bats and birds fled the air in terror, pungent as it was with psychotic desires.

The slake-moths flirted with ghastly and lascivious aerial ballet. They touched tentacles and limbs, unfolded new parts they had never seen before. The three less damaged moths tugged their sibling, the victim of the Weaver, on wafts of smoke and air. Gradually, the most wounded moth stopped licking its multitude of wounds with its trembling tongue, and began to touch its fellows. Their erotic charge was utterly infectious.

The polymorphous four-way wooing became fraught and competitive. Stroking, touching, arousing. Each moth in turn spiralled moonward, drunk on lust. It would split the seal on a gland hidden under its tail and exude a cloud of empathic musk.

Its fellows lapped at the psychoscent, sported like porpoises in clouds of carnality. They rolled and played then swept up and sprayed the sky themselves. For now, their sperm ducts were still. The little metadroplets were rich with the slake-moths’ erogenous, ovigenic juices. They bickered lecherously to be female.

Each successive exudation charged the air to a higher pitch of excitement. The moths bared their gravestone teeth and bleated their sexual challenge to each other. The moist valves below their chitin dripped with aphrodisiac. They swept through the banks of each other’s perfume.

As the pheremonal duel continued, one febrile voice sounded more and more triumphant. One body swept higher and higher, its fellows dropping away. Its emanations stank the air of sex. There were last-gasp attacks, spurts of erotic challenge. But one by one, the other moths closed their female pudenda, accepting defeat and masculinity.

The triumphant moth—the moth still scarred and dripping from its mêlée with the Weaver—soared. Its scent still stank of female juices, its fecundity was unquestioned. It had proved itself the most motherly.

It had gained the right to bear the brood.

The other three moths adored it. They became swains.

The feel of the new matriarch’s flesh made them ecstatic. They looped and fell and returned, aroused and ardent.

The mother-moth toyed with them, led them over the hot dark city. When their beseeching became as painful as its own lust, it hovered and presented itself, opened its segmented exoskeleton and curled its vagina towards them.

It coupled with them, one by one, becoming briefly a dangerous plummeting double-bodied thing, flanked by eager partners waiting their turn. The three who had become male felt organic mechanisms pull and twist, their bellies opening and penises emerging for the first time. They fumbled with their arms and flesh-ropes and bone jags and their matriarch did the same, reaching behind it with a complex twist of limbs that grabbed and tugged and intertwined.

Sudden slipping connections were made. Each pair consorted and copulated with a fervent need and pleasure.

When the hours of rutting had passed, the four slake-moths drifted on open wings, utterly exhausted. They dripped.

As the air cooled, their bed of thermals deflated slowly, and they began to beat their wings to stay aloft. One by one, the three fathers peeled away and down to the city below, to search for food to revive and sustain them, and to provide for their conjugal partner.

It lolled in the sky a while longer. When it had been alone for a time, its antennae twitched and it curled away and began to make its slow way south. It was exhausted. Its sexual organs and orifices had closed away beneath its iridescent shell, to keep hold of all that had been spent.

The slake-moth matriarch flew towards Riverskin and the cactus dome, ready to prepare the nest.

My talons flex, trying to open. They are constrained by the ridiculous and vile bandages wound around them, that flap like ragged skin.

I walk bent double along the sides of the railways, the trains screaming at me in irate warning as they blast by. I sneak now across the rail bridge, watching the Tar coil beneath me. I stop and look around. Way ahead of me and way behind the river slithers and throws rubbish in rhythmic little bursts against the bank.

Looking over to the west I can see over the water and the swell of Riverskin houses to the tip of the Glasshouse. It is illuminated from inside, a blister of light on the city’s skin.

I am changing. There is something within me which was not there before, or perhaps it is that something has gone. I smell the air and it is the same air it was yesterday, and yet it is different. There can be no doubt. Something is welling up under my own skin. I am not sure who I am.

I have trailed these humans as if I am dumb. A worthless, mindless presence, without opinion or intellect. Without knowing who I am, how can I know what to say?

I am not Respected Yagharek any longer, and I have not been for many months. I am not the raging thing that stalked the Shankell pits, that slaughtered man and trow, ratjinn and shardmouth, a menagerie of pugnacious beasts and warriors of races I had not dreamed could exist. That savage fighter is gone.

I am not the tiring one who stalked the lush grasslands and cold, hard hills. I am not the lost thing that wandered the concrete walkways of the city introspective and lost, seeking to become again something I never was.

I am none of those. I am changing, and I do not know what I will be.

I am afraid of the Glasshouse. Like Shankell, it has many names. The Glasshouse, the Greenhouse, the Planthouse, the Hothouse. It is nothing but a ghetto, dealt with sleight of hand. A ghetto in which the cactacae try to replicate the edge of the desert. Am I returning home?

To ask the question is to answer it. The Glasshouse is not the veldt, or the desert. It is a sad illusion, nothing but a mirage. It is not my home.

And if it were the desert, if it were a gateway to the deepest Cymek, to the dry forests and fertile swampland, to the repository of sand-hidden life and the great nomadic garuda library, if the Glasshouse were more than a shadow, if it were the desert it feigns to be, it would still not be my home.

That place does not exist.

I shall wander for a night and a day. I will retrace the steps that once I made, in the shade of the railways. I will stalk the city’s monstrous geography and find the streets that bore me here, the squat channels in the brick to which I owe my life and self.

I will find the tramps who shared my food, if they are not dead from disease or stabbed for their piss-stained shoes. They became my tribe, atomized and ruined and broken, but still some kind of tribe. Their numb lack of interest in me—in anything—was refreshing after days of careful skulking and an hour or two of ostentatious wandering in my agonizing wooden prostheses. I owe them nothing, those tedious alcohol- and drug-fucked heads, but I will find them again for my own sake, not theirs.

I feel as if I walk these streets for the last time.

Am I to die?

There are two possibilities.

I will help Grimnebulin and we will defeat these moths, these horrific night-creatures, these soul-drinkers, and he will create of me a battery. He will reward me, he will charge me up like a phlogistic cell and I will fly. As I think it I am climbing. I reach higher and higher on these girder-steps, climbing the city like a ladder to gaze at its tawdry, teeming night. I feel the flabby stubs of my wing muscles try to flap with a pathetic rudimentary motion. I will not rise on tides of air pushed down by feathers, but I will flex my mind like a wing and soar on channels of power, transformative energy, thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres, that Grimnebulin calls crisis.

I will be a marvel.

Or I will fail and die. I will fall and be skewered on harsh metal, or my dreams will be sucked from my mind and fed to some hatchling devil.

Will I feel it? Will I live on in the milk? Will I know that I am being drunk?

The sun is creeping into view. I am tiring.

I know that I should have stayed. If I am to be anything real, something more than the mute, imbecilic presence I have so far been, I should stay and intervene and plan and prepare and nod at their suggestions, supplement them with my own. I am, I was, a hunter. I can stalk the monsters, the horrendous beasts.

But I could not. I tried to say my sorries, to let Grimnebulin—even Blueday—know that I am one with them, that I am part of the gang. The crew. The posse. The moth-hunters. But it rang hollow in my skull.

I will look and find myself, and then I will know if I can tell them that. And if not, what I can say instead.

I will arm myself. I will bring weapons. I will find a knife, a whip like that I used to wield. Even if I find myself an outsider, I will not let them die unaided. I will sell our lives dear to the thirsting things.

I hear sad music. There is a moment of uncanny quiet, when the trains and the barges pass away from me in my eyrie, and the grinding of their engines ebbs away and the dawn is momentarily uncovered.

Someone at the river’s edge, in some garret, is playing the fiddle. It is a haunting strain, a tremulous dirge of semitones and counterpoints over a broken rhythm. These do not sound like local harmonies.

I recognize the sound. I have heard it before. On the boat that took me across the Meagre Sea, and before that in Shankell.

There is no escaping my southern past, it seems.

It is the dawn greeting of the fisherwomen of Perrick Nigh and the Mandrake Islands, way to the south. My unseen accompanist is welcoming the sun.

The few New Crobuzon Perrickish live mostly in Echomire, yet here she is, three miles upstream as the river twists, waking the great Dayfisher with her exquisite playing.

She plays to me for a few more moments, before the noise of the morning takes her sound away, and I am left clinging to the bridge, listening to the boom of klaxons and the whistle from the trains.

That sound from far away continues, but I cannot hear it. The noises of New Crobuzon fill my ears. I will follow them, welcome them. I will let them surround me. I will dive into the hot, city life. Under arch and over stone, through the sparse bone forest of the Ribs, into the brick burrows of Badside and Dog Fenn, through the booming industry of Gross Coil. Like Lemuel sniffing for contacts I will retrace all the steps I have made. And here and there, I hope, among the spires and the crammed architecture, I will touch the immigrants, the refugees, the outsiders who remake New Crobuzon every day. This place with bastard culture. This mongrel city.

I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain . . . A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home.

All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping in through my skin.

When I return to Griss Twist, my companions will be waiting, and we will liberate this hijacked city. Thanklessly and unseen.

Part Six:

The Glasshouse

Chapter Forty-two

The streets of Riverskin inclined gently upwards towards the Glasshouse. The houses were old and tall, with rotting wooden frames and walls of damp plaster. Every rain saturated and blistered them, sent slates cascading from the steep roofs as rusted nails dissolved. Riverskin seemed to sweat, gently, in the slow heat.

The southern half of Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of the city’s small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bekman Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.

But northern Riverskin was very different. It was quieter, more sullen. It was the preserve of the cactacae.

Large as the Glasshouse was, it could not possibly contain all the cactacae of the city, not even those who kept faith with tradition. At least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s cactus people lived outside its protective glass. They packed the Riverskin slums, and a few other quarters in places like Syriac and Abrogate Green. But Riverskin was the centre of their city, and there they mixed in equal numbers with human locals. They were the cactus underclass, who entered the Glasshouse to shop and worship, but were forced to live in the infidel city.

Some rebelled. Angry cactacae youths vowed never to enter the Glasshouse which had betrayed them. They referred to it ironically by an older, obsolete name: the Nursery. They scarred themselves and fought in brutal, pointless and exciting gangfights. Sometimes they terrorized the neighbourhood, mugging and stealing from the humans and cactacae elders who shared their streets.

Outside, in Riverskin, the cactus people were surly and quiet. They worked for their human or vodyanoi bosses without demur or enthusiasm. They did not communicate with their workmates of other races in anything more than curt grunts. Their behaviour inside the walls of the Glasshouse was never seen.

The Glasshouse itself was a huge, flattened dome. On the ground, its diameter was more than a quarter of a mile. At its peak, it was eighty yards high. Its base was angled to sit tight on the listing streets of Riverskin.

The framework was wrought in black iron, a great thick skeleton decorated with occasional curlicues and flourishes. It bulged out over the Riverskin houses, visible from a long way off on the top of its low hill. Emerging in two concentric circles from its skin were colossal girdered arms, nearly the size of the Ribs, suspending the dome and taking its weight on great cords of twisted metal.

The further away it was seen from, the more impressive the Glasshouse appeared. From the wooded top of Flag Hill, looking down across two rivers, the railways, the skyrails and four miles of grotesque urban sprawl, the facets of the dome glinted with clean shards of light. From the surrounding streets, however, the multitude of cracks and dark spaces where glass had fallen in were visible. The dome had been repaired only once in its three centuries of existence.

From the base of the dome the age of the structure showed. It was decrepit. Paint curled in great tongues away from the metalwork, and rust had eaten it like worms. For the first fifteen or so feet above the ground, the panes—each nearly seven feet square at the bottom, descending in width like pieces of pie as they approached the vertex—were filled with the same crumbling, painted iron. Above that, the glass was dirty and impure, tinted green and blue and beige in chance patchwork. It was reinforced, and was supposed to be able to support the weight of at least two decent-sized cactacae. Even so, several panes were broken and empty of glass, and many more were laced with a filigree of cracks.

The dome had been built without much concern for the surrounding houses. The pattern of streets that surrounded it continued until they reached its solid metal base. Those two or three or four houses that had been in the way of the dome’s edges had been crushed, and then the rows continued beneath the glass canopy, at a variety of random angles.

The cactacae had simply enclosed an existing clutch of New Crobuzon streets.

Over the decades, the architecture within the dome had been altered to adapt the once-human houses to cactacae tenants, tearing down some structures and replacing them with strange new edifices. But the broad layout and much of the structure was said to remain, exactly as it was before the dome existed.

There was one entrance to the dome, at the southern tip of its base in Yashur Plaza. At the opposite end of its circumference was its exit on Bytrash Street, a steep road that looked down onto the river. Cactus law stated that entrance to and exit from the Glasshouse was only by these portals respectively. This was unlucky for the cactacae who lived just outside in sight of one or other of the portals. Getting in, for example, might take two minutes, but returning home from the exit would involve a long, tangled walk home.

Each morning at five the gateways were thrown open, onto the short enclosed passage beyond, and each evening at midnight they were closed. They were guarded by a small unit of armoured guards, hefting huge war-cleavers and the powerful cactacae rivebow.

Like their dumb, rooted cousins, the cactacae had thick, fibrous vegetable skin. It was taut and punctured easily, but it healed fast, in ugly, thick scars—most cactacae were covered in harmless ganglions of scab tissue. It took a lot of thrusts or a lucky shot into the organs to have any real damaging effect. Bullets or arrows or quarrels were usually ineffective against cactacae. Which was why the cactus soldiers carried rivebows.

The designers of the first rivebow had been human. The weapons had been used during the ghastly premiership of Mayor Collodd—they had been carried by the human guards of the mayor’s cactus farm. But after the reforming Sapience Bill dissolved the farm and granted cactacae something approaching citizenship, the pragmatic cactus elders had realized this would be an invaluable weapon to keep their own people in line. Since then, the bow had been improved many times, this time by cactacae engineers.

The rivebow was an enormous crossbow, too large and heavy for a human effectively to operate. It fired not bolts, but chakris; flat metal disks with serrated or razored edges, or metal stars with curved arms. A toothed hole in the chakri’s centre slotted neatly onto a little bud of metal that emerged from the rivebow shaft. When the trigger was pulled, the wire in the shaft snapped violently to, pulling the metal bud at massive speed, intricate gears grinding together to send it spinning at an enormous rate. At the end of the enclosed channel the whirling bolt slipped sharply down and out from the chakri’s hole, and the chakri was discharged as fast as a slingshot stone, spinning like the blade of a circular saw.

Aerial friction dissipated its momentum quickly: it did not have nearly the range of a longbow or a flintlock. But it could sever a cactus limb or head—or a human one—at nearly one hundred feet, and slice savagely some way beyond that.

The cactacae guards glowered, and swung their rivebows with surly arrogance.

The late rays of the day blazed out from above the far-off peaks. The west-facing aspects of the Glasshouse dome glowed like rubies.

Straddling a corroded ladder that swept up to the peak of the dome, a silhouetted human figure grasped and clung to the metal. The man crept gradually up the rungs, rising up the curved firmament of the dome like the moon.

The walkway was one of three that extended at regular intervals from the very top of the dome’s arch, designed originally for the repair crews that had never appeared. The curve of the dome seemed to break the surface of the earth like the tip of a bent back, implying a vast body below ground. The figure was riding a gargantuan whaleback. He was buoyed up by the light that the dome trapped, that played on the underside of the glass and made the whole great edifice shine. He kept low, moving very slowly to avoid being seen. He had chosen the ladder on the Glasshouse’s north-western side, so as to avoid the trains on the Salacus Fields branch of the Sud Line. The tracks passed close by the glass on the opposite side of the dome, and any observant passengers would see the man crawling up the curved surface.

Eventually, after several minutes climbing, the intruder reached a metal lip that surrounded the apex of the great structure. The keystone itself was a single globe of limpid glass about eight feet in diameter. It sat perfectly in the circular hole at the dome’s apogee, suspended half in, half out like some great plug. The man stopped and looked out over the city, through the tips of the supporting struts and the thick suspension wires. The wind whipped about him, and he clung to the handholds with vertiginous terror. He looked up into the darkening sky, the stars dim to him from all the clotted light that surrounded him, that ebbed through the glass below his body.

He turned his attention to that glass, scanned its surface minutely, pane by pane.

After some minutes he raised himself and began to climb backwards down the rails. Down, fumbling with his feet, feeling for holds, gently probing with outstretched toes, pulling himself back towards the earth.

The ladder ran out twelve feet from the earth, and the man slid down on the grappling hook he had used to get up. He touched the dusty ground and looked around him.

“Lem,” he heard someone hiss. “Over here.”

Lemuel Pigeon’s companions were hiding in a gutted building at the edge of a rubble-strewn wasteground flanking the dome. Isaac was just visible, gesticulating at him from behind the doorless threshold.

Lemuel paced quickly across the thin scrub, treading on bricks and concrete overgrown and anchored with grass. He turned his back on the early evening light and slipped into the gloom of the burnt-out shell.

In the shadow before him crouched Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the three adventurers. There was a pile of ruined equipment behind them, steam-pipes and conducting wires, the clasps from retort stands, lenses like marbles. Lemuel knew that the mess would resolve itself into five monkey-constructs as soon as they moved.

“Well?” demanded Isaac.

Lemuel nodded slowly.

“I was told right,” he said quietly. “There’s a big crack up near the top of the dome, in the north-eastern quarter. From where I was it was a bit hard to tell the size, but I figure it’s at least . . . six feet by four. I looked pretty hard up there, and that was the only break I saw big enough for anything man-sized or thereabouts to get in or out. Did you have a little glance around the base?”

Derkhan nodded. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, plenty of little cracks, even a few places where a fair bit of glass was missing, especially higher up, but there were no holes big enough to get through. That must be the one.”

Isaac and Lemuel nodded.

“So that’s how they’re getting in and out,” said Isaac softly. “Well, it seems to me the best way of tracking them is to reverse their journey. Much as I damn well hate to suggest it, I think we should get up there. What’s it like inside?”

“You can’t see all that much,” said Lemuel, and shrugged. “The glass is thick, old and damn dirty. They only clean it once every three or four years, I think. You can make out the basic shapes of houses and streets and what have you, but that’s about all. You’d have to look inside to get the lay of the place.”

“We can’t all troop up there,” said Derkhan. “We’ll be seen. We should’ve asked Lemuel to go in, he’s the man for the job.”

“I wouldn’t have gone anyway,” said Lemuel tightly. “I don’t enjoy being that high up, and I certainly damn well won’t dangle upside down hundreds of feet above thirty thousand pissed-off cactacae . . .”

“Well, what are we going to do?” Derkhan was irritated. “We could wait until nightfall, but then the bloody moths are active. What we’ll have to do is go up one at a time. If, that is, it’s safe to. We need someone to go first . . .”

“I will go,” said Yagharek.

There was silence. Isaac and Derkhan stared at him.

“Great!” said Lemuel archly, and clapped twice. “That’s that sorted. So you can go up, and then . . . um . . . you can look around for us, chuck us down a message . . .”

Isaac and Derkhan were ignoring Lemuel. They were still staring at Yagharek.

“It is right that I should go,” said Yagharek. “I am at home so high,” he said and his voice clucked slightly, as if at a sudden emotion. “I am at home so high, and I am a hunter. I can look down on the landscape within and see where the moths might lurk. I can gauge the possibilities within the glass.”

Yagharek retraced Lemuel’s steps up the shell of the Glasshouse.

He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.

He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.

Yagharek pretended he was flying.

Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.

He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.

At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.

When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.

Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.

Yagharek struck out across the glass itself.

He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.

He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.

Leaning over, Yagharek could feel heat gusting from the lamplit depths within. The night outside was warm, but the temperature within must be very high.

He wound the grappling hook carefully around the metal joist at one side of the crack and tugged it hard to ensure it was secure. Then he wrapped the end of the rope three times around his waist. He gripped it near the hook, lay across the girder and put his head in through the lips of broken glass.

It felt like pushing his face into a bowl of strong tea. The air inside the Glasshouse was hot, almost stiflingly so, and full of smoke and steam. It shone with a hard, white light.

Yagharek blinked his eyes clean and shielded them, then looked down on the cactus town.

In the centre, below the massive nugget of glass at the dome’s tip, the houses had been cleared away and a stone temple had been built. It was red stone, a steep ziggurat, that reached a third of the way to the Glasshouse roof. Every stepped level was lush with desert and veldt vegetation, abloom in garish reds and oranges against their waxy green skins.

A little rim of land, about twenty feet wide, had been cleared all around it, beyond which point the streets of Riverskin had been left. The cartography was a snarled puzzle, a collection of road-ends and the rumps of avenues, here the corner of a park and there half a church, even the stump of a canal, now a trough of stagnant water, cut off by the edge of the dome. Lanes criss-crossed the little township at odd angles, segments cut from longer streets where the dome had been placed over them. A little random patch of alleys and roads had been contained, sealed under glass. Its content had changed even as the outlines remained mostly the same.

The chaotic aggregate of street-stubs had been reformed by the cactacae. What, years ago, had been a wide thoroughfare had been made a vegetable garden, the edges of its lawns flush with the houses on either side, little trails from front doors indicating the routes between patches of pumpkin and radishes.

Ceilings had been removed four generations ago to convert human houses into homes for their new, much taller inhabitants. Rooms had been added to the tops and backsides of buildings, styled like weird miniature effigies of the stepped pyramid in the centre of the Glasshouse. The additional buildings had been wedged into every space possible, to cram the dome with cactacae, and strange agglomerations of human architecture and monolithic, stone-slab edifices stretched in big blocks of variegated colour. Some were several storeys tall.

Swaying, dipping bridges of wood and rope were draped between many of the upper floors, linking rooms and buildings on opposite sides of streets. In many of the yards and on the tops of many buildings, low walls enclosed flat desert-gardens, with tiny patches of scrubby grass, a few low cactuses and undulating sand.

Little flocks of captive birds that had never found the shattered vents to the outside city swept low over the houses and called out in hunger. With a lurch of adrenalin and nostalgic shock, Yagharek recognized a bird-call from the Cymek. There were dune-eagles, he realized, perching on one or two roofs.

Rising around them on all sides, the dome refracted New Crobuzon like a dirty glass sky, rendering the surrounding houses a confusion of darkness and deflected light. The whole diorama below him thronged with cactus people. Yagharek scanned slowly, but he could not see another sapient race.

The simple bridges swung as cactacae passed over them in all directions. In the sand-gardens, Yagharek saw cactacae with big rakes and wooden paddles carefully sculpting the sastrugi that mimicked the rippling dunes made by the wind. Here in this tightly closed space, bounded on every side, there were no gusts to carve patterns, and the desert landscape had to be wrought by hand.

The streets and paths were tight crammed with cactacae buying and selling in the market, arguing gruffly too low for Yagharek to hear. They pulled wooden carts by hand, two working together if the vehicle or load was particularly large. There were no constructs in sight, no cabs, no animals of any sort beyond the birds and a few rock-rabbits Yagharek caught sight of on the ledges of buildings.

In the city outside, cactacae women wore great shapeless dresses like sheets. Here in the Glasshouse they wore only loincloths of white and beige and dun cloth, exactly like the men. Their breasts were somewhat larger than the men’s, and tipped with dark green nipples. In a few places, Yagharek could see a woman carrying a baby held tight to her chest, the child unworried by the pinprick wounds its mother’s spines inflicted. Boisterous little gangs of cactacae children played on corners, ignored or cuffed absently by passing adults.

On every part of the pyramid temple were cactacae elders, reading, gardening, smoking and talking. Some wore sashes of red or blue around their shoulders, that stood out strongly against their pale green skin.

Yagharek’s skin was prickling with sweat. Wafts of woodsmoke blurred his vision. They rose from a hundred chimneys at all different heights, trickling gently into the sky and eddying in slow mushrooming gusts. A few hazy threads found their way up and seeped from the cracks and holes in the glass sky. But with the wind kept out and the sun magnified by the vaulted translucent bubble, there were no breezes or bluster to dissipate the fumes. The underside of the glass, Yagharek saw, was coated in greasy soot.

There was still more than an hour to sundown. Yagharek glanced to his left and saw that the orb of glass atop the dome seemed to be bursting with light. It was sucking up every scrap of the sun’s emissions, concentrating them and sending them vividly into every nook of the Glasshouse, filling it with unforgiving light and heat. He saw that the metal casing which held it was wired for power, with cables snaking down the insides of the dome and disappearing from sight.

The flat sand-garden at the top of the layered tower at the Glasshouse’s centre was covered in complex machinery. Exactly below the swollen nugget of clear glass was a huge lensed machine, with fat pipes snaking out into vats around it. A cactacae with a coloured sash polished its copper workings.

Yagharek remembered rumours he had heard in Shankell, stories about a heliochymical engine of immense thaumaturgic power. He looked carefully at the glowing contraption, but its purpose was quite opaque.

As he watched, Yagharek became conscious of the large number of armed posses that were evident. He narrowed his eyes. He was gazing down at them like some god, seeing every surface of the little cactus town in the fierce light of the glass globe. He could see almost all the rooftop gardens, and it seemed to him that on at least half, a group of three or four cactus were stationed. They sat or stood, their expressions unreadable at such a distance, but the massive, weighty rivebows they carried were unmistakable. Hatchets dangled from their belts, curved poleaxes glowed in the reddening light.

There were more of the little patrols beside stalls in the sprawling market, sitting alert on the lowest level of the central temple, and walking the streets with a deliberate step, rivebows cocked and ready.

Yagharek saw the looks that the armed guards received, the nervous salutations and the frequent skyward glances of the populace.

He did not think that this situation was normal.

Something was making the cactus people uneasy. They could be truculent and taciturn, in his experience, but the subdued air of menace was like nothing he had experienced in Shankell. Perhaps, he reflected, these cactacae were different, a more sombre breed than their southern siblings. But he felt his skin prickle. The air was fraught.

Yagharek concentrated, and began to scan the inside of the dome with a hard, rigorous eye. He focused carefully, went into something of a hunter’s trance.

He started looking at the edges of the dome. He took in the whole inside circumference in one long, slow sweep, then spiralled his vision carefully towards the centre, examining and investigating the circle of houses and streets a little way in, and then further in again.

In this exacting, methodical way, he could cast his eye on every nook and cranny of the Glasshouse’s surfaces. His eyes stopped briefly, momentarily, on imperfections of the red stone, then moved on.

As the day came closer to its end, the nervousness of the cactus people seemed to increase.

Yagharek came to the end of his scanning sweep. There was nothing immediate, nothing clearly wrong that leapt out at him. He turned his attention to the inside of the roof immediately around him, looking for some purchase.

It would not be easy. Some way from him the girders coalesced around the heavy glass globe, but on the underside of the glass they were not as protuberant. He believed that with some effort he could climb them: as, probably, could Lemuel and perhaps Derkhan or one or two of the adventurers. But it was hard to imagine Isaac clinging so close and holding his bulk suspended, crawling hundreds of yards of dangerous metal piping to the earth.

The sun was low outside. Even with the languorous summer evenings, time was short.

He felt someone tap his back. Yagharek raised his head up, lifting it out of the inverted bowl into the air of New Crobuzon, air that felt suddenly chill.

Behind him, Shadrach was crouched on the glass. He wore a mirror-helm, and held out a similar piece cobbled together from plate iron towards Yagharek.

Shadrach’s helmet looked different. Yagharek’s was a rude piece of rescued metal. Shadrach’s was intricate, wired and valved with copper and brass. At the top was a socket, with holes to screw in some fitting. It was only the mirrors that seemed a makeshift addition.

“You forgot this,” Shadrach said in his gentle voice, waving the helmet. “No waved flag, no word from you for twenty minutes. I’m here to check you’re alive and all right.”

Yagharek showed him the girders inside the dome. He and Shadrach discussed the problem of Isaac in urgent whispered tones.

“You must go down,” said Yagharek. “You must go by the sewers, with Lemuel as your guide. You must find your way as fast as you can into the dome. Send some of the mechanical monkeys to me, to aid me if I am attacked. Look inside.”

Shadrach leaned over carefully and peered into the darkening glass. Yagharek pointed down, across the thronging village at a crumbling ghost-building by the vile canal end. The water, its towpaths and a little finger of torn land on which the broken house stood were all enclosed by an accidental fence of rubble, brambles and long-rusted barbed wire. The rejected sliver of space backed directly onto the dome, which swept up steeply over it like a flat cloud.

“You must find your way there.” Shadrach began to make some sound, murmuring about the impossibility, but Yagharek cut him off. “It is difficult. It will be difficult. But you cannot climb down from here on the inside, and if you can then Isaac certainly cannot. We need him inside. You must take him in. As fast as you can. I will come down to you, I will find you, when I have found the slake-moths. Wait for me.”

As he spoke, Yagharek strapped the makeshift helmet on his head and investigated the field of view it gave behind him.

He caught Shadrach’s eye in one of the big slivers of mirror.

“You must go. Be quick. Be patient. I will come to you and find you before the night is out. The moths must leave by this break, and so I will wait and watch for them.”

Shadrach’s face set. Yagharek was right. It was unthinkable that Isaac would be able to climb down the steep and dangerous iron rafters.

He nodded at Yagharek curtly, signalling goodbye into the garuda’s mirrors, then turned and scrambled back to the main ladder, descended at expert speed out of sight.

Yagharek turned and looked into the last of the sun. He breathed deeply and flickered his eyes from left to right, checking his vision in each jagged mirror. He calmed himself completely. He breathed in the slow rhythm of the yajhu-saak, the hunter’s reverie, the martial trance of the Cymek garuda. He composed himself.

After some minutes there came the skittering clatter of metal and wire on glass, and one by one three monkey-constructs came into view, approaching him from different directions. They gathered around him and waited, their glass lenses glinting rose in the evening, their thin pistons hissing as they moved.

Yagharek turned and regarded them through the mirrors. Then, gripping the rope carefully, he began to lower himself through the hole in the glass. He gesticulated at the constructs to follow him as he slipped past the gash. The heat of the dome washed up around him and closed over his head as he descended into the glass-bounded village, towards houses immersed in red light as the clear globe magnified and dispersed the setting sun’s rays, into the slake-moths’ lair.

Chapter Forty-three

Outside the dome, the air darkened inexorably. With the onset of the night, the bright rays that burst from the glass globe in the dome’s roof were snuffed out. The Glasshouse grew suddenly dimmer and more cool. But much of the heat was retained. The dome was still far warmer than the city outside. The lights from the torches and the buildings within reflected back on the glass. To the travellers looking back on the city from Flag Hill, to the slum-dwellers gazing desultorily down from the towerblocks of Ketch Heath, to the officer glancing from the skyrail and the driver of the south-bound Sud Line train, peering through smokestacks and flues, over the smoke-soiled roofscape of the city, the Glasshouse looked stretched out taut, distended with light.

As dusk fell, the Glasshouse began to glow.

Clinging to the metal on the inside skin of the dome, unnoticed like some infinitesimal tic, Yagharek slowly flexed his arms. He was affixed to a little knot of scaffolding about one-third of the way down the height of the dome. He was still easily high enough to look down on all the housetops, the tangles of architecture on all sides.

His mind was poised in yajhu-saak. He breathed slowly and regularly. He continued his hunter’s search, his eyes flitting restlessly from point to point below him, not spending more than a moment on each place, building up a composite picture. Occasionally he would unfocus and take in the whole sweep of the roofs below him, alert for any strange movements. He returned his attention often to the scum-covered trench of water where he had told Shadrach to assemble the others.

There was no sign of the band of intruders.

As the night deepened, the streets cleared at extraordinary speed. The cactacae flocked back to their houses. From a teeming township, the Glasshouse emptied, became a ghost town in a little over half an hour. The only figures left on the streets were the armed patrols. They moved nervously through the streets. Lights from windows were dimmed as shutters and curtains were closed. There were no gaslights in these streets. Instead, Yagharek watched lamp-lighters walk the length of the streets, reaching out with flaming poles to ignite oil-soaked torches ten feet above the pavements.

Each of the lamp-lighters was accompanied by a cactacae patrol, moving nervously, pugnacious and furtive through the obscuring streets.

On the top of the central temple, a group of cactus elders was moving around the central mechanism, pulling levers and tugging at handles. The enormous lens at the top of the device swung down on a ponderous hinge. Yagharek peered closely, but he could not discern what they were doing or what the machine was for. He watched without comprehension as the cactacae swung the thing around, about a vertical and a horizontal axis, checking and adjusting gauges according to obscure calibrations.

Above Yagharek’s head, two of the chimpanzee-constructs clung to the metal. The other was a few feet below him, on a strut parallel to his own. They were quite motionless, waiting for him to move.

Yagharek settled back, and waited.

Two hours after sundown, the glass of the dome looked black. The stars were invisible.

The streets of the cactacae Glasshouse glowed with a forbidding, sepia firelight. The patrols had become shadows on a darker street.

There were no sounds beyond the undertone of burning, the soft complaints of architecture and the sound of whispering. Occasional lights flitted like will-o’-the-wisps between the slowly cooling bricks.

There was still no sign of Lemuel, Isaac and the others. A small part of Yagharek’s mind was unhappy at this, but for the most part he was still inside, concentrating on the relaxation technique of the hunting trance.

He waited.

Some time between ten and eleven o’clock, Yagharek heard a sound.

His attention, which had spread out to suffuse him, to saturate his awareness, focused instantly. He did not breathe.

Again. The tiniest rippling, a snap like cloth in the wind.

He twisted his neck around and stared towards the noise, down at the mass of streets, into the fearful dark.

There was no response from the watchtower at the Glasshouse’s centre. Fancies crept through Yagharek’s mind, deep inside. Perhaps he had been deserted, a part of him thought. Perhaps the dome was empty but for him and the monkey-constructs, and some unearthly floating lights in the depths of the streets.

He did not hear the sound again, but a shade of deep black passed across his eyes. Something huge flitted up through the murk.

Terrified at some semi-conscious level far below the calm surface of his thoughts, Yagharek felt himself stiffen and grip the metal in his fingers, flatten himself painfully against the dome’s supports. He snapped his head away, facing the metal that he held. Intently, carefully, he stared into the mirrors before his eyes.

Some fell-creature inched its way up the Glasshouse skin.

The shape was almost exactly opposite him, as far away as it could be. It had sprung from some building below and flown a tiny distance to the glass, from there to crawl hand over tendril over claw, up towards the cooler air and the uncontained darkness.

Even through the yajhu-saak, Yagharek’s heart reeled. He watched the thing progress in his mirrors. It fascinated him in an unholy way. He tracked its dark-winged silhouette, like some deranged angel, all studded with dangerous flesh and dripping bizarrely. Its wings were folded, though the slake-moth gently opened and closed them, now and then, as if to dry them in the warm air.

It crawled with a horrible sluggish torpor towards the invigorating city night.

Yagharek had not pinpointed its nest, and that was critical. His eyes batted inconstantly between the insidious creature itself and the patch of domed darkness from where he had first seen it rise.

And as he watched intently through his mounted mirrors, he won his prize.

He kept his eyes on a tangle of old architecture at the southwestern edge of the Glasshouse. The buildings, amended and tinkered with after centuries of cactus occupation, had once been a clot of smart houses. There was almost nothing to distinguish them from their surroundings. They were a little taller than the neighbouring edifices, and their tops had been sliced off by the descending curve of the dome. But rather than demolish them outright, the buildings had been selectively cut, their upper floors taken off where they impeded the glass and the rest left intact. The further out from the centre the houses were, the lower the dome over them and the more of their raised floors had been destroyed.

It was originally the wedge of building at the fork where a street had split. The vertex of the terrace was almost intact, with only the roof removed. Behind it was a dwindling tail of brick storeys, shrinking under the mass of the dome, and evaporating at the edge of the cactus town.

From the uppermost window of this old structure emerged the unmistakable thrusting maw of a slake-moth.

Again, Yagharek’s heart moved, and it was a stern effort that restored its regular beat. He experienced all his emotions at a remove, through a foggy filter of the hunting trance. And this time he was diffusely aware of excitement, as well as fear.

He knew where the slake-moths roosted.

Now that he had discovered what he had sought, Yagharek wanted to shin as fast as he could down the innards of the dome, to remove himself from the slake-moth’s world, to get out of the heights of the air and hide on the ground under the looming eaves. But to move quickly, he realized, was to risk the slake-moth’s attention. He had to wait, swinging very slightly, sweating, silent and immobile, while the monstrous creatures crawled out into the deeper darkness.

The second moth leapt without the slightest sound into the air, gliding on spread wings for a second and alighting on the metal bones of the Glasshouse. It slid with a vile motion up towards its fellow.

Yagharek waited, without moving.

It was several minutes before the third moth appeared.

Its siblings had nearly reached the top of the dome, after a long, stealthy climb. The newcomer was too eager for that. It stood poised at the same window from which the others had emerged, gripping the frame, balancing its convoluted bulk on the edge of the wood. Then, with an audible snap of air, it beat its way straight upwards, into the sky.

Yagharek could not be sure where the next noise came from, but he thought the two crawling slake-moths hissed at their flying sibling, in disapproval or warning.

There was an answering hum. In the stillness of the Glasshouse curfew, the clicking of mechanized gears from the top of the temple was easily heard.

Yagharek was quite still.

A light burst forth from the top of the pyramid, a blazing white ray, so sharp and defined it seemed almost solid. It beamed from the lens of the strange machine.

Yagharek stared through his mirrored glasses. In the faint ambience radiating backwards from the glaring searchlight he could see a crew of cactacae elders stationed behind it, each frantically adjusting some dial, some valve, one grasping two enormous handles that jutted from the back of the light-emitting engine. He swivelled and twisted the thing, directing its luminous shaft.

The light glared savagely onto a random patch of the dome’s glass, then was wrested by its wielder into another position, swung randomly for a moment, then pinioned the impatient slake-moth as it reached the broken panes.

It turned its horned eyesockets to the light. The monstrous creature hissed.

Yagharek heard shouts from the cactus people on the ziggurat, a half-familiar tongue. It was an alloy, a bastard hybrid, mostly words he had last heard in Shankell, alongside New Crobuzon Ragamoll and other influences he did not recognize at all. As a gladiator in the desert city, he had learnt some of the language of his mostly cactus bookmakers. The formulations he heard now were bizarre, centuries out of date and corrupted with alien dialects, but still almost comprehensible to him.

“. . . there!” he heard, and something about light. Then as the slake-moth dropped away again from the glass to extricate itself from the torch, he heard, very clearly, “It’s coming!”

The slake-moth had easily fallen away and out of the reach of the enormous torch. Its beam oscillated wildly like a madman’s lighthouse as the cactacae fought to point it in the right direction. Desperately they swung it over the streets, up at the roof of the dome.

The other two moths remained unseen, flattening themselves against the glass.

There was a shouted discussion from below.

“. . . ready . . . sky . . .” he made out, then some word that sounded like the Shankell words for “sun” and “spear” run together. Someone shouted out to take care, and said something about the sunspear and the home: too far, they shouted, too far.

There was a barked order from the cactus directly behind the vast torch, and his team adjusted their motions obscurely. The leader demanded “limits,” of what Yagharek could not understand.

As the light lurched wildly, it found its target again, momentarily. For a moment, the tangled presence of the slake-moth sent a ghastly shadow across the inside of the dome.

“Ready?” shouted the leader, and there was a confirming chorus.

He continued to swivel the lamp, desperately trying to pin the flying moth with its hard light. It swooped and curved, arcing over the tops of the buildings and careering in spirals, a dimly glimpsed display of virtuoso aerobatics, a shadowy circus.

And then, for a moment, the creature was caught spreadeagled in the sky, the light caught it full on and time seemed to stop at the sight of the thing’s awesome, unfathomable and terrible beauty.

At the sight, the cactacae aiming the light tugged some hidden handle, and a gob of incandescence spat out of the lens and blazed along the path of the searchlight. Yagharek’s eyes widened. The clot of concentrated light and heat spasmed out of existence a few feet before it hit the glass of the dome.

The momentary white-out seemed to still all sound in the dome.

Yagharek blinked to clear the afterimage of that savage projectile from his eyes.

The cactacae below began to talk again.

“. . . get it?” asked one. There was a confusion of unclear answers.

They peered, along with Yagharek, unseen above them, into the air where the slake-moth had flown. They scoured the ground with their eyes, turning the powerful beam towards the pavement.

Throughout the streets below, Yagharek saw the armed patrols standing still, watching the searching light, standing implacable as it swept over them.

“Nothing,” shouted one to the elders on high, and his report was repeated from all sectors, shouted into the claustrophobic night.

Behind the thick curtains and the wooden shutters of Glasshouse’s windows, threads of light spilt into the air as torches and gaslights were lit. But even woken by the crisis, the cactacae would not peer out into the darkness, would not take the risk on what they might see. The guards were left alone.

And then, with a sough of wind as lascivious as a sexual breath, the cactus people on the temple summit learnt that they had not hit the slake-moth: it had ducked in a sharp zigzagging manoeuvre out of the range of their sunspear, it had flown low enough over the rooftops to touch them, to claw its way towards the tower, to pull itself slowly up and to rise magisterially into view, wings outstretched to their full compass, patterns flickering across them as fierce and complex as dark fire.

There was a tiny moment when one of the elders shrieked. There was a split second when the leader tried to tug the sunspear into position to blast the slake-moth into burning fragments. But they could not but see the wings unfolded before them, and their cries, their plans, evaporated as their minds overflowed.

Yagharek watched in his mirrored eyepieces, not wanting to see.

The two moths still clinging to the ceiling of the dome dropped suddenly away. They plummeted towards the earth, to lurch away from gravity with a stunning curving glide. They swept up the steep sides of the red pyramid, rising like devils from inside the earth, manifesting beside the transfixed cactacae horde.

One reached out with grasping creepers and whipped it around the thick leg of one of the cactus people. Thin arms and avaricious talons bit into cactus flesh without response, as the three slake-moths selected their victims, each grabbing hold of one of the entranced elders.

On the ground below the lights were moiling in confusion. The armed patrols were running in circles, shouting to each other, aiming their weapons skyward and lowering them again, cursing. They could see almost nothing. All they knew was that some vague, fluttering things were whirling like leaves around the top of the temple, and that the elders had stopped firing the sunspear.

A group of hard, brave warriors ran in to the entrance of the temple, racing up its wide staircases towards their leaders. They were too slow. They were helpless. The moths moved away from the building, slipping smoothly through the sky, their wings still stretched out, somehow flying while the wings presented an unmoving, mesmerizing vista. Each moth dipped slightly in the air as its prey was dragged from the edge of the brick. The three cactus elders dangled in snares, cat’s-cradles of eerie slake-moth limbs, gazing up in stupor at the tumbling storm of night-colours on their captors’ wings.

Several seconds before the squad of cactacae burst up from the trapdoor onto the roof, the moths disappeared. One by one, according to some flawless unspoken order, they shot straight up and burst out of the crack in the dome. They slipped out by some breakneck charm, passing without a moment’s pause through a gap not quite large enough for their wings.

They took their comatose prey with them, tugging the deadweight bodies into the night-city with a repulsive grace.

The cactus elders left beside the wilting sunspear shook themselves in confusion and exclaimed in amazement and discomfort as their minds returned to them. Their shouts became horrified when they saw that their companions had been taken. They wailed in rage and swung the sunspear up, aiming pointlessly at the empty skies. The younger warriors appeared, their rivebows and machetes poised. They looked around in confusion at the miserable scene and lowered their weapons.

Only then, finally, with the victims shouting blood-oaths and caterwauling in anger, with the night full of confused sounds, with the slake-moths flying out across the dark metropolis, did Yagharek emerge from the martial trance and continue climbing down the girders inside the Glasshouse dome. The monkey-constructs saw him move, and followed him towards the streets.

He moved sideways along cross-beams, ensuring that he came to ground behind the backs of the houses, in the little scrap of wasteland that surrounded the foetid stub of the canal.

Yagharek dropped the last few feet and landed silently, rolling on the broken bricks. He crouched and listened.

There were three little crunches as the mechanical apes landed around him and waited for orders or suggestions.

Yagharek peered into the filthy water beside him. The bricks were slippery with years of organic muck and slime. At one end, thirty feet or so within the dome’s walls, it came to an abrupt brick end. This must have been the start of a little tributary onto the main canal system. Where it met the dome’s wall, the canal was cut off with a rudely made blockage of concrete and iron. It had been hammered into place in the water, its edges sealed as tight as they could. There were still enough tiny impurities and channels in the sodden brickwork to ensure that the trench was kept full of water from outside. It seeped in through the decaying stone and eddied to a stop, thick with rubbish and dead things, a cloying broth of water-rotting filth.

Yagharek could smell it. He crept a little further away, towards the squat stumps of a wall that rose out of the shattered architecture. Outside, he realized, in the streets of the Glasshouse, the frantic shouts continued. The air was full of idiot demands for action.

He was about to settle down, to wait for Shadrach and the others, when Yagharek saw mounds of the broken bricks rising all around him. They tumbled to the ground with a little thudding downpour. Isaac and Shadrach, Pengefinchess and Derkhan and Lemuel and Tansell rose out of the brickdust. Yagharek saw that a pile of scrap-wire and glass behind them was two more monkey-constructs, moving forward now to join their fellows.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Isaac stumbled forward, trailing ashes and grime. The sewer muck that coated his clothes and bag was now coated with the grit from the collapsed buildings. His helmet—another like Shadrach’s, complex and mechanical looking—lolled battered and absurd on his head.

“Yag,” he said haltingly. “Good to see you, old son. So glad . . . you’re all right.” He grasped Yagharek’s hand, and the garuda, taken aback, did not extricate himself from the grip.

Yagharek felt himself emerge from a reverie he had not known he was in, looking around him, seeing Isaac and the others clearly, for the first time. He felt a belated surge of relief. They were filthy and scratched and bruised, but none of them looked hurt.

“Did you see it?” said Derkhan. “We’d just come up—it took us ages to work our way through the damn sewers, we kept hearing things . . .” She shook her head at the memory. “We found our way up through a manhole and we were in a street not too far from here. It was chaos, total chaos! The patrols were all running towards the temple, and we saw some . . . that light-gun thing. It was quite easy to make our way here. No one was interested in us . . .” Her voice trailed off. “We didn’t really see what happened,” she concluded quietly.

Yagharek breathed in deep.

“The moths are here,” he said. “I have seen their nest. I can take us there.”

The assembled company were elyctrified.

“Don’t the damn cactus know where they are?” said Isaac. Yagharek shook his head (a human gesture, the first he had learnt).

“They do not know the slake-moths sleep in their houses,” said Yagharek. “I heard them shouting: they think the moths come in to attack them. They think them intruders from without. They do not . . .” Yagharek stopped, thinking of that panic-stricken scene on the top of the cactacae sun-temple, of the helmetless cactus elders, the brave, idiot soldiers charging up, lucky enough to have missed the moths, saving themselves from pointless death. “They do not know how to deal with the moths at all,” he said quietly.

As he watched, Pengefinchess’s undine swept over her shirt from below, wetting her skin, rinsing the dust from her and her clothes, leaving them incongruously clean.

“We should find the nest,” said Yagharek. “I can take us to it.”

The adventurers nodded and began an automatic inventory of their weapons and equipment. Isaac and Derkhan looked nervous, but set their jaws. Lemuel looked away sardonically and began to pick his nails with a knife.

“There is something you must know,” said Yagharek. He was addressing everyone, and there was something peremptory in his tone, something that would not be ignored. Tansell and Shadrach looked up from carefully rummaging through their backpacks. Pengefinchess put down the bow she had been testing. Isaac looked at Yagharek with a terrible forlorn resignation.

“Three moths left by the broken roof, dandling mindless cactacae. But there are four. Vermishank told us. Perhaps he is wrong, or perhaps he lied. Perhaps another has died.

“Or perhaps,” he said, “one has stayed behind. Perhaps one is waiting for us.”

Chapter Forty-four

The cactacae patrols huddled together at the base of the Glasshouse, arguing with the remaining elders.

Shadrach crouched behind an alley, out of sight, and pulled a miniature telescope from some hidden pocket. He flicked it out to its full extent, played it over the congregated soldiers.

“They really don’t seem to know what to do,” he mused quietly. The rest of the intruding gang were huddled behind him, flat against the damp wall. They were as unobtrusive as they could make themselves in the moving shadows cast by the elevated torches that sputtered and burnt above them. “That must be why they have this curfew going on. The moths are taking them. Of course, it may always be in place. Whatever—” he turned to face the others “—it’s going to help us.”

It was not hard to creep unseen through the darkened streets of the Glasshouse. Their passage was quite unimpeded. They followed Pengefinchess, who moved with a weird gait, halfway between a frog’s leap and a thief’s creep. She held her bow in one hand, in the other an arrow with a wide, flanged head for use against cactacae, but she did not have to use it. Yagharek moved with her, a few feet behind, hissing directions at her. Occasionally she would stop and gesticulate behind her, flattening against the wall, hiding behind some cart or stall, watching as a brave or foolhardy soul above her pulled back the curtain from their window and peered into the street.

The five monkey-constructs scampered mechanically beside their organic companions. Their heavy metal bodies were quiet. They emitted only a few strange sounds. Isaac did not doubt that for the cactus people of the dome, the regular diet of nightmares would that night be amended to include some metallic scuttling thing, some clattering menace that stalked the streets.

Isaac found walking in the dome deeply unsettling. Even with the red-stone additions to the architecture and the spitting torchlight, the streets seemed basically normal. They could have been anywhere in the city. And yet, stretching over everything, creeping inwards from horizon to horizon, encircling the world like some claustrophobic sky, the enormous dome defined everything. Glimmers of light came through from outside, warped by the thick glass, uncertain and vaguely threatening. The black lattice of ironwork that held the glass in place ensnared the little townscape like a netting, like a vast spider’s web.

At that thought, Isaac felt a sudden shuddering lurch of emotion.

He felt a vertiginous sense of certainty.

The Weaver was somewhere nearby.

He faltered as he ran and looked up. He had seen the world as a web, for a split second, had glimpsed the worldweb itself, and had sensed the proximity of that mighty arachnid spirit.

“Isaac!” hissed Derkhan, running past him. She pulled him with her. He had been standing still in the street, gazing skyward, desperately trying to find his way into that awareness again. He tried to whisper to her, to let her know what he had realized, as he stumbled after her, but he could not be clear and she could not listen. She dragged him with her through the dark streets.

After a twisting journey, ducking out of sight of patrols and glancing up at the glowering glass sky, they halted before a clutch of dark buildings, at the intersection of two deserted streets. Yagharek waited until they were all close enough to hear him, before turning and gesturing.

“From that top window there,” he said.

The swooping dome bore down inexorably on the tail of the terrace, destroying the rooftops and reducing the mass of the street’s houses to ever-more-squat piles of rubble. But Yagharek was pointing at the end furthest from the wall, where the buildings were mostly intact.

The three floors below the attic were occupied. Glimmers of light spilt from the edges of curtains.

Yagharek ducked back around the edge of a little alley and pulled the others in after him. Way off to the north, they could still hear the consternated shouting from the confused patrols, desperate to decide what to do.

“Even if it wasn’t too risky to get the cactacae on our side,” hissed Isaac, “we’d be fucked if we tried to get them to help us now. They’re in a damn frenzy. One sniff of us and they’ll go berserk, hack us up with those rivebows faster’n you can say ‘knife.’ ”

“We must go past the rooms where the cactus people sleep,” said Yagharek. “We must get to the top of the house. We must find where the slake-moths come from.”

“Tansell, Penge,” said Shadrach decisively, “you watch the door.” They looked at him for a moment, then both nodded. “Prof? I reckon you’d best come in with me. And these constructs . . . you think they’ll be helpful, yes?”

“I think they’ll be damn well essential,” said Isaac. “But listen . . . I think the . . . I think there’s a Weaver here.”

Everyone stared at him.

Derkhan and Lemuel looked incredulous. The adventurers were quite impassive.

“What makes you say that, prof?” asked Pengefinchess mildly.

“I . . . I could sort of . . . sense it. We’ve dealt with it before. It said it might see us again . . .”

Pengefinchess glanced at Tansell and Shadrach. Derkhan spoke hurriedly.

“It’s true,” she said. “Ask Pigeon. He saw the thing.” Reluctantly, Lemuel nodded that yes, he had.

“But there’s not much we can do about it,” he said. “We can’t control the bugger, and if he comes for us or them, we’re pretty much at the mercy of events. He might do nothing. You said it yourself, ’Zaac: he’ll do whatever he wants.”

“So,” said Shadrach slowly, “we’re still going in. Any arguments?” There were none. “Right. You, garuda. You’ve seen them. You saw where they came from. You should come. So it’s me, the prof, the bird-man and the constructs. The rest of you stay here, and do exactly what Tansell and Penge tell you. Understood?”

Lemuel nodded, uncaring. There was a glowering moment with Derkhan, as she swallowed her resentment. Shadrach’s hard, commanding tone was impressive. She might not like him, she might think him worthless scum, but he knew his business. He was a killer, and that was what they needed right now. She nodded.

“First sign of any trouble you get out of here. Back to the sewers. Disappear. Regroup at the dump tomorrow, if need be. Understood?” This time he was speaking to Pengefinchess and Tansell. They nodded brusquely. The vodyanoi was whispering to her elemental and checking through her quiver. Some of her arrows were complicated affairs, with thin, spring-loaded blades that would whip out on contact to slice almost with the savagery of a rivebow.

Tansell was checking his guns. Shadrach hesitated a moment, then unbuckled his blunderbuss and handed it to the taller man, who accepted it with a nod of thanks.

“I’ll be at close quarters,” said Shadrach. “I’ll not need it.” He drew his carved pistol. The dæmonic face at the end of the muzzle seemed to move in the half-light. Shadrach whispered; it seemed as if he was speaking to his gun. Isaac suspected that the weapon was thaumaturgically enhanced.

Shadrach, Isaac and Yagharek walked slowly away from the group.

“Constructs!” Isaac hissed. “With us.” There was a pistoned hissing and the shudder of metal as the five compact little simian bodies came away with them.

Isaac and Shadrach looked over at Yagharek, then tested their mirror-helms to make sure their reflected vision was clear.

Tansell was standing before the little huddling group, making notes in a little book. He looked up, pursed his lips and stared at Shadrach, his head on one side. He looked up at the torches above them, took in the angle of the roofs that loomed over them. He scrawled obscure formulae.

“I’m going to try and get a veil-hex going,” he said. “You’re too visible. There’s no point asking for trouble.” Shadrach nodded. “Shame we can’t get the constructs as well, really.” Tansell motioned the automated apes out of the way. “Penge, will you help?” he said. “Channel a bit of puissance my way, will you? This shit is draining.”

The vodyanoi crept over a little and placed her left hand in Tansell’s right. Both of them concentrated, their eyes closing. There was no movement or sound for a minute; then, as Isaac watched, both their eyes fluttered blearily open at the same moment.

“Extinguish those damn lights,” hissed Tansell, and Pengefinchess’s mouth moved silently with his. Shadrach and the others looked around, unsure what he was referring to, when they saw him glaring at the flaming streetlamps above them.

Quickly, Shadrach beckoned Yagharek. He strode over to the nearest lamp and linked his hands, making a step. He braced his legs.

“Use your cloak,” he said. “Get up there and smother the flame.”

Isaac was probably the only person to see Yagharek’s infinitesimal hesitation. He realized the bravery he was seeing as Yagharek obeyed, preparing to tangle up and ruin his last disguise. Yagharek undid the clasp at his throat and stood before them all, his beaked and feathered head uncovered, the enormous emptiness behind his back shriekingly visible, his scars and stubs covered with a thin shirt.

Yagharek clutched Shadrach’s linked hands as gently as he could with those great taloned feet. He stood up. Shadrach lifted the hollow-boned garuda with ease. Yagharek swung his heavy cloak over the sticky, spitting torch. It snuffed with a burst of black smoke. Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

He stepped down and Shadrach and he moved quickly to the left, to the other flame that illuminated the cul-de-sac they crouched in. They repeated their operation, and the little brick gully was doused with darkness.

When he stepped down, Yagharek opened out his ruined cloak, charred and split and foul with tar. He paused for a moment and tossed it away from him. He looked tiny and forlorn in his dirty shirt. His weapons dangled in full view.

“Move into the deepest shadow,” hissed Tansell, his voice grating. Again, Pengefinchess’s mouth mirrored his own, and emitted not a sound.

Shadrach stepped backwards, finding a little alcove in the brick, tugging Yagharek and Isaac in with him, flattening them against the old wall.

They pushed themselves down, settled themselves and were still.

Tansell moved his left arm out stiffly and slung the end of a roll of thick copper wire towards them. Shadrach reached out and caught it easily. He wrapped it around his own neck, then looped it quickly over his companions. Then he slipped back into the darkness. At the other end, Isaac saw, the wire was attached to a hand-held engine, some clockwork motor, the catch of which Tansell released, letting the momentum take the mechanism, unwinding and dynamic.

“Ready,” Shadrach said.

Tansell began to hum and whisper, spitting out weird sounds. He was almost invisible. As Isaac watched him, he could see nothing more than a figure shrouded in obscurity, trembling with effort. The murmuring increased.

A shock snapped through him. Isaac spasmed a little and felt Shadrach hold him where he was. Isaac’s skin crawled and he felt a stinging current trickle in through his pores, where the wire touched his skin.

The sensation continued for a minute, and then dissipated as the engine wound down.

“All right,” croaked Tansell. “Let’s see if it’s worked.”

Shadrach stepped out of the hollow into the street.

The shadows came with him.

Enveloping him was an indistinct aura of darkness, the same one that had covered him as he stood in the deep shade. Isaac stared at him, saw the patch of deep black in Shadrach’s eyes and below his chin. Shadrach stepped slowly forward, and into the light shed by torches in the junction a little way off.

The shadows on his face and body did not alter. They remained fixed in the conjuncture they had assumed as he crouched in the coal darkness, exactly as if he stood still hidden from the flickering glow, beside the wall. The shadows that clung to him extended perhaps an inch from his skin, discolouring the air that surrounded him like a caliginous halo.

There was something else, an untimely stillness that crept with him even as Shadrach moved. It was as if the frozen furtiveness of his concealment in the bricks suffused the shadows that coated him. He stalked forward, yet the sense of it was that he was still. He confused the eye. You could follow his progress if you knew he was there and were determined to watch, but it was easier not to notice him.

Shadrach motioned Isaac and Yagharek to join him.

Am I like him? thought Isaac as he crept out into the lighter darkness. Do I slip around the corners of your eye? Am I half invisible, bringing my shadow-cover with me?

He looked over at Derkhan, and saw by her wide-mouthed stare that he was. To his left, Yagharek too was an indistinct figure.

“First sign of sun-up, go,” whispered Shadrach to his companions. Tansell and Pengefinchess nodded. They had disengaged, and shook their heads in exhaustion. Tansell raised his hand in a gesture of good luck.

Shadrach beckoned Isaac and Yagharek, and stepped out of the darkened alley into the sputtering firelight in front of the houses. After them came the monkeys, moving slowly, as silently as they could. They stood beside the two humans and the garuda, and the red light glinted violently from their battered metal shells. The same light slipped off the three hexed intruders like thin oil off a blade. It could find no purchase. The three unclear figures stood before the five quietly clattering constructs, and moved across the deserted street towards the house.

The cactacae did not lock their doors. It was easy enough to gain entrance to the house. Shadrach began to creep up the stairs.

As Isaac followed him, he sniffed at the exotic, unfamiliar smell of cactacae sap and strange food. Pots of sandy soil were placed all around the entrance hall, sporting a variety of desert plants, mostly unhealthy and dwindling in the interior of the house.

Shadrach turned and took in Isaac and Yagharek with a look. Very slowly, he put his finger to his lips. Then he continued to climb.

As they approached the first floor, they heard a quiet argument in deep cactus voices. Yagharek translated what he understood in a tiny whisper, something about being afraid, an exhortation to trust the elders. The corridor was bare and unadorned. Shadrach paused and Isaac peered over his shoulder, saw that the door to the cactus-people’s room was wide open.

Inside he saw a large room with a very high ceiling, wrought, he realized as he saw the fringe of planking that skirted the walls seven feet up, by tearing out the floor of the rooms above. A gaslight was turned on low. A little way from the door, Isaac saw several sleeping cactacae, standing with their legs locked, immobile and impressive. Two figures next to each other were still awake, leaning in slightly, whispering.

Very slowly, Shadrach stalked like a predatory creature up the last of the stairs and past the door. He paused just before he reached it, and looked back and pointed at one of the monkey-constructs, then beside himself. He repeated the gesture. Isaac understood. He pulled himself close to the aural inputs of the construct and whispered instructions to it.

It scampered up the stairs with a quiet clatter that made Isaac wince, but the cactacae did not notice it. The construct squatted quietly down beside Shadrach, blocked from sight inside the room by his dark-drenched form. Isaac sent another construct to follow it, then signalled Shadrach to move.

At a slow, steady crawl, the big man crept in front of the doorway, shielding the constructs with his body. Their forms still caught the light, would glint as they passed the threshold. Shadrach moved without pause past the line of sight of the cactacae talking within, with the constructs creeping beside him hidden from the light, then on past the edge of the doorway into the darkness of the corridor beyond.

And then it was Isaac’s turn.

He indicated two more constructs hide behind his bulk, then began to crawl along the wooden floor. His belly hung down as he shuffled along with the constructs.

It was a frightening feeling, to move out from behind the wall and emerge in full view of the cactacae couple talking quietly as they stood ready to sleep. Isaac was huddled against the banisters on the hallway, as far from the door as he could go, but there were still several intolerable seconds when he crept through the dim cone of light towards the safety of the dark corridor beyond.

He had time to stare at the big cactus people standing in the hard dirt on the floor, whispering. Their eyes passed over him as he crept before their door, and he held his breath, but his thaumaturgic shadows augmented the darkness of the house, and he went unseen.

Then Yagharek, his scrawny form doing its best to hide the last of the constructs, crept past the light.

They regrouped before the next stairs.

“This section is easier,” whispered Shadrach. “There’s no one on the floor above, it’s just the ceiling of this one. And then above that . . . that’s where our slake-moths hide.”

Before they reached the fourth floor, Isaac tugged at Shadrach and pulled him to a stop. Watched by Shadrach and Yagharek, Isaac whispered again to one of the monkey-constructs. He held Shadrach still as the thing crept with mechanical stealth over the lip of the stairs, and disappeared into the dark room beyond.

Isaac held his breath. After a minute, the construct emerged and waved its arm jerkily, indicated them to come up.

They rose slowly into a long-deserted attic room. A window looked out onto the junction of the streets, a window without glass, whose dusty frame was scuffed with a variety of bizarre markings. It was through this little rectangle that light came in, a wan and changing exudation of the torches below.

Yagharek pointed at the window slowly.

“From there,” he said. “It came from there.”

The floor was littered with ancient rubbish, and thick in dust. The walls were scratched with unsettling random designs.

The room was traversed by a discomfiting river of air. It was a faint current, almost undetectable. In the motionless heat of the dome, it was unsettling and remarkable. Isaac looked around, trying to trace its source.

He saw it. Even sweating in the night-heat, he shivered slightly.

Directly opposite the window, the plaster of the wall lay in shredded layers across the floor. It had fallen from a hole, a hole that looked newly created, an irregular cavity in the bricks that raised to the height of Isaac’s thighs.

It was a glaring, looming wound in the wall. The breeze connected it and the window, as if some unthinkable creature breathed out in the bowels of the house.

“It’s in there,” said Shadrach. “That must be where they’re hiding. That must be the nest.”

Inside the hole was a complex and broken tunnel, carved into the substance of the house. Isaac and Shadrach squinted into its darkness.

“It doesn’t look wide enough for one of those bastards,” said Isaac. “I don’t think they work quite according to . . . uh . . . regular space.”

The tunnel was four feet or so wide, rough-hewn and deep. Its interior was quickly invisible. Isaac kneeled before it and sniffed deeply of the darkness. He looked up at Yagharek.

“You have to stay here,” he said. Before the garuda could protest, Isaac pointed to his head. “Me and Shad here, we’ve got the helmets that the Council gave us. And with this—” he patted his bag “—we might be able to get close to whatever, if anything, is in there.” He reached in and brought out a dynamo. It was the same engine the Council had used to amplify Isaac’s mindwaves, attracting his erstwhile pet. He also brought out a large tangle of metal-sheathed piping, coiled around his hand.

Shadrach kneeled next to him and lowered his head. Isaac slotted an end of piping into place on the helmet’s outlet, and twisted the bolts that held it.

“According to the Council, channellers use a setup like this for some technique called . . . displacement-ontolography,” mused Isaac. “Don’t ask me. Point is, these exhaust pipes will flush out our . . . uh . . . psychic effluvia . . . and discharge it out here.” He glanced up at Yagharek. “No mindprint. No taste, no trail.” He spun the last bolt firmly and rapped Shadrach’s helmet gently. He lowered his own head and Shadrach began to repeat the operation. “See, if there is a moth down there, Yag, and you go anywhere near it, it’ll taste you. But it shouldn’t taste us. That’s the theory.”

When Shadrach was done, Isaac stood and threw the ends of the piping to Yagharek.

“Each of those is about . . . twenty-five, thirty feet. Hang on to it till it’s taut, then let us go on with it trailing behind. All right?” Yagharek nodded. His stood stiff, angry at being left, but understanding without question that there was no choice.

Isaac took two coiling wires and attached them first to the motor he held, then slotted the other end of each into a valve on his and Shadrach’s helmets.

“There’s a little antacidic chymical battery in there,” he said, waving the engine. “It works in conjunction with a metaclockwork design pinched from the khepri. Are we ready?” Quickly, Shadrach checked his gun, touched each of his other weapons in turn, then nodded. Isaac felt for his flintlock and the unfamiliar knife at his belt. “All right then.”

He snapped the little lever on the dynamo. A little humming hiss emerged from the engine. Yagharek held the outlets dubiously, peered into them. He felt some vague sensation, some weird little wash, trembling through him from the rims of the pipes. A little tremble passed through him from the hands up, a tiny tremor of fear that was not his own.

Isaac pointed at three of the monkey-constructs.

“Go in,” he said. “Four feet ahead of us. Move slowly. Halt for danger. You—” he pointed at another “—go behind us. One stay with Yag.”

Slowly, one by one, the constructs trooped into the darkness.

Isaac briefly laid a hand on Yagharek’s shoulder.

“Back soon, old son,” he said quietly. “Watch out for us.”

He turned away and kneeled, preceded Shadrach into the shaft of shattered brick, crouching and working his way into the stygian hole.

The tunnel was part of a subversive topography.

It crept at bizarre angles between the walls of the terrace, tight and close, sending the sound of his breath and the clanking of the monkeys’ bouncing into Isaac’s ears. His hands and knees ached from the crushing pressure of the sharp stone-shards under him. Isaac estimated that they were moving back through the terraced houses. They were shuffling downwards, and Isaac remembered how the curve of the dome had decapitated the houses at a lower and lower point as they approached the glass. The closer the houses were to the edge of the dome, he realized, the lower they would be, the more filled with old wreckage.

They were shuffling their way along the little stub of the street, towards the glass dome, down through deserted floors in an interstitial burrow. Isaac shivered for a moment in the dark. He was sweating from heat and from fear. He was terribly frightened. He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble.

After a short time of crawling Isaac felt a moment’s drag on him, then a release. He had reached the full extent of his piping, and Yagharek had let it go to drag behind him.

Isaac did not speak. He could hear Shadrach behind him, breathing deeply and grunting. The two men could not move more than five feet apart, because the wires connected their helmets to a single motor.

Isaac threw up his face and swung it around him, desperately searching for light.

The monkey-constructs swung their way up. Every few moments, one would momentarily turn on the lights in its eyes, and for a minuscule fraction of a second, Isaac would see a stark crawlway of littered brick and the metal gleam of the constructs’ bodies. Then the lights would go out. Isaac would try to negotiate by the ghost image that slowly ebbed from his eyes.

In the absolute dark, it was easy to sense the slightest glimmer. Isaac knew that he was crawling towards a source of light when he looked up and saw the grey outline of the tunnel ahead. Something pressed Isaac’s chest. He started massively, then recognized the pewter fingers and dark bulk of a construct. Isaac hissed to Shadrach to stop.

The construct gesticulated to Isaac with exaggerated jerky gestures. It pointed forward, towards its two fellows that hovered at the edge of the visible shaft, where the tunnel turned a sharp corner upwards.

Isaac indicated that Shadrach should wait. Then he crept forward at an almost motionless pace. Glacial dread was beginning to creep through his system, from the stomach out. He breathed deep and slow. He shifted his feet slowly, inching along, until he felt his skin prickle as it emerged into a shaft of faint light.

The tunnel ended in a wall of brick five feet high, on three sides of him. A wall rose behind him, above the tunnel mouth. Isaac looked up and saw a ceiling way above him. A pestilential stench began to dribble into the hole. Isaac screwed up his face.

He was crouching in a hole, by the wall, embedded in the cement floor of a room. He could see nothing of the chamber above and beyond him. But he could hear faint sounds. A slight rustle, like wind against discarded paper. The softest sound of liquid adhesion, like fingers sticky with glue meeting and parting.

Isaac swallowed three times and whispered to himself, gearing himself up to bravery, forcing himself on. He turned his back on the bricks before him, on the room beyond them. He saw Shadrach watching him on all fours, his face set. Isaac looked intently into his mirrors. He tugged briefly at the pipe attached to the top of his helmet, that twisted its way backwards into the tunnel and disappeared below Shadrach’s body into the depths, diverting his telltale thoughts.

Then Isaac began to stand, very slowly. He stared with violent fervour into the mirrors, as if trying to prove himself to some testing god—See! I’m not looking behind me, you damn well see if I do! The top of Isaac’s head breached the lip of the hole, and more light fell across him. The foul smell grew stronger still.

His terror was very strong. His sweat was no longer warm.

Isaac tilted his head and stood a little taller, until he saw the room itself in the sepia light that fought its way through one filthy, tiny window.

It was a long, thin room. Eight or so feet wide, and about twenty feet long. Dusty and long-deserted, with no visible entrance or exit, no hatches or doors.

Isaac did not breathe. At the furthest end of the room, sitting and seeming to stare directly at him, the lattice of its complex killing arms and limbs moving in baffling antiphase, its wings half-open in languorous threat, was a slake-moth.

It took a moment for Isaac to realize that he had not moaned. It took another few seconds of staring into the vile thing’s twitching antennaed sockets to realize that it had not sensed him. The moth shifted and turned a little, moving until it was three-quarters on to him.

Absolutely silently, Isaac exhaled. He twitched his head fractionally, to see the rest of the room.

When he saw its contents, he had to fight all over again not to make a sound.

Lying at irregular intervals the whole length of the floor, the room was littered with the dead.

That, Isaac realized, was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

Some, he saw with misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had lived at the end.

They could not be in paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become fuel for a slake-moth flight.

Isaac saw that in one of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders. The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

Then the slake-moth moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of dreamshit.

His eyes widened.

The slake-moth measured the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat globule of slake-moth milk. That’s got to be worth fucking thousands . . . Isaac thought. No, cut it to make it palatable, there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder everyone’s trying to get these damn things back . . .

Then, as Isaac watched, a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the centre of the sticky mass.

Under the armour that had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible, from where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

Isaac knew what he was seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

The slake-moth was laying its eggs.

Isaac slipped back below the surface of the wall. He was hyperventilating. Urgently, he beckoned Shadrach.

“One of the godsdamned things is right there and it’s laying its eggs so we have to damn well take it right now . . .” he hissed. Shadrach smacked his hand over Isaac’s mouth. He held Isaac’s eyes until the older man had calmed a little. Shadrach turned his back as Isaac had done, then stood slowly and gazed for himself onto the grisly scene. Isaac sat with his back to the bricks, waiting.

Shadrach dropped down again to Isaac’s level. His face was set.

“Hmmm,” he murmured. “I see. Right. Did you say the moth-thing can’t sense constructs?” Isaac nodded.

“As far as we know,” he said.

“Right then. You’ve done a damn fine job programming these constructs. And they’re an extraordinary design. Do you really mean it, that they’ll know when to attack, if we give them instructions? They can understand variables that complicated?”

Isaac nodded again.

“Then we have a plan,” said Shadrach. “Listen to me.”

Chapter Forty-five

Slowly, trembling almost uncontrollably, the memory of Barbile’s quasi-death vivid in him, Isaac climbed out of the hole.

He kept his eyes rigidly on the mirrors before him. He was dimly aware of the discoloured wall behind them. The vile shape of the slake-moth shook in the mirrors as his head moved.

As Isaac emerged, the slake-moth stopped moving suddenly. Isaac stiffened. It turned its head upwards and flickered its enormous tongue through the air. The vestigial antennae in its ocular sockets waved uneasily from side to side. Isaac moved again, creeping towards the wall.

The slake-moth moved its head uneasily. There was obviously some leakage, Isaac thought, from the edge of his helmet, some trickles of thought that wafted tantalizingly through the æther. But nothing clear enough for the slake-moth to find him.

When Isaac had made his way to the wall, Shadrach followed him up and into the room. Again, his presence discomfited the slake-moth a little, but nothing more than that.

After Shadrach, three monkey-constructs pulled themselves into view, leaving one to guard the tunnel. They began to walk slowly towards the slake-moth. It turned towards them, seemed to watch them without eyes.

“I think it can sense their physical shape and their movement, and ours as well,” whispered Isaac. “But without any mental trail, it doesn’t see any . . . either of us as sapient life. We’re just moving physical stuff, like trees in the wind.”

The slake-moth was turning to face the oncoming constructs. They separated and began to approach the moth from different directions. They did not move fast, and the slake-moth did not seem concerned. But it was a little wary.

“Now,” whispered Shadrach. He and Isaac reached out and began slowly to haul in the metal piping that extended from the top of their helmets.

As the open ends of the pipes drew closer, the slake-moth grew agitated. It skittered back and forth, returning to protect its eggs, then stalking forward a few feet, its teeth chattering in a terrible rictus.

Isaac and Shadrach looked at each other and counted silently together.

On three, they pulled the ends of their pipes out into the open room. In a single movement, as swiftly as they could, they whipped the metal around and sent the open ends into the corner, fifteen feet from them.

The slake-moth went berserk. It hissed and screeched in a loathsome register. It hunched up its body, increasing its size, and a host of exoskeletal jags flicked out of hollows in its flesh in organic threat.

Isaac and Shadrach stared into their mirrors, awed by its monstrous majesty. It had spread its wings and turned to face the corner where the pipe ends coiled. Its wing-patterns pulsed with misdirected, hypnotic energy.

Isaac was frozen. The slake-moth’s wings eddied with uncanny patterns. It stalked towards the pipe-ends in a low, predatory crouch, now on four legs, now six, now two.

Quickly, Shadrach pulled Isaac towards the dreamshit ball.

They walked forward, passing the incensed, hungry slake-moth, almost close enough to touch. They saw it approaching in their mirrors, a massive looming animal weapon. As they passed it, both men turned smoothly on their heels, walking backwards towards the dreamshit at one moment, then forwards the next. That way, they kept the slake-moth behind them, visible in the mirrors.

The moth walked straight past the constructs, knocking one aside without even noticing, as a serrated spine swung sideways in quivering, ravenous rage.

Isaac and Shadrach walked carefully, checking in their mirrors that the ends of their mental exhaust-pipes remained where they had been thrown, acting as slake-moth bait. Two of the monkey-constructs followed the slake-moth at a small distance, the third approaching the eggs.

“Quickly,” hissed Shadrach, and pushed Isaac to the floor. Isaac fumbled with the knife at his belt, wasting seconds with the clip. Then he had it out. He hesitated a moment, and then pushed it smoothly into the big, sticky mass.

Shadrach watched intently in his mirrors. The slake-moth, shadowed by the hovering constructs, pounced absurdly on the snaking ends of the pipes.

As Isaac drew his knife down the surface of the egg-case, the moth flailed with fingers and tongue to find the enemy whose mind remained tauntingly conscious.

Isaac wound the ends of his shirt around his hands and began to tug at the split he had made in the mass of dreamshit. With a big effort, he pulled the yielding ball apart.

“Quickly,” said Shadrach again.

The dreamshit—raw, uncut, distilled and pure—seeped through the cloth around Isaac’s hands and made his fingers tingle. He gave one last tug. The centre of the dreamshit ball was laid open, and there in the centre was a little clutch of eggs.

Each was translucent and oval, smaller than a hen’s. Through its semi-liquid skin, Isaac could see some faint, coiling shape. He looked up and beckoned the monkey-construct that stood nearby.

At the far end of the room, the slake-moth had picked up one of the metal tubes, putting its face in the flow of emotion from its open end. It shook it in confusion. It opened its mouth and unrolled its obscene, intrusive tongue. It licked the end of the pipe once, then plunged its tongue into it, eagerly seeking the source of this tempting flow.

“Now!” said Shadrach. The slake-moth’s hands moved along the coiled metal, seeking purchase. Shadrach’s face went suddenly white. He spread his legs and braced himself. “Now, dammit, do it now!” he shouted. Isaac looked up in alarm.

Shadrach was staring intently into his mirrors. With his left hand, he was aiming behind him, pointing his thaumaturgic pistol at the slake-moth.

Time slowed down as Isaac looked into his own mirrors and saw the dull metal pipe in the hands of the moth. He saw Shadrach’s hand, steady as the dead, clutching his flintlock, pointing it behind his own back. He saw the monkey-constructs waiting for their order to attack.

He looked down again at the vile clutch of eggs, seeping and glutinous below him.

He opened his mouth to shout to the constructs, and as he inhaled to yell, the slake-moth leaned forward a moment then pulled at the piping with all its horrendous strength.

Isaac’s voice was drowned by Shadrach’s wail and the explosion from his flintlock. He had waited a moment too long before firing. The enhanced ball smacked with a boom into the substance of the wall. Shadrach was pulled through the air. The leather strap attaching his helmet to his head snapped. The helmet flew away from him and arced at speed on the end of the pipe, tugging the connections from Isaac’s engine, shattering against the wall. Shadrach’s perfect curving trajectory collapsed as he was untethered. He tumbled in an ugly broken arc, his gun flying away from him, until he landed heavy and unwieldy on the concrete floor. His head smacked against the rough concrete floor, sending blood spattering out across the dust.

Shadrach screamed and moaned, rolled, clutching his head, trying to right himself.

His weltering mindwaves suddenly burst into the open. The slake-moth turned, growling.

Isaac shouted at the constructs. As the slake-moth began to stamp horribly quickly towards Shadrach, the two that stood behind it leapt up at it simultaneously. Flame burst from their mouths, flaring across the slake-moth’s body.

It screeched, and a clutch of skin-whips flailed across its smouldering back, battering against the constructs. The moth did not stop bearing down on Shadrach. A tentacular growth snapped around one of the construct’s necks and tugged it from the slake-moth’s back with awesome ease. It sent the metal body crunching against the wall as brutally as it had the helmet.

There was a terrible sound of rending as the construct burst apart, spreading shattered metal and flaming oil across the floor. It roared a little way from Shadrach, melting metal and cracking the concrete.

The construct by Isaac spat a gobbet of strong acid across the clutch of eggs. Instantly, they began to smoke, to split and hiss and dissolve.

The slake-moth let out an unholy, merciless, terrible scream.

Instantly it turned from Shadrach and tore across the room towards its brood. Its tail lashed violently from side to side, catching Shadrach as he lay moaning, sending him sprawling through his own blood.

Isaac stamped once, savagely, on the liquefying egg-clutch, then stumbled back and out of the slake-moth’s path. His foot slithered with the glabrous mess. He half ran, half crawled towards the wall, clutching his knife in one hand, the precious engine that kept his mindwaves hidden in the other.

The construct still clinging to the slake-moth’s back breathed fire all across its skin once again, and it screeched in pain. The segmented arms flew back and clutched for purchase on the construct’s skin. Without pausing, the moth got a grip under the construct’s arms and tore the thing from its skin.

It hammered it against the floor, shattering its glass lenses and bursting the metal casing of its head, sending valves and wire spewing in its wake. It flung the broken body away from it in a heap of rubbish. The last construct drew back, trying to gain range from which to spray its enormous, maddened enemy.

Before the construct could spit its acid, two massive flanges of serrated bone snaked out faster than a whiplash and shattered it effortlessly into two.

Its top half twitched and tried to drag itself across the floor. The acid it had carried pooled beneath it in the dust in an acrid smoking sump, corroding the dead cactacae around it.

The slake-moth ran its hands through the viscid scum that had been its eggs. It hooted and crooned.

Isaac crept away from the moth, gazing at it in his mirrors, feeling his way along the wall towards Shadrach, who lay moaning, crying out, befuddled with pain.

In the mirrors before his eyes, Isaac saw the slake-moth turn. It hissed, its tongue flickering. It spread its wings, and bore down on Shadrach.

Isaac tried desperately to reach the other man, but he was too slow. The slake-moth stamped past him again, and Isaac turned smoothly once more, always keeping the terrible predator in his mirrors.

As he watched in horror, Isaac saw the slake-moth pull Shadrach upright. Shadrach’s eyes rolled. He was concussed and in pain, coated in blood.

He began to slide down the wall again. The slake-moth spread his arms wide and then, so fast that it was completed before Isaac realized it had started, it thrust at him with two of its long, jagged claws, slamming them through Shadrach’s wrists and into the brick and concrete behind them, physically pinning him to the wall.

Shadrach and Isaac cried out together.

With its two bone-spears wedged in place, the moth reached out with its quasi-human hands and coaxed at Shadrach’s eyes. Isaac moaned at him to beware, but the big warrior was confused and in agony, and desperately looking around to see what it was that hurt him so.

Instead, he saw the slake-moth’s wings.

He quietened suddenly, and the slake-moth, its back still smouldering and cracking with the heat from the construct’s attack, leaned forward to feed.

Isaac looked away. He turned his head carefully, so that he would not see that probing tongue suck the sentience from Shadrach’s brain. Isaac swallowed and began to walk slowly across the room, towards the hole and the tunnel. His legs shook and he clenched his jaw. His only hope was to leave. That way, he might survive.

He was careful to ignore the slobbering, sucking noises, the liquid grunts of pleasure and the drip-drip-drip of saliva or blood that came from behind him. Isaac made his careful way towards the only exit in the room.

As he neared it, he saw the end of the metal pipe that attached to his helmet still lying undisturbed by the wall. He breathed a prayer. His mental essence was still leaking into the room. The slake-moth must know that there was another sentient being in there with it. The closer Isaac came to the tunnel, the closer he would be to the pipe’s outlet. It would no longer be misleading about his location.

And yet, and yet, it seemed that he was lucky. The slake-moth was so intent on drinking its fill and, judging by the sounds of ripping tissue, of wreaking revenge on poor Shadrach’s wracked body, that it was paying no attention to the terrified presence behind it. Isaac was able to walk on, past it, away, right to the lip of the burrow.

But there, as he stood poised, ready to drop quietly into the dark where the construct still waited and creep his way out into the dome and away from this nightmare nest, he felt a trembling beneath his feet.

He looked down.

The sound of frantic clawing feet was skittering through the tunnel towards him. He stepped back, utterly aghast. He felt the brickwork tremble deep inside.

With an almighty crash, the monkey-construct came catapulting from the tunnel to slam against the wall of bricks. It tried to push back with its arms, to somersault up into the room, but its momentum took it far too fast, and both its arms snapped neatly off at the shoulder.

It tried to raise itself, smoke and fire gouting from its mouth, but a slake-moth tore out of the tunnel and trod on its head, bursting its intricate machinery.

The moth leapt up into the room, and for a long merciless moment, Isaac was staring directly at it, with its wings outstretched.

It was only after several moments of terror and despair that Isaac realized the newcomer was ignoring him, was hurling itself past him across the bodies in the room towards the ruined eggs. And as it ran, it turned its head on its long, sinuous neck, and chattered its teeth in something like fear.

Isaac flattened himself against the wall again, peering into his mirrors at both the slake-moths.

The second moth forced open its teeth and spat out some high, gibbering sound. The first moth gave a last almighty suck and let Shadrach’s spent and ruined body fall. Then it moved back with its sibling, towards the glutinous ruins of the dreamshit and the eggs.

The two moths spread their wings. They stood wingtip to wingtip, their various armoured limbs extended, and waited.

Isaac crept slowly into the hole, not daring to wonder what was happening, why they were ignoring him. Behind him, the metal exhaust pipe snaked like an idiotic tail. As Isaac stared in bewilderment into his mirrors, unable to make sense of the scene behind him, the space around the tunnel entrance rippled for a moment. It buckled and suddenly flowered, and there in the pit with him stood the Weaver.

Isaac gaped in awe. The enormous arachnid creature loomed over him, looked down through a clutch of glinting eyes. The slake-moths bristled.

. . . GRIM AND NEBULOUS GRIMY AND NEBULAR YOU ARE YOU ARE . . . came that unmistakable voice, crooning into Isaac’s ears—especially his missing ear.

“Weaver!” He almost sobbed.

The vast spider presence leapt up, landing square on its four hind legs. It gesticulated intricately in the air with its knife hands.

. . . FOUND THE REAVER TEARING WORLDWEAVE OVER THE BLISTERING GLASS AND WE DANCED A BLOODTHIRSTY DUET EACH SAVAGE MOMENT MORE VIOLENT I CANNOT WIN WHEN THESE FOUR DASTARDLY CORNERS SQUARE UP TO ME . . . the Weaver said, and advanced on its prey. Isaac could not move. He gazed into the shards of mirror at the extraordinary contest behind him. . . . RUN HIDE LITTLE ONE YOU ARE A SKILFUL ONE FIXING THE RUCKS AND TEARS IT COMES AROUND YOU ONE HAS GONE TRAPPED INTO TRAPPING YOU AND CRUSHED LIKE WHEAT AND IT IS TIME TO FLEE BEFORE THE BEREFT BROTHERSISTER INSECTS ARRIVE TO MOURN THE MULCH YOU HELPED MELT . . .

They were coming, Isaac realized. The Weaver was warning him that they had sensed the death of the eggs, and were returning, too late, to protect the nest.

Isaac gripped hold of the edges of the tunnel, prepared to disappear into its folds. But he was held for a few seconds, his mouth hanging open in awe, his breathing shallow and amazed, by the sight of the slake-moths and the Weaver joining battle.

It was an elemental scene, something way beyond human ken. It was a flickering vision of horn blades moving much too fast for a human to see, an impossibly intricate dance of innumerable limbs across several dimensions. Gouts of blood sprayed in various colours and textures across the walls and floor, fouling the dead. Behind the unclear bodies, silhouetting them, the chymical fire hissed and rolled across the concrete floor. And all the while it fought, the Weaver sang its ceaseless monologue.

. . . OH HOW IT DOES HOW IT BRINGS ME TO THE BOIL I BUBBLE AND EFFERVESCE I AM DRUNK INTOXICATED ON THE JUICE OF ME THAT THESE MAD-WINGERS FERMENT . . . it sang.

Isaac stared in astonishment. Extraordinary things were happening. The slashing and the punishing thrusts continued with fervour, but now the slake-moths were whipping their vast tongues back and forth through the air. They ran them at lightning speed over the body of the Weaver as it shuddered in and out of the material plane. Isaac saw their stomachs distend and contract, saw them lick the length of the Weaver’s abdomen then reel back as if drunk, then come back hard and attack again.

The Weaver slipped in and out of sight, was one minute focused and brutal and would then become giddy, hop for a moment on the point of one leg, singing without words, before snapping back to become a voracious killer again.

Unthinkable patterns flitted across the slake-moths’ wings, utterly unlike any Isaac had seen them produce before. They licked hungrily as they slashed and stabbed at their enemy. The Weaver spoke calmly to Isaac as it fought.

. . . NOW LEAVE THIS PLACE AND REGROUP WHILE I THE DRINKARD AND THESE MY BREWERS BICKER AND GASH BEFORE THESE TWO BECOME A TRIUMVIRATE OR WORSE AND I SCAMPER FOR SAFETY GO NOW DOMEWARD AND OUT WE WILL SEE THEE AND ME WE WILL COMMUNE GO NAKED GO NAKED AS A DEAD MAN ON THE RIVER’S DAWN AND I WILL FIND YOU EASY AS CAKE WHAT A PATTERN WHAT COLOURS WHAT INTRICATE THREADS THAT WILL BE WEAVE WELL AND PRETTY NOW RUN FOR YOUR SKIN . . .

The mad inebriated fight continued. As Isaac watched, he saw the Weaver being forced back, its energy always ebbing and flowing, moving like a vicious wind, but gradually retreating. Isaac’s terror suddenly returned. He ducked into the brick burrow and crawled away.

There was a frantic minute in the dark, as Isaac felt his way at speed along the broken floor of the tunnel. The skin on his hands and knees was flayed by stone.

Light glimmered ahead of him, around a corner and he sped up. He cried out in pain and astonishment as his palms slapped down onto a patch of smooth, scorching metal. He hesitated, groped around him with his ragged sleeve over his hand. The wall and floor and ceiling was plated with a buffed surface of what, in the faint light, looked like a band of pressed steel four feet wide. His face creased in incomprehension. He braced himself, then slid quickly over the metal, hot as a kettle on a fire, trying to keep his skin from its surface.

He breathed out so fast and hard he moaned. He hauled himself through the exit, collapsing across the floor in the dark room where Yagharek waited.

Isaac passed out for three or four seconds. He came to with Yagharek crying out to him, dancing from foot to foot. The garuda was tense but focused. He was utterly controlled.

“Wake,” spat Yagharek. “Wake.” He was shaking Isaac by his collar. Isaac opened his eyes wide. The shadows that caked Yagharek’s face were ebbing away, he realized. Tansell’s hex must be wearing off.

“You are alive,” said Yagharek. His voice was curt, pared down and bare of emotion. He spoke to save time and effort, to conserve himself. “As I waited, through the window came the blunt snout then the body of a slake-moth. I turned and watched through these mirrors. It was racing, confused. I was ready with my whip and I hit backwards at it, stinging it across its skin, making it shriek. I thought that would mean my death, but the thing raced past me and the ape-construct into the hole, folding its wings away into an impossible space. It ignored me. It looked behind it as if it were chased. I felt a rucking motion in space following it, something moving below the skin of the world, disappearing into the tunnel after the slake-moth. I sent the monkey-thing after it. I heard a crumpling sound, the whiplash of straining metal. I do not know what happened.”

“The godsdamn Weaver melted the construct . . .” he said, his voice shaking. “Gods only fucking know why.” He stood quickly.

“Where is Shadrach?” said Yagharek.

“He got fucking taken, didn’t he? He got fucking drunk up!” Isaac scrambled to the window and leaned out, looking out at the torchlit streets. He heard the heavy, ponderous sound of cactacae running. As torches were carried along surrounding alleys, the shadows slid and shifted like oil in water. Isaac turned back to face Yagharek.

“It was fucking horrible,” he said, his voice hollow. “There was nothing I could do . . . Yag, listen. The Weaver was in there and it told me to get the godsdamn out because the moths can smell the trouble . . . Shit, listen. We burnt its eggs.” He spat the words with hard satisfaction. “The fucking thing had laid and we got past it and burnt the damn things, but the other moths could sense it and they’re heading back here right now . . . We’ve got to get out.”

Yagharek was still for a moment, thinking quickly. He looked at Isaac and nodded.

They retraced their steps quickly down the dark stairs. They slowed as they approached the first floor, remembering the couple talking quietly on their mattresses, but they saw in the flickering light through the open door that the room was deserted. All the cactacae who had been sleeping were up and out, in the streets.

“Godsdamn!” swore Isaac. “We’ll be seen, we’ll be fucking seen. The dome must be fucking crawling. We’re losing our shadows.”

They hovered at the front door. Yagharek and Isaac peered around the corner into the street. There was a crackling susurrus from the raised torches on all sides. Across the street was the little alley, its torches still doused, in which their companions lurked. Yagharek strained to see into its dark, but could not.

At the end of the street by the dome wall, under the stubby, boarded-up remnants of the house in which, Isaac realized, was the slake-moths’ nest, stood a gang of cactacae. Opposite them, where the road joined others and moved towards the temple at the dome’s centre, little groups of cactus warriors rushed by in either direction.

“Godspit, they must’ve heard all that ruckus,” hissed Isaac. “We have to damn well move, or we’re dead. One at a time.” He grabbed Yagharek and braced his arms behind the garuda’s back. “You first, Yag. You’re quicker and harder to see. Go. Go.” He pushed Yagharek out into the street.

Yagharek was not wrong-footed. He sprinted lightly, increasing speed. It was not panicked flight which might attract attention. He kept his pace just low enough that if one of the cactus people glimpsed motion, they might think it one of their own people. The shadows and stillness still varnished his fleeting figure.

It was forty feet to the darkness. Isaac held his breath, watching the muscles move beneath Yagharek’s scarred back.

The cactus people were jabbering in their harsh pidgin, arguing over who was to go in. Two swung huge hammers, taking turns to batter the bricked-up entrance to the last low house where, for all Isaac knew, the slake-moths and the Weaver still danced lethally together.

The darkness of the alley accepted Yagharek.

Isaac breathed deep, then stepped out into the alley himself.

He strode quickly away from the doorway, into the open street, willing his uncanny shade-covering to deepen. He began to jog towards the alleyway.

As he reached the midway point of the junction, there was a buffeting, a storm of wings. Isaac looked back and up at the window, on the vertex of the wedge of architecture.

Scrabbling at it with a repulsive desperation, the third slake-moth pushed its way through into the interior, returning home.

His breath caught, but the beast was ignoring him, its fervour reserved for its ruined spawn.

As Isaac turned his face again, he realized that the cactacae at the far end of the street had also heard the sound. From where they stood, they could not see the window, could not see the monstrous form infiltrating the house. But they could see Isaac running from them, fat and furtive.

“Oh shit,” breathed Isaac, and broke into a full, lumbering run.

There was a confusion of yells. One voice rose above the shouting and snapped orders. Several cactus warriors broke away from the congregation by the door and ran straight for Isaac.

They were not fast, but neither was he. They carried their massive weapons expertly, unimpeded as they ran.

Isaac sprinted as best he could.

“I’m on your damn side!” he shouted uselessly as he ran. His words were inaudible. Even if they had heard him, it was inconceivable that the cactus warriors, frightened and bewildered and pugnacious, would have paid any heed before killing him.

The cactacae were yelling, screaming for other patrols. There were answering shouts from neighbouring streets.

An arrow snapped from the alley before Isaac, whipping past him and thudding into some flesh behind. There was a gasp and a curse of pain from one of his pursuers. Isaac made out shapes in the darkness of the alley. Pengefinchess resolved from shadows, drawing back her bowstring once more. She bellowed at him to hurry. Behind her, Tansell stood with the blunderbuss drawn, aiming it uncertainly over her head. His eyes were scanning desperately behind Isaac. He shouted something.

Derkhan and Lemuel and Yagharek were crouched a little way behind, ready to run. Yagharek held his whip coiled and ready.

Isaac raced into the darkness.

“Where’s Shad?” screamed Tansell again.

“Dead,” shouted Isaac. Instantly, Tansell screamed with horrible anguish. Pengefinchess did not look up, but her arm spasmed and she almost dropped her arrow. She paused and aimed again. Tansell shot wildly over her head. The blunderbuss boomed and he staggered with the recoil. A great cloud of buckshot sprayed harmlessly over the heads of the cactus people.

“No!” shouted Tansell. “Oh Jabber no!” He was staring at Isaac, begging to be told that it was not true.

“I’m sorry, mate, truly, but we have to fucking go,” said Isaac urgently.

“He’s right, Tan,” said Pengefinchess, her voice desperately steady. She fired another arrow, with the spring-loaded blade that sliced a great gouge of cactus flesh. She stood, notching a third missile. “Let’s go, Tan. Don’t think, just move.”

There was a high-pitched whirring, and a cactacae chakri slammed into the brick by Tansell’s head. It embedded itself deep, sending a painful explosion of mortar-shards around it.

The cactacae squadron were approaching fast. Their faces were visible, twisted in rage.

Pengefinchess began to back away, tugging at Tansell.

“Come on!” she shouted. Tansell moved with her, muttering and moaning. He had dropped the gun, was crooking his hands like claws.

Pengefinchess ran, dragging Tansell. The others followed her, turning into the intricate maze of backstreets through which they had arrived.

The air behind them hummed with projectiles. Chakris and thrown axe-knives whistled past them.

Pengefinchess ran and leapt at an amazing speed. She turned occasionally and fired behind her, hardly aiming, before resuming her run.

“Constructs?” she shouted at Isaac.

“Fucked,” he wheezed. “You know how to get back to the sewers?”

She nodded and turned a corner sharply. The others followed her. As Pengefinchess plunged into the decrepit alleyways near the canal where they had hidden, Tansell turned suddenly back. His face was deep red. As Isaac watched, some little vein burst in the corner of Tansell’s eye.

He wept blood. He did not blink. He did not wipe it away.

Pengefinchess turned from the end of the street and howled at him not to be stupid, but he ignored her. His hands and limbs were trembling violently. He raised his gnarled hands and Isaac saw that his veins were protruding hugely, like a map across his skin.

Tansell began to pace back along the street, towards the turnoff where the cactacae would emerge.

Pengefinchess screamed for him one last time, then leapt mightily over a crumbling wall. She shouted for the others to follow her.

Isaac backed quickly towards the shattered brick, his eyes fixed on Tansell’s retreating figure.

Derkhan was scrambling up a little stairway of broken brick, hesitating and leaping down into the hidden yard where the vodyanoi wrestled with the manhole cover. It took Yagharek less than two seconds to scale the wall and drop to the other side. Isaac reached up and looked behind him again. Lemuel was running quickly down the alley, ignoring the desperate figure of Tansell behind him.

Tansell stood at the entrance to the alleyway. He shook with effort, his body coursing with thaumaturgic flow. His hair stood on end. Isaac saw little ebony sparks burst outwards from his body, snapping arcs of energy. The puissant charge that snapped and burst out from under his skin was absolutely dark. It glowed negatively, with unlight.

The cactacae turned the corner and were upon him.

The vanguard of the group were startled by this strange, darkly shining figure with hands crooked like a vengeful skeleton, making the air crackle with charged thaumaturgons. Before they could react, Tansell let out a growl, and sizzling bolts of the black energy burst out of his body towards them.

They rolled like ball-lightning through the air and smacked into several cactacae. The hex strokes burst against their victims, dissipating across their skin in crackling veins. The cactus people flew yards backwards, slamming hard against the cobbles. One lay still. The others writhed, shouting in pain.

Tansell raised his arms higher, and a warrior stepped forward, his war-cleaver held way behind his shoulder. He swung it in an enormous, powerful arc.

The heavy weapon smashed into Tansell’s left shoulder. Instantly, at the touch of his skin, it conducted the null-charge that sizzled through Tansell’s body. Tansell’s attacker spasmed mightily and was knocked back by the force of the current, spraying sap from his shattered arm; but the momentum of his massive blow sent the cleaver slicing and cutting through layers of fat and blood and bone, gashing Tansell open from his shoulder down to below his sternum, a huge rend in his flesh a foot and a half long. The cleaver remained embedded above his stomach, quivering.

Tansell called out once like an astonished dog. The dark null-charge fizzled out through the huge wound, which began to spew blood in a vast gouting torrent. Tansell fell to his knees, and onto the ground. The cactacae surged around him, kicking and striking out at the quickly dying man.

Isaac let out an anguished cry and reached the top of the wall. He gesticulated to Lemuel. He looked down into the dark yard. Derkhan and Pengefinchess had opened the way to the undercity.

The cactus people had not given up. Some not stamping on Tansell’s corpse were still running forward, waving their weapons at Isaac and Lemuel. As Lemuel reached the wall a rivebow sounded hard. There was a meaty thwack. Lemuel screamed and fell.

A massive serrated chakri was embedded deep in his back, in the spine just above his buttocks. Its silver edges poked out of the wound, which oozed blood copiously.

Lemuel looked up into Isaac’s face and screamed piteously. His legs shuddered. He flailed with his hands, sending brickdust up around him.

“Oh Jabber Isaac help me please!” he screamed. “My legs . . . Oh Jabber, oh gods . . .” He coughed up a great welling gob of blood which rolled horribly down his chin.

Isaac was transfixed with horror. He stared down at Lemuel, whose eyes were awash with terror and agony. He looked up briefly, and saw the cactacae bearing down on the crippled man, whooping in triumph. They were barely thirty feet away. As he watched, one saw Isaac watching and raised her rivebow, taking careful aim at his head.

Isaac ducked down, scrambled half down off the wall into the little yard. The open manhole wafted up noisome stenches from below.

Lemuel stared at him in disbelief.

“Help me!” he shrieked. “Jabber, fuck, no, oh Jabber no . . . Don’t go! Help me!”

He swung his arms like a child in a tantrum, the cactus people descending on him, his nails breaking and his fingers scraping raw as he tried frantically to claw his way up the wall pulling his useless legs behind him. Isaac stared at him in mortification, knowing that there was nothing at all he could do, that there was no time to go down for him, that the cactus people were almost on him, that his wounds would kill him even if Isaac could pull him across the wall, and knowing that even so, Lemuel’s last thoughts as he looked up were of Isaac’s betrayal.

From behind the mouldering concrete of the wall, Isaac heard Lemuel’s screams as the cactacae reached him.

“He’s nothing to do with it!” he shouted out in a rage of grief. Pengefinchess, her face set, dropped out of sight into the sewer that toiled below. “He’s nothing to do with it at all!” screamed Isaac, desperate for Lemuel’s wails to stop. Derkhan followed the vodyanoi, her face white, her ruined ear-hole bleeding. “Let him go you fucks, you shits, you stupid cactus bastards!” Isaac shrieked over Lemuel’s cacophony. Yagharek descended to his shoulders and gripped Isaac’s ankle fiercely, gesticulating at him to come, his inhuman beak clattering as he snapped in agitation. “He was helping you . . .” shouted Isaac with exhausted horror.

As Yagharek disappeared, Isaac gripped the edge of the manhole and lowered himself in. He squeezed his tight fat bulk past the metal lips and scrabbled with the lid, preparing to replace it as he dropped out of sight.

Lemuel continued to shout, in pain and fear, from over the wall. The brutal sounds of the terrified, triumphant cactacae punishing the intruder went on and on.

It’ll stop, thought Isaac desperately as he descended. They’re frightened and confused, they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll put a chakri or a knife or a bullet in his head any moment, finish this, put an end to this. They’ve no reason to keep him alive, he thought, they’ll kill him because they think he’s with the moths, they’ll do their bit to cleanse the dome, they’ll finish this, they’re panicking, they’re not torturers, he thought, they just want to stop the horror . . . They’ll end this any second, he thought in misery. This will stop now.

Yet the sound of Lemuel’s screams continued as he disappeared into the stinking darkness, and as he pulled the metal seal over his head. And even then they filtered tinny and absurd through the lid, even as Isaac fell into the stream of warm, faecal water, and staggered along the tunnels following the other survivors. He thought he could hear them even as he crawled through the dripping, trickling, reverberating water-sounds, underneath the liquid rush, along ancient channels like rutted veins, away from the Glasshouse, in a confused, random flight towards the relative safety of the mammoth night-city.

It was a long time before they were silent.

The night is unthinkable. We can only run. We make animal sounds as we rush to escape what we have seen. Dread and revulsion and alien emotions cling to us and cloy our movements. We cannot clean them off.

We scrabble our wounded way up and out from the undercity and reach the railside hovel. We shiver even in the awful heat, nodding mutely to the clattering trains that shake our walls. We stare warily at each other.

Except Isaac, who looks at nothing.

Do I sleep? Does anyone sleep? There are moments when the numbness overwhelms me and clogs up my head so that I cannot see or think. Perhaps these fugues, these broken zombie moments, are sleep. Sleep for the new city. Perhaps that is all we can hope for any more.

No one speaks, for a long, long time.

Pengefinchess the vodyanoi is the first to speak.

She begins quietly, murmuring things hardly recognizable as words. But she is addressing us. She sits, her back against the wall, her fat thighs splayed. The idiot undine winds around her body, washing her clothes, keeping her wet.

She tells us about Shadrach and Tansell. The three had met in some ill-defined episode she glosses over, some mercenary escapade in Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. They had run together for seven years.

The window of our shack is fringed with ragged stubs of glass. At dawn, they snag ineffectually at the sunlight. Under a sharp rafter of the insect-fouled light, Pengefinchess talks in a gentle monotone of her times with her dead companions: poaching in the Wormseye Scrub; thievery in Neovadan; tomb-robbing in the Ragamoll forest and steppe.

They had never been three equally united, she says, without spite or rancour. Always she, then Tansell and Shadrach together, who found in each other something, some calm passionate connection she could not and did not want to touch.

Tansell was mad with grief at the end, she says, unthinking, exploding, a mindless eruption of thaumaturgic misery. But had he been clear in his brain, she says, he would have done no different.

So she is on her own again.

Her testimony ends. It demands response, like some ritual liturgy.

She ignores Isaac, cosseted in agony. She looks to Derkhan and to me.

We fail her.

Derkhan shakes her head, wordless and sad.

I try. I open my beak and the story of my crime and my punishment and my exile wells up in my throat. It almost emerges, it almost bursts through the crack.

But I batten it down. It is not connected. It is not for tonight.

Pengefinchess’s history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base story of base things. I am silent.

But then, as we prepare to give up on words and let what happen will, Isaac raises his sluggish head and speaks.

First he demands food and water that we do not have. Slowly his eyes narrow and he begins to talk like a sentient creature. In a remote misery, he describes the deaths he has seen.

He tells us about the Weaver, the dancing mad god, and its fight with the moths, the eggs that burnt, the weird sing-song declamations of our unlikely and untrustworthy champion. In cold and clear words Isaac tells us what he thinks the Construct Council is become, and what it wants and what it might be (and Pengefinchess gulps deep in her throat in her astonishment, her protuberant eyes bulging more as she learns what has happened to the constructs in the city’s dump).

And the more he talks the more he talks. He talks of plans. His voice hardens. Something has come to an end in him, some waiting, some soft patience that died with Lin and now is buried, and I feel myself become stone as I hear him. He inspires me to rigour and purpose.

He talks of betrayals and counter-betrayals, of mathematics and lies and thaumaturgy, dreams and winged things. He expounds theories. He talks to me of flight, something I had half forgotten I might ever have, which I want again, as he mentions it, I want with all of me.

As the sun crawls like a sweating man to the apex of the sky, we remnants, we dregs, examine our weapons and our collected debris, our notes and our stories.

With reserves we did not know we could summon, with an astonishment I feel as if through a veil, we make plans. I coil my whip around my hand tight and sharpen my blade. Derkhan cleans her guns, and murmurs to Isaac. Pengefinchess sits back and shakes her head. She will go, she warns us. There is nothing that might incite her to stay. She will sleep a little, then bid us farewell, she says.

Isaac shrugs. He pulls compact valved engines from where he has stashed them in the piled-up rubbish of the shed. He pulls sheafs and sheafs of notes, sweat-stained, smeared, barely legible, from inside his shirt.

We begin to work, Isaac more fervently than any of us, scribbling frantically.

He looks up after hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this, he says. We would need a focus.

And then another hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

We have to do this, he says, and still, we need a focus.

He tells us what we must do.

There is silence, and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and discard them. Our criteria are confused—do we choose the doomed or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

Our morality becomes rushed and furtive.

But the day is more than half gone, and we must choose.

Her face set hard but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged with the vile task.

She takes what money we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for what we need.

Outside it begins to darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets of paper.

The thick sun illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with dusk.

None of us fear the night’s crop of dreams.

Part Seven:

Crisis

Chapter Forty-six

The streetlights flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker. It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft, which bobbed on the cool swell.

It was one of many that littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water, the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

This one was half covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

Hidden in the shadow of the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was naked and quite still.

He had lain there for some time. Yagharek had come with him to the river’s edge. They had crept for more than an hour through the uneasily shifting city, through the familiar streets of Brock Marsh and up through Gidd, on under rail-lines and past militia towers, eventually reaching the southern fringes of Canker Wedge. Less than two miles from the centre of the city, but a different world. Low, quiet streets and modest housing, small apologetic parks, frumpy churches and halls, offices with false fronts and façades in a cacophony of muted styles.

Here there were avenues. They were nothing like the wide banyan-fringed thoroughfares of Aspic, or the Rue Conifer in Ketch Heath, magnificently lined with ancient pine trees. Still, in the outskirts of Canker Wedge were stunted oaks and darkwoods that hid the architecture’s failings. Isaac and Yagharek, his feet wrapped in bandages again, his head hidden in a newly stolen cloak, had been thankful for the cover of leafy darkness as they made for the river.

There were no great conglomerations of heavy industry along the Canker. The factories and workshops and warehouses and docks studded the sides of the slower Tar, and the Gross Tar which the conjoined rivers became. It was not until the last mile of its distinct existence, where it passed Brock Marsh and a thousand laboratory outflows, that the Canker became fouled and dubious.

In the north of the city, in Gidd and Rim, and here in Canker Wedge, residents might row the waters for pleasure, an unthinkable pastime further south. So it was that Isaac had made his way here, where the river traffic was quiet, to obey the Weaver’s instructions.

They had found a little alley between the backs of two rows of houses, a thin sliver of space that sloped down towards the eddying water. It had not been hard to find a deserted boat, though there were not a fraction as many as there were by the industrial riversides of the city.

Leaving Yagharek watching from beneath his ragged hood like some motionless tramp, Isaac had picked his way down to the edge of the river. There was a fringe of grass and a band of thick mud between him and the water, and he shucked his clothes as he went, collecting them under his arm. By the time he reached the Canker he was nude under the waning darkness.

Without hesitating, steeling himself, he had walked on into the water.

It had been a short, cold swim to the boat. He had enjoyed it, luxuriating in the feeling, the black river washing him clean of sewer-filth and days of grime. He had trailed his clothes behind him, willing the water to suffuse their fibres and clean them, too.

He had hauled himself over the side of the boat, his skin prickling as he dried. Yagharek was barely visible, motionless, watching. Isaac arranged his clothes around him and pulled the tarpaulin a little way over him, so that he lay covered by shadows.

He watched the light arrive in the east and shivered as breezes raised paths of gooseflesh on him.

“Here I am,” he murmured. “Naked as a dead man on the river’s dawn. As requested.”

He did not know if the Weaver’s dreamlike pronouncement, that it had hummed that ghastly night in the Glasshouse, had been any kind of invitation. But he thought that by responding to it he might make it one, changing the patterns of the worldweb, weaving it into a conjuncture that might, he hoped, please the Weaver.

He had to see the magnificent spider. He needed the Weaver’s help.

Halfway through the previous night, Isaac and his comrades had become aware that the night’s tension, the unsettled sick feeling in the air, the nightmares, had returned. The Weaver’s attack had failed, as it had predicted. The moths were still alive.

It had occurred to Isaac that his taste was known to them now, that they would recognize him as the destroyer of the egg-clutch. Perhaps he should have been petrified with fear, but he was not. The railside shack had been left alone.

Maybe they’re afraid of me, he thought.

He drifted on the river. An hour passed, and the sounds of the city waxed unseen around him.

The noise of bubbles disturbed him.

He leaned up gingerly on his elbow, his mind rapidly clicking back into focus. He peered over the edge of the boat.

Yagharek was still visible, his posture completely unchanged, on the riverbank. Now there were some few passers-by behind him, ignoring him as he sat there covered up and smelling of filth.

Close to the boat, a patch of bubbles and disturbed water boiled up from below, snapping at the surface and sending out a ring of ripples about three feet across. Isaac’s eyes widened momentarily as he realized that the circle of ripples was exactly circular, and contained, that as each ripple reached its edge, it flattened impossibly, leaving the water beyond it undisturbed.

Even as Isaac moved back slightly, a smooth black curve breached in the dark, disturbed water. The river fell away from the rising shape, splashing within the limits of the little circle.

Isaac was staring into the Weaver’s face.

He snapped back, his heart beating aggressively. The Weaver stared up at him. Its head was angled so that only it emerged from the water, and not the looming body which rose higher when it stood.

The Weaver was humming, speaking deep in Isaac’s skull.

. . . YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU MIGHT BE . . . it said in a continuous lilting monologue . . . RIVER AND DAWN IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB . . . The words ebbed until they could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

“I’m glad to see you, Weaver,” he said. “I remembered our appointment.” He breathed deep. “I need to talk to you,” he said. The Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

It was like a dialogue with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it could be done.

Yagharek heard the subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

His eyes flickered across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

Yagharek pulled his knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

It must, Yagharek realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

Yagharek strained to hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind him. They were curt, and cried easily.

Time passed but the sun seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

And then, some time after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

The anaemic morning light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

He collapsed before Yagharek, wheezing.

The schoolboys tittered and whispered.

“I think . . . I think it’ll come,” said Isaac. “I think it understood.”

It was past eight when they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.

Derkhan had still not returned. Pengefinchess slept in the corner, or pretended to.

Isaac gathered the vital tubes and valves, the engines and batteries and transformers, into a vile sack. He retrieved his notes, rifled through them briefly to check them, then stashed them back into his shirt. He scrawled a note for Derkhan and Pengefinchess. He and Yagharek checked and cleaned their weapons, counted their meagre store of ammunition. Then Isaac looked out of the ruined windows into the city which had woken around them.

They must be careful now. The sun had gained its strength, the light was full. Anyone might be militia, and every officer would have seen their heliotype. They drew their cloaks around them. Isaac hesitated, then borrowed Yagharek’s knife and shaved bloodily with it. The sharp blade skittered painfully on the nodules and bumps on his skin that were the reason he had first grown a beard. He was ruthless and quick, and soon stood before Yagharek with a pasty chin, inexpertly shorn of whiskers, bleeding and patched with copses of stubble.

He looked ghastly, but he looked different. Isaac dabbed at his bleeding skin as they set out into the morning.

By nine, after minutes of skulking, striding nonchalantly past shops and arguing pedestrians, finding backstreet routes wherever they existed, the companions were in the Griss Twist dump. The heat was unforgiving, and seemed greater in these canyons of discarded metal. Isaac’s chin stung and tingled.

They picked their way over the wasteground towards the heart of the maze, towards the Construct Council’s lair.

“Nothing.” Bentham Rudgutter clenched his fists on his desk.

“Two nights we’ve had the airships up and searching. Nothing at all. Another crop of bodies every morning, and not a godsdamn thing all night. Rescue dead, no sign of Grimnebulin, no sign of Blueday . . .” He raised bloodshot eyes and looked across the table at Stem-Fulcher, who sucked gently at the pungent smoke of her pipe. “This is not going well,” he concluded.

Stem-Fulcher nodded slowly. She considered.

“Two things,” she said slowly. “It’s clear that what we need is specially trained troops. I told you about Motley’s officers.” Rudgutter nodded. He rubbed and rubbed at his eyes. “We can easily match those. We could easily tell the punishment factories to run us off a squadron of specialist Remade, with mirrors and backwards weapons and all, but what we need is time. We need to train them up. That’s three, four months at the least. And while we’re biding our time the slake-moths are just going to keep picking off citizens. Getting stronger.

“So we have to think about strategies for keeping the city under control. A curfew, for example. We know the moths can get into houses, but there’s no doubt that most of the victims are picked off the streets.

“Then we need to dampen speculation in the press about what’s going on. Barbile wasn’t the only scientist working on that project. We need to be able to stamp out any dangerous kind of sedition, we need to detain all the other scientists involved.

“And with half the militia engaged in slake-moth duties, we can’t risk another dock strike, or anything similar. It could cripple us quickly. We owe it to the city to put an end to any unreasonable demands. Basically, Mayor, this is a crisis bigger than any since the Pirate Wars. I think it’s time to declare a state of emergency. We need extraordinary powers.

“We need martial law.”

Rudgutter pursed his lips mildly, and considered.

“Grimnebulin,” said the avatar. The Council itself remained hidden. It did not sit up. It was indistinguishable from the mountains of filth and garbage around it.

The cable that entered the avatar’s head emerged from the floor of metal shavings and stone debris. The avatar stank. His skin was patched with mould.

“Grimnebulin,” he repeated in his uncomfortable, wavering voice. “You did not return. The crisis engine you left with me is incomplete. Where are the Is that went with you to the Glasshouse? The slake-moths flew again last night. Did you fail?”

Isaac held his hands up to slow the questioning.

“Stop,” he said peremptorily. “I’ll explain.”

Isaac knew that it was misleading to think of the Construct Council having emotions. As he told the avatar the story of that appalling night in the cactus Glasshouse—that night of so-partial victory at such horrendous price—he knew that it was not anger or sadness that caused the man’s body to shake, his face to spasm in random grotesqueries.

The Construct Council had sentience, but no feelings. It was assimilating new data, that was all. It was calculating possibilities.

He told it that the monkey-constructs had been destroyed and the avatar’s body spasmed particularly sharply, as the information flooded back down the cable into the hidden analytical engines of the Council. Without those constructs, it could not download the experience. It relied on Isaac’s reports.

As once before, Isaac thought he glimpsed a human figure fleeting in the rubbish around him, but the apparition was gone in an instant.

Isaac told the Council of the Weaver’s intervention, and then, finally, began to explain his plan. The Council, of course, was quick to understand.

The avatar began to nod. Isaac thought he could feel infinitesimal movements in the ground under him, as the Council itself began to shift.

“Do you understand what I need from you?” said Isaac.

“Of course,” replied the Construct Council in the avatar’s reedy quaver. “And I will be linked directly to the crisis engine?”

“Yes,” said Isaac. “That’s how this is going to work. I forgot some of the components of the crisis engine when I left it with you, which is why it wasn’t complete. But that’s just as well, because when I saw them, they gave me the idea for all this. But listen: I need your help. If this is going to work we need the maths to be exact. I brought my analytical engine with me from the laboratory, but it’s hardly a top-notch model. You, Council, are a network of damn sophisticated calculating engines . . . right? I need you to do some sums for me. Work out some functions, print up some programme cards. And I need them perfect. To an infinitesimal degree of error. All right?”

“Show me,” said the avatar.

Isaac pulled out two sheets of paper. He walked over to the avatar, holding them out. In the dump’s smell of oil and chymical mould and warming metal, the organic stink of the avatar’s slowly collapsing body was shocking. Isaac creased his nose in disgust. But he steeled himself and stood beside the rotting, half-alive carcass and explained the functions he had outlined.

“This page here is several equations I can’t get the answers to. Can you read them? They’re to do with the mathematical modelling of mental activity. This second page is more tricky. This is the set of programme cards I need. I’ve tried to lay out each function as exactly as I can. So here for example . . .” Isaac’s stubby finger moved along a line of complicated logic symbols. “This is ‘find data from input one; now model data.’ Then here we have the same demand for input two . . . and this really complex one here: ‘compare prime data.’ Then over here are the constructive, remodelling functions.

“Is that all comprehensible?” he said, stepping back. “And can you do it?”

The avatar took the papers and scanned them carefully. The dead man’s eyes moved in a smooth left-right-left motion along the page. It was seamless until the avatar paused and shuddered as data welled along the cable to the Construct’s hidden brain.

There was a motionless moment, and then the avatar said: “This can all be done.”

Isaac nodded in curt triumph. “We need it . . . well . . . now. As soon as possible. I can wait. Can you do that?”

“I will try. And then as evening falls and the slake-moths return, you will turn on the power, and you will connect me. You will link me up to your crisis engine.”

Isaac nodded.

He fumbled in his pocket and drew out another piece of paper, which he handed to the avatar.

“That’s a list of everything we need,” he said. “It’s all bound to be in the dump somewhere, or it can be rigged up. Do you have some . . . uh . . . some little yous somewhere that can track this stuff down? Another couple of those helmets you got for us, the ones communicators use; a couple of batteries; a little generator; stuff like that. Again, we need that now. The main thing is we need cable. Thick conducting cable, stuff that can take elyctrical or thaumaturgic current. We need two and a half, three miles of the stuff. Not all in one, obviously . . . it can be in pieces, as long as they can be connected easily one to the next, but we need masses. We have to link you up with our . . . with our focus.” His voice quietened as he said this, and his face set. “The cable has to be ready this evening, by six o’clock I think.”

Isaac’s face was hard. He spoke in a monotone. He looked at the avatar carefully.

“There’s only four of us, and one of those we can’t rely on,” he went on. “Can you contact your . . . congregation?” The avatar nodded slowly, waiting for an explanation. “See, we need people to connect those cables across the city.” Isaac tugged the list out of the avatar’s hands and began to sketch on the back: a jagged sideways Y for the two rivers, little crosses for Griss Twist, The Crow, and scribbles delineating Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth in between. He linked the first two crosses with a quick slash of pencil. He looked up at the avatar. “You’re going to have to organize your congregation. Fast. We need them in place with the cable by six o’clock.”

“Why do you not perform the operation here?” asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely.

“It wouldn’t work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city’s focal point, where all the lines converge.

“We have to go to Perdido Street Station.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Carrying a bloated sack of discarded technology between them, Isaac and Yagharek crept back through the quiet streets of Griss Twist, up the broken brick stairwell of the Sud Line. Like shambling city vagrants in clothes ill-suited to the sweltering air, they trudged a path through the skyline of New Crobuzon, back to their collapsing hideout by the railway line. They waited for a squealing onrush of train to pass, blowing energetically from its flared chimney, then picked their way through fences of wavering air poured upwards from the scalding iron tracks.

It was midday, and the air wrapped them like a heated poultice.

Isaac put down his end of the sack and tugged at the rickety door. It was pushed open from inside by Derkhan. She slipped through to stand in front of him, half closing the door behind her. Isaac glanced up and could see someone standing ill-at-ease in a dark corner.

“Found someone, ’Zaac,” whispered Derkhan. Her voice was taut. Her eyes were bloodshot and nearly tearful in her dirty face. She pointed briefly back into the room. “We’ve been waiting.”

Isaac had to meet the Council; Yagharek would inspire awe and confusion but no confidence in those he approached; Pengefinchess would not go; so hours ago, it was Derkhan who had been forced out into the city on the grisly and monstrous errand. It had turned her into some bad spirit.

At first, when she left the hut and walked into the city, made her way quickly through the tarry darkness that filled the streets, she had cried in a drab fashion to ease the pressure of her tortured head. She had kept her shoulders skulking high, knowing that of the few figures she saw quickly pacing their way somewhere, a high proportion were likely to be militia. The heavy nightmare tension of the air drained her.

But then as the sun rose and the night sank slowly into the gutters, her way had become easier. She had moved more quickly, as if the very material of the darkness had resisted her.

Her task was no less horrendous, but urgency bleached her horror until it was an anaemic thing. She knew that she could not wait.

She had some way to go. She was making for the charity hospital of Syriac Well, through four or more miles of intricately twisting slum and collapsing architecture. She did not dare take a cab, in case it was driven by a militia spy, an agent out to catch perpetrators like her. So she paced as quickly as she dared in the shadow of the Sud Line. It raised itself higher and higher above the roofs as it passed further and further from the city’s heart. Yawning arches of dripping brick soared over the squat streets of Syriac.

At Syriac Rising Station, Derkhan had broken away from the tracks of the rails and borne off into the snarl of streets south of the undulating Gross Tar.

It had been easy to follow the noise of costermongers and stallholders to the squalor of Tincture Prom, the wide and dirty street that linked Syriac, Pelorus Fields and Syriac Well. It followed the course of the Gross Tar like an imprecise echo, changing its name as it went, becoming Wynion Way, then Silverback Street.

Derkhan had skirted its raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.

It was an old and sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement flounces: gods and dæmons eyed each other across the tops of windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’ chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.

Once more a place of healing, they said.

Without funds or drugs, with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.

Derkhan had made her way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.

And there . . . there she had hunted.

She remembered stalking up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about her dying father who had gone missing—stomped off into the night to die—who she had heard might be here with these angels of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her father, she explained, was close to death.

The monk had pointed her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.

And Derkhan had passed through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient was dying and that no they were still not dead.

Derkhan looked down and flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription. Lungrot, she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. Then in another hand: Laudanum unavailable.

In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which, if Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went on, stretched the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would have ended the pain, one way or another.

Derkhan began to do what she had come for.

She examined the patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had been hazily aware of the criteria with which she gazed—of sound mind, and not so ill they will not last the day—and she had felt sick to her soul. The nun had seen her, had approached with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she sought.

Derkhan had ignored her, had continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of a tired old man whose notes gave him a week to live. He slept with his mouth open, dribbling slightly and grimacing in his sleep.

There had been a ghastly moment of reflection when she had found herself applying strained and untenable ethics to the choice—Who here is a militia informer? she wanted to shout. Who here has raped? Who has murdered a child? Who has tortured? She had closed down the thoughts. That could not be allowed, she had realized. That might drive her mad. This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice.

Derkhan had turned to the nun who followed her emitting a constant stream of blather it was no effort to ignore.

Derkhan remembered her own words as if they had never been real.

This man is dying, she had said. The nun’s noise had quieted, and she had nodded. Can he walk? Derkhan had asked.

Slowly, the nun said.

Is he mad? Derkhan had asked. He was not.

I’m taking him, she had said. I need him.

The nun had begun to vent outrage and astonishment and Derkhan’s own carefully battened down emotions had broken free momentarily and tears had flooded her face with appalling speed, and she had felt as if she would howl in misery so she closed her eyes and hissed in wordless animal grief until the nun was silent. Derkhan had looked at her again and shut down her own tears.

Derkhan had pulled her gun from inside her cloak and held it at the nun’s belly. The nun looked down and mewed in surprise and fear. While the nun still gazed at the weapon in disbelief, with her left hand Derkhan had pulled out the pouch of money, the remnants of Isaac’s and Yagharek’s money. She had held it out until the nun saw it, and realized what was expected and held out her hand. Then Derkhan poured the notes and gold-dust and battered coins into it.

Take this, she had said, her voice trembling and careful. She pointed randomly about the ward at the moaning, tossing figures in the beds. Buy laudanum for him and calciach for her, Derkhan had said, cure him and send that one quietly to sleep; make one or two or three or four of them live, and make death easier for one or two or three or four or five or I don’t know, I don’t know. Take it, make things better for how many you can, but this one I must take. Wake him up and tell him he has to come with me. Tell him I can help him.

Derkhan’s pistol wavered, but she kept it trained vaguely on the other woman. She closed the nun’s fingers around the money and watched her eyes crease and widen in astonishment and incomprehension.

Deep inside her, in the place that still felt, that she could not quite close down, Derkhan had been aware of a plaintive defence, an argument of justification—See? she felt herself assert. We take him but all these others we save!

But there was no moral accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could only ignore that anxious discourse. She stared deep and fervent into the nun’s eyes. Derkhan closed her hand tight around the nun’s fingers.

Help them, she had hissed. This can help them. You can help them all except him or you can help none of them. Help them.

And after a long, long time of silence, of staring at Derkhan with troubled eyes, of looking at the grubby currency and at the gun and then at the dying patients on all sides, the nun put the money into her white overall with a shaking hand. And as she moved away to waken the patient, Derkhan watched her with a terrible, mean triumph.

See? Derkhan had thought, sick with self-loathing. It wasn’t just me! She chose to do it too!

His name was Andrej Shelbornek. He was sixty-five. His innards were being eaten by some virulent germ. He was quiet and very tired of worrying, and after two or three initial questions, he followed Derkhan without complaint.

She told him a little about the treatments they had in mind, the experimental techniques they wished to try on his brutalized body. He said nothing about this, about her filthy appearance, or anything else. He must know what’s going on! she had thought. He’s tired of living like this, he’s making it easy on me. This was rationalization of the lowest kind, and she would not entertain it.

It was swiftly clear that he could not walk the miles to Griss Fell. Derkhan had hesitated. She pulled a few torn notes from her pocket. She had no choice but to hail a cab. She was nervous. She had lowered her voice into an unrecognizable snarl as she gave directions, with her cloak hiding her face.

The two-wheeled cab was pulled by an ox, Remade into a biped to fit with ease into New Crobuzon’s twisted alleyways and narrow thoroughfares, to turn tight corners and retreat without stalling. It lolloped on its two back-curved legs in constant surprise at itself, with a stride that was uncomfortable and bizarre. Derkhan sat back and closed her eyes. When she looked up again, Andrej was asleep.

He did not speak, or frown or seem perturbed, until she had bade him climb the steep slope of earth and concrete shards beside the Sud Line. Then his face had creased and he had looked at her in confusion.

Derkhan had said something blithely about a secret experimental laboratory, a site above the city, with access to the trains. He had looked concerned, had shaken his head and looked around to escape. In the dark below the railway bridge, Derkhan had pulled out her flintlock. Although dying, he was still afraid of death, and she had forced him up the slope at gunpoint. He had begun to cry halfway up. Derkhan had watched him and nudged him with the pistol, had felt all her emotions from very far away. She kept distant from her own horror.

Inside the dusty shack, Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out for help. He was astonishingly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.

There was a half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth, and it seemed that he would say something to assuage the old man’s fears, to assure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration. Andrej’s shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac, eager to be reassured.

But Isaac was tired, and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease, stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.

Isaac tried to meet his eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone finally shared her burden.

There was much to be done.

Isaac began his final calculations and preparations.

Andrej squealed through his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.

In curt whispers and brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what he was doing.

He looked over the battered engines in the shack, his analytical machines. He pored over his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box, a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic circuits.

He cleaned it slowly, examined its moving parts.

Isaac readied himself and his equipment.

When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment, oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had become of Shadrach’s pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac told her he did not know.

“A shame. It was a powerful piece,” she said abstractedly, looking out of the window and away. “Charmed. A puissant weapon.”

Isaac interrupted her. He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time, ignored Isaac’s pleading and demanded to know what in Hell he was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej’s snorts of fear and Isaac’s grim industry, and explained.

Then Derkhan asked Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them. She could only beg.

Isaac half listened, but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis mathematics.

Andrej whimpered unceasingly beside him.

Chapter Forty-eight

Just before four o’clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.

“See you at the rendezvous,” she murmured.

“You know what you have to do?” Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the door.

He hesitated now, at the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with mucus.

They had to bring him, and he could not raise the alarm.

He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.

The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the “milk fights”: those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.

“He’s an old man!” hissed Isaac. “And he’s dying, he’s frail . . . Be gentle . . .”

Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.

There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac—horrified, guilty and debased—could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.

Yagharek’s right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.

Eventually he let Andrej slump.

“He will wake,” he said. “Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful—too much and we will starve his brain of blood.”

They wrapped Andrej’s motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.

They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.

At the door, they turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his eyebrows in a query—Will I see you again? he might have been asking, or Will you help us? Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.

Isaac turned away, set his lips.

He and Yagharek began the dangerous journey across the city.

They did not risk crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past. He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way onto the rails and were heading for disaster.

Interception was too dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej’s body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.

The heat was intense, but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the architecture its reality. The sun’s heat stifled sounds and bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized dream of heat.

With Andrej supported between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for Cockscomb Bridge.

They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible.

They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.

Yagharek kept one surreptitious hand clamped on a cluster of nerve and arterial tissue at the side of Andrej’s neck, ready to pinch hard if the old man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coarse babble of swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in part. He was also steeling himself.

“Come on, fucker,” he grunted, tense and quiet, “come on, come on. Fucker. Scum. Bastard.” He did not know who he was swearing at.

Isaac and Yagharek crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let them pass with only jeers behind them. They could not let the opprobrium grow and become confrontation. If some bored toughs decided to kill time by harassing beggars, it would be catastrophic.

But they passed over Cockscomb Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and they felt safer again.

There were other beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands on him efficiently.

Here there were backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads and head down along overshadowed alleys. They passed under washing that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They passed piles of rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and ran away.

As always, they sought the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises sheltering from the heat.

Isaac and Yagharek ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track’s concrete and brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket above them.

Andrej was light, but he was beginning to weigh them down, his mass seeming to increase with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders, drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.

When they had rested and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the Sud Line, towards the city’s heart, the towers not yet visible over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of Perdido Street Station.

Isaac began to talk. He told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.

Derkhan made her way through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the Construct Council.

Isaac had warned the great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.

As she approached the hollow that was the Council’s lair, she thought she heard a susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was full.

Derkhan picked up her feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.

Then another man walked past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a massive coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory constrictor.

She straightened up slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into the presence of the Construct Council.

She entered the hollow, glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead. Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the gathering.

On all sides, engaged in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women. Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial cable.

It came in a variety of styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering under loops nearly the thickness of a man’s thigh. Others carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.

The thin hubbub of speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies. Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.

“Derkhan Blueday,” he said quietly. “We are ready.”

Derkhan huddled for a short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.

The bloody concavity of the avatar’s open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.

While Derkhan and the Council conferred, the rest of the assembled kept a respectful distance.

“This is almost all of my bloodlife congregation,” said the avatar. “I sent out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered, as you see.” He paused and clucked inhumanly. “We must proceed,” he said. “It is seventeen minutes past five o’clock.”

Derkhan looked up at the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.

At a command from the avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands, that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their cable if necessary.

Derkhan watched them with foreboding.

“They’ll never make it,” she said. “They haven’t the strength.”

“Many have brought carts,” responded the avatar. “They will leave in shifts.”

“Carts . . . ?” said Derkhan. “From where?”

“Some own them,” said the avatar. “Others have bought or rented them at my orders today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection that might result.”

Derkhan looked away. The control that the Council wielded over his human followers disturbed her.

As the last stragglers left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became strata of rubbish, invisible.

A short, thick coil of cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.

There was one vodyanoi still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away, watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the vodyanoi swam.

“Are you ready?” said Derkhan. The vodyanoi nodded quickly.

Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that the Council treated its worshippers like pawns, that it drew no satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree of . . . usefulness.

She could not understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this heretical church offered its congregation.

“Help me lift this down to the river,” she said, and picked up one end of the thick cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its way quickly over to her, helped brace her.

The avatar was still. He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him, towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west, from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct Council.

The cable was massive. Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.

Derkhan chose their passage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a prospector.

“D’you know what all this is about?” she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of rubbish. He shook his jowly head.

“No,” he said quickly. “Just heard that . . . that God-machine demanded our presence, ready for an evening’s work. Heard Its bidding when I got here.” He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining philosophically about management’s demands for unpaid overtime.

But when Derkhan, wheezing with effort, began to ask more—“How often do you meet?” “What other things does It bid you do?”—he looked at her with fear and suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then quickly nothing at all.

Derkhan became silent again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.

The dumps sprawled untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many as eight feet between the top of the riverwall and the choppy surface of the Tar.

Jutting directly from the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their infancy. But now the weight of accumulated filth made the old wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings, spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired, and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

Blocks of compressed garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of slag.

The huge cranes which took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man’s-land—flat scrub and baked earth—but that had rapidly disappeared as the rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly from the vulgar geology of the dump.

It was as if the trash was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

Derkhan and the vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see the Council’s hide. They left a trail of cable that became invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

The hillocks of garbage subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire, where the dump was open to the river.

Across the squalid water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the fence’s hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

Opposite her, Spit Hearth welled up fatly to the river’s edge. There was no unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan’s preparations unfold.

A few feet from the edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and scanned the gently moving surface.

The sun was slowly approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the river was varnished with reddening light.

“Penge!” Derkhan hissed. “You there?”

After a moment, there was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the current.

Slowly, Pengefinchess raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd, desperate relief.

“All right then,” said Pengefinchess. “Time for my last job.”

Derkhan nodded with absurd gratitude.

“She’s here to help,” Derkhan said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed suspicion. “This cable’s too big and heavy for you to manage yourself. If you get in, then I’ll feed it down to you both.”

It took a few seconds for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

Pengefinchess eyed him suspiciously as he kicked closer to her.

Derkhan looked quickly around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and tugged it to the edge of the water.

She began to feed it down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water. Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up, launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

Pengefinchess reached up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

Derkhan watched its halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted against a broken concrete pillar.

There was nothing on the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be tugging masses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out across the top of the water.

Eventually the cable was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the operation under way.

Minutes passed. Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

It was a vodyanoi, raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back, squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a message.

The river was very wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess. She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council’s vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection.

But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan marked her passing.

The arm and bow disappeared. Pengefinchess submerged again.

Derkhan turned her back on the river and headed back into the Council’s labyrinth.

She followed the trail of decaying cable through the twists of the junkyard scenery, into the Council’s presence. The avatar stood waiting by the diminished coil of rubber-swathed wire.

“Is the crossing successful?” he asked as soon as he saw her. He stumbled forwards, the cable that burst from his brainpan rattling behind him. Derkhan nodded.

“We’ve got to get things ready here,” she said. “Where’s the output?”

The avatar turned and indicated for her to follow him. He stopped for a moment and picked up the other end of the cable. He staggered under its weight, but he did not complain or ask for help, and Derkhan did not volunteer.

With the thick insulated wire under his arm, the avatar approached the constellation of rubbish that Derkhan recognized as the Construct Council’s head (with a slight unsettling jolt, as at a child’s book of optical tricks, as if an ink drawing of a young woman’s face had suddenly become a crone’s). It still lolled sideways, without any sign of life.

The avatar reached up over the grille that doubled as the Council’s metal teeth. Behind one of the enormous lights Derkhan knew were its eyes, a tangled knot of wire and tubing and rubbish burst out of a casing, in which the stuttering valves of some vastly complex analytical engine were working.

It was the first sign that the great construct was conscious. Derkhan thought she saw light glimmer faintly, waxing and waning, in the Council’s huge eyes.

The avatar pulled the cable into position beside the analogue brain, one of the network that made up the Council’s peculiar inhuman consciousness. He untwisted several of the thick wires in the cable, and in the explosion of metal from the Council’s head. Derkhan looked away, sickened, as the avatar placidly ignored the way the vicious metal tore jagged holes in his hands, and sluggish, greying blood oozed fitfully out and over his decaying skin.

He began to link the Council to the cable, twisting finger-thick wires together into a conducting whole, snapping connections into sockets that sputtered with obscure sparks, examining the seemingly meaningless buds of copper and silver and glass that flowered from the Construct Council’s brain and from the rubber sheathing of the cable, picking some, twisting and discarding others, plaiting the mechanism into impossibly complex configurations.

“The rest is easy,” he whispered. “Wire to wire, cable to cable, at every junction throughout the city, that is easy. This is the only taxing part, here at source, to connect up correctly, to channel the exudations, to mimic the operation of the communicators’ helmets for an alternative model of consciousness.”

Yet despite the difficulty, it was still light when the avatar looked up at her, wiped his lacerated hands against his thighs, and said that he had finished.

Derkhan watched the little flashes and sparks that burst ominously from the connection with awe. It was beautiful. It glittered like some mechanical jewel.

The Council’s head—vast and still immobile, like a sleeping dæmon’s—was linked to the cable with a knot of connective tissue, an elyctro-mechanical, thaumaturgic scar. Derkhan marvelled. Eventually she looked up.

“Well then,” she said hesitantly, “I’d best go and tell Isaac that . . . that you’re ready.”

With great sweeps of dirty water, Pengefinchess and her companion kicked their way through the eddying darkness of the Tar.

They stayed low. The bottom was barely visible as uneven darkness two feet below them. The cable unwound slowly from the great pile they had left at the bottom of the river, by the edge of the wall.

It was heavy, and they lugged it sluggishly through the filthy river.

They were alone in this part of the water. There were no other vodyanoi: only a few hardy, stunted fishes that skimmed nervously away at their approach. As if, thought Pengefinchess, anything in the whole of Bas-Lag could induce me to eat them.

Minutes passed and their hidden passage continued. Pengefinchess did not think of Derkhan or of what would happen that night, did not consider the plan on which she had eavesdropped. She did not evaluate its probable success. It was none of her concern.

Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on.

In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a great deal at stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy.

Ahead of her the slick darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out the Tar’s surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all directions through the little waves.

They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.

Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.

Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.

“Your companions know to find you here?” Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). “I am done,” she announced. “You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving.” He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. “Be fecund,” she said. It was a traditional farewell.

She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.

The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.

The current was stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians’ quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.

Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’ convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.

She began to feel other vodyanoi pass her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi’s house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to crumble in unsanitary fashion into the water. Those were the vodyanoi slums.

Here, on the other hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might lead through some carefully crafted passage below the surface into a riverside house all done in white marble. Its façade would be tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side, but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting huge rooms above and below the water; canal passageways; sluices refreshing the water every day.

Pengefinchess swam on past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city passed further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her escape with great pleasure.

She spread her arms and sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from her skin through the pores of the thin cotton shift she wore. After days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.

Pengefinchess felt it swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.

I’ll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I’ll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about.

She opened her enormous mouth, let the Canker gush through her. Pengefinchess swam on, through the suburbs, up and out of the city.

Chapter Forty-nine

Men and women in grubby overalls spread out from the Griss Twist dump.

They went on foot and in carts, singly, in pairs, and in little gangs of four or five. They moved in dribs and drabs, at unobtrusive speeds. Those on foot carried great swathes of cable over their shoulders, or looped between them and a colleague. In the backs of the carts the men and women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

They went out into the city at irregular intervals, over two or more hours, spacing their departures according to a schedule worked out by the Construct Council. It was calculated to be random.

A small horse-drawn wagon containing four men set off, entering the flow of traffic over Cockscomb Bridge and winding up towards the centre of Spit Hearth. They made their way without urgency, turning onto the wide, banyan-lined Boulevard St. Dragonne. They swayed with a muted clacking along the wooden slats that paved the street: the legacy of the eccentric Mayor Waldemyr, who had objected to the cacophony of wheels on stone cobblestones past his window.

The driver waited for a break in the traffic, then turned to the left and into a small courtyard. The boulevard was invisible, but its sounds were still thick around them. The cab stopped by a high wall of rich red brick, from behind which rose an exquisite smell of honeysuckle. Ivy and passionflower sprouted in little bursts over the lip of the wall, bobbing above them in the breeze. It was the garden of the Vedneh Gehantock monastery, tended by the dissident cactacae and human monks of that floral godling.

The four men leapt down from the cart and began to unload tools and the bales of heavy cable. Pedestrians walked past them, watched them briefly and forgot them.

One man held the end of the cable high against the monastery wall. His workmate lifted a heavy iron bracket and a mallet, and with three quick strokes he had anchored the end of the cable into the wall, about seven feet above the ground. The two moved along, repeated the operation eight or so feet further to the west; and then again, moving along the wall at some speed.

Their movements were not furtive. They were functional and unpresuming. The hammering was just another noise in the montage of city sound.

The men disappeared around the corner of the square and moved off to the west. They dragged the huge bail of insulated wire with them. The other two men stayed put, waiting by the tethered end of the cable, its copper and alloy innards splaying like metallic petals.

The first pair took the cable along the twisting wall that dug inwards through Spit Hearth, around the backs of restaurants and the delivery entrances to clothing boutiques and carpenters’ workshops, towards the red-light zone and The Crow, the bustling nucleus of New Crobuzon.

They moved the cable up and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains in the wall’s structure, and joining twisting skeins of other pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The drab cable was invisible. It was one nerve fibre in the city’s ganglions, a thick cord among many.

Inevitably, they had to cross the street itself, as it peeled away, curving slowly eastwards. They lowered the cable to the ground, approaching a rut that linked the two sides of the pavement. It was a gutter, originally for shit and now for rainwater, a six-inch channel between the paving slabs that sluiced through grilles into the undercity at the furthest end.

They laid the cable in the groove, attaching it firmly. They crossed quickly, standing aside occasionally while traffic interrupted them in their work, but this was not a busy street, and they were able to lay the cable without extensive interruption.

Their behaviour still did not merit attention. Running their cable back up the wall opposite—this time the boundary of a school, from the window of which came forth didactic barks—the unremarkable pair passed another group of workmen. They were digging up the opposite corner of the street, replacing shattered flagstones, and they looked up at the newcomers and grunted some shorthand greeting, then ignored them.

As they approached the red-light zone, the Construct Council’s followers turned into a courtyard, trailing their heavy coil. On three sides, walls rose above them, five or more floors of filthy brick, stained and mossy, years of smog and rain etched across them. There were windows at untidy intervals, as if they had been spilt from the highest point to fall irregularly between the roof and the ground.

Cries and oaths were audible, and laughed conversations, and the clattering of kitchenware. A pretty young child of uncertain sex watched them from a third-floor window. The two men looked at each other nervously for a moment, and scanned the rest of the overlooking windows. The child’s was the only face: they were otherwise unobserved.

They dropped the loops of cable, and one looked up into the child’s eyes, winked impishly and grinned. The other man dropped to one knee and peered through the bars of the circular manhole in the courtyard floor.

From the darkness below a voice hailed him curtly. A filthy hand shot up towards the metal seal.

The first man tugged his companion’s leg and hissed at him—“They’re here . . . this is the right place!”—then grabbed the rough end of the cable and tried to thrust it between the bars in the sewer’s entrance. It was too thick. He cursed and fumbled in his toolbox for a hacksaw, began to work on the tough grille, wincing at the screech of metal.

“Hurry,” said the invisible figure below. “Something’s been following us.”

When the cutting was done, the man in the courtyard shoved the cable hard into the ragged hole. His companion glanced down at the unsettling scene. It looked like some grotesque inversion of birth.

The men below grabbed at the cable, hauled it into the darkness of the sewers. The yards of wire coiled in the still, close courtyard began to unwind into the city’s veins.

The child watched curiously as the two men waited, wiping their hands on their overalls. When the cable was pulled taut, when it disappeared sharply under the ground, pulled at a tight angle around the corner of the little cul-de-sac, then they sauntered quickly out of that shadowed hole.

As they turned the corner, one man looked up, winked again, then walked on and disappeared from the child’s view.

In the main street the two men separated without a word, walking away in different directions under the setting sun.

At the monastery, the two men waiting by the wall were looking up.

On the building across the street, a concrete edifice mottled with damp, three men had appeared over the crumbling edge of the roof. They were hauling their own cable with them, the last forty or so feet of a much longer roll that now snaked away behind them, tracking their rooftop journey from the southern corner of Spit Hearth.

The cable trail they left wound among the rooftop shacks of squatters. It joined the legions of pipes that made erratic paths among the pigeon hutches. The cable was squeezed around spires and tacked like some ugly parasite onto slates. It bowed slightly across streets, twenty, forty or more feet above the ground, next to the little bridges thrown up across the divides. Here and there, where the gap was six feet or less, the cable simply spanned the drop, where its bearers had leapt across.

The cable disappeared south-eastwards, plunging suddenly down and through a slimy storm-drain, into the sewers.

The men made their way to the fire-escape of their building, and began to descend. They hauled the thick cable down to the first floor, looked down over the monastery garden and the two men watching on the ground.

“Ready?” shouted one of the newcomers, and made a throwing motion in their direction. The pair looking up, nodded. The three on the fire-escape paused, and swung the remnants of the cable in time.

When they threw it, it wriggled in the air like some monstrous flying serpent, descending with a heavy smack into the arms of the man who ran to catch it. He yelped, but held it, kept the end high above his head and pulled it as tight as he could across the divide.

He held the heavy wire against the monastery wall, positioning himself so that the new length of cable would link up snugly with the piece already attached to the Vedneh Gehantock garden wall. His companion hammered it into place.

The black cable crossed the street above the pedestrians’ heads, descending at a steep angle.

The three on the iron fire-escape leaned over, watching the frantic engineering of their fellows. One of the men below them began to twist together the huge snarls of wire, connecting the conducting material. He worked quickly, until the two bare ends of fibrous metal were conjoined in an ugly, functional knot.

He opened his toolkit and brought forth two little bottles. He shook them both briefly, then opened the stopper on one and dripped it quickly across the thicket of wires. The viscous liquid seeped in, saturating the connection. The man repeated the operation with the second bottle. As the two liquids met there was an audible chymical reaction. He stood back, stretched his arm to continue pouring, closing his eyes as smoke began to billow out from the rapidly heating metal.

The two chymicals met and mixed and combusted, spewing out noxious fumes with a quick burst of heat intense enough to weld the wires into a sealed mesh.

When the heat had lessened, the two men began the final job, laying ragged strips of sacking across the new connection and cracking the seals on a tin of thick, bituminous paint, slathering it on thickly, covering the bare metal seal, insulating it.

The men on the fire-escape were satisfied. They turned and retraced their steps, returning to the roof, from where they dissipated into the city as quick and untraceable as smoke in a breeze.

All along a line between Griss Twist and The Crow, similar operations were taking place.

In the sewers, furtive men and women picked their way through the hiss and drip of the subterranean tunnels. Where possible, these large gangs were led by workers who knew a little of the undercity: sewage workers; engineers; thieves. They were all equipped with maps, torches, guns and strict instructions. Ten or more figures, several with lengths of heavy cable, would pick their way together along their allotted route. When one piece of slowly unrolling wire ran out, they would connect another and continue.

There were dangerous delays as parties lost each other, blundering towards lethal zones: ghul-nests and undergang lairs. But they corrected themselves and hissed for help, making their way back towards their comrades’ voices.

When they finally met the tail end of another team in some main node of tunnel, some medium hub of sewer, they connected the two huge ends of wire, welding them with chymicals or heat-torches or backyard thaumaturgy. Then the cable was attached to the enormous arterial clutches of pipes that travelled the lengths of the sewers.

Their job done, the company would scatter and disappear.

In unobtrusive places, with extended backstreets or great stretches of interlinked roofs, the cable would poke from underground and be taken by the crews working above the streets. They unrolled the cable over hillocks of rank sedge behind warehouses, up stairways of damp brick, over roofs and along chaotic streets, where their industry was invisible in its banality.

They met others, the cable lengths were sealed. The men and women dispersed.

Mindful of the likelihood that some crews—especially those in the undercity—would become lost and miss their rendezvous points, the Construct Council had stationed spare crews along the route. They waited in building sites and by the banks of canals with their serpentine load beside them, for word that some connection had not been made.

But the work seemed charmed. There were problems, lost moments, wasted time and brief panics, but no team disappeared or missed its meeting. The spare men remained idle.

A great sinuous circuit was constructed through the city. It wound through more than two miles of textures: its matt-black rubber skin slid under faecal slime; across moss and rotting paper; through scrubby undergrowth, patches of brick-strewn grassland, disturbing the trails of feral cats and street-children; plotting the ruts in the skin of architecture, littered with granulated clots of damp brickdust.

The cable was inexorable. It moved on, its path deviating briefly here and there with whiplash curves, scoring a path through the hot city. It was as determined as some spawning fish, fighting its way towards the enormous rising monolith at the centre of New Crobuzon.

The sun was sinking behind the foothills to the west, making them magnificent and portentous. But they could not challenge the chaotic majesty of Perdido Street Station.

Lights flickered on across its vast and untrustworthy topography, and it received the now-glowing trains into its bowels like offerings. The Spike skewered the clouds like a spear held ready, but it was nothing beside the station: a little concrete addendum to that great disreputable leviathan building, wallowing in fat satisfaction in the city-sea.

The cable wound towards it without pause, rising above and falling beneath New Crobuzon’s surface in waves.

The west-facing front of Perdido Street Station opened onto BilSantum Plaza. The plaza was thronging and beautiful, with carts and pedestrians circulating constantly around the parkland at its centre. In this lush green, jugglers and magicians and stall-holders kept up raucous chants and sales pitches. The citizenry were blithely careless of the monumental structure that dominated the sky. They only noticed its façade with offhand pleasure when the low sun’s rays struck it full on, and its patchwork of architecture glowed like a kaleidoscope: the stucco and painted wood were rose; the bricks went bloody; the iron girders were glossy with rich light.

BilSantum Street swept under the huge raised arch that connected the main body of the station to the Spike. Perdido Street Station was not discrete. Its edges were permeable. Spines of low turrets swept off its back and into the city, becoming the roofs of rude and everyday houses. The concrete slabs that scaled it grew squat as they spread out, and were suddenly ugly canal walls. Where the five railway lines unrolled through great arches and passed along the roofs, the station’s bricks supported and surrounded them, cutting a path over the streets. The architecture oozed out of its bounds.

Perdido Street itself was a long, narrow passageway that jutted perpendicularly from BilSantum Street and wound sinuously east towards Gidd. No one knew why it had once been important enough to give the station its name. It was cobbled, and its houses were not squalid, though they were in ill-repair. It might once have described the station’s northern boundary, but it had long been overtaken. The storeys and rooms of the station had spread out and rapidly breached the little street.

They had leapt it effortlessly and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond, transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time.

Perdido Street was still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and out of shadow.

The tramp of heavy boots often sounded from above. The front of the station, and much of its roofscape, was guarded. Private security, foreign soldiers and the militia, some in uniform and some in disguise, patrolled the façade and the mountainous landscape of slate and clay, protecting the banks and stores, the embassies and the government offices that filled the various floors within. They would tread like explorers along carefully plotted routes through the spires and spiral iron staircases, past dormer windows and through hidden rooftop courtyards, journeying across the lower layers of the station roof, looking down over the plaza and the secret places and the enormous city.

But further to the east, towards the rear of the station, spotted with a hundred trade entrances and minor establishments, the security lapsed and became more haphazard. The towering construction was darker here. When the sun set, it cast its great shadow across a huge swathe of The Crow.

Some way out from the main mass of the building, between Perdido Street and Gidd Stations, the Dexter Line passed through a tangle of old offices that long ago had been ruined by a minor fire.

It had not damaged the structure, but it had been enough to bankrupt the company that had traded within. The charred rooms had long been empty of all but vagrants unperturbed by the smell of carbon, still tenacious after nearly a decade.

After more than two hours of torturously slow motion, Isaac and Yagharek had arrived at this burned shell, and collapsed thankfully within. They released Andrej, retied his hands and feet and gagged him before he woke. Then they ate what little food they had, and sat quietly, and waited.

Although the sky was light, their shelter was in the darkness shed by the station. In a little over an hour twilight would come, with night just behind it.

They talked quietly. Andrej woke and began to make his noises again, casting piteous looks around the room, begging for freedom, but Isaac looked at him with eyes too exhausted and miserable for guilt.

At seven o’clock there was a fumbling noise at the heat-blistered door. It was instantly audible above the rattling street sounds of The Crow. Isaac drew his flintlock and motioned Yagharek to silence.

It was Derkhan, exhausted and very dirty, her face smeared with dust and grease. She held her breath as she passed through the door and closed it behind her, releasing a sobbing exhalation as she slumped against it. She moved over and gripped Isaac’s hand, then Yagharek’s. They murmured greetings.

“I think there’s someone watching this place,” Derkhan said urgently. “He’s standing under the tobacconist’s awning opposite, in a green cloak. Can’t see his face.”

Isaac and Yagharek tensed. The garuda slid under the boarded-up window and raised his avian eye quietly to a knothole. He scanned the street across from the ruin.

“There is no one there,” he said flatly. Derkhan came over and stared through the hole.

“Maybe he wasn’t doing anything,” she said eventually. “But I’d feel safer a floor or two up, in case we hear someone come in.”

It was much easier to move, now that Isaac could force the crying Andrej at gunpoint without fear of being seen. They made their way up the stairs, leaving footprints in the charcoal surface.

On the top floor the window frames were empty of glass or wood, and they could look out across the short trek of slates at the staggered monolith of the station. They waited while the sky grew darker. Eventually, in the dim flicker of the orange gasjets, Yagharek clambered from the window and dropped lightly onto the moss-cushioned wall beyond. He stalked the five feet to the unbroken spine of roofs that connected the clutch of buildings to the Dexter Line and to Perdido Street Station. It sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters of light like an earthbound constellation.

Yagharek was a dim figure in the skyline. He scanned the landscape of chimneys and slanting clay. He was not watched. He turned towards the dark window, indicated the others to follow him.

Andrej was old and stiff, and found it hard to walk along the narrow walkways they forged. He could not jump the five-foot drops that were necessary. Isaac and Derkhan helped him, supporting him or holding him fast with a gentle, macabre assistance, while the other trained their flintlock at his brain.

They had untied his limbs so he could walk and climb, but they had left the gag in place to stifle his wails and sobs.

Andrej stumbled confused and miserable like some soul in the outlands of Hell, shuffling nearer and nearer his ineluctable end with agonizing steps.

The four of them walked across the roofworld parallel to the Dexter Line. They were passed in both directions by spitting iron trains, wailing and venting great coughs of sooty smoke into the dwindling light. They trooped slowly onwards, towards the station ahead.

It was not long before the nature of their terrain changed. The sharp-angled slates gave way as the mass of architecture rose around them. They had to use their hands. They made their way through little byways of concrete, surrounded by windowed walls; they ducked under huge portholes and had to scale short ladders that wound between stubby towers. Hidden machinery made the brickwork hum. They were no longer looking ahead to the roof of Perdido Street Station, but up. They had passed some nebulous boundary point where the terraced streets ended and the foothills of the station began.

They tried to avoid climbing, creeping around the edges of promontories of brick like jutting teeth and through accidental passageways. Isaac began to look around, nervous and fitful. The pavement was invisible behind a low rise of rooftops and chimney-pipes to their right.

“Keep quiet and careful,” he whispered. “There might be guards.”

From the north-east, a gouged curve in the station’s sprawling silhouette was a street approaching them, half covered by the building. Isaac pointed at it.

“There,” he whispered. “Perdido Street.”

He traced its line with his hand. A short way ahead it intersected with the Cephalic Way, along the length of which they were walking.

“Where they meet,” he whispered. “That’s our pick-up point. Yag . . . would you go?”

The garuda sped away, making towards the back of a tall building a few yards ahead, where rust-fouled guttering made a slanting ladder to the ground.

Isaac and Derkhan plodded slowly onwards, pushing Andrej gently forward with their guns. When they reached the intersection of the two streets they sat heavily and waited.

Isaac looked up at the sky, where only the high clouds still caught the sun. He looked down, watching Andrej’s misery and imploring gaze creasing his old face. From all around the city the night sounds were beginning.

“There’s no nightmares yet,” murmured Isaac. He looked up at Derkhan, held out his hand as if feeling for rain. “Can’t feel anything. They can’t be abroad yet.”

“Maybe they’re licking their wounds,” she said cheerlessly. “Maybe they won’t come and this—” her eyes flicked up towards Andrej momentarily “—this’ll all be useless.”

“They’ll come,” said Isaac. “I promise you that.” He would not talk of things going wrong. He would not admit the possibility.

They were silent for a while. Isaac and Derkhan realized simultaneously that they were both watching Andrej. He breathed slowly, his eyes flickering this way and that, his fear become a paralysing backdrop. We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn’t scream . . . but then he might speak . . . He left the gag in place.

There was a scraping sound near them. With calm speed, Isaac and Derkhan raised their pistols. Yagharek’s feathered head emerged from behind the clay, and they lowered their hands. The garuda hauled himself towards them over the cracked extrusion of roof. Draped over his shoulder was a great coil of cable.

Isaac stood to catch him as he staggered towards them.

“You got it!” he hissed. “They were waiting!”

“They were becoming angry,” said Yagharek. “They had come up from the sewers an hour or more ago: they were fearful that we had been captured or killed. This is the last of the wire.” He dropped the loops to the ground before them. The cable was thinner than many of the other sections, about four inches in cross-section, coated with thin rubber. There were perhaps sixty feet of wire remaining, sprawled in tight spirals by their ankles.

Isaac knelt to examine it. Derkhan, her pistol still trained on the cowering Andrej, squinted at the cable.

“Is it connected?” she asked. “Is it working?”

“I don’t know,” breathed Isaac. “We won’t be able to tell till I link it up, make it a circuit.” He hauled the cable up, swung it over his shoulder. “There’s not as much as I’d hoped,” he said. “We’re not going to get very close to the centre of Perdido Street Station.” He looked around and pursed his lips. It doesn’t matter, he thought. Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before . . . betrayal. But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks.

He pointed a little way away to the south-east, up a little slope of steep-sided, flat-topped rooflets. They extended like an exaggerated slate stairwell, overlooked by an enormous flat wall of stained concrete. The little rise of roof hillocks ended about forty feet above them, in what Isaac hoped was a flattened plateau. The huge L-shaped concrete wall continued into the air above it for nearly sixty feet, containing it on two sides.

“There,” said Isaac slowly. “That’s where we’ll go.”

Chapter Fifty

Halfway up the stepped roofs, Isaac and his companions disturbed someone.

There was a sudden raucous drunken noise. Isaac and Derkhan flurried for their pistols in anxious motion. It was a ragged drunk who leapt up in a shockingly inhuman motion and disappeared at speed down the slope. Strips of torn clothes fluttered behind him.

After that Isaac began to see the denizens of the station’s roofscape. Little fires sputtered in secret courtyards, tended by dark and hungry figures. Sleeping men curled in the corners beside old spires. It was an alternative, an attenuated society. Little vagrant hilltribes foraging. A quite different ecology.

Way above the heads of the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky. Noisy predators. Grubby specks of light and dark, moving edgily in the night’s cloud.

To Isaac’s relief, the plateau at the top of the hill of layered slate was flat, and about fifteen feet square. Large enough. He wagged his gun, indicating that Andrej should sit, which the old man did, collapsing slowly and precipitously into the far corner. He huddled in on himself, hugging his knees.

“Yag,” said Isaac. “Keep watch, mate.” Yagharek dropped the final twist of the cable he had hauled up, and stood sentry at the edge of the little open space, looking down across the gradient of the massive roof. Isaac staggered under the full weight of the sack. He put it down and began to unpack the equipment.

Three mirrored helmets, one of which he put on. Derkhan took the others, gave one to Yagharek. Four analytical engines the size of large typewriters. Two large chymico-thaumaturgical batteries. Another battery, this one metaclockwork, a khepri design. Several connecting cables. Two large communicators’ helmets, of the type used by the Construct Council on Isaac to trap the first slake-moth. Torches. Black powder and ammunition. A sheaf of programme cards. A clutch of transformers and thaumaturgic converters. Copper and pewter circuits of quite opaque purpose. Small motors and dynamos.

Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish.

Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare.

His head wobbled under the weight of his helmet. He connected two of the calculating engines, linking them into a powerful network. Then he began a much harder job, connecting the rest of the various oddments into a coherent circuit.

The motors were clipped to wires, and they to the larger of the analytical engines. The other engine he tinkered with internally, checking subtle adjustments. He had changed its circuitry. The valves within were no longer simply binary switches. They were attuned specifically and carefully to the unclear and the questionable; the grey areas of crisis mathematics.

He snapped small plugs into receivers and wired up the crisis engine to the dynamos and transformers that converted one uncanny form of energy into another. A discombobulated circuit spread out across the flat little roofspace.

The last thing he pulled from the sack and connected to the sprawling machinery was a crudely welded box of black tin, about the size of a shoe. He picked up the end of the cable—the enormous work of guerrilla engineering that stretched more than two miles to the huge hidden intelligence of the Griss Twist dump. Isaac deftly unwound the splayed wires and connected them to the black box. He looked up at Derkhan, who was watching him, her gun trained on Andrej.

“That’s a breaker,” he said, “a circuit-valve. One-way flow only. I’m cutting the Council off from this lot.” He patted the various pieces of the crisis engine. Derkhan nodded slowly. The sky had grown nearly completely dark. Isaac looked up at her and set his lips.

“We can’t let that fucking thing get access to the crisis engine. We have to stay away from it,” he explained as he connected the disparate components of his machine. “You remember what it told us—the avatar was some corpse pulled out of the river. Bullshit! That body’s alive . . . mindless, sure, but the heart’s beating and the lungs breathe air. The Construct Council had to take that man’s mind out of his body while he was alive. That was the whole point. Otherwise it would just rot.

“I don’t know . . . maybe it was one of that crazy congregation sacrificing himself, maybe it was voluntary. But maybe not. Whichever, the Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if it’s . . . useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,” Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. “It’s just a . . . a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s trying to . . . maximize itself. It’ll do whatever it has to—it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill—to increase its own power.”

Isaac stopped for a moment and looked up at Derkhan.

“And you know,” he said softly, “that’s why it wants the crisis engine. It kept demanding it. Made me think. That’s what this is for.” He patted the circuit-valve. “If I connected the Council direct, it might be able to get feedback from the crisis engine, get control of it. It doesn’t know I’m using this, that’s why it was so keen on being connected. It doesn’t know how to build its own engine: you can bet Jabber’s arse that’s why it’s so interested in us.

“Dee, Yag, d’you know what this engine can do? I mean, this is a prototype . . . but if it works like it should, if you got inside this, saw the blueprint, built it more solidly, ironed out the problems . . . d’you know what this can do?

“Anything.” He was silent for a while, his hands working, connecting his wires. “There’s crisis everywhere, and if the engine can detect the field, tap it, channel it . . . it can do anything. I’m hamstrung because of all the maths. You’ve got to express in mathematical terms what you want the engine to do. That’s what the programme cards are for. But the Council’s whole damn brain expresses things mathematically. If that bastard links up to the crisis engine, its followers won’t be crazy any more.

“Because you know they call it the God-machine . . . ? Well . . . they’ll be right.”

All three of them were quiet. Andrej rolled his eyes from side to side, not comprehending a single word.

Isaac worked silently. He tried to imagine a city in the thrall of the Construct Council. He thought of it linked up to the little crisis engine, building more and more of the engines on an ever-increasing scale, connecting them up to its own fabric, powering them with its own thaumaturgical and elyctro-chymical and steampower. Monstrous valves hammering in the depths of the dump, making the fabric of reality bend and bleed with the ease of a Weaver’s spinnerets, all doing the bidding of that vast, cold intelligence, pure conscious calculation, as capricious as a baby.

He fingered the circuit-valve, shaking it gently, praying that its mechanisms were sound.

Isaac sighed and brought out the thick sheaf of programme cards the Council had printed. Each was labelled in the Council’s tottering typewritten script. Isaac looked up quizzically.

“It’s not yet ten, is it?” he said. Derkhan shook her head. “There’s still nothing in the air, is there? The moths aren’t out yet. Let’s be ready by the time they fly.”

He looked down and pulled the lever on the two chymical batteries. The reagents within mixed. The sound of effervescence was dimly audible, and there was a sudden chorus of chattering valves and barking outputs as current was released. The machinery on the roofscape snapped into life.

The crisis engine whirred.

“It’s just calculating,” said Isaac nervously, as Derkhan and Yagharek glanced at him. “It’s not yet processing. I’m giving it instructions.”

Isaac began to feed the programme cards carefully into the various analytical engines before him. Most went to the crisis engine itself, but some to the subsidiary calculating circuits connected by little loops of cable. Isaac checked each card, comparing it with his notes, scribbling quick calculations before feeding it into any of the inputs.

The engines clattered as their fine ratcheting teeth slid over the cards, snapping into carefully cut holes, instructions and orders and information downloading into their analogue brains. Isaac was slow, waiting until he felt the click that signalled successful processing before removing each card and slotting in the next.

He kept notes, scrawling impenetrable messages to himself on ragged ends of paper. He breathed quickly.

Rain began to fall, quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and breaking open, as thick and warm as pus. The night was close, and the glutinous rainclouds made it more so. Isaac worked fast, his fingers feeling suddenly idiotic, too large.

There was a slow sense of dragging, a weightiness that pulled at the spirit and began to saturate the bones. A sense of the uncanny, of the fearful and hidden, that rolled up as if from within, a billowing ink-cloud from the depths of the mind.

“Isaac,” said Derkhan, her voice cracking, “you have to hurry. It’s starting.”

A swarm of nightmare feelings pattered down among them with the rain.

“They’re up and out,” said Derkhan with terror. “They’re hunting. They’re abroad. Hurry, you have to hurry . . .”

Isaac nodded without speaking and continued with what he was doing, shaking his head as if that might disperse the cloying fear that had settled on him. Where’s the fucking Weaver? he thought.

“Someone watches us from below,” said Yagharek suddenly, “some tramp who did not run. He does not move.”

Isaac glanced up again, then returned his attention to his work.

“Take my gun there,” he hissed. “If he comes up towards us, warn him off with a shot. Hopefully he’ll keep his distance.” Still his hands rushed to twist, to connect, to programme. He punched numbered keypads and wrestled roughcut cards into slots. “Nearly there,” he murmured, “nearly there.”

The sense of nocturnal pressure, of drifting in sour dreams, increased.

“Isaac . . .” hissed Derkhan. Andrej had fallen into a kind of terrified, exhausted half-sleep, and he began to moan and thrash, his eyes opening and shutting with bleary vagueness.

“Done!” spat Isaac, and stepped back.

There was a silent moment. Isaac’s triumph dissipated quickly.

“We need the Weaver!” he said. “It’s supposed to . . . it said it would be here! We can’t do anything without it . . .”

They could do nothing except wait.

The stench of twisted dream-imagery grew and grew, and brief screams sounded from random points across the city, as sleeping sufferers called out their fear or defiance. The rain fell thicker, until the concrete underfoot was slick. Isaac laid the greasy sack ineffectually across various sections of the crisis circuit, moving it in agitation, trying to protect his machine from the water.

Yagharek watched the glistening roofscape. When his head became too full of fearful dreams and he grew afraid of what he might see, he turned on his heel and watched through the mirrors on his helmet. He kept watch on the dim, immobile figure below.

Isaac and Derkhan dragged Andrej a little closer to the circuit (again with that ghastly gentleness, as if concerned for his wellbeing). Under Derkhan’s gun, Isaac retied the old man’s hands and legs, and fastened one of the communicator helmets tight to his head. He did not look at Andrej’s face.

The helmet had been adjusted. As well as its flared output on the top, it had three input jacks. One connected it to the second helmet. Another was connected by several skeins of wires to the calculating brains and generators of the crisis engine.

Isaac wiped the third connection briefly free of filthy rainwater, and plugged into it the thick wire extending from the black circuit-breaker, attached to which was the massive cable extending all the way to the Construct Council, south of the river. Current could flow from the Council’s analytical brain, through the one-way switch, into Andrej’s helmet.

“That’s it, that’s it,” said Isaac tensely. “Now we just need the fucking Weaver . . .”

It was another half an hour of rain and burgeoning nightmares before the dimensions of the roofspace rippled and shucked wildly, and the Weaver’s crooning monologue could be heard.

. . . AS THEE AND ME CONCURRED THE FAT FUNNELSPACE THE CLOT AT CITYWEB CENTRE SEES US CONFLAB . . . came the unearthly voice in all of their skulls, and the great spider stepped out lightly from the kink in the air and danced towards them, its shining body dwarfing them.

Isaac gave a barking breath, a sharp moan of relief. His mind juddered with the awe and terror the Weaver induced.

“Weaver!” he shouted. “Help us now!” He held out the other communicating helmet to the extraordinary presence.

Andrej had looked up and was shying away in a paroxysm of terror. His eyes bulged with the pressure of his blood and he began to retch behind his mask. He wriggled as fast as he could towards the edge of the roof, a terrible inhuman fear jack-knifing his body away.

Derkhan caught him and held him fast. He ignored her gun, his eyes empty of everything but the vast spider that loomed over him, peering down with slow portentous movements. Derkhan could hold him easily. His decaying muscles flexed and twisted ineffectually. She dragged him back and held him.

Isaac did not look at them. He held out the helmet to the Weaver beseechingly.

“We need you to put this on,” he said. “Put this on now! We can take them all. You said you’d help us . . . to repair the web . . . please.”

The rain sputtered against the Weaver’s hard shell. Every second or so, one or two random drops would sizzle violently and evaporate as they struck it. The Weaver kept talking, as it always did, an inaudible murmur that Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could not understand.

It reached out with its smooth, human hands, and placed the helmet on its segmented head.

Isaac closed his eyes in brief exhausted relief, then opened them again.

“Keep it on!” he hissed. “Fasten it!”

With fingers that moved as elegantly as a master tailor’s, the spider did so.

. . . WILL YOU TICKLE AND TRICK . . . it gibbered . . . AS THINKLINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON AND ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY CRAFTSMAN . . . and as the Weaver continued to croon with incomprehensible and dreamlike proclamations, Isaac saw the last fastening snap tight under its terrifying jaw, and he snapped on the switches that opened the circuit-valves on Andrej’s helmet, and he pulled the succession of levers that geared up the full processing power of the analytical calculators and the crisis engine, and he stepped back.

Extraordinary currents surged through the machinery assembled before them.

There was a very still moment, when even the rain seemed to pause.

Sparks of various and extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.

A massive arc of power suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment and pain.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek watched him, paralysed.

As the batteries sent great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit, flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.

The communicator helmet began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the æther.

But they were diverted.

They were processed, read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and switches.

An infinitely small moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry. First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry through Andrej’s helmet.

Isaac had seen how the slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not sated.

The Weaver’s whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly, and drew taste . . . but no sustenance.

The Weaver thought in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image and desire and cognition and emotion.

For the slake-moths, it was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum. Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.

The extraordinary squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the wires into the sophisticated engines.

Just behind it came the particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.

In extreme contrast to the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.

To the slake-moths it was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as nutrition. Like ashes.

The Council’s mind poured into the machine—and there was a moment of fraught activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles was one way.

It was assimilated, passing through the analytical engine.

A set of parameters was reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.

Within a seventh of a second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.

The machine examined the form of the first input x, Andrej’s mental signature.

Two subsidiary orders rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously. Model form of input y one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental current from the Weaver; Model form of input z, and they did the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.

The two lines of programming coalesced again into a tertiary order: Duplicate waveform of input x with inputs y and z.

The commands were extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its programme cards.

The mathematico-analytical maps of mentality—even simplified and imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were—became templates. The three were compared.

Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.

Andrej’s mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream-consciousness of the Weaver.

x, recorded the engines, was unlike y and unlike z.

But with underlying structure and subconscious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional charge, x, the analytical engines calculated, was equal to y plus z.

The thaumaturgo-psychic motors followed orders. They combined y and z. They created a duplicate waveform to that of x and routed it through the output on Andrej’s helmet.

The flows of charged particles pouring into the helmet from the Council and the Weaver were added together into a single vast slew. The Weaver’s dreams, the Council’s calculations, were blended to mimic subconscious and conscious, the working human mind. The new ingredients were more powerful than Andrej’s feeble emanations by a factor of enormous magnitude. The vastness of this power was unabated as the new, huge current surged towards the flared trumpet pointing up into the sky.

A little more than one-third of a second had passed since the circuit had snapped into life. As the enormous combined flow of y+z dashed towards the outflow, a new set of conditions was fulfilled. The crisis engine itself chattered into life.

It used the unstable categories of crisis maths, as much a persuasive vision as objective categorization. Its deductive method was holistic, totalizing and inconstant.

As the exudations of the Council and the Weaver took the place of Andrej’s outflow, the crisis engine was fed the same information as the original processors. It rapidly evaluated the calculations that had been performed and examined the new flow. In its astonishingly complex tubular intelligence, a massive anomaly became evident. Something the strictly arithmetic functions of the other engines could never have uncovered.

The form of the dataflows under analysis was not just the sum of their constituent parts.

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej’s mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities.

The layers of consciousness within x were dependent on each other, interlocking gears of a motor of self-sustaining consciousness. What was arithmetically discernible as rationalism plus dreams was really a whole, whose constituent parts could not be disentangled.

y and z were not half-complete models of x. They were qualitatively different.

The engine applied rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously identical to and radically divergent from the original it mimicked.

Three-fifths of a second after the circuit had snapped into life, the crisis engine arrived at two simultaneous conclusions: x=y+z; and x≠y+z.

The operation that had been carried out was profoundly unstable. It was paradoxical, unsustainable, the application of logic tearing itself apart.

The process was, from absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion, utterly riddled with crisis.

A massive wellspring of crisis energy was instantly uncovered. The realization of crisis freed it up to be tapped: metaphasic pistons squeezed and convulsed, sending controlled spurts of the volatile energy shooting through amplifiers and transformers. Subsidiary circuits rocked and juddered. The crisis motor began to whirl like a dynamo, crackling with power and sending out complex charges of quasivoltage.

The final command rang in binary form through the crisis engine’s innards. Channel energy, it said, and amplify output.

Just less than one second since the power had coursed through the wires and mechanisms, the impossible, paradoxical flow of cobbled-together consciousness, the combined flow of Weaver and Council, welled up and burst massively out of Andrej’s conducting helmet.

His own rerouted emanations wobbled in a loop of referential feedback, constantly being checked and compared to the y+z flow by the analogue and the crisis engines. Without outlet, it began to leak out, snapping in peculiar little arcs of thaumaturgic plasma. It dribbled invisibly over Andrej’s contorting face, mixing with the gobbing overflow from the Weaver/Council emission.

The main aggregate of that enormous and unstable created consciousness burst in huge gouts from the helmet’s flanges. A growing column of mental waves and particles burst out over the station, towering into the air. It was invisible, but Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could feel it, a prickling of the skin, sixth and seventh senses ringing dully like psychic tinnitus.

Andrej twitched and convulsed with the power of the processes rocking him. His mouth worked. Derkhan looked away in guilty disgust.

The Weaver danced back and forth on its stiletto feet, yammering quietly and tapping its helmet.

“Bait . . .” called Yagharek harshly and stepped back from the flow of energy.

“It’s hardly started,” yelled Isaac over the thudding of rain.

The crisis engine was humming and heating up, tapping enormous and growing resources. It sent waves of transforming current through thickly insulated cables, towards Andrej, who rolled and jack-knifed in spastic terror and pain.

The engine took the energy siphoned from the unstable situation and channelled it, obeying its instructions, pouring it in transformative form towards the Weaver/Council flow. Boosting it. Increasing its pitch and range and power. And increasing it again.

A feedback loop began. The artificial flow was made stronger; and like an enormous fortified tower on crumbling foundations, the increase of its mass made it more precarious. Its paradoxical ontology grew more unstable as the flow became stronger. Its crisis grew more acute. The engine’s transformative power grew exponentially; it bolstered the mental flow more; the crisis deepened again . . .

The prickling of Isaac’s skin grew worse. A note seemed to sound in his skull, a whine that increased in pitch as if something nearby spun faster and faster, out of control.

He winced.

. . . GOOD GRIEF AND GRACE THE SPILLING SLOSH GROWS MINDFUL BUT MIND IT IS NO MIND . . . the Weaver continued to murmur . . . ONE AND ONE INTO ONE WON’T GO BUT IT IS ONE AND TWO AT ONCE WILL WE WON HOW WIN HOW WONDERFUL . . .

As Andrej rolled like a victim of torture under the dark rain, the power that poured through his head and into the sky grew more and more intense, increasing at a frightening, geometric rate. It was invisible but sensible: Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek backed away from the squirming figure as far as the little space would allow. Their pores opened and closed, their hair or feathers crawled violently across their skin.

Still the crisis loop continued and the emanation increased, until it could almost be seen, a shimmering pillar of disturbed æther two hundred feet high, the light from stars and aerostats bending uncertainly around and through it as it towered like an unseen inferno over the city.

Isaac felt as if his gums were rotting, as if his teeth were trying to escape his jaw.

The Weaver danced on in delight.

An enormous beacon was scorched into the æther. A huge and rapidly growing column of energy, a pretend consciousness, the map of a counterfeit mind that swelled and fattened in a fearful curve of growth, impossible and vastly there, the portent of a nonexistent god.

Across New Crobuzon, more than nine hundred of the city’s best communicators and thaumaturges paused and looked suddenly in the direction of The Crow, their faces twisted with confusion and nebulous alarm. The most sensitive held their heads and moaned with inexplicable pain.

Two hundred and seven began to jabber in nonsense combinations of numerological code and lush poetry. One hundred and fifty-five suffered massive nosebleeds, two of them ultimately unstaunchable and fatal.

Eleven, who worked for the government, scrabbled from their workshop at the top of the Spike and ran, with handkerchiefs and tissues ineffectually stopping the bloody slick from their noses and ears, towards Eliza Stem-Fulcher’s office.

“Perdido Street Station!” was all they could say. They gabbled it like idiots for some minutes, to the home secretary and the mayor who was with her, shaking them with frustration, their lips twitching for other sounds, blood spattering their bosses’ immaculate tailoring.

“Perdido Street Station!”

Way out above the wide empty streets of Chnum; swooping slowly past the curve of temple towers in Tar Wedge; skirting the river above Howl Barrow and soaring widespread over the pauper slum of Stoneshell, intricate bodies moved.

With sluggish strokes and drooling tongues, the slake-moths sought prey.

They were hungry, eager to gorge themselves and ready their bodies and breed again. They must hunt.

But in four sudden, identical and simultaneous movements—separated by miles, in different quadrants of the city—the four slake-moths snapped their heads up as they flew.

They beat their complex wings and slowed, until they were almost still in the air. Four slobbering tongues lolled and lapped at the air.

In the distance, over the skyline that glimmered with grots of filthy light, on the outskirts of the central mass of building, a column was rising from the earth. Even as they licked and tastesmelled it, it grew and grew, and their wings beat back frantically as the wafts of flavour came over them, and the incredible succulent stench of the thing boiled and eddied in the æther.

The other smells and tastes of the city dissipated into nothing. With an amazing speed, the extraordinary flavour-trail doubled its intensity, suffusing the slake-moths, making them mad.

One by one they emitted a chittering of astounded, delighted greed, a single-minded hunger.

From all the way across the city, from the four compass points, they converged in a frenzy of flapping, four starving exultant powerful bodies, descending to feed.

There was a tiny putter of lights on a little console. Isaac edged closer, keeping his body low, as if he could duck under the beacon of energy pouring from Andrej’s skull. The old man lolled and twitched on the ground.

Isaac was careful not to look at Andrej’s sprawling form. He peered at the console, making sense of the little play of diodes.

“I think it’s the Construct Council,” he said over the drab rainfall sound. “It’s sending instructions to get round the firewall, but I don’t think it’ll be able to. This is too simple for it,” he said, and patted the circuit-valve. “There’s nothing for it to get control of.” Isaac visualized a struggle in the femtoscopic byways of wiring.

He looked up.

The Weaver was ignoring him and them all, drumming its little fingers against the slick concrete in complicated rhythms. Its low voice was impenetrable.

Derkhan was staring in exhausted disgust at Andrej. Her head jerked gently back and forward as if she was rocked by waves. Her mouth moved. She spoke in silent tongues. Don’t die, thought Isaac fervently, staring at the ruined old man, seeing his face contort as bizarre feedback rocked him, you can’t die yet, you have to hold on.

Yagharek was standing. He pointed up, suddenly, into a far quadrant of the sky.

“They have changed course,” he said harshly. Isaac looked up and saw what Yagharek was indicating.

Far away, halfway to the edge of the city, three of the drifting dirigibles had turned purposefully. They were hardly visible to human eyes, darker blots against the night sky, picked out with navigation lights. But it was clear that their fitful, random motion had changed; that they were powering ponderously towards Perdido Street Station, converging.

“They’re on to us,” said Isaac. He did not feel fearful, only tense and weirdly sad. “They’re coming. Godspit and shit! We’ve got about ten, fifteen minutes before they get here. We just have to hope the moths are quicker.”

“No. No.” Yagharek was shaking his head with quick violence. His head was cocked. His arms moved quickly, motioning them all to silence. Isaac and Derkhan froze. The Weaver continued its insane monologue, but it was subdued and hushed. Isaac prayed that it would not become bored and disappear. The apparatus, the constructed mind, the crisis would all collapse.

The air around them all was welting, splitting like troubled skin, as the force of that unthinkable and burgeoning blast of power continued to grow.

Yagharek was listening intently through the rain.

“People are approaching,” he said urgently, “across the roof.” With practised movements, he plucked his whip from his belt. His long knife seemed to dance into his left hand and pose, glinting in the refracted sodium lights. He had become a warrior and a hunter again.

Isaac stood and drew his flintlock. He checked hurriedly that it was clean and he filled the pan with powder, trying to shield it from the rain. He felt for his little pouch of bullets and his powder horn. His heart, he realized, was beating only very slightly faster.

He saw Derkhan readying herself. She drew her two pistols and checked them, her eyes cold.

On the roof’s plateau, forty feet below, a little troop of dark-uniformed figures had appeared. They ran nervously between the outcroppings of architecture, their pikes and rifles rattling. There were perhaps twelve of them, their faces invisible behind their sheer reflective helmets, their segmented armour flapping against them, subtle insignia displaying rank. They spread out, came at the gradient of roofs from different angles.

“Oh dear Jabber,” swallowed Isaac. “We’re fucked.”

Five minutes, he thought in despair. That’s all we need. The fucking moths won’t resist this, they’re coming here already, couldn’t you have taken a little longer?

The dirigibles still prowled closer and closer, sluggish and ineluctable.

The militia had reached the outer edges of the tumbling slate hill. They began to climb, keeping low, ducking behind chimney stacks and dormer windows. Isaac stepped back from the edge, keeping them out of sight.

The Weaver was tracing its index finger through the water on the roof, leaving a trail of scorched dry stone, drawing patterns and pictures of flowers, whispering to itself. Andrej’s body spasmed as the current rocked him. His eyes wavered unnervingly.

“Fuck!” shouted Isaac, in despair and rage.

“Shut up and fight,” hissed Derkhan. She lay down and peered carefully over the edge of the roof. The highly trained militia were frighteningly close. She aimed and fired with her left hand.

There was a snapping explosion that seemed muffled by the rain. The closest officer, who had scaled nearly halfway up the slope, staggered back as the ball struck his armoured breast and ricocheted into the darkness. He teetered momentarily on the edge of his little roof-step, managed to right himself. As he relaxed and stepped forward, Derkhan fired her other gun.

The officer’s faceplate shattered in an explosion of bloody mirror. A cloud of flesh burst from the back of his skull. His face was momentarily visible, a shocked gaze embedded with slivers of reflecting glass, blooming with blood from a hole below his right eye. He seemed to leap out backwards like a champion diver, sailing elegantly twenty feet to crack loudly against the base of the roof.

Derkhan bellowed with triumph, her cry becoming words. “Die, you swine!” she screamed. She ducked back out of sight as a rapid battery of shots smacked into the brick and stone above and below her.

Isaac dropped onto all fours beside her, staring at her. It was impossible to say, in the rain, but he thought she was sobbing angrily. She rolled back from the edge of the roof and began to reload her pistols. She caught Isaac’s eye.

“Do something!” she screamed at him.

Yagharek was standing, hanging back from the edge, grabbing glimpses every few seconds, waiting until the men were in reach of his whip. Isaac rolled forward, peered over the rim of the little platform. The men were drawing nearer, moving more carefully now, hiding at each level, staying out of sight, but still moving terribly fast.

Isaac aimed and fired. His bullet burst dramatically against slate, showering the lead militiaman with particles.

“Godsdamnit!” he hissed and ducked back to refill his gun.

A cold certainty of defeat was settling within him. There were too many men, coming too quickly. As soon as the militia reached the top, Isaac would have no defence. If the Weaver came to their aid they would lose their bait, and the slake-moths would escape. They might take one, two or three of the officers with them, but they could not escape.

Andrej was jerking up and down, arcing his back and straining against his bonds. The nerves between Isaac’s eyes were singing as the blast of energy continued to scald the æther. The airships were pulling near. Isaac screwed up his face, looked back over the edge of the plateau. On the broken plain of the roof below, drunkards and vagrants were rousing themselves and scurrying away like terrified animals.

Yagharek screeched like a crow and pointed with his knife.

Behind the militia, on the flattened roofscape they had left behind, a cloaked figure slipped out of some shadow, appearing like an eidolon, manifesting as if from nothing.

There was a flurry of bottle-green from its coiling cloak.

Something spat intense fire and noise from the figure’s outstretched hand, three, four, five times. Halfway up the slope, Isaac saw a militiaman bow away from the roof, collapsing in an ugly organic cascade down the length of the clay. As he fell, two more of the men staggered and collapsed. One was dead, blood pooling below his sprawled body and diluting in the rain. The other slid a little way and emitted a horrendous shriek from behind his mask, clutching at his bleeding ribs.

Isaac gazed in shock.

“Who the fuck is that?” he shouted. “What the fuck is going on?” Below him, their shadowed benefactor had ducked into a puddle of darkness. He seemed to be fumbling with his gun.

Below them, the militia had frozen. Orders were shouted in impenetrable shorthand. It was clear that they were confused and afraid.

Derkhan was staring into the darkness with a look of astonished hope.

“Gods bless you,” she screamed down the slate, into the night. She fired again with her left hand, but the bullet passed loudly and harmlessly into brick.

Thirty feet below them, the injured man still screamed. He fumbled ineffectually to undo his mask.

The unit split. One man ducked beneath outcroppings of brick and raised his rifle, aiming into the darkness where the newcomer hid. Several of the remaining men began to descend towards their new attacker. The others began to climb again, at redoubled speed.

As the two little groups moved up and down across the slippery roofscape, the dark figure stepped out again and fired with extraordinary rapidity. He’s got some kind of repeating pistol, thought Isaac with astonishment, and then started as two more officers reared up from the roof a little way below him and fell, twisting and screaming, to bounce brutally down the incline.

Isaac realized that the man below them was not firing at the militia who had turned and were approaching him, but was concentrating on protecting the little platform, picking off the closest officers with superb marksmanship. He had left himself vulnerable to a massed attack.

All across the roof the militia froze at the volley of bullets. But as Isaac looked down he saw that the second group of officers had descended to the base of the roof and were running in clumsily furtive formation at the shady assassin.

Ten feet below Isaac, the militia were closing in. He fired again, knocking the wind from one man, but failing to penetrate his armour. Derkhan shot, and below them, the poised marksman screeched an oath and dropped his rifle, which slid noisily away.

Isaac filled his gun with desperate haste. He glanced over at his machinery, saw that Andrej was curled under the wall. He was shuddering, with spittle fouling his face. Isaac’s head throbbed in time to some weird beat from the growing blaze of mental waves. He looked up at the sky. Come on, he thought, come on, come on. He looked down again as he reloaded, trying to find the mysterious newcomer.

He almost cried out in fear for their half-hidden protector, as four burly and heavily armed militia jogged towards the pitch-shade where he had hidden.

Something emerged from the darkness at speed, leaping from shadow to shadow, drawing the militia’s fire with extraordinary ease. A pathetic spatter of shots sounded, and the four men’s rifles were empty. As they dropped to one knee and began to reload, the cloaked figure emerged from the sheltering gloom and stood a few paces before them.

Isaac saw him from slightly behind, illuminated in the sudden cold light from some phlogistic lamp. His face was turned away, towards the militia. His cloak was patched and shabby. Isaac could just see a stubby little gun in his left hand. As the impassive glass masks glimmered in the light and the four officers seemed to falter into momentary stillness, something extended from the man’s right hand. Isaac could not see it well, squinted carefully until the man moved slightly and raised his arm, uncovering the toothed thing as the sleeve of the cloth fell away.

A massive serrated blade, slowly opening and shutting like wicked scissors. Gnarled chitin jutting ungainly from the man’s elbow, recurved razor tip gleaming at the end of the trapping jaw.

The man’s right arm had been replaced, Remade, with a vast mantis claw.

At the same instant, Isaac and Derkhan gasped and shouted his name: “Jack Half-a-Prayer!”

Half-a-Prayer, the Escapee, the fReemade Boss, the Man-’tis, stepped up lightly towards the four militia.

They fumbled with their guns, jabbed out with the glinting bayonets.

Half-a-Prayer sidestepped them with balletic speed and snapped his Remade limb shut, then backed easily away. One of the officers fell, blood bursting from his lacerated neck and welling up behind his mask.

Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone again, was stalking half in, half out of sight.

Isaac’s attention was diverted as an officer appeared over the brim of a window five feet below him. He fired too quickly and missed, but something snaked out above him and smacked violently against the man’s helmet. The officer reeled and fell back, gathering himself from another attack. Yagharek quickly gathered up his heavy whip, ready to strike again.

“Come on, come on!” screamed Isaac to the sky.

The airships were fat and looming now, descending, ready to pounce. Half-a-Prayer danced rings around his attackers, leaping in to maim and then dissolving into the dark. Derkhan was crying out, a little defiant shout every time she shot. Yagharek stood poised, his whip and dagger trembling in his hands. The militia were encroaching, but slowly, cowed and fearful, waiting for relief and back-up.

The Weaver’s monologue grew slowly louder, from a whispering in the back of the skull into a voice that crept forward through flesh and bone, filling the brain.

. . . IS IT IS IT THOSE NAUGHTY MAULERS THOSE TIRESOME PATTERNVAMPIRS THAT BLEED WEBSCAPE DRY IT IS THEY THEY COME THEY WHISTLE FOR THIS TORRENT THIS CORNUCOPIC SLEW OF FOOD THAT IS NOT TAKE CARE AND WHISPER WATCH . . . it said . . . RICH BREWS SIT UNEASY ON THE PALATE . . .

Isaac looked up with a soundless shout. He heard a fluttering, a buffet of disordered air. The raw emblazoning, the blast of invented brainwaves that made his spine tremble inside him continued unabated as a sound approached, oscillating frantically between materia and æther.

A glinting carapace dipped through thermals: weaving patterns of dark colour shot violently through the sky on two reflected pairs of shapeshifting wings. Convoluted limbs and spiny organic jags trembled in anticipation.

Famished and trembling, the first slake-moth came in.

The heavy segmented body came spiralling down, sliding tightly around the column of burning æther as if on a funfair ride. The moth’s tongue lapped avidly around it: it was immersed in intoxicating brain-liquor.

As Isaac stared into the sky exultantly, he saw another shape flit closer, and another, black on black. One of the moths ducked in a sharp arc directly below a fat and sluggish airship, careering towards the storm of mindwaves that sent ripples through the fabric of the city.

The force of militia arrayed on the roof chose that moment to renew their attack, and the sulphurous snap of Derkhan’s pistols woke Isaac to the danger. He looked round to see Yagharek crouched in a feral pose, his bullwhip unrolling like some half-trained mamba towards the officer whose head had appeared over the rim of the plateau. It constricted around his neck and Yagharek pulled hard, slamming the man’s forehead against the wet slates.

He snapped his whip free as the choking officer fell clattering away.

Isaac fumbled with his cumbersome pistol. He leaned over and saw that two of the officers who had turned on Jack Half-a-Prayer were down and dying, blood spewing languidly from enormous rents in their flesh. A third was stumbling away, holding his gashed thigh. Half-a-Prayer and the fourth man were gone.

All over the low hill of roofs, the calls of the militia sounded, half routed, terrified and confused. Urged on by their lieutenant they drew steadily closer.

“Keep them away,” shouted Isaac. “The moths are coming!”

The three slake-moths came down in a long interweaving helix, eddying below and above each other, rotating in descending order around the massive stele of energy that yawned vastly from Andrej’s helmet. On the ground below them the Weaver danced a subdued little jig, but the slake-moths did not see it. They noticed nothing except Andrej’s spasming form, the source, the wellspring of the enormous sweet bounty that gushed precipitously up and into the air. They were frenzied.

Watertowers and brick turrets rose up around them like reaching hands as one by one they breached the skyline and descended into the city’s gaslight nimbus.

Faint waves of anxiety gusted through them as they plunged. There was something fractionally wrong with the flavour that surrounded them—but it was so strong, so unbelievably powerful, and they were so drunk on it, unsteady on their wings and shaking with greedy delight, that they could not stop their vertiginous approach.

Isaac heard Derkhan shout a foul oath. Yagharek had leapt across the roof to her and flailed expertly with his whip, sending her attacker spinning. Isaac turned and fired at the falling figure, heard him grunt with pain as the bullet tore open the muscle of his shoulder.

The airships were almost overhead now. Derkhan was sitting back from the brink a little, blinking rapidly, her eyes fouled with clods of brickdust from where a bullet had shattered the wall beside her.

There were about five militia left on the roofs, and they were still coming, slow and stealthy.

A final insectile shadow swooped towards the roof from the south-east of the city. It looped in a long S-curve under the Spit Hearth skyrail and shot up again, riding the updrafts in the hot night, coming in towards the station.

“They’re all here,” whispered Isaac.

As he refilled his gun, spilling powder inexpertly about him, he looked up. His eyes widened: the first moth approached. It was a hundred feet above him and then sixty, then suddenly twenty and ten. He stared at it in awe. It seemed to move with no pace at all as time stretched out thin and very slow. Isaac saw the clutching half-simian paws and jagged tail, the enormous mouth and chattering teeth, eyesockets with their clumsy antennae stubs like fumbling maggots, a hundred extrusions of flesh that whiplashed and unfolded and pointed and snapped shut in a hundred mysterious motions . . . and the wings, those prodigious, untrustworthy, constantly altering wings, tides of weird colour drenching them and retreating like sudden squalls.

He watched the moth directly, ignoring the mirrors before his eyes. It had no time for him. It ignored him.

He was frozen for a long moment, in a terror of memories.

The slake-moth swept past him and a great backwash of air sent his hair and coat flailing.

The clutching multilimbed creature reached out, unrolled its enormous tongue, spat and chittered in obscene hunger. It landed on Andrej like some nightmare spirit, clutched him and sought desperately to drink.

As its tongue slid rapidly in and out of Andrej’s orifices, coating him in that thick citric saliva, another moth careened in on a trough of air, crashing into the first moth and fighting it for position on Andrej’s body.

The old man was twitching as his muscles fought to make sense of the slew of absurd stimuli engulfing them. The torrent of Weaver/ Council brainwaves blasted up and out of his skull.

The engine lying on the roofspace rattled. It grew dangerously hot as its pistons fought to retain control of the enormous wash of crisis energy. Rain spat and evaporated as it hit it.

As the third moth came in to land, the struggle to feed at the mouth of the font, at the pseudo-mind pouring from Andrej’s skull, continued. In an irritated convulsive motion, the first moth slapped the second a few feet away, where it licked eagerly at the back of Andrej’s head.

The first moth plunged its tongue into Andrej’s slavering mouth, then removed it with a sickening plop and sought another outflow. It found the little trumpet on Andrej’s helmet, from which the whole bursting wash of ever-increasing output poured. The moth slid its tongue into the opening and around dimensional corners into and out of the æther, rolling the sinuous organ around the multifarious planes of the flow.

It squealed in delight.

Its skull vibrated in its flesh. Gouts of the intense artificial mindwaves spurted down its throat and dripped invisibly from its mouth, a burning jet of intense, sweet thought-calories that poured and poured into the moth’s belly, more powerful, more concentrated than its day-to-day feed by a vast and increasing factor, an uncontrollable torrent of energy that raged through the slake-moth’s gullet and filled its stomach in seconds.

The moth could not break free. It locked in, gorged and fixated. It could sense danger, but it could not care, could not think of anything apart from the entrancing, inebriating flow of food that held it, that focused it. It was fixed with the mindless intent of a night insect battering itself against cracked glass to find a way in to a deadly flame.

The slake-moth immolated itself, immersed itself in the torrential blasts of power.

Its stomach swelled and chitin creaked. The massive wash of mental emanations overwhelmed it. The huge and skulking creature jerked once; its belly and skull burst with wet, explosive sounds.

Instantly it snapped back, dying quickly in two sprays of ichor and ragged skin, entrails and brainstuff bursting in curves from its massive injuries, oozing with undigested, indigestible mind-liquor.

It slumped dead across Andrej’s insensible form, twitching with spastic motion, dripping and broken.

Isaac bellowed with delight, a massive shout of astonished triumph. Andrej was briefly forgotten.

Derkhan and Yagharek turned quickly and stared at the dead moth.

“Yes!” shouted Derkhan exultantly, and Yagharek emitted the wordless ululating cry of a successful hunter. Below them, the militia paused. They could not see what had happened, and they were unnerved by the sudden shouts of triumph.

The second moth was scrambling over the body of its fallen sibling, licking and sucking. The crisis engine still sounded; Andrej still crawled in agony in the rain, unaware of what was happening. The slake-moth scrabbled for the continuing flow of bait.

The third moth arrived, sending rainwater spraying in the downdrafts from its ferociously beating wings. It paused for a fraction of a second, tasting the dead moth in the air, but the stench of those astonishing Weaver/Council waves was irresistible. It crawled through the sticky slick of the fallen moth’s bowels.

The other moth was quicker. It found the outflow pipe of the helmet and thrust its mouth into the funnel, its tongue anchoring it like some vampiric umbilical cord.

It gulped and sucked, hungry and exhilarated, drunk, burnt up with its desires.

It was captivated. It could not resist when the power of the food began to burn a hole in its stomach wall. It whined and puked, metadimensional globules of brainpattern travelling back up its gullet and meeting the torrent that it still sucked like nectar, converging in its throat and suffocating it, until the soft skin of its throat distended and split.

It began to bleed and die from the ragged tracheotomy, still drinking from the helmet and hastening its own death. The swell of energy was too much: it destroyed the moth as quickly and completely as its own unadulterated milk would a human. The slake-moth’s mind burst flatly like a great blood-blister.

It fell back, its tongue retracting sluggishly like old elastic.

Isaac roared again as the third moth kicked away the twitching corpse of its sisterbrother and fed.

The militia were breaching the last rise of rooftop before the plateau. Yagharek moved in a lethal dance, suddenly murderous. His whip slashed; officers stumbled and fell away, ducked out of sight, moved warily behind the chimneys.

Derkhan fired again, into the face of a militiaman who rose before her, but the main wad of powder in the shaft of her pistol did not properly ignite. She cursed and held the gun away from her at arm’s length, trying to keep it trained on the officer. He moved forward and the powder finally exploded, sending a ball over his head. He ducked and slipped to one foot on the frictionless roofspace.

Isaac pointed his gun and fired as the man fought to stand, sending a bullet into the back of his skull. The man jerked and his head battered against the ground. Isaac reached for his powder horn, then slid back. There was no time to reload, he realized. The last clutch of officers was vaulting towards him. They had been waiting for him to fire.

“Get back, Dee!” he yelled, and moved away from the edge.

Yagharek knocked one man down with a whipstrike at his legs, but he had to withdraw as the officers approached. Derkhan, Yagharek and Isaac moved back from the brink and looked desperately around for weapons.

Isaac stumbled on the segmented limb of a fallen moth. Behind him, the third moth was emitting little cries of greed as it drank. They fused into a single wail, an extended animal sound of delight or misery.

Isaac turned at the sound of the bleating and was caught in a moist detonation of flesh. Shredded innards slopped noisily over the roof, rendering it treacherous.

The third moth had succumbed.

Isaac stared at the dark, lolling shape, hard and variegated, as big as a bear. It was spreadeagled in a radial burst of limbs and bodyparts, dripping from its emptied-out thorax. The Weaver bent forward like a child and prodded the splayed exoskeleton with a tentative finger.

Andrej still moved, though his scissoring kicks were fitful. The moths had not drunk him, but the massive wash of artificial thoughts that bubbled up from the helmet. His mind still worked, bewildered and fearful and locked in the terrible feedback loop of the crisis engine. He was slowing down, his body collapsing under the extraordinary strain. His mouth worked in exaggerated yawns to clear itself of the thick, rotten-smelling saliva.

Directly above him, the final moth had spiralled into the fountain of energy from his helmet. Its wings were still, angled to control its fall, as it dropped like some murderous weapon out of the sky towards the tangled carnage. It bore down on the source of the feast, a clutch of arms and hands and hooks extended in frantic predation.

The militia lieutenant rose a foot or so over the grooved guttering at the edge of the plateau. He faltered and shouted something at his men—“. . . ing Weaver!”—then fired wildly at Isaac. Isaac leapt sideways, grunted in quick triumph when he realized that he was uninjured. He grabbed a spanner from the pile of tools by his foot and hurled it at the mirrored helmet.

Something rocked unsteadily in the air around Isaac. His gut tensed and fluttered. He looked around wildly.

Derkhan was moving backwards from the edge of the roof, her face creased with inarticulate horror. She was staring around her in inchoate fear. Yagharek was holding his left hand to his head, the long knife dangling uncertainly from his fingers. His right hand, his whip, was motionless.

The Weaver looked up and muttered.

There was a small round hole in Andrej’s chest where the officer’s bullet had caught him. Blood was welling out of it in lazy pulses, dribbling across his belly and saturating his filthy clothes. His face was white, his eyes closed.

Isaac shouted and rushed to him, held the old man’s hand.

The pattern of Andrej’s brainwaves faltered. The engines combining the Weaver’s and the Council’s exudations skittered uncertainly as their template, their reference, suddenly ebbed.

Andrej was tenacious. He was an old man whose body was collapsing under the oppressive weight of a rotting, wasting disease, whose mind was stiff with coagulated dream-emissions. But even with a bullet lodged under his heart and his lung haemorrhaging, it took him nearly ten seconds to die.

Isaac held Andrej as he breathed bloodily. The bulky helmet lolled absurdly on his head. Isaac clenched his teeth as the old man died. At the very end, in what might have been a twitch of dying nerves, Andrej tensed and clutched Isaac, hugging him back in what Isaac desperately wanted to be forgiveness.

I had to I’m sorry I’m sorry, he thought giddily.

Behind Isaac the Weaver still drew patterns in the spilt juices of the slake-moths. Yagharek and Derkhan were calling to Isaac, screaming at him, as the militia came over the edge of the roof.

One of the dirigibles had lowered itself now until it hung sixty or seventy feet over the flattened roofscape below. It loomed like a bloated shark. A tangle of ropes was spilling untidily through the darkness towards the great expanse of clay.

Andrej’s brain went out like a broken lamp.

A confused tangle of information weltered through the analytical engines.

Without Andrej’s mind as referent, the combination of the Weaver’s and the Construct Council’s waves became suddenly random, their proportions skewing and rolling unsteadily. They no longer modelled anything: they were just an untidy slosh of oscillating particles and waves.

The crisis was gone. The thickening mixture of mindwaves was no more than the sum of its parts, and it had stopped trying to be. The paradox, the tension, disappeared. The vast field of crisis energy evaporated.

The burning gears and motors of the crisis engine stuttered to an abrupt stop.

With a crushing implosive collapse, the enormous wash of mental energy was snuffed instantly out.

Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the militia for thirty feet around let out cries of pain. They felt as if they had walked from bright sunlight into a darkness so sudden and total it hurt them. They ached drably behind their eyes.

Isaac let Andrej’s body fall slowly to the wet ground.

In the wet heat a little way above the station, the last slake-moth eddied in confusion. It beat its wings in complex four-way patterns, sent coils of air in all directions. It hovered.

The rich trough of food, that unthinkable gush, was gone. The frenzy that had overtaken the moth, the terrible, uncompromising hunger, had gone.

It licked out and its antennae trembled. There were a handful of minds below it, but before it could attack the moth sensed the chaotic bubbling consciousness of the Weaver, and it remembered its agonizing battles and it screeched in fear and rage, stretching its neck back and baring its monstrous teeth.

And then the unmistakable taste of its own kind wafted up to it. It spun in shock as it tasted one, two, three dead siblings, all its siblings, every one of them, insides out, dead and crushed, spent.

The slake-moth was mad with grief. It keened in ultra-high frequencies and spun aerobatically, sending out little calls of sociality, echo-locating for other moths, fumbling through unclear layers of perception with its antennae and clutching empathically for any trace of an answer.

It was quite alone.

It rolled away from the roof of Perdido Street Station, away from that charnel-ground where its brothersisters lay burst, away from the memory of that impossible flavour, veering in terror away from The Crow and the Weaver’s claws and the fat dirigibles that stalked it, out of the shadow of the Spike towards the junction of the rivers.

The slake-moth fled in misery, searching for a place to rest.

Chapter Fifty-one

As the battered militia gathered themselves and began to peer, once more, over the edge of the roof at Isaac’s and Derkhan’s and Yagharek’s feet. They were wary now.

Three rapid bullets came flying down at them. One sent an officer flying without a word into the dark air beside the roof, to shatter a window four floors below with his weight. The other two buried themselves deep in the fabric of the bricks and stones, sending out wicked sprays of chips.

Isaac looked up. A dim figure was leaning out from a ledge twenty feet above them.

“It’s Half-a-Prayer again!” shouted Isaac. “How did he get there? What’s he doing?”

“Come on,” said Derkhan brusquely. “We have to go.”

The militia were still cowering just below them. Whenever an officer straightened up carefully and looked over the edge, Half-a-Prayer would send another bullet straight at him. He kept them caged in. One or two of them shot at him, but they were desultory, demoralized efforts.

Just beyond the rise of roofs and windows, unclear shapes were descending smoothly from the dirigible, sliding onto the slick surface below. They dangled loosely as they slipped through the air, attached by some hook on their armour. The ropes that held them uncoiled on smooth motors.

“He’s buying us some time, gods know why,” hissed Derkhan, stumbling over to Isaac and clutching at him. “He’s going to run out of bullets soon. These sods—” she waved vaguely at the half-hidden militia below them “—these are just the local flatfoots on roof-duty. Those bastards coming from the airships are going to be hardcore troops. We have to go.”

Isaac looked down and faltered towards the edge, but there were cowering militia visible on all sides. Bullets smacked down around Isaac as he moved. He yelled in fear, then realized that Half-a-Prayer was trying to clear the path before him.

It was no good, though. The militia were hunkering down and waiting.

“Fuck damn,” spat Isaac. He bent down and pulled a plug from Andrej’s helmet, disconnecting the Construct Council, which was still concertedly attempting to bypass the circuit-valve and gain control of the crisis engine. Isaac yanked the wire free, sending a damaging spasm of feedback and rerouted energy bolting down the line into the Council’s brain.

“Get this shit!” he hissed at Yagharek, and pointed at the engines that littered the roof, fouled with ichor and acid rain. The garuda dropped to one knee and scooped up the sack. “Weaver!” said Isaac urgently, and stumbled over to the enormous figure.

He kept looking back, over his shoulder, fearful of seeing some gung-ho militiaman reaching up to take a potshot. Over the rain, the sound of metallic crunching steps drew nearer on the roof below them in a pounding jog.

“Weaver!” Isaac clapped his hands in front of the extraordinary spider. The Weaver’s multifarious eyes slid up to meet him. The Weaver still wore the helmet that linked it to Andrej’s corpse. It was rubbing its hands in slake-moth viscera. Isaac looked down briefly at the pile of huge corpses. Their wings had faded to a pale, drab dun, without pattern or variation.

“Weaver, we need to go,” he whispered. The Weaver interrupted him.

. . . I TIRE AND GROW OLD AND COLD GRIMY LITTLING . . . the Weaver said quietly . . . YOU WORK WITH FINESSE I GRANT AND GIVE YOU BUT THIS SIPHONING OF PHANTASMS FROM MY SOLE SOUL LEAVES ME MELANCHOLIC SEE PATTERNS INHERE EVEN IN THESE THE VORACIOUS ONES PERHAPS I JUDGE QUICK AND SLICK TASTES FALTER AND ALTER AND I AM UNSURE . . . It raised a handful of glistening guts to Isaac’s eyes and began to pull them gently apart.

“Believe me, Weaver,” said Isaac urgently, “this was the right thing, we saved the city for you to . . . to judge, to weave . . . now that we’ve done this. But we need to go now, we need you to help us. Please . . . get us away from here . . .”

“Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “I don’t know who these swine are that are coming but . . . but they’re not militia.”

Isaac stole a glance out over the roofs. His eyes widened incredulously.

Stomping purposefully towards them was a battery of extraordinary metal soldiers. The light slid from them, illuminating their edges in cold flashes. They were sculpted in astonishing and frightening detail. Their arms and legs swung with great bursts of hydraulic power, pistons hissing as they stormed closer. Little glimmers of reflected light came from somewhere a little behind their heads.

“Who the fuck are those bastards?” said Isaac in a strangled voice.

The Weaver interrupted him. Its voice was suddenly loud again, purposeful.

. . . BY GOODNESS ME YOU CONVINCE . . . it said . . . LOOK AT THE INTRICATE SKEINS AND THREADLINES WE CORRECT WHERE THE DEADLINGS REAVED WE CAN RESHUFFLE AND SPIN AND FIX IT UP NICE . . . The Weaver bobbed excitedly up and down and stared at the dark sky. It plucked the helmet from its head in a smooth motion and threw it casually out into the night. Isaac did not hear it land. . . . IT RUNS AND HIDES ITS HIDE . . . it said . . . IT IS ROOTING FOR A NEST POOR FRIGHTENED MONSTER WE MUST CRUSH IT LIKE ITS BROTHERS BEFORE IT GNAWS HOLES IN THE SKY AND THE CITYWIDE COLOURFLOW COME AND LET US SLIDE DOWN LONG FISSURES IN THE WORLDWEB WHERE THE RENDER RUNS AND FIND ITS LAIR . . .

It staggered forward, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse. It opened its arms to Isaac like a loving parent, swept him quickly and effortlessly up. Isaac grimaced in fear as he was taken into its weird, cool embrace. Don’t cut me, he thought fervently, don’t slice me up!

The militia peered furtive and aghast over the roof at the sight. The enormous, towering spider stalked edgily this way and that, Isaac tucked lolling like some absurd, vast baby under its arm.

It moved with sure, fleeting motions across the sodden tar and clay. It could not be followed. It moved in and out of conventional space with motions too fast to see.

It stood before Yagharek. The garuda swung the sack of mechanical components that he had hastily gathered over onto his back. Yagharek delivered himself thankfully to the dancing mad god, throwing up his arms and clutching at the smooth waist between the Weaver’s head and abdomen . . . GRAB TIGHT LITTLE ONE WE MUST FIND A WAY AWAY . . . sang the Weaver.

The weird metallic troops were approaching the little elevation of flat land, their mechanical anatomy hissing with efficient energy. They swept past the lower militia, terrified junior officers who gazed up in astonishment at the human faces peering intently from the back of the iron warriors’ heads.

Derkhan looked round at the encroaching figures, then swallowed and walked quickly over to the Weaver, which stood with humanoid arms wide. Isaac and Yagharek were perched on its weapon arms, their legs scrabbling for purchase across its broad back.

“Don’t hurt me again,” whispered Derkhan, her hand flickering over the scabbed wound on the side of her face. She holstered her guns and raced across into the Weaver’s terrifying, cradling arms.

The second dirigible arrived at the roof of Perdido Street Station and threw out ropes for its troops to descend. Motley’s Remade squadron had reached the top of the rise of architecture and was vaulting over without pause. The militia gazed up at them, cowed. They did not understand what they were seeing.

The Remade breached the low rise of bricks without hesitation, only faltering when they saw the Weaver’s huge and skulking form scampering to and fro across the bricks, three figures jouncing like dolls on its back.

Motley’s troops stepped back towards the edge slowly, rain varnishing their impassive steel faces. Their heavy feet crushed the remnants of the engines that still lay split across the roof.

As they watched, the Weaver reached down and grasped hold of a quailing militiaman, who wailed in terror as he was dragged up by his head. The man flailed, but the Weaver pushed his arms away and cuddled him like a baby.

. . . OFF AND ON TO GO HUNTING WE WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE . . . whispered the Weaver to all present. It walked sideways off the edge of the roof, seemingly unencumbered, and disappeared.

For two or three seconds, only the rain sounded fitful and depressing on the roof. Then Half-a-Prayer let off a last volley of shots from above, sending the assembled men and Remade scattering. When they emerged carefully, there were no more attacks. Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone.

The Weaver and its companions had left no trail, and no trace.

The slake-moth tore through currents of air. It was frantic and afraid.

It sounded every so often, letting out a cry in a variety of sonic registers, but it was unanswered. It was miserable and confused.

And yet beneath it all, its infernal hunger was growing again. It was not free of its appetite.

Below it the Canker flowed through the city, its barges and pleasure boats little grubs of dirty light on the blackness. The slake-moth slowed and spiralled.

A line of filthy smoke was drawn slowly across the face of New Crobuzon, marking it like a stub of pencil, as a late train went east on the Dexter Line, through Gidd and Barguest Bridge, on over the water towards Lud Fallow and Sedim Junction.

The moth swept on over Ludmead, ducking low above the roofs of the university faculty, alighting briefly on the roof of the Magpie Cathedral in Saltbur, flitting away in a pang of hunger and lonely fear. It could not rest. It could not channel its rapacity to feed.

As it flew, the slake-moth recognized the configuration of light and darkness below it. It felt a sudden pull.

Behind the railway lines, rising from the shabby and decrepit architecture of Bonetown, the Ribs rose out into the night air in a colossal sweep and curve of ivory. They made memories eddy in the slake-moth’s head. It recalled the dubious influence of those old bones that had made Bonetown a fearful place, somewhere to be escaped, where air currents were unpredictable and noxious tides could pollute the æther. Distant images of days clamped still, being milked lasciviously, its glands sucked clean, a hazy sense of a suckling grub at its teat, but nothing being there . . . memories caught it up.

The moth was utterly cowed. It sought relief. It hankered for a nest, somewhere to lie still, recuperate. Somewhere familiar, where it could tend itself and be tended. In its misery, it remembered its captivity in a selective, twisted light. It had been fed and cleaned by careful tenders there in Bonetown. It had been a sanctuary.

Frightened and hungry and eager for relief, it conquered its fear of the Bonetown Ribs.

It set off southwards, licking its way through half-forgotten routes in the air, skirting the blistered bones, seeking out a dark building in a little alley, a bitumened terrace of unclear purpose, from where it had crawled weeks ago.

The slake-moth wheeled nervously over the dangerous city and headed for home.

Isaac felt as if he had been asleep for several days, and he stretched luxuriously, feeling his body slide uncomfortably forward and back.

He heard an appalling scream.

Isaac froze as memories came back to him in torrents, let him know how he had come to be there, held tight in the Weaver’s arms (he jerked and spasmed as he recalled it all).

The Weaver was stepping lightly over the worldweb, scuttling across metareal filaments connecting every moment to every other.

Isaac remembered the vertiginous pitch of his soul when he had seen the worldweb. He remembered a nausea that had wracked his existential being at the sight of that impossible vista. He struggled not to open his eyes.

He could hear the jabbering of Yagharek and Derkhan’s whispered curses. They came to him not as sounds but as intimations, floating fragments of silk that slipped into his skull and became clear to him. There was another voice, a jagged cacophony of bright fabric shrieking in terror.

He wondered who that might be.

The Weaver moved quickly across pitching threads alongside the damage and potentiality of damage that the slake-moth had wreaked, and might again. The Weaver disappeared into a hole, a dim funnel of connections that wound through the material of that complex dimension and

emerged again into the city.

Isaac felt air against his cheek, wood below him. He woke and opened his eyes.

His head hurt. He looked up. His neck wobbled as he adjusted to the weight of his helmet, still perched tight on his head, its mirrors miraculously unbroken.

He was lying in a shaft of moonlight in some dusty little attic. Sounds filtered into the space through the wooden floors and walls.

Derkhan and Yagharek were raising themselves slowly and carefully onto their elbows, shaking their heads. As Isaac watched, Derkhan reached up quickly and gently felt the sides of her head. Her remaining ear—and his, he quickly ascertained—was untouched.

The Weaver loomed in the corner of the room. It stepped forward slightly, and behind it, Isaac saw a militiaman. The officer seemed paralysed. He sat with his back against the wall, shaking quietly, his smooth faceplate skewwhiff and falling from his head. His rifle lay across his lap. Isaac’s eyes widened when he saw it.

It was glass. A perfect and useless model of a flintlock rifle rendered in glass.

. . . THIS WOULD BE HOMESTEAD FOR THE FLEETING WINGED ONE . . . crooned the Weaver. It sounded subdued again, as if its energy had ebbed from it during the journey through the planes of the web . . . SEE MY LOOKING-GLASS MAN MY PLAYMATE MY FRIENDLING . . . it whispered . . . HE AND ME SHALL WHILE TIME AWAY THIS IS THE RESTING PLACE OF THE VAMPIR MOTH THIS IS WHERE IT FOLDS ITS WINGS AND HIDES TO EAT AGAIN I WILL PLAY TIC-TAC-TOE AND BOXES WITH MY GLASS-GUNNER . . .

It stepped back into the corner of the room and set itself down suddenly with a jerk of its legs. One of its knife-hands flashed like elyctricity, moving with extraordinary speed, scoring a three-by-three grid onto the boards before the comatose officer’s lap.

The Weaver etched a cross into a corner square, then sat back and waited, whispering to itself.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek shuffled into the centre of the room.

“I thought it was going to get us away,” mumbled Isaac. “It’s followed the fucking moth . . . It’s here, somewhere . . .”

“We have to take it,” whispered Derkhan, her face set. “We’ve almost got them all. Let’s finish it.”

“With what?” hissed Isaac. “We’ve got our fucking helmets and that’s it. We’ve not got any weapons to face the likes of that thing . . . we don’t even know where we damn-well are . . .”

“We have to get the Weaver to help us,” said Derkhan.

But their attempts were quite fruitless. The gigantic spider ignored them utterly, wittering quietly to itself and waiting intently, as if waiting for the frozen militia officer to complete his move in tic-tac-toe. Isaac and the others entreated with the Weaver, begged it to help them, but they seemed suddenly invisible to it. They turned away in frustration.

“We have to go out there,” said Derkhan suddenly. Isaac met her eyes. Slowly, he nodded. He strode across to the window and peered out.

“I can’t tell where we are,” he said eventually. “It’s just streets.” He moved his head exaggeratedly from side to side, seeking some landmark. He re-entered the room eventually, shaking his head. “You’re right, Dee,” he said. “Maybe we’ll . . . find something . . . maybe we can get out of here.”

Yagharek moved without sound, stalking from the little room into a dimly lit corridor. He looked up and down its length, carefully.

The wall to his left slanted steeply in with the roof. To his right, the narrow passage was broken with two doors, before it curved away to the right and disappeared in shadows.

Yagharek kept crouched down. He beckoned slowly behind him, without looking, and Derkhan and Isaac emerged slowly. They carried their guns loaded with the last of their powder, damp and unreliable, aiming vaguely into the darkness.

They waited while Yagharek crept slowly on, then followed him in faltering, pugnacious steps.

Yagharek stopped by the first door and flattened his feathered head against it. He waited a moment, then pushed it open slowly, slowly. Derkhan and Isaac crept over, peered into an unlit storeroom.

“Is there anything in there we can use?” hissed Isaac, but the shelves were empty of everything except dry and dusty bottles, ancient decaying brushes.

When Yagharek reached the second door, he repeated the operation, waving at Isaac and Derkhan to be still and listening intently through the thin wood. This time he was still for much longer. The door was bolted several times, and Yagharek fumbled with all the simple slide-locks. There was a fat padlock, but it was resting open across one of the bolts, as if it had been left for a moment. Yagharek pushed slowly at the door. He poked his head through the resulting gap and stood like that, perched half in, half out of the room for a disconcertingly long time.

When he withdrew, he turned.

“Isaac,” he said quietly. “You must come.”

Isaac frowned and stepped forward, his heart beating hard in his chest.

What is it? he thought. What’s going on? (And even as he thought that a voice in the deepest part of his mind told him what was waiting for him, and he only half heard it, would not listen for fear that it was wrong.)

He pushed past Yagharek and walked hesitantly into the room.

It was a large, rectangular attic space, lit by three oil-lamps and the thin wisps of gaslight that found their way up from the street and through the grubby, sealed window. The floor was littered with a tangle of metal and discarded rubbish. The room stank.

Isaac was only fleetingly conscious of any of this.

In a dim corner, turned away from the door, kneeling up and chewing dutifully with her back and head and gland attached to an extraordinary twisted sculpture, was Lin.

Isaac cried out.

It was an animal wail, and it grew and grew in strength until Yagharek hissed at him, unheeded.

Lin turned with a start at the sound. She trembled when she saw him.

He stumbled over to her, weeping at the sight of her, at her russet skin and flexing headscarab; and as he approached he cried out again, this time in anguish, as he saw what had been done to her.

Her body was bruised and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

But it was her head, the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

Her wings had been taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation . . . Her carapace had been snapped and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath, which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on her left had been torn from their sockets.

Isaac fell forward and held her, closing her into him. She was so thin . . . so tiny and ragged and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be taken away as some new torture.

Isaac clutched her and cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her skin.

“I would have come,” he moaned in abject misery and joy. “I would’ve come, I thought you were dead . . .”

She pushed him back just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

Wanted you, love you, she signed chaotically, help me save me take me away, couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this . . .

For the first time, Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air that suggested a shoulder.

Isaac gasped at it, looked back at her.

Lemuel had been right. There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not have known that.

Motley could not bear for the sculpture to remain unfinished.

Derkhan and Yagharek entered. When she saw Lin, Derkhan cried out as Isaac had done. She ran across the room to where Isaac and Lin embraced and put her own arms around the two of them, crying and smiling.

Yagharek paced uneasily towards them.

Isaac was murmuring to Lin, telling her over and over how sorry he was, that he thought she was dead, that he would have come.

Kept me working, beating and . . . and torturing, taunting me, Lin signed, giddy and exhausted with emotion.

Yagharek was about to speak, but he snapped his head suddenly around.

The tramp of hurried feet was audible in the corridor outside.

Isaac stood, supporting Lin as he came, keeping her enfolded in his embrace. Derkhan moved away from the two of them. She drew her pistols and turned to face the door. Yagharek flattened himself against the wall in the shadow of the sculpture, his whip coiled and ready.

The door burst open and hammered against the wall, sprang back.

Motley stood before them.

He was silhouetted. Isaac saw a twisted outline against the black-painted walls of the corridor. A garden of multifarious limbs, a walking patchwork of organic forms. Isaac’s mouth dropped open in amazement. He realized as he watched the shuffling goat- and bird- and dog-footed creature, as he saw the clutching tentacles and knots of tissue, the composite bones and invented skin, that Lin’s piece was taken, without fancy, from life.

At the sight of him, Lin went limp with fear and the memory of pain. Isaac felt rage begin to engulf him.

Motley stepped back slightly and turned to face the way he had come.

“Security!” shouted Motley from some unclear mouth. “Get here now!” He stepped back into the room.

“Grimnebulin,” he said. His voice was quick and tense. “You came. Didn’t you get my message? Bit remiss, aren’t you?” Motley stepped into the room and the faint light.

Derkhan fired twice. Her bullets tore through Motley’s armoured skin and patches of fur. He staggered back on multiple legs with a bellow of pain. His cry became a vicious laugh.

“Far too many internal organs to hurt me, you useless slut,” he shouted. Derkhan spat with fury and edged closer to the wall.

Isaac stared at Motley, saw teeth gnashing in a multitude of mouths. The floor shook as people pounded along the corridor outside, racing towards the room.

Men appeared in the doorway behind Motley, waved weapons, waited uncertainly. For a moment Isaac’s stomach pitched: the men had no faces, only smooth skin stretched tight over their skulls. What kind of fucking Remades are these? he thought giddily. Then he caught sight of the mirrors extending backwards from the helmets.

His eyes widened as he realized that these were shaven-headed Remade with their heads turned one hundred and eighty degrees, specially and perfectly adapted to dealing with the slake-moths. They waited now for their boss’s orders, their muscular bodies facing Isaac, their heads turned permanently away.

One of Motley’s limbs—an ugly, segmented and suckered thing—shot out to indicate Lin.

“Finish your godsdamned job, you bugger bitch, or you know what you’ll get!” he shouted, and hobbled towards Lin and Isaac.

With an utterly bestial roar, Isaac pushed Lin to one side. A spray of chymical anguish burst from her. Her hands twisted as she begged him to stay with her, but he was launching himself at Motley in an agony of guilt and fury.

Motley shouted wordlessly, meeting Isaac’s challenge.

There was a sudden loud concussion. An explosion of glass scintillas sprayed across the room, leaving blood and curses.

Isaac froze in the centre of the room. Motley was frozen before him. The ranks of security were fumbling with their weapons, shouting orders at each other. Isaac looked up, into the mirrors before his eyes.

The last slake-moth stood behind him. It was framed in the ragged stubs of the window. Glass still dripped around it like viscous liquid.

Isaac gasped.

It was a huge, a terrifying presence. It stood, half crouched, a little way forward from the wall and the window-hole, various savage limbs clutching the floor. It was massive as a gorilla, a body of terrible solidity and intricate violence.

Its unthinkable wings were wide open. Patterns burst across them like negative fireworks.

Motley had been facing the great beast: his mind was captured. He gazed at the wings with an array of unblinking eyes. Behind him his troops were shouting in agitation, levelling weapons.

Yagharek and Derkhan had been standing with their backs to the wall. Isaac saw them in his mirrors behind the thing. The patterned sides of its wings were hidden from them: they were still with shock, but not in thrall.

Between the slake-moth and Isaac, sprawled on the boards where she had fallen in the ragged cascade of glass, was Lin.

“Lin!” shouted Isaac desperately. “Don’t turn round! Don’t look behind you! Come to me!”

Lin froze at his panicked tone. She saw him reach backwards in an appallingly clumsy gesture, step hesitatingly towards her without turning round.

She crawled slowly, very slowly, towards him.

Behind her, she heard a low, animal noise.

The slake-moth stood, pugnacious and uneasy. It could taste minds all around, moving on all sides, threatening and fearing it.

It was unsettled and nervous, still traumatized by the slaughter of its siblings. One of its spiny tentacles lashed the ground like a tail.

Before it, one mind was captive. But the moth’s wings were spread out wide and yet it had captured only one . . . ? It was confused. It faced the main mass of its enemies, it batted its wings at them hypnotically, trying to pull them under and send their dreams bubbling to the surface.

They remained resistant.

The slake-moth grew panicked.

The security behind Motley shifted in frustration. They tried to push past their boss, but he had frozen at the threshold to the room. His enormous body seemed fixed, his various legs planted hard on the ground. He gazed at the slake-moth wings in an intense trance.

There were five Remade behind him. They were poised. They were equipped specifically to defend against slake-moths, in case of escapes. In addition to small arms, three wielded flamethrowers; one a spray of femtocorrosive acid; one an elyctro-thaumaturgic barb-gun. They could see their quarry. But they could not get past their boss.

Motley’s men tried to aim their weapons around him, but his towering bulk occluded their line of fire. They shouted to each other and tried to devise strategies, but they could not. They gazed into their mirrors, watched the huge, predatory moth under Motley’s arms and limbs, through gaps in his outline. They were cowed by the monstrous sight.

Isaac stretched his arm back, reached for Derkhan.

“Come here, Lin,” he hissed, “and don’t look behind you.”

It was like some terrifying children’s game.

Yagharek and Derkhan shifted quietly, moving towards each other behind the moth. It chittered and looked up at their motion, but it remained more wary of the mass of figures before it, and it did not turn round.

Lin slid fitfully along the floor towards Isaac’s back, his clutching arms. A little way from him, she hesitated. She saw Motley, transfixed as if amazed, gazing past Isaac and over her, captivated by . . . something.

She did not know what was happening, what was behind her.

She knew nothing about the moths.

Isaac saw her hesitate, and began to howl at her not to stop.

Lin was an artist. She created with her touch and taste, making tactile objects. Visible objects. Sculpture to be fondled and seen.

She was fascinated by colour and light and shadow, by the interplay of shapes and lines, negative and positive spaces.

She had been locked in the attic for a long time.

In her position, some would have sabotaged the vast sculpture of Motley. The commission had become a sentence, after all. But Lin did not destroy it or skimp in her work. She poured everything she could, all her pent-up creative energy into that one monolithic and terrible piece. As Motley had known she would.

It had been her only escape. Her only means of expression. Starved of all the light and colour and shapeliness of the world, she had focused in her fear and pain and become obsessed. Creating a presence herself, the better to beguile her.

And now something extraordinary had entered her attic world.

She knew nothing of the slake-moths. The command don’t look behind you was familiar from fables, made sense only as a moralistic injuncture, some heavy-handed lesson. Isaac must mean be quick or don’t doubt me, something like that. His command made sense only as an emotional exhortation.

Lin was an artist. Savaged and tortured, confused by imprisonment and pain and degradation, Lin grasped only that something extraordinary, some utterly affecting sight had risen up behind her. And hungry for any kind of wonder after the weeks of pain in the shadow of those drab, colourless and shapeless walls, she paused, then quickly glanced behind her.

Isaac and Derkhan screamed in terrible disbelief; Yagharek called out with shock like some livid crow.

With her one good eye, Lin took in the extraordinary sweep of the slake-moth’s shape with awe; and then she caught sight of the gusting colours on the wings, and her mandibles clattered briefly and she was silent. Enthralled.

She squatted on the floor, her head twisted over her left shoulder, gazing stupidly at the great beast, at the rush of colours. Motley and she stared at the slake-moth’s wings, their minds overflowing.

Isaac howled and stumbled backwards, reaching out desperately.

The slake-moth reached out with a slithering clutch of tentacles and pulled Lin towards it. Its vast and dripping mouth slid open like a doorway into some stygian place. Rank citric spittle drooled across Lin’s face.

As Isaac grabbed backwards for her hand, staring intently into his mirrors, the slake-moth’s tongue lurched out of its stinking throat and lapped at her headscarab briefly. Isaac shouted again and again, but he could not stop it.

The long tongue, slippery with saliva, inveigled its way past Lin’s slack mouthparts and plunged into her head.

At the sound of Isaac’s appalled yells, two of the Remade trapped behind Motley’s enormous bulk reached over and fired erratically with their flintlocks. One missed completely, the other clipped the slake-moth’s thorax, eliciting a brief dollop of liquid and an irritated hiss, but no more. It was not the right weapon.

The two who had fired shouted at their fellows, and the small squadron began to shove at Motley’s bulk, in careful, timed thrusts.

Isaac was clutching for Lin’s hand.

The slake-moth’s throat swelled and shrank, its gristly throat swallowing in great swigs.

Yagharek reached down and grabbed the oil-lamp that stood by the foot of the sculpture. He hefted it briefly in his left hand, raised his whip in his right.

“Grab her, Isaac,” he called.

As the slake-moth clutched her thin body to its thorax, Isaac felt his fingers close around Lin’s wrist. He clenched hard, tried to pull her free. He wept and swore.

Yagharek hurled the lit oil-lamp against the back of the slake-moth’s head. The glass broke open and a little spray of incandescent oil spattered over the smooth skin. A burst of blue flame crawled across the dome of the skull.

The slake-moth squealed. A flurry of limbs whipped up to batter out the little fire as the slake-moth jerked its head back momentarily in pain. Instantly, Yagharek snapped his whip with a savage stroke. It smacked loud and dramatic against the dark skin. Coils of the thick leather wound almost instantly around the slake-moth’s neck.

Yagharek pulled hard and fast, with all his wiry strength. He drew the whip absolutely tight and braced himself.

The small fire kept stinging, burning tenaciously. The whip cut off the slake-moth’s throat. It could not swallow or breathe.

Its head lurched on its long neck. It emitted strangulated little cries. Its tongue swelled and it lashed it out of Lin’s mouth. The spurts of consciousness it had tried to drink clogged up in its throat. The moth clawed at the whip, frantic and terrified. It flailed and shook and spun.

Isaac hung on to Lin’s shrunken wrist, tugging at her as the moth twirled in a hideous dance. Its twitching limbs flew away from her, clutching vainly at the thong that choked it. Isaac pulled her clear, dropped to the floor and scrabbled away from the rampaging creature.

As it turned in its panic, its wings folded and it turned away from the door. Instantly, its hold on Motley was broken. Motley’s composite body stumbled forward and collapsed on the floor as his mind crawled back together. His men pushed over him, picking their way past a tangle of his legs into the room.

In a hideous drumming of feet the slake-moth spun. The whip was wrenched from Yagharek’s hands, tearing his skin. He staggered back, towards Derkhan, out of range of the slake-moth’s razored, spinning limbs.

Motley was standing. He stamped quickly away from the beast, passing back into the corridor.

“Kill the damn thing!” he shrieked.

The moth danced in a frenzy into the centre of the room. The five Remade stood in a little clutch around the door. They aimed through their mirrors.

Three jets of burning gas burst from the flamethrowers, scorching the vast creature’s skin. It tried to shriek as its wings and chitin roared and split and crisped, but the whip prevented it. A great gob of acid sprayed the twisting moth square in the face. It denatured the proteins and compounds of its hide in seconds, melting the moth’s exoskeleton.

The acid and the flame ate swiftly through the whip. Its remnants flew away from the spinning moth, which could finally breathe, and scream.

It shrieked in agony as fresh gouts of fire and acid caught it. It hurled itself blindly in the direction of its attackers.

Bolts of dark energy from the fifth man’s gun burst into it, dissipating across its surface area, numbing and scorching it without heat. It screeched again, but hurtled on, a sightless storm of flame, spitting acid and flailing ragged bone.

The five Remade moved back as it stumbled madly for them, following Motley into the corridor. The intense moving pyre slammed into the walls, igniting them, fumbling for the doorway.

From the little hallway, the sounds of fire, spewing acid and quarrels of elyctro-thaumaturgy continued.

For long seconds, Derkhan and Yagharek and Isaac stared up dumbfounded at the doorway. The moth still shrieked just out of sight, the corridor beyond was radiant with flickering light and heat.

Then Isaac blinked and stared down at Lin, who slumped in his embrace.

He hissed at her, shook her.

“Lin,” he whispered. “Lin . . . We’re leaving.”

Yagharek strode quickly over to the window and peered out over the street five floors below. Next to the window, a little jutting column of brick extended out from the wall, becoming a chimney. A drainpipe snaked up beside it. He stood quickly on the windowsill and reached up for the guttering, tugged it quickly. It was solid.

“Isaac, bring her here,” said Derkhan urgently. Isaac lifted Lin up, biting his lip at how light she was. He walked quickly with her to the window. As he watched her, his face suddenly broke into an incredulous, an ecstatic smile. He began to weep.

From the passage outside, the slake-moth keened weakly.

“Dee, look!” he hissed. Lin’s hands were fluttering erratically in front of her as he cradled her. “She’s signing! She’s going to be all right!”

Derkhan peered over, reading her words. Isaac watched, shook his head.

“She’s not conscious, it’s just random words, but, Dee, it’s words . . . We were in time . . .”

Derkhan smiled in delight. She kissed Isaac hard on the cheek, stroked Lin’s broken headscarab gently.

“Get her out of here,” she said quietly. Isaac peered out of the window, where Yagharek had wedged himself into a corner of architecture, on a little extrusion of brick a few feet away.

“Give her to me, and follow,” said Yagharek, jerking his head up above him. At the eastern end the long sloped roof of Motley’s terrace joined with the next street, which jutted perpendicularly south in a descending row of houses. The roofscape of Bonetown stretched out above and all around them; a raised landscape; linked islands of slate over the dangerous streets, extending for miles in the darkness, sweeping away from the Ribs to Mog Hill and beyond.

Even then, devoured alive by tides of fire and acid, stunned with bolts of obscure energy, the last slake-moth might have survived.

It was a creature of astonishing endurance. It could heal itself at frightening speeds.

If it had been in the open air, it could have leapt up and spread those terribly wounded wings and disappeared from the earth. It might have forced itself up, ignoring the pain, ignoring the scorched flakes of skin and chitin that would flutter around it filthily. It could have rolled into the wet clouds to douse the flames, wash itself free of acid.

If its family had survived, if it had been confident that it could return to its siblings, that they would hunt together again, it might not have panicked. If it had not witnessed a carnage of its kind, an impossible blast of poisonous vapour that enticed its brothersisters in and burst them, the moth would not have been insane with fear and anger, and it might not have become frenzied and lashed out, trapping itself further.

But it was alone. Trapped under brick, in a claustrophobic warren that constricted it, flattened its wings, left it nowhere to go. Assailed on all sides by murderous, endless pain. The fire came and came again too fast for it to heal.

It staggered the length of the corridor in Motley’s headquarters, a white-hot ball, reaching out to the last with ragged claws and spines, trying to hunt. It fell just before the top of the stairs.

Motley and the Remade looked on in awe from halfway down, praying that it lay still, that it did not crawl over the lip of the stairway and tumble flaming onto them.

It did not. It was still while it died.

When they were sure the slake-moth was dead, Motley sent men and women up and down the stairs in quick columns, carrying sodden towels and blankets to control the blaze it had left in its wake.

It took twenty minutes before the fire was subdued. The beams and boards of the attic were split and smoke-fouled. Massive footprints of charred wood and blistered paint stretched the length of the passage. The smouldering body of the moth rested on the top of the stairs, an unrecognizable pile of flesh and tissue, twisted by heat into an even more exotic shape than it had had in life.

“Grimnebulin and his bastard friends’ll be gone,” said Motley. “Find them. Find where they went. Track them down. Trace them. Tonight. Now.”

It was easy to see how they had escaped, out of the window and onto the roof. From there, though, they could have gone in almost any direction. Motley’s men shifted, looking uneasily at each other.

“Move, you Remade scum,” raged Motley. “Find them now, track them down and bring them to me.”

Terrified gangs of Remade, of humans, of cactacae and vodyanoi set out from Motley’s terrace-den, off into the city. They made pointless plans, compared notes, frantically raced down to Sunter, to Echomire and Ludmead, to Kelltree and Mog Hill, all the way to Badside, over the river to Brock Marsh, to West Gidd and Griss Fell and Murkside and Saltpetre.

They might have walked past Isaac and his companions a thousand times.

There was an infinity of holes in New Crobuzon. There were far more hiding places than there were people to hide. Motley’s troops never had a chance.

On nights like that one, when rain and streetlamp light made all the lines and edges of the city complex—a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers—it was an endless, recursive, secretive place.

Motley’s men made their way home empty-handed and afraid.

Motley raged and raged at the unfinished statue that taunted him, perfect and incomplete. His men searched the building, in case some clue had been missed.

In the last room on the attic corridor, they found a militiaman sitting with his back to the wall, comatose and alone. A bizarre, beautiful glass flintlock lay across his lap. A game of tic-tac-toe was scratched into the wood by his feet.

Crosses had won, in three moves.

We run and hide like hunted vermin, but it is with relief and joy.

We know that we have won.

Isaac carries Lin in his arms, sometimes hauling her over his shoulder apologetically when the way is tough. We race away. We run as if we are spirits. Weary and exhilarated. The shabby geography in the east of the city cannot restrain us. We clamber over low fences and into narrow swathes of backyards, rude gardens of mutant apple trees and wretched brambles, dubious compost, mud and broken toys.

Sometimes a shade will pass across Derkhan’s face and she will murmur something. She thinks of Andrej; but it is hard that night to retain guilt, even when it is deserved. There is a sombre moment, but under that spew of warm rain, above the city lights that bloom promiscuous as weeds, it is hard not to catch each other’s eyes and smile or caw softly in astonishment.

The moths are gone.

There have been terrible, terrible costs. There has been Hell to pay. But tonight as we settle in a rooftop shack in Pincod, beyond the reach of the skyrails, a little way north of the railway and the squalor of Dark Water Station, we are triumphant.

In the morning, the newspapers are full of dire warnings. The Quarrell and The Messenger both hint that severe measures are to come.

Derkhan sleeps for hours, then sits alone, her sadness and her guilt finally given space to flower. Lin moves fitfully, in and out of consciousness. Isaac dozes and eats the food we have stolen. He cradles Lin constantly. He talks of Jack Half-a-Prayer in wondering tones.

He sifts through the battered and broken components of the crisis engine, tuts and purses his lips. He tells me he can get it working again, no problem.

At that I come alive with longing. A final freedom. I want it badly. Flight.

He reads the pilfered papers over my shoulder.

In the climate of crisis, the militia are to be given extraordinary powers, we read. They may revert to open, uniformed patrols. Civilian rights may be curtailed. Martial law is mooted.

But throughout that blustery day, the shit, the filthy discharge, the dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through the æther and on into the earth. I fancy I can feel it as I lie under these dilapidated planks; it subsides gently around me, denatured by the daylight. It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension and away.

And when the night comes, the nightmares have gone.

It is as if some gentle sob, some mass exhalation of relief and languor sweeps the city. A wave of calm gusts in from the nightside, from the west, from Gallmarch and Smog Bend to Gross Coil, to Sheck and Brock Marsh, Ludmead and Mog Hill and Abrogate Green.

The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.

The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.

But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.

Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.

I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.

When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.

We have been freed.

This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.

We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.

We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.

But she does not.

That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.

But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.

She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.

She raises her hands and signs for him.

He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.

Derkhan’s eyes widen as she reads the words.

Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.

Morning . . . food . . . warming, he falters, insect . . . journey . . . happy.

She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.

He comforts her, holds the apple before her, helping her to bite, wiping her when she drips juice and residue across herself. Afraid, she signs, as Isaac hesitantly translates. Mind tiring spilling loose, art Motley! She shakes suddenly, peering around her in terror. Isaac shushes her, comforts her. Derkhan watches in misery. Alone, Lin signs desperately, and spews out a chymical message that is opaque to us all. Monster warm Remade . . . She looks around. Apple, she signs. Apple.

Isaac lifts it to her mouth and lets her feed. She jigs like a toddler.

When the evening comes and she falls asleep once more, quickly and deeply, Isaac and Derkhan confer, and Isaac begins to rage and shout, and to cry.

She’ll recover, he shouts, as Lin shifts in her sleep, she’s half-dead with fucking tiredness, she’s had the shit beaten out of her, it’s no wonder, no wonder she’s confused . . .

But she does not recover, as he knows she will not.

We ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone, burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men.

Lin wakes happy, talks animated gibberish with her hands, flails to stand and cannot, falls and weeps or laughs chymically, chatters with her mandibles, fouls herself like a baby.

Lin toddles across our roof with her half-mind. Helpless. Ruined. A weird patchwork of childish laughter and adult dreams, her speech extraordinary and incomprehensible, complex and violent and infantile.

Isaac is broken.

We move roofs, made uneasy by noises from below. Lin has a tantrum on our journey, made mad by our inability to understand her bizarre stream of words. She drums her heels on the pavement, slaps Isaac with weak strokes. She signs vile insults, tries to kick us away.

We control her, hold her tight, bundle her away.

We move by night. We are fearful of the militia and of Motley’s men. We watch out for constructs which might report to the Council. We watch carefully for sudden movements and suspicious glances. We cannot trust our neighbours. We must live in a hinterland of half darkness, isolated and solipsistic. We steal what we need, or buy from tiny late-night grocers miles from where we are settled. Every askance look, every gaze, every shout, sudden flurry of hooves or boots, every bang or hiss of a construct’s pistons is a moment of fear.

We are the most wanted in New Crobuzon. An honour, a dubious honour.

Lin wants colourberries.

Isaac interprets her motions thus. The faltering charade of chewing, the pulsing of her gland (an unsettling sexual sight).

Derkhan agrees to go. She loves Lin, too.

They spend hours on Derkhan’s disguise, with water and butter and soot, ragged clothes from all over, foodstuffs and the remnants of dyes. She emerges with sleek black hair that shines like coal-crystals and a puckered scar across her forehead. She holds herself hunched and scowls.

When she leaves, Isaac and I spend the hours waiting fearfully. We are almost totally silent.

Lin continues her idiot monologue, and Isaac tries to answer with his own hands, caressing her and signing slowly as if she were a child. But she is not: she is half an adult, and his manner enrages her. She tries to stalk away and falls, her limbs disobedient. She is terrified of her own body. Isaac helps her, sits her up and feeds her, massages her tense, bruised shoulders.

Derkhan returns to our muttered relief with slabs of paste and a large handful of variegated berries. Their tones are lush and vivid.

I thought the damn Council had us, she says. I thought some construct was after me. I had to wind through Kinken to get away.

None of us know if she was really being tracked.

Lin is excited. Her antennae and her headlegs quiver. She tries to chew a finger of the white paste, but she trembles and spills it and cannot control herself. Isaac is gentle with her. He pushes the paste slowly into her mouth, unobtrusive, as if she ate for herself.

It takes some minutes for the headscarab to digest the paste and direct it towards the khepri’s gland. As we wait, Isaac shakes a few colourberries at Lin, waiting until her twitches decide him that she wants a particular bunch, which he feeds to her gently and carefully.

We are silent. Lin swallows and chews carefully. We watch her.

Minutes pass and then her gland distends. We rock forward, eager to see what she will make.

She opens her gland-lips and pushes out a pellet of moist khepri-spit. She moves her arms in excitement as it oozes shapeless and sopping from her, dropping heavy to the floor like a white turd.

A thin drool of coloured spittle from the berries streams out after it, spattering and staining the mess.

Derkhan looks away. Isaac cries as I have never seen a human do.

Outside our foul shanty the city squats fatly in its freedom, brazen again and fearless. It ignores us. It is an ingrate. The days are cooler this week, a brief ebbing of the relentless summer. Gusts blow in from the coast, from the Gross Tar estuary and Iron Bay. Clutches of ships arrive every day. They queue in the river to the east, waiting to load and unload. Merchant ships from Kohnid and Tesh; explorers from the Firewater Straits; floating factories from Myrshock; privateers from Figh Vadiso, respectable and law-abiding so far from the open sea. Clouds scurry like bees before the sun. The city is raucous. It has forgotten. It has some vague notion that once its sleep was troubled: nothing more.

I can see the sky. There are slats of light between the rough boards that surround us. I would like very much to be away from this now. I can imagine the sensation of wind, the sudden heaviness of air below me. I would like to look down on this building and this street. I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.

Lin signs. Sticky fearful, whispers Isaac snottily, watching her hands. Piss and mother, food wings happy. Afraid. Afraid.

Part Eight:

Judgement

Chapter Fifty-two

“We have to leave.”

Derkhan spoke quickly. Isaac looked up at her dully. He was feeding Lin, who squirmed uncomfortably, unsure of what she wanted to do. She signed at him, her hands tracing words and then simply moving, tracing shapes that had no meaning. He flicked fruit detritus from her shirt.

He nodded and looked down. Derkhan continued as if he had disagreed with her, as if she were convincing him.

“Every time we move, we’re afraid.” She spoke quickly. Her face was hard. Terror, guilt, exhilaration and misery had scoured her. She was exhausted. “Every time any kind of automaton goes past, we think the Construct Council’s found us. Every man or woman or xenian makes us freeze up. Is it the militia? Is it one of Motley’s thugs?” She kneeled down. “I can’t live like this, ’Zaac,” she said. She looked down at Lin, smiled very slowly and closed her eyes. “We’ll take her away,” she whispered. “We can look after her. We’re finished here. It can’t be long before one of them finds us. I’m not waiting around for that.”

Isaac nodded again.

“I . . .” He thought carefully. He tried to organize his mind. “I’ve got . . . a commitment,” he said quietly.

He rubbed the flab below his chin. It itched as his stubble regrew, pushing through his uneven skin. Wind blew through the windows. The house in Pincod was tall and mouldering and full of junkies. Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek had claimed the top two floors. There was one window on each side, overlooking the street and the wretched little yard. Weeds had burst out through the stained concrete below like subcutaneous growths.

Isaac and the others barricaded the doors whenever they were in: slipped out carefully, disguised, mostly at night. Sometimes they would venture out in the daylight, as Yagharek had now. There was always some reason given, some urgency that meant the vague trip could not wait. It was just claustrophobia. They had freed the city: it was untenable that they should not walk under the sun.

“I know about the commitment,” Derkhan said. She looked over at the loosely connected components of the crisis engine. Isaac had cleaned them up the previous night, slotted them into place.

“Yagharek,” he said. “I owe him. I promised.”

Derkhan looked down and swallowed, then turned her head to him again. She nodded.

“How long?” she said. Isaac glanced up at her, broke her gaze and looked away. He shrugged briefly.

“Some of the wires are burnt out,” he said vaguely, and shifted Lin into a more comfortable position on his chest. “There was a shitload of feedback, melted right through some of the circuits. Um . . . I’m going to have to go out tonight and rummage around for a couple of adapters . . . and a dynamo. I can fix the rest of it myself,” he said, “but I’ll have to get the tools. Trouble is, every time we nick something we put ourselves even more at risk.” He shrugged slowly. There was nothing he could do. They had no money. “Then I have to get a cell-battery or something. But the hardest thing is going to be the maths. Fixing all this up is mostly just . . . mechanics. But even if I can get the engines to work, getting the sums right to . . . you know, formulating this in equations . . . that’s damn hard. That’s what I got the Council to do last time.” He closed his eyes and rested his head against the wall.

“I have to formulate the commands,” he said quietly. “Fly. That’s what I’ve got to tell it. Put Yag in the sky and he’s in crisis, he’s about to fall. Tap that and channel it, keep him in the air, keep him flying, keep him in crisis, so tap the energy and so on. It’s a perfect loop,” he said. “I think it’ll work. It’s just the maths . . .”

“How long?” Derkhan repeated quietly. Isaac frowned.

“A week . . . or two, maybe,” he admitted. “Maybe more.”

Derkhan shook her head. She said nothing.

“I owe him, Dee!” Isaac said, his voice tense. “I’ve promised him this for ages, and he . . .”

He got the slake-moth off Lin, he had been about to say, but something in him had preempted him, asked if that was such a good thing after all, and appalled, Isaac faltered into silence.

It’s the most powerful science for hundreds of years, he thought in a sudden rage, and I can’t come out of hiding. I have to . . . to spirit it away.

He stroked Lin’s carapace and she began to sign to him, mentioning fish and cold and sugar.

“I know, ’Zaac,” said Derkhan without anger. “I know. He’s . . . he deserves it. But we can’t wait that long. We have to go.”

I’ll do what I can, promised Isaac, I have to help him, I’ll be quick.

Derkhan accepted it. She had no choice. She would not leave him, or Lin. She did not blame him. She wanted him to honour his agreement, to give Yagharek what he wanted.

The stink and sadness of the damp little room overwhelmed her. She muttered something about scouting out the river and she left. Isaac smiled without warmth at her half-hearted excuse.

“Be careful,” he said unnecessarily as she left.

He lay cuddling Lin with his back to the foetid wall.

After a while he felt Lin relax into sleep. He slipped out from behind her and walked over to the window, looked out over the bustle below.

Isaac did not know the name of the street. It was wide, lined with young trees all pliant and hopeful. At the far end, a cart had been parked sideways, deliberately creating a cul-de-sac. A man and a vodyanoi were arguing ferociously beside it, while the two cowed donkeys drawing it hung their heads, trying not to be noticed. A group of children materialized in front of the motionless wheels, kicking a ball of tied rags. They scampered, their clothes flapping like flightless wings.

An argument broke out, four little boys prodding one of the two vodyanoi children in the group. The fat little vodyanoi backed away on all fours, crying. One of the boys threw a stone. The argument was forgotten quickly. The vodyanoi sulked a brief moment, then hopped back into the game, stealing the ball.

Further along the road, a few doors down from Isaac’s building, a young woman was chalking some symbol onto the wall. It was an unfamiliar, angular device, some witch’s talisman. Two old men sat together on a stoop, tossing dice and laughing uproariously at the results. The buildings were bird-limed and grotty, the tarred pavement punctuated with water-filled potholes. Rooks and pigeons threaded through smoke from thousands of chimneys.

Cuttings from conversations reached Isaac’s ears.

“. . . so he says a stiver for that? . . .”

“. . . damaged the engine, but then he was always a cunt . . .”

“. . . don’t say nothing about it . . .”

“. . . it’s on Dockday next, and she copped a total crystal . . .”

“. . . savage, absofuckinglutely savage . . .”

“. . . remembrance? For who?”

For Andrej, thought Isaac suddenly, without warning or reason. He listened again.

There was much more. There were languages he did not speak. He recognized Perrickish and Fellid, the intricate cadences of Low Cymek. And others.

He did not want to leave.

Isaac sighed and turned back into the room. Lin squirmed on the floor in sleep.

He looked at her, saw her breasts pushing at her torn shirt. Her skirt rode up her thighs. He looked away.

Since recovering Lin, twice he had woken with the warmth and pressure of her against him, his prick erect and eager. He had rubbed his hand over the swell of her hips and down into her parted legs. Sleep had rolled off him like fog as his arousal grew and he had opened his eyes to see her, moving her beneath him as she woke, forgetting that Derkhan and Yagharek were sleeping nearby. He had breathed at her and spoken lovingly and explicitly of what he wanted to do, and then he had jerked backwards in horror as she began to sign babble at him and he remembered what had happened to her.

She had rubbed against him and stopped, rubbed him again (like some capricious dog, he had thought, appalled), her erratic arousal and confusion absolutely clear. Some lustful part of him had wanted to continue, but the weight of sorrow had shrivelled his penis almost instantly.

Lin had seemed disappointed and hurt, then she hugged him, happily and suddenly. Then she curled up in despair. Isaac had tasted her emissions in the air around them. He had known she was crying herself to sleep.

Isaac glanced out at the day again. He thought of Rudgutter and his cronies; of the macabre Mr. Motley; he imagined the cold analysis of the Construct Council, cheated of the engine it coveted. He imagined the rages, the arguments, the orders given and received that week that cursed him.

Isaac walked over to the crisis engine, took brief stock of it. He sat down, folded paper in his lap, and began to write calculations.

He was not worried that the Construct Council might mimic his engine itself. It could not design one. It could not calculate its parameters. The blueprint had come to him in an intuitive leap so natural that he had not recognized it for hours. The Construct Council could not be inspired. Isaac’s fundamental model, the conceptual basis of the engine, he had never even had to write down. His notes would be quite opaque to any reader.

Isaac positioned himself so that he worked in a shaft of sunlight.

The grey dirigibles patrolled the air, as they did every day. They seemed uneasy.

It was a perfect day. The wind from the sea seemed constantly to renew the sky.

Yagharek and Derkhan, in separate quarters of the city, enjoyed their furtive times in the sun, and tried not to court danger. They walked away from arguments and stuck to the crowded streets.

The sky was riotous with birds and wyrmen. They flocked to buttresses and minarets, crowding the gently sloped roofs of militia towers and struts, coating them in white shit. They stormed in shifting spirals around the Ketch Heath towers and the skeletal edifices in Spatters.

They scudded over The Crow, wove intricately through the complex pattern of air that rose above Perdido Street Station. Rowdy jackdaws squabbled over the layers of clay. They flitted over the lower hulks of slate and tar at the station’s shabby rear, descending towards a peculiar plateau of concrete above a little brow of windowed roofs. Their droppings fouled its recently scrubbed surface, little pellets of white splattering against the dark stains where some noxious fluid had spilled copiously.

The Spike and the Parliament building swarmed with little avian bodies.

The Ribs bleached and split, their flaws worsening slowly in the sun. Birds alit briefly on the enormous shafts of bone, launching themselves free again quickly, seeking refuge elsewhere in Bonetown, skimming over the roof of a smoke-damaged black terrace, in the heart of which Mr. Motley ranted against the incomplete sculpture which mocked him with unending spite.

Gulls and gannets followed rubbish barges and fishing boats up along the Gross Tar and the Tar, swooping down to snatch organic morsels from the detritus. They wheeled away to other pickings, to the offal-piles in Badside, the fish market in Pelorus Fields. They landed briefly on the split, algaed cable that crawled out of the river by Spit Hearth. They explored the rubbish heaps in Stoneshell, and picked at half-dead prey crawling through the Griss Twist wasteland. The ground purred beneath them, as hidden cables hummed inches below the ragged topsoil.

A larger body than the birds rose up from the slums of St. Jabber’s Mound and soared into the air. It sailed at a massive height over the western city. The streets below became a mottled stain of khaki and grey like some exotic mould. It passed easily above the aerostats in the gusting breeze, warmed by the noon sun. It maintained a steady pace eastwards, crossing the city’s nucleus where the five rail lines burst out like petals.

In the air over Sheck, gangs of wyrmen looped the loop in vulgar aerobatics. The drifting figure passed over them serene and unnoticed.

It moved slowly, with langorous strokes that suggested it could increase its speed tenfold suddenly and with ease. It crossed the Canker and began a long descent, passing in and out of the air over the Dexter Line trains, riding their hot exhaust briefly, then gliding earthwards with unseen majesty, descending towards the canopy of roofs, weaving easily through the maze of the thermals gusting up from massive smokestacks and little hovels’ flues.

It banked towards the huge gas cylinders in Echomire, spiralled back easily, slipped under a layer of disturbed air and flew steeply down towards Mog Station, passing under the skyrails too fast to be seen, disappearing into the Pincod roofscape.

Isaac was not lost in his numbers.

He looked up every few minutes at Lin, who slept and moved her arms and wriggled like a helpless grub. His eyes looked as if they had never been lit up.

In the early afternoon, when he had worked for an hour, an hour and a half, he heard something clatter in the yard below. Half a minute later there were footsteps on the stairs.

Isaac froze and waited for them to stop, to disappear into one of the junkies’ rooms. They did not. They moved with a deliberate tread up the final two flights, making their careful way up the noisome steps and halting outside his door.

Isaac was still. His heart beat quickly in alarm. He looked around wildly for his gun.

There was a knock at the door. Isaac said nothing.

After a moment, whoever was outside knocked again: not hard, but rhythmically and insistently, repeatedly. Isaac stalked closer, trying to be quiet. He saw Lin twisting uncomfortably at the sound.

There was a voice outside the door, a weird, harsh, familiar voice. It was all grating treble, and Isaac could not understand it, but he reached out for the door suddenly, unsettled and aggressive and ready for trouble. Rudgutter would send a whole damn squadron, he thought as his hand closed on the handle, it’s bound to be some junkie begging. And although he did not believe that, he was reassured that it was not the militia, or Motley’s men.

He pulled the door open.

Standing before him on the unlit stairs, leaning slightly forward, sleek feathered head mottled like dry leaves, beak curved and glinting like an exotic weapon, was a garuda.

He saw instantly that it was not Yagharek.

Its wings rose up and swelled around it like a corona, vast and magnificent, feathered in ochre and smooth red-stained brown.

Isaac had forgotten what an uncrippled garuda looked like. He had forgotten the extraordinary scale and grandeur of those wings.

He understood what was happening almost immediately, in some inchoate and unstructured way. A wordless intimation hit him.

Following it by a fraction of a second came a massive gust of doubt and alarm and curiosity and a slew of questions.

“Who the fuck are you?” he breathed, and: “What are you fucking doing here? How did you find me . . . What . . .” Half-answers came unbidden to him. He stepped back from the threshold quickly, trying to banish them.

“Grim . . . neb . . . lin . . .” The garuda struggled with his name. It sounded as if he was a dæmon being invoked. Isaac jerked his arm quickly for the garuda to follow him into the little room. He closed the door and pushed the chair back up against it.

The garuda stalked into the centre of the room, into a sunlit patch. Isaac watched it warily. It wore a dusty loincloth and nothing more. Its skin was darker than Yagharek’s, its feathered head more mottled. It moved with incredible economy, tiny snapping movements and great stillness, its head cocked to take in the room.

It stared at Lin for a long time, until Isaac sighed and the garuda looked up at him.

“Who are you?” Isaac said. “How did you fucking find me?” What did he do? Isaac thought, but did not say. Tell me.

They stood, slim, tight-muscled garuda and fat, thickset human, at opposite ends of the room. The garuda’s feathers were shiny with sun. Isaac stared at them, suddenly tired. Some sense of inevitability, of finality, had entered with the garuda. Isaac hated it for that.

“I am Kar’uchai,” the garuda said. Its voice was harder even than Yagharek’s with Cymek intonations. It was difficult to understand. “Kar’uchai Sukhtu-h’k Vaijhin-khi-khi. Concrete Individual Kar’uchai Very Very Respected.”

Isaac waited.

“How did you find me?” he said eventually, bitterly.

“I have . . . come a long way, Grimneb . . . lin,” Kar’uchai said. “I am yahj’hur . . . hunter. I have hunted for days. Here I hunt with . . . gold and paper-money . . . My quarry leaves a trail of rumour . . . and memory.”

What did he do?

“I come from Cymek. I have hunted . . . since Cymek.”

“I can’t believe you found us,” said Isaac suddenly, nervously. He talked quickly, hating the pervasive sense of ending and ignoring it aggressively, blotting it. “If you did the damn militia can for sure and if they can . . .” He strode quickly back and forth. He knelt down by Lin, stroked her gently, drew breath to say more.

“I am come for justice,” said Kar’uchai, and Isaac could not speak. He felt suffocated.

“Shankell,” said Kar’uchai. “Meagre Sea. Myrshock.” I’ve heard about the journey, thought Isaac in anger, you don’t have to tell me. Kar’uchai continued. “I have . . . hunted across a thousand miles. Seek justice.”

Isaac spoke slowly, in rage and sadness.

“Yagharek is my friend,” he said.

Kar’uchai continued as if he had said nothing. “When we found that he was gone, after . . . judgement . . . I was chosen to come . . .”

“What do you want?” said Isaac. “What are you going to do to him? You want to take him back with you? You want to . . . what, cut off . . . more of him?”

“I have not come for Yagharek,” said Kar’uchai. “I have come for you.”

Isaac stared in miserable confusion.

“It is up to you . . . to let justice be . . .”

Kar’uchai was relentless. Isaac could say nothing.

What did he do?

“I heard your name first in Myrshock,” said Kar’uchai. “It was on a list. Then here, in this city, it came back again and again until . . . all others melted away. I hunted. Yagharek and you . . . were linked. People whispered . . . of your researches. Flying monsters and thaumaturgic machines. I knew that Yagharek had found what he sought. What he came a thousand miles for. You would deny justice, Grimneb’lin. I am here to ask you . . . not to do that.

“It was finished. He was judged and punished. And it was over. We did not think . . . we did not know that he might . . . find a way . . . that justice could be retracted.

“I am here to ask you not to help him fly.”

“Yagharek is my friend,” said Isaac steadily. “He came to me and employed me. He was generous. When things . . . went wrong . . . got complicated and dangerous . . . well, he was brave and he helped me—us. He’s been part of . . . of something extraordinary. And I owe him . . . a life.” He glanced at Lin and then away again. “I owe him . . . for the times . . . He was ready to die, you know? He could have died, but he stayed and without him . . . I don’t think I could have come through.”

Isaac spoke quietly. His words were sincere and affecting.

What did he do?

“What did he do?” said Isaac, defeated.

“He is guilty,” said Kar’uchai quietly, “of choice-theft in the second degree, with utter disrespect.”

“What does that mean?” shouted Isaac. “What did he do? What’s fucking choice-theft anyway? This means nothing to me.”

“It is the only crime we have, Grimneb’lin,” replied Kar’uchai in a harsh monotone. “To take the choice of another . . . to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to . . . for all we individuals to have . . . our choices.”

Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions . . . Talking and talking of individuals . . . but crushing them in layers and hierarchies . . . until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor.

“We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone . . . And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear.

“A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night . . . they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect.

“Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them.

“To kill . . . not in war or defence, but to . . . murder . . . is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment . . . but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices . . . if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew . . . and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft.

“That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.

“Yagharek’s was a heinous . . . a terrible forgetting. Theft in the second degree.”

“What did he do?” shouted Isaac, and Lin woke with a flutter of hands and a nervous twitching.

Kar’uchai spoke dispassionately.

“You would call it rape.”

Oh, I would call it rape, would I? thought Isaac in a molten, raging sneer; but the torrent of livid contempt was not enough to drown his horror.

I would call it rape.

Isaac could not but imagine. Immediately.

The act itself, of course, though that was a vague and nebulous brutality in his mind (did he beat her? Hold her down? Where was she? Did she curse and fight back?). What he saw most clearly, immediately, were all the vistas, the avenues of choice that Yagharek had stolen. Fleetingly, Isaac glimpsed the denied possibilities.

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then . . . what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?

The choice to look at Yagharek with respect?

Isaac’s mouth worked and Kar’uchai spoke again.

“It was my choice he stole.”

It took a few seconds, a ludicrously long time, for Isaac to understand what Kar’uchai meant. Then he gasped and stared at her, seeing for the first time the slight swell of her ornamental breasts, as useless as bird-of-paradise plumage. He struggled for something to say, but he did not know what he felt: there was nothing solid for words to express.

He murmured some appallingly loose apology, some solicitation.

“I thought you were . . . the garuda magister . . . or the militia, or something,” he said.

“We have none,” she replied.

“Yag . . . a fucking rapist,” he hissed, and she clucked.

“He stole choice,” she said flatly.

“He raped you,” he said, and instantly Kar’uchai clucked again.

“He stole my choice,” she said. She was not expanding on his words, Isaac realized: she was correcting him. “You cannot translate into your jurisprudence, Grimneb’lin,” she said. She seemed annoyed.

Isaac tried to speak, shook his head miserably, stared at her and again saw the crime committed, behind his eyes.

“You cannot translate, Grimneb’lin,” Kar’uchai repeated. “Stop. I can see . . . all the texts of your city’s laws and morals that I have read . . . in you.” Her tone sounded monotonous to him. The emotion in the pauses and cadences of her voice was opaque.

“I was not violated or ravaged, Grimneb’lin. I am not abused or defiled . . . or ravished or spoiled. You would call his actions rape, but I do not: that tells me nothing. He stole my choice, and that is why he was . . . judged. It was severe . . . the last sanction but one . . . There are many choice-thefts less heinous than his, and only a few more so . . . And there are others that are judged equal . . . many of those are actions utterly unlike Yagharek’s. Some, you would not deem crimes at all.

“The actions vary: the crime . . . is the theft of choice. Your magisters and laws . . . that sexualize and sacralize . . . for whom individuals are defined abstract . . . their matrix-nature ignored . . . where context is a distraction . . . cannot grasp that.

“Do not look at me with eyes reserved for victims . . . And when Yagharek returns . . . I ask you to observe our justice—Yagharek’s justice—not to impute your own.

“He stole choice, in the second highest degree. He was judged. The band voted. That is the end.”

Is it? thought Isaac. Is that enough? Is that the end?

Kar’uchai watched him struggle.

Lin called to Isaac, clapping her hands like a clumsy child. He knelt quickly and spoke to her. She signed anxiously at him and he signed back as if what she said made sense, as if they were conversing.

She was calmed, and she hugged him and looked nervously up at Kar’uchai with her unbroken compound eye.

“Will you observe our judgement?” said Kar’uchai quietly. Isaac looked at her quickly. He busied himself with Lin.

Kar’uchai was silent for a long time. When Isaac did not speak, she repeated her question. Isaac turned to her and shook his head, not in denial but confusion.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Please . . .”

He turned back to Lin, who slept. He slumped against her and rubbed his head.

After minutes of silence, Kar’uchai stopped her swift pacing and called his name.

He started as if he had forgotten she was there.

“I will leave. I ask you again. Please do not mock our justice. Please let our judgement be.” She moved the chair from the door and stalked out. Her taloned feet scratched at the old wood as she descended.

And Isaac sat and stroked Lin’s iridescent carapace—marbled now with stress-fractures and lines of cruelty—thinking about Yagharek.

Do not translate, Kar’uchai had said, but how could he not?

He thought of Kar’uchai’s wings shuddering with rage as she was pinioned by Yagharek’s arms. Or had he threatened with a knife? A weapon? A fucking whip?

Fuck them, he would think suddenly, staring at the crisis engine’s parts. I don’t owe their laws respect . . . Free the prisoners. That was what Runagate Rampant always said.

But the Cymek garuda did not live like the citizens of New Crobuzon. There were no magisters, Isaac remembered, no courts or punishment factories, no quarries and dumps to pack with Remade, no militia or politicians. Punishment was not doled out by backhanding bosses.

Or so he had been told. So he remembered. The band voted, Kar’uchai had said.

Was that true? Did that change things?

In New Crobuzon punishment was for someone. Some interest was served. Was that different in the Cymek? Did that make the crime more heinous?

Was a garuda rapist worse than a human one?

Who am I to judge? Isaac thought in sudden anger, and stormed towards his engine, picked up his calculations, ready to continue, but then, Who am I to judge? he thought, in sudden hollow uncertainty, the ground taken from under him, and he put his papers down slowly.

He kept glancing at Lin’s thighs. Her bruises had almost gone, but his memory of them was as savage a stain as they had been.

They had mottled her in suggestive patterns around her lower belly and inner thighs.

Lin shifted and woke and held him and shied away in fear and Isaac’s teeth set at the thought of what might have been done to her. He thought of Kar’uchai.

This is all wrong, he thought. That’s just exactly what she told you not to do. This isn’t about rape, she said . . .

But it was too hard. Isaac could not do it. If he thought of Yagharek he thought of Kar’uchai, and if he thought of her he thought of Lin.

This is all arse-side up, he thought.

If he took Kar’uchai at her word, he could not judge the punishment. He could not decide whether he respected garuda justice or not: he had no grounds at all, he knew nothing of the circumstances. So it was natural, surely, it was inevitable and healthy, that he should fall back on what he knew: his scepticism; the fact that Yagharek was his friend. Would he leave his friend flightless because he gave alien laws the benefit of the doubt?

He remembered Yagharek scaling the Glasshouse, fighting beside him against the militia.

He remembered Yagharek’s whip savaging the slake-moth, ensnaring it, freeing Lin.

But when he thought of Kar’uchai, and what had been done to her, he could not but think of that as rape. And he thought of Lin, and everything that might have been done to her, until he felt as if he would puke with anger.

He tried to extricate himself.

He tried to think himself away from the whole thing. He told himself desperately that to refuse his services would not imply judgement, that it would not mean he pretended knowledge of the facts, that it would simply be a way of saying, “This is beyond me, this is not my business.” But he could not convince himself.

He slumped and breathed a miserable moan of exhaustion. If he turned from Yagharek, he realized, no matter what he said, Isaac would feel himself to have judged, and to have found Yagharek wanting. And Isaac realized that he could not in conscience imply that, when he did not know the case.

But on the heels of that thought came another; a flipside, a counterpoint.

If withholding help implied negative judgement he could not make, thought Isaac, then helping, bestowing flight, would imply that Yagharek’s actions were acceptable.

And that, thought Isaac in cold distaste and fury, he would not do.

He folded his notes slowly, his half-finished equations, his scribbled formulae, and began to pack them away.

When Derkhan returned, the sun was low and the sky was blemished with blood-coloured clouds. She tapped the door in the quick rhythm they had agreed, bundling past Isaac when he opened it.

“It’s an amazing day,” she said with sadness. “I’ve been sniffing quietly all over the place, getting a few leads, a few ideas . . .” She turned to face him and was instantly quiet.

His dark, scarred face bore an extraordinary expression. Some complex composite of hope and excitement and terrible misery. He seemed to brim with energy. He shifted as if he crawled with ants. He wore his long beggar’s cloak. A sack sat beside the door, bulging with heavy, bulky contents. The crisis engine was gone, she realized, disassembled and hidden away in the sack.

Without the spread-out mess of metal and wire, the room seemed utterly bare.

With a little gasp, Derkhan saw that Isaac had wrapped up Lin in a foul, tattered blanket. Lin clutched at it fitfully and nervously, signing nonsense up at him. She saw Derkhan and jerked happily.

“Let’s go,” said Isaac in a hollow voice that strained with tension.

“What are you talking about?” said Derkhan angrily. “What are you talking about? Where’s Yagharek? What’s come over you?”

“Dee, please . . .” whispered Isaac. He took her hands. She reeled at his imploring fervour. “Yag’s still not come back. I’m leaving this for him,” he said, and plucked a letter from his pocket. He tossed it nervously into the centre of the floor. Derkhan began to speak again and Isaac cut her off, shaking his head violently.

“I’m not . . . I can’t . . . I don’t work for Yag no more, Dee . . . I’m terminating our contract . . . I’ll explain everything, I promise, but let’s go. You’re right, we’ve stayed much too long.” He flicked his hand at the window, where the evening sounded boisterous and easygoing. “The fucking government are after us, and the biggest damn gangster on the continent . . . And the . . . the Construct Council . . .” He shook her gently.

“Let’s go. The . . . the three of us. Let’s get out and away.”

“What happened, Isaac?” she demanded. She shook him back. “Tell me now.”

He looked away quickly, and back at her.

“I had a visitor . . .” She gasped and her eyes widened, but he shook his head slowly. “Dee . . . a visitor from the fucking Cymek.” He held her eyes and swallowed. “I know what Yagharek did, Dee.” He was quiet as her face rearranged itself into a cold calm. “I know what he got . . . punished for.

“There’s nothing holding us here, Dee. I’ll tell you everything—everything, I swear—but there’s nothing holding us here. I’ll tell you while we . . . while we go.”

For days he had been in an awful lassitude, distracted by crisis maths and utterly, exhaustingly despondent about Lin. Quite suddenly, the urgency of their situation had come home to him. He realized their danger. He understood how patient Derkhan had been, and he understood that they must leave.

“Godsdamnit,” she said quietly. “I know it’s only a few months, but he . . . he’s your friend. Isn’t he? We can’t just . . . can we just leave him . . . ?” She looked at him and her face creased. “Is it . . . what is it? Is it so terrible? Is it bad enough that it . . . that it cancels everything else out? Is it so terrible?” Isaac closed his eyes.

“No . . . yes. It’s not that simple. I’ll explain when we go.

“I’m not going to help him. That’s the bottom line. I can’t, I fucking can’t, Dee, I fucking can’t. And I can’t see him, I don’t want to see him. So there’s nothing here, so we can go.

“We really must go.”

Derkhan argued, but briefly and without conviction. She was gathering her tiny bag of clothes, her little notebook, even while she said she was not sure. She was caught up in Isaac’s wake.

She scrawled a tiny addendum to the back of Isaac’s note, without opening it. Good luck, she scribbled. We will meet again. Sorry to disappear so suddenly. You know how to get out of the city. You know what to do. She paused for quite a long time, unsure of how to say goodbye, and then wrote Derkhan. She replaced the letter.

She wrapped her scarf about her, let her new black hair slide like oil over her shoulders. It rubbed against the scab left by her ruined ear. She looked out of the window, to where the sky grew thick with evening, then turned and put her arm gently around Lin, helped her walk in her erratic fashion.

Slowly, the three of them descended.

“There’s a bunch of guys over in Smog Bend,” Derkhan said. “Bargemen. They can take us south without any questions.”

“Fuck, no!” hissed Isaac. He looked up from below his hood with wide eyes.

They stood at the end of the street, where the cart had acted as goal for the children hours before. The warm evening air was full of smells. There were loud disagreements and hysterical laughter from a parallel avenue. Grocers and housewives and steelwrights and minor criminals chatted on corners. The lights were emerging with the sputter of a hundred different fuels and currents. Flames in various colours sprang up behind frosted glass.

“Fuck no,” Isaac said again. “Not inland . . . Let’s go out . . . Let’s go to Kelltree. Let’s go to the docks.”

So they walked together slowly south and west. They skirted between Saltbur and Mog Hill, shuffling through the busy streets, an unlikely trio. A tall and bulky beggar with a hidden face, a striking crow-haired woman and a hooded cripple walking in unsteady spasming gait, half-supported and half-pulled by her companions.

Every steaming construct that walked past made them duck their heads uncomfortably away. Isaac and Derkhan kept their eyes down, talking quickly under their breath. They glanced up nervously as they passed below skyrails, as if the militia streaking above them could sniff them out from all that way above. They avoided catching the eyes of the men and women who lounged aggressively on street corners.

They felt as if they held their breath. An agonizing journey. They were tremulous with adrenalin.

They looked around them as they walked, taking in everything they could as if their eyes were cameras. Isaac snatched glimpses of opera posters curling ragged off walls, twists of barbed wire and concrete embedded with broken glass, the arches of the Kelltree rail-link that branched from the Dexter Line, hovering over Sunter and Bonetown.

He looked up at the Ribs that loomed colossal to his right, and he tried to remember their angles, exactly.

With every step they pulled themselves free of the city. They could feel its gravity receding. They felt light-headed. As if they might cry.

Unseen, just below the clouds, a shadow drifted lazily after them. It turned and spiralled as their course became clear. It swept giddily in a moment of lonely aerobatics. As Isaac and Lin and Derkhan continued, the figure broke off its circles and shot away at speed through the sky, heading out of the city.

Stars appeared and Isaac began to whisper goodbye to The Clock and Cockerel, to Aspic Bazaar and Ketch Heath and his friends.

It stayed warm as they made their way south, shadowing the trains, into a wide-open landscape of industrial estates. Weeds escaped from lots and encroached onto the pavement, tripping the pedestrians that still filled the night-city, making them swear. Isaac and Derkhan guided Lin carefully through the outskirts of Echomire and Kelltree, bearing south, the trains beside them, heading for the river.

The Gross Tar, shimmering prettily under the neon and the gaslight, its pollution obscured by reflections: and the docks full of tall ships with heavy furled sails and steamboats leaking iridescently into the water, merchant vessels drawn by bored seawyrms chewing on vast bridles, unsteady factory-freighters that bristled with cranes and steamhammers; ships for whom New Crobuzon was just one stop on a journey.

In the Cymek, we call the moon’s little satellites the mosquitoes. Here in New Crobuzon they call them her daughters.

The room is full of light from the moon and her daughters, and empty of all else.

I have stood here for a long time, Isaac’s letter in my hand.

In a moment, I will read it again.

I heard the emptiness of the decaying house from the stairs. The echoes receded for too long. I knew before I touched the door that the attic was deserted.

I was away for hours, seeking some spurious, faltering freedom in the city.

I wandered into the pretty gardens of Sobek Croix, through fussing clouds of insects and past the sculpted lakes of overfed fowl. I found the ruins of the monastery, the little shell displayed proudly at the park’s heart. Where romantic vandals carve their lovers’ names onto the ancient stone. The little keep was deserted a thousand years before New Crobuzon’s foundations were laid. The god to which it was consecrated died.

Some people come at night to honour the dead god’s ghost. What tenuous, desperate theology.

I visited Howl Barrow today. I saw Lichford. I stood before a grey wall in Barrackham, the crumbling skin of a dead factory, and read all the graffiti.

I was foolish. I took risks. Did not remain carefully hidden.

I felt almost drunk with that little snatch of freedom, eager for more.

So I returned at last through the night, to that hollow and forsaken attic, to Isaac’s brutal betrayal.

What breach of faith, what cruelty.

I open it once more (ignoring Derkhan’s pathetic little words, like some dusting of sugar on poison). The extraordinary tension in the words seems to make them crawl. I can see Isaac striving for so many things as he writes. Bluff no-nonsense. Anger, stern disapproval. True misery. Objectivism. And some weird comradeship, some shame-faced apology.

. . . had a visitor today . . . I read, and . . . under the circumstances . . .

Under the circumstances. Under the circumstances I will flee you. I will turn and judge you. I will leave you with your shame, I will know you from the inside and I will pass on and I will not help you.

. . . not going to ask you “how could you?” I read and I feel weak suddenly, truly weak, not as if I will faint or vomit but as if I will die.

It makes me cry out.

It makes me scream. I cannot stop this noise, I do not want to, I shriek and shriek and as my voice grows, memories of war-cries come to me, memories of my band racing in to hunt or fight, memories of funereal ululation and exorcism wails but this is none of these, this is my pain, unstructured, uncultured, unregulated and illicit and my own, my agony, my loneliness, my misery, my guilt.

She told me no, that Sazhin had asked for her that summer; that as it was his gathering-year she had said yes; that she wanted to pair exclusively as a present to him.

She told me I was unfair, that I should leave her immediately, respect her, show respect and leave her be.

It was an ugly, vicious coupling. I was only a little stronger than her. It took a long time to subdue her. She clawed and bit me every moment, battered me viciously. I was unrelenting.

I grew infuriated. Lustful and jealous. I beat her and entered her when she lay stunned.

Her anger was extraordinary and awesome. It woke me to what I had done.

Shame has draped me since that day. Remorse came only a little later. They gather about me as if to replace my wings.

The band’s vote was unanimous. I did not contest the facts (it entered my mind to do so for the briefest moment and a wave of self-loathing made me retch).

There could be no question about judgement.

I knew it was the correct decision. I could even show a little dignity, a tiny shred, as I walked between the elected finishers of the law. I was slow, shuffling with the enormous weight of ballast attached to me, to stop me fleeing and flying, but I walked on without pause or question.

It was only at the last that I faltered, when I saw the stakes that would tether me to the baked earth.

They had to drag me the last twenty feet, into the dried-up bed of the Ghost River. I twisted and fought at every step. I begged for mercy I did not deserve. We were half a mile from our encampment and I am sure that my band heard every scream.

I was stretched out cruciform, my belly in the dust and the sun driving upon me. I tugged at my bonds until my hands and feet were absolutely numb.

Five on each side, holding my wings. Holding my great wings tight as I thrashed and sought to beat them hard and viciously against my captors’ skulls. I looked up and saw the sawman, my cousin, red-feathered San’jhuarr.

Dust and sand and heat and the coursing wind in the channel. I remember them.

I remember the touch of the metal. The extraordinary sense of intrusion, the horrific in-out-in-out motion of the serrated blade. It fouled with my flesh many times, had to be withdrawn and wiped clean. I remember the breathtaking inrush of hot air on tissue laid bare, on nerves torn from their roots. The slow, slow, merciless cracking of bone. I remember the vomit that quenched my screams, briefly, before my mouth cleared and I drew breath and screamed again. Blood in frightening quantities. The sudden, giddying weightlessness as one wing was lifted away and the stubs of bone trembled shatteringly back into my flesh and ragged fringes of meat slithered from my wound and the agonizing pressure of clean cloth and unguents on my lacerations and the slow stalk of San’jhuarr around my head and the knowledge, the unbearable knowledge that it was all about to happen again.

I never questioned that I deserved the judgement. Even when I fled to find flight again. I was doubly ashamed. Crippled and shorn of respect for my choice-theft; I would add to that the shame of overturning a just punishment.

I could not live. I could not be earthbound. I was dead.

I put Isaac’s letter in my ragged clothes without reading his merciless, miserable farewell. I cannot say for sure that I despise him. I cannot say for sure I would do other than he has done.

I step out and down.

Some streets away in Saltbur, a fifteen-storey towerblock rises over the eastern city. The front door will not lock. It is easy to clamber over the gate that supposedly blocks access to the flat roof. I have climbed that edifice before.

It is a short walk. I feel as if I am sleeping. The citizens stare at me as I step past them. I am not wearing my hood. I cannot see that it matters.

No one stops me as I climb the huge building. On two levels, doors open very slightly as I walk past on the treacherous stairwell, and I am stared at by eyes too hidden in darkness for me to see. But I am not challenged, and within minutes I am on the roof.

One hundred and fifty feet or more. There are plenty of taller structures in New Crobuzon. But this is high enough that the block rears out of the streets and stone and brick like something enormous emerging from water.

I stalk past the rubble and the signs of bonfires, the detritus of intruders and squatters. I am alone in the skyline tonight.

The brick wall that contains the roofspace is five feet high. I lean on it and look out, to all sides.

I know what it is I see.

I can place myself exactly.

That is a glimpse of the Glasshouse dome, a smudge of dirty light between two gas towers. The clenching Ribs are only a mile away, dwarfing the railways and the stubby houses. Dark clutches of trees pepper the city. The lights, the lights of all the different colours, all around me.

I vault easily onto the wall, and stand.

I am on top of New Crobuzon now.

It is such an enormous thing. Such a great wallow. There is everything within it, spread out under my feet.

I can see the rivers. The Canker is about six minutes’ flying time away. I stretch out my arms.

The winds rush up to me and hammer me with joy. The air is boisterous and alive.

I close my eyes.

I can imagine it with absolute exactitude. A flight. To kick out with the legs and feel my wings grab the air and throw it easily earthward, scooping great chunks away from me like paddles. The hard slog into a thermal where the feathers plump and prime, spread out, drifting, easing, gliding up around in a spiral over this enormity below me. It is another city from above. The hidden gardens become spectacles to delight me. The dark bricks are something to shake off like mud. Every building becomes an eyrie. The whole of the city can be treated with disrespect, landing and alighting on a whim, soiling the air in passing.

From the air, in flight, from above, the government and militia are pompous termites, the squalor a dulled patch passing quickly away, the degradations that take place in the shadow of the architecture are none of my concern.

I feel the wind force my fingers apart. I am buffeted invitingly. I feel the twitching as my ragged flanges of wingbone stretch.

I will not do this any more. I will not be this cripple, this earthbound bird, any longer.

This half-life ends now, with my hope.

I can so well picture a last flight, a swift, elegant curving sweep through the air that parts like a lost lover to welcome me.

Let the wind take me.

I lean forward on the wall, out over the tumbling city, into the air.

Time is quite still. I am poised. There is no sound. The city and the air are poised.

And I reach up slowly and run my fingers through my feathers. Pushing them slowly aside as my skin bristles, rubbing them mercilessly the wrong way, against the grain. I open my eyes. My fingers close and clutch at the stiff shafts and oiled fibres on my cheeks and I snap my beak shut so I will not cry out, and I begin to pull.

And a long time later, hours later, in the deepest part of the night, I step back down through that pitch stairwell and emerge.

A single cab clatters quickly through the deserted street and then there is no sound. Across the cobbles, beige light drools down from a guttering gasjet.

A dark figure has been waiting for me. He steps into the little pool of light, and stands, his face shadowed. He waves slowly to me. There is a fractional moment when I think of all my enemies and wonder which this man is. Then I see the huge scissoring mantis limb with which he greets me.

I find that I am not surprised.

Jack Half-a-Prayer extends his Remade arm again and with a slow, portentous movement, he beckons me.

He invites me in. Into his city.

I step forward into what little light there is.

I do not see him start as I pass out of silhouette and he sees me.

I know how I must look.

My face a mass of raw and ragged flesh, bleeding copiously from a hundred little punctures where the feathers left my flesh. Tenacious fluffs of down that I have missed patch me like stubble. My eyes peer out from bald, pink, ruined skin, blistered and sickly. Trickles of blood draw paths along my skull.

My feet are constricted again by filthy strips of rag, their monstrous shape hidden. The fringes of feathers that segued into their scales are ripped clean. I walk gingerly, my groin as raw and newly plucked as my head.

I tried to break my beak, but I could not.

I stand before the building in my new flesh.

Half-a-Prayer pauses, but not for very long. With another languorous stroke, he repeats his invitation.

It is generous, but I must decline.

He offers me the half-world. He offers to share his bastard liminal life, his interstitial city. His obscure crusades and anarchic vengeance. His scorn for doors.

Escaped Remade, fReemade. Nothing. He does not fit in. He has wrested New Crobuzon into a new city, and he strives to save it from itself.

He sees another broken-down half-thing, another exhausted relic that he might convert to fight his unthinkable fight, another for whom existence in any world is impossible, a paradox, a bird that cannot fly. And he offers me a way out, into his uncommunity, his margin, his mongrel city. The violent and honourable place from where he rages.

He is generous, but I decline. That is not my city. Not my fight.

I must leave his half-breed world alone, his demimonde of weird resistance. I live in a simpler place.

He is mistaken.

I am not the earthbound garuda any more. That one is dead. This is a new life. I am not a half-thing, a failed neither-nor.

I have torn the misleading quills from my skin and made it smooth, and below that avian affectation, I am the same as my citizen fellows. I can live foresquare in one world.

I indicate him thanks and farewell and turn away, stepping off into the dim lamplight to the east, towards the university campus and Ludmead Station, through my world of bricks and mortar and tar, bazaars and markets, sulphur-lit streets. It is night and I must hurry to my bed, to find my bed, to find a bed in this my city where I can live my foresquare life.

I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.

I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.

CHINA MIÉVILLE (Norwich, England, 1972) lives and works in London. He has had short fiction published in the Neonlit and Britpulp! anthologies, and his first novel was King Rat.

Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to a fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a talented linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon.

For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactacae and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave.

Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission…

China Miéville

The Scar

Bas-Lag (EN) 2

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 21.03.2025

Original title: The Scar

China Miéville, 2002

Cover design: David Stevenson

Cover illustration: Ashley Wood

Digital editor: Titivillus

ePub base r2.1

To Claudia, my mother

Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me, a naked and vulnerable fact.

—Dambudzo Marechera, Black Sunlight

Acknowledgments

With deep love and thanks to Emma Bircham, again and always.

Huge gratitude to all at Macmillan and Del Rey, especially my editors, Peter Lavery and Chris Schluep. And as ever, more thanks than I can say to Mic Cheetham.

I’m indebted to everyone who read drafts and gave me advice: my mother, Claudia Lightfoot; my sister, Jemima Miéville; Max Schaefer; Farah Mendelsohn; Mark Bould; Oliver Cheetham; Andrew Butler; Mary Sandys; Nicholas Blake; Deanna Hoak; Jonathan Strahan; Colleen Lindsay; Kathleen O’Shea; and Simon Kavanagh. This would be a much poorer book without them.

A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.

It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete. But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land, and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.

The sea throngs.

There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them. Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock shelves and dropping into a zone below light.

There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from nightmares.

There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes, leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.

In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a few feet of warm, mineral-rich water into a cold which would kill them.

The landscape below the surface is one of mountains and canyons and forests, shifting dunes, ice caverns and graveyards. The water is dense with matter. Islands float impossibly in the deeps, caught on charmed tides. Some are the size of coffins, little slivers of flint and granite that refuse to sink. Others are gnarled rocks half a mile long, suspended thousands of feet down, moving on slow, arcane streams. There are communities on these unsinking lands: there are hidden kingdoms.

There is heroism and brute warfare on the ocean floor, unnoticed by land-dwellers. There are gods and catastrophes.

Intruding vessels pass between the sea and the air. Their shadows fleck the bottom where it is high enough for light to reach. The trading ships and cogs, the whaling boats pass over the rot of other craft. Sailors’ bodies fertilize the water. Scavenger fish feed on eyes and lips. There are jags in the coral architecture where masts and anchors have been reclaimed. Lost ships are mourned or forgotten, and the living floor of the sea takes them and hides them with barnacles, gives them as caves to morays and ratfish and cray outcastes; and other more savage things.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized.

They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

At the edges of the shelves of rock where cold, light water gives way to a creeping darkness, a he-cray scrambles. He sees prey, clicks and rattles deep in his throat while he slips the hood from his hunting squid and releases it.

It bolts from him, diving for the shoal of fat mackerel that boil and re-form like a cloud twenty feet above. Its foot-long tentacles open and whip closed again. The squid returns to its master, dragging a dying fish, and the school reknits behind it.

The cray slices the head and tail from the mackerel and slips the carcass into a net bag at his belt. The bloody head he gives his squid to gnaw.

The upper body of the cray, the soft, unarmored section, is sensitive to minute shifts of tide and temperature. He feels a prickling against his sallow skin as complex washes of water meet and interact. With an abrupt spasm the mackerel-cloud congeals and disappears over the crusted reef.

The cray raises his arm and calls his squid closer to him, soothes it gently. He fingers his harpoon.

He is standing on a granite ridge, where seaweed and ferns move against him, caressing his long underbelly. To his right, swells of porous stone rise above him. To the left the slope falls away fast into disphotic water. He can feel the chill emanating from below. He looks out into a steep gradation of blue. Way overhead, on the surface, there are ripples of light. Below him the rays peter swiftly out. He stands only a little way above the border of perpetual dark.

He treads carefully here, on the edge of the plateau. He often comes to hunt here, where prey are less careful, away from the lighter, warmer shallows. Sometimes big game rises curiously from the pitch, unused to his shrewd tactics and barbed spears. The cray shifts nervously in the current and stares out into the open sea. Sometimes it is not prey but predators that rise from the twilight zone.

Eddies of cold roll over him. Pebbles are dislodged around his feet and bounce slowly down the slope and out of sight. The cray braces himself on the slippery boulders.

Somewhere below him there is a soft percussion of rocks. A chill not carried by any current creeps across his skin. Stones are realigning, and a spill of thaumaturgic wash is spewing through new crevices.

Something baleful is emerging in the cold water, at the edge of the dark.

The cray hunter’s squid is beginning to panic, and when he releases it again, it jets instantly up the slope, toward the light. He peers back into the murk, looking for the source of the sound.

There is an ominous vibration. As he tries to see through water stained by dust and plankton, something moves. Way below, a plug of rock bigger than a man shudders. The cray bites his lip as the great irregular stone falls suddenly free and begins a grinding descent.

The thundering of its passage reverberates long after it has become invisible.

There is a pit in the slope now, that stains the sea with darkness. It is quiet and motionless for a time, and the cray fingers his spear with anxiety, clutching at it and hefting it and feeling himself tremble.

And then, softly, something colorless and cold slips from the hole.

It confuses the eye, flitting with a grotesque organic swiftness that seems to belie intention, like gore falling from a wound. The he-cray is quite still. His fear is intense.

Another shape emerges. Again he cannot make it out: it evades him; it is like a memory or an impression; it will not be specified. It is fast and corporeal and coldly terrifying.

There is another, and then more, until a constant quick stream dribbles from the darkness. The presences shift, not quite invisible, communing and dissipating, their movements opaque.

The he-cray is still. He can hear strange, whispering discourses on the tides.

His eyes widen as he glimpses massive backbent teeth, bodies pebbled with rucks. Sinuous muscled things fluttering in the freezing water.

The he-cray starts and steps backward, his feet skittering on sloping stone, trying to quiet himself but too slow—small shattered sounds emerging from him.

With a single motion, a lazy, predatory twitch, the dark things that huddle in council below him move. The he-cray sees the darks of a score of eyes, and he knows with a sick-making fear that they are watching.

And then with a monstrous grace, they rise, and are upon him.

Part One:

Channels

Chapter One

It is only ten miles beyond the city that the river loses its momentum, drooling into the brackish estuary that feeds Iron Bay.

The boats that make the eastward journey out of New Crobuzon enter a lower landscape. To the south there are huts and rotten little jetties, from where rural laborers fish to supplement monotonous diets. Their children wave at travelers, warily. Occasionally there is a knoll of rock or a small copse of darkwood trees, places that defy cultivation, but mostly the land is clear of stones.

From the decks, sailors can see over the fringe of hedgerow and trees and bramble to a tract of fields. This is the stubby end of the Grain Spiral, the long curl of farmland that feeds the city. Men and women can be seen among the crops, or plowing the black earth, or burning the stubble—depending on the season. Barges putter weirdly between fields, on canals hidden by banks of earth and vegetation. They go endlessly between the metropolis and the estates. They bring chymicals and fuel, stone and cement and luxuries to the country. They return to the city past acres of cultivation studded with hamlets, great houses, and mills, with sack upon sack of grain and meat.

The transport never stops. New Crobuzon is insatiable.

The north bank of the Gross Tar is wilder.

It is a long expanse of scrub and marsh. It stretches out for more than eighty miles, till the foothills and low mountains that creep at it from the west cover it completely. Ringed by the river, the mountains, and the sea, the rocky scrubland is an empty place. If there are inhabitants other than the birds, they stay out of sight.

Bellis Coldwine took her passage on an east-bound boat in the last quarter of the year, at a time of constant rain. The fields she saw were cold mud. The half-bare trees dripped. Their silhouettes looked wetly inked onto the clouds.

Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories. She could recall the formation of a flock of geese that passed over the boat, barking; the stench of sap and earth; the slate shade of the sky. She remembered searching the hedgerow with her eyes but seeing no one. Only threads of woodsmoke in the soaking air, and squat houses shuttered against weather.

The subdued movement of greenery in the wind.

She had stood on the deck enveloped in her shawl and watched and listened for children’s games or anglers, or for someone tending one of the battered kitchen gardens she saw. But she heard only feral birds. The only human forms she saw were scarecrows, their rudimentary features impassive.

It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.

And then they had snapped, and she had found herself catapulted here, now, alone and away from home.

Much later, when she was miles from everything she knew, Bellis would wake, astonished that it was not the city itself, her home for more than forty years, that she dreamed of. It was that little stretch of river, that weatherbeaten corridor of country that had surrounded her for less than half a day.

In a quiet stretch of water, a few hundred feet from the rocky shore of Iron Bay, three decrepit ships were moored. Their anchors were rooted deep in silt. The chains that attached them were scabbed with years of barnacles.

They were unseaworthy, smeared bitumen-black, with big wooden structures built precariously at the stern and bow. Their masts were stumps. Their chimneys were cold and crusted with old guano.

The ships were close together. They were ringed with buoys strung together with barbed chain, above and below the water. The three old vessels were enclosed in their own patch of sea, unmoved by any currents.

They drew the eye. They were watched.

In another ship some distance away, Bellis raised herself to her porthole and looked out at them, as she had done several times over the previous hours. She folded her arms tight below her breasts and bent forward toward the glass.

Her berth seemed quite still. The movement of the sea beneath her was slow and slight enough to be imperceptible.

The sky was flint-grey and sodden. The shoreline and the rock hills that ringed Iron Bay looked worn and very cold, patched with crabgrass and pale saline ferns.

Those wooden hulks on the water were the darkest things visible.

Bellis sat slowly back on her bunk and picked up her letter. It was written like a diary; lines or paragraphs separated by dates. As she read over what she had last written she opened a tin box of prerolled cigarillos and matches. She lit up and inhaled deeply, pulling a fountain pen from her pocket and adding several words in a terse hand before she breathed the smoke away.

Skullday 26th Rinden 1779. Aboard the Terpsichoria

It is nearly a week since we left the mooring in Tarmuth, and I am glad to have gone. It is an ugly, violent town.

I spent my nights in my lodgings, as advised, but my days were my own. I saw what there was to the place. It is ribbon-thin, a strip of industry that juts a mile or so north and south of the estuary, split by the water. Every day, the few thousand residents are joined by huge numbers who come from the city at dawn, making their way from New Crobuzon in boat- and cartloads to work. Every night the bars and bordellos are full of foreign sailors on brief shore leave.

Most reputable ships, I am told, travel the extra miles to New Crobuzon itself, to unload in the Kelltree docks. Tarmuth docks have not worked at more than half-capacity for two hundred years. It is only tramp steamers and freebooters that unload there—their cargoes will end up in the city just the same, but they have neither the time nor the money for the extra miles and the higher duty imposed by official channels.

There are always ships. Iron Bay is full of ships—breaking off from long journeys, sheltering from the sea. Merchant boats from Gnurr Kett and Khadoh and Shankell, on their way to or from New Crobuzon, moored near enough Tarmuth for their crews to relax. Sometimes, far out in the middle of the bay, I saw seawyrms released from the bridles of chariot-ships, playing and hunting.

The economy of Tarmuth is more than prostitution and piracy. The town is full of industrial yards and sidings. It lives as it has for centuries, on the building of ships. The shoreline is punctuated with scores of shipyards, building slipways like weird forests of vertical girders. In some loom ghostly half-completed vessels. The work is ceaseless, loud, and filthy.

The streets are crisscrossed with little private railways that take timber or fuel or whatever from one side of Tarmuth to the other. Each different company has built its own line to link its various concerns, and each is jealously guarded. The town is an idiotic tangle of railways, all replicating each other’s journeys.

I don’t know if you know this. I don’t know if you have visited this town.

The people here have an ambivalent relationship with New Crobuzon. Tarmuth could not exist a solitary day without the patronage of the capital. They know it and resent it. Their surly independence is an affectation.

I had to stay there almost three weeks. The captain of the Terpsichoria was shocked when I told him I would join him in Tarmuth itself, rather than sailing with him from New Crobuzon, but I insisted, as I had to. My position on this ship was conditional on a knowledge of Salkrikaltor Cray, which I falsely claimed. I had less than a month until we sailed, to make my lie a truth.

I made arrangements. I spent my days in Tarmuth in the company of one Marikkatch, an elderly he-cray who had agreed to act as my tutor. Every day I would walk to the salt canals of the cray quarter. I would sit on the low balcony that circled his room, and he would settle his armored underbody on some submerged furnishing and scratch and twitch his scrawny human chest, haranguing me from the water.

It was hard. He does not read. He is not a trained teacher. He stays in the town only because some accident or predator has maimed him, tearing off all but one leg from his left side, so that he can no longer hunt even the sluggish fish of Iron Bay. It might make a better story to claim that I had affection for him, that he is a lovable, cantankerous old gentleman, but he is a shit and a bore. I could make no complaints, however. I had no choice but to concentrate, to effect a few focus hexes, will myself into the language trance (and oh! how hard that was! I have left it so long my mind has grown fat and disgusting!) and drink in every word he gave me.

It was hurried and unsystematic—it was a mess, a bloody mess—but by the time the Terpsichoria tied up in the harbor I had a working understanding of his clicking tongue.

I left the embittered old bastard to his stagnant water, quit my lodgings there, and came to my cabin—this cabin from where I write.

We sailed away from Tarmuth port on the morning of Dustday, heading slowly toward the deserted southern shores of Iron Bay, twenty miles from town. In careful formation at strategic points around the edge of the bay, in quiet spots by rugged land and pine forests, I spotted ships. No one will speak of them. I know they are the ships of the New Crobuzon government. Privateers and others.

It is now Skullday.

On Chainday I was able to persuade the captain to let me disembark, and I spent the morning on the shore. Iron Bay is drab, but anything is better than the damned ship. I am beginning to doubt that it is an improvement on Tarmuth. I am driven to bedlam by the incessant, moronic slap of waves.

Two taciturn crewmen rowed me ashore, watching without pity as I stepped over the edge of the little boat and walked the last few feet through freezing surf. My boots are still stiff and salt-stained.

I sat on the pebbles and threw stones into the water. I read some of the long, bad novel I found on board. I watched the ship. It is moored close to the prisons, so that our captain can easily entertain and converse with the lieutenant-gaolers. I watched the prison-ships themselves. There was no movement from their decks, from behind their portholes. There is never any movement.

I swear, I do not know if I can do this. I miss you, and New Crobuzon.

I remember my journey.

It is hard to believe that it is only ten miles from the city to the godsforsaken sea.

There was a knocking at the door of the tiny cabin. Bellis’ lips pursed, and she waved her sheaf of paper to dry it. Unhurriedly she folded it and replaced it in the chest containing her belongings. She drew her knees up a little higher and played with her pen, watching as the door opened.

A nun stood in the threshold, her arms braced at either side of the doorway.

“Miss Coldwine,” she said uncertainly. “May I come in?”

“It’s your cabin too, Sister,” said Bellis quietly. Her pen spun over and around her thumb. It was a neurotic little trick she had perfected at university.

Sister Meriope shuffled forward a little and sat on the solitary chair. She smoothed her dark russet habit around her, fiddled with her wimple.

“It has been some days now since we became cabin-mates, Miss Coldwine,” Sister Meriope began, “and I do not feel . . . as if I yet know you at all. And this is not a situation I would wish to continue. As we are to be traveling and living together for many weeks . . . some companionship, some closeness, could only make those days easier . . .” Her voice failed, and she knotted her hands.

Bellis watched her, unmoving. Despite herself, she felt a trickle of contemptuous pity. She could imagine herself as Sister Meriope must see her: Angular, harsh, and bone-thin. Pale. Lips and hair stained the cold purple of bruises. Tall and unforgiving.

You don’t feel as if you know me, Sister, she thought, because I haven’t spoken twenty words to you in a week, and I don’t look at you unless you speak to me, and then I stare you down. She sighed. Meriope was crippled by her calling. Bellis could imagine her writing in her journal “Miss Coldwine is quiet, yet I know that I shall come to love her like a sister.” I am not, thought Bellis, getting involved with you. I will not become your sounding board. I will not redeem you of whatever tawdry tragedy brings you here.

Bellis eyed Sister Meriope and did not speak.

When she had first introduced herself, Meriope had claimed that she was traveling to the colonies to establish a church, to proselytize, for the glory of Darioch and Jabber. She had said it with a small sniff and a furtive look, idiotically unconvincing. Bellis did not know why Meriope was being sent to Nova Esperium, but it must have to do with some misfortune or disgrace, the transgression of some idiotic nunnish vow.

She glanced at Meriope’s midriff, looking for swelling under those forgiving robes. That would be the most likely explanation. The Daughters of Darioch were supposed to forego sensual pleasures.

I will not serve as replacement confessor for you, thought Bellis. I have my own bloody exile to work out.

“Sister,” she said, “I’m afraid you catch me at work. I have no time for pleasantries, I regret to say. Perhaps another time.” She was irritated with herself for that last tiny concession, but it had no effect, anyway. Meriope was broken.

“The captain wishes to see you,” the nun said, muffled and forlorn. “His cabin, at six o’clock.” She shuffled out of the door like a bullied dog.

Bellis sighed and swore quietly. She lit another cigarillo and smoked it right through, pinching the skin above her nose hard, before pulling out her letter again.

“I will go bloody mad,” she scribbled quickly, “if this damned nun does not stop fawning and leave me alone. Gods preserve me. Gods rot this damned boat.”

It was dark when Bellis obeyed the captain’s summons.

His cabin was his office. It was small, and pleasantly outfitted in dark wood and brass. There were a few pictures and prints on the walls, and Bellis glanced at them and knew that they were not the captain’s, that they came with the ship.

Captain Myzovic gestured her to sit.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said as she settled herself. “I hope your quarters are satisfactory. Your food? The crew? Good good.” He looked down briefly at the papers on his desk. “I wanted to raise a couple of issues with you, Miss Coldwine,” he said, and sat back.

She waited, staring at him. He was a hard-faced, handsome man in his fifties. His uniform was clean and pressed, which not all captains’ were. Bellis did not know whether it would be to her advantage to meet his eyes calmly or demurely to look away.

“Miss Coldwine, we haven’t spoken very much about your duties,” he said quietly. “I will do you the courtesy, of course, of treating you like a lady. I must tell you I’m not used to hiring those of your sex, and had the Esperium authorities not been impressed by your records and references, I can assure you . . .” He let the sentence dissipate.

“I have no wish to make you feel uncomfortable. You’re berthing in the passengers’ quarters. You’re eating in the passenger mess. However, as you know, you are not a paying passenger. You are an employee. You have been taken on by the agents of the Nova Esperium colony, and for the duration of this journey I am their representative. And while that makes little difference to Sister Meriope and Dr. Tearfly and the others, to you . . . it means I am your employer.

“Of course you are not crew,” he continued. “I would not order you as I order them. If you prefer, I would only request your services. But I must insist that such requests are obeyed.”

They studied each other.

“Now,” he said, his tone relaxing a little, “I don’t foresee any onerous demands. Most of the crew are from New Crobuzon or the Grain Spiral, and those that aren’t speak perfectly good Ragamoll. It’s in Salkrikaltor that I’ll first need you, and we’ll not be there for a good week or more, so you’ve plenty of time to relax, to meet the other passengers. We sail tomorrow morning, early. We’ll be away by the time you’re up, I shouldn’t doubt.”

“Tomorrow?” Bellis said. It was the first word she had spoken since entering.

The captain looked at her sharply. “Yes. Is there a problem?”

“Originally,” she said without inflection, “you told me we would sail on Dustday, Captain.”

“I did, Miss Coldwine, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ve finished my paperwork a deal quicker than I expected, and my brother officers are ready to transfer their inmates tonight. We sail tomorrow.”

“I had hoped to return to town, to send a letter,” Bellis said. She kept her voice level. “An important letter to a friend in New Crobuzon.”

“Out of the question,” the captain said. “It cannot be done. I’ll not waste any more days here.”

Bellis sat still. She was not intimidated by this man, but she had no power over him, none at all. She tried to work out what was most likely to engage his sympathy, make him acquiesce.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said suddenly, and to her surprise his voice was a little gentler. “I am afraid the matter is in motion. If you wish I can give your letter to Lieutenant-Gaoler Catarrs, but I cannot in truth recommend that as entirely reliable. You’ll have the opportunity to deliver your message in Salkrikaltor. Even if there are no New Crobuzon ships docking there, there is a warehouse, to which all our captains have the keys, for access to information, spare cargo, and mail. Leave your letter there. It’ll be picked up by the next home-bound ship. It won’t be much delayed.

“You can learn from this, Miss Coldwine,” he added. “At sea, you can’t waste time. Remember that: don’t wait.”

Bellis sat on a little longer, but there was nothing at all that she could do, so she thinned her lips and left.

She stood for a long time under Iron Bay’s cold sky. The stars were invisible; the moon and its daughters, its two little satellites, were unclear. Bellis walked, tense against the chill, and climbed the short ladder to the ship’s raised front, heading for the bowsprit.

Bellis held on to the iron railings and stood on the tips of her toes. She could just see out, across the lightless sea.

Behind her the sounds of the crew faded. A way off, she could see two guttering red pins of light: a torch on the bridge of a prison-ship, and its twin in the black surf.

From the crow’s nest, or from somewhere in the rigging, from some indistinct spot a hundred feet or more above her, Bellis heard a strain of mouth-music. It was not like the imbecilic shanties she had heard in Tarmuth. It was slow and complex.

You will have to wait for your letter, Bellis mouthed silently across the water. You will have to wait to hear from me. You’ll have to wait a little while longer, until cray-country.

She watched the night until the last lines of division between shore, sea, and sky were obscured. Then, cosseted by darkness, she walked slowly aft, toward the constricted doorways and stooped passages leading to her cabin, a scrap of space like a flaw in the ship’s design.

(Later the ship moved uneasily, in the coldest hour, and she stirred in her bunk and she pulled the blanket up to her neck, and she realized somewhere below her dreams that the living cargo was coming aboard.)

I am tired here in the dark and I am full of pus.

My skin’s taut with it, stretched till it puckers nor can I touch it without it rages. I’m infected. I hurt where I touch and I touch everywhere to make sure that I hurt that I’m not yet numb.

But still thank whatever makes these veins mine I’m full of blood. I worry my scabs and they brim I brim with it. And that’s a small comfort nor mind the pain.

They come for us when the air’s so still and black without not a seabird cries. They open our doors and shine lights, uncovering us. I am almost ashamed to see how we have surrendered, we’ve surrendered up to filth.

I can see nothing beyond their lights.

Where we lie together they beat us apart, and I wrap my arms around the spastic matter that twitches in my midriff as they begin to herd us.

We wind through tarry passages and engine chambers and I’m all cold to know what this is for. And I’m more eager, I’m quicker than some of the old ones bent double coughing and spewing and afraid to move.

And then there’s a swallowing up, I’m eaten up by the cold gulped down by darkness and gods fuck me blind we are outside.

Outside.

I’m dumb with it. I’m dumb with wonder.

It has been a long time.

We huddle together, each against the next man like troglodytes like myopic trow. They’re cowed by it the old ones, by the lack of walls and edges and the movement of the cold, by water and air.

I might cry gods help me. I might.

All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds.

Bugger me I’m crooning like I soothe a baby. That’s for me that coddling noise.

And then they push us on like livestock shuffling rattling chains, dripping farting muttering astonished, across the deck crippled under the weight of bodies and fetters, to a swaying rope bridge. And they hurry us along and over it, all our number, and each man pauses a moment in the middle of the low-slung passage between vessels, their thoughts visible and bright like a chymical burst.

They consider leaping.

Into the water of the bay.

But the rope walls around the bridge are high and there’s barbed wire hemming us in and our poor bodies are sore and weak and each man falters, and continues, and crosses the water to a new ship.

I pause like the others in my turn. Like them I’m too afraid.

And then there’s a new deck underfoot, scrubbed iron smooth and clean, vibrating from engines, and more corridors and clattering keys and after all another long unlit room where we collapse exhausted and changed over and raise ourselves slowly to see who our new neighbors are. Around me begin the hissed arguments and bickerings and fights and seductions and rapes that make up our politics. New alliances are formed. New hierarchies.

I sit apart for a while, in the shadows.

I’m still caught in that moment when I entered the night. It’s like amber. I’m a grub in amber. It snares me and damn but it does it makes me beautiful.

I’ve a new home now. I’ll live in that moment as long as I can, till the memories decay and then I’ll come out, I’ll come to this new place we sit in.

Somewhere pipes are banging like great hammers.

Chapter Two

Outside of Iron Bay, the sea was hard. Bellis woke to its slapping assault. She quit the cabin, picking her way past Sister Meriope, who was vomiting with what Bellis did not believe was just seasickness.

Bellis emerged into wind, and a great cracking as sails tugged like animals at their tethers. The enormous smokestack vented a little soot, and the ship hummed with the power of the steam engine deep below.

Bellis sat on a container. So we’re off, then, she thought nervously. We’re heading out. We’re away.

The Terpsichoria had seemed busy while they were moored: someone was always scrubbing something, or raising a piece of machinery, or running from one end of the ship to the other. But now that sense of activity was increased by a huge factor.

Bellis squinted out across the maindeck, not yet ready to look at the sea.

The rigging teemed. Most of the sailors were human, but here and there a spined hotchi raced along rope crawlways and onto crow’s nests. On the decks men lugged containers and wound huge winches, shouting instructions in incomprehensible shorthand, threading chains onto fat flywheels. There were towering cactacae, too heavy and ungainly to climb rope but making up for that with their efforts below, with their strength, fibrous vegetable biceps bunching massively as they tugged and tied.

Officers in blue uniforms strode among them.

The wind blew across the ship, and the deck’s periscopic cowls crooned like dolorous flutes.

Bellis finished her cigarillo. She stood slowly and walked to the side, her eyes lowered, till she reached the rail and she looked up and out to sea.

There was no land at all.

Oh gods, look at it all, she thought in shock.

For the first time in her life, Bellis looked out across nothing but water.

Alone beneath a colossal rearing sky, anxiety welled up in her like bile. She wanted very much to be back in the alleys of her city.

Slicks of spume spread fast around the ship, disappearing and reappearing incessantly. The water moiled in intricate marbled surges. It shifted for the ship, as it would for a whale or a canoe or a fallen leaf, a dumb accommodation that it might overturn with any sudden swell.

It was a massive moronic child. Powerful and stupid and capricious.

Bellis cast her gaze about nervously, looking for any island, any jag of coastline. At that moment, there was none.

A cloud of seabirds trailed them, plunging for carrion in the vessel’s wake, spattering the deck and the foam with guano.

They sailed without stopping for two days.

Bellis felt almost stupefied with resentment that her journey was under way. She paced the corridors and decks, shut herself in her cabin. She watched blankly as the Terpsichoria passed rocks and tiny islands in the distance, illuminated by grey daylight or the moon.

Sailors scanned the horizon, oiling the large-bore guns. With hundreds of ill-charted islets and trading towns, with an unending number of ships supplying the insatiable commercial hole of New Crobuzon at one end, Basilisk Channel was plied by pirates.

Bellis knew that a ship this size with an ironclad hull and New Crobuzon’s colors flying would almost certainly not be preyed upon. The crew’s vigilance was only slightly unnerving.

The Terpsichoria was a merchant vessel. It was not built for passengers. There was no library, no drawing room, no games room. The passengers’ mess was a halfhearted effort, its walls bare but for a few cheap lithographs.

Bellis took her meals there sitting alone, monosyllabic to any pleasantries, while the other passengers sat below the dirty windows and played cards. Bellis watched them surreptitiously and intensely.

Back in her cabin, Bellis took endless stock of what she possessed.

She had left the city in a sudden hurry. She had very few clothes, in the austere style she favored: severe and black and charcoal. She had seven books: two volumes of linguistic theory; a primer in Salkrikaltor Cray; an anthology of short fiction in various languages; a thick, empty notebook; and copies of her own two monographs, High Kettai Grammatology and Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She had a few pieces of jewelry in jet and garnet and platinum; a small bag of cosmetics; ink and pens.

She spent hours adding details to her letter. She described the ugliness of the open seas, the harsh rocks that poked up like traps. She wrote long, parodic descriptions of the officers and passengers, reveling in caricature. Sister Meriope; Bartol Gimgewry the merchant; the cadaverous surgeon Dr. Mollificatt; Widow and Miss Cardomium, a quiet mother and daughter transformed by Bellis’ pen into a scheming pair of husband hunters. Johannes Tearfly became the professorial buffoon pilloried in music halls. She invented motivations for them all, speculating on what might send them halfway across the world.

Standing at the back of the ship on the second day, by the morass of gulls and ospreys still bickering over the ship’s effluent, Bellis looked for islets but saw only waves.

She felt jilted. Then, as she searched the horizon, she heard a noise.

A little way from her the naturalist, Dr. Tearfly, stood watching the birds. Bellis’ face set hard. She prepared to leave as soon as he spoke to her.

When he looked down and saw her watching him coldly, he gave her an absent smile and pulled out a notebook. His attention was off her immediately. She watched as he began to sketch the gulls, paying her no mind at all.

He was in his late fifties, she guessed. His thinning hair was combed tightly back, and he wore little rectangular spectacles and a tweed waistcoat. But despite the academic uniform he did not look weak or absurdly bookish. He was tall, and he held himself well.

With quick, precise strokes, he marked out folded avian claws and the brute pugnacity of the seagulls’ eyes. Bellis warmed to him very slightly.

After a while she spoke.

It made journeying easier; she admitted that to herself. Johannes Tearfly was charming. Bellis suspected he would be equally friendly to everyone on board.

They took lunch together, and she found it easy to steer him away from the other passengers, who watched them intently. Tearfly was endearingly free of intrigue. If it occurred to him that keeping the company of the rude and distant Bellis Coldwine might lead to rumors, he did not care.

Tearfly was happy to discuss his work. He enthused about the unstudied fauna of Nova Esperium. He told Bellis about his plans for publishing a monograph, on his eventual return to New Crobuzon. He was collating drawings, he told her, and heliotypes and observations.

Bellis described to him a dark, mountainous island she had seen in the north, in the small hours of the previous night.

“That was North Morin,” he said. “Cancir’s probably off to the northwest right now. We’ll be docking at Dancing Bird Island after dark.”

The ship’s position and progress were matters of constant conversation among the other passengers, and Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

Dancing Bird Island appeared just as the sun went down. Its volcanic rock was brick-red, and hunched into little peaks like shoulder bones. Qé Banssa clambered up the slopes of the bay. It was poor, an ugly little fishing port. The thought of setting foot in another resentful town imprisoned by maritime economics depressed Bellis.

The sailors without shore leave were sullen as their comrades and passengers disappeared down the gangplank. There were no other New Crobuzon ships at dock: nowhere for Bellis to deliver her letter. She wondered why they were stopping at this negligible port.

Apart from an arduous research trip to the Wormseye Scrub years previously, this was the furthest Bellis had ever been from New Crobuzon. She watched the small crowd at the dockside. They looked old and eager. Over the wind she heard a smattering of dialects. Most of the shouts were in Salt, the sailors’ argot, a found language riveted together from the thousand vernaculars of the Basilisk Channel, Ragamoll, and Perrickish, the tongues of the Pirate and Jheshull Islands.

Bellis saw Captain Myzovic climb the steep streets toward New Crobuzon’s crenellated embassy.

“Why are you staying on board?” said Johannes.

“I don’t feel any great need for greasy food or trinkets,” she said. “These islands depress me.”

Johannes smiled slowly, as if her attitude delighted him. He shrugged and looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain,” he said, as if she had returned his question, “and I have work to do aboard.”

“Why are we stopping here anyway?” said Bellis.

“I suspect it’s government business,” said Johannes carefully. “This is the last serious outpost. Beyond this the New Crobuzon sphere of influence becomes far more . . . attenuated. There are probably all manner of things to be attended to, out here.

“Luckily,” he said after a silence, “it’s none of our business.”

They watched the still-darkening ocean.

“Have you seen any of the prisoners?” Johannes asked suddenly.

Bellis looked at him in surprise. “No. Have you?” She felt defensive. The fact of the ship’s sentient cargo discomfited her.

When it had come, Bellis’ realization that she had to leave New Crobuzon had been urgent and frightening. She had made her plans in low panic. She needed to get as far away as she could, and quickly. Cobsea and Myrshock seemed too close, and she had thought feverishly of Shankell and Yoraketche, and Neovadan and Tesh. But they were all too far or too dangerous, or too alien, or too hard to reach or too frightening. There was nothing in any of them that could become her home. And Bellis had realized aghast that it was too hard for her to let go, that she was clinging to New Crobuzon, to what defined her.

And then Bellis had thought of Nova Esperium. Eager for new citizens. Asking no questions. Halfway across the world, a little blister of civilization in unknown lands. A home from home, New Crobuzon’s colony. Rougher, surely, and harder and less cosseted—Nova Esperium was too young for many kindnesses—but a culture modeled on her city’s own.

She realized that, with that destination, New Crobuzon would pay her passage, even as she fled it. And a channel of communication would remain open to her: regular if occasional contact with ships from home. She might then know when it was safe to return.

But the vessels that undertook the long, dangerous journey from Iron Bay across the Swollen Ocean carried with them Nova Esperium’s workforce. Which meant a hold full of prisoners: peons, indentured laborers, and Remade.

It curdled the food in Bellis’ stomach to think of the men and women locked below, out of the light, and so she did not think of them. She would have had nothing to do with such a voyage and such harsh traffic if she had had a choice.

Bellis looked up at Johannes, trying to gauge his thoughts.

“I must admit,” he said hesitantly, “I’m surprised I’ve heard no sound at all from them. I had thought they would be let out more often than this.”

Bellis said nothing. She waited for Johannes to change the subject, so that she could continue to try to forget what lay beneath them.

She could hear the bonhomie from Qé Banssa’s waterfront pubs. It sounded urgent.

Under tar and steel, in the damp chambers below. Food bolted and fought over. Shit, spunk, and blood congealing. Shrieks and fistfights. And chains like stone and all around whispers.

“That’s a shame, lad.” The voice was rough from lack of sleep, but the sympathy was genuine. “You’ll most probably get a hiding for that.”

Before the bars of the prison hold, the cabin boy stood looking mournfully at shards of pottery and spilt stew. He had been spooning food into bowls for the prisoners, and his hand had slipped.

“Clay like that looks strong as iron, till you drop it.” The man behind the bars was as filthy and tired as all the other prisoners. Bubbling from his chest, visible beneath a torn shirt, was a huge tumor of flesh from which emerged two long ill-smelling tentacles. They swung lifeless, deadweight blubbery encumbrances. Like most of the transportees, the man was Remade, carved by science and thaumaturgy into a new shape, in punishment for some crime.

“Reminds me of when Crawfoot went to war,” said the man. “Did you ever hear that story?”

The cabin boy picked greasy meat and carrots from the floor and dropped them into a bucket. He glanced up at the man.

The prisoner shuffled back and settled against the wall.

“So one day, at the beginning of the world, Darioch looks out from his treehouse and sees an army coming toward the forest. And bugger me if it ain’t the Batskin Brood come to get back their brooms. You know how Crawfoot took their brooms, don’t you?”

The cabin boy was about fifteen, old for his position. He wore clothes not much cleaner than the prisoners’. He looked the man full on and grinned yes, he knew that story, and the sudden change in him was so marked and extraordinary it was as if he were briefly given a new body. For a moment he looked strong and cocky, and when the smile went and he returned to the slop of food and pottery, some of that sudden swagger remained.

“All right then,” the prisoner continued. “So Darioch calls Crawfoot to him and shows him the Batskins on their way, and he says to him, ‘This is your fuck-up, Crawfoot. You took their stuff. And it happens that Salter’s away at the edge of the world, so you’re going to have to do the fighting.’ And Crawfoot’s bitching and moaning and giving it all this . . .” The man opened and shut his fingers like a talkative mouth.

He started to continue, but the cabin boy cut him off. “I know it,” he said with sudden recognition. “I heard it before.”

There was a silence.

“Ah well,” the man said, surprised by his own disappointment. “Ah well, I tell you what, son, I’ve not heard it for a while myself, so I think I’ll just carry on and tell it.”

The boy looked at him quizzically, as if trying to decide whether the man was mocking him. “I don’t mind,” he said. “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

The prisoner told the story, quietly, interrupted by coughing and sighs for breath. The cabin boy came and went in the darkness beyond the bars, cleaning the mess, spooning out more food. He was there at the story’s end, when Crawfoot’s chimney-pot-and-china-plate armor shattered, cutting him worse than if he’d worn none at all.

The boy looked at the tired man, the story finished, and grinned again.

“Ain’t you going to tell me the lesson?” he said.

The man smiled weakly. “I reckon you already know it.”

The boy nodded and looked up for a moment, concentrating. “ ‘If it’s nearly right, but it isn’t quite, better to have none, than make do with one,’ ” he recited. “I always preferred them stories without the morals,” he added. He squatted down by the bars.

“Fuck but I’m with you there, lad,” said the man. He paused and held out his hand through the bars. “I’m Tanner Sack.”

The cabin boy hesitated a moment: not nervous, just weighing up possibilities and advantages. He took Tanner’s hand.

“Ta for the story. I’m Shekel.”

They continued.

Chapter Three

Bellis came out of sleep when they set sail again, though the bay was still dark. The Terpsichoria juddered and shivered like a cold animal, and she rolled to the porthole and watched the few lights of Qé Banssa move away.

That morning, she was not allowed onto the main deck.

“Sorry ma’am,” said a sailor. He was young, and desperately uncomfortable at blocking her way. “Captain’s orders: passengers not allowed onto main deck till ten.”

“Why?”

He shied as if she had hit him. “Prisoners,” he said, “taking a constitutional.” Bellis’ eyes widened fractionally. “Captain’s giving them a shot of air, and then we’ve to clean the deck—they’re awful dirty. Why’n’t you have some breakfast, ma’am? This’ll be done in a trice.”

Out of the young man’s sight she stopped and considered. She did not like the coincidence of this, so soon after her discussion with Johannes.

Bellis wanted to see the men and women they carried below. She could not tell if she was driven by prurience, or a more noble instinct.

Instead of heading abaft for the mess, she wound down side passages through dim space, past poky doors. Bass sounds traveled through the walls: human voices sounded like dogs barking. Where the corridor ended she opened the last door, onto a walk-in cupboard lined with shelves. Bellis looked behind her, but she was alone. She finished her cigarillo and entered.

Pushing aside dried-up, empty bottles, Bellis saw that an ancient window had been blocked by shelves. She cleared them of detritus and wiped ineffectually at the glass.

She started as somebody walked past the pane, outside, barely three feet away. Stooping, she squinted through the dirt, out over the ship. The enormous mizzenmast was before her, and faintly, she saw the main- and foremasts beyond it. Below her was the main deck.

The sailors were moving, climbing and cleaning and winding in their rituals.

There was a mass of others, huddled in groups, moving slowly if at all. Bellis’ mouth twisted. They were mostly human and mostly men, but they defied generalization. She saw a man with a sinuous three-foot neck, a woman with a skein of spasming arms, a figure whose lower quarters were caterpillar treads, and another with metal wires jutting from his bones. The only thing they had in common were their greying clothes.

Bellis had never seen so many Remade in one place before, so many who had been altered in the punishment factories. Some were shaped for industry, while others seemed formed for no purpose other than grotesquerie, with misshapen mouths and eyes and gods-knew what.

There were a few cactacae prisoners, and other races too: a hotchi with broken spines; a tiny clutch of khepri, their scarab headbodies twitching and glinting in the washed-out sun. There were no vodyanoi, of course. On a journey like this, fresh water was too valuable to use keeping them alive.

She heard gaolers’ shouts. Men and cactacae strutted among the Remade, wielding whips. In groups of two and three and ten the prisoners began to shuffle in random circles around the deck.

Some lay still, and were punished.

Bellis pulled her face away.

These were her unseen companions.

They had not seemed much invigorated by the fresh air, she reflected coldly. They had not seemed to enjoy their exercise.

Tanner Sack moved just enough to keep from being beaten. He moved his eyes in a rhythm. Down for three long steps, to keep attention from himself, then up for one, to see the sky and the water.

The ship was juddering faintly from the steam engine below, and the sails were extended. The cliffs of Dancing Bird Island moved past them fast. Tanner moved toward the port side, slowly.

He was surrounded by the men who shared his hold. The women prisoners stood in a smaller group, a little way off. They all wore the same dirty faces and cold stares as him. He did not approach them.

Tanner heard a sudden whistle, a sharp two-tone different from the scream of the gulls. He looked up, and perched on some bulky metal extrusion, scrubbing it clean, Shekel looked down at him. The boy caught his eye and gave Tanner a wink and a fast smile. Tanner smiled back, but Shekel had already looked away.

An officer and a sailor with distinctive epaulets conferred at the ship’s bow, huddled over a brass engine. As Tanner strained to see what they were doing, a stick slapped across his back, not hard but with the threat of much worse. A cactacae guard was bellowing at him to keep moving, so he picked up his feet again. The alien tissue grafted to Tanner’s chest twitched. The tentacles itched and shed skin like severe sunburn. He spat on them and rubbed the saliva in, as if it were unguent.

At ten o’clock precisely, Bellis swallowed her tea and went outside. The deck had been swept and scrubbed clean. There was no sign that the prisoners had ever stood upon it.

“It’s odd to think,” said Bellis a little later, as she and Johannes stood watching the water, “that in Nova Esperium we might be in charge of men and women who traveled with us on this very boat, and we’d never know.”

“That’ll never happen to you,” he said. “Since when does a linguist need indentured assistants?”

“Neither does a naturalist.”

“Not true at all,” he said mildly. “There are crates to be taken into the bush, there are traps to be set, there are drugged and dead carcasses to lug, dangerous animals to subdue . . . It’s not all watercoloring, you know. I’ll show you my scars some time.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” He was thoughtful. “I’ve a foot-long gash where a sardula got nasty . . . a bite from a newborn chalkydri . . .”

“A sardula? Really? Can I see?”

Johannes shook his head. “It got me . . . close to a delicate place,” he said.

He did not look at her, but he did not seem prudish.

Johannes shared his cabin with Gimgewry, the failed merchant, a man crippled with the understanding of his own inadequacy, who eyed Bellis with miserable lust. Johannes was never lascivious. He seemed to think always of other things before he had a chance to notice Bellis’ attractions.

It was not that she was seeking to be approached—she would spurn him quickly if he did court her. But she was used to men trying to flirt with her—usually only for a short time, until they realized that her cool demeanor was not an act they could persuade her to drop. Tearfly’s company was frank and unsexual, and she found it disconcerting. She wondered briefly if he might be what her father had called an invert, but she saw no more sign that he was attracted to any of the men on board than he was to her. And then she felt vain for wondering.

There was a glimmer of something like fear in him, she thought, when an insinuation hung between them. Perhaps, she thought, he’s no interest in such matters. Or perhaps he’s a coward.

Shekel and Tanner traded stories.

Shekel already knew many of Crawfoot’s Chronicles, but Tanner knew them all. And even those that Shekel had heard before Tanner knew variations of, and he narrated them all well. In turn Shekel told him about the officers and passengers. He was full of scorn for Gimgewry, whose frantic masturbation he had heard through the privy door. He found the vacantly avuncular Tearfly enormously dull, and he was nervous of Captain Myzovic, but blustered and told lies about him wandering the decks drunk.

He lusted after Miss Cardomium. He liked Bellis Coldwine—’Cold ain’t the fucking word, though,” he said, “for Miss Black-and-blue.”

Tanner listened to the descriptions and insinuations, laughing and tutting where appropriate. Shekel told him the rumors and fables that the sailors told each other—about the piasa and the she-corsairs, Marichonians and the scab pirates, the things that lived below the water.

Behind Tanner stretched the long darkness of the hold.

There was a constant scavenging fight for food and fuel. It wasn’t just leftover meat and bread: many prisoners were Remade with metal parts and steam engines. If their boilers went out, they were immobilized, so anything that might burn was hoarded. In the far corner of the chamber stood an old man, the pewter tripod on which he walked locked solid for days. His furnace was dead cold. He ate only when someone bothered to feed him, and no one expected him to live.

Shekel was fascinated by the brutality of that little realm. He watched the old man with avid eyes. He saw the prisoners’ bruises. He glimpsed peculiar double silhouettes of men coupling in consent or rape.

He had run a gang in Raven’s Gate, back in the city, and he was worried about what would happen to them now, without him. His first-ever theft, aged six, had netted him a shekel piece, and the nickname had stuck. He claimed that he could not remember any other name. He had taken this job on the ship when his gang’s activities, which included the occasional burglary, had attracted too much attention from the militia.

“Another month and I’d have been in there with you, Tanner,” he said. “Ain’t a lot in it.”

Tended by the ship’s thaumaturges and wyrdshipmen, the meteoromancing engine by Terpsichoria’s bowsprit displaced air in front of the ship. The ship’s sails bowed out to fill the vacuum; pressure billowed in from behind. They made good speed.

The machine reminded Bellis of New Crobuzon’s cloudtowers. She thought of the huge engines jutting over the Tar Wedge roofscape, arcane and broken. She felt a hard longing for the streets and canals, for the size of the city.

And for engines. Machines. In New Crobuzon they had surrounded her. Now there was only the little meteoromancer and the mess-hall construct. The steam engine below made the whole of Terpsichoria a mechanism, but it was invisible. Bellis wandered the ship like a rogue cog. She missed the utilitarian chaos she had been forced to leave.

They were sailing a busy part of the sea. They passed other ships: in the two days after they left Qé Banssa, Bellis saw three. The first two were little elongated shapes at the horizon; the third was a squat caravel that came much closer. It was from Odraline, as the kites it flew from its sails announced. It pitched wildly in the choppy sea.

Bellis could see the sailors aboard it. She watched them swing in the complex rigging and scramble the triangular sails.

The Terpsichoria passed barren-looking islands: Cadann, Rin Lor, Eidolon Island. There were folktales concerning every one, and Johannes knew them all.

Bellis spent hours watching the sea. The water so far east was much clearer than that near Iron Bay: she could see the smudges that were huge schools of fish. The off-duty sailors sat with their legs over the side, angling with crude rods, scrimshawing bones and narwhal tusks with knives and lampblack.

Occasionally the curves of great predators like orca would breach in the distance. Once, as the sun went down, the Terpsichoria passed close to a little wooded knoll, a mile or two of forest that budded from the ocean. There was a clutch of smooth rocks off the shore, and Bellis’ heart skidded as one of the boulders reared and a massive swan’s neck uncoiled from the water. A blunt head twisted, and she watched the plesiauri paddle lazily out of the shallows and disappear.

She became briefly fascinated with submarine carnivores. Johannes took her to his cabin and rummaged among his books. She saw several titles with his name on the spine: Sardula Anatomy; Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools; Theories of Megafauna. When he found the monograph he was looking for, he showed her sensational depictions of ancient, blunt-headed fish thirty feet long; of goblin sharks with ragged teeth and jutting foreheads; and others.

On the evening of the second day out of Qé Banssa, Terpsichoria sighted the land that rimmed Salkrikaltor: a jagged grey coastline. It was past nine in the evening, but the sky, for once, was absolutely clear, and the moon and her daughters shone very bright.

Despite herself, Bellis was awed by this mountainous landscape, all channeled through by wind. Deep inland, at the limits of her vision, she could see the darkness of forest clinging to the sides of gulleys. On the coast the trees were dead, salt-blasted husks.

Johannes swore with excitement. “That’s Bartoll!” he said. “A hundred miles north there’s Cyrhussine Bridge, twenty-five damned miles long. I hoped we might see that, but I suppose it would have been asking for trouble.”

The ship was bearing away from the island. It was cold, and Bellis flapped her thin coat impatiently.

“I’m going inside,” she said, but Johannes ignored her.

He was staring back the way they had come, at Bartoll’s disappearing shore.

“What’s going on?” he murmured. Bellis turned back sharply. The frown was audible in his voice. “Where are we going?” Johannes gesticulated. “Look . . . we’re bearing away from Bartoll.” The island was now little more than an unclear fringe at the edge of the sea. “Salkrikaltor’s that way—east. We could be sailing over the cray within a couple of hours, but we’re heading south . . . We’re heading away from the commonwealth . . .”

“Maybe they don’t like ships passing overhead,” Bellis said, but Johannes shook his head.

“That’s the standard route,” he said. “East from Bartoll gets you to Salkrikaltor City. That’s how you get there. We’re heading somewhere else.” He drew a map in the air. “This is Bartoll and this is Gnomon Tor, and between them, in the sea . . . Salkrikaltor. Down here, where we’re heading now . . . there’s nothing. A line of spiky little islands. We’re taking a very long way around to Salkrikaltor City. I wonder why.”

By the next morning, several other passengers had noticed the unusual route. Within hours, word spread among the cloistered little corridors. Captain Myzovic addressed them in the mess. There were almost forty passengers, and all were present. Even pale, pathetic Sister Meriope and others similarly afflicted.

“There is nothing to be concerned about,” the captain assured them. He was clearly angry at being summoned. Bellis looked away from him, out of the windows. Why am I here? she thought. I don’t care. I don’t care where we’re going or how we damn well get there. But she did not convince herself, and she stayed where she was.

“But why have we deviated from the normal route, Captain?” someone asked.

The captain exhaled angrily. “Right,” he said. “Listen. I am taking a detour around the Fins, the islands at the southern edge of Salkrikaltor. I am not obliged to explain this action to you. However . . .” He paused, to impress upon the passengers how privileged they were. “Under the circumstances . . . I must ask you all to observe a degree of restraint, as regards this information.

“We will be circumnavigating the Fins before reaching Salkrikaltor City, so that we might pass some of New Crobuzon’s holdings. Certain maritime industries. Which are not public knowledge. Now, I could have you confined to cabins. But then you might see something from the portholes, and I’d rather not let loose the rumors that would result. So you are free to go above, to the poop-deck only. But. But I appeal to you as patriots and as good citizens to exercise discretion about what you see tonight. Am I clear?”

To Bellis’ disgust, there was a slightly awed silence. He’s stupefying them with pomposity, she thought, and turned away with her contempt.

The waves were broken by an occasional rock tusk, but nothing more dramatic. Most of the passengers had congregated at the back of the ship, and they gazed eagerly over the water.

Bellis kept her eyes to the horizon, irritated that she was not alone.

“Do you think we’ll know when we see whatever it is?” asked a clucking woman Bellis did not know, and whom she ignored.

It grew dark and much colder, and some of the passengers retired below. The mountainous Fins dipped in and out of visibility at the horizon. Bellis sipped mulled wine for warmth. She became bored, and watched the sailors instead of the sea.

And then, at around two in the morning, with only half the passengers left on deck, something appeared in the east.

“Gods above,” Johannes whispered.

For a long time it remained a forbidding, unreadable silhouette. And then, as they approached, Bellis saw that it was a huge black tower that reared from the sea. An oily light flared from its peak, a spew of dirty flame.

They were almost upon it. A little over a mile away. Bellis gasped.

It was a platform suspended above the sea. More than two hundred feet long on each side, it hung immensely, its concrete weight poised on three massive metal legs. Bellis could hear it pounding.

Waves broke against its supports. It had a skyline as intricate and twisted as a city’s. Above the three leg-pillars was a cluster of seemingly random spires, and cranes moving like clawed hands; and over them all a huge minaret of girders soared and drooled fire. Thaumaturgic ripples distorted the space above the flame. In the shadows under the platform, a massive metal shaft plunged into the sea. Lights glimmered from its built-up levels.

“What in the name of Jabber is that?” Bellis breathed.

It was awesome and extraordinary. The passengers were gaping like fools.

The mountains of the southernmost Fin were a shadow in the distance. Near the base of the platform were predatory shapes: ironclad ships patrolling. Lights flashed in a complex staccato from the deck of one of them, and there was a corresponding burst from the bridge of the Terpsichoria.

From the deck of the fabulous structure, a klaxon sounded.

They were passing away from it now. Bellis watched it dwindle, venting flame.

Johannes remained still with astonishment.

“I have no idea,” he said slowly. It took a moment for Bellis to realize he was answering her question. They kept their eyes on the enormous shape in the sea for as long as they could make it out at all.

When it was gone they walked in silence toward the corridor. And then, as they reached the door into the cabins, someone behind them shouted.

“Another!”

It was true. Miles in the distance, a second colossal platform.

Bigger than the first. It loomed on four legs of weatherbeaten concrete. This one was sparser. There was one fat, squat tower rising from each corner, and a colossal derrick at its edge. The structure growled like something alive.

Again came a lightflash challenge from the thing’s defenders, and again the Terpsichoria responded.

There was a wind, and the sky was cold as iron. In the shallows of that bleak sea the edifice roared as the Terpsichoria slipped by in darkness.

Bellis and Johannes waited another hour, their hands numb, their breath coiling out of them in visible gusts, but nothing else appeared. All they could see was the water, and here and there the Fins, serrated and unlit.

Chainday 5th Arora 1779. Aboard the Terpsichoria

As soon as I entered the captain’s office this morning, it was clear that something had angered him. He was grinding his teeth, and his expression was murderous.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said, “in a few hours we will be arriving at Salkrikaltor City. The other passengers and crew will be granted a few hours’ leave, but I’m afraid there’ll be no such luxury for you.”

His tone was neutral and dangerous. His desk was cleared of paraphernalia. This disturbed me, and I cannot explain why. Usually he is surrounded by a bulwark of detritus. Without it there was no buffer between us.

“I will be meeting with representatives of the Salkrikaltor Commonwealth, and you will translate. You have worked with trade delegations—you know the formula. You will translate into Salkrikaltor Cray for the representatives, and their translator will render their words into Ragamoll for me. You listen carefully to make sure of him, and he’ll be listening to you. That ensures honesty on both sides. But you are not a participant. Do I make myself entirely clear?” He labored the point like a teacher. “You will not hear anything that passes between us. You’re a conduit, and nothing more. You hear nothing.”

I met the bastard’s eye.

“Matters will be discussed of the highest security. On board a ship, Miss Coldwine, there are very few secrets. Mark me.” He leaned toward me. “If you mention what is discussed to anyone—to my officers, your puking nun, or your close friend Dr. Tearfly—I will hear of it.”

I am sure I do not need to tell you that I was shocked.

Thus far I have avoided confrontation with the captain, but his anger made him capricious. I will not appear weak to him. Months of bad feeling is a smaller price than to cower strategically whenever he comes close.

Besides which I was enraged.

I put frost in my voice.

“Captain, we discussed these matters when you offered me this post. My record and references are clear. It is beneath you to question me now.” I was very grand. “I am not some press-ganged seventeen-year-old for you to intimidate, sir. I will do my job as contracted, and you will not impugn my professionalism.”

I have no idea what had angered him, and I do not care. The gods can rot his bastard hide.

And now I sit here with the “puking nun”—although in fact she seems a little better, and has even simpered about taking a service on Shunday—and finish this letter. We are approaching Salkrikaltor, where I will have my chance to seal it and leave it, to be picked up by any New Crobuzon ship passing. It will reach you, this long farewell, only a few weeks late. Which is not so very bad. I hope it finds you well.

I hope that you miss me as I miss you. I do not know what I will do without this means to connect me with you. It will be a year or more before you hear from me again, before another ship steams or sails into the harbor at Nova Esperium, and think of me then! My hair long and braided with mud, no doubt, abjuring clothes, marked with sigils like some savage shaman! If I still remember how to write, I will write to you then, and tell you of my time, and ask what it is like in my city. And perhaps you will have written to me, and you will tell me that all is safe, and that I can come home.

The passengers debated excitedly over what they had seen the previous night. Bellis scorned them. The Terpsichoria passed through the Candlemaw Straits and into the calmer water of Salkrikaltor. First the lush island of Gnomon Tor loomed into view, and then, before five in the afternoon, Salkrikaltor City came over the horizon.

The sun was very low and the light was thick. The shoreline of Gnomon Tor rose green and massive a few miles north. In a horizontal forest of lengthening shadows, the towers and rooftops of Salkrikaltor City broke the waves.

They were rendered in concrete, in iron, rock and glass, and in sweeps of hardy cold-water coral. Columns spiraled with walkways, linked by spine-thin bridges. Intricate conical spires a hundred feet high, dark square keeps. A mass of contrary styles.

The outlines of the skyline were a child’s exuberant sketch of a reef. Organic towers bulged like tubeworm casts. There were analogs of lace corals—high-rise dwellings that branched into scores of thin rooms—and squat many-windowed arenas like gargantuan barrel sponges. Frilled ribbons of architecture like fire coral.

The towers of the submerged city rose a hundred feet above the waves, their shapes uninterrupted. Huge doorways gaped at sea level. Green scum marks marked the height of a tide that would cover them.

There were newer buildings. Ovoid mansions carved from stone and ribbed with iron, suspended above the water on struts that jutted from the submerged roofscape. Floating platforms topped with terraces of square brick houses—like those of New Crobuzon—perched preposterously in the sea.

There were thousands of cray, and a fair number of humans, on the walkways and bridges at water level, and way above. Scores of flat-bottomed barges and boats puttered between the towers.

Oceangoing ships were docked at the town’s outskirts, tied up to pillars in the sea. Cogs and junks and clippers, and here and there a steamship. The Terpsichoria approached.

“Look there,” someone said to Bellis, and pointed downward—the water was absolutely clear. Even in the waning light Bellis could see the wide streets of Salkrikaltor suburbs far below. They were outlined with cold-looking streetlights. The buildings stopped at least fifty feet from the surface, to ensure clearance for the ships that passed above them.

On the walkways linking the submarine spires Bellis could see yet more citizens, more cray. They scuttled and swam quickly, moving with much more facility than their compatriots above them in the air.

It was an extraordinary place. When they had docked, Bellis watched enviously as the Terpsichoria’s boats were lowered. Most of the crew and all the passengers lined up eagerly before the ladders. They grinned and bickered excitedly, casting their eyes toward the city.

It was dusk now. Salkrikaltor’s towers were silhouettes; their lit windows reflected in the black water. There were faint sounds on the air: music, shouts, grinding machinery, waves.

“Be back aboard by two in the morning,” yelled a sublieutenant. “Stick to the human quarters and whatever else you can find above water. Plenty to do there without risking your lungs.”

“Miss Coldwine?”

Bellis turned to Lieutenant Commander Cumbershum.

“Please come with me, miss. The submersible’s ready.”

Chapter Four

Constrained within the tiny submersible, a tight tangle of copper tubing and dials, Bellis stretched to see past the obstructions of Cumbershum and Captain Myzovic, and the midshipman at the helm.

One moment the sea was lapping at the bottom of the reinforced front window; then suddenly the vessel pitched, and waves washed over the bulbous glass as the sky disappeared. The sounds of splashing and the faint wail of gulls were instantly gone. The only noise was a buzzing whine as the propeller began to spin.

Bellis was agog.

The sub tilted and moved gracefully down toward unseen rock and sand. A powerful arc light snapped on below its snub nose, opening a cone of illuminated water before them.

Near the bottom, they tilted slightly skyward. The evening light filtered faintly down, blocked by the massive black shadows of ships.

Bellis gazed over the captain’s shoulder into the dark water. Her face was impassive, but her hands moved, working with awe. Fish moved in precise waves, ebbing back and forth around the ungainly metal intruder. Bellis could hear her own quick breathing unnaturally loud.

The submersible picked a careful way between the chains dangling like vines from the canopy of vessels above them. The pilot moved levers with an expert grace, and the craft curled up and over a little lip of corroded rock, and Salkrikaltor City appeared.

Bellis gasped.

Everywhere lights were suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of New Crobuzon’s gas lamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.

The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral. There were other submarines moving smoothly between the towers and above the roofs. The sunken promenades beneath them climbed their way to the distant ramparts and cathedrals of the city’s core, a mile or so away, seen very faintly through the sea. There at the heart of Salkrikaltor City were taller edifices that loomed all the way out of the waves. They were no less intricate below the surface. The city was convoluted and interconnected.

Everywhere there were cray. They looked up idly as the sub passed above them. They stood and haggled outside shops festooned with undulating colored cloth; they bickered in little squares of seaweed topiary; they walked along tangled backstreets. They guided carts pulled by extraordinary beasts of burden: sea snails eight feet high. Their children played games, goading caged bass and colorful blenny.

Bellis saw houses that were patched together, half-repaired. Away from the main streets, currents picked at organic rubbish moldering in coral courtyards.

Every motion seemed stretched out in the water. Cray swam over the roofs, flapping their tails in inelegant motion. They stepped off high ledges and sank slowly down, legs braced for landing.

From inside the submersible, the city seemed silent.

They flew slowly toward the monumental architecture at Salkrikaltor’s center, disturbing fish and floating scraps. It was a real metropolis, Bellis reflected. It bustled and thronged. Just like New Crobuzon, but cosseted and half hidden by water.

“Housing for officials, that is,” Cumbershum pointed out to her. “That’s a bank. Factory over there. That’s why the cray do such business with New Crobuzon: we can help them with steam technology. Very hard to get going underwater. And this is the central council of the Cray Commonwealth of Salkrikaltor.”

The building was intricate. Rounded and bulbous like an impossibly huge brain coral, carved with a covering of folds. The towers jutted way up through the water and into the air. Most of its wings—all marked with coiled serpents and hieroglyph romances—had open windows and doorways in traditional Salkrikaltor style, so that small fish entered and exited unhindered. But one section was sealed, with small portholes and thick metal doors. From its vents spewed a constant stream of bubbles.

“That’s where they meet topsiders,” the lieutenant said. “That’s where we’re heading.”

“There’s a human minority in Salkrikaltor City’s topside,” said Bellis slowly. “There are plenty of rooms above water, and the cray can take air without problems for hours at a time. Why do they make us meet them down here?”

“For the same reason we receive the Salkrikaltor ambassador in the reception rooms at Parliament, Miss Coldwine,” said the captain, “no matter that it is somewhat hard and inconvenient for him. This is their city; we are mere guests. We—” He turned to her and waved his hand to encompass himself and Lieutenant Commander Cumbershum only. “—that is. We are guests.” He turned slowly away.

You son of a pig, Bellis thought furiously, her face set like ice.

The pilot eased his speed down to almost nothing and maneuvered through a large, dark opening into the wing. They sailed over cray, who directed them on with sweeps of their arms, to the dead end of the concrete corridor. A huge door shut ponderously behind them.

From fat stubby pipes that lined the walls burst a massive unceasing explosion of bubbles. The sea was pushed out through valves and sluices. Slowly the water level fell. The sub settled gradually on the concrete floor and listed to one side. The water came down past the porthole and streaked and streamed it with droplets, and Bellis was staring out into air. With the sea pumped out of it, the room looked shabby.

When the pilot finally undid the screws locking them in, the hatch swung open with a merciful cool blast. The concrete floor was puddled with brine. The room itself smelled of kelp and fish. Bellis stepped from the submersible as the officers adjusted their uniforms.

Behind them stood a cray. She carried a spear—too intricate and flimsy to be anything other than ceremonial, Bellis judged—and wore a breastplate of something vivid green that was not metal. She nodded in greeting.

“Thank her for her welcome,” said the captain to Bellis. “Tell her to inform the council leader that we have arrived.”

Bellis breathed out and tried to relax. She composed herself and brought back to mind the vocabulary, the grammar and syntax and pronunciation and soul of Salkrikaltor Cray: everything she had learned in those intensive weeks with Marikkatch. She offered a quick, cynical, silent prayer.

Then she formed the vibrato, the cray’s clicking barks, audible in air and water, and spoke.

To her intense relief, the cray nodded and responded.

“You will be announced,” she said, carefully correcting Bellis’ tense. “Your pilot waits here. You come our way.”

Large, sealed portholes looked out onto a garden of garish sea plants. The walls were covered by tapestries showing famous moments of Salkrikaltor history. The floor was stone slabs—quite dry—warmed by some hidden fire. There were dark ornaments in the room—jet, black coral, black pearl.

Nodding, welcoming the humans, were three he-cray. One, much younger than his companions, stood a little back, just like Bellis.

They were pale. Compared to the cray of Tarmuth, they spent far more of their lives below the water, where the sun could not stain them. All that distinguished cray upper bodies from humans’ was the little ruff of gills on the neck, but there was also something alien about their submarine pallor.

Below the waist, the crays’ armored hindquarters were those of colossal rock lobsters: huge carapaces of gnarled shell and overlapping somites. Their human abdomens jutted out from above where the eyes and antennae would have been. Even in the air, an alien medium, their multitude of legs worked with intricate grace. They sounded softly as they moved, a gentle percussion of chitin.

They adorned their crustacean hindquarters with a kind of tattoo, carving designs into the shell and staining them with various extracts. The two older cray had an extraordinary array of symbols on their flanks.

One stepped forward and spoke very quickly in Salkrikaltor. There was a moment’s silence.

“Welcome,” said the young cray behind him, the translator. He spoke Ragamoll with a heavy accent. “We are glad you have come and speak with us.”

The discussion started slowly. Council Leader King Skarakatchi and Councilman King Drood’adji made expressions of polite and ritualistic delight that were matched by Myzovic and Cumbershum. Everyone agreed that it was excellent that they had all met, and that two such great cities remained on such good terms, that trade was such a healthy way of ensuring goodwill, and so on.

The conversation shifted quickly. With impressive smoothness, Bellis found herself translating specifics. The conversation had moved on to how many apples and plums the Terpsichoria would leave in Salkrikaltor, and how many bottles of unguent and liquor it would receive in return.

It was not long before matters of state were discussed, information that must come from the upper echelons of New Crobuzon’s parliament: details about when and if ambassadors would be replaced, about possible trade treaties with other powers, and how such arrangements would impact on relations with Salkrikaltor.

Bellis found it easy to close her ears to what she said, to pass such information straight through herself. Not out of patriotism or fealty to New Crobuzon’s government—of which she felt none—but out of boredom. The secret discussions were incomprehensible, the little snippets of information that Bellis spoke underwhelming and tedious. She thought instead of the tons of water above them, intrigued that she felt no panic.

She worked automatically for some time, forgetting what she said almost immediately it was out of her mouth.

Until suddenly she heard the captain’s voice change, and she discovered that she was listening.

“I have one further question, Your Excellency,” said Captain Myzovic, sipping his drink. Bellis coughed and barked the Salkrikaltor sounds. “In Qé Banssa, I was ordered to check a bizarre rumor passed on by the New Crobuzon representative. It was so preposterous I was certain there had been a misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I detoured around the Fins—which is why we are late for this meeting.

“During our diversion I discovered to my . . . dismay and concern that the rumors were true. I bring this up because it concerns our good friendship with Salkrikaltor.” The captain’s voice was hardening. “It is to do with our concerns in Salkrikaltor waters. At the southern edge of the Fins, as the councilors know, are the . . . vitally important investments for which we pay generous mooring rights. I am speaking, of course, of our platforms, our rigs.”

Bellis had never heard the word rigs used so, and she spoke it smoothly in Ragamoll. The crays seemed to understand. She kept her translation automatic and smooth, but Bellis listened in fascination to every word the captain spoke.

“We passed them after midnight. First one, then another. All was as it should be, both for the Manikin and Trashstar rigs. But, councilors . . .” He sat forward, put down his glass, and stared at them predatorily. “I have a very important question. Where is the other one?”

The cray officials stared at the captain. With slow, comic simultaneity, they looked at each other, then back at Captain Myzovic.

“We confess . . . to confusion, Captain.” The translator spoke softly for his leaders, his voice unchanging, but for the briefest second Bellis caught his eye. Something passed between them, some shared astonishment, some camaraderie.

What are we party to, brother? Bellis thought. She was tense, and craved a cigarillo.

“We have no knowledge of what you speak,” her opposite number continued. “We are not concerned with the platforms, so long as mooring rental is paid. What has happened, Captain?”

“What has happened,” said Captain Myzovic, his voice tight, “is that the Sorghum, our deep-sea rig, our mobile platform, is gone.” He waited for Bellis to catch up with him, and then waited some more, stretching the silence. “Along, I might add, with her retinue of five ironclads, her officers, staff, scientists, and geo-empath.

“The first word that the Sorghum was no longer at its mooring point reached Dancing Bird Island three weeks ago. The crews of the other rigs were asking why they had not been told of the Sorghum’s orders to relocate. No such order had been given.” The captain put down his glass and stared at the two cray. “The Sorghum was to remain in situ for another six months at least. It should be where we left it. Council Leader, Councilor—what has happened to our rig?”

When Skarakatchi spoke, the translator mimicked his soft tones. “We know nothing.”

Captain Myzovic knotted his hands. “This happened barely a hundred miles away, in Salkrikaltor waters, in a region your navy and hunters regularly patrol, and you know nothing?” His tone was controlled but threatening. “Councilors, that is extraordinary. You have no notion what happened? Whether she sank in a freak squall, if she was attacked and destroyed? Can you tell me that you have heard nothing? That something could do this to us just off your coasts, and you are quite ignorant?”

There was a long silence. The two cray leaned in and whispered to each other.

“We hear many rumors . . .” King Skarakatchi said through the translator. Drood’adji looked at them both sharply. “But we have heard nothing of this. We can offer our support and sorrow to our friends of New Crobuzon—but no information.”

“I must tell you,” Captain Myzovic said after a murmured consultation with Cumbershum, “that I am deeply unhappy. New Crobuzon can no longer pay mooring rights for a rig that is not there. Our rent is hereby to be cut by a third. And I will be sending word back to the city about your inability to offer assistance. This must cast in some doubt the ability of Salkrikaltor to act as custodians of our interests. My government will wish to discuss this further. New arrangements may have to be made. Thank you for your hospitality,” he said, and drained his glass. “We will be staying one night in Salkrikaltor harbor. We’ll head off early tomorrow morning.”

“A moment, please, Captain.” The council leader raised his hand. He muttered quickly to Drood’adji, who nodded and scuttled gracefully out of the room. “There is one more matter to discuss.”

When Drood’adji returned, Bellis’ eyes widened. Behind him walked a human man.

He was so out of place it brought her up short. She stared like a fool.

The man was a little younger than she, with an open, cheerful face. He carried a large pack and wore clean but battered clothes. He smiled disarmingly at Bellis. She frowned slightly and broke eye contact.

“Captain Myzovic?” The man spoke Ragamoll with a New Crobuzon accent. “Lieutenant Commander Cumbershum?” He shook their hands. “And I’m afraid I don’t know your name, ma’am,” he said, his hand outstretched.

“Miss Coldwine is our translator, sir,” said the captain before Bellis could respond. “Your business is with me. Who are you?”

From his jacket the man pulled an official-looking scroll.

“That should explain everything, Captain,” he said.

The captain scrutinized it carefully. After half a minute he looked up sharply, waving the scroll disdainfully.

“What, by damn, is this idiocy?” he hissed suddenly, making Bellis start. He jabbed the scroll at Cumbershum.

“I think it makes matters reasonably clear, Captain,” said the man. “I have other copies, in case your anger overwhelms you. I’m afraid I’m going to have to commandeer your ship.”

The captain gave a hard bark of laughter. “Oh really?” He sounded dangerously tense. “Is that right, Mr. . . .” He leaned over and read the paper in his lieutenant’s hands. “Mr. Fennec? Is that right?”

Glancing at Cumbershum, Bellis realized that he was staring at the newcomer with astonishment and alarm. He interrupted the captain.

“Sir,” he said urgently. “Might I suggest that we thank our hosts and let them return to their business?” He looked meaningfully at the cray. The translator was listening carefully.

The captain hesitated and gave a curt nod. “Please inform our hosts that their hospitality is excellent,” he ordered Bellis brusquely. “Thank them for their time. We can find our own way out.”

As Bellis spoke, the cray bowed gracefully. The two councilors came forward and shook hands again, to the captain’s barely concealed fury. They left the way Mr. Fennec had come in.

“Miss Coldwine?” The captain indicated the door that led back to the submersible. “Wait for us outside, please. This is government business.”

Bellis lingered in the corridor, silently cursing. She could hear the captain’s bellicose roaring through the door. However she strained, though, she could not make out what was being said.

“Godsdammit,” she muttered, and returned to the featureless concrete room where the submersible sat like some grotesque wallowing creature. The cray attendant waited idly, softly clucking.

The submersible pilot was picking his teeth. His breath smelled of fish.

Bellis leaned against a wall and waited.

After more than twenty minutes the captain burst through the door, followed by Cumbershum, desperately trying to placate him.

“Just don’t fucking speak to me at the moment, Cumbershum, all right?” shouted the captain. Bellis stared, astonished. “Just make sure you keep Mr. fucking Fennec out of my sight or I will not be responsible for what happens, signed and sealed letter of fucking commission or not.”

Behind the lieutenant, Fennec peered around the edge of the door.

Cumbershum gestured Bellis and Fennec quickly into the back of the submersible. He looked panicked. When he sat down in front of Bellis, beside the captain, she saw that he was straining away from Myzovic.

As the sea began to pour back in through the walls of the concrete room, and the sound of hidden engines made the vessel vibrate, the man in the scuffed leather coat turned to Bellis and smiled.

“Silas Fennec,” he whispered, and held out his hand. Bellis paused, then took it.

“Bellis,” she murmured. “Coldwine.”

No one spoke on the journey to the surface. Back on the Terpsichoria’s deck, the captain stormed to his office.

“Mr. Cumbershum,” he belted. “Bring Mr. Fennec to me.”

Silas Fennec saw Bellis watching him. He jerked his head toward the captain’s back and for the briefest moment rolled his eyes, then nodded in farewell and trotted off in Myzovic’s wake.

Johannes was gone, off somewhere in Salkrikaltor. Bellis looked resentfully across the water at lights that picked out the towers. There were no boats by the Terpsichoria’s sides, and no one to row her away from the ship. Bellis brimmed with frustration. Even the mewling Sister Meriope had found the strength to leave the boat.

Bellis went to find Cumbershum. He was watching his men patch up a damaged sail.

“Miss Coldwine.” He looked at her without warmth.

“Lieutenant,” she said. “I wanted to know how I might place some mail in the New Crobuzon storeroom of which Captain Myzovic told me. I have something urgent to send . . .”

Her voice petered out. He was shaking his head.

“Impossible, Miss Coldwine. I can spare no one to escort you, I don’t have the key and I am not asking the captain for it now . . . Would you like me to go on?”

Bellis felt a sting of misery, and she held herself very still.

“Lieutenant,” she said slowly, keeping her voice emotionless. “Lieutenant, the captain himself promised me that I might deposit my letter. It is extremely important.”

“Miss Coldwine,” he interrupted, “if it were down to me I would escort you myself, but I cannot, and I am afraid that is an end to the matter. But besides . . .” He looked up furtively, then whispered again. “Besides . . . please don’t speak of this but . . . you’ll have no need of the warehouse. I can’t say any more. You’ll understand in a few hours. The captain’s called a meeting early tomorrow morning. He’ll explain. Believe me, Miss Coldwine. You don’t need to deposit your letter here. I give you my word.”

What is he implying? Bellis thought, panicked and exhilarated. What is he godsdamned implying?

Like most of the prisoners, Tanner Sack never moved far from the space he had claimed. Near the infrequent light from above and also the food, it was sought-after. Twice someone had tried to steal it, moving in on his patch of floor when he had gone to piss or shit. Both times he had managed to persuade the intruder away without a fight.

He remained sitting, his back to the wall, at one edge of the cage, for hours at a time. Shekel never had to go looking for him.

“Oy, Sack!”

Tanner was dozing, and the clouds in his head took a long time to part.

Shekel was grinning at him from beyond the bars. “Wake up, Tanner. I want to tell you about Salkrikaltor.”

“Shut up, boy,” grumbled a man beside Tanner. “We’re trying to sleep.”

“Fuck off, Remade cunt,” snapped Shekel. “D’you want any food next time I’m here, eh?”

Tanner was waving his hands in placation. “All right, lad, all right,” he said, trying to wake up fully. “Tell me about whatever it is, but keep it down, eh?”

Shekel grinned. He was drunk and excited.

“Did you ever see Salkrikaltor City, Tanner?”

“No, lad. I ain’t never left New Crobuzon before,” Tanner said softly. He kept his voice low, hoping that Shekel would imitate him.

The boy rolled his eyes and sat back. “You take a little boat, and you row past big buildings that come plumb out of the sea. Some places they’re close together like trees. And there’s massive bridges way above, and sometimes . . . sometimes you see someone—human or cray—just jump. And dive, if they’re a human, or tuck in all them legs otherwise, and land in the water and light out swimming, or disappear underneath.

“I was just in a bar in the the Landside Quarter. There was . . .” His hands jigged in and out of tight shapes as he illustrated what he was saying. “You just step out of the boat through a big doorway, in a big room, with dancers—woman dancers.” He grinned, puerile. “And next to the bar, the floor’s fucking gone . . . and there’s a ramp, going down for miles into the sea. All lit up underneath. And cray coming and going, up and down that walkway, into the bar or home again, in and out of the water.”

Shekel kept grinning and shaking his head.

“One of our geezers gets so drunk he sets off himself.” He laughed. “We had to haul him out of it, sopping. I don’t know, Tanner . . . I never saw anything like it. They’re scrabbling around right now, right underneath us. Right now. It’s like a dream. The way it sits on the sea, and there’s more below than above. It’s like it’s reflected in the water . . . but they can walk on into the reflection. I want to see it, Tanner,” he said urgently. “There’s suits and helmets and whatnot on the ship . . . I’d go down in a minute, you know. I’d see it the way they do . . .”

Tanner was trying to think of something to say, but he was still tired. He shook his head and tried to remember any of Crawfoot’s Chronicles that told of life in the sea. Before he could speak, though, Shekel swayed to his feet.

“I better go, Tanner,” he said. “Captain’s put signs up everywhere. Assemble in the morning, important instructions, blah de blah. I’d best get shut-eye.”

By the time Tanner remembered the story of Crawfoot and the Conch Assassins, Shekel had disappeared.

Chapter Five

When Bellis rose the next day, the Terpsichoria was in the middle of the open ocean.

It was growing less cold as they traveled east, and the passengers who congregated for the captain’s announcement no longer wore their heaviest coats. The crew stood in the shadow of the mizzenmast, the officers by the stairway to the bridge.

The newcomer, Silas Fennec, stood alone. He saw Bellis watching him and smiled at her.

“Have you met him?” said Johannes Tearfly, behind her. He was rubbing his chin and watching Fennec with interest. “You were with the captain below, weren’t you? When Mr. Fennec appeared?”

Bellis shrugged and looked away. “We didn’t speak,” she said.

“Do you have any idea why we’ve diverted?” Johannes asked. Bellis frowned to show that she did not understand. He looked at her with exasperation. “The sun,” he said slowly. “It’s on our left. We’re heading south. We’re going the wrong way.”

When the captain appeared above them on the stairs, the murmurs on deck silenced. He hefted a copper funnel to his lips.

“Thank you for assembling so quickly.” His raised voice echoed tinnily above them in the wind. “I have unsettling news.” He put down the mouthpiece for a moment and seemed to consider what to say. When he spoke again he sounded pugnacious. “Let me say that I will brook no argument or dissent. This is not for discussion. I am responding to unforeseen circumstances, and I will not be questioned. We will not be heading to Nova Esperium. We are returning to Iron Bay.”

There was a burst of shock and outrage from the passengers, and mutters of bewilderment from the crew. He can’t do this! thought Bellis. She felt a surge of panic—but no surprise. She realized that she had been expecting this, since Cumbershum’s hint. She realized, too, that somewhere inside her there was a joy at the thought of return. She battened that feeling down hard. It won’t be a homecoming for me, she thought savagely. I have to get away. What am I going to do?

“Enough!” the captain shouted. “As I said, I do not take this decision lightly.” He raised his voice over shouted protests. “Within the week we’ll be back in Iron Bay, where alternative arrangements will be made for paying passengers. You may have to sail with another ship. I’m aware that this will add a month to your voyage, and I can only offer apologies.”

Grim-faced and livid, he looked totally unapologetic. “Nova Esperium will have to survive a few more weeks without you. Passengers are confined to the poop deck until three o’clock. Crew remain for new orders.” He put down the speaking trumpet and descended toward the deck.

For a moment he was the only thing moving. Then the stillness broke and there was a surge as several passengers strode forward, against his orders, demanding that he change his mind. The captain’s barks of outrage could be heard as they reached him.

Bellis was staring at Silas Fennec. Piecing it together.

His face was immobile as he observed the agitation. He noticed Bellis watching him, held her eyes for a moment, then walked unhurriedly away.

Johannes Tearfly looked absolutely stricken. He gaped in an almost comical show of dismay.

“What’s he doing?” he said. “What’s he talking about? I can’t wait another fortnight in the rain of Iron Bay! Godspit! And why are we heading south? He’s taking the long route past the Fins again . . . What is going on?”

“He’s looking for something,” said Bellis, just loud enough for him to hear. She took his elbow and gently led him away from the crowd. “And I wouldn’t waste your breath on the captain. You won’t hear him admit it, but I don’t think he has the slightest choice.”

The captain strode from rail to rail on deck, snapping out a telescope and scouring the horizon. Officers shouted instructions to the men in the crow’s nests. Bellis watched the bewilderment and rumor-mongering of the passengers.

“The man’s a disgrace,” she overheard, “screaming at paying passengers like that.”

“I was standing outside the captain’s office, and I heard someone accuse him of wasting time—of disobeying orders,” Miss Cardomium reported, bewildered. “How can that be?”

It’s Fennec, thought Bellis. He’s angry because we’re not going directly back. Myzovic is . . . what? Looking for evidence of the Sorghum, on the way.

The sea beyond the Fins was darker, more powerful, and cold—unbroken by rocks. The sky was wan. They were beyond Basilisk Channel. This was the edge of the Swollen Ocean. Bellis stared at the endless green waves with distaste. She felt vertiginous. She imagined three, four, five thousand miles of brine yawning away eastward, and closed her eyes. The wind butted her insistently.

Bellis realized she was thinking again about the river, the slow stretch of water that connected New Crobuzon to the sea like an umbilicus.

When Fennec reappeared, walking quickly across the poop deck, Bellis intercepted him. “Mr. Fennec,” she said.

His face opened as he saw her. “Bellis Coldwine,” he said. “I hope you’re not too put out by the detour.”

She indicated for him to follow her out of earshot of the few passengers and crew around them. She stopped in the shadow of the ship’s enormous chimney.

“I’m afraid I am, Mr. Fennec,” she said. “My plans are quite specific. This is a serious problem for me. I have no idea when I’ll be able to find another ship that wants my services.” Silas Fennec inclined his head in vague sympathy. He was clearly distracted.

Bellis spoke again. “I wonder if you’d shed light on the forced change of plans that has our captain so angry.” She hesitated. “Will you tell me what is happening, please?”

Fennec raised his eyebrows. “I can’t, Miss Coldwine,” he said, his voice mild.

“Mr. Fennec,” she muttered coldly, “you’ve seen the reaction of our passengers; you know how unpopular this diversion is. Don’t you think I—all of us, but I most of all—deserve some explanation? Can’t you think what would happen if I were to tell the others what I suspect—that this whole mess was instigated because of the mysterious newcomer—” Bellis spoke quickly, trying to provoke or shame him into telling her the truth, but her voice stopped short when she saw his reaction. His face changed suddenly and utterly.

His amiable, mildly sly expression went hard. He held up a finger to hush her. He looked quickly around, then spoke to her fast. He sounded sincere and very urgent.

“Miss Coldwine,” he said. “I understand your anger, but you must listen to me.”

She drew herself up, meeting his gaze.

“You must withdraw that threat. I won’t appeal to your professional code or your bloody honor,” he whispered. “Probably you’re as cynical about such things as I am. But I will appeal to you. I have no idea what you’ve worked out or guessed, but let me tell you that it is vital—do you understand?—that I get back to New Crobuzon quickly, without interruption, without fuss.” There was a long pause.

“There is . . . there is a vast amount at stake, Miss Coldwine. You cannot spread mischief. I am begging you to keep these things to yourself. I’m relying on you to be discreet.”

He was not threatening her. His face and voice were stern but not aggressive. As he claimed, he was begging, not trying to intimidate her into submission. He spoke to her like a partner, a confidante.

And impressed and shocked by his fervor, she realized that she would keep what she had heard to herself.

He saw this decision move across her face and nodded in sharp thanks before walking away.

In her cabin, Bellis tried to work out what she was going to do. It would not be safe for her to stay long in Tarmuth. She had to join a ship as soon as possible. Her gut was heavy with hope that she might make it to Nova Esperium, but she realized with an awful foreboding that she was no longer in a position to make a choice.

She felt no shock. She simply realized, rationally and slowly, that she would have to go wherever she could. She could not delay.

Alone, away from the fug of anger and confusion that had swept over the rest of the ship, Bellis felt all her hope was dried up. She felt desiccated like old paper, as if the blustery air on the deck would burst her and blow her away.

Her partial knowledge of the captain’s secrets was no comfort. She had never felt more homeless.

She cracked the seal on her letter, sighed, and began to add to its last page.

Skullday 6th Arora, 1779. Evening, she wrote. Well, my dear, who would have thought this? A chance to add a little more.

It comforted her. Although the arch tone she used was an affectation, it consoled her, and she did not stop writing while Sister Meriope returned and went to bed. She continued by the light of the tiny oil lamp, hinting at conspiracy and secrets, while the Swollen Ocean gnawed monotonously on the Terpsichoria’s iron.

Confused shouting woke Bellis at seven o’clock the next morning. Still lacing up her boots, she stumbled with several other sleepy passengers out into the light. She squinted into the brightness.

Sailors pushed up against the port railings, gesticulating and shouting. Bellis followed their gazes to the horizon and realized that they were looking up.

A man was hanging motionless in the sky, two hundred feet above them, out over the sea.

Bellis gasped idiotically.

The man kicked his legs like a baby and stared at the boat. He seemed to stand in the air. He was strapped in a harness, dangling just below a taut balloon.

He fiddled with his belt and something, some ballast, fell away, spinning lazily into the sea. He jerked and rose forty feet. With the faint sound of a propellor he moved in an inelegant curve. He began a long, unsteady circuit of the Terpsichoria.

“Get back to your godsdamned stations!” The crew broke up industriously at the sound of the captain’s voice. He strode out onto the main deck and peered at the slowly turning figure through his telescope. The man hovered near the top of the masts in a vaguely predatory manner.

The captain yelled up at the aviator through the funnel. “You there . . .” His voice carried well. Even the sea seemed quiet. “This is Captain Myzovic of the Terpsichoria, steamer in the New Crobuzon Merchant Navy. You are requested to touch down and make yourself known to me. If you do not comply I will consider it a hostile action. You have one minute to begin a descent or we will defend ourselves.”

“Jabber,” Johannes whispered. “Have you ever seen anything like that? He’s too far out to have come from land. He’s got to be scouting from some ship, out of sight over the horizon.”

The man continued to circle above them, and for seconds the buzzing of his engine was the only sound.

Eventually Bellis spoke. “Pirates?” she whispered.

“Possible.” Johannes shrugged. “But the freebooters out here couldn’t take a ship our size, or with our guns. They go for smaller merchants, the wooden hulls. And if it’s privateers . . .” He pursed his lips. “Well, if they’re licensed by Figh Vadiso or wherever, then they just might have the firepower to engage us, but they’d be insane to risk war with New Crobuzon. The Pirate Wars are over, for Jabber’s sake!”

“Right!” the captain shouted. “This is your last warning.” Four musketeers had stationed themselves at the rail. They took aim at the airborne visitor.

Instantly the sound of his motor changed. The man jerked and began to move erratically away from the ship.

“Fire, dammit!” shouted the captain, and the muskets sounded, but the man had sped up and away and beyond their aim. For a long time he receded, sinking slowly toward the horizon. Nothing was visible in the direction the aeronaut was headed.

“His ship must be twenty miles away or more,” said Johannes. “It’ll take him at least an hour to reach it.”

The captain was yelling at the crew, organizing them into units and arming them, stationing them around the ship’s edge. They fingered their rifles nervously, staring across the slowly moving sea.

Cumbershum trotted up toward the congregated passengers and ordered them back to their cabins or to the mess. His tone was curt.

“The Terpsichoria is more than a match for any pirate, and that scout could easily see that,” he said. “But until we’re back behind the Fins, the captain insists that you remain out of the way of the crew. Now, please.”

Bellis sat for a long while with her letter in her pocket. She smoked and drank water and tea in the half-empty mess. At first the air was tense, but after an hour fear had dissipated somewhat. She began to read.

And then there were muffled shouts and the vibration of running feet. Bellis spilled her dregs and ran with the other passengers to the window.

Racing toward them out of the sea were a handful of dark shapes.

Squat little ironclad scouts.

“They’re lunatics!” hissed Dr. Mollificatt. “There’s, what, five of them? They can’t take us!”

A shattering boom sounded from the deck of the Terpsichoria, and the sea yards in front of the leading boat exploded in a huge crater of steam and water.

“That’s a warning shot,” someone said. “But they’re not turning.”

The little craft drove on through the violent spray, hurtling suicidally toward the big iron ship. There was the sound of more running from above, more shouted orders.

“This is going to be hideous,” grimaced Dr. Mollificatt, and as he spoke the Terpsichoria yawed violently with the grind of metal on metal.

In the hold, Tanner Sack fell violently across his neighbor. There was a massed shout of fear. As the Remade smacked into each other, scabs and infected flesh broke open. There were shrieks of pain.

Penned in the dark, the prisoners felt the ship uprooted suddenly from the sea.

“What’s happening?” they screamed toward the hatches. “What’s going on? Help us!”

They stumbled and kicked and clawed their way to the bars, crushing each other against the iron. There were more screams, and louder panic.

Tanner Sack shouted with his fellows.

No one came to them.

The ship reeled as if it had been punched. Bellis was hurled against the window. Passengers were scattering, screaming or shouting, getting to their feet with terror in their eyes, throwing spilled chairs and stools out of the way.

“What in Jabber’s name was that?” Johannes shouted. Someone nearby was praying.

Bellis stumbled with the others out onto the deck. The little armored boats were still plowing toward the Terpsichoria on the port side, but looming from nowhere on the starboard side, where no one had been looking, tight and flush against the ship, was a massive black submersible.

It was more than a hundred feet long, striated with pipes, studded with segmented metal fins. Seawater still streamed from it, from the seams between its rivets and the ridges below its portholes.

Bellis gaped at the baleful-looking thing. Sailors and officers were shouting in confusion, running from rail to rail, trying to regroup.

Two hatches on the top of the submersible began to rise.

“You!” From the deck, Cumbershum pointed at the passengers. “Inside, now!”

Bellis retreated into the corridor.

Jabber help me oh dear gods oh spit and shit, she thought in a confused stream. She stared wildly about and heard passengers running pointlessly from place to place.

Then suddenly she remembered the little cupboard, from where she could see the deck.

Outside, beyond the thin wall, she could hear shouts and gunshots. Frantically, she cleared the shelf in front of the window and put her eyes to the dirty pane.

Bursts of smoke discolored the air. Men ran past the glass in panicked rout. Beyond them and below, across the deck, little groups of men fought in confused and ugly battle.

The invaders were mostly men and cactus-people, a few tough-looking women, and Remade. They were dressed in ostentatious and outlandish gear: long colorful coats and pantaloons, high boots, and studded belts. What distinguished them from the pirates of pantomime or cheap prints was the grime and age of their clothes, the fixed determination in their faces and the organized efficiency of their attacks.

Bellis saw everything with impossible detail. She perceived it as a series of tableaux, like heliotypes flashed up one after the other in the dark. The sound seemed disassociated from what she saw, a wiry buzz of noise at the back of her skull.

She saw the captain and Cumbershum screaming orders from the forecastle, firing their pistols and frantically reloading. Blue-clad sailors fought with inexpert desperation. A cactacae midshipman threw down his broken blade and felled one of the buccaneers with a massive punch, roared with pain as the man’s comrade hacked deep into his forearm in a spray of sap. A group of terrified men attacked the pirates with muskets and bayonets, hesitated, and were caught between two Remade with massive blunderbusses. The young sailors went down screaming in a rain of ragged flesh and shrapnel.

Buzzing sedately between the masts, Bellis saw suspended figures, three or four of them, harnessed to balloons like the first scout, flying low over the fighting, firing flintlocks into the crowd.

Gore stained the deck.

There was more and more screaming. Bellis was trembling. She bit her lip. There was something unreal about the scene. The violence was grotesque and hideous, but in the wide eyes of the sailors Bellis saw bewilderment, a doubt that this could possibly be happening.

The pirates fought with heavy scimitars and squat pistols. In their multicolored clothes they looked like rabble, but they were quick and disciplined, and they fought like an army.

“Dammit!” shouted Captain Myzovic, then looked up and fired. One of the dangling balloonists jerked, and his head snapped back in an arc of blood. His hands clutched spastically at his belt, releasing ballast like heavy droppings. The corpse began to rise, swiftly, spiraling into the clouds.

The captain gesticulated frantically. “Regroup, for fuck’s sake,” he shouted. “Take that bastard on the poop deck!”

Bellis twisted her head, but she could not quite see the captain’s target. She heard him, though, close to her, giving terse orders. The invaders responded, breaking off skirmishes to form tight units, targeting officers, trying to break the line of sailors blocking their way to the bridge.

“Surrender!” shouted the voice beside her window. “Surrender and this finishes now!”

“Dispatch that bastard!” the captain shouted to his crew.

Five or six sailors ran past Bellis’ window, swords and pistols drawn. There was a moment of silence, then a thud and a faint crackling.

“Oh Jabber . . .” The cry was hysterical, but it broke off suddenly in a retching exhalation. There was a blossoming of screams.

Two of the men stumbled back into Bellis’ view, and she cried out aghast. They collapsed to the deck in great gouts of blood, and died quickly. Their clothes and bodies were savaged with an incredible number of wounds, as if they had been outnumbered by hundreds of enemies. There was not a six-inch space on any of them that was not scored with some deep gash. Their heads were shredded flesh and bone.

Bellis was transfixed. She trembled, her hands at her mouth. There was something deeply unnatural about those wounds. They seemed to shiver between states, deep rends that were suddenly insubstantial and dreamlike. But the blood that pooled below them was quite real, and the men were really dead.

The captain was staring in shock. Bellis heard a thousand overlapping whispers of air. There were two blubbering screams, and wet drumbeats as bodies fell.

The last of the sailors ran past Bellis, back the way he had come, howling in terror. A hurled flintlock smacked solidly into the back of his head. He fell to his knees.

“You godsforsaken swine!” Captain Myzovic was screaming. His voice sounded outraged and deeply afraid. “You demon-loving bastard!”

Paying him no attention, a grey-clad man walked slowly into Bellis’ field of vision. He was not tall. He moved with studied poise, carrying his heavily muscled body as if he were a much more slender man. He wore leather armor, a dark charcoal outfit studded with pockets, belts, and holsters. It was streaked and streaked with blood. Bellis could not see his face.

He walked toward the fallen man, holding a straight sword stained completely red and dribbling thickly.

“Surrender,” he said quietly to the man before him, who looked up in terror and sobbed, fumbled idiotically for his knife.

The grey-clad man spun instantly in the air, his arms and legs bent. He twirled as if he were dancing and stamped out quickly, the bottom of his foot slamming into the fallen man’s face and smashing him back. The sailor sprawled, bleeding, unconscious or dead. As the man in grey landed he was instantly still. It was as if he had not moved.

“Surrender,” he shouted, very loud, and the men of the Terpsichoria faltered.

They were losing the fight.

Bodies lay like litter, and dying men screamed for help. Most of the dead wore the blue of the New Crobuzon Merchant Navy. Every second more pirates emerged from the submersible and the armored tugs. They surrounded the Terpsichoria’s men, corralled them on the main deck.

“Surrender,” shouted the man again, his accent unfamiliar. “Throw down your weapons and we’ll end this. Raise your hands against us and we’ll cull you until you hear sense.”

“Gods fuck and blast it . . .” shouted Captain Myzovic, but the pirate commander interrupted him.

“How many of your men would you kill, Captain?” he said, projecting his voice like an actor. “Order them to drop their weapons now, and they need not feel like traitors. Otherwise you order them to die.” He drew out a thick pad of felt from his pocket and began to wipe his blade. “Decide, Captain.”

The deck was silent. There was only the faint sound of engines from the aeronauts.

Myzovic and Cumbershum huddled in conversation for a second, and then the captain looked out at his bewildered, frightened men and threw up his hands.

“Drop your weapons,” he shouted. There was a pause before his men obeyed. Muskets and pistols and short swords smacked dully against the deck. “You have the advantage, sir,” he yelled.

“Stay where you are, Captain,” shouted the man in grey. “I’ll come to you.” He spoke quickly in Salt to the pirates standing with him in front of the window. Faintly, Bellis heard a word that sounded like “passengers,” and adrenaline made her giddy.

Bellis huddled still and quiet while she heard shrieks from the corridors beyond, as the pirates led the passengers outside.

She heard Johannes Tearfly, the pitiful tears of Meriope, the frightened pomposity of Dr. Mollificatt. She heard a shot followed by a terrified scream.

From outside, Bellis could hear the terrified passengers lamenting as they were ordered onto the main deck.

The pirates were thorough. Bellis was silent, but she could hear the slamming of doors as the passages were searched. She tried desperately to wedge the door closed, but the man in the corridor shouldered it open with ease; and faced with him all grim and bloodstained, faced with his machete, she lost any heart for resistance. She dropped the bottle with which she had armed herself and let him haul her out.

The crew were lined up, almost a hundred of them, in wounded misery at one end of the deck. Their dead had been thrown over the side. The passengers were huddled together, a little way apart. Some of them, like Johannes, had bloody noses and bruises.

In the middle of the passengers, nondescript in brown and looking as subdued and miserable as all the others, was Silas Fennec. He kept his head down. He would not meet Bellis’ furtive gaze.

In the center of the deck stood the Terpsichoria’s stinking cargo: the scores of Remade brought up from below. They were totally confused, myopic in the light, staring in confusion at the pirates.

The flamboyant invaders swung from the rigging or swept debris into the sea. They surrounded the deck and trained their guns and bows on their captives.

It had taken a long time to bring up all the terrified, bewildered Remade. When the fetid holds were checked, several dead bodies were found. They were dropped into the sea, where their metal limbs and additions took them very quickly down and out of the light.

The huge submersible still lolled fatly in the water, clamped close to the Terpsichoria. The two vessels bobbed in time.

The man in grey, the pirates’ leader, turned slowly to face his captives. It was the first time Bellis had seen his face.

He was in his late thirties, she guessed, with cropped greying hair. Strong featured. His deep-set eyes were melancholy, his mouth set taut and sad.

Bellis stood next to Johannes, near the silent officers. The leather-clad man walked toward the captain. As he passed the passengers, he looked directly at Johannes for two or three paces, then slowly away.

“So,” said Captain Myzovic, loud enough for many people to hear. “The Terpsichoria is yours. I take it that you intend ransom? I might as well tell you, sir, that whichever power you represent has made a grave mistake. New Crobuzon will not take kindly to this.”

The pirate leader was still.

“No, Captain,” he said. Now that he was not shouting over battle, his voice was soft, almost feminine. Like his face, it seemed stained by some tragedy. “Not ransom. The power I represent cares not at all about New Crobuzon, Captain.” He met Myzovic’s eyes and shook his head slowly and solemnly. “Not at all.”

He reached behind him, without looking, and one of his men handed him a big flintlock pistol. He held it in front of him expertly, squinting at it briefly and checking the pan.

“Your men are brave, but they are not soldiers,” he said, hefting the weapon. “Will you look away, Captain?”

There were seconds of silence before Bellis’ stomach pitched and her legs almost buckled as she understood what he meant.

Realization hit the captain and others at the same moment. There were gasps as Myzovic’s eyes widened, and his face crawled with anger and terror. The emotions crowded each other out in an ugly battle. His mouth twisted, opened, and closed.

“No I will not look away, sir,” he shouted finally, and Bellis’ breath caught at the sound of it, the hysteria and shock that broke his voice. “I will not, damn and fuck you, sir, you fucking coward, sir, you shit . . .”

The man in grey nodded.

“As you wish,” he said. He raised the gun and shot Captain Myzovic through the eye.

There was a short crack and a burst of blood and bone as the captain spasmed backward, his ruined face snarling and stupid.

As he hit the ground there was a chorus of screams and disbelieving gasps. Beside Bellis, Johannes staggered, making guttural sounds. Bellis retched and swallowed, her breath coming very fast as she stared at the dead man twitching in a slick of gore. She bent, afraid she might vomit.

Somewhere behind her Sister Meriope stammered Darioch’s Lament.

The murderer handed the gun back, received another newly primed and loaded. He turned back to the officers.

“Oh Jabber,” Cumbershum crooned, his voice shaking. He stared at Myzovic’s body, then looked at the pirate. “Oh dear Jabber,” he whimpered, and closed his eyes. The man in grey shot him through the temple.

“Gods!” someone shouted hysterically. The officers were yelling, looking wildly around, trying to back away. The thunder of those two gunshots seemed to haunt the deck like ghost sounds.

People were screaming. Some of the officers had fallen to their knees in supplication. Bellis was hyperventilating.

The man in grey quickly scaled the ladder to the forecastle and looked out over the deck.

“The killing,” he shouted through cupped hands, “is over.”

He waited for the frightened sounds to abate.

“The killing is over,” he repeated. “That’s all the killing we need to do. Do you hear? It is finished.”

He spread his arms as noise began to grow again, this time of bewilderment and untrusting relief.

“Listen to me,” he shouted. “I have an announcement. You, in blue, you sailors of the New Crobuzon Merchant Navy. Your navy days are over. You lieutenants and sublieutenants, you must reconsider your stations. There’s no room where we’re going for those who venerate their New Crobuzon commissions.” With desperate, panicked slyness, Bellis slid a glance at Fennec. He was gazing at his knotted hands with fierce intensity.

“You . . .” continued the man, gesturing at the men and women from the holds. “You are no longer Remade, no longer slaves. You . . .” He looked at the passengers. “Your plans for your new life must change.”

He gripped the deck and swept his eyes over his mystified prisoners. Slow channels of blood reached toward them from the cadavers of the captain and his first officer.

“You must come with me,” the man said, just loud enough for everyone to hear. “To a new city.”

Interlude I

Elsewhere

Unclear things glide and grapple rocks, pulling their way through the water.

They move in the night through sea opaque with darkness, through cultivated fields of kelp and seaweed toward the lights of cray villages that scatter the shallows. They slide silently into the kraals.

Penned seals glimpse them and taste the eddies of distorted water that spin off in their wakes, and in a panicked frenzy twist and hurl themselves against the woven walls and roofs of their cages. The intruders peer like curious goblins through the gouged window holes of huts and terrify the inhabitants, who rush out on their segmented legs wielding pitchforks and spears, fearfully jabbing.

The cray farmers are quickly overcome.

They are held, captured and held still, and questioned. Lulled by thaumaturgy, persuaded by violence, the cray mutter answers to hissed questions.

In haphazard shards of information, the sinuous hunters learn things that they need to know.

They hear about the shelled submersibles from Salkrikaltor that cruise the villages of the Basilisk Channel. Patrolling a thousand miles of water, watching the nebulous borders of the cray commonwealth’s influence. Watching for intruders.

The hunters bicker and brood and caucus.

We know where he came from.

But perhaps he does not return.

There is uncertainty. To his home, or east—out?

The trail forks, and there is only one thing to do. The hunters separate into two contingents. One heads southwest for the shallow water, for Iron Bay and Tarmuth and the drooling dilute salt of the Gross Tar estuary, to watch and listen, to wait for word, to spy and hide, and seek word.

With a flutter of displaced water they are gone.

The other group, with a more uncertain task, heads away and down.

They swim low, heading for the crushing deeps.

Interlude II

Bellis Coldwine

Oh. Oh where are we going?

Locked in our cabins and questioned blank-faced, as if these murderous men these pirates were census takers or bureaucrats or . . . —Name? they ask, and—Occupation? Then they want to know my—Reason for heading to Nova Esperium? and I think I will laugh in their faces.

Where are we fucking going?

They take long notes, they itemize me on their printed forms, then turn to Sister Meriope and do the same for her. They respond the same way to the linguist and the nun, with little nods and points of clarification.

Why can we keep our things? Why do they not strip the jewelry from me rape me or run me through? No weapons, they tell us, and no money and no books, but our other belongings we can keep, and they rummage through our sea chests (a halfhearted search) and take out daggers and bills and monographs and dirty my clothes but leave what else they find. They leave letters, boots, pictures, and all accumulated tat.

I argue for my books. I can’t let you take them I say, let me keep them they’re mine, some I wrote, and they let me keep the blank-paged notebook but the printed ones, the stories the textbooks the long novel they take from me. Effortlessly. They don’t care when I show them that B. Coldwine is me. They take the Coldwines away.

And I don’t know why. I cannot make sense of what they are doing.

Sister Meriope sits and prays, muttering her sacred suras, and I am surprised and pleased that she is not weeping.

We are kept inside and time to time they come to us with tea and food, not rude nor pleasant, disinterested as zookeepers. I want to get out I tell them. I rap sharp on my door and I must visit the privy I say, and peer around the door frame and the guard in my corridor bellows at me to get inside, and brings me a bucket which Sister Meriope stares at in mortification. I don’t care, I was lying, I wanted to find Johannes or Fennec, I want to see what is happening elsewhere.

All over, sounds of feet and half-heard discussion in a language I almost understand.—North-north-east I hear and other side of the deck and—Ever? I couldn’t tell and—where’s His Guardship gone? and then I hear more that is opaque.

Through the porthole by my head I see nothing but squalls above water, darkness above and below. I smoke and smoke.

And when my cigarillos are finished I lie back and realize I’m not waiting to die, I don’t believe I’ll die, I am waiting for something else.

To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.

I realize with some surprise as I watch sundown’s greasepaint that I am closing my eyes and I am bone tired and godspit really? really will I? I will, I will sleep I

sleep

unquiet but long, sleeping eyes flickering with Meriope’s religious whimpers, opening sometimes but still

asleep

till with a rush of panic I sit up and look out at a brightening sea.

Morning is coming. I have missed the night, hiding away in my dreaming head.

I dress carefully. I rub my long boots clean. I paint my face as always and tie back my hair.

It is half past six when a cactus man knocks at our door and brings us gruel. As we sip he tells us what will happen.—We are nearly arrived he says.—When we have tied up follow the other passengers, listen for your names and go where you are told, and you’ll . . . but I lose track, I lose track, we will what? Will we understand then? Will we know then what is happening?

Where are we going?

I pack my belongings away and prepare to disembark somewhere, somewhere. I am thinking of Fennec. What is he doing and where is he, so quiet when the captain was killed (blood bursting)? He would not want it known that he has a commission, that he can command ships, reschedule ocean crossings.

(I hold him in my hands.)

Out. Into a quick bright wind. It worries at me insistently.

My eyes are like a cave-thing’s. I have learnt to see in the drab brown light of my cabin and this morning startles me. My eyes are teary and I blink and blink and the sea clouds run from me above. Everywhere I can hear the soft applause of waves. I can taste salt in my air.

Around me are the others, Mollificatt and Cardomiums one and two. Murrigan and Ettenry and Cohl Gimgewry Yoreling Tearfly my Johannes glimpsing at me swiftly and with a sudden smile before swept away in a crowd, and Fennec somewhere his head down still, and all of us look made of roughcut paper in this light. We are made of baser stuff than the rest of the day. It ignores us with the arrogance of a fucking child.

I want to shout to Johannes but he’s been taken away by the current of us and with my newly clear eyes I look and look.

I struggle with my sea chest, stumbling, hobbling the deck’s length. I feel battered by the light and air and I look up again and see birds arcing. I struggle forward and keep them in my sights and they wheel over us, passing to starboard, and they head erratically for the horizon and I see masts in their flight path. I have been avoiding this. I have not yet looked to the side of the ship, I have not seen where we are. My destination has been skulking beyond the corner of my eye but now as I watch the gulls it leaps into view.

It is everywhere. How could I not see?

Someone is shouting names as we shuffle past, splitting us into groups and handing out instructions, complex orders but I am not listening because I am looking out over

Dear Jabber

My name is called and I am here next to Johannes again but I am not looking at him because

I am watching

mast upon mast and sail and tower and

on and more

We are here

beside this forest

Godspit Jabber and fuck

a trick a trick of perspective

a city that moves and ripples and slops endlessly side to side

—Miss Coldwine someone says coldly but I cannot, not now I am looking, and I have put down my chest and I am looking

and someone is shaking Johannes’ hand and he stares at them bemused as they speak to him.—Dr. Tearfly, you are most welcome this is indeed an honor, but I am not listening because we are here we have arrived and look at it all look at it

Oh I’ll I’ll I could laugh or spew as my stomach yaws look we are here we are here

We are here.

Part Two:

Salt

Chapter Six

There were lamps under the water. Green, grey, cold white, and amber globes of cray design, tracing the undersides of the city.

Light prickled on suspended particles. It came not only from the thousand knots of illumination but from corridors of early sunlight that angled down, picking out passages from the waves to the deep water. Fish and kree circled them and passed through them dumbly.

From below, the city was an archipelago of shadows.

It was irregular and sprawling and hugely complex. It displaced currents. Jags of keel contradicted each other in all directions. Anchor chains trailed like hair, snapped and forgotten. From its orifices billowed refuse; fecal matter and particulate, and oil eddying uneasily and rising in small slicks. A constant drool of trash fouled the water and was swallowed by it.

Below the city there were a few hundred yards of rapidly thinning light, then miles of dark water.

The underside of Armada was crisscrossed with life.

Fish eddied through its architecture. Fleeting newtlike figures moved with intellect and purpose between boltholes. There were wire mesh cages tucked into hollows and dangling from chains, crowded with fat cod and tunny. Cray dwellings like coral tumors.

Beyond the edges of the city, and below it at the far reaches of light, huge half-tame seawyrms corkscrewed and fed. Submersibles droned—rigid shadows. A dolphin made constant vigilant rounds. A moving ecology and politics were tethered to the city’s calcified base.

The sea around it resonated with noise made physical: staccato clicks and the vibrations of pounding metal, the swallowed sound of watery friction as currents rubbed against each other. Barks that dissipated when they reached the air.

Among those that gripped and dangled underneath the city were scores of men and women. They fumbled in dragged-out time, clumsy beside the elegant fronds and sponges.

The water was cold, and the topsiders wore rubberized leather suits and massive helmets of copper and tempered glass, tethered to the surface by tubes of air. They hung on ladders and guy ropes, poised precariously over an unthinkable space.

Stuck tight inside their helmets, they were cut off from sound, and each of them moved ponderously alongside their fellows, quite alone. They clambered like lice across a pipe that poked into the dim sea like an inverted chimney. It was a thriving patchwork of algae and shells in extraordinary shades. Weeds and stinging filigree smothered it like ivy and dangled out and down, fingering the plankton.

There was a diver whose chest was bare, from which two long tentacles extruded, waving in the current, but also according to their own faint inclinations.

It was Tanner Sack.

Pumping its tail, the dolphin plunged up past the edges of the city, out and up toward the light. He burst through decreasing water pressure and out into the air, jackknifing, suspended in spray, fixing the city with a cunning eye.

Below again, he curled back through striae of water. Huge shapes were dimly visible some way off, unclear through water and a shimmering of thaumaturgy. Patrolled by tethered sharks, they were not to be investigated. The eye could not focus on them.

There were no divers upon them.

Bellis came out of sleep to the sound of voices.

It was weeks since she had arrived in Armada.

Every morning was the same. Waking and sitting up, waiting, looking around her little room with an incredulity, a shuddering disbelief that would not stop. It welled up even stronger than the longing with which she missed New Crobuzon.

How did I get here? The question was constant in her.

She opened her curtains, gripped her windowsill, and stood staring out over the city.

When they had arrived, on the first day, they had stood huddled with their belongings on the Terpsichoria’s deck, surrounded by guards, and by women and men with checklists and paperwork. The faces of the pirates were hard, made cruel by weather. Through her fear, Bellis watched carefully, and could make no sense of them. They were disparate, a mixture of ethnicities and cultures. Their skins were all different colors. Some were scarified in abstract designs; some wore batik robes. They looked as if they shared nothing except their grim demeanor.

When they stiffened suddenly into a kind of attention, Bellis knew their superiors had arrived. Two men and a woman were standing by the ship’s rail. The murderer—the grey-armored leader of the raiding party—stepped up to join them. His clothes and sword were now quite clean.

The younger man and the woman stepped forward to the swordsman. When Bellis saw them she could only stare.

The man wore a dark grey suit; the woman a simple blue dress. They were tall and held themselves with immense authority. The man had a trim mustache and an easy arrogance. The woman’s features were heavy and irregular, but the flesh of her mouth was sensual, the cruel cast of her eyes compelling.

What had made Bellis stare at them both with fascination and distaste, what commanded her attention, were the scars.

Curling down the outside of the woman’s face, from the corner of her left eye to the corner of her mouth. Fine and uninterrupted. Another, thicker and shorter and more jagged, swept from the right side of her nose across her cheek and curled up as if to cup her eye. And others, contoured to her face. They disfigured her ocher skin with esthetic precision.

Flickering her eyes from the woman to the man, Bellis had felt something curdle inside her. What fucking unhealthiness is this? she had thought uneasily.

He was adorned with identical, but mirrored marks. A long curved cicatrix down the right side of his face, a shorter flourishing cut below his left eye. As if he were the woman’s distorted reflection.

As Bellis watched the wounded pair, aghast, the woman spoke.

“You will have realized by now,” she said in good Ragamoll, projecting her soft voice so that everyone could hear, “that Armada is not like other cities.”

Is that a welcome? Bellis had thought. Was that all that the traumatized and bewildered survivors of the Terpsichoria were to be offered?

The woman had continued.

She told them about the city.

Sometimes she was silent, and without a pause the man would speak. They were almost like twins, finishing each other’s sentences.

It had been hard to listen to what they were telling her. Bellis was agog at the feelings she saw pass between the scarred man and woman every time they glanced at each other. Above all a hunger. Bellis had felt unstuck in time: as if she were dreaming this arrival.

Later, she would realize that she had absorbed much of what had been said, that it had passed into her and been processed at some level below consciousness. It came out as she began to live in Armada, against her will.

At the time, all she had been aware of was the couple’s shared intensity, and the stunned excitement that greeted the woman’s final sentence.

The words had reached Bellis full seconds after they were spoken, as if her skull were some thick medium through which sound traveled sluggishly.

There was a massed gasp and a whoop and then a swell of incredulous cheering, a huge breaking wave of joy from the hundreds of exhausted Remade prisoners who stood shivering and stinking. It rose and rose, at first tentative and then rapidly delirious with triumph.

“Human, cactacae, hotchi, cray . . . Remade,” the woman had said. “In Armada you are all sailors and citizens. In Armada you are not distinguished. Here you are free. And equal.”

There, finally, was a welcome. And the Remade accepted it with loud and tearful thanks.

Bellis had been herded away with her random companions, out into the city where the men and women of the city’s trades were waiting with contracts and hard, eager looks. And as she shuffled out of the room, she looked back at the group of leaders and saw with astonishment that someone had joined them.

Johannes Tearfly was looking down, totally bewildered, at the hand that the scarred man proffered—not snubbing it, but as if he could not think what he was supposed to do with it. The elderly man who had stood with the murderer and the scarred couple stepped forward, stroking his bright white beard, and greeted Johannes loudly by name.

That was all Bellis had seen or heard before she was taken away. Off the ship, out into Armada, into her new city.

A flotilla of dwellings. A city built on old boat bones.

Everywhere battered clothes shook and dried in the constant wind. They ruffled in Armada’s alleyways, by tall brickwork, steeples, masts, and chimneys and ancient rigging. Bellis looked from her window across the vista of reconfigured masts and bowsprits, a cityscape of beakheads and forecastles. Across many hundreds of ships lashed together, spread over almost a square mile of sea, and the city built on them.

Countless naval architectures: Stripped longships; scorpion galleys; luggers and brigantines; massive steamers hundreds of feet long down to canoes no larger than a man. There were alien vessels: ur-ketches, a barge carved from the ossified body of a whale. Tangled in ropes and moving wooden walkways, hundreds of vessels facing all directions rode the swells.

The city was loud. Tethered dogs, the shouts of costermongers, the drone of engines, hammers and lathes, and stones being broken. Klaxons from workshops. Laughter and shouting, all in the variant of Salt, the mongrel sailors’ tongue, that was the language of Armada. And below those city sounds the throaty noise of boats. Complaining wood and the snaps of leather and rope, the percussion of ship on ship.

Armada moved constantly, its bridges swinging side to side, its towers heeling. The city shifted on the water.

The vessels had been reclaimed, from the inside out. What had once been berths and bulkheads had become houses; there were workshops in old gundecks. But the city had not been bounded by the ships’ existing skins. It reshaped them. They were built up, topped with structure; styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and esthetics into a compound architecture.

Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats’ constant motion.

Bellis could see the awnings of Winterstraw Market: hundreds of jolly boats and flat-bottomed canal runners, none more than twenty feet long, filling the spaces between grander vessels. The little boats bumped each other constantly, tethered together with chains and crusted knotwork. The stallholders were opening up, garlanding their little shop boats with ribbons and signs and hanging up their wares. Early shoppers descended to the market from surrounding ships by steep rope bridges, stepping expertly from boat to boat.

Beside the market was a corbita smeared with ivy and climbing flowers. Low dwellings were built onto it and beautifully carved. Its masts had not been felled, but were wound with greenery that made them look like ancient trees. There was a submersible that had not dived for decades. A ridge of thin houses extended around its periscope like a dorsal fin. The two vessels were joined by rippling wooden bridges that passed above the market.

A steamship was become a residential block, its hull broken with new windows, a children’s climbing frame on its deck. A boxy paddleboat housed mushroom farms. A chariot ship, its bridle polished decoratively, was covered with brick terraces that filled the curves of its naval foundations. Chains of smoke rose from its chimneys.

Buildings laced with bone, colors from greys and rusts to the flamboyant glares of heraldry: a city of esoteric shapes. Its hybridity was stark and uncharming, marred with decay and graffiti. The architecture hunkered and rose and hunkered again with the water, vaguely threatening.

There were slums and mansions in the bodies of tramp merchant ships, and built tottering across sloops. There were churches and sanatoria and deserted houses, all licked by constant damp, contoured with salt—steeped in the sounds of waves and the fresh-rot smell of the sea.

The ships were tethered together in a weave of chains and hinged girders. Every vessel was a pontoon in a web of rope bridges. Boats coiled toward each other in seawalls of embedded ships, surrounding free-floating vessels. Basilio Harbor, where Armada’s navy and visitors could tie up, repair or unload, sheltered from storms.

The largest ships meandered instead around the edges of the city, beyond the tugs and steamers tethered to Armada’s sides. Out in the open water were fleets of fishing boats, the city’s warships, the chariot ships and whim trawlers and others. These were Armada’s pirate navy, heading out across the world, coming in to dock with cargoes plundered from enemies or the sea.

And beyond all that, beyond the city sky that thronged with birds and other shapes, beyond all the vessels was the sea.

The open sea. Waves like insects in incessant motion.

Stunning and empty.

Bellis was protected by those who had caught her, she was made to understand. She was a resident of Garwater riding, ruled by the man and woman with the scars. They had promised work and a berth for all those they had taken, and it had happened quickly. Agents had met the terrified, confused new arrivals, calling out the names on their lists, checking the skills and details of the newcomers, brusquely explaining in pidgin Salt what work they offered.

It had taken Bellis some minutes to understand, and more to believe, that she was being offered work in a library.

She had signed the proffered papers. The officers and sailors from the Terpsichoria were being led forcibly away for “assessment” and “reeducation,” and Bellis had felt in no mood to be difficult. She had scratched her name, tight with resentment. Call this a damned contract? she felt like shouting. There’s no choice here, and everybody knows it. But she had signed.

The organization, the mumming of legality, confused her.

These were pirates. This was a pirate city, ruled by cruel mercantilism, existing in the pores of the world, snatching new citizens from their ships, a floating freetown for buying and selling stolen goods, where might made right. The evidence of this was everywhere: in the severity of the citizens, the weapons they wore openly, in the stocks and whipping posts she saw on the Garhouse vessels. Armada, she thought, must be ordered by maritime discipline, the lash.

But the ship-city was not the base brutocracy that Bellis had expected. There were other logics at work. There were typed contracts, offices administrating the new arrivals. And officials of some kind: an executive, administrative caste, just as in New Crobuzon.

Alongside Armada’s club law, or supporting it, or an integument around it, was bureaucratic rule. This was not a ship, but a city. She had entered another country as complex and organized as her own.

The officials had taken her to the Chromolith, a long-decaying paddleship, and berthed her in two little round rooms joined by a spiral staircase, built in what had been the vessel’s big chimney. Somewhere far below her, in the ship’s guts, was an engine that had once vented its soot through what was now her home. It had gone cold long before she was born.

The room was hers, they told her, but she must pay for it, weekly, at the Garwater Settlement Office. They had given her an advance on her wages, a handful of notes and change—“ten eyes to a flag, ten flags to a finial.” The currency was rough-cut and crudely printed. The colors of the ink varied from note to note.

And then they had told her, in rudimentary Ragamoll, that she would never leave Armada, and they had left her there alone.

She had waited, but that was all. She was alone in the city, and it was a prison.

Eventually hunger had driven her down to buy greasy street-food from a vendor who jabbered at her in Salt too quick for her easily to understand. She had walked the streets, astonished that she was not accosted. She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine, surrounded by the women and men in lush, ragged dress, the street children, the cactacae and khepri, hotchi, llorgiss, massive gessin and vu-murt, and others. Cray lived below the city and walked topside in the day, sluggish on their armored legs.

The streets were narrow little ridges between the houses crammed on decks. Bellis grew used to the city’s yawing, the skyline that shifted and jostled. She was surrounded by catcalls and conversations in Salt.

It was easy for her to learn: its vocabulary was obvious, stolen as it was from other languages, and its syntax was easy. She had to use it—she could not avoid buying food, asking for directions or clarification, speaking to other Armadans—and when she did her accent marked her out as a newcomer, not city-born.

For the most part those she spoke to were patient with her, even crudely good-humored, forgiving her surliness. Perhaps they expected her to relax as she made Armada her home.

She did not.

That morning, as Bellis stepped out of the Chromolith smokestack, the question How did I get here? broke through into her mind again.

She was out in the street in the city of ships, in the sun, enclosed in a press of her kidnappers. Men and women, tough-faced humans and other races, even a few constructs were all around her, bartering, working, jabbering in Salt. Bellis walked on through Armada, a prisoner.

She was heading for The Clockhouse Spur. This riding abutted Garwater, and was more commonly known as Booktown, or the khepri quarter.

It was a little more than a thousand feet from Chromolith Towers to the Grand Gears Library. The walk there took her over at least six vessels.

The sky was full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. Those were chaotic. Some were congealed from lashed-together gasbags, extruding cabins and engines randomly, like chance accretions of material. Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit.

From Chromolith Bellis crossed a steep little bridge to the schooner Jarvee, crowded with little kiosks selling tobacco and sweets. She passed up onto the barquentine Lynx Sejant, its deck full of silk merchants selling offcuts from Armada’s piracy. Right, past a broken llorgiss sea pillar bobbing like some malevolent fishing lure, and Bellis crossed Taffeta Bridge.

She was now on the Severe, a massive clipper, the edge of Booktown riding, where the khepri ruled. Beside carts pulled by Armada’s sickly inbred ox and horses, Bellis passed a team of three khepri guard-sisters.

There were similar trios in Kinken and Creekside, New Crobuzon’s khepri ghettos. It had astonished Bellis the first time she had seen them here. The khepri in Armada, like those in New Crobuzon, must be descendants of refugees from the Mercy Ships, worshipping what was left, what they remembered, of the Bered Kai Nev pantheon. They held traditional weapons. Their lithe humanoid women’s bodies were weatherbeaten, their heads like giant scarabs iridescent in the cold sun.

With so many mute khepri residents, the streets of Booktown were quieter than those of Garwater. Instead, the air was slightly spiced with residue from the chymical mists that were part of khepri communication. It was their equivalent of a boisterous hubbub.

Punctuating the alleyways and squares were khepri-spit sculptures, like those in New Crobuzon’s Plaza of Statues. Figures from myth, abstract forms, sea creatures executed in the opalescent material the khepri metabolized through their headscarabs. The colors were muted, as if colorberries were less plentiful here, or of worse quality.

On an avenue on the Compound Dust, a khepri clockwork ship—a Mercy Ship that had fled the Ravening—Bellis slowed, fascinated by its cogs and architecture. Insects and husks blew fitfully into her path from the gusting deck-field of a farm ship aft, and the distant bleating of livestock sounded through slats in its lower decks.

Then on to the fat factory ship the Aronnax Lab, past metallurgy workshops and refineries, into Krome Plaza, where a great suspended platform reached out across the water onto the deck of the Pinchermarn, the aftmost of the vessels that made up Grand Gears Library.

“Relax . . . no one cares that you’re late, you know,” said Carrianne, one of the human staff, as Bellis hurried past. “You’re new, you’re press-ganged, so you might as well milk it.” Bellis heard her laughing, but did not respond.

The corridors and converted mess halls were crammed with bookshelves and guttering oil lanterns. Scholars of all races pursed their lips, if they had them, and looked up wistfully in Bellis’ wake. The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages. Stifled coughs sounded like apologies as Bellis entered the acquisitions department. Books tottered on cabinets and trolleys and in loose towers on the floor.

She was there for hours, coding methodically. Stacking books written in scripts she could not read, recording the details of the other volumes onto cards. Filing them alphabetically—the Salt alphabet was a slightly variant form of the Ragamoll script—according to author, title, language, themes, and subjects.

A little before she was due to break for her lunch Bellis heard footsteps. It must be Shekel, she thought. He was the only person from the Terpsichoria she saw or spoke to. She smiled at the thought of it: herself consorting with the cabin boy. He had come swaggering in to find her, almost a fortnight previously, all adolescent nerve, excited at their capture and new situation. (Someone had told him about “a scary lofty lady in black with blue lips” working in the library, he explained to her. He grinned when he said that, and she had looked away to avoid smiling back.)

He was living by various vague means, sharing a house with a Remade man from the Terpsichoria. Bellis offered Shekel a brass flag to help her with reshelving, which he accepted. Since then he had come several times, done a little work, talking to her about Armada and the scattered remnants of their ship.

She learned a lot from him.

But it was not Shekel who was now approaching her in the narrow corridor, but a nervous, quizzically smiling Johannes Tearfly.

It was with some embarrassment, later, that she remembered herself rising at his arrival (with a cry of pleasure like a gushy child, for gods’ sakes) and throwing her arms around him.

He opened to her, too, smiling with shy warmth. And after a long moment of close greeting, they disengaged and looked at each other.

This was the first chance he’d had to get out, he told her, and she demanded to know what he had been doing. He’d been sent to the library and had taken the chance to seek her out, and again she told him to tell her what he had been damn well doing. When he told her that he could not, that he had to go now, she almost stamped in frustration, but he was telling her wait, wait, that he had more free time now, and that she should just listen a moment.

“If you’re free tomorrow night,” he said, “I’d like to take you to supper. There’s a place in starboard Garwater, on the Raddletongue, called the Unrealized Time. Do you know it?”

“I’ll find it,” she said.

“I could come and collect you,” he began, and she cut him off.

“I’ll find it.”

He smiled at her, with the bemused pleasure she remembered. If you’re free indeed! she thought sardonically. Does he really think . . . Is it possible? She felt suddenly uncertain, almost afraid. Do the others go out every night? Am I alone in exile? Are the Terpsichoria’s passengers carousing every evening in their new home?

As she left the library that evening, Armada’s close quarters and narrow streets oppressed Bellis. But when she raised her eyes and looked beyond the skyline, the Swollen Ocean weighed down on her like granite, and she felt breathless. She could not believe that the mass of water and air beyond Armada did not drown it, disappear it in an instant. She counted her coins and approached a skycab driver refilling his dirigible from a gas depot on Aronnax Lab.

She swayed in the cradle as it buzzed sedately a hundred feet above the highest deck. Bellis could see the edges of the city bobbing randomly, moving very slowly with whatever currents took it. There, the distant wood of the haunted quarter. The arena. The stronghold of the Brucolac.

And in the center of Garwater riding, something extraordinary that Bellis never grew accustomed to seeing—the source of the riding’s strength. Something looming enormously over the shipscape around it: the largest ship in the city, the largest ship that Bellis had ever seen.

Almost nine hundred feet of black iron. Five colossal funnels and six masts stripped of canvas, more than two hundred feet high; and tethered way above them a huge, crippled dirigible. A vast paddle on each side of the ship, like industrial sculptures. The decks seemed almost bare, unbroken by the haphazard building that misshaped other vessels. The Lovers’ stronghold, like a beached titan: the Grand Easterly, lolling austere amid Armada’s baroque.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Bellis said suddenly. “Don’t take me to Chromolith.”

She directed the pilot aft-aft-star’d—the city’s directions all relative to the colossal Grand Easterly itself. As the man gently tugged at his rudder she looked down over the crowds. Air eddied as the aeronaut picked a way through the masts and rigging that jutted up around them in the Armada sky. Around the towers Bellis saw the city birds: gulls and pigeons and parakeets. They brooded on roofs and in decktop aeries, alongside other presences.

The sun was gone, and the city sparkled. Bellis felt a gust of melancholy as she passed light-strung rigging close enough to grasp. She saw her destination, the Boulevard St. Carcheri on the steamer Glomar’s Heart, a shabby-opulent promenade of gently colored streetlamps, knotted rustwood trees, and stucco façades. As the gondola began to descend, she kept her eyes on the shabbier, darker shape beyond the parkland.

Across four hundred feet of water glinting with impurities rose a tower of intertwined girders as high as the dirigibles, gushing with flame. A massive concrete body on legs like four splintering pillars emerging from the dirtied sea. Dark cranes moving without visible purpose.

It was a monstrous thing, awe-inspiring and ugly and foreboding. Bellis sat back in her descending aerostat and kept her eye on the Sorghum, New Crobuzon’s stolen rig.

Chapter Seven

It rained remorselessly all the next day, hard grey drops like shards of flint.

The costermongers were quiet; very little business was done. Armada’s bridges were slippery. There were accidents: the drunk or the clumsy slipping into the cold sea.

The city’s monkeys sat subdued under awnings and bickered. They were pests, feral tribes that raced across the floating city, fighting, vying for scraps and territory, brachiating below bridges and careering up rigging. They were not the only animals living wild in the city, but they were the most successful scavengers. They huddled in the cold damp and groomed each other without enthusiasm.

In the dim light of Grand Gears Library, the signs requesting silence were made absurd by the percussion of rain.

The bloodhorns of Shaddler riding sounded mournfully, as they customarily did when it rained hard and the scabmettlers said that the sky was bleeding. Water beaded weirdly on the surface of the Uroc, Dry Fall riding’s flagship. The dark and rotting fabric of the haunted quarter mildewed and glowered. People in the neighboring Thee-And-Thine riding pointed at the deserted quarter’s decrepit skyline and warned, as they always did, that somewhere within, the tallow ghast was moving.

In the first hour after dusk, in the muted edifice of Barrow Hall on the Therianthropus, the heart of Shaddler, a bad-tempered meeting came to an end. The scabmettler guards outside could hear delegations leaving. They fingered their weapons and ran their hands over the crust of their organic armor.

There was a man among them: a few inches shy of six feet and prodigiously muscled, dressed in charcoal-colored leather, a straight sword by his side. He spoke and moved with quiet grace.

He discussed weaponry with the scabmettlers, then had them show him strokes and sweeps from mortu crutt, their fighting science. He let them touch the filigree of wires that wound around his right arm and down the side of his armor into the battery on his belt.

The man was comparing the Stubborn Nail strike of stampfighting with the sadr punch of mortu crutt. He and his sparring partner swept their arms in slow demonstration attacks, when the doors opened at the top of the stairs above them and the guards came to quick attention. The man in grey straightened slowly and walked to the corner of the entresol.

A coldly furious man descended toward them. He was tall and young-looking and built like a dancer, with freckled skin the color of pale ash. His hair seemed to belong to someone else: it was dark and long and very tightly curled, and it hung in unruly locks from his scalp like an unkempt fleece. It jounced and coiled as he descended.

As he passed the scabmettlers he gave a peremptory little bow, which they returned with more ceremony. He stood still before the man in grey. The two men eyed each other with impenetrable expressions.

“Liveman Doul,” said the newcomer eventually, in a whispering voice.

“Deadman Brucolac,” was the reply. Uther Doul gazed at the Brucolac’s broad, handsome face.

“It seems your employers are going ahead with their idiot scheming,” the Brucolac murmured, and then was silent. “I still can’t believe, Uther,” he said finally, “that you approve of this lunacy.”

Uther Doul did not move, did not take his eyes from the other man.

The Brucolac straightened his back and gave a sneer that might have indicated contempt, or a shared confidence, or many other things. “It won’t happen, you know,” he said. “The city won’t allow it. That’s not what this city is for.”

The Brucolac opened his mouth idly, and his great forked tongue flickered out, tasting the air and the ghosts of Uther Doul’s sweat.

There were things that made very little sense to Tanner Sack.

He did not understand how he could bear the cold of the seawater. With his bulky Remade tentacles, he had to descend with his chest uncovered, and the first touch of the water had shocked him. He had almost balked, then had smeared himself with thick grease; but he had acclimatized much faster than made sense. He was still aware of the chill, but it was an abstract knowledge. It did not cripple him.

He did not understand why the brine was healing his tentacles.

Since first they had been implanted at the caprice of a New Crobuzon magister—a punishment supposedly related to his crime according to some patronizing allegorical logic that had never made any sense to him—they had hung like stinking dead limbs. He had cut at them, experimentally, and the layers of nerves implanted in them had fired and he had nearly fainted with pain. But pain was all that had lived in them, so he had wrapped them around himself like rotting pythons and tried to ignore them.

But immersed in the saltwater, they had begun to move.

Their multitude of small infections had faded, and they were now cool to the touch. After three dives, to his grinding shock, the tentacles had started to move independently of the water.

He was healing.

After a few weeks of diving, new sensations passed through them, and their sucker pads flexed gently and attached themselves on surfaces nearby. Tanner was learning to move them by choice.

In the confused first days when the captives had first arrived, Tanner had wandered through the ridings and listened bewildered as merchants and foremen offered him work in a language he was learning very quickly to understand.

When he verified that he was an engineer, the liaison officer for the Garwater Dock Authority had eyed him greedily, and had asked him in child’s Salt and pantomime hand gestures whether he would learn to be a diver. It was easier to train an engineer to dive than to teach a diver the skills that Tanner had accumulated.

It was hard work learning to breathe the air pumped down from above without panicking in the hot little helmet, how to move without overcompensating and sending himself spinning. But he had learned to luxuriate in the slowed-down time, the eddying clarity of water seen through glass.

He did similar work now to that he had always done—patching and repairing, rebuilding, fumbling with tools by great engines—only now, well below the stevedores and the cranes, it was performed in the crush of water, watched by fishes and eels, buffeted by currents born miles away.

“I told you that Coldarse is working in the library, didn’t I?”

“You did, lad,” Tanner said. He and Shekel were eating below an awning at the docks while the deluge continued around them.

Shekel had arrived at the docks with a little group of raggedy-arsed youngsters between twelve and sixteen years old. All the others, from what Tanner could tell, were city-born; and that they had let a press-ganged join them, one who still struggled to express himself in Salt, was evidence of Shekel’s adaptability.

They had left Shekel alone to share his food with Tanner.

“I like that library,” he said. “I like going there, and not just because of the ice woman, neither.”

“There’s a lot worse you could do than settle into some reading, lad,” said Tanner. “We’ve finished Crawfoot’s Chronicles; you could find some other stories. You could read them to me, for a change. How’re your letters?”

“I can make them out,” said Shekel vaguely.

“Well, there you go then. You go and have a word with Miss Coldy, and get her to recommend some reading for you.”

They ate silently for a while, watching a group of the Armada cray come up from their hivewreck below.

“What’s it like under there?” Shekel said at last.

“Cold,” said Tanner. “And dark. Dark but . . . luminous. Massive. You’re just surrounded by massiveness. There are shapes you can only just see, huge dark shapes. Subs and whatnot—and sometimes you think you see others. Can’t make them out properly, and they’re guarded, so’s you can’t get too close.

“I’ve watched cray under their wrecks. Seawyrms that saddle up sometimes to the chariot ships. The menfish, like newts, from Bask riding. Can’t hardly see them, the way they move. Bastard John, the dolphin. He’s the Lovers’ security chief below, and a colder, more vicious sod you could not imagine.

“And then there’s a few . . . Remade.” His voice eddied into silence.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” said Shekel, watching Tanner closely. “I can’t get used to . . .” He said nothing more.

Neither could get used to it. A place where the Remade were equal. Where a Remade might be a foreman or a manager instead of the lowest laborer.

Shekel saw Tanner rub his tentacles. “How are they?” he asked, and Tanner grinned and concentrated, and one of the rubbery things contracted a little and began to drag itself like a moribund snake toward Shekel’s bread. The boy clapped appreciatively.

At the edge of the jetty where the cray were surfacing, a tall cactus-man stood, his bare chest pocked with fibrous vegetable scars. A massive rivebow was strapped across his back.

“D’you know him?” said Tanner. “His name’s Hedrigall.”

“That don’t sound like a cactacae name,” said Shekel, and Tanner shook his head.

“He’s no New Crobuzon cactus,” he explained, “nor even a Shankell one. He’s a press-ganged, like us. Came to the city more than twenty years ago. He’s from Dreer Samher. Near enough two thousand miles from New Crobuzon.

“I tell you what, Shekel, he’s got some stories. You don’t need books to get tales off him.

“He was a trader-pirate before he got captured and joined the city here, and he’s seen just about all the things that live in the sea. He can cut your hair with that rivebow; he’s that good a shot. He’s seen keragorae and mosquito-men and unplaced, and whatever else you like. And gods, he knows how to tell you about ’em. In Dreer Samher, they’ve fablers who tell stories for a calling. Hed was one. He can make his voice hypnagogic if he wants, keep you totally drunk on it. All while he tells you stories.”

The cactus-man was standing very still, letting the rain pelt his skin.

“And now he’s an aeronaut,” Tanner said. “He’s been piloting Grand Easterly’s airships—scouts and warflots—for years. He’s one of the Lovers’ most important men, and a fine bloke he is. He spends most of his time now up in the Arrogance.”

Tanner and Shekel looked behind them, and up. More than a thousand feet above the deck of the Grand Easterly the Arrogance was tethered. It was a big, crippled aerostat, with twisted tail fins and an engine that had not moved in years. Attached by hundreds of yards of tar-stiffened rope, winched to the great ship below it, it served as the city’s crow’s nest.

“He likes it up there, Hedrigall,” said Tanner. “Told me he just wants things quiet, these days.”

“Tanner,” said Shekel slowly, “what do you reckon to the Lovers? I mean, you work for them: you’ve heard them talk; you know what they’re like. What d’you think of them? Why d’you do what they say?”

Tanner knew, as he spoke, that Shekel would not fully understand him. But it was such an important question that he turned and looked very carefully at the boy he shared his rooms with (on the port end of an old iron hulk). The boy who had been his jailer and his audience and his friend and was becoming something different, something like family.

“I was going to be a slave in the colonies, Shekel,” he said quietly. “The Lovers of Grand Easterly took me in and gave me a job that pays money and told me they didn’t give a cup of piss that I was Remade. The Lovers gave me my life, Shekel, and a city and a home. I tell you that whatever they fucking want to do is alfuckingright by me. New Crobuzon can kiss my arse, lad. I’m an Armada man, a Garwater man. I’m learning my Salt. I’m loyal.”

Shekel stared at him. Tanner was a slow-talking, quiet man, and Shekel had never seen that intensity from him before.

He was very impressed.

It continued raining. All across Armada, the passengers from the Terpsichoria who had been let out tried to live.

On gaudy yawls and barquentines, they were arguing, buying and selling and stealing, learning Salt, some weeping, poring over maps of the city, calculating the distance from New Crobuzon or Nova Esperium. They mourned their old lives, staring at heliotypes of friends and lovers at home.

In a reeducation jail between Garwater and Shaddler were scores of sailors from the Terpsichoria. Some were shouting at their guard-counselors, who were trying to soothe them, all the time gauging whether this man or that could overcome his ties, whether his link to New Crobuzon would attenuate, whether he could be won over to Armada.

And if not, deciding what was to be done with them.

Bellis arrived at the Unrealized Time with her makeup and hair rain-battered. She stood bedraggled in the doorway while a waiter greeted her, and she stared at him, astonished at this treatment. As if he were a real waiter, she found herself thinking, in a real restaurant in a real city.

The Raddletongue was a big and ancient vessel. It was so crusted with buildings, so recrafted and interfered with, that it was impossible to tell what kind of ship it had once been. It had been part of the Armada for centuries. The ship’s forecastle was covered with ruins: old temples in white stone, much of their substance scattered and pounded to dust. The remnants were smothered in ivy, and nettles that did not keep the city’s children away.

There were strange shapes in the Raddletongue’s streets, lumps of obscure sea-salvaged stuff left in corners as if forgotten.

The restaurant was small and warm and half-full, paneled in darkwood. Its windows looked out over a fringe of ketches and canoes to Urchinspine Docks, Armada’s second harbor.

Bellis saw with a stab of emotion that from the restaurant’s ceiling hung little strings of paper lanterns. The last place she had seen that had been in the Clock and Cockerel, in Salacus Fields in New Crobuzon.

She had to shake her head to clear it of a biting melancholy. At a table in the corner, Johannes was getting to his feet, waving to her.

They sat quietly for a while. Johannes seemed shy, and Bellis found herself resentful that it had been so long since she had heard from him, and suspecting that she was not being fair she retreated into silence.

Bellis saw with amazement that the red wine on the table was a vintage Galaggi, a House Predicus 1768. She looked up at Johannes with eyes wide. With her mouth set shut she looked disapproving.

“I thought we might celebrate,” he said. “I mean, at seeing each other again.”

The wine was excellent.

“Why’ve they just left me . . . us . . . to get on with it? Or to rot?” Bellis demanded. She picked at her concoction of fish and bitter ship-grown leaves. “I’d have thought . . . I’d have thought it ill-advised to pluck a few hundred people from their lives, then let them loose in . . . this . . .”

“They’ve not done that,” Johannes said. “How many of the other Terpsichoria passengers have you seen? How many of the crew? Don’t you remember the interviews, the questions, when we first arrived? They were tests,” he said gently. “They were estimating who was safe, and who not. If they think you’re too troublesome, or too . . . tied to New Crobuzon . . .” His voice petered away.

“Then what?” demanded Bellis. “Like the captain . . . ?”

“No no no,” said Johannes quickly. “I think that they . . . work on you. Try to persuade you. I mean, you know about press-ganging. There are plenty of sailors in the New Crobuzon navy who were doing nothing more nautical than carousing in a tavern the night they were ‘recruited.’ It doesn’t stop most of them working as sailors once they’re taken.”

“For a while,” said Bellis.

“Yes. I’m not saying it’s exactly the same. That’s the big difference: once you join Armada you don’t . . . leave.”

“I’ve been told that a thousand times,” Bellis said slowly. “But what about Armada’s fleet? What about the cray underneath? You think they can’t get away? Anyway, if that were true, if people never did have a chance to leave, no one but the city-born would be prepared to live here.”

“Obviously,” Johannes said. “The city’s freebooters are on sail for months, maybe years at a time till they make their way back to Armada. And they’ll dock at other ports during those journeys, and I’m sure some of their crew must have disappeared. There must be ex-Armadans scattered here and there.

“But the fact is, those crews are chosen: partly for their loyalty, and partly for the fact that if they do run, it won’t matter. They’re almost all city-born, for a start: it’s a rare press-ganged who’s given a letter of pass. The likes of you and me, we couldn’t hope to get on a vessel like that. Armada is where most of us press-ganged’ll see things out.

“But dammit, think who gets taken, Bellis. Some sailors, sure, some ‘rival’ pirates, a few merchants. But the ships the Armadans encounter—you think they all get taken? Most of the press-ganged vessels are . . . well, ships like the Terpsichoria. Slavers. Or colony ships full of transported Remade. Or jail ships. Or ships carrying prisoners of war.

“Most of the Remade on the Terpsichoria realized long ago that they’d never be going home. Twenty years, my eye—it’s a life sentence, and a death sentence, and they know it. And here they are now, with work and money and respect . . . Is it any wonder they accept it? As far as I know there are only seven Remade from the Terpsichoria being treated for rejection, and two of those already suffer dementia.”

And how the fuck, wondered Bellis, how in the name of Jabber do you know that?

“What about the likes of you and me?” Johannes continued. “All of us . . . we already knew we’d be away from home—away from New Crobuzon—for five years at the very, very least, and probably more. Look at the motley group we were. I’d say very few of the other passengers had unbreakable ties with the city. People arriving here are unsettled, sure; and surprised, confused, alarmed. But not destroyed. Isn’t it a ‘new life’ that they promise Nova Esperium colonists? Wasn’t that what most of us sought?”

Most, perhaps, thought Bellis. But not all. And if it’s satisfaction with this place they look for before they let us live free here, then gods know—I know—they can make mistakes of judgment.

“I doubt,” Johannes said quietly, “they’re so naïve as to just leave us to roam unchecked. I’d be surprised if they didn’t keep careful note of us. I suspect we don’t go unwatched. But what could we do, anyway? This is a city, not a dinghy we can commandeer or scuttle.

“It’s only the crew who’d represent any kind of real problem. Many have families waiting for them. Those are the ones who’d likely refuse to accept that this is their new home.”

Only the crew? thought Bellis, a bad taste in her throat.

“So what happens to them? Like the captain?” she said in a dead voice. “Like Cumbershum?”

Johannes flinched. “I . . . I’ve been told it’s . . . it’s only the captains and first officers of any ships encountered . . . That they simply have too much to lose, that they’re particularly tied to their home port . . .”

There was something fawning and apologetic in his face. With a waxing alienation, Bellis realized that she was alone.

She had come here tonight thinking that she might be able to talk to Johannes about New Crobuzon, that he would share her unhappiness, that she could touch the bloodied part of her mind and talk about the people and streets she missed so hard.

Perhaps that they might broach the subject that had burrowed through her thoughts for weeks: escape.

But Johannes was acclimatizing. He spoke in a carefully neutral register, as if what he said was just reportage. But he was trying to come to terms with the city’s rulers. He had found something in Armada that made him prepared to consider it home.

What did they do to achieve this? she thought. What is he doing?

“Who else have you heard about?” she said after a cold silence.

“Mollificatt, I’m very sorry to say, was one of those who succumbed when we first arrived,” he said, looking genuinely sad. The mongrel and changing population of Armada made it a carrier of countless diseases. The city-born were hardy, but every batch of press-ganged was afflicted with fevers and murrains on its first arrival, and several of their number inevitably died. “I’ve heard rumors that our newcomer, Mr. Fennec, is working somewhere in Garwater, or Thee-And-Thine riding. Sister Meriope . . .” he said suddenly, his eyes widening. He shook his head. “Sister Meriope is . . . She is being held for her own safety. She threatens herself with violence constantly. Bellis,” he whispered, “she is with child.”

Bellis rolled her eyes.

I can’t listen to this, thought Bellis, saying just enough to be in the conversation. She felt alone. Tawdry secrets and clichés. What next? she thought with contempt as Johannes rambled on through the passenger list and the officers of the Terpsichoria. Some trusty sailor actually a woman disguised to go to sea? Love and buggery among the ranks?

There was something pathetic about Johannes that night, and she had never thought so before.

“How do you know all this, Johannes?” said Bellis carefully, at last. “Where’ve you been? What are you actually doing?”

Johannes cleared his throat and stared into his glass for a long time.

“Bellis . . .” he said. Around him, the soft clatter of the restaurant seemed very loud. “Bellis . . . can I tell you in confidence?” Johannes sighed, then looked up at her.

“I’m working for the Lovers,” he said. “And I don’t mean I work in Garwater riding. I work directly for them. They have a team of researchers, working on a quite . . .” He shook his head and began to smile with delight. “A quite extraordinary project. An extraordinary opportunity. And they invited me to join them—because of my previous work.

“Their team had read some of my research, and they decided that I’d be . . . that they wanted me to work with them.” He was overjoyed, she realized. He was like a child, almost exactly like a child.

“There are thaumaturges, oceanologers, marine biologists. That man—the man who defeated the Terpsichoria, Uther Doul—he’s part of the team. He’s central, in fact. He’s a philosopher. There are different projects all being pursued. Projects on cryptogeography and probability theory, as well as . . . as the investigation I’m working on. The man in charge of that is fascinating. He was with the Lovers when we arrived: a tall old man with a beard.”

“I remember him,” said Bellis. “He welcomed you.”

A look somewhere between contrition and excitement overtook Johannes.

“He did,” he said. “That’s Tintinnabulum. A hunter, an outsider, employed by the city. He lives on the Castor with seven other men, where Garwater meets Shaddler and Booktown. A small ship with a belfry . . .

“We’re doing such fascinating work,” he said suddenly, and seeing his pure pleasure Bellis could see how Armada had won him. “The equipment’s old and unreliable—the analytical engines are ancient—but the work’s so much more radical. I’ve months of research to catch up on—I’m learning Salt. This work . . . it means reading the most varied things.”

He grinned at her with incredulous pride. “For my project, there are certain key texts. One of them’s mine. Can you believe that? Isn’t that extraordinary? They’re from all over the world. From New Crobuzon, Khadoh. And there are mystery books that we can’t find. They’re in Ragamoll and Salt and moonscript . . . One of the most important’s said to be in High Kettai. We’ve made a list of them from references in the books we do have. Gods know how they’ve got such a fantastic library here, Bellis. Half these books I could never find at home—”

“They stole it, Johannes,” she said, and silenced him. “That’s how they’ve got it. Every damned volume in Grand Gears Library is stolen. From ships, from the towns they plunder on the coast. From people like me, Johannes. My books that I wrote that have been stolen from me. That’s where they get their books.”

Something cold was settling in Bellis’ gut.

“Tell me,” she began, and stopped. She drank some wine, breathed deep, and started again. “Tell me, Johannes, that is somewhat remarkable, isn’t it? That out of an entire ocean—an entire fucking ocean—that out of that whole empty sea they should pluck the one ship that was carrying their intellectual hero . . .”

And again she saw in his eye that uncomfortable cocktail of apology and elation.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “That’s the thing, Bellis. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

She suddenly knew what he was going to say, a certainty that nauseated and repelled her, but she liked him still, she really did, and she so wanted to be wrong that she did not stand to go; she waited to be corrected, knowing that she would not be.

“It wasn’t coincidence, Bellis,” she heard him saying. “It wasn’t. They have an agent in Salkrikaltor. They receive colonial passenger lists. They knew we were coming. They knew I was coming.”

The paper lanterns swung as the door opened and closed. There was pretty laughter from a nearby table. The smell of stuffed meat cosseted them.

“That was why they took our ship. They came for me,” said Johannes softly, and Bellis closed her eyes, defeated.

“Oh, Johannes,” she said unsteadily.

“Bellis,” he said, alarmed, reaching out, but she cut him off with a curt gesture. What, do you think I’m going to cry? she thought furiously.

“Johannes, let me tell you there is a world of difference between a five-year, a ten-year sentence—and life.” She could not look at him. “It may be that for you, for Meriope, for the Cardomiums, for I don’t know who else, Nova Esperium meant a new life. Not for me.

“Not for me. For me it was an escape, a necessary and a temporary escape. I was born in Chnum, Johannes. Educated in Mafaton. Was proposed to in Brock Marsh. Broke up in Salacus Fields. New Crobuzon is my home; it will always be my home.”

Johannes looked at her with mounting unease.

“I have no interest in the colonies. In Nova fucking Esperium. None. I don’t want to live with a group of venal inadequates, failed spivs, disgraced nuns, bureaucrats too incompetent or weak to make it back home, resentful terrified natives . . . Godspit, Johannes, I’ve no interest in the sea. Freezing, sickening, filthy, repetitive, stinking . . .

“I’ve no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! ‘The Floating Pirate City’! I don’t want it! I don’t want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking its victims dry. This isn’t a city, Johannes; it’s a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it.

“I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It’s dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous—particularly for me, particularly now—but it’s my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history . . . New Crobuzon,” she said slowly, “is the greatest city in Bas-Lag.”

And coming from her, from someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon’s brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian.

“And you’re telling me,” she said finally, “that I’ve been exiled from my city—for life—because of you?”

Johannes was looking at her, stricken.

“Bellis,” he said slowly, “I don’t know what to say. I can only say that . . . that I’m sorry. This wasn’t my choice. The Lovers knew I was on the passenger list, and . . . That’s not the only reason. They need more guns, so they might have taken her anyway, but . . .”

His voice broke off. “But probably not. Mostly they came for me. But Bellis, please!” He leaned toward her urgently. “It wasn’t my choice. I didn’t make this happen. I had no idea.”

“But you’ve made your peace with it, Johannes,” said Bellis. She stood at last. “You’ve made peace. You’re lucky you’ve found something that makes you happy here, Johannes. I understand that it wasn’t your choice, but I hope you’ll understand that I can’t just sit here as if nothing is wrong, making jolly conversation, when it’s down to you that I’m without a home.

“And don’t call them the fucking Lovers, like it’s a title, like those two perverts are a celestial constellation or something. Look at you all agog at them. They’re like us; they have names. You could have said no, Johannes. You could have refused.”

As she turned to go, he said her name. She had never heard him use such a tone, stony and fierce. It shocked her.

He looked up at her, his hands clenched on the table. “Bellis,” he said, in the same voice. “I’m sorry—I’m truly sorry—that you feel kidnapped. I had no idea. But what is it you object to? Living in a parasitic city? I doubt that. New Crobuzon may be more subtle than Armada day to day, but try telling those in the ruins of Suroch that New Crobuzon’s not a pirate.

“Culture? Science? Art? Bellis, do you even understand where you are? This city is the sum of hundreds of cultures. Every maritime nation has lost vessels to war, press-ganging, desertion. And they are here. They’re what built Armada. This city is the sum of history’s lost ships. There are vagabonds and pariahs and their descendants in this place from cultures that New Crobuzon has never so much as heard of. Do you realize that? Do you understand what that means? Their renegades meet here and overlap like scales, and make something new. Armada’s been plowing the Swollen Ocean for damn near ever, picking up outcasts and escapees from everywhere. Godspit, Bellis, do you know a bloody thing?

“History? There’ve been legends and rumors about this place among all the seafaring nations for centuries; did you know that? Do you know any sailors’ tales? The oldest vessel here is more than a thousand years old. The ships may change, but the city traces its history back to the Flesh-Eater Wars, at least, and some say back to the godsdamned Ghosthead Empire . . . A village? Nobody knows the population of Armada, but it’s hundreds of thousands at least. Count all the layers and layers of decks; there are probably as many miles of street here as in New Crobuzon.

“No, you see Bellis, I don’t believe you. I don’t think you have any reason for not wanting to live here, any objective reasons for preferring New Crobuzon. I think you simply miss your home. Don’t misunderstand me. You don’t have to offer any explanations. It’s understandable you’d love New Crobuzon. But all you’re actually saying is ‘I don’t like it here; I want to go home.’ ”

For the first time, he looked at her with something akin to dislike.

“And if it comes to weighing up your desire to return against the desires, for example, of the several hundred Terpsichoria Remade who are now allowed to live as something more than animals, then I’m afraid I find your need less than pressing.”

Bellis kept her eyes on him. “If anyone were by chance to tell the authorities,” she said coolly, “that I might be a suitable case for incarceration and reeducation, then I swear to you I would end myself.”

The threat was ridiculous and quite untrue, and she was sure he knew that, but it was as close as she could come to begging him. She knew he had it in his power to cause her serious trouble.

He was a collaborator.

She turned and left him—out into the drizzle that still enveloped Armada. There was so much that she had wanted to say to him, to ask. She had wanted to talk to him about the Sorghum rig, that massive flaming enigma now in a little cove of ships. She wanted to know why the Lovers had stolen it, and what it could do, and what they planned for it. Where are its crews? she wanted to ask. Where is the geo-empath whom no one has seen? And she was sure Johannes knew these things. But there was no way she would speak to him now.

She could not shake his words from her ears. She hoped fervently that her own still troubled him.

Chapter Eight

When Bellis looked out of her window the next morning, she saw, over the roofs and chimneys, that the city was moving.

At some time in the night, the hundreds of tugboats that milled constantly around Armada like bees around a hive had harnessed the city. With thick chains they had attached themselves in great numbers to the city’s rim. They spread outward from the city, with their chains taut.

Bellis had become used to the city’s inconsistencies. The sun would rise to the left of her smokestack house one day, to the right the next, as Armada had spun slowly during the night. The sun’s antics were disorienting. Without land visible, there was nothing except the stars by which to gauge position, and Bellis had always found stargazing tedious: she was not someone who could instantly recognize the Tricorn or the Baby or the other constellations. The night sky meant nothing to her.

Today the sun rose almost directly in front of her window. The ships that strained at their chains and tugged at Armada’s mass cut across her field of vision, and she calculated after a moment that they were heading south.

She was awed by that prodigious effort. The city easily dwarfed the proliferation of ships that were pulling at it. It was hard to estimate Armada’s motion, but looking at the water coursing between ships, and the slap of breakers against the edges of the city, Bellis suspected that their passage was cripplingly slow.

Where are we going? she wondered, helplessly.

Bellis felt curiously shamed. It was weeks since she had arrived on Armada, and she realized that she had not wondered about the city’s motion, about its passage across the sea or its itinerary, or how its fleet, out engaged in their piracy, found their way back to a home that moved. She remembered with a sudden shudder Johannes’ attack on her the previous night.

Some of what he had said was true.

So was much of what she herself had said, of course, and she was still angry with him. She did not want to live on Armada, and the thought of seeing out her days on this mesh of moldering tubs made her mouth curl with anger so strong it was like panic. But still.

But still, it was true that she had locked herself off in her unhappiness. She was ignorant of her situation, ignorant of Armada’s history and politics, and she realized that this was dangerous. She did not understand the city’s economies; she did not know where the ships came from that sailed into the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. She did not know where the city had been or where it was going.

She began to open her mind as she stood in her nightgown, watching the sun pour across the bows of the slowly moving city. She felt her curiosity unfurl.

The Lovers, she thought with distaste. Let’s start there. Godspit, the Lovers. What in the name of Jabber are they?

Shekel took coffee with her on an upper deck of the library.

He was an excited boy. He told her that he was doing something with one person, and something else with another, and that he had had a fight with a third, and that a fourth lived in Dry Fall riding, and she withered beside his casual knowledge of the city. She felt disgraced again, for her ignorance, and she listened carefully to his ramblings.

Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactacae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate-merchant for Dreer Samher, and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous island south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men.

In turn, Bellis asked him about the ridings, the haunted quarter, the city’s route, the Sorghum rig, Tintinnabulum. She turned up her questions like cards.

“Yeah,” he said slowly. “I know Tinnabol. Him and his mates. Strange coves. Makler, Metzger, Promus, Tinnabol. There’s one called Argentarius, who’s mad, who no one ever sees. I can’t remember the others. Inside the Castor’s all over trophies. Gruesome. Sea trophies. Every wall. Stuffed hammerheads and orca, things with claws and tentacles. Skulls. And harpoons. And helios of the crew standing on the corpses of things I hope I never see.

“They’re hunters. They ain’t been in the city so long. They’re not press-ganged, exactly. There’s loads of stories, rumors about what they’re doing, why they’re here. It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

Bellis could not understand how Shekel knew so much about Tintinnabulum until he grinned and continued.

“Tintinnabulum’s got a . . . an assistant,” he said. “Her name’s Angevine. She’s an interesting lady.” He grinned again, and Bellis turned away, embarrassed by his fumbling enthusiasm.

There were printing presses in Armada, and authors and editors and translators, and new books and Salt translations of classic texts were brought out. But paper was scarce: print runs were minuscule, and the books were expensive. The ridings of the city relied on Booktown’s Grand Gears Library, and paid premiums to ensure their borrowing rights.

The books came mostly from Garwater riding’s piracies. For an unknown number of centuries this most powerful riding in Armada had donated all the books it commandeered to The Clockhouse Spur. No matter who ran Booktown, these donations had ensured its loyalty. Other ridings copied the practice, though perhaps without such stern supervision. They might let their press-ganged keep this or that volume, or would trade some of the rarest volumes they snatched. Not Garwater, which treated book hoarding as a serious crime.

Sometimes Garwater ships would prowl the coastal settlements of Bas-Lag committing wordstorms, and the pirates would rampage from house to house, seizing every book and manuscript they found. All for Booktown, the Clockhouse Spur.

The delivery of all this plunder was ongoing, so Bellis and her colleagues kept busy.

The khepri newcomers in their Mercy Ships, randomly intercepted by Armada, had taken over the Booktown riding in a gentle coup more than a century before. They had been wise enough to realize that despite traditional khepri lack of interest in written texts—their compound eyes made reading somewhat difficult—the riding relied on its library. They had continued its stewardship.

Bellis could not estimate the number of books: there were so many tiny old holds in the ships of the library, so many converted chimneys and bulkheads, stripped cabins, annexes, all stuffed with texts. Many were ancient, countless thousands of them long undisturbed. Armada had been stealing books for many centuries.

The catalogs were only partial. In recent centuries a bureaucracy had arisen whose function was to list the library’s contents, but during some reigns they were more careful than others. Mistakes were always made. A few acquisitions were shelved almost randomly, insufficiently checked. Errors slipped into systems and begot other errors. There were decades’ worth of volumes hidden in the library, in plain view yet invisible. Rumors and legends were rife about their powerful, lost, hidden, or forbidden contents.

When she had first gone into the dark corridors, Bellis had run her fingers along the miles of shelves as she walked. She had pulled a book out at random and, opening it, had stopped short to see the handwritten name in fading ink on the top of the first page. She had tugged out another volume and there was another name, written in calligraphy and ink only a little more recent. The third book was unadorned, but the fourth, again, was marked as the property of another long-dead owner.

Bellis had stood still and read the names again and again, and felt suddenly claustrophobic. She was encased in stolen books, buried in them as if in dirt. The thought of the countless hundreds of thousands of names that surrounded her, vainly scrawled in top right-hand corners—the weight of all that ignored ink, the endless proclamations that this is mine this is mine, every one of them snubbed simply and imperiously—took Bellis’ breath from her chest. The ease with which those little commands were broken.

She felt as if all around her, morose ghosts were milling, unable to accept that the volumes were no longer theirs.

That day, as she sorted through new arrivals, Bellis found one of her own books.

She sat for a long time on the floor with her legs splayed, propped up against the shelves, staring at the copy of Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She felt the familiar fraying spine and the slightly embossed “B. Coldwine.” It was her own copy: she recognized its wear. She gazed at it guardedly, as if it were a test she might fail.

The cart did not contain her other work, High Kettai Grammatology, but she did find the Salkrikaltor Cray textbook she had brought to the Terpsichoria.

Our stuff’s finally coming through, she thought.

It affected her like a blow.

This was mine, she thought. This was taken.

What else was from her ship? Was this Doctor Mollificatt’s copy of Future Tenses? she wondered. Widow Cardomium’s Orthography and Hieroglyphs?

She could not be still. She stood and walked, tense, wandering vague and stricken through the library. She passed into the open air and over the bridges that linked the library’s vessels, carrying her book clutched to her, above the water and then back into the darkness by the bookshelves.

“Bellis?”

She looked up, confused. Carrianne stood before her, her mouth twisted slightly in what might be amusement or concern. She looked terribly pale, but she spoke with her usual strong voice.

The book dangled from Bellis’ hands. Her breathing slowed, and she smoothed the crisis from her face, arranging it carefully once more, wondering what to say. Carrianne took her arm and tugged her away.

“Bellis,” she said again, and though she wore an arch smirk there was genuine kindness in her voice. “It’s high time you and I made a little effort to get to know each other. Have you eaten lunch?”

Carrianne dragged her gently through the corridors of the Dancing Wight, on up a half-covered walkway to the Pinchermarn. This is not like me, Bellis thought as she followed, to let myself be tugged along in someone’s wake. This is not like me at all. But she was in a kind of daze, and she gave in to Carrianne’s insistent pulling.

At the exit, Bellis realized with a gust of surprise that she was still carrying her copy of Codexes of the Wormseye Scrub. She had been clutching it so tight her hands looked bloodless.

Her heart sped up as she realized that under Carrianne’s protection, she could walk straight past the guard, could hold the book close, out of sight, could leave the library with her contraband.

But the closer she got to the door, the more she hesitated, the less she understood her motives, the more she was suddenly terrified of capture, until with a sudden long sigh she deposited the monograph in the carrel beside the desk. Carrianne watched her inscrutably. In the light beyond the door, Bellis looked back at her deserted volume and felt a surge of something, some tremulous emotion.

Whether it was triumph or defeat she could not tell.

The Psire was the largest ship in the Clockhouse Spur, a big steamer of archaic design refitted for industry and cheap housing. Stubby concrete blocks loomed on its rear deck, all fouled with birdlime. Strings of washing linked windows where humans and khepris leaned out and talked. Bellis descended a rope ladder behind Carrianne, toward the sea, through the smell of salt and damp to a galley in the Psire’s shadow.

Below the galley’s deck was the restaurant, full of noisy lunchtime diners. The waiters were khepri and human, and even a couple of rusted constructs. They strode the narrow walkway between two rows of benches, depositing bowls of gruel and plates of black bread, salads, and cheeses.

Carrianne ordered for them, then turned to Bellis with a look of sincere concern.

“So,” she said. “What’s happening with you?”

Bellis looked up at her, and for a dreadful second she thought she would cry. The feeling went quickly, and she set her face. She looked away from Carrianne, at the other human customers, the khepri and cactacae. A couple of tables from her were two llorgiss, their trifurcated bodies seeming to face every way at once. Behind her was some glistening amphibious thing from Bask riding, some species she could not even begin to recognize.

She felt the restaurant move as the waves lapped at it.

“I know what I’m seeing, you know,” said Carrianne. “I was press-ganged, too.”

Bellis looked up sharply. “When?” she said.

“Nearly twenty years ago,” said Carrianne, looking through the windows at Basilio Harbor and the industrious tugs beyond, still hauling the city. She said something slowly and deliberately in a language Bellis almost recognized. The analytical part of her linguist’s brain began to collate, to catalog the distinctive staccato fricatives, but Carrianne forestalled her.

“It’s something we used to say, in the old country, to people feeling unhappy. Something stupid and trite like, ‘It could be worse.’ Literally it means ‘You still have eyes and your spectacles aren’t yet broken.’ ” She leaned in and smiled. “But I won’t be hurt if you don’t take any comfort from it. I’m further from my first home than you are, Crobuzoner. More than two thousand miles further. I’m from the Firewater Straits.”

She laughed at Bellis’ raised eyebrow, the incredulous look.

“From an island called Geshen, controlled by the Witchocracy.” She tasted her dwarf Armadan chicken. “The Witchocracy, more ponderously known as Shud zar Myrion zar Koni.” She waved her hands mock-mysteriously. “City of Ratjinn, Hive of the Jet Sorrow—and suchlike. I know what you New Crobuzoners say about it. Very little of which is true.”

“How were you taken?” said Bellis.

“Twice,” said Carrianne. “I was stolen and stolen again. We were sailing our whim-trawler for Kohnid in Gnurr Kett. That’s a long, hard journey. I was seventeen. I won the lottery to be figurehead and concubine. I spent the daylight strapped to the bowsprit, scattering orchid petals in front of the ship, spent the night reading the men’s cards and in their beds. That was dull, but I enjoyed the days. Dangling there, singing, sleeping, watching the sea.

“But a Dreer Samher war cog intercepted us. The Samheri were jealous of their trade with Kohnid. They had a monopoly—do they still?” she added suddenly, and Bellis could only shake her head uncertainly, I don’t know.

“Well, they strapped our captain to my place below the bowsprit and scuttled the ship. Most of the men and women they put on lifeboats with a few provisions, and pointed in the direction of the coast. It was a long way away, and I doubt they made it.

“Some of us they kept aboard. There was no ill treatment beyond cuffs and rudeness. I tortured myself stupid wondering what they’d do to me, but then came the second interception. Dry Fall riding needed ships, and sent poachers out. Armada was far south of here then, so Dreer Samher boats were perfect prey.”

“And . . . and how did you . . . ? Did you find it hard,” said Bellis, “when you came here?”

Carrianne looked at her for a while.

“Some of the cactacae,” she said, “never adjusted. They refused, or tried to escape, or attacked their guards. I suppose they were killed. Me and my companions . . . ?” She shrugged. “We’d been rescued, so it was very different.

“But, yes, it was hard, and I was miserable, and I missed my brother, and all of that. But, you see, I made a choice. I chose to live, to survive.

“After a time some of my shipmates moved out of Dry Fall. One lives in Shaddler, another in Thee-And-Thine. But mostly we stayed in the riding that took us in.” She ate for a little while, then looked up again. “It can be done, you know. You will make this place your home.”

She meant it reassuringly. She was being kind. But to Bellis it sounded like a threat.

Carrianne was talking to her about the ridings.

“Garwater you know,” Carrianne said, her voice deadpan. “The Lovers. The scarred Lovers. Fucked-up bastards. The Clockhouse Spur you know.”

The intellectuals’ quarter, thought Bellis, like Brock Marsh in New Crobuzon.

“Shaddler’s the scabmettlers’. Bask. Thee-And-Thine.” Carrianne was counting off the ridings on her fingers. “Jhour. Curhouse, The Democratic Council. That brave redoubt. And Dry Fall,” she concluded. “Where I live.”

“Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” she said unexpectedly. “You don’t seem to me the colonist type.”

Bellis looked down. “I had to leave,” she said. “Trouble.”

“With the law?”

“Something happened . . .” She sighed. “I did nothing, nothing at all.” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “A few months ago there was a sickness in the city. And . . . there were rumors that someone I knew was involved. The militia were working their way through everyone he’d known, everyone he’d had involvement with. It was obvious they’d come for me, eventually. I never wanted to leave.” She spoke carefully. “It was no choice.”

The lunch, the company, even the small talk Bellis normally despised, had all calmed her. As they rose to leave, she asked Carrianne if she was feeling well.

“I noticed in the library . . .” she said. “I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I was thinking you look rather pale.”

Carrianne smiled archly. “That’s the first time you’ve asked after me, Bellis,” she said. “You want to watch that. I might start thinking you give a brass eye about me.” The amiable taunt stung. “I’m fine. It’s just that I was taxed last night.”

Bellis waited, sifting through the information she had already assimilated, to see if Carrianne’s statement would make sudden sense. It did not.

“I don’t understand,” she said, exhausted by incomprehension.

“Bellis, I live in Dry Fall riding,” said Carrianne. “Sometimes we’re taxed, understand? Bellis, you know our ruler’s the Brucolac, don’t you? You’ve heard about him?”

“I’ve heard of him . . .”

“The Brucolac. He’s oupyr. Loango. Katalkana.” With each esoteric word, Carrianne held Bellis’ eyes and saw that she was not understood. “Haemophage, Bellis. Ab-dead.

“Vampir.”

Surrounded as she had been for weeks by a cloud of rumors and hints like insistent midges, Bellis had learned at least a little about most of the ridings. All the weird little femto-states clamped together in unhealthy congregation, resenting each other and maneuvering for position.

But somehow the most important, the most striking or unbelievable or appalling things, she had missed. At the end of the day, she thought of that moment when she had been made to see how ignorant she was: when Carrianne had explained her pallor and Bellis had realized how far from home she was.

She was pleased that she had done little more than blanch at Carrianne’s explanation. Something had hardened in her when she heard the word vampir—the same word in Ragamoll and Salt. Carrianne had, at that moment, taught her that there was nowhere further for her to go. She could be no further from her home.

In Armada they talked a language she could understand. She recognized the ships, even altered and rebuilt as they were. They had money and government. The differences of calendar and terminology she could learn. The found and scavenged architecture was bizarre but comprehensible. But this was a city where vampir did not need to hide and predate furtively, but could walk in the nights openly, and could rule.

Bellis realized then that all her cultural markers were obsolete. She was sick of her ignorance.

At the Sciences card catalog Bellis’ fingers fluttered through the entries, speeding through the alphabet until she found Johannes Tearfly’s name. There was more than one copy of several of his books.

If the Lovers who run my life wanted to get hold of you so badly, Johannes, she thought to herself as she scribbled the classmarks of his works, then I’m going to get inside their minds. Let’s see what they’re so excited about.

One of the books was on loan, but copies of the others were available. As an employee of the library, Bellis had borrowing rights.

It was very cold as she made her way home past the crowds, under jabbering Armada monkeys in the rigging, over the swaying walkways and decks and raised streets of the city, over the waves that slopped between vessels. The sky was raucous with catcalls. In her bag, Bellis carried Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools; Sardula Anatomy; Essays on Beasts; Theories of Megafauna; and Transplane Life as a Problem for the Naturalist—all by Johannes Tearfly.

She sat up late curled close to her stove, while freezing clouds diffused the moonlight outside. She read by lamplight, skipping from book to book.

At one in the morning she looked out over the dark shipscape.

The halo of boats that ringed the city still dragged it onward.

She thought of all the Armadan boats at sea, the agents of its piracy, taxing the ships and communities they passed. Ranging for months across thousands of miles, until, laden down with booty, and even as their city moved, they made their way back by arcane methods.

The city’s nauscopists watched the sky, and knew from its minute variations when vessels were approaching, so the tugs could haul Armada away and out of sight. Sometimes the evasion failed, and foreign ships were intercepted, welcomed in to trade, or hunted down. By secret science, the authorities always knew when incoming vessels were Armada’s own, and welcomed them home.

Even so late there were still sounds of industry from some quarters, cutting through the beat of waves and animals’ night calls. Between the layers of rope and wood that overlaid her view like scratches on a heliotype, Bellis could see to the little bay of boats at the aft end of Armada, where the rig Sorghum wallowed. For weeks, fire and thaumaturgic wash had billowed up from the tip of its stack. Every night the stars had been effaced around it in a drab, dun light.

No more. The clouds above the Sorghum were dark. The flame was out.

For the first time since she had arrived in Armada, Bellis dug through her belongings and brought out her neglected letter. She faltered as she sat there by the stove, the paper folded in front of her, a fountain pen poised. And then, irritated with her own hesitation, she began to write.

Even as Armada made its slow way south toward warmer waters, for a few days the weather turned hard cold. Winds blew frost in from the north. The trees and ivy, the slim gardens that adorned the decks of boats, became brittle and blackened.

Just before the chill hit, Bellis saw whales off the city’s port edge, playing with apparent pleasure. After a few minutes they came suddenly much closer to Armada, slammed the water with their huge tails, and were gone. The cold came quickly after that.

There was no winter in the city, no summer or spring, no seasons at all; there was only weather. For Armada it was a function not of time, but place. While New Crobuzon hunkered under snowstorms at the end of the year, Armadans might be basking in the Hearth Sea; or they might be bunked below while crews in thick coats tugged them slowly to anchor in the Muted Ocean, at temperatures that would have made New Crobuzon seem mild.

Armada tramped the oceans of Bas-Lag in patterns dictated by piracy, trade, agriculture, security, and other more opaque dynamics, and took what weather came.

The city’s irregular climate was hard on plant life. The flora of Armada survived by thaumaturgy, luck and chance, as well as stock. Centuries of husbandry had produced strains that grew fast and hardy, and could thrive in a wide range of temperatures. There were irregular crops throughout the year.

Farmlands were draped across decks and under artificial lights. There were mushroom plantations in dank old holds, and loud, stinking berths full of generations of wiry inbred animals. Fields of kelp and edible bladderwracks grew on rafts suspended below the city, alongside mesh-cages full of crustaceans and food-fish.

As days passed, Salt came to Tanner more easily, and he began to spend more time with his workmates. They would carouse in the pubs and gambling halls on the aft edge of Basilio Harbor. Shekel came too, sometimes, happy in the company of the men, but more often he took himself off, alone, to the Castor.

Tanner knew that he went to see the woman Angevine, whom Tanner had not met, a servant or bodyguard for Captain Tintinnabulum. Shekel had told him about her, in faltering adolescent terms, and Tanner had started off amused and indulgent. Nostalgic for himself at that age.

Shekel spent more and more time with the strange studious hunters who lived on the Castor. Once, Tanner came looking for him.

Belowdecks, Tanner had passed into a clean, dark corridor of cabins, each with a name stamped upon it: Modist, he had read, and Faber, and Argentarius. The berths of Tintinnabulum’s companions.

Shekel was in the mess, with Angevine.

Tanner had been shocked.

Angevine was in her thirties, he estimated, and she was Remade.

Shekel had not told him that.

Just below her thighs, Angevine’s legs ended. She jutted like some strange figurehead from the front of a little steam-driven cart, a heavy contraption with caterpillar treads, filled with coke and wood.

She could not be city-born, Tanner had realized. That kind of Remaking was too harsh, too capricious and inefficient and cruel to have been effected for anything other than punishment.

He thought well of her for putting up with the lad’s bothering. Then he saw how intensely she spoke to Shekel, how she leaned in to him (at a bizarre angle, anchored by the heavy vehicle below her), how she held his eyes. And Tanner had stopped, shocked again.

Tanner left Shekel to his Angevine. He did not ask what was happening. Shekel, forced into a sudden new conjuncture of feelings, behaved like a hybrid of child and man, now boastful and preening, now subdued and caught up with intense emotions. In what little information he gave out, Tanner learned that Angevine had been press-ganged ten years ago. Like the Terpsichoria, her ship had been stolen on its way to Nova Esperium. She, too, was from New Crobuzon.

When Shekel came home to the little rooms on the portmost edge of an old factory ship, Tanner was jealous, and then contrite. He determined to keep ahold of Shekel as best as he could, but to let him go as he needed.

Tanner tried to fill a vacuum by making friends. He spent more time with his workmates. There was a strong camaraderie among the dockworkers. He took part in their lewd jokes and games.

They opened to him, brought him in by telling tales.

As a newcomer he was an excuse for them to trot out stories and rumors they had all heard a mass of times before. One of them would mention dead seas, or boiltides, or the moray king, and would turn to Tanner. You’ve probably not heard of the dead seas, Tanner, he or she would say. Let me tell you . . .

Tanner Sack heard the weirdest stories of the Bas-Lag seas, and the legends of the pirate city and Garwater itself. He heard of the monstrous storms that Armada had survived; the reason for the scars on the Lovers’ faces; how Uther Doul had cracked the possibility code and found his puissant sword.

He joined in celebrations for this or that happy occurrence—a marriage, a birth, luck at cards. And somber things too. When a dockside accident took off half a cactus-woman’s hand with a jag of glass, Tanner gave what eyes and flags he could spare to the whip-round. Another time, the riding was plunged into depression by the news that a Garwater ship, the Magda’s Threat, had gone down near the Firewater Straits. Tanner shared the loss, and his sadness was not feigned.

But although he liked his workmates, and the taverns and convivials were a pleasant way of spending evenings—and one that improved his Salt in great gouts—there was a constant odd ambience of half-acknowledged secrecy. He could not make sense of it.

There were certain mysteries that the work of the underwater engineers threw up. What manner of things were those shadows he sometimes glimpsed, behind the tightly tethered guard sharks, unclear through what must be adumbrating glamours? What were the purposes of the repairs that he and his colleagues daily carried out? What was it that the Sorghum, the stolen rig that they tended carefully, sucked up from the base of the sea, thousands of feet below? Tanner had followed its fat, segmented pipe down with his eyes many times, growing giddy as it dwindled.

What was the nature of this project that was hinted at in nods and cryptic remarks? The plan that underpinned all their efforts? That no one would talk openly about, but that many seemed to know a little of, and a few pretended by omission, or hint, to understand?

Something big and important lay behind Garwater’s industry, and Tanner Sack did not yet know what it was. He suspected that none of his fellows did, either, but still he felt excluded from some community: one based on lies, cant, and bullshit.

Stories occasionally reached him about the other Terpsichoria passengers or crew or prisoners.

Shekel had told him about Coldwine in the library. The man Johannes Tearfly he had seen himself, visiting the docks with a secretive group, all notepads and murmured discussion. A part of Tanner had thought tartly that it didn’t take long for ranks to reestablish themselves, that while he worked his arse off below, the gentleman watched and ticked his little charts and fumbled with his waistcoat.

Hedrigall, the impassive cactus-man who piloted the Arrogance, told Tanner about a man called Fench, also from the Terpsichoria, who was visiting the docks quite often (Do you know him? Hedrigall had asked, and Tanner had shaken his head: it was too dull to explain that he had known no one above the decks). Fench was a good man, Hedrigall said, whom you could talk to, who seemed already to know everyone on the ship, who spoke on knowledgeable terms about people like King Friedrich and the Brucolac.

There was a distracted air to Hedrigall when he talked about these things, which reminded Tanner of Tintinnabulum. Hedrigall was one of those who always seemed to know something about something that he would not discuss. It would have felt to Tanner a breach of their embryonic friendship to ask him outright.

Tanner took to walking the city at night.

He would wander, surrounded by the sounds of water and ships, the sea smell in him. Under the moon and her glowing daughters, diffused through faint cloud, Tanner walked steadily around the edge of the bay containing the now-silent Sorghum. He trod past a cray dwelling: a suspended, half-sunk clipper, its prow and bows jutting like an iceberg. He walked up the covered bridge to the rear of the enormous Grand Easterly, his head down as he passed the few other insomniacs and night workers.

By rope bridge to the starboard side of Garwater. An illuminated dirigible skidded slowly overhead, and a klaxon sounded nearby while a steamhammer pounded (some late shift), and the sound for a moment was so reminiscent of New Crobuzon that he felt a strong, nameless emotion.

Tanner lost himself in a maze of old ships and bricks.

In the water below he thought he saw fleeting and random patches of light: the anxiety of bioluminescent plankton. The city’s snarls seemed to be answered sometimes, miles away, by something big and very distant and alive.

He wound in the direction of Curhouse and Urchinspine Harbor. Below him was surf, to either side decaying brickwork damp with mildew and salt-stained. High walls and windows, many broken, and alleyways between main streets, winding between old bulkheads and cowls. Rubbish on deserted dhows. Balustrades and taffrails buffeted in the cold wind by the ragged remnants of posters; politics and entertainment advertised in garish colors rendered from squid and shellfish and stolen ink.

Cats padded past him.

The city shifted and corrected, and the tireless fleet of steamships beyond Armada’s bounds plowed on, chains outstretched, hauling their home.

Tanner stood in the quiet, looking up at old towers, the silhouettes of slates, chimneys, factory roofs, and trees. Across a little stretch of water, broken by a hamlet of houseboats, lights glimmered in the cabins of boats from shores about which Tanner Sack knew nothing. Others were watching the night.

(—Have you fucked before? she said, and Shekel could not help but remember things he did not much want to. The Remade women in the dark stinking of Terpsichoria who took his fumbling prick inside them for more portions of bread. Those whom the sailors held down whether they would or not (all the men catcalled him to join them) and whom twice he had lain on (once only pretending to finish before slinking away discomforted by her shrieks and) once entering for true and spending inside her, tightly struggling and crying as she was. And before them girls in the back alleys of Smog Bend, and boys (like him) showing their privates, their transactions something between barter and sex and bullying and play. Shekel opened his mouth to answer and the truths struggled, and she saw and interrupted him (it was a mercy she did him) and said—No not for games or money and not when you took it or gave it by force but when you fucked one who wanted you and who you wanted like real people like equals. And of course when she said that of course the answer was no, and he gave it, grateful to her for making this his first time (an undeserved gift that he took humble and eager).

He watched her take off her blouse and his breath came very short at the sight of all that woman’s flesh and at the eagerness in her own eyes. He felt the radiant heat of her boiler (which she could never let die she told him, which ate and ate fuel incessantly, old and broken and unreasonably greedy) and saw the dark pewter of her harness where it met the pasty flesh of her upper thighs like a tide. His own clothes were off him in easy layers and he stood shivering and thin and scrawny, prick bobbing erect and adolescent, heart and passion filling him so that it was hard to swallow.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.

Heal me, he thought, not understanding what he thought, hoping for a reconfiguration. There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

—My Remade girl, he said wondering, and she forgave him that, instantly, because she knew he would not think it again.

It was not easy, with the stubs of her legs pinioned in metal, in a tight V, parted only slightly, with only two inches of the inside of her thighs below her cunt in flesh. She could not open to him or lie back, and it was not easy.

But they persevered, and succeeded.)

Chapter Nine

Shekel came to Bellis and asked her to teach him to read.

He knew the shapes of the Ragamoll alphabet, he told her, and had a tentative sense of which sound each letter made, but they remained esoteric. He had never tried to link them and make them words.

Shekel seemed subdued, as if his thoughts were outside the corridors of the library boats. He was slower than usual to smile. He did not talk about Tanner Sack, or about Angevine, whose name had peppered his conversations recently. He wanted only to know if Bellis would help him read.

She spent more than two hours, after her shift, going through the alphabet with him. He knew the names of the letters, but his sense of them was abstract. Bellis had him write his name, and he did, scratchy and inexpert, pausing halfway into the second letter and skipping ahead to the fourth, then going back and filling in lost spaces.

He knew his written name, but only as strokes of a pen.

Bellis told him that the letters were instructions, orders, usually to make the sound that started their own name. She wrote her own first name, separating each letter from its neighbors by an inch or more. Then she had him obey the orders they gave him.

She waited while he faltered through the buh and eh and luh luh ih suh. Then she brought the letters closer together and had him obey them—still slowly—again. And once more.

Finally she closed the characters up into a word and told him to repeat his exercise quickly, to do what the letters told him (“Look at them, so close together”) in one quick run.

Buh eh luh luh ih suh.

(Confused by the double lingua-alveolar, as she had expected.)

He tried once more, and halfway through he stopped and began to smile at the word. He gave her a look so full of delight that it brought her up short. He said her name.

After she had showed him the rudiments of punctuation she had an idea. She walked with him through ships’ bowels, past sections on science and humanities where scholars read hunkered beside oil lamps and little windows, then out between buildings in the drooling rain, over the bridge to the Corrosive Memory. It was a galleon at the outer edge of Grand Gears Library. It contained children’s books.

There were very few readers on the children’s deck. The shelves that surrounded them bristled with garish colors. Bellis ran her fingers along their spines as she walked, and Shekel gazed at them with a deep curiosity. They stopped at the very back of the ship, studded with portholes and listing quite sharply away from them, covered by an incline of books.

“Look,” Bellis said. “Can you see?” She indicated the brass label. “Rag. A. Moll. Ragamoll. These are books in our language. Most of them’ll come from New Crobuzon.”

She plucked a couple and opened them. She froze for a fraction of a second, too quickly for Shekel to notice. Handwritten names peered up at her from the inside front pages, but these were scrawled in crayon, in infants’ hands.

Bellis turned the pages quickly. The first book was for the very young, large and carefully hand-colored, full of pictures in the simplistic Ars Facilis style that had been in vogue sixty years previously. It was the story of an egg that went to battle against a man made of spoons, and won, to become mayor of the world.

The second was for older children. It was a history of New Crobuzon. Bellis stopped short, seeing the etched pictures of the Ribs and the Spike and Perdido Street Station. She skim-read quickly, curling her face in amused contempt at the grotesquely misleading history. The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust and, most shamefully, the Pirate Wars all suggested, in childish and disingenuous language, that New Crobuzon was a stronghold of liberty that thrived despite almost insuperable and unfair odds.

Shekel was watching her, fascinated.

“Try this one,” she said, and held out to him The Courageous Egg. He took it reverentially. “It’s for young children,” she said. “Don’t get worried about the story; it’s much too silly for you. It means nothing. But I want to know if you can work out what’s happening, if you can understand what goes on, by working through the words like I showed you. Follow the letters’ orders, say the words. There are bound to be some in there that you can’t understand. When you come to them, write them down, and bring the list to me.”

Shekel looked up at her sharply. “Write them down?” he said.

She saw inside him. He still related to the words as if they were outside entities: subtle teases that he was finally beginning to understand, just a little. But he had not yet conceived of being able to encode them into his own secrets. He had not realized that by learning to read he had learned to write.

Bellis found a pencil and a half-used piece of paper in her pocket and handed them to him.

“Just copy the words that you don’t understand, the letters in order exactly like they are in the book. Bring them to me,” she said.

He eyed her, and another of those beatific smiles shot across him.

“Tomorrow,” she went on, “I want you to come to me at five o’clock, and I’m going to ask you questions about the story in the book. I’m going to have you read pieces to me.” Shekel stared at her as he took the book, nodded briskly, as if they’d reached some business arrangement in Dog Fenn.

Shekel’s demeanor changed when they left the galleon. He held himself cocky again, and swaggered a little as he walked, and even began to talk to Bellis about his dockside gang. But he gripped The Courageous Egg tight. Bellis checked it out on her own ticket, an act of trust that she performed without thinking and that touched him deeply.

It was cold again that night, and Bellis sat close to her stove.

Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity. She performed them joylessly and as quickly as possible, then sat with Tearfly’s books and continued to work through them, making notes. At nine she stopped and brought out her letter.

She wrote.

Blueday 27th of Dust 1779 (although that means nothing here, Here it is 4th Sepredi of Hawkbill Quarto, 6/317), Chromolith Smokestack.

I will not stop looking for clues. At first, when I read Johannes’ books, I opened them at random and skimmed through at random, and pieced together what I could in snippets, waiting for inspiration. But I have realized that I will not make headway thus.

Johannes’ work, he has told me, is one of the driving forces behind this city. The nature of the scheme of which he is part, which he would not describe but which was important enough for Armada to risk an act of gross piracy against the greatest power in Bas-Lag, must be hidden somewhere in the pages of his books. It was, after all, one of those books that made him irresistible to the Lovers. But I cannot even work out which of his works is the “required reading” he described for this secret project.

So I am reading them carefully, taking each in turn; starting with the preface and working through to the index. Gleaning information. Trying to feel what designs might be in these works.

Of course, I am not a scientist. I have never read books like these before. A great deal of what is in them is opaque to me.

“The acetabulum is a depression on the outer side of the os innominatum just where the ilium and ischium fuse.”

I read such sentences like poesy: ilium, ischium, os innominatum, ecto-cuneiform and cnemial crest, platelets and thrombin, keloid, cicatrix.

The book that I like least so far is Sardula Anatomy. Johannes was gored once by a young sardula, and it must have been at the time that he researched this book. I can imagine the creature pacing back and forth in a cell, subjected to soporific vapors, and lashing out as it feels itself slipping away. And then dead, and transfered into a cold book that peels away Johannes’ passion along with the sardula’s skin. A drab list of bones and veins and sinews.

My favorite of the books comes as a surprise. It is neither Theories of MegaFauna nor Transplane Life, volumes as much philosophy as zoology, which I therefore expected to feel closer to than the others. I found their abstruse ponderings intriguing but vague.

No, the volume that I read most closely, that I felt I understood, that kept me quite entranced, was Predation in Iron Bay Rockpools.

Such an intricate concatenation of narratives. Chains of savagery and metamorphosis. I can see it all. Devil crabs and ragworms. The oyster drill gnawing a murderous peephole in its prey’s armor. The stretched-out slow-time ripping open of a scallop by a famished starfish. A beadlet anemone devouring a young goby with an implosive burst.

It is a vivid little seascape Johannes has conjured for me, of shell-dust and sea urchins and merciless tides.

But it tells me nothing about the city’s plans. Whatever Armada’s rulers have in mind, I will have to look deeper to find. I will keep reading these books. They are the only clues I have. And I will not thus seek to understand Armada so that I can learn to live happily in my rusting chimney. I will understand where we are going, and why, so that I might leave.

There was a sudden knocking on Bellis’ door. She looked up, alarmed. It was nearly eleven o’clock.

She stood slowly and descended the tight spiral staircase in the center of her circular room. Johannes was the only person in Armada who knew where she lived, and she had not spoken to him since their altercation in the restaurant.

Bellis padded slowly toward the door, waited, and the sharp rapping came again. Was he here to apologize? To rage at her again? Did she even want to see him, to reopen the door to that friendship?

She was still angry with him, she realized, and still somewhat ashamed.

There was a third bout of knocking, and Bellis stepped forward, her face set, ready to hear him out and see him off. When she pulled open the door she stopped short, her mouth hanging with astonishment, her curt admonition whispered away from her with her breath.

Standing on her threshold, huddled against the cold and looking up at her warily, was Silas Fennec.

They sat in silence for a little while, drinking the wine Fennec had brought.

“You’ve done well, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, looking appreciatively around the battered metal cylinder that was her room. “A lot of us newcomers are in much less attractive places.” She raised one eyebrow at him, but he nodded again. “I promise you it’s true. Have you not seen?”

Of course she had not.

“Where are you living?” she asked.

“Near Thee-And-Thine riding,” he said, “in the base of a clipper. No windows.” He shrugged. “Are these yours?” He pointed to the books on her bed.

“No,” she said, and tidied them quickly away. “They only let me keep my notebook. Even books I’d damn well written, they took away.”

“Same for me,” he said. “All I’ve got left is my journal. It’s the log of years of traveling. I’d have been heartbroken to lose it.” He smiled.

“What do they have you doing?” Bellis asked, and Fennec shrugged again.

“I managed to avoid all that,” he said. “I’m doing what I want to do. You work in the library, don’t you?”

“How?” she said sharply. “How did you keep them off your back? How do you manage to live?”

He watched her for a while without answering.

“I got three or four offers—like you, I imagine. I told the first that I’d accepted the second, the second that I’d said yes to the third, and so on. They don’t care. As for how I live, well . . . It’s easier than you think to make yourself indispensable, Miss Coldwine. Providing services, offering whatever it is people will pay for. Information mostly . . .” His voice petered out.

Bellis was bewildered by his candor, suggesting conspiracies and underworlds around her.

“You know . . .” he said suddenly, “I’m grateful to you, Miss Coldwine. Sincerely grateful.”

Bellis waited.

“You were there in Salkrikaltor City, Miss Coldwine. You saw the conversation between the late Captain Myzovic and myself. You must have wondered what exactly was on that letter that had the captain so unhappy, that turned you back, but you remained quiet. I’m sure you realized that things could have become . . . very hard for me when we were hijacked by Armada, but you said nothing. And I’m grateful.

“You did say nothing?” he added with an anxiety he could not quite hide. “As I say, I’m very grateful.”

“When we last spoke, on the Terpsichoria,” Bellis said, “you told me it was vital you get back to New Crobuzon immediately. Well, what now?”

He shook his head uncomfortably.

“Hyperbole and . . . and bullshit,” he said. He glanced up, but she showed no disapproval of his language. “I get into habits of exaggeration.” He waved his hand to dispel the issue. There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So you can express yourself in Salt?” Bellis asked. “For this work you do, presumably you have to, Mr. Fennec.”

“I have had many years to perfect Salt,” he said in the language, swift and expert, with an unfeigned smile, and continued in Ragamoll. “And . . . Well, I’m not going by that name here. If you’d indulge me, I’m known here as Simon Fench.”

“So where did you learn Salt, Mr. Fench?” she said. “You mentioned your travels . . .”

“Dammit.” He looked amused and embarrassed. “You make the name sound like a hex. You can call me what you like, Miss Coldwine, in these rooms, but outside, I beg your indulgence. Rin Lor. I learnt Salt in Rin Lor, and the outer edge of the Pirate Islands.”

“What were you doing there?”

“The same thing,” he said, “that I do everywhere. I buy and I sell. I trade.”

“I’m thirty-eight years old,” he said after they had drunk some more and Bellis had fussed with the stove. “I’ve been a trader since before I was twenty. I’m a New Crobuzon man, don’t get me wrong. Born and brought up in the shadow of the Ribs. But I doubt I’ve spent five hundred days in that city in the last twenty years.”

“What do you trade?”

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Furs, wine, engines, livestock, books, labor. Whatever. Liquor for pelts in the tundra north of Jangsach, pelts for secrets in Hinter, secrets and artworks for labor and spices in High Cromlech . . .”

His voice drifted away as Bellis caught his eye.

“No one knows where High Cromlech is,” she said, but he shook his head.

“Some of us do,” he said quietly. “Now, I mean. Some of us do now. Oh it’s a damn hard journey, granted. From New Crobuzon you can’t go north through the ruins of Suroch, and south adds hundreds of miles through Vadaunk or the cacotopic stain. So it’s Penitent’s Pass to Wormseye Scrub, round Gibbing Water, skirt Kar Torrer Kingdom and over Cold Claw Sound . . .” His voice faded and Bellis hung on, eager to hear where next.

“And there are the Shatterjacks,” he said softly. “And High Cromlech.”

He took a long drink of wine.

“They’re nervous of outsiders. Live ones. But gods know we were a sorry-looking bunch. We’d been on the road for months, lost fourteen men. We went by dirigible, barge, llama, and pterabird, and miles and miles on foot. I lived there for months. I brought back a lot of . . . amazing things to New Crobuzon. I’ve seen things even stranger than this city, I tell you.”

Bellis could say nothing. She was wrestling with what he said. Some of the places he mentioned were virtually mythological. The idea that he might have visited them—lived in them, for Jabber’s sake—was extraordinary, but she did not think he was lying.

“Most people who try to get there die,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But if you can do it, if you can get to the Cold Claws, especially the far shores . . . well, you’re made. You’ve access to the Shatterjack Mines, the grasslands north of Hinter, Yanni Seckilli Island in the Cold Claw Sea—and they’re eager for business, I tell you. I spent forty days there, and the only real trade they have is with the savages from the north, who turn up in coracles once a year, carrying stuff like biltong. Of which there’s only so much you can eat.” He grinned. “But their main problem is that The Gengris cuts them off from the south, doesn’t let outsiders pass that way. Anyone who can get past that from the south, they treat like a lost brother.

“If you make it, you have access to all manner of information, places, goods, and services that no one else has. That’s why I’ve . . . an arrangement with Parliament. That’s why that pass, giving me powers to commandeer vessels, in certain circumstances; giving me certain rights. I’m in a position to provide information to the city that they can’t get from anywhere else.”

He was a spy.

“When Seemly crossed the Swollen Ocean and found Bered Kai Nev six and a half centuries ago,” he said, “what do you think he carried in his holds? The Fervent Mantis was a big ship, Bellis . . .” He paused—she had not invited him to use her first name. But she made no sign of disapproval, and he continued. “It carried booze and silk and swords and gold. Seemly was looking to trade. That’s what unlocked the eastern continent. All the explorers you’ve heard of—Seemly, Donleon, Brubenn, probably Libintos and bloody Jabber, too—they were traders.” He spoke with childish gusto.

“It’s people like me who bring back the maps and the information. We can offer insights like no one else. We can trade them with the government—that’s my commission. There’s no such thing as exploration or science—there’s only trade. It was merchants who traveled to Suroch, who brought back the maps Dagman Beyn used in the Pirate Wars.”

He saw Bellis’ expression and registered that this particular story did not cast him and his fellows in the best light.

“Bad example,” he muttered, and Bellis could not help but laugh at his contrition.

“I won’t live here,” Bellis said. It was near two in the morning, and she was watching the stars through the window. They dragged with excruciating slowness across the pane as Armada was tugged gradually around.

“I don’t like it here. I resent being kidnapped. I can understand why some of the other press-ganged from Terpsichoria don’t mind . . .” She said that as a grudging sop to the guilt that Johannes had inculcated in her, and she knew uncomfortably that it was grossly insufficient, that it denigrated the freedom that had been granted to the Terpsichoria’s human cargo. “But I will not live out my life here. I’m going home to New Crobuzon.”

She spoke with a hard certainty she did not quite feel.

“Not me,” he said. “I mean, I like coming back, and living it up after some trip or other—dinners in Chnum, that sort of thing—but I couldn’t live there. Though I understand why you’d like it. I’ve seen a lot of cities, and never anything to compare. But whenever I’ve been there more than a couple of weeks, I start to feel claustrophobic. Hemmed in by the dirt and the begging and the people . . . and the cant they spout in Parliament.

“Even when I’m uptown, you know? BilSantum Plaza or Flag Hill or Chnum—still I feel like I’m trapped in Dog Fenn or Badside. I just can’t ignore them. I have to get out. And as for the bastards that run the place . . .”

Bellis was interested in his unabashed disloyalty. He was in the pay of the damn New Crobuzon government, after all, and even through the slight fog of wine, Bellis was coldly conscious that it was they, his bosses, who had caused her to flee.

But Fennec showed no commitment to them at all. He badmouthed the Crobuzoner authorities with bohemian good humor.

“They’re snakes,” he went on. “Rudgutter and all the others, I wouldn’t trust them as far as I could piss them. Dammit, I’ll take their money. If they want to pay me to tell them things I’d be happy to tell them anyway, am I going to say no? But they’re no friends of mine. I can’t sit easy in their city.”

“So is all this . . .” Bellis spoke carefully, trying to gauge him. “Is this not a hardship, then, being here? If you’ve no great love for New Crobuzon—”

“No.” He interrupted her with a hard manner quite unlike the amiable arrogance he had so far displayed. “That is not what I said. I’m a New Crobuzon man, Bellis. I want somewhere to come home to . . . even if I leave it again. I’m not rootless; I’m not some vague wanderer. I’m a businessman, a merchant, with a base and a house in East Gidd and friends and contacts, and New Crobuzon is always where I return to. Here . . . I’m a prisoner.

“This isn’t the kind of exploring that I have in mind. I’m damned if I’m staying here.”

And hearing that, Bellis opened another bottle of wine and poured him some more.

“What were you doing in Salkrikaltor?” she asked. “More business?”

Fennec shook his head. “I got picked up,” he said. “Salkrikaltor patrols sometimes deploy hundreds of miles away from the city, checking the kraals. One of their craft picked me up in the outskirts of the Basilisk Channel. I was heading south in a crippled ammonite-sub, leaking and very slow. The cray in the shallows east of the Sols told them about this dubious-looking tub limping round the edge of their village.” He shrugged. “I was damn well livid to get picked up, but I think they did me a favor. I doubt I’d have made it home. By the time I met any cray who could understand me, we were all the way out in Salkrikaltor City.”

“Where’d you come from?” said Bellis. “Jhesshul Islands?”

Fennec shook his head and observed her, without speaking, for several seconds.

“Nothing like that,” he said. “I crossed over from the other side of the mountains. I was in the Cold Claw Sea. In The Gengris.”

Bellis looked up sharply, ready to laugh or sniff dismissively, but she saw Fennec’s face. He nodded slowly.

“The Gengris,” he said again, and she looked away, astonished.

More than a thousand miles west of New Crobuzon was a huge lake, four hundred miles across—Cold Claw Loch. From its northern tip jutted Cold Claw Sound, a corridor of freshwater a hundred miles wide and eight hundred long. At its northern end the sound expanded massively and suddenly, stretching back eastward almost the width of the continent, narrowing like a talon, became the jaggedly curving Cold Claw Sea.

These were the Cold Claws, a conjoined body of water too vast to be anything but an ocean. A massive, freshwater, inland sea ringed by mountains and scrubland and swamps and the few hardy, remote civilizations that Fennec claimed to know.

At its easternmost edge, Cold Claw Sea was separated from the saltwater of the Swollen Ocean by a tiny strip of land: a ribbon of mountainous rock less than thirty miles wide. The sea’s sharp southernmost tip—the point of the talon—was almost directly north of New Crobuzon, more than seven hundred miles away. But the few travelers who made the journey from the city always bore a little west, to reach the waters of Cold Claw Sea two hundred miles or so away from its southern vertex. Because lodged like an impurity in the sea’s jag was an extraordinary, dangerous place, something between an island, a half-sunk city, and a myth. An amphibious badland about which the civilized world knew next to nothing, except that it existed and that it was dangerous.

That place was called The Gengris.

It was said to be the home of the grindylow, aquatic demons or monsters or degenerate crossbred men and women, depending on which story one believed. It was said to be haunted.

The grindylow, or The Gengris (the distinction between race and place was unclear), controlled the south of the Cold Claw Sea with unbreakable power and a cruel, capricious isolationism. Their waters were lethal and uncharted.

And here was Fennec claiming—what?—to have lived there?

“It isn’t true that there are no outsiders there,” he was saying, and Bellis quieted her mind enough to listen. “There are even a few native human, born and bred in The Gengris . . .” His mouth twisted. “And bred is the word, though I’m not sure human is, anymore. It suits them fine that everyone thinks it’s . . . like a little piece of hell there in the water, that it’s beyond any kind of pale. But, shit, they deal with traders like everyone else. There’re a few vodyanoi, a couple of humans . . . and others.

“I was there for more than half a year. Oh, it’s dangerous like nowhere else I’ve been, don’t get me wrong. You know if you trade in The Gengris that the rules . . . are very different. That you’ll never learn, never understand them. I’d been there six weeks when my best friend there, a vodyanoi from Jangsach who’d been there for seven years, trading back and forth . . . he was taken away. I never found out what happened to him, or why,” Fennec said flatly. “It might be that he insulted one of the grindylow gods, or it might have been that the catgut he supplied wasn’t thick enough.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Because, if you could last,” he snapped, suddenly excited, “it was so worth it. There was no reason to grindylow trades, no point bartering or trying to second-guess. They ask me for a bushel of salt and glass beads in equal parts—fine. No questions, no queries; I’ll provide it. Mixed fruit? It’s there for them. Cod, sawdust, resin, fungus, I don’t care. Because, by Jabber, when they paid, when they were happy . . .

“It was worth it.”

“But you left.”

“I left.” Fennec sighed. He got up and rummaged around in her cupboard. She did not scold him for it.

“I was there for months, buying, selling, exploring The Gengris and its environs—diving, you understand—and keeping my journal.” He spoke with his back to her, fussing with the kettle. “Then I got word that I’d . . . that I’d transgressed. That the grindylow were angry with me, and that my life was over unless I could get out, fast.”

“What had you done?” said Bellis slowly.

“I have no idea,” he snapped. “No idea at all. Maybe the ball bearings I provided were the wrong kind of metal, or the moon was in the wrong house, or some grindylow magus had died and they blamed me. I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to leave.

“I left a few things that gave them a false trail. See . . . I’d come to know the southern jag of Cold Claw Sea pretty well. They like to keep it secret, but I could find my way around it better than any outsider’s supposed to. There are tunnels. Fissures in the ridge that cuts off Cold Claw Sea from the Swollen Ocean. Through those burrows, out to the coast.”

He paused and looked out into the sky. It was nearly five o’clock. “I was trying to head south once I got into the ocean, but I got dragged out into the edges of the channel. Which is where the cray found me.”

“And you waited for a New Crobuzon ship to take you home,” Bellis said. He nodded. “Ours was going in the wrong direction, so you decided to commandeer it . . . with the powers vested in your little letter.”

He was lying, or leaving out some important part of the truth. That was trivially obvious, but Bellis did not comment. If he wanted to fill out his story he would do so. She would not pester him.

As she sat back in her chair, her half-drunk tea beside her on the uneven floor, she felt a sudden gush of tiredness, so that all of a sudden she could barely speak. She saw the first sickly light of dawn and knew it was too late to go to bed.

Fennec watched her. He saw her slump with exhaustion. He was more awake than she. He made himself another cup of tea as she let fits of dozing lap at her like little waves. She flirted with dreams.

Fennec began to tell her stories about his time in High Cromlech.

He told her the smells of the city, flint dust and rot and ozone, myrrh and embalming spices. He told her about the pervading quiet, and the duels, and the high-caste men with lips sewn shut. He described the descent of the Bonestrasse, great houses looming to either side on ornate catafalques, the Shatterjacks visible at the thoroughfare’s end, spilling out for miles. He talked on for nearly an hour.

Bellis sat with her eyes open, starting now and then as she remembered that she was awake. And as Fennec’s stories lurched east, across one and a half thousand miles, and he began to tell her about the malachite chapels of The Gengris, she was conscious that there was a growing crop of shouts and clattering from below, that Armada was waking beneath them, and she stood and smoothed her hair and clothes, and told him that he had to leave.

“Bellis,” he said from the stairs. Before, when he had used her first name, it had been in the spurious closeness of nighttime. Hearing him call her Bellis like that, with the sun up and people awake around them, was different. But she said nothing, and that gave him permission to continue.

“Bellis, thank you again. For . . . protecting me. When you said nothing about the letter.” She watched him tight-faced, and was silent. “I’ll see you again, soon. I hope that’ll be all right.”

And again she said nothing, conscious of the distance daylight had brought between them, and of the many things he was not telling her. But, still, she did not mind if he came again. It had been a long time since she had conversed as she had that night.

Chapter Ten

There were very few clouds that morning. The sky was hard and empty.

Tanner Sack was not going to the docks. He walked afore, through the industrial hulks that surrounded his home. He took a route toward the little tangle of dockside vessels punctuated with pubs and scored with alleys. He had his sea legs, his hips shifting unconsciously with each tilt of the pavements.

He was surrounded by bricks and tarred beams. The sounds of the factory ships and the rig Sorghum ebbed behind him, losing him in the twists of the city. His tentacles swung, and moved very gently. They were wrapped in soothing brine-soaked bandages.

Last night, for the third time in succession, Shekel had not come home.

He was with Angevine again.

Tanner thought about Shekel and the woman, still a little shamed by his own jealousy. Jealous of Shekel or of Angevine—it was a knot of resentment too tangled for him to untie. He tried not to feel deserted, which he knew was not fair. He determined that he would look out for the boy no matter what, would keep a home for him for whenever he came back, would let him go with as much grace as Tanner could muster.

He was just sad that it had come so fast.

Tanner could see the masts of Grand Easterly dominating the skyline to star’d. Aerostats sailed like submersibles through the city’s rigging. He descended to Winterstraw Market and made his way over its little vessels accosted by vendors and jostled by early shoppers.

The water was very close to him here, just below his feet. It slopped all around him in the grooves between the boats that made up the bazaar, awash with rubbish. The smell and sound of it were strong.

He closed his eyes momentarily and imagined himself hovering in the cool saltwater. Descending, feeling the pressure increase as the sea cosseted him. His tentacles grasping at passing fish. Making sense of the mysteries of the city’s underside: the obscure dark shapes in the distance, the gardens of pulp and rockweed and algae.

Tanner felt his resolve waxing, and he walked more quickly.

In The Clockhouse Spur riding he almost became lost in the unfamiliar environs. He referred carefully to his hand-scrawled map. Tanner made his way along winding walkways stretched out over low boats, and across ornately reconfigured caravels, to the Duneroller, a fat old gunship. An unstable-looking tower tottered at the ship’s rear, tethered by guy ropes to the rigging.

This was a quiet quarter. Even the water coursing between these boats seemed subdued. This was a neighborhood of back-alley thaumaturges and apothecaries, the scientists of Booktown.

In the office at the top of the tower, Tanner looked out from the imperfectly cut window. He could see across the restless shipscape to the horizon that pitched gently, swung up and down in the window frame as the Duneroller listed with the sea.

There was no word in Salt for Remaking. Serious augmentation or change was not common. Major work—to ameliorate the effects of the New Crobuzon punishment factories or, rarely, for some more proactive purpose—relied on a handful of practitioners. Self-taught biothaumaturges, specialist doctors, and chirurgeons and—rumor held—a few exiles from New Crobuzon whose expertise had been gleaned years before in the punitive service of the state.

For these serious changes, the word was taken from the Ragamoll. It was that Ragamoll word that filled Tanner’s mouth.

He brought his eyes back to the man behind the desk, patiently waiting.

“I need you to help me,” Tanner said, faltering. “I want to be Remade.”

Tanner had thought about it for a long time.

His coming to terms with the sea felt like a long, drawn-out birth. Every day he spent more time below, and the water felt better against him. His new limbs had adapted completely, were as strong and almost as prehensile as his arms and hands.

He had seen with envy how Bastard John the dolphin policed his watch, passing through the brine with unique motion (as he swept in to punish some slacking worker with a brutal butting); and had watched as cray from their half-sunk ships (suspended at the point of being lost, pickled in time) or the unclear menfish from Bask riding launched themselves into the water, uncontained by harnessing or chains.

When he left the sea, Tanner felt his tentacles hang heavy and uncomfortable. But when he was below, in his harness, his leather and brass, he felt tethered and constrained. He wanted to swim free, across and up into the light and even, yes, even down, into the cold and silent darkness.

There was only one thing he could do. He had considered asking the docks to subsidize him, as they surely would, gaining an infinitely more efficient worker to do their bidding. But as the days went on and his resolution grew, he had dispensed with that plan, and had begun to hoard his eyes and flags.

That morning, with Shekel away and the clear sky blowing salt air into him, he realized, suddenly, that this was truly and completely what he wanted to do. And with a great happiness he understood that it was not because he was ashamed that he would not ask for money, nor because he was proud, but only because the process and the decision were, completely and uniquely and without confusion, his own.

When he was not with Angevine (times that stayed in his head like dreams), Shekel was in the library, moving through the towers of children’s books.

He had made his way through The Courageous Egg. The first time it had taken him hours. He had gone back over it again and again, picking up his pace as much as he could, copying the words that he couldn’t at first read and making the sounds slowly out loud, in order, until meaning wrestled its way through the separated shapes.

It was hard and unnatural at first, but the process began to come more easily. He reread the book constantly, more and more quickly, not interested by the story, but ravenous for the unprecedented sensation of meaning coming up at him from the page, from behind the letters like an escapee. It almost made him queasy, almost made him feel like spewing, it was so intense and unnerving. He turned the technique to other words.

He was surrounded by them: signs visible on the commercial street beyond the windows, signs throughout the library and across the city and on brass plaques in his hometown, in New Crobuzon, a silent clamor, and he knew that there was no way he would ever be deaf to all those words again.

Shekel finished The Courageous Egg and was full of rage.

How come I wasn’t told? he thought, searing. What fucker was it kept this from me?

When Shekel came looking for Bellis in her little office off the Reading Room, his manner surprised her.

She was very tired from Fennec’s visit the night before, but she made a little effort and focused on Shekel, asked him about his reading. To her own surprise, she found the fervor with which he answered her moving.

“How’s Angevine?” she asked, and Shekel tried to speak but could not. Bellis eyed him.

She had expected adolescent bragging and hyperbole, but Shekel was visibly crippled by emotions he had not learned to feel. She felt an unexpected gust of affection for him.

“I’m a bit worried about Tanner,” he said slowly. “He’s my best mate, and I think he’s feeling a bit . . . deserted. I don’t want to piss him off, you know? He’s my best mate.” And he began to tell her about his friend Tanner Sack and, in doing so, let her know, shyly, about how things stood with him and Angevine.

She smiled inwardly at that—an adult tactic, and he had performed it well.

He told her about their home on the factory ship. He told her about the big shapes that Tanner had half-seen under the water. He began to recite the words on boxes and books that lay around the room. He said them out loud and scribbled them on sheafs of paper, breaking them into syllables, treating each word with equal, analytical disinterest, participle or verb or noun or proper name.

As they strained to move a box of botanical pamphlets, the door to the office opened and an elderly man entered with a Remade woman. Shekel started, and moved toward the newcomers.

“Ange—” he started, but the woman (rolling forward on a stuttering pewter contraption where her legs should be) shook her head swiftly and folded her arms. The white-haired man waited for Angevine and Shekel’s wordless interaction to conclude. As Bellis watched him warily she realized that he was the one who had welcomed Johannes on board. Tintinnabulum.

He was brawny and held himself tall despite his age. His ancient bearded face, framed with stringy white hair to below his shoulders, looked transplanted onto a younger body. He turned his eyes to Bellis.

“Shekel,” said Bellis quietly, “would you mind leaving for a few moments?” But Tintinnabulum interrupted her.

“There’s no need for that,” he said. His voice seemed very distant: dignified and melancholy. He switched to good, accented Ragamoll. “You’re a New Crobuzoner, aren’t you?” She did not respond, and he nodded gently as if she had. “I’m speaking to all the librarians—particularly those like you, cataloging new acquisitions.”

What do you know about me? Bellis thought carefully. What has Johannes told you? Or does he protect me, despite our argument?

“I have here . . .” Tintinnabulum held out a sheet of paper. “I have here a list of authors whose books we’re most interested in tracing. These are writers of great use to us in our work. We’re requesting your help. We have some works by some of these writers, and we’re eager to find whatever else we can. Others are said to have written specific volumes for which we’re searching. About others we know only rumors. You’ll find three of them have works in the catalog—those books we already know about, but we’re interested in any others.

“It might be that one or other of these names surfaces in the next batch of books that arrives. Or it may be that the library has stocked their work for centuries, and they’re lost on the shelves. We’ve searched the relevant sections carefully—biology, philosophy, thaumaturgy, oceanology—and have found nothing. But we could have made mistakes. We would like you to keep a watch for us, on every new book you take in, on forgotten ones you find behind shelves, any time you catalog unlisted volumes. Two of these, those that aren’t from New Crobuzon, are old.”

Bellis took the list and looked at it, expecting it to be very long. But, typed very neatly, in the dead center of the sheet, there were only four names. None of them meant anything to her.

“Those are the core of our list,” Tintinnabulum said. “There are others—there’s a much longer version that will be posted at the desks—but those four are the ones we’d ask you to commit to memory, to search for . . . assiduously.”

Marcus Halprin. That was a New Crobuzon name. Angevine was motioning at Shekel surreptitiously as she and Tintinnabulum moved slowly toward the door.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer (transliteration), Bellis read, and beside it the original: a set of cursive pictograms she recognized as the lunar calligraphy of Khadoh.

Beneath that was the third name, A. M. Fetchpaw—New Crobuzon again.

“Halprin and Fetchpaw are relatively recent writers,” said Tintinnabulum from the doorway. “The other two are older, we think—probably a century or so. We’ll leave you to your work, Miss Coldwine. If you should find anything that we want, anything by any of these writers not listed in the catalogs, please come to my vessel. It’s by the for’ard tip of Garwater, the Castor. I can assure you that anyone able to help us will be rewarded.”

What do you know about me? thought Bellis anxiously as the door closed.

She sighed and looked at the paper again. Shekel looked over her shoulder and began, hesitantly, to say the names on the paper out loud.

Krüach Aum, Bellis read finally, ignoring Shekel’s slow progress through the syllables. How exotic, she thought sardonically, looking at the script, an archaic variant of Ragamoll. Johannes mentioned you. That’s a Kettai name.

Halprin and Fetchpaw each had books listed in the catalogs. Fetchpaw’s were volumes one and two of Against Benchamburg: A Radical Theory of Water. Halprin’s were Maritime Ecologies and The Biophysics of Brine.

Uhl-Hagd-Shajjer had a large number of works listed, Khadohi books apparently averaging little more than forty pages each. Bellis was familiar enough with the moon-writing alphabet to make out how the titles sounded, but she had no idea what they meant.

Of Krüach Aum there was nothing.

Bellis watched Shekel teaching himself to read, rifling through the sheets on which he had written difficult words, scribbling additions to them as he said their sounds, copying words from the papers around him, from files, from the list of names that Tintinnabulum had left her. It was as if the boy had once known how to read, and was now remembering.

At five o’clock he sat with her and went through The Courageous Egg. Shekel answered her questions about the egg’s adventures with a care that skirted the comic. She pronounced the words he did not know, syllable by slow syllable, guiding him through the confusions of silent or irregular letters. He told her he already had another book ready for her, that he had read in the library itself that day.

That night, for the first time, Bellis wrote in her letter about Silas Fennec. She mocked his pseudonym, but admitted that his company, his cocky edge, had been a relief after days of being alone. She continued to work her way through Johannes’ Essays on Beasts. She wondered whether Fennec would come by again, and when he did not, she went to bed in an irritated burst of boredom.

She dreamed, not for the first time, of the river journey to Iron Bay.

Tanner dreamed of being Remade.

He found himself back in the punishment factory in New Crobuzon, where his extra limbs had been grafted to him in searing, drugged minutes of pain and humiliation. Once again the air clamored with industrial noises and screams, and he lay strapped to damp, stained wood, but this time the man bending over him was not a masked biothaumaturge, but the Armadan chirurgeon.

Just as he had in the waking day, the chirurgeon showed him charts of his body, with red markings where work would be done, emendations marked out like corrections on a schoolchild’s copybook.

“Will it hurt me?” Tanner asked, and the punishment factory faded and sleep faded, but the question remained. Will it hurt? he thought as he lay in his newly lonely room.

But when he had gone once more below the water, his longing overcame him again, and he realized that he was less afraid of the pain than of hankering like this forever.

Angevine told Shekel—sternly—how to treat her when she was working.

“Can’t try and talk to me like that, boy,” she told him. “I been working with Tintinnabulum for years. Garwater pays me to look after him, ever since they brought him in. He’s trained me well, and I owe him loyalty. You don’t mess with me when I’m working. D’you understand?”

She spoke to him in Salt now, most of the time, forcing him to learn (she was hard on him, she wanted to bring him into her city without delay). As she turned to go, Shekel stopped her and told her, haltingly, that he did not think he could come to her cabin that night, that he felt he should spend a night with Tanner, who must be feeling a bit low, he said.

“Good of you to think of him,” she said. So many ways he was growing, so fast. Loyalty and lust and love weren’t enough for her. It was these frequent glimmerings of the man underneath the childhood he was shucking that swept Angevine with true passion for him, that stained her vague parental warmth with something more hard and base and breathless.

“Give him an evening,” she said. “Come by mine tomorrow, lover.”

She gave him that last word carefully. He was learning to take such presents with grace.

Shekel spent hours alone in the library, in the shelfscape of wood and vellum, gently rotting leather and paperdust. He kept to the Ragamoll section, surrounded by books that he pulled carefully down and opened around him, text and pictures like flowers on the floor. He slowly took in stories about ducks and poor boys who became kings, and battles against the trow, and the history of New Crobuzon.

He kept notes of every troublesome word whose sounds tried to evade him: Curious, saber, tough, Jhesshul, Krüach. He practiced them constantly.

As he wandered the shelves he kept his books with him, reshelving them at the end of the day not by the classmarks he did not understand, but by invented mnemonics that told him this one belonged between the big red and the small blue spines, and this one at the end, beside the volume with the picture of an airship.

There was one terrible panicked moment. He picked a book from the wall, and the shapes inside, all the letters, were friends to him; but as he settled before them and began to mouth and mutter them, waiting for them to sound as words in his head, they were all gibberish. He grew frantic very quickly, fearing that he had lost what it was he had gained.

But then he realized that he had taken a book from a shelf just to one side of the Ragamoll section; that it shared the alphabet that was now his, but pieced it together into a different language. Shekel was dumbstruck at the realization that these glyphs he had conquered could do the same job for so many peoples who could not understand each other at all. He grinned as he thought about it. He was glad to share.

He opened more foreign volumes, making or trying to make the noises that the letters spelled and laughing at how strange they sounded. He looked carefully at the pictures and cross-referenced them again. Tentatively he concluded that in this language, this particular clutch of letters meant boat, and this other set moon.

Shekel moved off slowly, making his way further from the Ragamoll section, picking up random works and gaping at their impenetrable stories, moving down the long corridors of children’s books until he reached new shelving and opened a book whose script was like nothing he knew. He laughed, delighted at its strange curves.

He moved off further and found yet another alphabet. And a little way off there was another.

For hours he found intrigue and astonishment by exploring the non-Ragamoll shelves. He found in those meaningless words and illegible alphabets not only an awe at the world, but the remnants of the fetishism to which he had been subjected before, when all books had existed for him as these did now, only as mute objects with mass and dimension and color, but without content.

Though it was not quite the same. It was not the same to see these alien pages and know that they would have meaning to some foreign child, as The Courageous Egg and The History of New Crobuzon and The Wasp in a Wig now surrendered meaning to him.

He gazed at the books in Base and High Kettai and Sunglari and Lubbock and Khadohi with a kind of fascinated nostalgia for his own illiteracy, without for a fraction of a moment missing it.

Chapter Eleven

Silas was waiting for Bellis as she emerged from the Pinchermarn, the sun low over the sea. She saw him leaning back against a railing and watching for her.

He smiled when he saw her.

They ate together, and talked, gently fencing around one another. Bellis could not tell if it was him she was glad to see, or whether she had simply had enough of loneliness, but either way she welcomed his company.

He had a suggestion. It was the fourth Bookdi of Hawkbill. That was a scabmettler blood-day, and in Thee-And-Thine riding there was a major fight festival. Several of the best fighters from Shaddler riding were coming, to show their skills. Had she ever seen mortu crutt, or stampfighting?

Bellis took convincing. In New Crobuzon she had never visited Cadnebar’s glad circus, or any of its lesser imitators. The idea of watching such combat repelled her somewhat, and bored her more. Silas was insistent. Studying him, she realized that his desire to see these fights was not motivated by sadism or voyeurism: she did not know what did drive it, but it was less base than that. Or differently base, perhaps.

She also knew that he was eager for her to come with him.

To get to Thee-And-Thine, they passed over Shaddler riding, the scabmettler home. Their aircab moved sedately past a spindly tower of girders at the rear of the great iron Therianthropus, and on, star’d.

This was to be Bellis’ first time in Thee-And-Thine. It’s about time, she told herself with shame. She was committed to understanding the city, but her resolution risked waning and becoming a nebulous depression again.

The fighting ground was a little way fore of Thee-And-Thine’s flagship, a big clipper with sails sliced into decorative patterns, in the thick of the merchant riding’s backstreets. The arena was a ring of small vessels with benches laid in gradients on their decks, facing into the circle of sea. Opulent gondolas hung from dirigibles around the edges of the arena. These were the private boxes of the rich.

Tethered in the middle was the stage itself; it was a wooden platform, its edges studded with brass gas lamps to light it and barrels to keep it afloat. That was the fighting ground: a circle of refitted ships and balloons around a piece of driftwood.

With a flourish of money and a brief word, Silas freed up two seats in the front row. He talked continuously in a low voice that outlined the politics and personalities around them.

“That’s the vizier of Thee-And-Thine,” he would explain, “come to make up the money he lost at the start of the quarto.” “The woman over there with the veil never shows her face. She’s said to be on the Curhouse council.” His eyes moved constantly over the crowd.

Vendors sold food and spiced wine, and bookmakers shouted odds. The festival was unpretentious and profane, like most of what went on in Thee-And-Thine.

The crowd was not all human.

“Where are the scabmettlers?” Bellis said, and Silas began to point, seemingly randomly, around the arena. Bellis struggled to see what he saw: he was indicating humans, she thought, but their skin was blanched grey, and they looked squat and strong. Scarification marked their faces.

Bloodhorns sounded, and by chymical trickery the lights of the stage burst suddenly red. The crowd brayed enthusiastically. Two seats along from her, Bellis saw a woman whose physiognomy marked her as scabmettler. She did not cheer or shout, but sat still through the vulgar enthusiasm. Bellis could see other scabmettlers reacting similarly, waiting stolidly for the holy-day battles.

At least the general bloodlust was honest, she thought, contemptuous. There were enough scabmettler bookies to show that this was an industry, whatever the Shaddler elders might pretend.

Bellis realized wryly that she was tense to see what would happen. Excited.

When the first three fighters were ferried over to the arena, the crowd fell silent. The scabmettler men stepped onto the platform, naked except for loincloths, and stood in a triangle back-to-back in the center.

They were poised, all of them well muscled, their grey skin pallid in the gas jets.

One of the men seemed to be facing her directly. He must have been blinded by the lights, but still she entertained the fancy that it was a private performance for her.

The fighters kneeled and washed themselves, each from a bowl of steaming infusion the color of green tea. Bellis saw leaves and buds in it.

Then she started. From their bowls each man had pulled out a knife. They held them still and dripping. They were recurved, the cutting edge curling like a hook or a talon. Skinning knives. Something with which to score, to pare off flesh.

“Is that what they fight with?” she turned to Silas to ask, but the sudden mass gasp from the crowd pulled her attention back to the stage. Her own cry came an instant later.

The scabmettlers were carving furrows in their own flesh.

The fighter right before Bellis was tracing the outlines of his muscles in wicked strokes. He hooked the knife under the skin of his shoulder, then curled around with surgical precision, drawing a red line that linked deltoid and biceps.

The blood seemed to hesitate for a second, then to blossom, an eructation of it, bursting out from the fissure like boiling water, pouring out of him in great gouts, as if the pressure in his veins was immeasurably greater than in Bellis’. It raced across the man’s skin in a macabre slick, and he turned his arm expertly this way and that, channeling his own blood according to some design Bellis could not see. She watched, waiting for a cascade of gore to foul the stage, which did not happen, and her breath stopped in her throat as she saw that the blood was setting.

It poured in great oozing washes from the man’s wounds, the substance of the blood crawling over itself to reach higher, and she saw that the edges of the wound were crusted with embankments of clotting blood, vast accretions of the stuff, the red turning swiftly brown and blue and black, and freezing in crystalline jags that jutted inches from his skin.

The blood that ran down his arm was setting also, expanding at an impossible rate and changing color like vivid mold. Shards of scab matter frosted into place like salt or ice.

He dipped his knife again in the green liquid and continued to cut, as did his fellows behind him. He grimaced against the pain. Where he sliced the blood exploded, and coursed along the runnels in his anatomy, and set hard in an abstract armor.

“The liquid’s an infusion that slows coagulation. It allows them to shape the armor,” Silas whispered to Bellis. “Each warrior perfects his own pattern of cuts. That’s part of their skill. Quick-moving men cut themselves and direct the blood so as to leave their joints free, and they pare off excess armor. Slow, powerful ones coat themselves in scab until they’re as clumsy and heavily armored as constructs.”

Bellis did not want to speak.

The men’s grisly, careful preparations took time. Each of them sliced in turn at his face and chest and belly and thighs, and grew a unique integument of dried blood: hardened cuirasses and greaves and vambraces and helmets with irregular edges and coloration; random extrusions like lava flows, organic and mineral at once.

The laborious act of cutting turned Bellis’ stomach. The sight of that armor so carefully cultivated in pain astounded her.

After that cruel and beautiful preparation, the fight itself was as dull and unpleasant as Bellis had thought it would be.

The three scabmettlers circled each other, each wielding two fat scimitars. Encumbered by their bizarre armor, they looked like animals in outlandish plumage. But the armor was harder than wax-boiled leather, deflecting strokes from the weighted swords. After a long, sweaty battering, a clot of the stuff fell free from the forearm of one fighter, and the quickest man slashed out at him.

But scabmettler blood provided another defense. As the man’s flesh parted, his blood gushed out and over his enemy’s blade. Unthinned by anticoagulant, it set almost instantly as it met the air, in an ugly, unsculpted knot that grasped the scimitar’s metal like solder. The wounded man bellowed and spun, ripping the sword out of his opponent’s hand. It juddered absurdly in his wound.

The third man stepped in and cut his throat.

He moved with speed, at such an angle that although his blade was spattered with quick-setting gore, it was not trapped by the glacier of blood that bloomed and froze in the ragged hole.

Bellis was holding her breath with shock, but the defeated man did not die. He fell to his knees in obvious pain, but the rime of scab had immediately sealed his wound, saving him.

“You see how hard it is for them to die on that arena?” murmured Silas. “If you want to kill a scabmettler, use a club or a bludgeon, not a blade.” He looked briefly around him and then spoke intensely and quietly, his voice muffled by the spectators. “You’ve got to try to learn things, Bellis. You want to defeat Armada, don’t you? You want out? So you have to know where you are. Are you accumulating knowledge? Godspit, trust me, Bellis; this is what I do. Now you know how not to try to kill a scabmettler, right?”

She stared at him, eyes widening in astonishment, but his brutal logic made sense. He committed to nothing and collated everything. She imagined him doing the same thing in High Cromlech and The Gengris and Yoraketche, hoarding money and information and ideas and contacts, all of it raw material, all of it potentially a weapon or a commodity.

He was, she realized uneasily, more serious, far more serious, than she. He was preparing and planning all the time.

“You have to know,” he said. “And there’s more to come. There are some people you need to know.”

There were other scabmettler fights, all with their oddly stunted savagery: varieties of scab armor, different styles of combat all executed with the stylized movements and ostentation of mortu crutt.

And there were other contests, between humans and cactacae and all the nonaquatic races of the city—displays of stampfighting.

Combatants used the bottom of their clenched fists, as if they were banging a tabletop—a blow called a hammerpunch. They did not kick with the front of the foot but stamped with the base. They swept and pulled and tripped and slammed, moving with quick and jerky sinuosity.

Bellis watched minutes and minutes of broken noses, bruises, blackouts. The bouts blurred into one. She tried to see possibilities in everything, tried to hoard what she saw, as she sensed Silas was doing.

Little waves lapped over the edges of the stage, and she wondered when this display would end.

Bellis heard a rhythmic, pounding sound in the crowd.

At first it was a murmur, a repeated murmur that beat below the susurrus of the spectators like a heartbeat. But it gathered strength, and became louder and more insistent, and people began to look around and to smile, and to join their voices to it with increasing excitement.

“Yes . . .” said Silas, stretching out the word with a hard delight. “Finally. This is what I wanted to see.”

At first Bellis heard the sound like it was drums, spoken drums. Then suddenly as an exclamation—Oh, Oh, Oh—repeated in perfect time, accompanied by banging arms and kicking feet.

It was only when the frenzy spread to her own boat that she realized it was a word.

“Doul.” It came from all around her. “Doul, Doul, Doul.”

A name.

“What are they saying?” she hissed to Silas.

“They’re calling for someone,” he said, his eyes scanning the surrounds. “They want a display. They’re demanding a fight from Uther Doul.”

He gave her a quick, cold smile.

“You’ll recognize him,” he said. “You’ll know him when you see him.”

And then the percussion of the name broke down into cheers and applause, an ecstatic wave of it that grew and grew as one of the little dirigibles tethered to the rigging cast off and drew slowly closer to the stage. Its crest was a steamer against a red moon, the sigil of Garwater. The gondola below it was polished wood.

“It’s the Lovers’ carriage,” Silas said. “They’re giving up their lieutenant for a moment, another ‘spontaneous’ display. I knew he couldn’t resist.”

Sixty feet above the arena, a rope spilled down from the airborne craft. The shrieks from the spectators were extraordinary. With great speed and skill, a man leaped from the vessel and slipped, hand over hand, to the blood-spattered fighting ground.

He stood, shoeless and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of leather britches. With his arms relaxed by his sides he rotated slowly to take in the crowd (frenzied now that he had touched down to fight). And as he turned his face swept slowly over Bellis’, and she gripped the rail in front of her, her breath catching momentarily, recognizing the crop-haired man, the man in grey, the murderer who had taken Terpsichoria.

By some goading, a clutch of men were blandished into fighting him.

Doul—the sad-faced butcher of Captain Myzovic—did not move, did not stretch or bounce or pull his muscles this way or that. He merely stood waiting.

Four opponents stood ill at ease on the edge of the arena. They were buoyed on the audience’s enthusiasm, shouts and raging washing over them as they shifted and murmured tactics to each other.

Doul’s face was set absolutely blank. When his rivals fanned out opposite him, he dropped slowly into stampfighting stance, his arms slightly raised, his knees bent, looking quite relaxed.

In the first brutal, astonishing seconds, Bellis did not even breathe. One hand to her mouth, her lips pursed shut. Then she emitted little gasps of astonishment with the rest of the crowd.

Uther Doul did not seem to live in the same time as anyone else. He seemed like some visitor to a world much more gross and sluggish than his own. Despite the bulk of his body, he moved with such speed that even gravity seemed to operate more quickly for him.

There was nothing spare to his movements. As he shifted from stamp to hammerpunch to block, his limbs slipped from one poise, one state, to the next by the most utterly seamless and pared-down routes, like machines.

Doul slapped open-handed, and one man went down; he stepped sideways and, poised on one leg, kicked twice to another’s solar plexus, then used the raised leg to block the attack of the third. He spun and shoved without flourish, with brutal precision, dispatching his rivals at his ease.

He took the last one with a throw, scooping his arm from the air and hugging it tight to him, pulling the man after his trapped limb. Doul seemed to roll through the air, preparing his body as he fell, landing astride the other’s back, pinioning his arm and immobilizing him.

There was a long silence, and then a rapture burst from the crowd like blood from a scabmettler, a tide of applause and cheers.

Bellis watched, and went cold, and held her breath again.

The fallen men raised themselves, or were dragged off, and Uther Doul stood, breathing heavily but rhythmically, his arms held very slightly out, the ridges of his muscles running with sweat and other men’s blood.

“The Lovers’ guard,” said Silas amid the audience’s frenzy. “Uther Doul. Scholar, refugee, soldier. Expert in probability theory, in Ghosthead history, and in fighting. The Lovers’ guard, their second, their assassin and strong-arm and champion. That’s what you had to see, Bellis. That is what’s trying to stop us leaving.”

They left and walked the winding nightlit pathways of Thee-And-Thine toward Shaddler, and Garwater and the Chromolith.

Neither spoke.

At the end of Doul’s fight, Bellis had seen something that had brought her up short and made her afraid. As he had turned, his hands clawed, his chest taut and heaving, she had seen his face.

It was stretched tight, every muscle straining, into a glare of feral savagery unlike anything she had ever seen on a human being.

Then a second later, with his bout won, he had turned to acknowledge the crowd and had looked once more like a contemplative priest.

Bellis could imagine some fatuous warrior code, some mysticism that abstracted the violence of combat and allowed one to fight like a holy man. And equally she could imagine tapping into savagery, letting atavistic viciousness take over in a berserker fugue. But Doul’s combination stunned her.

She thought of it later, as she lay in her bed, listening to light rain. He had readied and recovered himself like a monk, fought like a machine, and seemed to feel it like a predatory beast. That tension frightened her, much more than the combat skills he had shown. Those could be learned.

Bellis helped Shekel through books that grew more complex by the hour. When they separated she left him exploring the children’s section again, and went back to the rooms where Silas waited for her.

They drank tea and talked about New Crobuzon. He seemed sadder, quieter than usual. She asked him why, and he would only shake his head. There was something tentative about him. For the first time since meeting him, Bellis felt something like pity or concern for him. He wanted to tell or ask her something, and she waited.

She told him what Johannes had said to her. She showed him the naturalist’s books and explained how she was trying to piece together Armada’s secret from those volumes, without ever knowing which were important, or what within them might be clues.

At half-past eleven, after an extended silence, Silas turned to her. “Why did you leave New Crobuzon, Bellis?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, and all her usual evasions came to her throat, but she remained silent.

“You love New Crobuzon,” he continued. “Or . . . is that the best way to put it? You need New Crobuzon. You can’t let it go, so it doesn’t make sense. Why would you leave?”

Bellis sighed, but the question did not go away.

“When were you last in New Crobuzon?” she said.

“More than two years ago,” he calculated. “Why?”

“Did word reach you, when you were in The Gengris . . . Did you ever hear of the Midsummer Nightmare? The Dream Curse? Sleeping Sickness? Nocturne Syndrome?”

He was flicking his hand vaguely, trying to catch the memory. “I heard something from a merchant, a few months back . . .”

“It was about six months ago,” she said. “Tathis, Sinn . . . Summer. Something happened. Something went wrong with . . . with the nights.” She shook her head vaguely. Silas was listening without scepticism. “I still have no idea what it was—it’s important you know that.

“Two things happened. Nightmares. That was the first thing. People were having nightmares. And I mean everybody was having nightmares. It was as if we’d all . . . breathed bad air, or something.”

The words were inadequate. She remembered the exhaustion and the misery, the weeks of dreading sleep. The dreams that woke her screaming and weeping hysterically.

“The other thing. There was a . . . a disease, or something. People were being afflicted all over the place. All races. It did something . . . It killed the mind, so there was nothing left but the body. People would be found in the morning, in the streets or in bed or whatever, alive, but . . . mindless.”

“And the two were linked?”

She glanced at him and nodded, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Nobody knows, but it seems so. And one day it all stopped, all of a sudden. People had been talking about martial law, about the militia coming out openly onto the streets . . . It was a crisis. I’m telling you it was horrendous. It arrived for no reason. It ruined our sleep and stole hundreds of peoples’ minds away—they were never cured—and then suddenly it went. For no reason.”

She went on eventually. “After it quieted, there were rumors . . . There were a thousand rumors about what had happened. Daemons, Torque, biological experiments gone wrong, a new strain of vampirism . . . ? No one knew. But there were certain names that came up again and again. And then in early Octuary, people I knew began to disappear.

“At first I just heard some story about some friend of a friend whom no one could find. Then, a little while later, there was another, and another. I wasn’t yet worrying. No one was. But they never reappeared. And they got closer to me. The first person to go I barely knew. The second I’d seen at a party some months before. The third was someone I worked with at the university, and drank with now and then. And the rumors about the Midsummer Nightmare, the names began to get whispered a bit louder, and I heard them again and again, until . . . until one name came out loudest. One person was being blamed; a person who linked everyone who was disappearing to me.

“His name was der Grimnebulin. He’s a scientist and a . . . a renegade, I suppose. There was money on his head—you know how the militia puts the word out, all hints and pass-it-ons, so no one knew how much or for what. But it was understood that he was gone, and that the government was keen to find him.

“And they were coming for the people who knew him: colleagues, acquaintances, friends, lovers.” She held Silas’ gaze bleakly. “We’d been lovers. Godspit, four, five years ago. We’d not even spoken for probably two. He’d taken up with a khepri, I heard.” She shrugged. “Whatever he’d done, the Mayor’s boys were trying to find him. And I could see it was soon my turn to disappear.

“I was paranoid, but I was right to be. I was avoiding going to work, I was avoiding the people I knew, and I realized I was waiting to be taken. The militia,” she spoke with sudden zeal, “were fucking predatory in those months.

“We’d been close, Isaac and me. We’d lived together. I knew the militia would want me. And maybe they did let some of the people they questioned go, but I never heard from any of them again. And whatever questions they wanted to ask, I had no answers. Gods knew what they’d have done to me.”

It had been a forlorn, miserable time. Never one with many close friends, those that she had she had been too afraid to seek, in case of incriminating them, or in case they had been bought. She remembered her frantic preparations, her furtive deals and dubious sanctuaries. New Crobuzon had been a dreadful place then, she remembered. Oppressive and coldly tyrannical.

“So I made plans. I realized . . . I realized that I had to leave. I had no money and no contacts in Myrshock or Shankell; I had no time to organize. But the government pays you to go to Nova Esperium.” Silas began to nod slowly. Bellis jerked her head in a desultory laughing motion. “So one branch of government was hunting me, while another was processing my application to leave and discussing pay. That’s the advantage of bureaucracy. But I didn’t have long to play games like that with them, so I took passage on the first ship I could. I learnt Salkrikaltor Cray to do it.

“Two years? Three?” She shrugged. “I didn’t know how long it would be till I’d be safe. Ships come from home at least annually to Nova Esperium. My contract was five years, but I’ve broken contracts before. I thought I’d stay until they forgot, till some other public enemy or crisis or whatever took over their attention. Until I got word that it was safe to go back—there are people who know where . . . where I was going.” She had been about to say where I am. “And so . . .” she concluded.

They looked at each other for a long time.

“So that’s why I ran away.”

Bellis thought of the people she had left, the few people she had trusted, and was suddenly and briefly overwhelmed by how much she missed them.

These were strange circumstances. She was a fugitive, eager, desperate to return to the place she had fled. Well, she thought, in all plans, circumstances intervene. She smiled with cold humor. I tried to leave the city for a year or two, and circumstances intervened—some things happened—and instead I find myself trapped for the rest of my life as a librarian in an itinerant pirate city.

Silas was subdued. He seemed moved by what she had told him, and she studied him and knew that he was thinking over his own story. Neither of them were self-pitying. But they had come to be here through no fault or design of their own, and they did not wish to stay.

There were minutes more silence within the room. Outside, of course, the subdued puttering from the hundreds of engines that dragged them south continued. And the glottals of waves continued; and the other sounds—city noise, night noise.

When Silas rose to leave, Bellis came with him to the door, sticking quite close by him, though she did not touch or look at him. He paused at her entrance and met her eyes, melancholy. There was a long second, and then they bent in to each other, his arms on the door, hers unmoving by her sides, committing to nothing.

They kissed, and only their lips and tongues moved. They were carefully poised, so as not to breathe, or to encroach too far on the other with touches or sound, but finding a connection nonetheless, warily and with relief.

When their long and deep kiss broke, Silas risked moving his lips gently as they parted, finding her again with a little succession of mouth-to-mouth touches; and she allowed him that, even though that first moment was passed and these tiny codas took place in real time.

Bellis breathed slowly and looked at him steadily, and he at her, for just as long as they would have done anyway, and he opened the door and walked out into the cool, speaking his goodnight quietly, not hearing her echo.

Chapter Twelve

The next day was New Year’s Eve.

Not, of course, to the Armadans, for whom it was a day marked only by a sudden increase in warmth, making it merely autumnal. They could not ignore the fact that it was the solstice, the shortest day of the year: but they did not treat that as of much importance. Beyond a few cheerful remarks about the nights drawing in, the day went unremarked.

But Bellis was sure that, among the New Crobuzon press-ganged, she was not alone in keeping track of the days back home. She speculated that there would be subdued parties speckled across the ridings that night. Quiet, so as not to stand out, or to alert the yeomanry or the proctors, or whatever authority there was in a particular riding, that some among the cramped terraces and galleys of Armada were loyal to alternative calendars.

It was a kind of hypocrisy, she vaguely acknowledged: New Year’s Eve had never meant anything to her before.

For the Armadans, it was Horndi, the beginning of another nine-day week, and a day that Bellis had free. She met Silas on the bare deck of the Grand Easterly.

He took her to the star’d-aft edge of Garwater, to Croom Park. He had been surprised that she had not visited it before, and as they entered it and passed deep into its byways, she could understand why.

The bulk of the park was a long strip, more than a hundred feet wide and almost six hundred long, on the huge body of an ancient steamer whose nameplate had long been effaced by nature. The greenery spread across broad, swaying bridges to two old schooners lined up back-to-back, almost parallel to the great ship. Fore of the steamer, it extended onto a hunkered little sloop with long-dead guns, part of the fabric of Curhouse riding, sharing the park between the two boroughs.

Bellis and Silas wandered tangled pathways, passing the granite statue of Croom, the pirate hero from Armada’s past. Bellis was overwhelmed.

Unknown centuries before, the architects of Croom Park had set to covering the fabric of the war-shattered steamer with mulch and loam. Eddying on ocean currents, there was no ground for Armadans to till or fertilize and, like their books and money, they had had to steal it. Even that, even their earth, their mud, was plundered over years, dragged in great trenches from coastal farms and forests, torn from bewildered peasants’ plots and taken back across the waves to the city.

They had let the ruined steamer rust and rot, and had filled its holed carcass with the soil they had stolen, starting in the forepeak and engine rooms and the lowest coal bunkers (deposits of coke still unused, packed once again in seams below tons of dirt), piling the earth around the moldering propeller shaft. They filled some of the big furnaces and left others half empty, encased them, metal air bubbles in the striae of marl and chalk.

The landscapers moved up to decks of cabins and staterooms. Where walls and ceilings had escaped injury, they perforated them raggedly, rupturing the integrity of the little rooms and opening passageways for roots and moles and worms. Then they filled the scraps of space with earth.

The ship was low in the water, kept buoyant by judicious air pockets and by its tethering neighbors.

Above the water, in the open air, layers of peat and dirt spread out and reclaimed the main deck. The raised bridge, the aftercastle and observation decks and lounges, became steep knolls skinned in topsoil. Abrupt little hills, they burst in tight curves of earth from the surrounding plateau.

The unknown designers had performed similar transformations on the three smaller wooden boats close by. That had been much easier than working on iron.

And then there was the planting, and the parkland had bloomed.

There were copses of trees across the steamer’s body, old and densely spaced, tiny conspiratorial forests. Saplings, and many midsize trees a century or two old. But there were also some massive specimens, ancient and huge, that must have been uprooted full-grown from wooded shorelines and replanted scores of years ago, to grow old aboard. Grass was everywhere underfoot, and cow parsley and nettles. There were cultivated flowerbeds on the Curhouse gunboat, but on the steamer’s corpse the woods and meadows of Croom Park were wild.

Not all the plants were familiar to Bellis. In its slow journeys around Bas-Lag, Armada had visited places unknown to New Crobuzon’s scientists, and it had plundered those exotic ecosystems. On the smaller ships were little glades of head-high fungus, that shifted and hissed as walkers passed through them. There was a tower covered in vivid red, thorned creepers that stank like rotting roses. The long forecastle of the star’d-most ship was out of bounds, and Silas told Bellis that beyond the intricately woven fence of briars, the flora was dangerous: pitcher plants of odd and unquantified power, wake trees like predatory weeping willows.

But on the old steamer itself, the landscape and the foliage were more familiar. One of its raised deck-hills was paved inside with moss and turf and made into sunken gardens. Lit and kept alive by bright gaslight and what little day came through dirt-caked portholes, plants of different themes filled each of the cabins. There was a tiny tundra garden of rocks and purple scrub; a desert full of succulents; woodland flowers and meadowland—all adjoining, all linked by a dim corridor knee-high in grass. In its sepia light, under warpaint of verdigris and climbing plants, plaques pointing to the mess and the heads and boiler rooms could still be read. They were crossed by paths well-worn by woodlice and ladybirds.

A little way from its entrance—a door in the hill—out in the air, Bellis and Silas walked slowly in the damp shade.

They had visited each of the four ships of the park. There were only a few other people in the green environs with them. On the aft-most of the vessels Bellis had stopped, shocked, and pointed across the gardens and the reclaimed rails of the deck, out over a hundred feet of ocean to the city’s edge. Tethered there, she had seen the Terpsichoria. The chains and ropes that bound it were clean. New bridges connected it to the rest of the city. An architectural skeleton of wood loomed from its main deck: a building site, foundations.

This was how Armada grew for its populace, swallowing up prey and reconfiguring them, rendering them into its own material like mindless plankton.

Bellis felt nothing for the Terpsichoria, had only contempt for those who felt affection for boats. But seeing her last link to New Crobuzon brazenly and effortlessly assimilated depressed her.

The trees around them were evergreen and deciduous in an unruly mix. Silas and Bellis walked through pines and the black claws of leafless oaks and ash. Old masts soared over the canopy like the most ancient trees in the forest, barked in rust, dangling ragged foliage of long-frayed wire rigging. Bellis and Silas walked in their shadows, and in the shadows of the wood, past grassy undulations broken by little windows and doors, where cabins had been effaced by earth. Worms and burrowing animals moved behind the cracked glass.

The steamer’s ivy-caked chimneys disappeared behind them as they moved into the heart of the wood, out of sight of the surrounding ships. They traced spiraling paths that wound back on themselves arcanely, seeming to multiply the space of the park. Blistered cowls broke from the ground, choked with brambles; roots and vines entrapped the capstans and coiled intricately through the guardrails of moss-cushioned ladders leading into blank hillsides.

In the shade of a cargo derrick become some obscure skeleton, Bellis and Silas sat in the wintery landscape and drank wine. As Silas rummaged in his little bag for a corkscrew, Bellis saw his bulging notebook inside. She picked it up and looked at him questioningly, and when he nodded his permission she opened it.

There were lists of words: the jottings of someone trying to learn a foreign language.

“Most of that stuff’s from The Gengris,” he said.

She turned slowly through the pages of nouns and verbs, and came to a little section like a diary, with dated entries written in a shorthand code she could make little of, words pared down to two or three letters, punctuation dispensed with. She saw commodity prices, and scribbled descriptions of the grindylow themselves: unpleasant little pencil sketches of figures with prodigious eyes and teeth and obscure limbs, flat eel-tails. There were heliotypes attached to the pages, executed furtively, it seemed, in dim light; unclear sepia tints, discolored and water-stained, the monstrosity of the figures they depicted exaggerated by blisters and impurities in the paper.

There were hand-drawn maps of The Gengris, covered in arrows and annotations, and other maps of the surrounding water of the Cold Claw Sea, the topography of submerged hills and valleys and grindylow fortresses picked out in different colors for different rocks, granite and quartz and limestone, carefully corrected over several pages. There were suggestive sketches of machinery, of defensive engines.

Silas leaned over her as she read, pointing out features.

“That’s a gorge just south of the city,” he said, “that leads right up to the rocks separating off the sea. That tower there”—some irregular smudge—“was the skin library, and those were the salp vats.”

Beyond those pages were scrawled diagrams of gashes and tunnels and clawed machines, and mechanisms like locks and sluices.

“What are these?” she said, and Silas glanced over, and laughed when he saw what she was looking at.

“Oh, the embryos of big ideas—that sort of thing,” he said, and smiled at her.

They sat with their backs to an overgrown stump, or perhaps the earth-smothered anatomy of a binnacle. Bellis put Silas’ book away. Still not quite at ease, she leaned in and kissed him.

He responded gently, and an aggression came to her, and she pushed herself into him more firmly. She drew away for a moment, her face set, and looked at him staring back at her with pleasure and uncertainty. She tried to parse him, to understand the grammar of his actions and reactions, and she could not.

But frustrated as she was by that, she felt intimately how his antagonisms mirrored hers. His despite and hers—at Armada, at this absurd existence—had become conjoined. And it was an extraordinary relief and release to share even something as cold as that.

She held his face and kissed him hard. He responded eagerly. When his arm came slowly around her waist, and his fingers crooked and combed her hair, she broke from him and took hold of his hand. She pulled him after her, back through the winding ways of the park, portward, to her home.

In Bellis’ room, Silas watched silently as she undressed.

She draped her skirt, shirt, jacket, and bloomers over the back of her chair and stood stripped bare in the fading light of her window, letting down her scraped-up hair. Silas stirred. His clothes were scattered like seed. He smiled at her again, and she sighed and smiled too, finally, deprecatingly, for what seemed the first time in months. With that smile came an unexpected little stab of shyness, and with the smile it quickly left again.

They were not children; they were not new to this. They did not fumble or panic. She walked to him and straddled him with practiced grace and desire. And when she did, pushing against his cock, when he wrestled his hands out from where she had pinioned them, he knew how to move her.

Passionate; loveless but not joyless; expert; eager. It made her smile again, and gasp and come in a great gout of relief and pleasure. When she lay back in the narrow bed, having taught him how she liked to fuck and learned his own predilections, she glanced up at him (his eyes closed, sweating). She checked herself and verified that she was still lonely, still as numb to this place as ever. She would have been astounded to find it any other way.

But still, but still. Even so. She smiled again. She felt better.

For three days, Tanner lay in the surgery, strapped to the wooden table, feeling the tower and the ship move slowly and slightly beneath him.

Three days. He moved only inches at a time, wriggling against the restraints, shifting slightly to the left or right.

Most of the time he swam in glutinous aether dreams.

The chirurgeon was kindly, and kept him drugged as much as was possible without damaging him, so Tanner meandered in and out of twilight consciousness. He muttered to himself, and to the chirurgeon, who fed him and wiped him like a baby. He would sit with Tanner in his spare minutes or hours, and talk to him, pretending that his absurd and frightening responses made sense. Tanner spat out words or was silent, or wept and giggled: drugged; feverish; sluggish; cold; soundly sleeping.

Tanner had blanched when the chirurgeon had told him how it would have to be. To be shackled again, to be strapped down while his body was rebuilt. The narcotic- and agony-raddled memories of the punishment factory had assaulted him.

But the chirurgeon had gently explained that some of the procedures were fundamental; some would involve the reconfiguration of his insides from the tiniest building blocks up. He could not move while the atoms and particles of his blood and lungs and brain found their ways along new pathways and met in alternative combinations. He must be still and patient.

Tanner acquiesced, as he had known he would.

On the first day, as Tanner lay deep in chymical and thaumaturgic sleep, the chirurgeon opened him.

He scored deep gashes in the sides of Tanner’s neck, then lifted off the skin and outer tissue, gently wiping away the blood that coursed from the raw flesh. With the exposed flaps oozing, the chirurgeon turned his attention to Tanner’s mouth. He reached inside with a kind of iron chisel and slid it into the pulp of the throat, twisting as he pushed, carving tunnels in the flesh.

Constantly vigilant that Tanner was not choking on the blood that ran into his mouth and throat, the chirurgeon created new passageways in his body. Runnels linked the back of Tanner’s mouth to the openings in his neck. Where the new orifices opened behind and below his teeth, the chirurgeon ringed them with muscle, pushing it into place with a clayflesh hex, stimulating it with little crackles of elyctricity.

He stoked the fire that drove his bulky analytical engine, and fed it program cards, gathering data. Finally, he wheeled into place alongside the gurney a tank containing a sedated cod, and linked the motionless fish to Tanner’s body by a cryptic and unwieldy construction of valves, gutta-percha tubes, and wires.

Homeomorphic chymicals sluiced dilute in brine across the cod’s gills, and then through the ragged wounds that would be Tanner’s. Wires linked the two of them. The chirurgeon muttered hexes as he operated the juddering apparatus—he was rusty with bio-thaumaturgy, but methodical and careful—and kneaded Tanner’s bleeding neck. Water began to drool through the holes and over the opened-up skin.

For most of the night, the scene was replayed, the surgery swaying gently with the water below. The chirurgeon slept a little, periodically checking Tanner’s progress, and that of the slowly dying cod suspended in a matrix of thaumaturgic strands that dragged out its demise. He applied pressure when it was needed, changed the settings of finely calibrated gauges, added chymicals to the sluicing water.

In those hours, Tanner dreamed of choking (while he opened and closed his eyes, unknowing).

When the sun came up, the chirurgeon uncoupled Tanner and the fish from his machinery (the cod dying instantly, its body shrunken and wrinkled). He closed up the flaps of skin in Tanner’s neck, slimy with gelatinous gore. He smoothed them down, his fingers tingling with puissance as the gashes sealed.

Without Tanner waking—still drugged as he was, there was no danger of that—the chirurgeon placed a mask over Tanner’s mouth, sealed his nose with his fingers, and began to pump brine gently into him. For several seconds there was no reaction. Then Tanner coughed and gagged violently, spattering water. The chirurgeon stood poised, ready to release Tanner’s nose.

And then Tanner calmed. All without waking, his epiglottis flexed and his windpipe constricted, keeping the saltwater from entering his lungs. The chirurgeon smiled as water began to seep from Tanner’s new gills.

It came sluggishly at first, bringing with it blood and dirt and scab matter. And then the water ran clean and the gills began to flex, regulating it, and it pulsed across the floor in measured draughts.

Tanner Sack was breathing water.

He woke later, too vague to understand what had happened, but infected by the chirurgeon’s enthusiasm. His throat hurt terribly, so he slept again.

That was by far the hardest thing done.

The chirurgeon peeled back Tanner’s eyelids and bound to him clear nictitating membranes taken and modified from a caiman bred in one of the city’s farms. He injected Tanner with particulate life-forms that thrived in him harmlessly and interacted with his body, making his sweat a touch more oleaginous, to warm him and slide him through water. He grafted in a little ridge of muscle at the base of Tanner’s nostrils, and little nubs of cartilage, so that he could flex them closed.

Finally, the chirurgeon performed by far the easiest, if the most visible, alteration. Between Tanner’s fingers and his thumb, he stretched a membrane, a web of rubbery skin that he pinched into position, tethering it in Tanner’s epidermis. He removed Tanner’s toes and replaced them with the fingers from a cadaver, sewing and sealing them onto Tanner’s foot until he looked simian; then he changed the resemblance from ape to frog as he stretched more webbing between those once-more living digits.

He bathed Tanner, washed him in seawater. Kept him clean and cool, and watched his tentacles writhe in his sleep.

And on the fourth day Tanner woke, properly and completely. Untied, free to move, his mind empty of chymicals.

He sat up, slowly.

His body hurt; it raged in fact. It assaulted him in waves that beat with his heart. His neck, his feet, his eyes, dammit. He saw his new toes and looked away for a moment, a memory of the old horror of the punishment factory come back for a second, till he battened it down and looked again (More pus, he thought, with a shade of humor).

He clenched his new hands. He blinked slowly and saw something translucent slip across his vision before his eyelid came down. He breathed deep into water-bruised lungs and coughed, and it hurt, as the chirurgeon had warned it would.

Tanner, despite the pain and the weakness and the hunger and nervousness, began to smile.

The chirurgeon came in as Tanner grinned and grinned, and grunted to himself, and rubbed himself gently.

“Mr. Sack,” he said, and Tanner turned to him and held out his shaking arms as if to grab him, trying to shake his hand. Tanner’s tentacles flexed as well, trying to reach out in echo through the too-thin air. The chirurgeon smiled.

“Congratulations, Mr. Sack,” he said. “The procedures were successful. You are now amphibian.”

And at that—they couldn’t help themselves and didn’t try—both he and Tanner Sack laughed uproariously, even though it hurt Tanner’s chest, and even though the chirurgeon wasn’t certain what was funny.

When he got home, after hauling himself gingerly through the valleys of Booktown and Garwater, he found Shekel waiting in rooms that had never been so clean.

“Ah now, lad,” he said, shy of him. “That’s great what you’ve done, ain’t it?”

Shekel tried to grab him in welcome, but Tanner was too sore and held him back good-naturedly. They talked quietly into the evening. Tanner asked carefully after Angevine. Shekel told Tanner that his reading was improving, and that nothing much had happened, but that it was warmer now, could Tanner feel it?

He could. They crawled south at an almost geologically slow pace, but the tugs and steamers had been dragging them continuously for two weeks now. They were perhaps five hundred miles south of where they had been—they had traveled so far, with a motion so slow it was unnoticed—and the winter was waning as they approached the band of temperate sea and air.

Tanner showed Shekel the additions, the changes to his body, and Shekel winced at their oddness and inflammations, but was fascinated. Tanner told him all the things the chirurgeon had explained.

“You’ll be tender, Mr. Sack,” he had said. “And even when you’re well, I want to warn you: some of the cuts I’ve made, some of the wounds, they may heal hard. They might scar. In that case, I want you not to be downhearted or disappointed. Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.”

“A fortnight, lad,” Tanner said, “before I’m back at work, he reckons. If I practice and all.”

But Tanner had an advantage the doctor had not considered: he had never learned to swim. He did not have to adjust a flailing, inefficient, slapping paddle into the sinuous motion of a sea dweller.

He sat by the dockside while his workmates greeted him. They were surprised, solicitous, and friendly. Bastard John the dolphin broke surface nearby, glaring at Tanner with his liquid, piggy eyes and emitting what were doubtless insults in his imbecilic cetacean chittering. But Tanner was not cowed that morning. He received his colleagues like a king, thanking them for their concern.

At the border of Garwater and Jhour ridings, there was a space in the fabric of the city, between vessels: a patch of sea that might have housed a modest ship formed a swimming area. Only a very few of the Armadan pirates could swim, and in such temperatures, few would try. There were only a handful of humans swimming in that patch of open sea, brave or masochistic.

Under the water, slowly, nervous of his new buoyancy and freedom, over hours that day and the next and next, Tanner spread his arms and hands, opening out the webs of skin and capturing the water, pushing himself forward in inexpert bursts. He kicked out in something like a breaststroke, those still-sore toes flexing, painful and powerful. The little presences he could not see or feel beneath his skin pulsed infinitesimal glands and lubricated his sweat.

He opened his eyes and learned to close only his inner eyelids—an extraordinary sensation. He learned to see in the water, unconstrained by any unwieldy helmet, any iron and brass and glass. Not peering through a porthole, but looking out freely, peripheral vision and all.

Slowest and most frightening of all, alone—who could possibly teach him?—Tanner learned to breathe.

The first inrush of water into his mouth closed his windpipe reflexively, and his tongue clamped back and his throat tightened and blocked the route to his stomach, and the seawater scored its way through his tender new pathways, opening him up. He tasted salt so totally it became quickly insensible. He felt rills of water pass through him, through his neck, his gills, and Godspit and shit and all he thought, because he felt no need to breathe.

He had filled his lungs before descending, out of habit, but aerated he was too buoyant. Slowly, in a kind of luxuriant panic, he exhaled through his nose and let his air disappear above him.

And felt nothing. No dizziness or pain or fear. Oxygen still reached his blood, and his heart kept pumping.

Above him, the pasty little bodies of his fellow citizens floundered across the surface of the water, tethered to the air they breathed. Tanner spun beneath them, clumsy still but learning, corkscrewing, looking above and below—up into the light and bodies and the massive sprawling interlocking shape of the city, down into the boundless blue dark.

Chapter Thirteen

Silas and Bellis spent two nights together.

During the days, Bellis shelved, helped Shekel to read and told him about Croom Park, sometimes ate with Carrianne. Then she returned to Silas. They talked some, but he left her quite ignorant of how he passed his hours. She had a sense that he was full of secret ideas. They fucked several times.

After the second night, Silas disappeared. Bellis was glad. She had been neglecting Johannes’ books, and she now returned to their unfamiliar science.

Silas was gone for three days.

Bellis explored.

She ventured finally into the farthest parts of the city. She saw the burn temples of Bask riding, and its triptych statues spread across the fabric of several boats. In Thee-And-Thine (which was not as rough or as frightening as she had been led to believe, was little more than an exaggerated, pugnacious marketplace) she saw the Armada asylum, a massive edifice that loomed from a steamer, cruelly placed, it seemed to Bellis, right next to the haunted quarter.

There was a little outcropping of Garwater boats like a buffer between Curhouse and Bask, separated off from the main body of their riding by some historical caprice. There, Bellis found the Lyceum, its workshops and classrooms staggering precipitously down the sides of a ship, layered like a mountainside town.

Armada had all the institutions of any city on land, devoted to learning and politics and religion, only perhaps in a harder form. And if the city’s scholars were tougher than their landside equivalents, and looked more like rogues and pirates than doctors, it did not invalidate their expertise. There were different constabularies in each riding, from the uniformed proctors of Bask to Garwater’s loosely defined yeomanry who were marked out only by their sashes—a badge as much of loyalty as office. Each riding’s law was different. There was a species of court and disputation in Curhouse, while the lax, violent, piratical discipline of Garwater was doled out with the whip.

Armada was a profane and secular city, and its unkempt churches were treated as irreverently as its bakers. There were temples to the deified Croom; to the moon and her daughters, to thank them for the tides; to sea gods.

If she ever became lost, Bellis needed only to find her way out from backstreets or alleys, look up through all the aerostats moored to masts, and find the Arrogance, looming stately over the glowering Grand Easterly. It was her beacon, and by it she steered her way home.

In the midst of the city there were rafts—wooden floats extending scores of yards to each side. Houses perched ludicrously on them. There were needle-thin submarines bobbing tethered between barquentines, and chariot ships filled with hotchi burrows. Tumbledown buildings smothered decks or perched precarious across the backs of tens of tiny vessels in the cheap neighborhoods. There were playhouses and prisons and deserted hulks.

When she raised her eyes to the horizon, Bellis could see disturbances out to sea: churning water, wakes without obvious cause. Wind- and weather-born, usually, but sometimes she might glimpse a pod of porpoises, or a plesiaur or seawyrm neck, or the back of something big and fast that she could not identify. The life beyond the city, and all around it.

Bellis watched the city’s fishing boats return in the evenings. Sometimes pirate ships would appear and be welcomed back into the harbors of Basilio or Urchinspine, the motors of Armada’s economy finding their way, uncannily, home.

Armada was full of figureheads. They poked up in unlikely places, ornate and ignored like the carved door knockers on New Crobuzon houses. At the end of a terrace, walking between rows of close brick dwellings, Bellis might come face-to-face with a splendid corroded woman, her breastplate moldering, her painted gaze flaked and vague. Hanging in the air like a spirit, below the bowsprit of her ship, which jutted across its neighbor’s deck and pointed into the alley.

They were all around. Otters, drakows, fish, warriors, and women. Above all women. Bellis hated the blank-eyed, curvaceous figures, wobbling up and down moronically with the swell, haunting the city like banal ghosts.

In her room, she finished Essays on Beasts and remained uncomprehending of Armada’s secret project.

She wondered where Silas was, and what he was doing. She was not upset or angry at his absence, but she was curious and a little frustrated. He was, after all, the closest thing she had to an ally.

He returned on the evening of the fifth of Lunuary.

Bellis let him enter. She did not touch him, nor he her.

He was tired and subdued. His hair was mussed, his clothes dusty. He sat back in a chair and covered his hands with his eyes, murmuring something inaudible, some greeting. Bellis made him tea. She waited for him to speak, and when after a while he did not, she returned to her book and her cigarillo.

She had made several more pages of notes before he spoke.

“Bellis. Bellis.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up at her. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell you the truth. I’ve kept things from you.”

She nodded, turning to face him. His eyes were closed.

“Let’s . . . take stock,” he said slowly. “The city’s heading south. The Sorghum . . . Do you know what the Sorghum’s for? The Sorghum, and the other rigs that I gather the Terpsichoria took you past, suck fuel from under the sea.”

He spread his hands wide, indicating massiveness. “There are fields of oil and rockmilk and mercus under the earth, Bellis. You’ve seen the screwbores they use to plumb for the stuff on land. Well, geo-empaths and the like have found vast deposits under the rock, lying under the sea.

“There’s oil under southern Salkrikaltor. That’s why the Manikin and the Trashstar and Sorghum have been perched out there for more than three decades. The supports of the Manikin and Trashstar go down four hundred feet and sit on the bottom. But the Sorghum . . . The Sorghum’s different.” He spoke with a morbid relish. “Someone in Armada knew what they were doing, I tell you. The Sorghum sits on two iron hulls—submersibles. The Sorghum’s not tethered. The Sorghum’s a deepwater rig. The Sorghum can travel.

“You can just keep adding sections to its drill shaft, and it can go down Jabber fucking knows how far. Miles down. You can’t find oil and so on everywhere. That’s why we were stationary for so long. Armada was sitting over a field of something or other the Sorghum could get at, and we couldn’t move off until it had stored up for wherever it’s going.”

How do you know all this? thought Bellis. What’s this truth you have to tell me?

“I don’t think it’s just oil,” Silas continued. “I’ve been watching the flame over the rig, Bellis. I think they’ve been drawing up rockmilk.”

Rockmilk. Lactus saxi. Viscous and heavy as magma, but bone cold. And dense with thaumaturgons, the charged particles. Worth several times its considerable weight in gold, or diamonds, or oil or blood.

“Ships don’t use fucking rockmilk to fire their engines,” Silas said. “Whatever they’ve stockpiled for, it’s not just to keep their vessels trim. Look at what’s happening. We’re heading south, to deeper, warmer seas. I’ll bet you a finial we’re skirting close to ridges beneath, where there are deposits, a route that lets the Sorghum drill. And when we get wherever we’re going, your friend Johannes and his new employers are going to use . . . what, several tons of rockmilk and Jabber knows how much oil to do . . . something. By which time . . .” He paused, and held her gaze. “By which time it’ll be too late.”

Tell me, Bellis thought, and Silas was nodding as if he had heard her.

“When we met on the Terpsichoria, I was in something of a state, I remember. I told you I had to return to New Crobuzon immediately. You reminded me of that yourself, recently. And I told you that I’d been lying. But I wasn’t. What I said on Terpsichoria was true: I have to return. Dammit, you probably realized all this.”

Bellis said nothing.

“I didn’t know how to . . . I didn’t know if I could trust you, if you’d care,” he continued. “I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you, but I didn’t know how far I could go. But dammit, Bellis, I trust you now. And I need your help.

“It’s true, what I told you, that sometimes the grindylow turn against some poor sod for no reason anyone can figure. That people disappear at their whim. The grindylows’ whim, the deeplings. But it’s not true, what I said then, about that happening to me. I know exactly why the grindylow wanted to kill me.

“If they chose, the grindylow could swim upriver to the top of the Bezheks, where all the rivers join together, and they could cross into the Canker. Be swept downriver on the other side of the mountains, all the way to New Crobuzon.

“Others could cross into the ocean through the tunnels, come at the city by sea. They’re euryhalinic, the grindylow, happy in freshwater or brine. They could make their way to Iron Bay. To the Gross Tar, and New Crobuzon. All it would take for the grindylow to get to the city is determination. And I know they have that.”

Bellis had never seen Silas so tense.

“When I was there, there were rumors. Some big plan was in the offing. One of my clients, a magus, a kind of thug-priest, its name came up again and again. I started to keep my eyes and ears open. That’s why they want to kill me. I found something out.

“The grindylow don’t do secrecy; they don’t do policing as we do. There was evidence in front of me for weeks, but it took me a long time to recognize it. Mosaics, blueprints, librettos, and such-like. Took me a long time to understand.”

“Tell me what you found,” said Bellis.

“Plans,” he said. “Plans for an invasion.”

“It would be like nothing you can imagine,” he said. “Gods know our history’s littered with betrayal and fucking blood, but . . . ‘Stail, Bellis . . . You’ve never seen The Gengris.” There was a desperation in his voice that Bellis had never heard before. “You’ve never seen the limb-farms. The workshops, the fucking bile workshops. You’ve never heard the music.

“If the grindylow take New Crobuzon, they wouldn’t enslave us, or kill us, or even eat us all. They wouldn’t do anything so . . . comprehensible.”

“But why?” said Bellis, finally. “What do they want? Do you think they can do it?”

“I don’t godsdamned know. No one knows a thing about them. I suspect the New Crobuzon government has more plans about what to do if fucking Tesh invades than if the grindylow do. We’ve never had any reason to be scared of them. But they have their own . . . methods, their own sciences and thaumaturgies. Yes,” he said. “I think they have a chance.

“They want New Crobuzon for the same reason every other state or savage on Ragamoll does. It’s the richest, the biggest, the most powerful. Our industries, our resources, our militia—look at everything we have. But unlike Shankell or Dreer Samher or Neovadan or Yoraketche, The Gengris . . . The Gengris has a chance.

“They can come with surprise . . . Poison the water, come into the sewers. Every godsdamn crevice and crack and water tank in the city would be a fucking encampment. They can storm us with weapons we’d never understand, in an endless guerrilla war.

“I’ve seen what the grindylow can do, Bellis.” Silas sounded exhausted. “I’ve seen it, and I’m scared.”

From outside came the far-off sound of monkeys squabbling sleepily.

“That’s why you left,” said Bellis in the quiet that followed.

“That’s why I left. I couldn’t believe what I’d found out. But I dithered . . . I fucking farted time away.” His anger welled up suddenly. “And when I realized that there was no fucking mistake, that this wasn’t a confusion, that they really did intend to unleash some godsforsaken unthinkable apocalypse on my hometown . . . then I left. I stole the sub, and left.”

“Do they know that . . . you know?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I took some stuff with me, so that it looks like I stole and ran.”

Bellis could see that he was tight with tension. She could remember some of the heliotypes she had seen in his notebook. Her heart lurched, and slow alarm crept through her with her blood, like a sickness. Bellis struggled to grasp what he was telling her. It was too big for her; it made no sense. She could not contain it. New Crobuzon . . . How could it be threatened?

“Do you know how long?” she whispered.

“They have to wait till Chet to harvest their weapons,” he said. “So maybe six months. We have to find out what Armada’s planning to do, because we have to know where we’re going, with this fucking rockmilk and all. Because we . . . we have to get a message back to New Crobuzon.”

“Why,” Bellis breathed, “didn’t you tell me before?”

Silas laughed hollowly. “I didn’t know who on this place to trust. I was trying to get away from here myself, trying to find some way home. It took me a long time to believe that . . . that there wasn’t any. I thought I could just take the message to New Crobuzon myself. What if you didn’t believe me? Or what if you were a spy? What if you told our new fucking rulers—”

“Well, what about that?” Bellis interrupted. “Isn’t it worth thinking about? Maybe they’d help us get a message . . .”

Silas stared at her with nasty incredulity.

“Are you mad?” he said. “You think they’d help us? They don’t give spit what happens to New Crobuzon. They’d most likely welcome its fucking destruction—one less competitor nation on the sea. You think they’d let us ride to the rescue? You think they’d care? The bastards would probably do everything they could to hold us back, to let the grindylow do their worst. And, besides, you’ve seen how they treat . . . Crobuzoner officials and agents. They’d search my notes, my papers, and it would come out that I have a commission. That I work for New Crobuzon. Jabber Almighty, Bellis, you saw what they did to the captain. What do you think they’d do to me?”

There was a long silence at that.

“I needed . . . I need someone to work with me. We have no friends in this city. We have no allies. And thousands of miles away, our home’s in danger, and we can’t trust anyone to help us. So it’s up to us to get a message back.”

After he said that there was a pause that became a silence. It dragged out, longer and longer, and became terrible because they both knew it should be filled. They should be coming up with plans.

And both of them tried. Bellis opened her mouth several times, but words dried in her throat.

We’ll hijack one of their boats, she wanted to say but could not; the idiocy of it choked her. We’ll sneak out just the two of us in a dinghy; we’ll get through the guard boats and row and sail for home. She tried to say that, tried to think it without scorn, and almost moaned. We’ll steal an airship. All we need are guns and gas, and coal and water for the engine, and food and drink for a two-thousand-mile journey, and a map, a chart of where in the godsforsaken fucking middle of the fucking entire Swollen Ocean we are, for Jabber’s sake . . .

Nothing, there was nothing, she could say nothing; she could think nothing.

She sat and tried to speak, tried to think of ways she could save New Crobuzon, her city which she treasured with a ferocious, unromantic love, and which lay under the most baleful threat. And the moments passed and passed, and Chet and the summer and the grindylow harvest kept coming closer, and she could say nothing.

Bellis imagined bodies like puffy eels, eyes and slablike recurved teeth heading under cold water toward her home.

“Oh dear gods, dear Jabber . . .” she heard herself say. She met Silas’ troubled eyes. “Dear gods, what are we going to do?”

Chapter Fourteen

Slow like some vast, bloated creature, Armada passed into warmer water.

The citizens and the yeomanry put aside their heavier clothes. The press-ganged from the Terpsichoria were disorientated. The idea that seasons could be escaped, could be outrun physically, was profoundly unsettling.

The seasons were only points of view—matters of perspective. When it was winter in New Crobuzon, it was summer in Bered Kai Nev (so they said), though they shared the days and nights that grew long and short in antiphase. Dawn was dawn all across the world. In the eastern continent, summer days were short.

The birds of Armada’s microclimate increased in number. The small, inbred community of finches and sparrows and pigeons that clung to the city’s skyline wherever it moved were joined by transients: migrators that crossed the Swollen Ocean, following the year’s heat. A few were waylaid from their gigantic flocks by Armada, coming down to rest and drink, and staying.

They circled confused over the wheeled spires of Curhouse, where the Democratic Council met in session after emergency session, fiercely and ineffectually debating Armada’s direction. They agreed that the Lovers’ secret plans could not be good for the city, that they must do something, bickering miserably as their impotence became more and more clear.

Garwater had always been the most powerful riding, and now Garwater had the Sorghum, and the Democratic Council of Curhouse could do nothing at all.

(Nevertheless, Curhouse opened tentative communications with the Brucolac.)

The hardest thing for Tanner was not gill-breathing, not moving his arms and legs like a frog or vodyanoi, but staring into the face of the colossal gradient of dark water below him. Attempting to look it full-on and not be cowed.

When he had worn his diving suit, he had been an intruder. He had challenged the sea, and he had worn armor. Clinging to the rungs and the guy ropes, hanging on for life, he had known that the endless space below him that stretched out like a maw was exactly that: a mouth the size of the world, straining to swallow him.

Now he swam free, descending toward darkness that no longer seemed to hunger for him. Tanner swam lower and lower. At first he seemed close enough to reach up and stroke the toes of the swimmers above him. It gave him a voyeuristic pleasure to see their frantic, paddling little bodies above him. But when he turned his face to the sunless water below him his stomach pitched at its implacable hugeness, and he turned quickly and made back for the light.

Each day he descended further.

He slipped below the level of Armada’s keels and rudders and descending pipeways. The long sentinels of weed that fringed them, that delimited the city’s lowest points, reached out for him, but he slipped past them like a thief. He stared at the deep.

Tanner passed through a rain of baitfish that nibbled at the city’s scraps, and then he was down in clear water, and there was nothing of Armada around him. He was below the city, all the way below it.

He hung still in the water. It was not difficult.

The pressure coddled him, tightly as if in swaddling.

The ships of Armada sprawled almost a mile across the sea, occluding his light. Above him, Bastard John fussed around below the docks like a hornet. In the twilight water around him Tanner saw a thick suspension of particles, life upon tiny life. And beyond the plankton and krill he faintly saw Armada’s seawyrms and its submersibles, a handful of dark shadows around the city’s base.

He struggled to overcome his vertigo; he made it something else. No less awe, but less fear. He took what was like fear in him, and made it humility.

I’m damn small, he thought, hanging like a mote of dust in still air, in a sea that’s damn big. But that’s alright. I can do that.

With Angevine he was shy and a little resentful, but he worked hard for Shekel’s sake.

She came to eat with them. Tanner tried to chat with her, but she was withdrawn and hard. For some time they sat and chewed their kelp bread without any sounds. After half an hour, Angevine motioned to Shekel, and he, well-practiced, stood behind her and scooped pieces of coke from the container behind her back into her boiler.

Angevine met Tanner’s gaze without embarrassment.

“Keeping your engines stoked?” he said eventually.

“They aren’t the most efficient,” she replied slowly (in Salt, spurning the Ragamoll that he had used, though it was her native tongue).

Tanner nodded. He remembered the old man in the hold of the Terpsichoria. It took a while for him to say more. Tanner was shy of this stern Remade woman.

“What model is your engine?” he said eventually, in Salt. She stared at him in consternation, and he realized with astonishment that she was ignorant of the mechanics of her own Remade body.

“It’s probably an old pre-exchange model,” he continued slowly. “With only one set of pistons and no recombination box. They were never any good.” He stopped there for a while. Go on, he thought. She might say yes, and the lad’d like it. “If you fancy, I could take a look. Worked with engines all my life. I could . . . I could even . . .” He hesitated at a verb that sounded somehow obscene, discussing a person. “I could even refit you.”

He wandered away from the table, ostensibly for more stew, to avoid listening to Shekel’s embarrassing monologue: gratitude to Tanner and cajoling of the unconvinced Angevine combined. Over the chorus of go on Ange best mate Tanner you’re my best mate, Tanner saw that Angevine was unsettled. She was not used to offers like this, unless they meant incurring debts.

It ain’t for you, Tanner thought fervently, wishing he could tell her. It’s for the boy.

He moved further away while she and Shekel whispered to each other. He turned his back on them politely, stripped to his longjohns, and slipped into a tin bath full of brine. It soothed him. He soaked with the same sense of luxury that he once would have had for a hot bath, and he hoped that Angevine would understand his motivations.

She was nobody’s fool. After a short time she said with dignity something like thanks then, Tanner, that might be good. She said yes, and Tanner found to his mild surprise that he was glad.

Shekel was still excited by the clamor of silent sounds reading had given him, but with familiarity came control. He no longer found himself stopping midway along a corridor and gasping as the word bulkhead or heads shouted itself to him from some ship’s sign.

For the first week or so, graffiti had been an intoxication. He had stood in front of walls and ships’ sides and let his eyes crawl across the morass of messages scratched or scrawled or painted on the city’s flanks. Such a diversity of styles: the same letters could be written tens of different ways but always say the same thing. Shekel never stopped enjoying that fact.

Most of what was written was rude or political or scatological. Dry Fall Fuck Off, he read. Names in scores. Somebody loves somebody, repeated again and again. Accusations, sexual and otherwise. Barsum or Peter or Oliver is a Cunt or a Whore or a Queer or whatever else it might be. The writing gave each declaration a different voice.

In the library, his ransacking of the shelves had become less furious, less drunken in its haste and exhilaration, but he still picked books out and laid them down in great numbers, and read them slowly and wrote down words he did not understand.

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause.

In the shelves of foreign volumes, Shekel found release. He was fascinated by their cryptic alphabets and orthographies, their strange pictures for foreign children. He came and rummaged among them when he needed quiet in his head. He could be assured that they would be silent.

Until the day that he picked one up and turned it in his hands, and it spoke to him.

At twilight, something idled out of the deep sea and came toward Armada.

It approached the last day-shift of engineers below the water. They were coming slowly up, clambering hand over hand up the ladders and pitted surfaces of the undercity, wheezing into their helmets, not looking down, not seeing what was coming.

Tanner Sack was sitting with Hedrigall on the edge of the Basilio docks. They dangled their legs like children over the side of a little cog, watching the cranes shift cargo.

Hedrigall was hinting at something. He spoke to Tanner obliquely. He hedged and implied, and Tanner understood that this was about the secret project, the unspoken thing that so many of his workmates shared. Without a scrap of that knowledge, Tanner could not make sense of what Hedrigall was saying. He could tell only that his friend was unhappy, and fearful of something.

A little way away they could see the corps of engineers emerge streaming from the water, climbing the ladders to rafts and weather-beaten steamers where juddering engines and colleagues and constructs pumped air for them.

The water in that little corner of the harbor began abruptly to bubble as if at a boil. Tanner touched Hedrigall’s forearm to quiet him, and stood, craning his neck.

There was a commotion at the water’s edge. Several workers rushed over and began to haul in the divers. More men surfaced, breaking the water in little bursts and scrabbling desperately at their helmets and at the ladders, fighting to get into the air. A furrow in the water swelled and broke the surface as Bastard John breached. He thrashed his tail wildly until it looked as if he stood unsteadily on the surface of the sea, and chattered like a monkey.

One man, hanging from a ladder, hunched out of the green water, finally threw off his helmet, and shrieked for help.

“Bonefish!” he screamed. “There are men down there!”

All around them people looked out of windows in alarm, left their work, and ran to the water, leaning out over the little trawlers bobbing in the middle of the harbor, pointing into the water and shouting to those on the docksides.

Tanner’s heart froze as billows of red coiled to the surface.

“Your knife!” he shouted to Hedrigall. “Give me your fucking knife!” He threw off his shirt and ran, without hesitating.

He leaped, his tentacles unwrapping from him, Hedrigall bellowing something unheard behind him. Then his long, webbed toes broke the surface, and with a burst of cold, he was in the water, and then under it.

Tanner blinked frantically, sliding his inner eyelid into place and peering down. In the middle distance, obscured by the sea, the shadows of submersibles prowled clumsily under the city.

He could see the last of the men clambering desperately toward the light, appallingly slow and clumsy in their suits. He saw places where great patches of blood discolored the water. A chunk of cartilage was drifting down through a haze of flesh, where one of Armada’s guard sharks had been torn apart.

Tanner kicked down, swimming fast. Some way off, at the base of a huge sunken pipe, sixty or more feet down, he saw a man clinging, immobilized by fear. And under him in the shadowy water, flickering this way and that like a flame, was a dark body.

Tanner balked, appalled. The thing was massive.

Above him, he heard the flattened reports of bodies hitting the water. Armed men were descending, lowered from cranes, standing in harnesses, bristling with harpoons and spears, but they moved slowly, edging down by inches, at the mercy of the engines above them.

Bastard John streaked past Tanner, startling him, and from hidden corners of the city’s underside, Tanner saw the silent menfish of Bask riding slip through the water toward the predator below.

Emboldened, he kicked and plunged down again.

His mind rushed. He knew that attacks by big predators occurred sometimes—red sharks, wolfish, hooksquid, and others smashing into the fish cages and attacking the workers—but he had never experienced one. He had never seen a dinichthys, a bonefish.

He hefted Hedrigall’s knife.

With sudden disgust Tanner realized that he was passing through a cloud of blood-fouled water, and he could taste it in his mouth and across his gills. His stomach lurched as he saw, sinking slowly beside him, the ragged remnants of a diving suit with indistinct shreds waving within it.

And then he reached the bottom of the pipe, a few bodies’ lengths from the bleeding, motionless diver, and the creature beneath rose up to meet him.

He heard the pounding of water and felt an onrush of pressure, and looked down and screamed silently into the brine.

A great blunt-faced fish was rushing up toward him. Its head was encased in skull-armor, smooth and round like a cannonball, split by massive jaws in which Tanner saw not teeth, but two razor-ridges of bone chewing at the water, scraps of flesh fluttering from them. Its body was long and tapered, without contours or a fanning tail; its dorsal fin was low and streamlined, merging with its tailbone like some fat-bodied eel.

It was more than thirty feet long. It came at him, its mouth big enough to bite him in half without effort, its tiny little eyes stupid and malevolent behind their protective ridge.

Tanner howled with idiot bravery, brandishing his little knife.

Bastard John streaked across Tanner’s view, coming up behind the dinichthys, and butted it hard in the eye. The huge predator swerved with frightening speed and grace and snapped at the dolphin. The slabs of bone in its mouth crunched together and grated.

It veered violently and shot after Bastard John. With rushes of displaced water, little ivory lances streaked past as the newt-people fired their strange weapons at the dinichthys. It ignored them and bore down on the dolphin.

Tanner kicked violently away, his legs spasming as he raced toward the clinging diver. As he swam he looked around him and saw, to his horror, that the massive bone-plated fish had gone deep, despite Bastard John’s attempts to goad it, and was doubling back from below, heading straight for Tanner.

With a last kick, Tanner touched the rough metal of the pipe and scrabbled for the diver. Tanner stared at the dinichthys, his heart hammering as the monstrous thing powered toward him. The suckers of his tentacles anchored him to the shaft. He waved the knife in his right hand, praying for Bastard John or the newt-men or the armed divers to reach him. With his left he reached out for the trapped man.

His fumbling hand reached into something warm and soft, something that gave to his fingers in a horrifying way, and Tanner snatched his hand back. He glanced up for a second at the man beside him.

He looked into a faceplate full of water, and a wide-eyed white face, eyes protuberant, mouth distended and still. The leather in the center of the suit had been gouged away, and the man’s stomach was torn from him. Entrails waved in the water like anemones.

Tanner moaned and snapped away, sensing the dinichthys below him, kicking out fearfully, slashing ineffectually at nothing as with a sudden vicious tide the ridges and scales swept past him, tons of muscle flexing, the sound of bone on bone jarring through the water. The pipe shuddered as the corpse was snatched from it. The snub-skulled hunter zigzagged away through the inverted forest of Armada’s keels, the dead man dangling in its jaws.

Bastard John and the Bask menfish followed it, unable to match its effortless pace. In shock, Tanner kicked toward them pointlessly, the memory of the monstrous fish’s presence slowing him and making him cold. He was vaguely aware that he should surface, should keep himself warm and drink sweetened tea, that he felt sick and very frightened.

The dinichthys was heading down now, into the realms of crushing pressures its pursuers could not hope to survive. Tanner watched it go, moving slowly, trying not to breathe in any dissipating blood. He was alone now.

He dragged himself through water like tar, up past unfamiliar undersides, disoriented and lost. He could still see the dead man’s face and slick bowels. And as he found his bearings, as he twisted and saw the mobile ships in Basilio docks and the sprinkled crumblike boats of Winterstraw Market, he looked up and saw in the cold lancing shadow of the boat above him one of the huge, vague shapes that dangled from the city’s undersides, that was obscured by charms and carefully guarded, that he was forbidden to see. He saw that it was linked to others, and he drifted higher, unchallenged now the shark that had guarded it was dead, and the shape was clearer, and suddenly he was close, he was only a few yards from it, and he had penetrated the murk and the obfuscatory hexes, and he could see it clearly now, and he knew what it was.

The next day, Bellis was treated to lurid descriptions of the monster’s attack from several of her colleagues.

“Gods and fuck above,” said Carrianne to her, appalled. “Can you imagine? Sliced in pieces by that bastard?” Her descriptions became more grotesque and unpleasant.

Bellis did not give Carrianne her attention. She was thinking about what Silas had told her. She approached it as she did most things—coolly, trying to grasp it intellectually. She searched for books on The Gengris and the grindylow, but found very little that was not children’s myths or absurd speculation. She found it hard—impossibly hard, almost—to grasp the scale of danger to New Crobuzon. All the years of her life the city had squatted around her, massive and variegated and permanent. The idea that it could be threatened was almost inconceivable.

But, then, the grindylow were inconceivable, too.

Bellis found herself truly alarmed by Silas’ descriptions and his obvious fear. With a kind of morbid extravagance, Bellis had tried to imagine New Crobuzon after an invasion. Ruined and broken. It started as a game, a sort of dare, where she filled her mind with horrifying images. But then they flickered through her unstoppably, as if projected by a magic lantern, and they appalled her.

She saw the rivers congealed with bodies, and shimmering as grindylow passed beneath. She saw petal-ash spewing from the burnt-out Fuchsia House; shattered rubble in Gargoyle Park; the Glasshouse cracked open like an egg and stacked with cactus corpses. She imagined Perdido Street Station itself in collapse, its train lines twisted and splayed, its facade torn off, forcing its intricate architectural byways into the light.

Bellis imagined the ancient, massive Ribs that arced over the city snapped, their curves interrupted in a cascade of bone-dust.

It chilled her. But there was nothing she could do. No one here, no one in power in this city, could possibly care. She and Silas were alone, and until they understood what was happening in Armada, until they knew where they were going, Bellis could not think of any way she could get away.

Bellis heard the door open and looked up from her piles of books. Shekel stood at the threshold, holding something in his hands. She was about to greet him, but paused at the sight of his face.

He wore an expression of great seriousness and uncertainty, as if not sure whether he had done something wrong.

“I’ve got something to show you,” he said slowly. “You know I write down all the words I can’t work out at first. And then when I find them again in other books, I know them. Well . . .” He looked at the book he was holding. “Well, I found one of them yesterday. And the book’s not in Ragamoll, and the word’s not a . . . not a verb or a noun or whatever.” He stressed the technical words she had taught him: not with pride, but to make a point.

He handed the little book to her. “It’s a name.”

Bellis examined it. Sunk into the cover and picked out in stained metal leaf was the author’s name.

Krüach Aum.

The work that Tintinnabulum was looking for, one central to the Lovers’ project. Shekel had found it.

He had picked it off the children’s shelves. As Bellis sat and flicked through its pages, she saw that it was no wonder it had been misshelved. It was full of pictures in a primitive style: executed in thick, simple lines with childish perspective, so that proportions were unclear, and a man might be nearly the size of a tower next to him. Each recto page was text, each verso a picture, so that the whole short book had the feel of an illustrated fable.

Whoever had shelved it had obviously looked at it briefly without understanding it, and put it, without examination, with other picture books—children’s books. It had not been recorded. It had lain undisturbed for years.

Shekel was talking to Bellis, but she did not hear him clearly: don’t know what to do, he was saying awkwardly, thought you could help, the one Tintinnabulum was looking for, did the best thing. Adrenaline and tremulous excitement were filling her as she studied the volume. There was no title. She turned to the first page, and her heartbeat quickened in her throat as she realized that she had been right about Aum’s name. The book was in High Kettai.

It was the arcane, classical language of Gnurr Kett, the island nation thousands of miles south of New Crobuzon, at the edge of the Swollen Ocean, where the warm water became the Black Sandbar Sea. It was a strange, very difficult tongue that used the Ragamoll script but derived from quite another root. Base Kettai, the everyday language, was much easier, but the relationship between the two was attenuated and ancient. Fluency in one gave only the slightest understanding of the other. High Kettai, even in Gnurr Kett itself, was the preserve of the cantors and a few intellectuals.

Bellis had studied it. Fascinated by its structures of embedded verbs, it was High Kettai that Bellis had made the subject of her first book. It was fifteen years since she had published High Kettai Grammatology, but even rusty as she was, looking at the opening chapter of the book, the meaning came slowly to her.

“I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride,” Bellis read silently, and looked up, trying to calm herself, almost afraid to go on.

She turned the pages rapidly, looking at the pictures. A man in a tower by the sea. The man on the shore, the skeletons of great engines littering the sand. The man making calculations by the sun, and by the shadows of strange trees. She turned to the fourth picture and caught her breath. A rill of goosebumps came and went over her.

In the fourth picture, the man stood again on the shore—his blank, stylized eyes the only features on his face, rendered by the artist as placid as a cow’s—and above the sea, swarming toward an approaching boat, was a cloud of dark figures. The picture was vague, but Bellis could see thin arms and legs dangling, and a blur of wings.

It made her uneasy.

She scanned, trying to remember the language. There was something very odd about this book. It felt very different from all the other High Kettai works Bellis had seen. Something incongruous was in the tone, quite at odds with the poetry that characterized the old Gnurr Kett canon.

“He would have sought help from outsiders,” she hesitantly made out, “but all others shun our island, fearful of our hungry women.”

Bellis looked up. Jabber knows, she thought, what I’ve got my hands on.

She thought quickly, trying to work out what she should do. Her hands still turned the pages like a construct’s, and she looked down to see that, midway through the volume, the man was at sea in a little boat. He and his vessel were drawn very small. He was lowering a chain and a massive recurved hook into the sea.

Deep below, in the midst of the spirals that signified the water, were concentric circles, dwarfing his yacht.

The picture held her attention.

She stared at it, and something deep within her moved. She held her breath. And with a wash of realization the picture reconfigured itself like a child’s optical illusion. She saw what it was—she knew what she was looking at—and her stomach pitched so hard that she felt she was falling.

She knew what Garwater’s secret project was. She knew where they were heading. She knew what Johannes was doing.

Shekel was still talking. He had moved on to the dinichthys attack.

“Tanner was down there,” she heard him say with pride. “Tanner went to help ’em, only he couldn’t get there in time. But I’ll tell you a funny thing. You remember a while ago I told you there’s things under the city, shapes he couldn’t make out? And he weren’t allowed to see? Well, after the bonefish swims off yesterday, poor old Tanner comes up right underneath one, doesn’t he? He gets to see it clearly—he knows what’s under there, now. So guess what it was . . .”

He paused theatrically for Bellis to guess. She still stared at the picture.

“A bridle,” she said, almost inaudible. Shekel’s expression changed to confusion. Suddenly she spoke loudly. “A giant bridle, a bit, reins, a harness bigger than a building.

“Chains, Shekel, the size of boats,” she said. He stared at her and nodded in bewilderment as she concluded. “Tanner saw chains.”

She still did not take her gaze from the picture she held: a little man in a little ship on a sea of frozen waves that overlapped in perfect sequence like fish scales, and below them deeps rendered in crosshatched and tightly spiraled ink, and at the bottom, easily eclipsing the vessel above, a circle in a circle in a circle, vast no matter how vague the perspective, unthinkably big, with darkness at the center. Looking up, looking up at the fisherman hunting his prey.

Sclera, iris, and pupil.

An eye.

Interlude III

Elsewhere

There are intruders in Salkrikaltor. They sit quiet, their eyes taking in the city and the cray, measured and inexorable like plugholes.

They have left a trail of missing farmers and submarine adventurers and wanderers and minor bureaucrats. They have extracted information with coddling tones and thaumaturgy and torture.

The intruders watch with eyes like oil.

They have explored. They have seen the temples and the shark pits and the galleries and arcades, and the cray slums, the architecture of the shallows. As light fails and Salkrikaltor’s globes glow, traffic increases. Young cray dandies fight and posture on the spiraling walkways above (their actions are reflected in the hidden watchers’ eyes).

Hours pass. The streets empty out. The globes dim a little in the hours before dawn.

And there is silence. And dark. And cold.

And the intruders move.

They pass through empty streets, cloaked in darkness.

The intruders move like ribbons of waste, as if they are nothing, as if they are tugged by random ebbs and tides. They trace anemone-scarred backstreets.

Nothing living is in the trench-streets except night fishes, the snails, the crabs that freeze with fear as the intruders approach. They pass beggars in the atomies of buildings. Through a rip in a warehouse poised on the brink of being dust. Out over the lowest level of a water-beaten roofscape like coral, insinuating themselves into shadows that seem too small for them. Quick as morays.

A name was whispered to them in a coil of blood, a clue that they have accepted, and stalked and found.

They rise and look down on the roofscape through the sea.

He sleeps there, his legs folded below him, his torso rocking faintly in the current, his eyes closed—the he-cray they have hunted. The intruders hunker low. They stroke him and touch him and make sounds from within their throats, and his eyes open slowly and he spasms violently in the bonds in which they have spread-eagled him (as quietly and gently as nannies, not to wake him), and his mouth strains so wide that it looks as if it will split and bleed. He would be screaming and screaming in cray vibrato if they had not fit him with a collar of bone that skewers painlessly into certain nerves in his neck and back and cuts off his sound.

Little gouts of blood float up from the cray’s throat. The intruders watch him curiously. When finally his frenzy exhausts him, a captor moves with alien grace and speaks.

—you know something it says.—we need to know it too.

They begin their work, whispering questions as they touch and touch the cray translator with unthinkable expertise, and he snaps back his head and screams again.

Again, without a sound.

The intruders continue.

And later.

The wormcast floor of the ocean plunges out of sight and the water opens endlessly and the dark figures (far from home) sit motionless suspended in the dark, and ponder.

The trail has exploded.

Little filigrees of rumor twist away from them, recurve, and tease. The southern ship has disappeared. From the rock edges of the continent, where land rises to separate fresh- from saltwater, they have tracked to the Basilisk Channel, to the up-pointing fingers of Salkrikaltor City, to the ship puttering between the sea and New Crobuzon the river-straddler. But that ship has disappeared, leaving lies and stories eddying behind it.

Mouths from the deep. Ghost pirates. Torque. Hidden storms. The floating city.

Again and again the floating city.

The hunters investigate the rigs that loom from Salkrikaltor’s southern waters: supports like outsize trees, like pachyderms’ legs, crumbling concrete shafts in the seabed, mud oozing up around them as if around toes.

Drills worry at the soft rock, sucking at its juices. The rigs feed in shallows like swamp things.

Men in shells of leather and air descend on chains to tend to the mumbling giants, and the hunters spirit them away with predatory ease. They take away the masks, and the men scrabble futilely and emit their lives in bubbling howls of air. Their captors keep them alive with hexes, with mouth-kisses of oxygen, with massage to slow their hearts, and in caves under the light water the men beg for mercy and, at their captors’ insistence, tell them all manner of stories.

Stories, above all, of the floating city that snatched the Terpsichoria away.

Night falls, and the shadows shed by day are smothered.

The unclear figures have all the water of the world to search. The Oceans: the Rime; the Boxash; the Vassilly and Tarribor and Teuchor; the Muted and Swollen. And the Gentleman’s Sea and the Spiral Sea and the Clock and Hidden and others; and all the straits and sounds and channels. And the bays, and the bights.

How can they search it all? How can they start?

They ask the sea.

They strike out for the deep waters.

—where is the floating city? they ask.

The king of the goblin sharks does not know or care. The corokanth will not tell. The hunters ask elsewhere.—where is the floating city?

They find monkish intelligences masquerading as cod and congers that claim ignorance and swim away for more contemplation. The hunters ask the salinae, the brine elementals, but cannot make sense of the liquid shrieks of information with which they are answered.

Rising with the sun and breaching, the hunters bob in waves and think again.

They ask the whales.

—where is the floating city? they ask the great stupid krill-swillers, the grey and the humpback and the blue. They straddle them like mountaineers and manipulate the pleasure centers of their heavy brains. They bribe them, funneling tons of plankton in a panicked soup into the whale’s gurning grins.

The hunters make the question a demand.

—find the floating city, they say carefully, in concepts simple enough for the whales to understand.

Which they do. The huge animals ponder, their synapses so sluggish the hunters grow impatient (but they know they must wait). Finally, after minutes when the only noise is a sluicing as the whales jaw the water, with a concerted thunder of flukes they break their silence.

They moan across thousands of miles; echo-locating; sounding; sending friendly, stupid messages to each other; doing what they have been told: Looking for Armada.

Part Three:

The Compass Factory

Chapter Fifteen

“They’re raising an avanc.”

Silas’ face fluttered with astonishment, with denial, with a gamut of incredulities.

“That can’t be,” he said quietly, shaking his head.

Bellis’ mouth twisted. “Because avancs are legends?” she offered harshly. “Extinct? Stories for children?” She pursed her lips and shook Krüach Aum’s book. “Whoever shelved this, twenty years ago, thought that they were children’s stories, Silas. I can read High Kettai.” Her voice was urgent. “This is not a children’s book.”

The day was waning, and the muttering of the city continued outside. Bellis looked through the window at the light dying in sheets of spectacular colors. She handed Silas the book and spoke again.

“I’ve been doing little else for two days. I’ve been haunting the library like a damned eidolon, reading Aum’s book.” Silas was turning the pages one by one, carefully, his eyes scanning the text as if he could understand it, which Bellis knew he could not.

“It’s in High Kettai,” she said, “but it’s not from Gnurr Kett, and it’s not old. Krüach Aum is anophelii.”

Silas looked up, aghast. There was a very long silence.

“Believe me,” said Bellis. She felt, and sounded, drained. “I know how it sounds. I’ve spent the last two days trying to find out everything I can.

“I thought they were dead, too, but they’re only dying, Silas. They’ve been dying for more than two thousand years. When the Malarial Queendom collapsed they were eradicated in Shoteka, in Rohagi, in most of the Shards. But they managed to survive . . . They’ve clung on to a little hold on some shithole of a rock south of Gnurr Kett. And believe it or not, even after the Queendom, there are people who trade with them.” She nodded grimly. “They have some arrangement with Dreer Samher or Gnurr Kett or both, or something. I can’t work it out.

“And they write books, it seems.” She pointed at the volume. “Gods only knows why it’s in High Kettai. Maybe that’s what they speak now—they’d be the only people in the world who do. I don’t know, Godsdammit, Silas. Maybe it’s all crap,” she snapped with sudden irritation. “Maybe that damn thing’s a forgery or a lie or, yes, a children’s story. But I’ve been told by Tintinnabulum to look for anything by Krüach Aum, so do you think the subject matter of this damn book is just coincidence?”

“What does it say?” he asked.

Bellis took the book from him and slowly translated the first lines.

“ ‘I would lie if I told you that I write this without pride. I am full of it like food, because I have . . . found a story to tell, of what had not been done since the Ghosthead Empire and was achieved once more, a thousand years ago. One of our ancestors, after our queens collapsed and we came here to hide . . . With . . . devices and thaumaturgy . . . he went out over the water . . . to a dark place . . . and he sent hexes into the mouth of the water and after twenty-one days of heat and thirst and hunger he . . . drew out a great and mysterious thing.’ ” She looked up at Silas and concluded, “ ‘The mountain-that-swims, the godwhale, the greatest beast ever to visit our world, the avanc.’ ”

She closed the book softly.

“He called up an avanc, Silas.”

“What happened?” he said. “You’ve read it, what happened?”

Bellis sighed. “It doesn’t say how or where, but Aum found a bunch of old manuscripts, an old story. And he’s put them together and made sense of them, and retold them. The story of an anophelius, who’s never named. Centuries ago. There are ten pages about his preparations. The man fasts; he researches; he stares out to sea a lot; he gathers the things he needs: barrels, liquor, old machines that have been moldering on the beach. He goes out to sea. Alone. Trying to keep control of a yacht way too big for one man, but no one would come with him. He’s looking for a particular place, some kind of . . . deep, deep shaft, a hole in the ocean’s floor. That’s where he’s hunting. That’s where he casts. That’s where he wants the avanc to . . . come through, from where they normally live.

“Then we get twenty very dull pages about the privations of the sea. Hungry, thirsty, tired, wet, hot . . . That sort of thing. He knows he’s in the right place. He’s sure his hook is . . . extending into somewhere else. Bleeding through the world. But he can’t attract the avanc. There’s no worm that big.

“Then on the third day, when he’s totally exhausted, and his ship’s being moved around by weird currents, the sky darkens. There’s an elyctric storm coming. And he decides it’s not enough to be in the right place—he needs power to snare the thing. He’s being pounded by hail and rain, and the sea’s going berserk. The boat’s plowing through huge waves, banging like it’s going to shatter.”

Silas was listening to her with eyes wide, and Bellis had a sudden ridiculous image of herself as a teacher telling the children a story.

“As the middle of the storm gets nearer and nearer, he yanks a load of wire to the top of the mainmast, coiling it round the rigging, and links it up to some kind of generator. Then . . .”

Bellis sighed. “I couldn’t really follow what happened then. He does some thaumaturgy or other. I think he was trying to conjure fulmen, elyctric elementals, or sacrifice them or something, but it’s not clear. Well . . .” She shrugged. “Whether he succeeds or not, whether it’s an elemental answering him or just the result of winding copper wire up a hundred-foot mast in the middle of a thunderstorm, lightning strikes the conductor.”

She held open the relevant illustration: the boat in silhouette, outlined in white, with a rather squat, geometrically rendered lightning bolt stuck like a saw into the top of the mast.

“There’s a massive burst of energy through the engines. The thaumaturgic controls he’s rigged up to try to bait and control the avanc suddenly spasm with supercharged puissance, then burn out instantly. And his boat lurches, and the cranes and winches tethering his hook bend suddenly, and there’s a rushing from underneath.

“He hooked an avanc, says Aum. And it rose.”

Bellis fell quiet. She turned the pages and read Aum’s words to herself.

The ocean vibrated with a scream five miles down, and the water rose and shuddered and was unsteady as it was displaced, vastly, and the waves died as the tides were supplanted by a great onrush from below and the water tossed the boat like a mote, and the horizon disappeared as the avanc surfaced.

That was all. No description of the creature. The verso page that should have held an illustration was left blank.

“He sees it,” she said quietly. “When he sees the size of it he realizes that he’d only snagged it with his hooks and hexes. He’d thought he’d reel it in like an angler . . . Impossible. The avanc breaks the chains, effortlessly. And then it sinks again, and the sea’s empty. And he’s all alone, and he has to get himself all the way home.”

Bellis could picture it, and it moved her. She imagined the broken figure, sodden with brine and in the middle of a still-terrible storm, crawling to his feet, stumbling across the deck of his ill-prepared ship. Setting dying motors in motion, limping back across the sea hungry and exhausted, and above all alone.

“Do you think it’s the truth?” said Silas.

Bellis opened the book to its last section and held it out for him to see. The pages were crammed with strange-looking mathematic notations.

“The last twenty pages are taken up with equations, thaumaturgic notes, references to his colleagues. Aum calls it a data appendix. It’s almost impossible to translate. I don’t understand it—it’s high theory, crypto-algebra and the like. But it’s incredibly carefully done. If it’s a fake it’s needlessly complex. What he’s done . . . Aum has checked the details—of the dates, the techniques, the thaumaturgies, and the science . . . He’s worked out how it was done. These last pages . . . They’re an exposition, a scientific treatise, explaining how you’d go about it. How you’d raise an avanc.

“Silas, this book was written and printed in the last Kettai Vullfinch Year. That was twenty-three years ago. Which incidentally means that Tintinnabulum and his cohorts have it wrong—he thought Aum was writing in the last century. It was printed in Kohnid in Gnurr Kett, part of the imprint Shivering Wisdom. There aren’t too many Kettai works in this library, as you’d expect. And of those there are, the vast bulk are in Base Kettai. But there are a few High Kettai, and I’ve looked at them all. Shivering Wisdom publish in High Kettai: philosophy and science and ancient texts, gnostic mechonomy and the like.

“Shivering Wisdom obviously think this is on the level, Silas. If it’s a fraud, it’s taken in a scientific publishing house—as well, dammit, as the best fucking minds on Armada.

“What else are the Lovers’ scientists reading, Silas? My friend Johannes’ book Theories of MegaFauna. Another of his, about transplane life. Radical theories about the nature of water, books on maritime ecology. And they’re going crazy to find this little book here, probably because Tintinnabulum and his hunters have seen a few references to it, and they can’t damn well find it. Jabber’s sake, what do you think that’s all about?

“Silas, I’ve read this thing.” She made him meet her eyes. “This is for real. This is a book on how to raise an avanc. And how to control it. The anophelius Aum writes about . . . the avanc broke loose from him easy.” She leaned forward.

“But he was one man. Armada’s a city. He scavenged steam engines: Armada has whole industrial districts. There are giant chains under the city—did you know that? What do you think they plan on doing with them? And Armada has the Sorghum.” She let that sink in and saw his eyes change fractionally. “This city has hundreds of gallons of fucking rockmilk, Silas, and the means to get hundreds more. Jabber knows what thaumaturgy they can fuel with that shit.

“The Lovers think they can succeed where Aum’s man failed,” she said simply. “They’re heading for the sinkhole, to call up an avanc. They’re going to harness it to the city. And they’re going to control it.”

“Who else knows about the book?” said Silas, and Bellis shook her head.

“No one knows,” she said. “Only the boy, Shekel. He has no idea what it is, what it means.”

You did the right thing bringing this to me, Bellis had said. I’ll see what this is all about and pass it right on to Tintinnabulum as soon as I’ve seen if it’s of any use.

She remembered Shekel’s disquiet, his fear. He visited Tintinnabulum’s Castor often, to be with Angevine. Bellis knew, with a quick stab of pity, that he had not taken the book there directly himself because he was afraid that he had made a mistake. His reading was still inexpert, and faced with something of such apparent importance, his confidence had left him. He had stared at the combination of letters spelling Krüach, and had looked at the name he had copied from Tintinnabulum’s paper, and had seen that they were the same, but still, but still.

But still he was not quite sure. He did not want to make a fool of himself, or waste people’s time. He had taken it to Bellis, his friend and teacher, to check, to make sure. And ruthlessly, she had taken it from him, knowing that it gave her power.

The Lovers were bringing them south to a fissure in the seabed from where the avanc might rise. They had collected what was necessary—the scientist they needed, a rig to fuel the hexes—and now they were heading toward their quarry, their experts working in tight and ceaseless concert to complete their calculations, to solve the enigma of the summoning, even as they traveled.

And immediately Silas and Bellis saw this, as soon as they realized that they had achieved their aim, that they knew the Lovers’ plan, that they could work out where the city was heading, they began to talk frantically about how they could use that knowledge to escape.

What are we doing? thought Bellis in the silence. Another night we’re sitting in my stupid little round chimney room, saying oh gods oh gods to ourselves and each other, because we’ve picked off one layer of mystery and underneath is yet more shit, yet more trouble, that we can do nothing about. She felt like moaning with exhaustion. I don’t want to wonder what I’m going to do anymore, she thought. I want to just do something.

She drummed her fingers across the book’s script. A script that she and few others could read.

Looking at that arcane language, a vague, unpleasant suspicion ached in her. She felt as she had that night in the restaurant, when Johannes had told her that the Lovers used his books.

The constant grinding of the flotilla of tugs and others that dragged the city had become background noise. But, unnoticed and forgotten, they continued. There was not a moment of night or day that Armada did not inch south. The effort was prodigious and the pace glacial, slower than a human could crawl.

But days passed at that torturous rate, and the city did move. People shed coats and woolen trousers. The days were still short, but without fuss or proclamation, Armada had passed into a temperate zone of the sea. And it continued to move toward warmer water.

Armada’s plants—crops of wheat and barley, decktop grasslands, weed regiments reclaiming old stone and metal—felt the change. Scavenging constantly for heat, they drew sustenance from the random change of season and began rapidly to grow, to bud. The smells of the parklands became richer; the green began to be broken by hardy little flowers.

Every day there were more birds overhead. The pirate ships sailed over new and colorful fish in the warm waters. In Armada’s multitude of little temples, services welcomed the latest of the city’s irregular, contingent springs.

Tanner had seen the chains, and having done so, it did not take him very long to realize what was planned for the city.

Of course he could not know the details. But he remembered what he had seen, even through the shock and cold that had been settling on him as he rose through the water. He had come up below one of the forbidden ships and at the heart of an obscuring glamour, the scale of what he observed had at first confused him, but then it had resolved itself and he had realized it was a chain link, fifty feet long.

The Grand Easterly stretched out overhead like an ominous cloud. The metal was riveted to its underside with ancient bolts bigger than a man. Through the centuries of growth that encased the ship’s hull, Tanner realized that another link connected to the first, flush against the steamer’s hull. Beyond that, the weed growth and the charmed water had obscured his vision.

There were great chains below the city. And, knowing that, it did not take him very long to guess what was planned. With an almost rueful surprise, Tanner Sack realized that he now knew the secret that had seemed always to hover at the edge of conversation in the docks. The source of unease and winks and shared glances, the unspoken project that shaped all their efforts.

We’re going to raise something from the sea, he thought calmly. Some beastie? Are we going to tether some sea serpents or kraken or Jabber knows what and . . . what then? Could it pull Armada? Like a seawyrm does a chariot ship?

That makes sense enough, he thought, awed by the scale of the thing, whatever it was, but not afraid nor disapproving.

Why hide that from the likes of me? he thought. Ain’t it as if I’m loyal?

It took Tanner days to recover from the dinichthys attack. His sleep was poor; he broke into fearful sweats. He remembered the feeling of the burst man’s bowels in his hand, and although he had seen and held the dead before, there was a quality of terror to that corpse’s eyes that distressed him days later. He could not shake the memory of the bonefish plunging at him, as implacable as a geological event.

His workmates treated him with respect. “You tried, Tanner, man,” they said to him.

After two days, Tanner went back to the pool between Garwater and Jhour, to swim and soothe his cracking skin. He watched the men and women in the water; there were a few more of them in these hospitable temperatures. Other pirate-citizens watched from the side, marveling at the esoteric skill of swimming.

Tanner saw the spinning drops of water shed by inexpert paddling and up-flung arms, saw the fractured surface of the water, and he found himself twitching uneasily as swimmers ducked below, out of sight, into the deep water. He could not see them, could not see what was below them. He moved forward, made to jump, and felt his stomach pitch.

He was afraid.

Too late now, he told himself with an edge of hysteria. It’s too late now, man! You’re Remade for this! You live in the damn water, and you ain’t never going back.

He was doubly frightened: of the sea and of his own fear that threatened to landlock him, turn him into a freakshow, gilled and webbed but airbound, skin peeling and gills drying painfully, tentacles rotting, too scared to swim. So he forced himself in, and the brine soothed him and brought him some peace.

It was terribly hard, opening his eyes and forcing his gaze down into diffuse, sunlit blue below him, knowing that he would likely never see rock beneath the water again, but only that stretching deep where predators flicked their tails and eddied out of sight.

It was appallingly hard, but he swam, and felt better for it.

At Shekel’s insistence, Angevine let Tanner rummage in her metal innards. She was still uncomfortable about it. For him to operate, they had had to put out her boiler, immobilizing her. It was the first time for years she had allowed that to happen. She lived in fear of her fires going cold.

He tinkered as he would with any engine, tapping at pipes and wielding his wrench with gusto, till he glanced up and saw how bloodless her knuckles were as she clenched Shekel’s hand.

The last time anyone had put their hands in her like this, Tanner realized, was when she was Remade. He was gentler with her then.

As he had expected, she was powered by an old, inefficient engine. It needed replacing, and with a curt warning to Angevine, and to the sound of her horrified yells, he began to dismantle it.

Eventually she calmed down (too late to back out anyway, he explained somewhat ruthlessly: she’d never move again if he left her like this). And when, after several hours, he had finished, and he rolled out from under her, sweating and oil-covered, and began to light the fuel in her reconfigured boiler, it was clear she could feel the difference immediately.

They were both tired and embarrassed. When the pressure built in her engine, and Angevine began to move, to feel the new reserves of power he had given her, to check on her fire and realize how much longer the coke was lasting, she recognized how much he had done for her. But Tanner was no more comfortable being thanked than she was in thanking him, and there was little more than overlapping mutterings on each side.

Later, Tanner settled in his tub of seawater and thought about what he had done. She shouldn’t have to scrabble continually for scraps of fuel anymore. Her mind was freed up: no more thinking all the time about the boiler, no more rousing herself in the small hours to feed her fires.

He grinned.

When first he had stood up, Tanner had noticed a newly gouged mark on her chassis, from the edge of his spanner or screwdriver. He had scratched a wound in the stained iron. Angevine always made an effort to keep her metal parts clean, so the mark Tanner had made stood out. He had shifted uneasily.

When Angevine had seen it, her mouth and face had stiffened with anger. But as the minutes went on, and she swayed with the sense of steam, her expression had changed. And as she had left, while Shekel waited for her in the doorway, Angevine had rolled to Tanner and spoken to him quietly.

“Never mind about the scratch, eh?” she had said. “You’ve done a great job, Tanner. And that mark . . . Well, it’s part of rebuilding, eh? Part of the new.” She had smiled at him quickly and had left without looking back.

“Oh, you’re welcome, for Jabber’s sake,” murmured Tanner out loud at the memory, pleased and embarrassed. He sat back in his bath. “For the lad, really. It’s for the lad’s sake.”

There were only ten ships of any size in the haunted quarter of Armada, tucked away at the city’s fore-port corner, bordering Dry Fall and King Friedrich’s Thee-And-Thine.

The subjects of Friedrich’s violent mercantile rule for the most part ignored the eerie ships next to their riding, concentrating on their bazaars and glad’ circuses and moneylenders. In Dry Fall, however, the baleful influence of the haunted quarter crept over the little fringe of sea and stained the Brucolac’s riding. Where Dry Fall neighbored the deserted ships, its own vessels were subdued and unpleasant.

Perhaps it was the presence of the Brucolac and his cadre of vampir lieutenants in Dry Fall itself that sharpened the inhabitants’ senses to the dead and ab-dead. Perhaps that was why unlike those in Thee-And-Thine, the citizens of Dry Fall riding could not forget the presence of the fearful haunted quarter beside them.

Uncanny noises emanated from it: mutterings that carried on the wind; the faint grind of motors; things grating against other things. Some claimed that the sounds were illusory, the product of wind and the bizarre architecture of the ancient ships. Very few believed that. Sometimes a foolhardy group—invariably the recently press-ganged—would enter the hulks, to emerge some hours later closed-mouthed and pale and refusing to speak. And on occasion, of course, they did not return.

Attempts to sever the ten ships from the fabric of the city, to scuttle them and scour the haunted quarter from Armada’s map, were reputed to have been tried and to have failed in alarming ways. Most citizens were superstitious about that quiet place: frightened as they were of it, they would have argued strongly against any attempts to remove it.

Birds would not settle in the haunted ships. Their skyline of old masts and mast stumps, their moldering bituminous carcasses and ragged sails were stark and deserted.

The border of Dry Fall and the haunted quarter was where one went to be undisturbed.

Two men stood in the night’s cool drizzle. They were alone on the deck of a clipper.

In front of them, thirty feet away, was a long, slim vessel, some ancient galley that creaked in Armada’s incessant wind and motion, empty and unlit. The bridges that linked it to the clipper were rotting and blocked with chains. It was the foremost ship of the haunted quarter.

From way behind the men rose the noises of the city center, the irregular shopping arcades that wound across the bodies of several vessels, the playhouses and dance halls. The clipper itself was silent. A row of tent houses on its deck was mostly uninhabited. Those few who lived there had realized who stood on the clipper’s deck, and were staying very carefully out of sight.

“I’m bewildered,” said the Brucolac quietly, not looking at his companion. His quiet, hoarse voice was only just audible. Wind and rain pushed his shaggy hair back from his face as he looked out past the galley at the black sea. “Explain it to me.” He turned and raised his eyebrows, in a look of mild consternation, at Uther Doul.

With no bodyguards, no yeomanry or bystanders to see this interaction, the glowering tension that characterized the two men’s public confrontations was absent. Their body language was only a little cautious, like people meeting for the first time.

“It’s not like I don’t know you, Uther,” the Brucolac said. “It’s not like we haven’t stood together. I trust you, sincerely. I trust your instincts. I know how you think. And we both know it’s just a matter of . . . of fucking chance that you’re their man . . . rather than mine.” There was regret in his voice, a small note of regret.

The Brucolac stared at Uther Doul with his pale eyes. His long, forked tongue tasted the air, and he spoke again.

“Tell me, man. Tell me what’s happening. Moon’s Tits, you can’t support this idiotic idea. Are you feeling guilty? Is that it? That it was you who gave them the notion? That they’d never have thought of this if it weren’t for what you told them?” He leaned in a little as he spoke.

“It’s not the power, Uther. You know that. I don’t give a sailor’s toss who runs Armada. Dry Fall’s all I want. Garwater’s always been the strongest, and that’s fine by me. And it’s not the fucking avanc, either. Shit, if I thought that would work, I’d be with you. I’m not one of those Curhouse arseholes jabbering on about what’s ‘against nature,’ and ‘tampering with deadly forces’ and crap like that. Shit, Uther, if I thought doing deals with daemons would strengthen the city, don’t you think I’d do it?”

Uther Doul glanced at him, and for the first time his face moved, twitching in contained amusement.

“You’re ab-dead, Brucolac,” he said in his singer’s voice. “You know there are plenty who think you’ve already done deals with the Hellkin.”

The Brucolac ignored him and continued. “I’m against this because we both know this won’t stop with the avanc.” His voice was cold. Doul looked away. The night was without stars or horizon: the sea and sky bled ink into each other. “And it’s not going to take long for others to clock that. Shaddler might do whatever it’s told till the fucking sea boils, but do you think Jhour and Booktown will stick with the Lovers when they realize what the plan really is? Uther, you’re heading for mutiny.”

“Deadman . . .” began Doul, and paused heavily. Doul was the only man in the city who used the foreign honorific. It came from his homeland. “Deadman Brucolac. I’m the Lovers’ man. You know it, and you know why. And maybe it could have been another way, but it isn’t. I’m a soldier, Brucolac. A good soldier. If I didn’t think they could do it—if I didn’t think it would work—then I wouldn’t support it.”

“Bullshit.” The Brucolac’s voice came hard and throaty. “Gods fuck and damn it, Uther, that . . . is a lie. Do you remember, do you even remember how I found out what they want to do with the avanc?”

“Spies,” said Doul levelly, meeting his eyes again.

The Brucolac was dismissive. “Spies could only ever get insinuations and hints. Don’t lie to yourself. I know because you told me.”

Doul’s eyes went quite cold and sharp.

“That is slander and I will not have you repeat it—” he said, but the Brucolac broke him off with laughter.

“Look at yourself,” he urged, incredulous. “Who do you think you’re talking to? Stop being so fucking pompous. You know what I mean. Of course you didn’t volunteer the information, or even damn well admit it. But shit, Uther, I came to you and confronted you with what I’d worked out, and you . . . Well, you’re too professional to give away anything that could come back to bite you, but if you’d wanted to mislead me or leave me thinking I was wrong you could have.

“You didn’t. And I’m grateful. And fair enough, if you want to play this stupid game where you’ll not admit what we both know to be the case, and you won’t confirm my suspicions but you damn well won’t deny them either, then that’s . . . that’s fine. Just keep on being silent.

“The facts remain, Uther.” The Brucolac absently picked splinters of wood from the guardrail and let them drift down into the dark. “The fact remains that you let me know. And you know the other riding leaders won’t trust me if I tell them. You’ve given me something I have to carry alone. And I think that’s because you know it’s a stupid, dangerous plan, and you don’t know what to do with that knowledge, and you wanted an ally.”

Doul smiled. “Are you so arrogant?” he said lightly. “Are you that sure of yourself, that you can turn any conversation, any miscommunication, round?”

“Remember the razor golems?” said the Brucolac suddenly, and Uther Doul fell silent. “The steamwind plain?” the Brucolac continued. “Remember that place? The things we saw? This city owes us, Uther. We were the ones who saved it, whether they’ll admit it, whether they know it or not. Where were the damn Lovers then? That was you . . . and me.”

The call of gulls. The sound of wind between the boats, the creaking of the haunted quarter.

“I learnt things then, Uther.” The Brucolac spoke quietly. “I learnt how to read you. I know you.”

“Godsdammit!” Uther Doul faced him. “How dare you play old soldiers with me? I am not on your side, Brucolac! I do not agree with you! Can you understand that? We have history, it’s true, and Khyriad knows I’ll not willingly turn on you, Deadman, but . . . that is all. I’m a lieutenant, and you were never my captain. I came here tonight as you asked, out of courtesy to you. Nothing more.”

The Brucolac held his hand to his mouth and eyed Doul. His long tongue flickered over his fingers. When he lowered his hand, he looked sad.

“The Scar does not exist,” he said. There was silence.

“The Scar does not exist,” he repeated, “and if by some chance the astrolonomers are wrong, and it does, then we’ll not find it. And if by some fucking miracle we do find it, then you know—you, Uther, of all people know—that it’ll mean our deaths.”

He pointed briefly at the sword scabbarded on Doul’s left side. He moved his finger, indicating his companion’s right sleeve, ridged with branching wires like veins.

“You know that, Uther,” the Brucolac said. “You know the forces that would spill from something like that. You know we couldn’t possibly face them. You know that better than anyone, whatever those fools think they’ve learnt from you. It would mean the end of us all.”

Uther Doul looked down at his sword.

“Not our deaths,” he said, and smiled unexpectedly and beautifully. “Nothing so straightforward.”

The Brucolac shook his head.

“You’re the bravest man I’ve known, Doul, in more ways than I can count.” His tone was wistful, regretful. “Which is why it bewilders me to face this side of you. This base, pusillanimous, cowardly, recreant, craven aspect.” Doul did not move or react, and the Brucolac did not sound as if he was taunting. “Have you convinced yourself that the bravest thing is to do your duty, come what may, Uther?”

He shook his head, his gaze incredulous. “Are you a masochist, Uther Doul? Is that it? Does it make you hard to debase yourself like this? Do you find yourself erect when those cut-up cunts give you orders you know to be idiocy? Do you come, do you touch yourself when you obey them regardless? Well good godspit, your cock must be raw from tugging by now, because these are the most lunatic orders you have ever tried to obey, and you know that.

“And I will not allow you to carry them out.”

Doul watched, motionless, as the Brucolac turned his back and strode away.

The vampir wrapped shadow around himself as he walked, vanishing quickly into a fog of glamour, his footsteps muting as he disappeared. There was a rustling sound in the air, and way above the deck the old rigging thrummed briefly as something brushed it and was gone.

Doul followed the noises up through the air with his eyes. Only when everything around him was still did he turn back to the sea and the haunted quarter, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword.

Chapter Sixteen

With atlases and explorers’ monographs, Bellis and Silas drew maps of Gnurr Kett and the Cymek and Iron Bay. They tried to trace a route home.

The anophelii island was unmarked, but interpreting the stories of the cactacae merchants, they worked it out to be some scores of miles from the southern tip of Gnurr Kett, a thousand miles or so from the island’s civilized northern shores. And from that northern edge it was almost another two thousand to New Crobuzon.

Bellis knew how uncommon it was to see Kettai ships at harbor in the city’s Kelltree docks. She foraged in works of political economy and traced the routes of commodities from Dreer Samher to Gnurr Kett, to Shankell, to the Mandrake Islands and Perrick Nigh and Myrshock, and eventually, perhaps, by some tortuous route or other, to New Crobuzon.

“From the mosquito island we’ll be almost as far from the city as if we’d made it to the damn colonies,” said Bellis bitterly. “Thousands of miles of unknown waters and mapless places and rumors and crap in between. Right at the wrong end of a long, long trading chain.”

All their free moments were spent like this, hunched together in Bellis’ cylindrical room, ignoring the sounds and the daylight or lamplight outside, she smoking furiously, cursing at Armada’s unpleasant ship-grown tobacco, both of them scribbling note after note, hunting through old books. Trying to make something from the knowledge they’d stolen. Trying to work out an escape.

They had hunted hard for the city’s secret. Now that they had it, the slowly dawning understanding that still, even so, even with that knowledge they might not make it home, appalled them.

If we can just work out where we’ll be . . . Bellis would think, and a queasy understanding would grow in her that it was not as if the whole damn city would dock, or would trundle past Kohnid or some other port in plain view. And if it did, she would still have to fight her own way from the city to the shore, to the docks, to a ship, across the water again, home. And there was no way at all that she could make that happen.

Get me to the shore, she thought. If I could get to the shore, maybe I could persuade someone to help me, or I could steal a boat, or I could stow away, or . . . something . . .

But she could not get to the shore. And even if she could, all those ideas might come to nothing, and she knew it.

“Shekel came to see me today,” she said. “It’s been near enough a week since he gave me the book, Silas. He asked me what it was, whether it was what Tintinnabulum was looking for. I told him I’d know for certain soon.”

“It won’t be long,” she said ominously. “It won’t be long till he overcomes his shyness and tells someone. He’s friends with some loyal dockhand who works for the Lovers. He’s fucking Tintinnabulum’s servant, for Jabber’s sake.

“We have to move, Silas. We have to make a decision. We have to decide what we’re going to do. When he tells his friends that he found the book by Krüach Aum, the yeomanry’ll be here in minutes. And then not only will they have the book, but they’ll know we were keeping it from them. And gods know I don’t want to see the inside of an Armadan jail.”

It was impossible to judge how much exactly the Lovers knew about raising the avanc. They must know something—the location of the sinkholes, the scale of the engines and thaumaturgy necessary, perhaps some parts of the science required. But they were particularly seeking the volume by Krüach Aum.

The only description of a successful attempt to call and capture an avanc, Bellis thought. They know whereabouts in the world to go, but I’m betting there’s a load they don’t know. They must think they can piece it together, and probably they can, in time. But I just bet this would make things a damn sight easier.

And she wrestled with stupid ideas, like demanding her freedom in exchange for the book, knowing miserably that that would never work. Hope was slipping away from her, and that made her cold.

In a kind of desperate carelessness, she talked with Carrianne about escape. Couching all her questions and ideas in an idiotically unconvincing what if? register, she asked Carrianne whether she had ever wanted to leave the city.

Carrianne grinned with friendly cruelty. “Never crossed my mind,” she said.

They were in a pub in Dry Fall, and Carrianne looked around ostentatiously before turning back to Bellis and speaking more quietly. “Of course. But what had I got to go back to, Bellis? Why would I risk something like that? Some press-ganged try it every few years, you know. Off in a little boat, or what have you. They’re always, always stopped.”

Only the ones you hear about, thought Bellis.

“What happens to them?” she said.

Carrianne looked down at her drink for a while, then back up at Bellis with another hard smile.

“It’s just about the one thing that every ruler in Armada agrees on,” she said, “the Lovers, the Brucolac, King Friedrich and Braginod and the Council and all. Armada can’t afford to be found. Of course there are sailors that know we’re out here somewhere, and there are communities like Dreer Samher that we can trade with. But to be found out by some big power—like New Crobuzon? That would want us off the seas? People trying to escape are stopped, Bellis. Not caught, you understand. Stopped.”

Carrianne slapped Bellis on the back.

“Godsdammit, don’t look so appalled!” she said heartily. “You can’t really tell me you’re surprised. You know what would happen if they got home and let out the wrong sort of information, and your lot got hold of Armada? Just ask any of the Remade who made it out of the New Crobuzon slave ships, see how loyal they feel about the Crobuzoner navy. Ask some of those who’ve been to Nova Esperium and seen what happened to the natives. Or some of the sailors who’ve come up against New Crobuzon freebooters waving their damn letters of marque. You think we’re pirates, Bellis? Drink up and shut up!”

That night for the first time, Bellis wondered aloud what she and Silas might do if they could not return home. She raised the possibility as a spur.

But a kind of calm horror descended on her as she realized that her own escape was not the only consideration. What if we can’t escape? she thought coolly. Is that the end of it? Is that the last word?

Silas was watching her, his face bleak and tired. Looking at him, Bellis saw the spires and markets and brick rookeries of her home city with sudden, stark clarity. She remembered her friends. She thought again about New Crobuzon. In spring, stinking of sap; at the close of the year, cold and intricate; at the festival of Jabber’s Morning, lit up, strung with gimgews and lanterns, jostled by singing crowds, the trains decked out in pious livery. At midnight on any day of the year, in the lamplight.

At war, at bloody war with The Gengris.

“We have to get a message to them,” she said quietly. “That’s the most important thing. Whether or not we can get back, we have to warn them.”

With that, she let go of what she could not achieve. And miserable as it made her, something inside her became less frantic. The schemes that she tentatively suggested now were more grounded, more systematic, more likely to succeed.

Bellis realized that Hedrigall was key.

There were many stories about the big cactus-man, the Samheri fabler and aeronaut. A cloud of rumors, truth and lies. And among the things that Shekel had breathlessly told her, one had stuck hard in Bellis’ memory: Hedrigall had been to the island of the mosquito-people.

It could be true. He had been a trader-pirate from Dreer Samher, who were the only group known regularly to deal with the anophelii. Sap, not blood, ran in them: they were undrinkable. They could barter without fear.

And he might remember things.

The day was overcast and warm, and Bellis sweated from the moment she left her rooms for work. Even scrawny as she was, by the end of the day she felt laden down with excess flesh. The smoke from her cigarillos seemed to cosset her head like a stinking hat, and even Armada’s unending winds didn’t dust her clean.

Silas was waiting for her outside her rooms.

“It’s true,” he said, grimly elated. “Hedrigall’s been there. He remembers it. I know how the Dreer Samher traders operate.”

Their maps could become more accurate, their knowledge of the island less tenuous.

“He’s loyal, is Hedrigall,” Silas said, “so I’ve got to be careful. Agree or disagree with what he’s told to do, he’s a Garwater man. But I can get information out of him. It’s my job.”

Even with what they learned from Hedrigall, they were armed with nothing more than a sheaf of unconnected facts. They shuffled and reshuffled them, dropped them like spillikins and watched how they fell. And, having stripped herself of that unrealistic desperation for her own freedom, Bellis began to see order in the facts’ patterns.

Until they had a plan.

It was so loose, so nebulous, it was hard to admit that it was all they had.

They sat back in silent unease. Bellis heard the recurring muttering of the waves, watched the smoke from her cigarillo unravel in front of the window, obscuring the night sky. The conjuncture disgusted her suddenly: it seemed to have trapped her. Her life was reduced to a succession of nights and smoking and scratching for ideas. But now something had changed.

It might be the last night that she needed to do this.

“I hate this,” said Silas eventually. “I fucking hate it, that I can’t . . . But can you do it? There’s a lot falling on you.”

“I have to,” she replied. “You don’t know High Kettai. Is there any other way you could convince them to take you?”

Silas grit his teeth and shook his head.

“But what about you?” he said. “Your friend Johannes knows you’re not exactly a model Armadan citizen, doesn’t he?”

“I can convince him,” Bellis said. “There aren’t going to be too many Kettai readers in Armada. But you’re right; he’s the only real barrier.” She was silent for some time, eventually continuing thoughtfully. “I don’t think he’s mentioned me to them. If he’d wanted to make life hard, if he suspected me of being . . . dangerous, I’d know it by now. I think he has a sense of . . . of honor, or something, that stops him talking about me.”

That’s not what it is, she thought even as she spoke. You know why he hasn’t reported you for dissidence.

Like it or not, however you left it, whatever you think of him, he counts you a friend.

“When they read this,” said Silas, “and they realize that Krüach Aum’s not from Kohnid, and that he may still be alive, they’ll probably fall over themselves to find him. But . . . what if they don’t?

“We have to get them to that island, Bellis. If we can’t do that, we have nothing. It’s no small thing we want them to do. You know where we’re trying to head them. You know what’s there. You can leave me to do the rest—I can put together what we need. I have the seal, so I can get the messages written. I can do all that. But dammit, that’s all I can do.” He was bitter. “And if we can’t get them to the fucking island, we have nothing at all.”

He picked up Krüach Aum’s book and turned the pages slowly. When he reached the data appendix, he held it up to Bellis.

“You’ve translated this, haven’t you?” he said.

“What I can.”

“They’re not expecting ever to see this book, but they think they can maybe raise the avanc anyway. If we give them this—” He waggled it, and the pages flapped like wings. “—maybe it’s all they’ll need. Maybe they’ll just look through these pages, and do whatever decoding they have to do to make sense of it, using you, using all the other translators and scientists in the Lyceum and in the Grand Easterly . . . Maybe everything they’d need to raise the avanc is right here. We might just be handing them the last piece they need.”

He was right. If Aum’s claims were true, all the data he had used, all the information, all the configurations were there in those pages.

“But without this book,” Silas continued, “we have nothing. Nothing to sell you to them, nothing to entice them to the island. They’ll just head off as they were planning, and work on whatever they’ve got, and maybe raise the avanc anyway. If they had nothing, they’d make do. But if we give them a part of what they want, they’ll have to have it all. We have to turn this from a gift . . . into bait.”

And after a moment, Bellis understood. She pursed her lips and nodded quickly. “Yes,” she said. “Give it to me.”

She leafed through to the data appendix and paused, wondering how to start.

Eventually she shrugged and simply tore out a clutch of pages.

After that initial, oddly euphoric moment, she was more careful. She had to make it look right. She thought about other damaged volumes she had seen, picturing the misfortunes that could befall books. Water and fire? Mold? Those were impossible to mimic well.

Trauma, then.

She placed the appendix open, flat, on a strategic nail on her floor, trod on it, and kicked it hard. The nail hooked into the equations and footnotes and yanked them away, to lie in a crumpled pile.

It was perfect. There were three pages at the start of the appendix, where terms were discussed and defined, and then the paper was torn out by its roots. Only the ragged fringes remained, little wedges of half-eradicated words. It looked like the result of a random, stupid accident.

They burned the appendix, whispering like reprobate children.

It did not take long for all the pages to vent as smoke and particles out over Armada, where the wind took and dissipated them.

Tomorrow we make our move, thought Bellis. Tomorrow we start.

The wind was from the south. The fingers of smoke from Armada’s chimneys pointed back the way they had come.

Standing on the deck of the Shadeskinner and looking out, with her back to the city, Bellis could pretend that she was on a normal ship.

The clipper was part of Garwater’s suburbs: the people there lived below in preexisting cabins. No houses were built on its decks. The Shadeskinner was bronze-trimmed wood, and rope and old canvas. It was without any taverns or cafés or whorehouses, and very few people lingered on its deck. Bellis stared at the ocean, just like a passenger on a clipper at sea.

She stood alone for a long time.

The sea glimmered under the gaslights.

Finally, at a little past nine in the evening, she heard hurried footsteps.

Johannes Tearfly stood before her, the expression on his face unreadable. She nodded at him, slowly, and said his name.

“Bellis, I’m so sorry I’m late,” he said. “Your message . . . It was short notice and I couldn’t rearrange everything. I got here as quickly as I could.”

Is that right? thought Bellis coldly. Or are you almost an hour late to punish me?

But she realized that his voice sounded sincerely contrite: that his smile was uncertain, but not cold.

They walked the deck aimlessly, meandering toward the narrowing front, then turning back again. They talked awkwardly, the memory of their argument heavy on them.

“How goes the research, Johannes?” Bellis said eventually. “Are we nearly . . . wherever we’re going?”

“Bellis . . .” He shucked his shoulders in irritation. “I thought perhaps you might have . . . Dammit, if you’ve called me here just to—”

She cut him off with her hands. There was a long silence and Bellis closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face and voice had softened.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. The fact is, Johannes, that what you said to me hurt. Because I know you’re right.” His face was guarded as she forced the words out. “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said quickly. “This place’ll never be my home. I was taken here by piracy, Johannes: I was stolen.

“But . . . but, you were right that . . . that I’d cut myself off. I knew nothing about the city, and I felt ashamed of that.” He started to interrupt, but she would not let him. “And more than anything, I saw the . . . the chance of it all.” Her voice grew impassioned. She spoke what sounded like uncomfortable truths. “I’ve seen things here, I’ve learnt things . . . New Crobuzon’s still my home, but you’re right that there is nothing that binds me to it but chance. I’ve given up on going home, Johannes,” she said (and instantly her stomach clenched because it was so nearly true), “and it’s made me realize that there are things here worth doing.”

Something seemed to be shifting in him; some expression was burgeoning on Johannes’ face. Bellis suspected that it was delight, and quickly she interrupted it.

“Don’t expect me to fall in love with this damned place, alright? But . . . but for most of the people on the Terpsichoria, for the Remade, this press-ganging is the best thing that could have happened. And as for the rest of us . . . well, it’s fair that we should live with that. You helped me see that, Johannes. And I wanted to say thank you.”

Bellis’ face was impassive, the words tasting like curdled milk in her mouth (even though she realized they were not entirely lies).

There had been a time when Bellis had considered telling Johannes the truth about the threat to New Crobuzon. But she was still stunned by the speed with which he had allied himself to Armada and Garwater. It was clear that he had very little love for the city of his birth. But still, she thought, he would not (surely) be neutral in the case of The Gengris. He must have friends, family in New Crobuzon. He could not be indifferent to that threat. Surely?

But what if he did not believe her? If he did not, if he thought this was a convoluted attempt to escape, if he brought her and her claims to the attention of the Lovers, who would not give two shits about the fate of New Crobuzon, then she would have frittered away her only chance to get a message back to the city.

Why should the rulers of Armada care what one far-off nation did to another? Perhaps they would even welcome the grindylow plans. New Crobuzon’s was a strong navy. Bellis had no idea how deep Johannes’ new allegiance extended. She could not risk telling him the truth.

She waited carefully on the Shadeskinner’s deck, sensing Johannes’ guarded pleasure.

“Do you think you can do it?” she said eventually.

He frowned. “Do what?”

“Do you think you can raise the avanc?”

He was stunned. She watched the thoughts race across him. Incredulity and anger and fear. She saw him consider lying for a tiny moment, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but that temptation ebbed, taking all the other emotions with it.

He was composed again in seconds.

“I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised,” he said quietly. “It’s absurd to think you can keep something like that secret.” He drummed his fingers on the rail. “To be honest, it’s a constant amazement to me how few people seem to know. It’s as if those who don’t are conspiring with those who do. How did you know? No amount of care or thaumaturgy can keep plans this big secret, I suppose. They’ll have to come clean soon: too many people know already.”

“Why are you doing it?” Bellis said.

“Because of what it’ll do for the city,” he said. “That’s why the Lovers are doing it.” He kicked the rail contemptuously and jerked a thumb at the steamboats and tugs way to starboard, massed at the end of their chains, hauling southward. “Look at how this bloody thing moves. A mile an hour? Two with a strong wind? It’s absurd. And this kind of effort is so fuel-intensive it’s damn rare for them. Most of the time this place just bobs around, circling the ocean. But think how all that can change if they can snare this thing. They’ll be able to travel wherever they want. Think about the power. They’ll rule the fucking seas.

“It was tried once before.” He looked away, rubbing his chin. “They think. There’s evidence under the city. Chains. Hidden by hexes centuries old. The Lovers . . . they’re not like any rulers this place has ever had. Especially her. And something changed when Uther Doul came to be their guard, more than a decade back. Since then they’ve pursued this. They got messages to Tinnabol and his crew, the best hunters there are. Not just quick with a harpoon; they’re scientists: marine biologists, coordinators. They’ve been in charge of the avanc hunt for years. There’s nothing they don’t know about trapping. If anyone had tried to do this before, they’d have heard stories about it.

“Of course on their own they could never catch an avanc. But they have more information on them now than anyone in the world. Can you imagine what it would mean to a hunter, to succeed in this? So that’s why the Lovers are doing it, and that’s why Tintinnabulum’s crew are doing it.” He caught Bellis’ eye, and a smile broke on him.

“And me?” he said. “I’m doing it, Bellis, because it’s an avanc!”

His enthusiasm was as sudden, irritating, and infectious as a child’s. His passion for his work was quite sincere.

“I have to be honest,” she said carefully. “I would not have believed that I’d say or think this, but . . . but I understand.” She looked at him levelly. “To tell the truth, it’s part of what mellowed me about this place. When I first found out what was happening, what the plan was with the avanc, I was so overwhelmed that it just frightened me.” She shook her head and groped for words. “But that changed. It’s the most . . . It’s the most extraordinary project, Johannes. And I realized that I want it to succeed.”

Bellis was aware that she was doing this well.

“I care, Johannes. I never thought I’d give a stiver for anything that happened in this place, but the scale of this plan, the hubris . . . And the thought that I might help . . .” Johannes watched her with cautious pleasure. “Because of how I found out the truth. That’s why I asked you to come here, Johannes. I have something for you.”

She reached into her bag and handed him the book.

Poor Johannes was suffering so many shocks tonight, Bellis thought vaguely, wave after wave of them: the shock of her contacting him, of seeing her, of her apparent change of mind about the city, of the fact that she knew about the avanc, and now this.

She was silent through his breathless incredulity and gasps and choked joy.

Finally he looked up at her.

“Where did you get this?” He could hardly speak.

She told him about Shekel and his fervor for the children’s section. She reached out gently to the book in his hands and turned the pages back.

“Look at the illustrations,” she said. “You can see how it got misshelved. I doubt there’s many people aboard who can read High Kettai. It was this that got under my skin. This.” She stopped at the picture of the massive eye under the boat. Even now as she dissembled, even having seen the simple picture scores of times, still she felt a little rill of astonishment as she looked at it.

“It wasn’t just the pictures that told me what was going on, Johannes.” From her bag she pulled a mass of paper, covered with her tight handwriting. “I do read High Kettai, Johannes,” she said. “I wrote a damn book about it.” And again, something about that fact sat ill inside her. She ignored it and waved the manuscript at him.

“I’ve translated Aum.”

And here was yet another shock for Johannes, who reacted with the same noises and fervor as before.

That’s the last one, Bellis thought, calculating. She watched him dancing with delight on the empty deck. That’s the end of them. When he had finished his stupid little jig, she began to steer him in the direction of the city, toward the pubs. Let’s sit and ponder this, she thought coolly. Let’s get drunk together, eh? Look at you, so overjoyed that I’m back on your side. So thrilled to have your friend back. Let’s work out what’s to be done, you and me.

Let’s help you come up with my plan.

Chapter Seventeen

In these warm waters, the night-lights and the sound of the waves against the city’s flanks were softer, as if the sea was aerated and the light diffuse: brine and illumination became less starkly elemental. Armada nestled in the long, balmy darkness of what was now, unquestionably, a summer.

At night, in pub gardens that abutted Armada’s parklands, its plots, its meadowland left fallow on forecastles and main decks, cicadas sang over the wave noise and the puttering tug motors. Bees and hornets and flies had appeared. They clustered at Bellis’ windows, butting themselves to death.

Armadans were not people of the cold, or of the heat, or of New Crobuzon’s temperate climate. Elsewhere Bellis might apply climatic stereotypes (the stolid cold-dweller, the emotive southerner), but in Armada she could not. On that nomadic city, such factors were irregular, they defied generalization. All that could be said was that for that summer, at that conjuncture of date and place, the city softened.

The streets were full for longer, and the patchwork phonemes of Salt conversations were everywhere. It was looking to be a loud season.

In a hall in the Castor, Tintinnabulum’s ship, a meeting was taking place.

It was not a big room. It strained to contain everyone within it. They sat in uncomfortable formality on stiff chairs around a battered table. Tintinnabulum and his companions, Johannes and his colleagues, biomathematicians and thaumaturges and others, mostly human but not all so.

And the Lovers. Behind them, Uther Doul stood by the door, his arms folded.

Johannes, faltering and excited, had been speaking for some time. At the climax of his story, he paused ostentatiously and slapped Krüach Aum’s book onto the table. And after the pause, at the crescendo of the first wave of gasps, he followed it with Bellis’ translation.

“You can see now,” he said with a trembling voice, “why I called this extraordinary meeting.”

The Lover picked up the two documents and carefully compared them. Johannes watched her in silence. Her mouth curled in concentration, and the scars on her face coiled to contain her expression. On the right side of her chin, he noticed the puckered flesh and scab of a new wound. He looked briefly at her lover beside her and saw a matching wound below his mouth, on the left.

Johannes felt the unease he always did at the sight. No matter how often he saw the Lovers, their proximity brought on a nervousness in him that did not fade. They had an extraordinary presence.

Perhaps it’s authority, Johannes thought. Perhaps that’s what authority is.

“Who here speaks Kettai?” the Lover said.

Opposite her, a llorgiss raised an arm.

“Turgan,” she acknowledged.

“I know some,” it said in its breathy tones, “mostly Base, a little High. But this woman is much more proficient than me. I have looked at the manuscripts, and much of the original was beyond me.”

“Don’t forget,” said Johannes, raising his hand, “Coldwine’s High Kettai Grammatology is a standard reference book. There aren’t that many textbooks for High Kettai . . .” He shook his head. “Weird, difficult language. But of those that there are, Coldwine’s is one of the best. If she weren’t on board, if Turgan or someone else had to translate this, they’d probably spend most of their time referring to her damn book anyway.”

His hands were jerking in aggressive, choppy movements.

“She’s translated into Ragamoll, obviously,” he said, “but it’s easy enough to render that into Salt. But, look, the translation is not the most exciting thing here. Maybe I’ve not been clear . . . Aum’s not Kettai. We couldn’t visit a Kettai scientist, obviously. Kohnid’s way off our route, and Armada wouldn’t be safe in those seas . . . but Krüach Aum’s not from Kohnid. He’s anophelii. Their island’s a thousand miles south. And there’s every chance he’s alive.”

It brought them up short.

Johannes nodded slowly. “What we have here,” he continued, “is invaluable. We have a description of the process, the effects, we have confirmation of the area involved—all those things. But unfortunately Aum’s footnotes and calculations are missing—as I said, the text is badly damaged. So what we have is merely the . . . the lay description. The science is missing.

“We’re heading for a sinkhole some way off the southern coast of Gnurr Kett. Now, I’ve checked with a couple of cactacae ex of Dreer Samher, who used to deal with the anophelii: where we’re going, we’ll only be a couple of hundred miles from the anophelii island.” He paused, aware that he was speaking too quickly in his excitement.

“Obviously,” he went on, more slowly, “we could continue as previously planned. In which case we know roughly where we’re going; we know more or less the kind of power involved in the summoning; we have some idea of the thaumaturgy involved . . . And we could risk it.

“But we could go to the island. A landing party. Tintinnabulum, some of our scientists, one or other or both of you.” He looked at the Lovers.

“We’d need Bellis to translate,” he went on. “The cactacae who’ve been there can’t help us: when they traded it was all hand signs and head shaking, apparently, but obviously some of the anophelii speak High Kettai. We’d need guards—and engineers, because we’re going to have to start thinking about containment for the avanc. And . . . we find Aum.”

He sat back, aware that it was not one iota as simple as he had presented it, but still he felt excited.

“In the very worst case,” he said, “Aum’s dead. In which case we’ve lost nothing. Perhaps there’ll be others there, who remember him, who can help us.”

“That’s not the worst case,” said Uther Doul. The atmosphere shifted: all whispering stopped, and everyone in the room faced him—except the Lovers, who listened gravely without turning.

“You’re talking,” Doul continued softly, in his singer’s voice, “as if this is just a place, like other places. It’s not. You have no idea what you’re saying. Do you understand what you’ve discovered? What Aum’s race means? This is the island of the mosquito-people. The worst case is that the anophelii women come upon us on the beach and suck us dry, leaving our husks to rot. The worst case is that we are all instantly butchered.”

There was a silence.

“Not me,” someone said. Johannes gave a half smile. It was Breyatt, a cactacae mathematician. Johannes tried to catch his eye. Well scored, he thought.

The Lovers were nodding.

“Your point is taken, Uther,” said the Lover. He stroked his small mustache. “But let’s not . . . exaggerate. There are ways around the problem, as this gentleman points out . . .”

“This gentleman is cactus,” said Doul. “For those of us with blood the problem remains.”

“Nevertheless—” The Lover spoke with authority. “—I think it would be foolish to suggest that there’s no way this can be done. That’s not how we proceed. We start by working out what’s to our advantage, what is the best plan . . . Then we work our way around problems. If it seems that our best chance of success lies on this island, then that’s where we’ll go.”

Doul did not move. He looked impassive. There was nothing in his demeanor to suggest that he had been overruled.

“Godsdammit!” Johannes barked in frustration, and everyone turned to him. He was shocked at his own outburst, but he continued without losing momentum. “Of course there are problems and difficulties,” he said passionately, “of course it’ll take organization, it’ll take work and effort and . . . and maybe we’ll need protecting, and we can bring cactacae fighters with us, or constructs, or I don’t damn well know what . . . But what’s going on here? Are you all in the same room as me?”

He picked up Aum’s book and held it reverentially like a sacred sutra.

“We have the book. We have a translator. This is the testimony of one who knows how to raise an avanc. This changes everything . . . Does it matter where he lives? So his home is inhospitable.” He stared at the Lovers. “Is there anywhere we wouldn’t go for this? Surely we can’t even consider not going.”

When they broke up, the Lovers spoke noncommittally. But everything was different now, and Johannes knew he was not alone in knowing that.

“It may be time to announce our intentions,” the Lover said as they gathered their notes.

The room was full of people trained into a culture of secrecy. Her suggestion shocked them. But, Johannes realized, it made sense.

“We knew we’d have to be open about this some time,” she continued. Her lover nodded.

There were scientists from Jhour and Shaddler and The Clockhouse Spur taking part in the attempt to raise the avanc, and the rulers of those ridings had been consulted out of courtesy. But the inner circle was all Garwater: those who once had not been, the Lovers had, in a breach of tradition, persuaded to defect. Information about the project was tightly circumscribed.

But a plan of such magnitude could not be hidden forever.

“We have the Sorghum,” said the Lover, “so we decide where we all go. But what will the rest of the city think while they sit stranded in some patch of sea waiting for our landing party to return? What are they going to think when we reach the sinkhole, raise the damned avanc? Their rulers won’t talk: our allies take our lead, and our enemies don’t want this in the open. They’re afraid of which way their people will turn.

“Perhaps,” she concluded slowly, “it’s time to bring the citizens to our side. Enthuse them . . .”

She looked at her partner. As always, they seemed to be communicating silently.

“We need lists,” the Lover said, “of everyone who should go to the island. We must look at new arrivals—there may be expertise we’ve missed. And we need security details for all candidates. And we have to represent all ridings.” He smiled, his scars tracing the contours of his face, and picked up Bellis’ translation.

When Johannes reached the door, the Lovers called his name.

“Come with us,” said the Lover, and Johannes’ stomach yawed uneasily.

Oh Jabber, he thought. What now? I’ve had enough of your company.

“Come and talk to us,” the Lover continued, and waited while his partner finished for him.

“We want to talk to you about this woman, Coldwine,” she said.

Past midnight, Bellis was woken by a repeated banging on her door. She looked up, thinking it must be Silas, until she saw him lying motionless and awake beside her.

It was Johannes. She tugged her hair out of her face and blinked at him on her doorstep.

“I think they’re going to go ahead,” he said. Bellis gasped.

“Listen, Bellis. They were . . . well, intrigued by you. What they’ve heard has suggested that . . . well, that you’re not their material. Nothing bad, you know?” He was eager to mollify her. “Nothing, you know, dangerous . . . but not exactly sympathetic. Like a lot of press-ganged: best left aboard at all costs. It’s normally years before incomers get letters of pass.”

Was that all it was? thought Bellis slowly. The misery and loneliness, the aching for New Crobuzon that made her feel something had been torn from her—was it just an everyday symptom, shared by a thousand like her? Was it so banal?

“But . . . well I told them all the things you’d said to me,” Johannes said, and smiled. “And I can’t promise anything, but . . . I think you’d be the best person, and I told them that.”

Silas seemed to be sleeping when she returned to bed, but something in the shallowness of his breath told her he was not. She leaned over him as if about to kiss him hard, her lips found his ear, and she whispered, “It’s working.”

They came for her the next morning.

It was after Silas had left, heading for Armada’s underworld to perform his opaque, illegal activities. To the work that kept him under the city’s skin, that made him too dangerous even to attempt passage to the anophelii island.

Two of the Garwater yeomanry, pistols slung easy in their belts, steered Bellis to an aerostat cab. It was not far from Chromolith to the Grand Easterly. The mass of the enormous steamer stretched out above the city. Its six colossal masts, its chimneys, its bare decks unadorned by houses or towers.

The sky was full of aerostats: Scores of little cabs studding the air like bees around a hive; outlandish vessels built for freight, transporting heavy goods between the ridings; the peculiar little single-rider balloons with their pendulous occupants. A little way out were warflots, elliptical flying guns. And above them all the massive, crippled Arrogance.

They wound over the skyscape of Armada, lower than Bellis was used to, rising and sinking with the topography of roofs and rigging. Warrens of brick like New Crobuzon slums passed below. Built on the cramped space of deck tops, they looked precarious: their outer walls too close to the water, the alleyways that riddled them impossibly thin.

Beyond the haze above the Gigue, whose fore was an industrial district of foundries and chymical plants, the Grand Easterly was approaching.

Bellis was uncertain. She had never been inside the Grand Easterly before.

Its architecture was austere: darkwood panels, lithographs and heliotypes, stained glass. A little age-blistered, but well kept, its innards were a tangle of passageways and staterooms. Bellis was left to wait in a small chamber. The door was locked on her.

She went to the iron-fringed window and looked down over Armada’s random ships. In the distance she could see the green of Croom Park, spread like disease across the bodies of several ships. The room she was in was higher by far than any of the surrounding vessels, the side of the ship falling away below. At eye level she saw dirigibles and a mass of thin masts.

“This is a New Crobuzon ship, you know.”

Even as she turned, Bellis recognized the voice. It was the scarred man, the Lover, standing in the doorway, alone.

Bellis was shocked. She had known that there would be interrogation, investigation, but she had not expected this: to be questioned by him. I translated the book, she thought. I get special treatment.

The Lover closed the door behind him.

“It was built more than two and a half centuries ago, at the end of the Full Years,” he continued. He spoke to her in Ragamoll, with only a slight accent. He sat, indicated to her to do the same. “In fact, it’s been claimed that the Grand Easterly’s building itself brought the Full Years to an end. Obviously,” he said, deadpan, “that is ridiculous. But it’s a useful symbolic coincidence. Decline was setting in at the end of the 1400s, and what more potent symbol of the failure of science than this ship? In a scramble to prove that New Crobuzon was still in its golden age, they come up with this thing.

“It’s a very poor design, you know. Trying to combine the paddle power of those stupid huge wheels, on her flanks, with a screw propeller.” He shook his head, not taking his eyes from Bellis. “You can’t power something of this size with paddles. So they just loomed there like tumors, ruining the ship’s line, acting as brakes. Which meant the screw didn’t work very well, either, and you couldn’t sail it. Isn’t it ironic?

“But there’s one thing that they did right. They set out to build the biggest vessel ever seen. They had to launch the thing sideways, in the estuary by Iron Bay. And for a few years it limped around. Awesome but . . . ungainly. They tried to use it during the Second Pirate Wars, but it lumbered like a massively armed rhinoceros while the Suroch and Jheshull ships danced around it.

“Then, they’ll tell you, it sank. Of course, it didn’t. We took it.

“They were wonderful years for Armada, the Pirate Wars. All that carnage; ships disappearing every day; missing cargos; sailors and soldiers fed up with fighting and dying, eager to escape. We stole ships and technology and people. We grew and grew.

“We took the Grand Easterly because we could. That was when Garwater took control, which it has never lost. This ship is our heart. Our factory, our palace. It was a dreadful steamer, but it is a superlative fortress. That was the last . . . great age for Armada.”

There was silence for a long time.

“Until now,” he said, and smiled at her. And the interrogation began.

When it was all finished, and she emerged mole-eyed into the afternoon, she found it hard to recall his questions exactly.

He had asked her a great deal about the translation. Had she found it hard? Was there anything that had not made sense? Could she also speak High Kettai, or merely read it? And on and on.

There had been questions designed to gauge her state of mind, her relationship to the city. She had spoken carefully: it was a tentative line between the truth and lies. She did not try to hide all of her distrust, her distaste at what had been done to her, her resentment. But she battened it down, somewhat: contained it, made it safe.

She tried not to seem to try.

There was no one to meet her outside, of course, and that gladdened her, obscurely. She crossed the steep bridges that descended from the Grand Easterly to the lower ships beside it.

She made her way home through some of the most intricate byways and alleys. Passing under brick arches that dripped with Armada’s constant salt damp; by groups of children playing variants of the shove-stiver and catch-as-can she remembered from the streets at home, as if there were a deep grammar of street games shared across the world; beside small cafés in the shadow of raised forecastles, where their parents played their own games, backgammon and chatarang.

Gulls arced and shat. The backstreets pitched and shifted with the surface of the sea.

Bellis relished her solitude. She knew that if Silas had been with her, the sense of complicity would have been cloying.

They had not had sex for a long time. It had only ever happened twice.

After those times, they had shared her bed and thrown off their clothes in front of each other without shyness or hesitation. But neither, it seemed, was moved to fuck. It was as if having used sex to connect and open to each other, the channel was in place and the act was superfluous.

It was not that she had no desires. The last two or three nights they had been together, she had waited for him to sleep, then masturbated quietly. She often kept her thoughts from him, sharing only what they needed to make their plans.

Bellis was not inordinately fond of Silas, she realized with mild surprise.

She was grateful to him; she found him interesting and impressive, though not so charming as he thought himself. They held something between them: extraordinary secrets, plans that could not be allowed to fail. They were comrades in this. She did not mind him sharing her bed; she might even tup him again, she thought with an inadvertent smirk. But they were not close.

Given what they had shared, this seemed a little bizarre, but she acknowledged it.

The next morning, before six, when the sky was still dark, men and women gathered in a fleet of dirigibles on the deck of the Grand Easterly. Between them they hauled bundles of raggedly printed leaflets. They lugged them into the aerostat carriages, argued over routes, and consulted maps. They divided Armada into quadrants.

The daylight was filling up the city as they lifted off sedately.

Costermongers, factory workers, yeomanry, and a thousand others looked up from the brick and wood warrens around the Grand Easterly: from Winterstraw Market’s intricate concatenation of vessels, from towers in Booktown and Jhour and Thee-And-Thine, peering over the city’s rigging. They saw the first wave of dirigibles lift off and spread out over the city’s chambers, out across the ridings. And at strategic points in the airflow, tacking against the wind, the aerostats began to shed paper.

Like confetti, like the blossom already straining to grow on Armada’s hardy trees, the leaflets coiled out and down in great billows. The air sounded with them—a susurrus of paper sliding against paper—and with the gulls and city sparrows that cut away from them in confusion. Armadans looked up, shielding their eyes against the rising sun, and saw the scudding clouds and clear warm blue, and descending below them the snips of paper skittering through the air.

Some fell into chimneys. Hundreds more touched the water. They funneled into the trenches between vessels and settled on the sea. They bobbed on the waves, becoming saturated, their ink spreading to become unreadable, nibbled by fishes, till the brine clogged their fibers and they sank. Below the surface there was a snow of disintegrating paper. But many thousands landed on the decks of Armada’s ships.

Again and again the dirigibles circled the city’s airspace, passing over each of the ridings, finding pathways between the tallest towers and masts, scattering their leaflets. Curious and delighted, people picked them out of the air. In a city where paper was expensive, this extravagance was extraordinary.

Word spread fast. When Bellis descended to the deck of the Chromolith, onto a layer of leaflets rustling like dead skin, all around her there were arguments. People stood in the doorways of their shops and houses, shouting to each other or muttering or laughing, waving the leaflets in inky hands.

Bellis looked up and saw one of the last of the aerostats to port, moving away from her out over Jhour, another fluttering cloud descending behind it. She picked up one of the papers gusting at her feet.

Armadan citizens, she read, after long and careful study, something can be achieved that would have astounded our grandparents. A new day is soon to dawn. We are to change our city’s movements forever.

She scanned the page quickly, racing through the propagandist explanation, and her eyes moved slower over the key word, picked out in bold.

Avanc . . .

Bellis felt a thrill of confused emotion. I did this, she thought with weird pride. I set this in motion.

“It is choice work,” said Tintinnabulum thoughtfully.

He was hunkered down in front of Angevine, thrusting his face and hands into the engines in her metal underparts. She leaned her flesh body back, impassive and patient.

For some days, Tintinnabulum had been conscious of a change in his servant, a difference in the clattering of her engines. She moved more quickly and exactly, turning in tight arcs and stopping without a wheezing slowdown. She found it easier to negotiate Armada’s swaying bridges. An edge of anxiety in her was gone—her constant scavenging, her scrabbling for discarded coal and wood, had stopped.

“What has happened to your engine, Angevine?” he had asked her. And smiling with immense, shy pleasure, she had shown him.

He rummaged in her tubework, burning his hands stoically on her boiler, examining her reconfigured metal viscera.

Tintinnabulum knew that Armadan science was a mongrel. It was as piratical as the city’s economy and politics, the product of theft and chance—as various and inconsistent. The engineers and thaumaturges learned their skills on equipment that was rotted and out of date, and on stolen artifacts of such sophisticated design that they were mostly incomprehensible. It was a patchwork of technologies.

“This man,” he murmured, up to his elbow in Angevine’s motor, fingering a three-way switch at the back of her chassis, “this man may be just a jobbing engineer, but . . . this is the choicest work. Not many aboard Armada could make this. Why did he do it?” he asked her.

She could only respond vaguely to that.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum said.

Tintinnabulum and his crew were not Armadan-born, but their commitment to Garwater was unquestionable. Stories were told about how they had joined Armada—the Lovers had tracked them by esoteric means, persuaded them to work in the city for unknown wages. For them, the ropes and chains linking the fabric of Garwater had been parted. The riding had opened itself, let Tintinnabulum enter and embed himself in the very heart of the city, which had resealed behind him.

That morning, Angevine too had picked up one of the slew of leaflets that suddenly clogged up Armada’s alleys, and had learned the purpose of the Garwater project. It had excited her, but had not, she realized, come as a particular surprise. She had been present on the edge of official discussions for a long time, had seen the literature left lying on Tintinnabulum’s desk, had caught glimpses of scribbled diagrams and half-finished calculations. As soon as she discovered what it was that Garwater was attempting, she felt that she had always known. After all, did she not work for Tintinnabulum? And what was he but a hunter?

His room was full of evidence. Books—the only ones that she knew of outside the library—etchings, carved tusks, broken harpoons. Bones and horns and hides. In the years she had worked for him, Tintinnabulum and his crew of seven had lent their expertise to Garwater. Horned sharks and whales and ceti, bonefish, shellarc—he had snared and harpooned and caught them all, for food, for protection, for sport.

Sometimes, when the eight were meeting, Angevine would put her ear flat against the wood and press hard, but she could only ever hear the occasional snatch of sound. Enough to learn tantalizing things.

The ship’s madman, Argentarius, whom no one ever saw, she would hear railing and screaming to them, telling them he was afraid. Some prey of theirs had done this to him long ago, Angevine came to understand. It had galvanized his comrades. They were stamping their authority on the deep sea, thumbing their noses at that terrible realm.

When she had heard them speak of hunting, it was the largest game that enthused them: the leviathan and lahamu, the cuttlegod.

Why not the avanc?

None of it was any surprise, really, Angevine thought.

“Is he trustworthy?” Tintinnabulum repeated.

“He is,” Angevine said. “He’s a good man. He’s grateful for being spared the colonies; he’s angry with New Crobuzon. He’s had himself Remade, the better to dive, the better to work in the docks—he’s a sea creature now. He’s loyal as any Garwater born, I’d say.”

Tintinnabulum raised himself and shut Angevine’s boiler. His mouth pursed thoughtfully. On his desk he found a long, handwritten list of names.

“What’s he called?” he said.

He nodded, leaned over, and carefully added Tanner Sack.

Chapter Eighteen

Rumor and word of mouth were even stronger forces in Armada than in New Crobuzon, but Armada was not without a more organized media than that. There were criers, most yelling the semiofficial line of one or other of the ridings. A few news sheets and periodicals were available, printed on dreadful-quality, ink-saturated sheets that were constantly recycled.

Most were irregular, available when writers and printers could be bothered or find the resources. Many were free; most were thin: one or two folded sheets crammed with print.

Armada’s halls were full of plays and music, coarse and very popular, so the publications were full of reviews. Some contained titillation and scandal mongering, but to Bellis they were depressingly parochial. Disputes about allocation of seized goods, or over which riding was responsible for which haul, were generally the most provocative and controversial topics they carried. And those were just the news sheets she could make sense of.

In the hybrid culture of Armada, as many different traditions of journal were represented as existed in the world of Bas-Lag, alongside unique forms born on the pirate city. More Often Than Not was a weekly that reported only on the city’s deaths, in verse. Juhangirr’s Concern, published in Thee-And-Thine riding, was wordless, telling what stories it considered important (according to criteria quite opaque to Bellis) in sequences of crude pictures.

Occasionally, Bellis would read The Flag or Council’s Call, both published out of Curhouse. The Flag was probably the best news-gathering organ in the city. Council’s Call was a political publication, carrying arguments between proponents of the various ridings’ governmental systems: Curhouse’s democracy, Jhour’s solar queendom, the “absolutist benevolence” of Garwater, the Brucolac’s protectorate, and so on.

Both the publications, for all their vaunted toleration of dissent, were more or less loyal to Curhouse’s Democratic Council. It was therefore no great surprise to Bellis, who had started to understand the tussles of Armadan politics, when The Flag and Council’s Call began to raise doubts about conjuring the avanc.

They were circumspect at first.

“The Summoning would be a triumph of science,” read the editorial in The Flag, “but there are questions. More motive power for the city can only be good, but what will be the cost?”

It was not long before their objections became more strident.

But with Armada still in the swell of thrill from Garwater’s extraordinary declaration, voices of caution and outright rejection were a small minority. In the pubs—even those of Curhouse and Dry Fall—there was massive excitement. The scale of the undertaking, the promised capturing of an Avanc, for gods’ sakes, was giddying.

Still, through a few journals, through pamphlets and posters, sceptics voiced their ignored opposition.

Recruitment began.

A special meeting was convened at the Basilio docks. Tanner Sack rubbed his tentacles and waited. Eventually the yeoman-sergeant stepped forward.

“I’ve a list here,” he shouted, “of engineers and others who’ve been requested for special duty by the Lovers.” The whispers and murmurs swelled briefly, then subsided. No one was in any doubt as to what the special duty was.

As each name was read out, there was audible excitement from its bearer and those nearby. Those named came as no surprise to Tanner. He recognized the best of his colleagues: the fastest workers, the most skillful engineers who had most recently been in contact with cutting-edge technology. Several were relatively recently press-ganged—a disproportion came from New Crobuzon, and more than a handful were Remade from the Terpsichoria itself.

He only realized that he himself had been called as he felt his back pounded by some enthusiastic mate. A tension that he had not known was built up inside him broke, and he relaxed. He realized that he had been waiting for this. He deserved this.

There were others already assembled at the Grand Easterly, workers from the industrial districts, from foundries and laboratories. There were interviews. Metallurgists were separated from engineers and from chymical workers. They were quizzed, their expertise judged. Persuasion was used, but not coercion. At the first (unclear) mention of the anophelii, the first hint of the nature of the island, several men and women refused to be part of the project. Tanner was troubled. But there’s no way you’ll say no to this, he admitted to himself, come what may.

After dark, when the tests and questions were completed, Tanner and the others were taken to one of the Grand Easterly’s staterooms. The chamber was huge and exquisite, picked out in brass and black wood. There were about thirty people left. We’ve been whittled down, Tanner thought.

What noises there were died immediately when the Lovers entered. As on that very first day, they were flanked by Tintinnabulum and Uther Doul.

What will you tell me this time? thought Tanner slowly. More wonders? More changes?

When the Lovers spoke, they told the full story of the island, and their plans, and everyone in the room was committed.

Tanner leaned back against a wall and listened. He tried to cultivate scepticism—the plans were so absurd, there were so many ways they could fail!—but he found that he could not. He listened, his heart rate increasing, as the Lovers and Tintinnabulum told him and his new companions how they would go to the home of the mosquito people, how they would search for a scientist who might not still be alive, and consult and build machines for containing the most extraordinary creature ever to swim in Bas-Lag’s seas.

Elsewhere, the hidden side of the campaign against the Summoning was convening.

At the heart of Dry Fall riding was the Uroc. It was a huge old vessel, fat and glowering, five hundred feet long and more than a hundred wide at the middle of its main deck. Its dimensions, silhouette, and specifications were unique. No one in Armada was certain how old it was, or from where it originally came.

There were rumors, in fact, that the Uroc was as counterfeit as a pinchbeck ring. It was not a clipper or a barque or a chariot ship or any other known design, after all: nothing of its peculiar shape could ever have sailed, was the claim. The Uroc had been built in Armada, said the cynics, already hemmed in by its surroundings. It was not a found and reappropriated vessel, they said: it was nothing more than wood and iron mimicking a stilled ship.

Some knew better. There were still a very few in Armada who remembered the Uroc’s arrival.

They included the Brucolac, who had been sailing it, alone, at the time.

Every night, when the sun set, he would rouse himself. Safe from daylight’s rays he would climb the Uroc’s baroque mast-towers. He would reach out from the slit windows and caress the tines and scales that draped from the irregular crossbars. With fingertips of suprahuman sensitivity, he could feel the little pulses of power below those slats of thin metal and ceramic and wood, like blood through capillaries. He knew that the Uroc could still sail, if need be.

It had been built before his ab-death or his first birth. It had been constructed thousands of miles away, somewhere that no one alive in Armada had ever seen. It had been generations since the floating city had visited that place, and the Brucolac hoped passionately that it would never return.

The Uroc was a moonship. It tacked and sailed on gusts of lunar light.

Weird decks jutted like land formations on the vessel’s body. The intricate segments of its multilayered bridge, the chasm that was constructed in the center of its body, the twisted architecture of its portholes and chambers marked it out. Spires broke its wide body, some doubling as masts, some tapering randomly into nothing. Like the Grand Easterly, the Uroc was not built upon at all, despite the crowded brick rookeries on the vessels to either side. But where the Grand Easterly was kept pristine as a matter of policy, no one had ever suggested building on the moonship. Its topography would not allow it.

By day it looked bleached and sickly. It was not pleasant to see. But as the light failed its surface would shimmer with a subtle nacre, as if it were haunted by ghost-colors. It became awesome then. That was when the Brucolac would walk its decks.

Sometimes he held meetings in its unsettling chambers. He would summon his ab-dead lieutenants to discuss riding business like the goretax, Dry Fall’s tithing. It is what makes us unique, he would tell them. It is what gives us our strength and makes our citizens loyal.

That night, while Tanner Sack and the others inducted into Garwater’s scheme slept, or reflected on what they would have to do, the Brucolac welcomed visitors aboard the Uroc: a delegation from the Curhouse Council, naïve enough to believe that they traveled and met in secret (the Brucolac had no such illusions: he picked one set of footsteps out of the palimpsest he could hear on the surrounding boats, and idly attributed them to a Garwater spy).

The Curhouse councilors were nervous in the moonship. They followed the Brucolac in a huddle, trying not to show discomfort as they scurried after him. Conscious of his guests’ requirements for light, the Brucolac had lit torches in the corridors. He had chosen not to use gaslights, taking a small malicious pleasure in the ostentation, and in the knowledge that the shadows the torches cast would flutter as unpredictable and predatory as bats in the ship’s narrow passages.

The circular meeting room was set in the ship’s broadest mast-tower, looking out over the deck fifty feet up. It was opulent and unwelcoming, inlaid with jet and pewter and finely worked lead. There were no candles or flames here, but an icy light picked out the interior with scientific clarity: moon- and starlight were gathered on the ship’s masts, amplified, and sent through mirrored shafts like veins to bleed out into the chamber. The strange illumination stripped the scene of any color.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” said the Brucolac in his guttural whisper. He smiled and pulled back his mass of hair; tasted the air with his long, serpentine tongue; and indicated that his guests should sit around the darkwood table. He watched them find places—human, hotchi, llorgiss, and others all watching him warily.

“We have been outmaneuvered,” the Brucolac continued. “I suggest we consider our response.”

Dry Fall seemed much like Garwater. The decks of a hundred skiffs and barges and hulks were lit up against the darkness, and bustled with the sound of pubs and playhouses.

But looming silently over them all was the Uroc’s distorted silhouette. It watched over the convivials of Dry Fall without comment or censure or enthusiasm, and they responded, glancing at it now and then with a kind of wary, uneasy pride. They had more freedom and more say than those who lived in Garwater, they reminded themselves; more protection than Thee-And-Thine; more autonomy than Shaddler.

The Dry Fallers knew that many citizens of other ridings regarded the goretax as a price too high, but that was squeamish stupidity. It was the recently press-ganged who were most vociferous about that, Dry Fallers pointed out—superstitious outsiders who had not yet learned Armadan ways.

There were no floggings in Dry Fall, the inhabitants reminded such newcomers. Their goods and entertainments were subsidized for all those who carried a Dry Fall seal. For matters of importance, the Brucolac held meetings where everyone could have a say. He protected them. There was nothing like the anarchic, violent rule that existed elsewhere in the city. Dry Fall was safe, civilized, its streets well maintained. The goretax was a reasonable trade.

They were protective of their riding, and insecure. The Uroc was their talisman, and no matter how raucous and chaotic the evening, they would glance occasionally at its skyline as if for reassurance.

That night, like every night, the mast-towers of the Uroc blossomed with the unearthly luminescence known as saint’s fire. It afflicted all ships at some time—during an elyctric storm, or when the air was desiccated—but for the moonship it was as certain and regular as tides.

Night birds, bats, and moths flocked to it and danced in its glare. They battered and snapped at each other, and some descended to be waylaid by the other, smaller lights emitted by windows. In the Brucolac’s meeting room, the Curhouse councilors looked up, made nervous by the constant drumming of little wings on the glass.

The meeting was not going well.

The Brucolac was struggling. He sincerely needed to engage with the councilors, and he tried to work with them, to propose strategies, to review possibilities. But he found it hard to rein in his ability to intimidate. It was at the heart of his power and his strategy. He was not Armadan born: the Brucolac had seen scores of cities and nations, in life and in ab-death, and something had been made clear to him: if the quick did not exist in fear, then the vampir would.

They might style themselves merciless night hunters, of course, where they hunkered and hid their identities in cities, emerging at night to feed, but they slept and fed in fear. The quick would not tolerate their presence—discovery meant true death. That had become unacceptable to him. When he had brought haemophagy to Armada two centuries back, he had come to a city free of the reflexive, murderous horror for his kind—a place he could live openly.

But the Brucolac had always understood the payoff. He did not fear the quick, so they must fear him. Which he had always found easy to ensure.

And now, when he was sick of intrigue, when he hungered for complicity, when he needed help and this mixed bag of bureaucrats was all he had, the dynamic of terror was too strong to overcome. The Curhouse Council were too afraid to work with him. With every look, every lick of his teeth, every exhalation and slow clenching of his fists, he reminded them of what he was.

Perhaps it meant nothing, he reflected savagely. What help could they be? He could not tell them about the Scar. They would ask him how he knew, and he could say nothing; then they would not believe him. Or he could try to explain about Doul, in which case they would see him as a traitor, swapping secrets with the Garwater right-hand man. And still they would almost certainly not believe him.

Uther, he thought slowly, you are a clever, manipulative swine.

Sitting in this room surrounded by his supposed allies, all he could think was how much closer he felt to Doul, how much he and Doul shared. He could not shake the sensation—which made no sense at all—that the two of them were working together.

The Brucolac sat and listened to the pontifications and bad reasoning of the councilors, who were terrified of change, concerned for the balance of power. He endured preposterous and meaningless abstractions quite divorced from the real nature of the problem. There were arguments over the precise nature of the Lovers’ transgression. There were suggestions that they might appeal to the bureaucrats of Garwater below their rulers’ noses—fleshless and unworkable ideas, without systematicity.

At one point, someone around the table mentioned the name Simon Fench. No one knew who he was, but his name was mentioned more and more frequently among that minority opposed to the Summoning. The Brucolac waited, eager to hear some concrete suggestion. But the debate degenerated again, quickly, into wasted air. He waited and waited, but nothing valid was said.

He could feel the passage of the sun below the world. A little more than an hour before dawn, he gave up trying to contain himself.

“Gods and fuck,” he growled in his graveyard whisper. The councilors were silent instantly, and aghast. He stood and spread out his arms. “I have been listening to you for hours,” he hissed, “spewing your trite horseshit. Platitudes and desperation. You are ineffectual.” He made the word sound like a soul-blasting curse. “You are failures. You are pointless. Get out of my boat.”

There was a moment’s silence before the mass of councilors began to scramble to their feet, trying and failing to retain at least a part of their dignity. One of them—Vordakine, one of the better ones, a woman for whom the Brucolac retained a scrap or two of respect—opened her mouth to remonstrate with him. Her face was white, but she stood her ground.

The Brucolac curved his arms above has head like wings and opened his mouth, unrolling his tongue and letting his poisoned fangs snap down, his hands crooked and feral.

Vordakine’s mouth swiftly closed, and she followed her colleagues to the door, anger and fear on her face.

When they had all left, and he was alone, the Brucolac sank back into his chair. Run home, you little fuck bloodbags, he thought. He gave a sudden bone-cold grin, thinking of his absurd pantomime at the end. Moon’s tits, he thought wryly, they probably think I can change into a bat.

Recalling their terror, he suddenly remembered the only other place he had ever lived openly as ab-dead, and he shuddered. The exception to his rule, the only place where the payoff of fear between quick and vampir did not apply.

Thank the bloodlords, the shriven, the gods of salt and fire, I will never have to go back there again. To that place where he was free—forced to be free—of all pretense, all illusion. Where the true nature of the quick, the dead, and the ab-dead was laid bare.

Uther Doul’s homeland. In the mountains. He remembered the cold mountains, the merciless flint skree, more forgiving by far than Doul’s fucking city.

Chapter Nineteen

In the great workshops of Jhour riding, an extraordinary commission had arrived.

One of the mainstays of Jhour’s economy was airship building. For rigid, semi-, and nonrigid dirigibles, for aeroflots and engines, the Jhour factories were the guarantors of quality.

The Arrogance was the biggest craft in the Armadan sky. It had been captured decades back, crippled in the aftermath of some obscure battle, and had been retained as a folly and a watchtower. The city’s mobile aerostats were half its length, the greatest of them only a little more than two hundred feet, buzzing sedately around the city, bearing inappropriate names like Barracuda. The aerostatic engineers were constrained by space—nowhere in Armada was there room for the vast hangars in which huge craft like the largest of the New Crobuzon airships—the explorers and Myrshock shuttles, seven hundred feet of metal and leather—could be made. And, in any case, Armada had no need for any such craft.

Until now, it seemed.

The morning after the leaflets had fallen, the entire workforce of Jhour’s Custody Aeroworks—stitchers, engineers, designers, metallurgists, and countless others—were summoned by an incredulous-looking foreman. All around the plant in the reshaped steamer, the skeletal frames of dirigibles lay untended as he told the workers falteringly of their commission.

They had two weeks.

Silas was right, Bellis thought. There was no chance he could have unobtrusively smuggled himself onto the island trip. Even she, cut off as she was from the city’s scandal and intrigue, was hearing about Simon Fench with increasing regularity.

Of course it was still vague whisperings. Carrianne had mentioned something about someone who had doubts about the Summoning, who had read a pamphlet put out by someone known as Fink or Fitch or Fench. Shekel told Bellis that he thought the Summoning was an excellent idea but that he’d heard that someone called Fench said that the Lovers were heading for trouble.

Bellis was still amazed at Silas’ ability to insinuate himself under the city’s skin. Was he not at risk? she wondered. Weren’t the Lovers searching for him?

She smiled to think of Shekel. She had not been able to continue with his lessons for some time now, but when he had recently visited her he had taken a few quick, proud minutes to show her that her help was no longer necessary.

He had come to ask her what was in Krüach Aum’s book. Shekel was not stupid. It was clear to him that what he had given her must be related to the sudden tumultuous events of the last week—the cascade of leaflets, the extraordinary plan, Tanner’s bizarre new commission.

“You were right,” she had told him. “It took me a while to translate the book, but when I realized what it was—the account of an experiment—”

“They raised an avanc,” Shekel had interrupted her, and she had nodded.

“When I realized what the book was,” she went on, “I made sure that Tintinnabulum and the Lovers saw it. It was something that they needed, part of their plan . . .”

“The book I found,” Shekel had said and begun to grin incredulously.

In the Custody Aeroworks, a massive framework of wires and curving girders was taking shape.

At one corner of the enormous room there was a heavy cloud of buff-colored leather. A hundred men and women sat around its edges, thick finger-long needles in each hand, stitching ambidextrously. There were vats of chymicals and resin and gutta-percha to seal the enormous gasbags. Wood frames and metal incandescent from forges were beginning to take the outlines of control and observation gondolas.

The Custody workshop, big as it was, could not contain this commission in its final form. Instead, all the finished components were to be lifted onto the bare deck of the Grand Easterly, where the bags would be inserted, the sections of skeleton riveted together, and the leather covering stitched into place.

The Grand Easterly was the only ship in Armada big enough for that.

It was Chainday the twentieth, or the seventh Skydi of Hawkbill—Bellis no longer cared which. She had not seen Silas for four days.

The air was warm and thick with birdsong. Bellis felt claustrophobic in her rooms, but when she left to walk the streets the feeling did not ebb. The houses and flanks of ships seemed to sweat in the sea-heat. Bellis had not changed her opinion of the sea: its size and monotony affronted her. But that morning she suddenly and urgently needed to get out from under the city’s eaves.

She was reproachful with herself for the hours she had waited for Silas. She had no idea what had happened to him, but the sense that she was alone, that he might not be coming back, had hardened her quickly. She realized how vulnerable she had become, and she reerected a wall around herself, like bone. Sitting and waiting like a fucking child, she thought furiously.

The yeomanry came for her every day, took her to the Lover and Tintinnabulum and the Castor’s hunters, and to committees whose roles in the Summoning she did not understand. Her translation was scrutinized and picked apart: she had to face a man who read High Kettai, though not so well as she. He had demanded intricate details: Why had she chosen this tense, this part of speech? why had she rendered this word in this way? His manner was combative, and she took a small pleasure in undermining him.

“And on this page here,” he had snapped in one typical exchange, “why render the word morghol ‘willing.’ It means the opposite!”

“Because of voice and tense,” she had responded without apparent emotion. “The entire clause is in the ironic-continuous.” She had almost added It’s common to mistake it for the pluperfect, but had contained herself.

Bellis had no idea what all this grilling meant. She felt as if she were being siphoned dry. She had been cautiously proud of her act. She was enthusiastic about the project and the island, then reined herself quickly in, as if a tussle was going on within her between an unfurling desire and a sulky, curmudgeonly, press-ganged response.

But no one had yet told her she would come with them to the island, the crux of her whole plan. She wondered if something had gone wrong. And, anyway, Silas had disappeared. Perhaps it was time, she told herself coolly, for a new plan. If it did not work out, if they left her behind for another translator, then she would tell them the truth, she decided. She would beg mercy for New Crobuzon, would tell them about the grindylow attack so that they would know and might send the message for her.

But with an unpleasant fear she remembered Uther Doul’s words just before he shot Captain Myzovic. The power I represent cares not at all about New Crobuzon, he had said. Not at all.

She crossed the Whiskey Bridge from the Badmark, a barge at the outer edge of Garwater, to the broad clipper Darioch’s Concern.

The streets of Shaddler seemed bleaker to her than Garwater, more pared down. Façades were simpler, where they existed at all. Wood was scrubbed and cut into spare, repeating patterns. Pomp’s Way was a market street abutting both Garwater and The Clockhouse Spur, and the pavement was full of carts and animals and visiting shoppers—khepri, human, and others—jostling with the scabmettlers who made up half of Shaddler.

Bellis could recognize the scabmettlers now even without their armor, from their distinctive, heavy physiognomy and ashen complexions. She passed a temple, its bloodhorns silent, its guards adorned with clot-plate. Beyond it was a herbarium, with sheafs of dried astringents smelling strong in the warmth.

There were sacks of the distinctive yellow blodfrey that boiled up into the anticoagulant tea. She could see men and women drinking it from a cauldron. It was taken to ward off allclot attacks: the scabmettlers were prone to sudden and total setting of the blood in their veins, which killed them quickly and painfully, transforming sufferers into twisted statues.

Bellis was standing between wheel ruts in front of a warehouse, and she ducked out of the way of the beast tugging a wagon toward her, some crossbred pygmy horse, onto a swaying bridge leading to a quieter part of town. Poised between two vessels, Bellis looked across the water. She could see the stubby bulk of a chariot ship, the curves of a cog, a fat paddleboat. And beyond them there were more. Each vessel embedded in a web of bridges, suspended by gently belling walkways.

There was a constant traffic of people on them. Bellis felt alone.

The Sculpture Garden took up the front of a two-hundred-foot corvette. Its guns were long gone; its cowls and masts had been crushed.

A little plaza of cafés and pubs passed seamlessly into the garden, like a beach into the sea. Bellis felt her footing change as she passed from the wood and gravel paths to the garden’s soft earth.

It was only a fraction the size of Croom Park, a patch of young trees and well-tended grass interspersed with decades’ worth of sculpture in various styles and materials. There were curlicued wrought-iron benches under the trees and the artwork. And at the edge of the park, over a little low railing, was the sea.

Bellis’ breath caught on seeing it. She could not help herself.

Men and women sat at tables covered with liqueurs and teas, or walked the garden. They looked bright and garish in the sun. Watching them wander calmly and sip their drinks, Bellis almost shook her head to remember that these were pirates: grizzled, scarred, armed, living off plunder. They were all of them pirates.

She looked up at her favored sculptures as she passed them: The Threatening Rossignol; Doll and Teeth.

Bellis sat and looked past The Proposal, a slab of featureless jade like a tombstone, over the wooden wall, out to sea—at the steamers and tugboats doggedly dragging the city. She could see two gunboats, an armed airship above them, prowling protectively at the edge of Armada’s waters.

A pirate brig was sailing north, around the edge of the city and away. She watched it set out on its month-long, or two- or three- or four-month hunting voyage. According to the will of its captain? According to some grand scheme handed down by the ridings’ rulers?

At the other edge of the sea, miles off, Bellis caught sight of a steamer heading in toward the city. Clearly an Armadan ship, or perhaps some favored trader. Had it not been, it would not have got so close. It might have come from a thousand miles away, she thought. When it had set sail, Armada might have been in another sea. And yet when its job was done—its thieving, its robbery—it sailed unerringly for home. That was one of Armada’s enduring mysteries.

There was a burst of birdsong behind her. She had no idea, nor did she care, what breed it was that sang, but she listened with ignorant pleasure. And then, as if announced by the avian fanfare, Silas walked slowly into view.

She started and began to rise, but he did not slow as he passed close to her.

“Sit,” he said curtly, and stood by the guardrail, leaning out over the edge of the ship. She froze and waited.

He stood, without looking at her, some distance away. They stayed like that for a long time.

“They’ve been watching your rooms,” he said at last. “That’s why I’ve not been coming. That’s why I’ve stayed away.”

“They’re tracking me?” said Bellis, hating how ineffectual she sounded.

“This is my business, Bellis,” Silas said. “I know how it’s done. Interviews can only tell them so much. They need to check up on you. You shouldn’t be surprised.”

“And . . . they’re watching now?”

Silas shrugged fractionally.

“I don’t think so.” He slowly turned. “I don’t think so, but I can’t be sure.” His mouth was hardly moving as he spoke. “They’ve been outside your house for four days. They were with you at least to the outskirts of Shaddler. I think they lost interest there, but I don’t want to risk it.

“If they connect us, if they realize that their translator consorts with Simon Fench . . . then we’re fucked.”

“Silas.” Bellis spoke with cold resignation. “I’m not their translator. I’ve not been asked to go with them. I think they must have someone else—”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “They’re going to ask you tomorrow.”

“Is that right?” Bellis said calmly. Her insides, though, were shuddering, with excitement or foreboding or something. She controlled herself and did not ask him What are you talking about? or How do you know?

“Tomorrow,” he repeated. “Believe me.”

She did. And she felt almost sick suddenly, watching him penetrate layers of intrigue without apparent effort. His tentacles of influence and information were sunk so deep, he was like some parasite living off information, siphoning it from beneath the city’s skin. Bellis looked at him with wary respect.

“They’ll come for you tomorrow,” he went on. “You’ll be in the landing party. The plan’s as we discussed it. They’re allowing two weeks on the island, so you’ll have a fortnight to get the information to a Dreer Samher vessel. You’ll have everything you need to get them to go to New Crobuzon. I’ll get it to you.”

“Do you really think you can persuade them?” said Bellis. “They don’t often sail north of Shankell—New Crobuzon’s about a thousand miles out of their way.”

“Jabber, Bellis . . .” Silas’ voice remained hushed. “No, I can’t persuade them. I’ll not be there. You have to persuade them.”

Bellis clucked her tongue, irritated with him, but said nothing.

“I’ll bring what you need,” he said. “A letter in Salt and Ragamoll. Seals, advice, papers, and proof. Enough to convince the cactus traders to go north for us. And enough to let the New Crobuzon government know what’s happening. Enough to protect them.”

The park shifted with the waves. The sculptures creaked as they corrected. Neither Bellis nor Silas spoke. For a while there was only the sound of water and birds.

They’ll know we’re alive, thought Bellis. At least, they’ll know he’s alive.

She stopped that thought, quickly. “We can get word to them,” she said decisively.

“You’ll have to find a way,” said Silas. “Do you realize what’s at stake here?”

Don’t treat me like a fucking imbecile, she thought furiously, but he caught her eye for a second and seemed quite unabashed.

“Do you realize,” he repeated, “what you’ll have to do? There’ll be guards, Armadan guards. You’ll have to get past them. You’ll have to get past the anophelii, for Jabber’s sake. Can you do this?”

“I will make it happen,” said Bellis coldly, and he nodded slowly. He started to speak again, and for the briefest moment seemed unsure of what to say. “I’ll not . . . have a chance to see you,” he said slowly. “I’d better stay away.”

“Of course,” said Bellis. “We can’t risk anything now.”

His face betrayed an unhappiness, something unfulfilled. Bellis pursed her lips.

“I’m sorry for that, and for . . .” he said. He shrugged and looked away from her. “When you return, and it’s all done, perhaps then we can . . .” His voice petered out.

Bellis felt a flicker of slight surprise at his sadness. She felt nothing. She was not even disappointed. They had sought and found something in each other, and they had business together (an absurdly understated formulation for their project), but that was all. She bore him no ill feelings. She even felt a residue of affection and gratitude to him, like a film of grease. But no more than that. She was surprised by his faltering tone, his regret and apology and hints of deeper feelings.

Bellis discovered, with unfolding interest, that she was not quite convinced by him. She did not believe his insinuations. She could not tell whether he believed them himself, but she knew, suddenly, that she did not.

She found that calming. She sat still, after he was gone, with her hands folded, her pale face immobile and lapped by the wind.

They came and told her that her language skills were requested, that she was to travel on a scientific expedition.

On the Grand Easterly, in one of the low clusters of rooms a scant story or two above the deck, Bellis looked out over the surrounding ships of Garwater and at the Grand Easterly’s bowsprit above them. The ship’s funnels were clean; its masts jutted two, three hundred feet into the sky, as bare as dead trees, their shafts embedded below in striae of dining rooms and mezzanines.

Stretched out across the deck, like a broken fossil, were laid the innards of a huge airship. Curves of metal like barrel straps or ribs; propellers and their engines; massive detumescent gasbags. They stretched for hundreds of feet along the side of the Grand Easterly, skirting the bases of the masts. Gangs of engineers riveted them in place, constructing the enormous thing in segments. The noises and the glow from hot metal reached Bellis through the windows.

The Lovers arrived, and the briefing sessions began.

At night Bellis found herself affected by insomnia. She stopped trying to sleep and tentatively began to write her letter again.

She felt as if everything was occurring at one remove from her. Each day she was escorted to the Grand Easterly. Perhaps thirty-five men and women gathered daily in that room. They were of various races. Some were Remade. One or two, Bellis was sure, came from the Terpsichoria. She recognized Shekel’s companion Tanner Sack, and saw that he recognized her.

Quite suddenly it had become hot. The city had passed, at its groaning rate, into a new stretch of the world’s sea. The air was dry, and it was as warm every day as the rarest moment of a New Crobuzon summer. Bellis did not relish it. She would stare into a new, hard sky and feel herself waning in its influence. She sweated, and smoked less, and wore thinner clothes.

People walked stripped to the waist, and the sky was full of arcing summer birds. The water around the city was clear, and big schools of colorful fish were close to the surface. The byways of Garwater began to smell.

The briefings were given by Hedrigall and others like him—press-ganged cactacae, once pirate-traders from Dreer Samher. Hedrigall was a brilliant orator, his fabler training making his descriptions and explanations sound like wildly exciting stories. It was a dangerous trait.

He told Bellis and her new companions about the island of the anophelii. And, hearing the stories, Bellis began to wonder if she had taken on a task she could not complete.

Tintinnabulum came sometimes to the meetings. Always one or both of the Lovers was present. And sometimes, to Bellis’ unease, Uther Doul lounged beside the gathering, leaning against a wall, his hand to his sword.

She could not stop watching him.

Outside, the aerostat took shape like some enormous vague-edged whale. Bellis saw ladders being laid internally. Flimsy-seeming cabins were constructed. Tar- and sap-coated leather was hauled into position.

It had been a mass of parts, and then a cut-up body, and then a work in progress, and now it was becoming a vast airship. It lolled on the deck. It was like some insect just emerged from chrysalis: still too weak to fly, but now clearly become what it would be.

Bellis sat alone in her bed, in the hot nights, sweating and smoking, terribly afraid of what she had to do but almost trembling with excitement. She would rise, sometimes, and walk, just to hear her feet slapping on the metal floor, relishing the fact that she was the only thing in her room making a sound.

Chapter Twenty

Short, uncomfortably hot days and interminable sweaty nights. Daylight lasted longer as the weeks progressed, but still early every evening the light had gone and the stretched-out, sticky summer night drained the city of strength.

There were half-hearted fights at the junctions of ridings. Bravos from Garwater out drinking might end up in the same bar as a group of Dry Fallers. At first there would be nothing but a few surly murmurs: the Garwater lads might mutter about leech lovers or daemon’s bum-boys. The Dry Fall mob would make a loud joke or two about perverts at the helm, and laugh too much at bad puns about cutting.

A few drinks or sniffs or puffs later and the punches would be thrown, but somehow the antagonists’ energies rarely seemed entirely in the fray. They did what they expected of themselves—little more than that.

By midnight the streets were clearing out, and by two or three they were mostly empty.

The drone from the surrounding ships never dimmed. There were factories and workshops in various industrial districts, perched stinking and smoke-bawling on the arse-ends of old ships, which did not stop. The nightwatch moved through the city’s shadows, each riding’s in its own colors.

Armada was not like New Crobuzon. Here there was not a whole alternative economy of rubbish and squalor and survival: the basements of empty buildings did not harbor a mass of beggars and homeless. There were no dumps to plunder: the city’s rubbish was stripped of everything that could be reused, and the remainder was jettisoned into the sea with the city’s corpses, spoor dissolving as it sank.

There were slums draped across the sloops and frigates, found housing moldering in the brine air and heat, sweating matter onto their inhabitants. The cactacae laborers of Jhour stood, sleeping, tight-packed in cheap flophouses. But the New Crobuzon pressganged could see the difference. Poverty here was less likely to kill. Fights were more likely to be fueled by booze than desperation. A roof was likely to be found, even if it drizzled plaster. There were no vagrants huddled in angles of architecture to watch late-night walkers.

So in the dead hours, as a man made his way toward the Grand Easterly, he was unseen.

He walked without hurry along Garwater’s less salubrious byways. Needle Street and Blodmead Street and the Wattlandaub Maze on the Surge Instigant; the Cable’s Weft, a barquentine decaying into fungus-mottled camouflage; and on to the submersible Plengant. He picked his way past the trapdoors cut into its top, stayed in shadow close to the blistering periscope tower.

Behind him, its tower unlit among the spires and masts, he could see the derrick of the Sorghum.

The flat flank of the Grand Easterly swept up beside the Plengant like the side of a canyon. From deep within it, behind its metal skin, there were the vibrations of unceasing industry. There were trees on the surface of the submersible, gripping the iron with roots like knotted toes. The man walked in their shadow and heard the quick skin-sounds of bats above him.

There were thirty or forty feet of sea between the submarine and the cliff face of the steamship. The man saw the lights and shadows of late-night dirigibles in the sky, weak shifting rays spilling over the Grand Easterly’s guardrail from the torches of the yeomanry patrolling the deck.

Opposite him was the enormous sweeping curve of the Grand Easterly’s starboard sponson, the cover to the paddlewheel. From the bottom of its bell-shaped covering, the slats of a great wheel within emerged like ankles from a skirt.

The man emerged from the shade of the sickly trees. He removed his shoes, tying them to his belt. When no one came, and there were no sounds, he walked to the curving edge of the Plengant and slid suddenly into the cool water, with only a faint sound. It was only a short swim to the flank of the Grand Easterly, and into the shadows below the sponson.

Where, brine-soaked and dogged, the man hauled himself up the slats of the sixty-foot paddle, into the darkness. He was as quiet as he could be in the echoes. He climbed to the side of the wheel’s huge crankshaft and to a service hatchway, long forgotten, that he had known was there.

It took minutes of effort to break the scab of age, but the man finally managed to open it, to make his way along the crawl space into an enormous, silent engine room abandoned a long time ago to the dust.

He crept past the thirty-ton cylinders and huge, ignored engines. The chamber was a maze of walkways and monolithic pistons, thickets of gears and flywheels as tangled as a forest.

Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up. The man picked the lock of the door, then stood motionless, holding the handle. He remembered the layout of the ship. He knew where he was heading—past the guards.

It was in the nature of the man’s profession that he knew a few hexes: passes to send dogs to sleep; words that made him sticky to shadows; hedge-magic and trickery. But he doubted very much that it would protect him here.

With a sigh, the man reached for the cloth-wrapped package tied to his belt. He felt a gust of foreboding.

And a trembling excitement.

As he unwrapped the heavy thing, he reflected nervously that if he really understood how to use it, the stiff lock of the service hatch and the unpleasant night swim could probably have been dispelled like breath. He was still a fumbling ignorant.

He picked the last of the stiff cloth away and held up a carving.

It was larger than his fist, cut out of a slick stone that looked black or grey or green. It was ugly. It curled around itself like a fetus, etched with lines and coils that suggested fins or tentacles or folds of skin. The work was expert but unpleasant, seemingly designed to make the eye recoil. The statue watched the man with its one open eye, a perfect black half-sphere above a round mouth ringed in little teeth like a lamprey’s. It gaped at him with a darkness in its throat.

Twisting down the little figurine’s back, curving tightly back and forth in layers, sandwiching its folds together, was a flap of thin, dark skin. A sliver of tissue. A fin.

It was embedded into the fabric of the stone. The man ran his finger along its length. His face wrinkled in distaste, but he knew what he had to do.

He placed his lips close to the statue’s head and began to whisper in a hissing language. The sibilants echoed faintly in the big room, threading through the still machinery.

The man recited puissant doggerel to the statue and caressed it in prescribed patterns. His fingers began to numb as something leached from him.

Finally, he swallowed and turned the statue so that its face regarded him. He brought it close, hesitated, and turning his head slightly in a ghastly parody of passion, he began to kiss its mouth.

He opened his own lips and pushed his tongue into the statue’s craw. He felt the cold thorns of its teeth, and he probed further. The figurine’s mouth was cavernous, and the man’s tongue seemed to reach into the center of the little piece. It was very cold to his mouth. He had to steel himself not to gag on its taste, musty and salt and piscine.

And as the man wriggled his tongue in the stone throat, something kissed him back.

He had expected it—hoped for it, relied on it. But still it came with a jolt of nausea and shock. A little flickering something tonguing his own tongue. Cold and wet and unpleasantly organic, as if a fat maggot lurked at the statue’s core.

The taste intensified. The man felt his gorge rise and his stomach spasm, but he kept his bile down. The statue lapped at him with stupid lasciviousness, and he steeled himself to its affections. He had asked a boon of it, and it graced him with a kiss.

He felt saliva flow from him and, abominably, back into him from the statue. His tongue numbed at its slippery touch, and the coldness faded back toward his teeth. Seconds passed, and he could hardly feel his mouth. The man felt tingling like a drug pass through his body, from the back of his throat down.

The statue stopped kissing him; the little tongue was withdrawn.

He pulled his own tongue out too fast and tore it on the obsidian teeth. He did not feel that, did not realize until he saw the blood drip onto his hand.

Carefully he rewrapped the statue, then stood and waited for its kiss to course through him. The man’s perception trembled, rippled. He smiled unsteadily and opened the door.

He could see musty oil portraits and heliotypes retreating in perspective on either side. He could sense a patrol of yeomen with dogs approaching him.

He grinned. He raised his arms, reached out and up, and pitched slowly forward, falling as if his knees had been shot out. He could taste his own blood, and the saltfish-rot of the statue. His tongue was filling his mouth, and he never hit the ground.

He moved in a new way.

He saw with the statue’s sight, which it had bestowed on him with a kiss, and he slipped and oozed through spaces as the statue dreamed of moving. He questioned the angles of the corridor, reconfigured them.

The man did not walk and did not swim. He inveigled his way through crevices in possible spaces and passed, without effort and sometimes with, along channels he could now see. When he saw two yeomen and their mastiffs approaching, his way was clear.

He was not invisible, nor did he pass into another plane. Instead he moved to the wall and watched its texture, looked at its scale anew, saw the dust motes close up so that they filled his view; then he slithered behind them, hidden away, and the patrol passed away without noticing him.

At the end of the corridor was a right turn. The man squinted at the corner after the patrol had disappeared, and he managed with a little effort to use it to head left instead.

He passed like that through the Grand Easterly, remembering the maps he had seen. When patrols came he turned the architecture against them by a variety of means and slipped quickly past them. Where he was trapped behind them at the wrong end of a long passage, he might pass them by looking askance and stretching out his arm, gripping hold of the far wall and pulling himself quickly around its corner. He turned so that doors were below him, plummeting, with gravity, the length of corridors for speed.

Giddy, queasy with a kind of motion sickness brought on by his new movements, the man went quickly and inexorably aft, toward the rear and bottom of the ship.

Toward the compass factory.

Its security was tight. Guards with flintlocks surrounded it. The man had to squeeze carefully and slowly through layers of slant and perspective to reach the door. He hid in front of the guards, too big and close for them to see, out of focus and looming, and he bent over them and peered into the keyhole, at the intricate gears that dwarfed him.

He conquered them and was inside.

The room was deserted. Desks and benches were laid out in rows. There were machines, their drive belts and motors still.

At some places were copper and brass housings like large fob watches. At others were slivers of glass and equipment to grind them. There were intricately carved hands, chains and engraving needles, tightly wound springs. And hundreds of thousands of gears. Ranging in size from small to minuscule, like atom-sized relations of the wheels in the engine room. They were scattered everywhere, like grooved coins or fish scales or dust.

It was an artisanal factory. Each station was worked by an expert, a craftsperson of exquisite skill, passing his or her part-finished work to the next. The intruder knew how specialized each job was, what rare minerals had to be incorporated, the precision of the thaumaturgy necessary. Each of the finished articles was worth many times its weight in gold.

And there they were, in a locked cabinet like a jeweler’s, behind a desk at the back of the long room. The compasses themselves.

It took several minutes of careful effort for the man to open the case. The statue’s gifts were still strong in him, and he adapted well to his new perception; but still, it took a long time.

Each of the pieces was different. His hand trembling, he drew out one of the smallest: a simple, stark model, its edges picked out in polished wood. He clicked it open. Its bone face was marked with several concentric dials, some numbered, some etched with obscure sigils. Spinning loosely around the center was a single black hand.

On the compass’s back was a production number. The man noted it carefully and began the most important part of this mission. He searched for all records of this compass’s existence: in the book of records behind the display cabinet, on the list made by the metalworker who had finished the casing, in parts lists of incorrect and replacement fittings.

The man was thorough, and after half an hour he had found every mention. He laid them out in front of him and checked whether the timing worked.

The piece had been completed a year and a half ago, and it had not yet been assigned to any ship. The man smiled cautiously.

He found pens and ink, and examined the main record book more closely. Forgery was easy to him. He began to add, very carefully, to his compass’s details. In the column “Assigned To,” the man added a date, a year ago (rapidly calculating the Armadan quartos), and the name Magda’s Threat.

If anyone should, for any reason, look for information on compass model CTM4E, they would now find it. They would discover that it had been installed a year previously on the poor Magda’s Threat, a ship that had gone down months ago, with all hands and cargo, without a trace, in waters a thousand miles away.

When he had replaced everything, the man had just one task left.

He opened the compass, brooding on the intricacies of its metaclockwork entrails, stolen and adapted from a khepri design centuries before. On the tiny shaving of stone he knew was embedded at its core, bound in with homeotropic thaumaturgy. Its hand swing vaguely on its axis.

With ten quick twists the man wound it up.

He held it to his ear and heard its faint, almost inaudible ticking. He watched its face. Its dials spasmed and snapped into new positions.

The hand spun wildly, then set hard, pointing afore, back toward the center of the Grand Easterly.

It was not a conventional compass, of course. The hand was not pointing north.

This hand was pointing to a chunk of rock that was hemmed in by thaumaturgy, encased in glass, bolted under iron, depending on which rumor one believed. It had fallen from the sky, it was from the heart of the sun, it was from hell.

For the years until its clockwork ran down, the compass would point precisely toward the city’s lodestone, the godrock buried somewhere in the core of the Grand Easterly.

The man wrapped the compass very tight in oiled cloth and then in leather, and buttoned it into his pocket.

It must be almost dawn. The man was exhausted. He was finding it hard to see the room and its angles and planes, its walls and materials and dimensionality, other than as he usually did. He sighed, and his heart sank. He was losing the statue’s powers, but he had yet to get out of there.

And so, moistening his lips, flexing his tongue, surrounded by armed officers who would kill him for even knowing about the factory, the man began to unwrap his statue again.

Interlude IV

Elsewhere

On keep on.

The water is like sweat and our whales do not like it.

Nonetheless.

South.

The trail is clear.

Into temperate and then into warm seas.

The submarine rockscape was dramatic here, jags and clefts in the world’s crust. Atolls and reefs rose from the deep water in a melee of vivid colors. The water was fertilized by rotting palm leaves and lotuses and the corpses of unique creatures: amphibious things that swam in mud, and fish that breathed air, and aquatic bats.

On every island there were scores of ecological niches, and for each unique opportunity there was a beast. Sometimes there were two or more, fighting for ascendancy.

The hunters made their way into shallows, into salt lagoons and caves, and ate what they found there.

The whales moaned and mewled and begged to return to the cold waters, and their masters ignored them or punished them, and told them again what it was they were looking for.

The hunters remarked upon the water temperature, and the new quality of light, and the crystalline colors of the fish that surrounded them, but they did not complain. It would have been unthinkable for them to care, with their quarry still loose.

South, they commanded, and even when their whales began to die, one by one, their colossal bodies falling prey to alien warmwater viruses and collapsing, their skins peeling off grey and rotten, their bodies bloating with gas and bobbing stinking and pustulant to the surface to be torn to pieces by carrion birds till their bones and the remnants of their flesh slid down into darkening water, their masters did not hesitate.

South, they said, and followed the trail into tropical seas.

Part Four:

Blood

Chapter Twenty-one

Shunday 29th Lunuary 1780—or the Eighth Bookdi of Hawkbill Quarto 6/317, as you please. On the Trident.

Another addition to this letter. It has been some time since I have written. I would apologize if it made any sense. I feel as if I should, somehow—absurdly. As if you read while I write, and fret during the delays. Of course, when you finally get this letter, a day’s silence or a week’s or a year’s will be the same—a line left clear, a row of stars. My months will be collapsed. But I am confused by time.

I am digressing—making little sense. Forgive me.

I am excited, and somewhat afraid.

I sit on the privvy and write this. I am beside a window, and the morning sun is streaming in on me. I am thousands of feet above the sea.

It was awesome at first; I will admit that. It was desperately beautiful. After a time, the monotony of wrinkled water and sky and occasional cloud is numbing.

The sea here is quite empty. I must be able to see sixty, seventy, ninety miles to the horizon, and there is not a sail, not a skiff or fishing boat. The water color shifts between green, blue, and grey according to I don’t know what beneath the surface.

Our motion through the air is almost undetectable. We can feel the vibrations, of course, from the steam engines aft, the big propellers, but there is no sense of acceleration, of passage or direction.

This Trident is an astonishing vessel. Garwater is pouring effort and money into this journey. That is clear.

It must have been a sight, when the Trident lifted off from the deck of the Grand Easterly. It had spent long enough jutting over the ocean, lifted on a framework to keep it clear of the deck’s little capstans and bulkheads. I don’t doubt that there were bets taken on whether we would smash into the sea or into the fabric of the city.

But we lifted clear. It was late afternoon, and there was a darkness at the edge of the sky. I can imagine the Trident hanging there like gods know what, as big as most of the ships of the city, new and scrubbed clean.

We have brought with us the most bizarre thing. Hanging between our engines is a pen full of sheep and pigs.

The animals have food and water for our two-day journey. They must be able to see the gulf of air through the slats in their floor. I thought they might panic, but they can only stare down at the clouds below their hooves, with blank lack of interest. They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them.

I sit here in this little cubby, the lavatory, between the livestock and the control car where the captain and his crew steer us. A corridor from the main chamber.

I have come here to write, several times, since we lifted off.

The others spend their times sitting, whispering or playing cards. I suppose some are in their berths, tucked in the deck above me, below the gasbags. Perhaps they are being talked once more through what is expected of them. Perhaps they are practicing.

My own role is simple, and has been made very clear. After all these weeks and all these thousands of miles, I am back to being told that I am a conduit, that I will merely pass information and language through me, that I do not hear what is spoken.

I can do that. And until then, I have nothing to do but write.

Where possible, cactus-people have been chosen for this mission. At least five of those aboard have actually been to the anophelii island before, years ago. Hedrigall, of course, and others I do not know.

This raises issues of desertion: it is rare for any Armadan press-ganged to come into contact with their old compatriots again, but there must be Samheri on the island. My business here relies on such a meeting. All the cactacae on this mission, I understand, have reasons not to wish to return to their first home. They are like Johannes, or Hedrigall, or Shekel’s friend Tanner—loyal to their adopted country.

Hedrigall, though, makes me wonder. He knows Silas—or at least he knows one Simon Fench.

I of all people know that the Garwater authorities can misjudge who is to be trusted.

Dreer Samher is pragmatic. At sea, a meeting of Samheri ships and those of Perrick Nigh or the Mandrake Islands might mean battle, but relations with Armada are courteous, for safety’s sake. And besides, they will be at dock. Port-peace operates there as law-merchant does on the land, and it is a strong code, adhered to and administered by those subordinated to it.

Tanner Sack is on the airship, and I can tell that he knows who I am. He watches me with what might be distaste, or shyness, or almost any other emotion. Tintinnabulum is aboard, and several of his crew. Johannes is not—I am relieved at that.

The scientists who are here are a strange mixture. The pressganged look mostly as I expect scholars to. The Armadans look like pirates. I am told that this one is a mathematician, this one a biologist, this one an oceanologer: they all look like pirates, scarred and pugnacious in ragged regalia.

There are the guards: cactus and scabmettler. I have seen inside their armory, and there are rivebows and flintlocks and polearms. They have brought black powder with them, and what look to me like war engines. In case the anophelii do not cooperate, I think we have brought plenty to persuade them.

In charge of all the guards is Uther Doul. And giving him his orders is one-half of Garwater’s ruling pair, alone, the Lover.

Doul stalks from room to room. He talks to Hedrigall more than to anyone else, I think. He seems disquieted. I do my best not to meet his eye.

He intrigues me: his presence, his anomolous voice. He wears the grey leather that is his uniform, much-scarred and pocked, but immaculately clean. The right arm of the tunic is interwoven with wires that extend down to his belt. He wears his sword on his left hip, and he bristles with pistols.

He stares aggressively from windows, then stalks back, usually to wherever the Lover is standing.

The Lover’s scarred face revolts me somewhat. I’ve known—I have been with—those who found release in pain, who made it part of sex; and though I find the prediliction slightly absurd, it does not trouble or disturb me at all. That is not what I find wrong with the Lovers. I have a sense that their cutting is somehow almost contingent. What makes me queasy is something deeper that inheres between them.

I try to avoid the Lover’s eye, but I find myself pruriently drawn by her marks. It is as if they have been carved into some mesmeric pattern. But peering at them surreptitiously from behind my fingers, I see nothing romantic or secret or revelatory, nothing but the evidence of old wounds. Nothing but scars.

* * * * * * *

Later, same day.

Silas delivered what was needed, at the last possible minute. As if for theatrics.

I have to admire his methods.

Ever since our terse conversation in the Sculpture Garden I had been wondering how he would give me the materials for our message. My rooms are guarded, I am watched, what am I to do?

On the morning of the twenty-sixth of Lunuary, I woke to find a packet from him on the floor of my room.

It was an ostentatious piece of prestidigitation. I could not help laughing when I looked up and saw a patch of iron on my ceiling, freshly bolted over a six-inch hole.

Silas had climbed to the top of Chromolith Smokestacks, onto the roof of thin metal that booms like an orchestral drum under the rain, and he had cut a hole in it. Dropping the package inside, he had conscientiously bolted a new roof piece into position. All without the slightest sound: neither awaking me, nor alerting those who must have been watching.

When he performs tricks like that, under duress, to protect himself, it is easy to imagine him at his job for the government. I suppose I am lucky to have him on my side, and so is New Crobuzon.

I was pleased not to see him. I feel very distant from him now. I bear him no ill will: I took from him something that I needed, and I hope that I gave it back to him; but that really must be the end of the matter. We are coincidental comrades, is all.

Inside the little leather bag, Silas had put several items.

He had written a letter to me, explaining everything. I read it carefully before examining the bag’s other contents.

There were other letters. He had written to the pirate captain we hope to find: two copies of the same letter, in Ragamoll and Salt. To Whomever Agrees to Courier This Missive to New Crobuzon, it begins.

It is formal and to the point. It promises the reader that he will receive a commission on safe, sealed delivery to its destination. That by the power vested in Procurator Fennec (license number such-and-such) by Mayor Bentham Rudgutter and the office of mayor in perpetuity, it is declared that the bearers of this letter are to be treated as honored guests of New Crobuzon, their ship is to be refitted to their specifications, they are to receive an honorarium of three thousand guineas. And most important of all, they are to be granted a special tax-free letter of marque from the New Crobuzon government, exempting the vessel, for a year, from prosecution or attack under New Crobuzon’s self-declared maritime law for any reason other than the immediate self-defense of a New Crobuzon ship.

The money is very enticing, but it is the promised exemption with which we hope to sway our cactacae. Silas is offering them the status of recognized pirate without tariffs. They can pillage what they like, never paying a stiver, and the New Crobuzon navy will not molest them—will indeed protect them—for the duration of the contract.

It is a powerful incentive.

At the bottom of the letters, Silas has signed his name, and across some just-visible passwords has imprinted in wax the seal of the New Crobuzon Parliament.

I did not know he had such a seal. It is strange to see it here, so far from home. It is astonishingly fine work: the stylized wall, the chair and paraphernalia of office, and below in tiny figures a number, identifying him. The seal is an extraordinarily powerful symbol.

What is more, he has given it to me.

But I am digressing. I will come to the ring.

The other letter is much longer. It spreads over four sides, in an intricate, condensed hand. I have read it carefully, and it has chilled me.

It is to Mayor Rudgutter, and it is an outline of the grindylow invasion plan.

Much of it is opaque to me. Silas has written in a terse shorthand that approaches code—there are abbreviations I do not recognize and references to things of which I have never heard—but there is no mistaking its meaning.

Status Seven, I read at the top of the sheet, Code: Arrowhead, and though I do not understand them the words chill me.

Silas has been sparing me details, I realize (the most dubious favor one can do). He knows the plans of the invasion well, has laid them out in cold, precise terms. He warns of units and squadrons in specific numbers, carrying obscure ordnance described in one letter or syllable, no less disturbing for that.

Demi-regiment Ivory Magi/Groac’h to advance south along Canker equipped with E.Y.D. and P-T capacity, Third Moon Quarter, I read, and the scale of what faces us terrifies me. Our previous eagerness to escape, the effort we poured into focusing on that, appalls me now, it is so petty and so small.

There is enough information here to defend the city. Silas has discharged his duty.

Again, at the bottom of that letter is the city’s seal, vindicating it, making it, for all its soulless, banal language, horribly real.

With the letters is a box.

It is a jewelry box; simple, solid, and very heavy darkwood. And within, nestling on its plumply cushioned lining, is a necklace and a ring.

The ring is for me. Its large silver-and-jade face is carved with an inverted imprint—it is the seal. It is crafted with breathtaking artistry. Within its circuit Silas has placed a nugget of red sealing wax.

This is mine. When I have shown our captain the letters and the necklace, I will close them within the cushioned box and lock it, seal it within the leather pouch, and touch the hot wax with this ring, which I will keep. That way the captain will know what is inside, that we are not betraying him, but that he cannot tamper with the contents if the recipients are to believe and reward him.

(As I think through this chain of events I could become dispirited, I must confess. It seems so tenuous. I am sighing as I write this. I will think on this no longer.)

The necklace is to cross the sea. In distinction to the ring, it is a crude, simple piece, designed without any esthetics at all. A thin, plain iron chain. At its end, an ugly little flap of metal that is adorned only with a serial number, a stamped symbol (two owls under a crescent moon), and three words: Silas Fennec Procurator.

It is my identification, Silas tells me in his letter. It is the ultimate proof that the letters are genuine. That I am lost to New Crobuzon, and that this is my valedictory.

* * * * * * *

Later still. The sky is darkening.

I am disturbed.

Uther Doul has spoken to me.

I was on the deck of berths above the gondola, coming out of the heads. I was vaguely amused by the thought of all our amassed stools and piss cascading from the sky.

A little way down the corridor I heard a shuffling sound and saw light from a doorway. I peered in.

The Lover was changing. I caught my breath.

Her back was as crosshatched with scars as her face. Most looked old, the scored skin greying and pale. One or two, though, were livid. The marks spread down her back and over her buttocks. She was like a marked animal.

I could not but gasp.

The Lover turned at the sound, unhurried. I saw her bosom and sternum, as wounded as her back. She watched me, pulling a shirt on. Her face, with all its intricate cuts, was impassive.

I stammered some apology and turned abruptly and walked toward the stairs. But with horror I saw Uther Doul emerge from the same room and eye me, his hand on his fucking sword.

This letter I write was burning in my pocket. I was carrying enough evidence to have myself and Silas executed for crimes against Garwater—which would doom New Crobuzon in the process. I was very afraid.

Pretending I had not seen Doul, I descended to the main gondola and took a post by the window, frantically watching the cirrus. I hoped that Doul would leave me be.

It was no good. He came to me.

I felt him standing by my table, and I waited a long time for him to go, to leave without speaking, his intimidation successfully completed, but he did not. Eventually, against my will, it seemed, I turned my head and looked at him.

He watched me silently for a while. I grew more and more anxious, though I held my face still. Then he spoke. I had forgotten how beautiful his voice is.

“They are called freggios,” he said.

“The scars: they’re called freggios.” He indicated the seat opposite me and inclined his head. “May I sit?”

What could I say to that? Could I say No, I wish to be alone, to the Lovers’ right-hand man, their guard and assassin, the most dangerous man on Armada? I pressed my lips together and shrugged politely: It is no concern of mine where you sit, sir.

He clasped his hands on the table. He spoke (exquisitely), and I did not interrupt him or walk away or discourage him with apparent lack of interest. Partly, of course, I was afraid for my life and safety—my heart was beating very fast.

But it was also his oration: he speaks like one reading from a book, every sentence carefully formed, written by a poet. I have never heard anything like it. He held my gaze and seemed not to blink.

I was fascinated by what he told me.

“They are both press-ganged,” he said. “The Lovers.” I must have gaped. “Twenty-five, thirty years ago.

“He came first. He was a fisherman. A water peasant from the north end of the Shards. Spent all his life on one or other of those little rocks, casting his nets and lines, gutting and cleaning and filleting and flensing. Ignorant and dull.” He watched me with eyes a darker grey than his armor.

“One day he rowed too far out and the wind took him. A Garwater scout found him and stole his cargo and debated whether or not to kill him, terrified, skinny little fisherboy. In the end they took him back to the city.”

His fingers shifted, and he began gently to massage his own hands.

“People are made and broken and remade by their circumstances,” he said. “Within three years the boy ruled Garwater.” He smiled.

“Less than three quartos after that, one of our ironclads intercepts a vessel—a gaudy recurved sloop—on its way from Perrick Nigh to Myrshock. One of Figh Vadiso’s noble families, it appears: A husband and wife and daughter, with their retainers, relocating to the mainland. Their cargo was stripped. The passengers were of no interest to anyone, and I’ve no idea what happened to them. They may have been killed; I don’t know. What is known is that when the servants were inducted and welcomed as citizens, there was one maid who caught the new ruler’s eye.”

He looked out into the sky.

“There are some who were there, on board the Grand Easterly, at that meeting,” he said quietly. “They say she stood tall and smiled crooked at the ruler—not like one trying to ingratiate herself, or one terrified, but as if she liked what she saw.

“Women don’t have it well in the northern Shards,” he said. “Each island has its own customs and laws, and some of them are unpleasant.” He clasped his hands. “There are places where they sew women shut,” he said, and watched me. I met his eye: I do not intimidate. “Or cut them, excise what they were born with. Or keep them chained in houses to serve the men. The isle our boss was born to was not so harsh as that, but it . . . exaggerated certain traits that you might recognize from other cultures. From New Crobuzon, for example. A certain sacralization of the woman. A contempt masked as adoration. You understand, I’m sure. You published your books as by B. Coldwine. I’m sure you understand.”

That shook me; I admit it. That he knew this much about me, that he understood my reasons for that harmless little piece of obfuscation.

“On the boss’s island, the men go to sea and leave their wives and lovers on the land, and no amount of custom or tradition can chain legs closed. A man who loves a woman with a fierce enough passion—or says he does, or thinks he does—aches when he leaves her. He knows intimately how strong, how powerful her charms are. He himself succumbed to them, after all. So he must lessen them.

“On the boss’s island, a man who loves strongly enough will cut his woman’s face . . .” We watched each other, unmoving. “He’ll mark her, to make her his, inscribe his property, notch it like wood. Spoil her just enough that no other will want her.

“Those scars are freggios.

“Love, or lust, or something, some combination, overtook the boss. He courted the newcomer and quickly claimed her, with the masculine assertiveness he had been trained into. And by all accounts she welcomed his attentions and returned them, and she was his concubine. Until the day he decided she was his entirely, and with a kind of clumsy bravado, he drew his knife after coitus and cut her face.” Doul paused, then smiled with sudden and sincere pleasure.

“She was still; she let him do it . . . And then she took the knife and cut him back.”

“It was the making of them both,” he said softly.

“You can see the disingenuity. He was a remarkable boy to have risen so high so fast, but he was still a peasant playing peasant games. I don’t doubt he believed it when he told her that it was for love that he cut her, that he did not trust other men to resist her, but whether he did or not, it was a lie. He was marking territory, like a pissing dog. Telling others where his holdings began. And yet she cut him back.”

Doul was smiling at me again. “That was not expected. Property does not mark its owner. She did not fight him; while he marked her, she took him at his word. The blood, the split skin, the tissue and pain, the clot and the scar were for love, so they were hers to give as well as receive.

“Pretending that freggios were what he claimed they were, she changed them, and made them much more. Changing them, she changed him, too. Scarred his culture as well as his face. They found solace and strength in each other, then. They found an intensity and a connection in those wounds, wounds made suddenly pure.

“I do not know how he reacted, that first time. But that night she stopped being his courtesan and became his equal. They lost their names that night and became the Lovers. And we had two rulers on Garwater—two who ruled with more single-minded purpose than one ever had. And everything is open to them. She taught him that night how to remake rules, how always to go further. She made him like her. She was hungry for transformations.

“She remains so. I know that better than many: the eagerness with which she greeted me and my work, when I first came.” He spoke very softly, thoughtfully. “She takes the scraps of knowledge newcomers bring and makes them . . . remakes them with a drive and zeal that’s impossible to resist. However much you may want to.

“They reaffirm their purpose every day, those two. There are new freggios all the time. Their bodies and faces have become maps of their love. It’s a geography that changes, that becomes more manifest, as the years move. One for one, every time: marks of respect and equality.”

I said nothing—I had said nothing for many minutes—but Doul’s monologue had come to an end, and he waited for me to respond.

“Were you not there, then?” I asked finally.

“I came later,” he said.

“Press-ganged?” I said, astonished, but he shook his head again.

“I came of my own will,” he said. “I sought Armada out, a little more than ten years ago.”

“Why,” I said slowly, “are you telling me this?”

He shrugged a very little. “It’s important,” he said. “It’s important you understand. I saw you—you’re afraid of the scars. You should know what it is that you see. Who rules us, their motivation and passion. Drive. Intensity. It is the scars,” he said, “that give Garwater its strength.”

He nodded and left me then, abruptly. I waited for several minutes, but he did not reappear.

I am deeply perturbed. I do not understand what happened, why he spoke to me. Was he sent by the Lover? Did she instruct him to tell me her history, or was he operating on his own agenda?

Does he believe everything he told me?

The scars give Garwater its strength, he tells me, and I am left wondering if he is blind to another possibility. Has he not noticed, I wonder? Is it coincidence that the three most powerful people in Garwater, hence in Armada and hence on the seas, are outlanders? That they were not born within Armada’s confines? That they grew to cognition and agency unconstrained by the limits of what is, what remains, and cannot but be a mess of old boats, a little town—even if the most extraordinary one in the history of Bas-Lag—and that they can therefore see a world beyond its petty robberies and claustrophobic pride?

They are not beholden to Armada’s dynamics. What are their priorities?

I want to know the Lovers’ names.

Except when he fights (I remember that, and it terrifies me), Uther Doul’s face is almost motionless. It is compelling and a little tragic, and it is nigh impossible to tell what he thinks or believes. Whatever he says to me, I have seen the Lover’s scars, and they are ugly and unpleasant. And the fact that they bespeak some sordid ritual, some game for the emotionally arrested to play, does not change that.

They are ugly and unpleasant.

Chapter Twenty-two

Thirty-six hours after the aerostat had risen over Armada and headed away to the southwest, land began to appear beneath them.

Bellis had slept little. She was not tired, however, and rose before five on the second morning to watch the dawn from the stateroom.

When she entered, there were others already awake and watching: several of the crewmen, Tintinnabulum and his companions, and Uther Doul. Her heart sank a little at the sight of him. She found his manner—even more reserved and measured than her own—troubling, and she did not understand his interest in her.

He noticed her and wordlessly indicated the windows.

In the sunless predawn light, rocks were breaking the water below. It was hard to judge the size or distance of the land formations. A scatter-pattern of stones like whales’ backs, none more than a mile across, few larger than Armada itself. Bellis could see no birds or animals—nothing but bleak brown rock and the green of scrubland.

“We’ll reach the island within the hour,” someone said.

The airship hummed with vague industry, with preparations that Bellis did not care to understand. She returned to her berth and packed quickly, then sat in the stateroom in her black clothes, her thick carpetbag at her feet. Deep within it, nestled in the folds of her spare skirts, was the little leather pouch and its contents that Silas Fennec had given her, along with the letter she was writing.

The crew were walking quickly back and forth, barking incomprehensible orders to each other. Those of them who were not working congregated by the windows.

The airship had descended considerably. They were only a thousand feet or so above the water, and the face of the sea had grown more intricate. Its wrinkles had resolved themselves into wave shapes and foam and currents, and the darknesses and colors of reefs and weed forests—and was that a wreck?—below.

The island was ahead of them. Bellis shivered to see it, laid out so stark in the hot sea. It stretched perhaps thirty miles long and twenty across. It was jagged with dust-colored peaks and little mountains.

“Sunshit, I didn’t think I’d have to see this place again!” said Hedrigall in Sunglari-accented Salt. He pointed at the island’s farthest shore. “There’s more than a hundred and fifty miles between it and Gnurr Kett,” he continued. “They’re not strong in the air, the anophelii. Couldn’t last more than sixty miles. That’s why the Kettai let them live, and trade with them through the likes of me and my old comrades, knowing they’ll never make the mainland. That—” He jerked a thick green thumb. “—is a ghetto.”

The dirigibles were slanting, skirting the coastline. Bellis watched the island intently. There was nothing to see, no life apart from plants. With a sudden chill, Bellis realized that the skies were empty. There were no birds. Every other island they had passed had been a mass of shifting feathered bodies, the rocks that edged it smeared with guano. The gulls had surrounded every landmass in a little gusting corona, swooping to take fish from the warm seas, squabbling on thermals.

The air above the anophelii island’s volcanic cliffs was as dead as bone.

The aerostat passed over silent ocher hills. The inlands were hidden by a ridge of rock, a spine that ran parallel to the coast. There was a long silence broken only by the engines and the wind, and when someone finally did speak—shouting “Look!”—the sound seemed intrusive and defensive.

It was Tanner Sack, pointing at a little crabgrass meadow nestling in rocks, sheltered from the waves. The green was broken by a little clutch of moving white specks.

“Sheep,” said Hedrigall after a moment. “We’re nearing the bay. There must have been a delivery recently. There’ll be a few herds of them left for a while longer.”

The shape and nature of the coastline was changing. The stone spines and jags were giving way to lower, less antagonistic geography. There were short beaches of black shale; slopes of hard earth and ferns; low, bleached trees. Once or twice, Bellis saw farmyard animals, wandering feral: pigs, sheep, goats, cattle. Just a very few of them, here and there.

Inland a mile or two, there were ribbons of grey water, sluggish rivers oozing from the hills, intersecting and crisscrossing the island. The waters slowed over plateaus of flat land and burst their banks, diffusing and becoming pools and swampland, feeding white mango trees, vines, greenery as thick and cloying as vomit. In the distance, on the other edge of the island, Bellis saw stark shapes that she thought were ruins.

Below her there was motion.

She tried to track whatever it was, but it was too fast, too erratic. She was left with nothing more than an impression fleeting across her eye. Something had skated through the air, emerging from some dark hole in the rocks and entering another.

“What do they trade?” said Tanner Sack, without looking away from the landscape. “The sheep and pigs and whatnot get left here: your lot bring them and other stuff in from Dreer Samher, for the Kettai. What’s in it for them? What do the anophelii trade?”

Hedrigall stood back from the window and gave a curt laugh. “Books and intelligence, Tanner, man,” he said. “And flotsam and jetsam, driftwood, bits and pieces they find on the beach.”

There was more motion in the air below the dirigible, but Bellis simply could not focus on whatever it was that moved. She bit her lip, frustrated and nervous. She knew she was not imagining things. There was really only one thing the shapes could be. She was perturbed that no one else had mentioned them. Don’t they see? she thought. Why does no one say anything? Why don’t I?

The dirigible slowed, moving against a faint wind.

Surmounting a ridge of rockland, it was buffeted. There was an explosion of breath and whispers, incredulous excitement. Below them, in the shadows of hills patched barren and lush in random patterns, was a rocky bay. Anchored in the bay were three ships.

“We’re here,” Hedrigall whispered. “Those are Dreer Samher vessels. That’s Machinery Beach.”

The ships were galleons, ornately picked out in gold, surrounded, enclosed by cosseting rocks that jutted into the sea and curled around the natural harbor. Bellis realized she was holding her breath.

The sand and shale of the inlet’s beach was a dark red, dirty like old blood. It was broken by weirdly shaped boulders the size of torsos and houses. Bellis’ eyes skittered over the dark surface, and she saw trails, pathways scored in the matter of the shoreline. Beyond the boundary of stringy boscage that edged the beach, the trails became more defined. They entered rocky elevations that rose slowly from the earth to overlook the sea. The air was broken by heat waves where the sun baked the stone, and trees like olives and dwarf jungle species specked the slopes.

Bellis followed the trails winding up the scorched hillsides until (her breath stopping again) her eyes came to rest on a scattering of light-bleached houses, dwellings that extruded from the rocks like organic growth—the anophelii township.

There was no wind in the bay. There was a tiny grouping of clouds like paint dots around the sun, but heat blasted through them and reverberated around the enclosed rock walls.

There were no sounds of life. The tedious repetition of the sea seemed to underline the silence rather than break it. The dirigible hung quietly, its engines powered down. The Samheri boats creaked and shifted nearby. They were empty. No one had come to greet the airship.

Scabmettler guards in their bloodclot armor kept watch with cactacae as the passengers descended. Bellis touched land, crouching beside the rope ladder, and ran her fingers through the sand. Her breathing was quick and very loud in her head.

At first she was conscious of nothing but the novelty of being on ground that did not sway. She remembered her land-legs delightedly, only realizing at that moment that she had forgotten them. Then she became aware of her surroundings again, and felt the beach beneath her closely, and for the first time registered its strangeness.

She remembered the naïve woodcuts in Aum’s book. The stylized monochrome of the man in profile on the beach, broken mechanisms around him.

Machinery Beach, she thought, and looked out across the dirty-red sand and scree.

Some way off were the shapes she had taken to be boulders—huge things the size of rooms, breaking up the shoreline. They were engines. Squat and enormous and coated with rust and verdigris, long-forgotten appliances for unknown purposes, their pistons seized by age and salt.

There were smaller rocks, too, and Bellis saw that these were shards of the larger machines, bolts and pipework junctions; or finer, more intricate, and complete pieces; gauges and glasswork and compact steam-power engines. The pebbles were gears, cogs, flywheels, bolts, and screws.

Bellis looked down at her cupped hands. They were full of thousands of minuscule ratchets and gear wheels and ossified springs, like the innards of inconceivably tiny clocks. Each particle of wreckage a grain like sand, hard and sun-warmed, smaller than a crumb. Bellis let them sift from her hands, and her fingers were stained the dark blood color of the shoreline—painted with rust.

The beach was an imitation, a found sculpture mimicking nature in the materials of the junkyard. Every atom from some shattered machine.

When does this age from? How old is this? What happened here? thought Bellis. She was too numb to feel any but the most tired awe. What disaster, what violence? She imagined the seafloor around the bay—a reclaimed reef of decaying industry, the contents of a city’s factories allowed to collapse, pounded by waves and sun, oxidizing, bleeding with rust, breaking into their constituent parts and then into smaller shards, thrown back by the water onto the island’s edge, evolving into this freakish shore.

She picked up another handful of machine-sand, let it dissipate. She could smell the metal.

This is the flotsam Hedrigall meant, she realized. This is a graveyard of dead devices. There must be millions of secrets moldering here into rust-dust. They must sift through it, and scrub it clean, and offer the most promising bits for trade—two or three pieces picked randomly from a thousand-piece puzzle. Opaque and impenetrable, but if you could put it together, if you could make sense of it, what might you have?

She stumbled away from the rope ladder, listening to the crunch of ancient engines underfoot.

As the last of the passengers descended, the guards kept careful watch on the horizon, muttering. A little way from Bellis, the pen of livestock had been winched to the ground. It stank like a farmyard, and its inhabitants sounded noisily and stupidly into the still air.

“Close together and listen to me,” said the Lover harshly, and she was surrounded. The engineers and scientists had been scattering, dumbly running their fingers through the metal shale. A few, like Tanner Sack, had gone to the sea. (He had submerged briefly, with a sigh of pleasure.) For a moment, there was no sound except little breakers foaming on the rust shore.

“Now listen, if you want to live,” the Lover went on. People shifted, uneasy. “It’s a mile or two to the village, up those rocks overlooking this place.” They gazed up at them; the hillside looked empty. “Keep together. Take the weapon issued to you, but don’t use it unless you’re in immediate danger of your life. There are too many of us here, and too many untrained, and we don’t want to start shooting each other in panic. We’ll be flanked by cactacae and scabmettler guards, and they know how to use what they’re carrying, so hold fire wherever possible.

“The anophelii are fast,” she said. “Famined, and dangerous. You remember the briefings, I hope, so you know what we face. The menfolk are somewhere in that village, and we have to find them. A little way over there are the swamplands, and the waters. Where the women live. And if they hear or smell us, they’ll come. So move quickly. Is everybody ready?”

She indicated with her arms, and cactacae guards corralled them. They unlocked the animal pen, still attached like an anchor to the Trident by its chains. Bellis raised her eyebrow on seeing that the pigs and sheep wore collars and strained against leashes. The muscular cactacae held them in check.

“Then let’s go.”

It was a nightmarish journey from Machinery Beach to the hillside township. When it was done, and she thought back on it, days or weeks later, Bellis found it impossible to distinguish events into any coherent stream. There was no sense of time in her memories, nothing but snippets of images pieced into something like a dream.

There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears, and the rich smell of rot and sap; insects in relentless profusion, stinging and licking. Bellis has been given a flintlock, and (she remembered) holds it away from herself as if it stinks.

She is herded, shuffling with the other passengers—the solitary hotchi’s spines bristling and relaxing in nervous alternation, the khepri headlegs squirming—surrounded by those whose physiognomy makes them safe: the cactacae and the scabmettlers, who drag the livestock after them. The one group is bloodless, the other full of blood so sensitive it protects them. They carry guns and rivebows. Uther Doul is the only human guard. He holds weapons in each hand, and Bellis would swear that whenever she looks at him they have changed: knife and knife; gun and knife; gun and gun.

Looking out over the vine-smothered rocks and into clearings, down inland, over slopes of dense foliage and pools that look as thick as snot. Hearing sounds. Bursts of motion in the leaves, at first; nothing more offensive. But then the start of a horrible keening, impossible to pinpoint, as if the air itself is in pain.

The proliferation of that sound, all around them.

Bellis and her neighbors bump into each other, clumsy with terror and exhaustion and the wet heat, trying to watch all sides at once, and seeing the first signs of movement, shapes zigzagging through the trees like buffeted dust motes, always getting closer, an unstable mix of random motion and malign intent.

And then the first of the she-anophelii breaks the cover of the trees, running.

Like a woman bent double and then bent again against the grain of her bones, crooked and knotted into a stance subtly wrong. Her neck twisted too far and hard, her long bony shoulders thrown back, her flesh worm-white and her huge eyes open very wide, utterly emaciated, her breasts empty skin rags, her arms outstretched like twists of wire. Her legs judder insanely fast as she runs until she falls forward but does not hit the ground, continues toward them, just above the earth, her arms and legs dangling ungainly and predatory, as (Gods and Jabber and fuck) wings open on her back and take her weight, giant mosquito wings, nacreous paddles shudder into motion with that sudden vibrato whine, moving so fast they cannot be seen, and the terrible woman seems borne toward them below a patch of unclear air.

What happened next came back to Bellis again and again in memories and dreams.

Gazing hungrily, the mosquito-woman stretches her mouth open, spewing slaver, lips peeled back from toothless gums. She retches, and with a shocking motion a jag snaps from her mouth. A spit-wet proboscis, jutting a foot from her lips.

It extrudes from her in an organic movement, something like vomiting, but unmistakably and unsettlingly sexual. It seems to come from nowhere: her throat and head do not look long enough to contain it. She veers toward them on screaming wings, and from the undergrowth come others.

Memories were blurry. Bellis remained sure of the heat, and of what she had seen, but the immediacy of the images shocked her whenever she thought back. The landing party almost breaks up in sudden terror, and random shots are fired in dangerous, chaotic directions (Doul barking angrily hold fire).

Bellis sees the first of the flitting mosquito-women skirting the cactacae, uninterested in them. They fly instead for the scabmettler guards, alighting on them (the muscular men moving only slightly under the weight of the fatless winged women), stabbing mindlessly at them with their lancelike mouthparts, unable to penetrate the scabs that armor them. Bellis hears the snap of cut leashes as the terrified pigs and sheep scatter in a trail of shit and dust.

There are ten or twelve of the mosquito-women now (so many so quickly), and as the livestock bolt they turn instantly to that easier prey. They rise on those thin wings, their heads hunkered, their hips and limbs loose beneath them, dangling in the air like puppets suspended from their elongated shoulderblades, their dark proboscises still wet and extended; and they descend on the petrified animals. They overtake them easily, descending with their half-random motion to block their paths and intercept them, their arms outstretched, their fingers wide, tugging hold of hair and skin. Bellis watches (she remembered moving backward inexpertly, constantly, stumbling over the feet of those around her but staying upright through force of horror), aghast and hypnotized, as the first of the she-anophelii moves in to feed.

The woman-thing straddles a huge sow, pulling herself out of the air and wrapping her limbs around it as if it is a loved toy. Her head draws back, and the long mouth-jag extends a few inches extra, as smooth as a crossbow quarrel. Then the mosquito-woman jerks her face forward, her stretched-open mouth twisting, and she slams the proboscis into the body of the animal.

The pig screams and screams. Bellis still watches (her legs taking her away from that sight, but her eyes staying desperately fixed on it). The pig’s legs give way in sudden shock as its skin is punctured, as six, ten, twelve inches of chitin ease through the resistance of skin and muscle and infiltrate the deepest parts of its bloodstream. The mosquito-woman straddles the collapsed animal and pushes her mouth into it, and grinds her proboscis deep, and tenses her body (every muscle and tendon and vein visible through the shrunken skin) and begins to suck.

For a few seconds, the pig continues to scream. And then its voice gives out.

It is thinning.

Bellis can see it shrink.

Its skin shifts uneasily and begins to wrinkle. The tiniest trickles of blood ooze out from the imperfect seal where the anophelii mouthparts puncture it. Bellis watches in disbelief, but it is not her imagination—the pig is shrinking. Its legs kick with spastic terror, and then with the judder of dying nerves as its extremities are drained. Its fat shanks are compressing as its innards shrivel, drying. Its skin is well creased now, in tides and ridges all over its diminishing body. The color is leaving it.

And as the blood and health disappear from the sow, they enter the mosquito-woman.

Her belly swells. She attached herself to the pig a husk, gaunt and malnourished. As the pig lessens, she grows, becoming fatter at an astonishing rate, color flooding her from her distending stomach outward. She moves oily on the dying animal, growing sluggish and replete.

Bellis watches with sick fascination as the pints of pig blood pass fast through that bony fletch, rushing from one body into another.

The pig is dead now, its rucked skin sinking into new valleys between its drained muscles and its bones. The anophelius is fat and pinking. Her arms and legs have nearly doubled in girth, and the skin is now stretched around them. The swelling is mostly concentrated on her bosoms and belly and arse, which are obese now, but not soft like human fat. They look tumorous: taut, gore-swelled, and pendulous growths.

All around the clearing, the same is happening to the other animals. Some are adorned with one woman, some with two. All are shriveling, as if sun-dried and desiccated, and all the anophelii are growing gross and tight with blood.

It has taken that first mosquito-woman a minute and a half to suck the last of the liquid from the pig (Bellis could never shake the memories of that sight, or of the little sounds of the woman-thing’s satisfaction).

The anophelius rolls from the animal’s shrunken carcass, sleepy-eyed, drooling a little blood as her proboscis retracts. She withdraws, leaving the pig a sack of tubes and bone.

The hot air around Bellis is thick now with the stink of spew as her companions lose control of themselves at the sight of the anophelii feeding. Bellis does not vomit, but her mouth twists violently and she feels herself raising her pistol in what does not feel like anger or fear, but disgust.

But she does not fire. (And what would have happened if someone untrained as she had pulled the trigger? Bellis wondered much later, looking back.) The danger seems to have passed. The Armadans are moving on up the hill, past that little clearing and the smells of dung and hot blood, past more rocks and pestilential water, toward the township they had seen from the air.

The sequence of events became less blurred, less mashed together by heat and fear and disbelief. But then, at that point, at that moment, as Bellis retreated from that hot carnage of pig and sheep blood and drained offal, the repulsive frenzy of the anophelii repast and then (worse) their bloated torpor, a mosquito-woman looked up from the sheep she had arrived at too late to drain and saw their retreat. She hunched her shoulders and flew dangling toward them, her mouth agape and her proboscis dripping, her stomach only a little swelled by her sisters’ leftovers, eager for fresh meat, angling past the cactacae and scabmettler guards and bearing down on the terrified humans, her wings awail.

Bellis felt herself jerked by fear back toward that confused trash of disjointed images, and she saw Uther Doul step forward calmly into the mosquito-woman’s path, raise his hands (carrying two guns now) and wait until she was nearly upon him, till her mouthparts jutted at his face and he fired.

Heat and noise and black lead exploded from his weapons and burst the mosquito-woman’s stomach and face.

Even half-empty as she was, the woman’s gut split audibly, in a great gout of blood. She collapsed from the air, her shattered face runnelling in the dirt, her proboscis still extended, a greasy red slick soaking rapidly into the earth. Her body came to rest in front of Doul.

Bellis was back in linear time. She felt stunned, but remote from what she saw. Some yards away, the gorged anophelii did not notice their fallen sister. As the landing party turned on the steep path and headed into the foothills, the mosquito-women were beginning to haul their newly heavy bodies away from the now-bloodless carnage they left to rot. Swollen as grapes, they hung below their malevolently piping wings and flew slowly back toward their jungle.

Chapter Twenty-three

They waited, silent: the Lover, Doul, Tintinnabulum, Hedrigall, and Bellis. And standing before their visitors, their faces cocked in what looked like polite confusion, were two anophelii.

Bellis was astonished by the two mosquito-men. She had expected something dramatic, skin discolored by chitin, stiff little wings like their women’s.

They looked like nothing more or less than small men, bent a little by age. Their ocher robes were discolored with dust and the stains of plants. The older man was balding, and the arms protruding from his sleeves were extraordinarily thin. They had no lips, no jawbones, no teeth. Their mouths were sphincters, tight little rings of muscle that looked exactly like anuses. The skin on all sides simply slid in toward that hole.

“Bellis,” said the Lover, her voice hard, “try again.”

They had entered the town to the stares and astonishment of the mosquito-men.

Disheveled and sweating and dust-blind, the Armadan landing party had stumbled the last yards up the hill into the sudden shade of houses cut and built into the sides of the gorge that split the rock. There was little apparent plan to the township: little square dwellings sprawled up on the main slopes, in the sun, and swept as if spilt down the steep edges of the fissure itself, linked by chiseled steps and pathways. The chimneys of submerged chambers poked like mushrooms from the earth around them.

The town was punctuated with engines reclaimed from Machinery Beach, each piece scrubbed clean of rust, in hundreds of obscure shapes. Some moved; some were still. Those in the sunlight glinted. None was powered by the noisy steam pistons of New Crobuzon and Armada; there was no oily smoke in the air. These were heliotropic engines, Bellis supposed, their paddles and blades whirring in the hard sunlight, their cracked glass housings sucking it up, sending arcane energies down the wires that linked random houses. The longer wires were knotted together, from whatever short lengths had been salvaged.

On their flat roofs, on the sides of the hills, in the shade of the narrow cleft itself, and from the canopies of the gnarled trees around the township, from doorways and windows, the mosquito-men turned to stare. There was no sound at all, no whoops or shouts or gasps. Nothing but the astonished gaze of all those eyes.

Once, Bellis (with a horrible spasm of fear) thought she saw the drifting, meandering flight of a she-anophelius over some of the higher-up buildings. But the males nearby turned and began to throw stones at the figure, driving it away before it had spotted the Armadans or entered any of the houses.

They reached a kind of square, ringed by the same dirt-colored houses and the skeletal sun-engines, where the crevice widened and admitted light from the baked blue sky. At the far end, Bellis saw a split in the rocks and a jutting cliff, a precipitous path down to the sea. And here, finally, someone came to meet them: a little delegation of nervous anophelii males, bowing and ushering them forward, into a great hall in the stone of the hills.

In an inner room, lit by immensely long bored shafts full of light, by mirrors that refracted the day and recycled it in the mountain, two anophelii had come to stand before them, bowing politely, and Bellis (remembering that day in Salkrikaltor City, different language but the same job), had come forward and greeted them in her clearest High Kettai.

The anophelii had stood still, their expressions quizzical, not understanding a word.

Bellis tried again to make sense in the stilted eloquence of High Kettai. The anophelii looked at each other and emitted hissing noises like farts.

Seeing their mouth-sphincters twitch and dilate, Bellis real-ized the truth, and she wrote, rather than spoke, the High Kettai words.

I am named Bellis, she wrote. We have come very, very far to speak to your people. Do you understand me?

When she handed the paper to the anophelii, their eyes opened wide and they looked at each other and crooned enthusiastically. The older man took Bellis’ pen.

I am Mauril Crahn, he wrote. It is scores of years since we have had visitors such as you. He looked up at her, his eyes crinkling. Welcome to our home.

The anophelii hooting tongue had no written form. For them High Kettai was written language, but they had never heard it spoken. They could express themselves perfectly in elegant script, but they had no idea how it would sound. The very concept of High Kettai “sounding” was alien to them.

Over scores or hundreds of years, a symbiosis had built up between the Samheri sailors and the Gnurr Kett authorities in Kohnid. The Samheri cactacae came to the island with livestock and a few trade goods, and took their cut as middlemen. Kohnid bought from them whatever the anophelii gave.

Between them, they controlled the flow of information to the mosquito-people. They had carefully ensured that no language other than High Kettai reached the island’s shores, and that none of the anophelii ever left it.

The terrible memories of the Malarial Queendom abided. Kohnid was playing a game, keeping the brilliant anophelii as pet thinkers; giving them nothing that might make them powerful, or let them escape—Kohnid would not risk unleashing the she-anophelii on the world again—but just enough to think with. The Kettai would not allow anophelii access to any information outside of its control: the centuries-long maintenance of High Kettai as the island’s written language ensured that. And that way, anophelii science and philosophy were in the hands of the Kohnid elite, who were almost alone in being able to read it.

The jigsaw pieces of ancient technology that the anophelii possessed, the works of their philosophers must be quite astonishing, thought Bellis, to allow this convoluted system to continue. Each Samheri journey from Kohnid to the island would bring with it a few carefully chosen books, and sometimes commissions. Given these conditions, some Kohnid theorist might demand, and remembering the paradox laid out in your previous essay, what is the answer to the following problem? And handwritten anophelii works, under chosen Kettai names, made the return journey, in response to such questions, or to problems posed by the anophelii themselves, to be printed by Kohnid publishers—without payment. Sometimes they were doubtless claimed by some Kettai scholar as his or her own work, all adding to the prestige of the High Kettai canon.

The mosquito-people had been reduced to captive scholars.

The island’s ruins housed old texts, in the High Kettai language the anophelii could read, or in long-dead codes they carefully broke. And with the slow accretion of the books from Kohnid, and the written records of their ancestors, the anophelii also pursued their own investigations. Sometimes such a resulting work was sent overseas to the island’s masters in Kohnid. It might even be published.

That was what had happened to Krüach Aum’s book.

Two thousand years ago, the mosquito-people had ruled the southern lands in a short-lived nightmare of blood and plague and monstrous thirst. Bellis did not know how much the anophelii men knew of their own history, but they had no illusions about the nature of their own womenfolk.

How many did you kill? wrote Crahn. How many of the women?

And when, after a hesitation, Bellis wrote One, he nodded and responded, That is not so many.

The township was without rank. Crahn was not a ruler. But he was eager to help, and to tell the guests everything they might want to know. The anophelii responded to the Armadans with a courteous, measured fascination, a contemplative, almost abstract reaction. In their phlegmatic response, Bellis detected an alien psychology.

Bellis wrote the Lover’s and Tintinnabulum’s questions as quickly as she could. They had not yet broached the most important subject, the very reason they were on this island, when they heard a ruckus from the other room where their companions waited. Loud voices in Sunglari, and responses in shouted Salt.

The Dreer Samher trader-pirates stationed on the island had returned to their ships and had discovered the newcomers. A gaudily adorned cactus-man strode into the little room followed by two of his erstwhile compatriots, now Armadan cactacae, angrily remonstrating with him in Sunglari.

“Sunshit!” he yelled in accented Salt. “Who the fuck are you?” He held a massive cutlass in one hand, hefting it angrily. “This island is Kohnid territory, and it’s forbidden to come here. We’re their agents here, and we’re authorized to protect their fucking holdings. Tell me why I shouldn’t have you fucking killed here and now.”

“Ma’am,” said one of the Armadan cactacae, waving his hand wearily in introduction. “This is Nurjhitt Sengka, captain of the Tetneghi Dustheart.”

“Captain,” said the Lover, stepping forward, Uther Doul moving behind her like her shadow. “It’s good to meet you. We must talk.”

Sengka was not a freebooter, but an official Dreer Samher pirate. The Samheri’s regular stationing on the island was monotonous and easy and dull: nothing happened, nobody came, nobody went. Every month, or two, or six, a new Samheri mission would arrive from Kohnid or Dreer Samher with a cargo full of livestock for the she-anophelii, and perhaps some random collection of commodities for the men. The newcomers would relieve their bored compatriots, letting them go off with whatever brilliant essays and reclaimed scientific refuse they had gathered to trade.

Whoever was stationed on the island spent their time bickering and fighting and betting amongst themselves, ignoring the mosquito-women, visiting the men only to take what they needed by way of food or machinery. And officially, they were there to police the flow of information into the island, the linguistic purity that gave Kohnid its stranglehold—and to stand in the way of any anophelii escape.

The idea was ridiculous; no one ever came to the island. Very few sailors knew of it. There were occasional very rare cases of lost vessels arriving on the shore, but their ignorant crews generally suffered rapid death at the hands of the island’s women.

And no anophelii ever left.

Formally, therefore, the Armadan newcomers’ presence on the island was not forbidden under the agreement between Dreer Samher and Kohnid. Only High Kettai was being used, after all, and nothing had been brought in to trade. But the presence of strangers who could converse with the natives was unprecedented.

Sengka looked wildly around. When he realized that these bizarre intruders came from the mysterious boat city of Armada, his eyes widened. But they were courteous and seemed keen to explain themselves. And although he cast angry glances at the cactus-people who had once been his countrymen, and hissed insults at them, called them traitors and pretended disdain for the Lover, he did listen, and he let himself be led back to the large room where the Armadan party waited.

And while the Lover and the cactus guards and Uther Doul moved away, Tintinnabulum came to Bellis’ side. He gathered his long, white hair in a ponytail, blocking her from the view of the others with his powerful shoulders and arms.

“Don’t stop now,” he murmured. “Get to the point.”

Crahn. she wrote.

For a brief moment, she felt slightly hysterical with the absurdity of this. If she set foot outside, she knew, she risked instant and unpleasant death. Those ravenous mosquito-women would find her before very long, a sack of blood like her; they’d smell her out and siphon every drop out of her, drain her as easily as turning a spigot.

Yet within these sheltering walls, only an hour since she had seen the carnage on the path, a dead anophelius burst on the heat-split skin and bones of the drained animals, she was asking polite questions of an attentive host in a long-dead language. She shook her head.

We are looking for one of your people, she wrote. We need to speak to him. This is greatly important. Do you know one named Krüach Aum?

Aum, he responded, no slower or quicker than before, without a shred more or less interest, who fishes for old books in ruins. All of us know Aum.

I can bring him to you.

Chapter Twenty-four

Tanner Sack missed the sea.

His skin was blistering in the heat, and his tentacles felt sore.

He had waited for most of a day as the Lover and Tintinnabulum and Bellis Coldwine and the others conversed with the silent anophelii men. He and his companions had muttered to each other, had chewed their biltong and tried without success to ask for fresher food from their curious, reserved hosts.

“Stupid arse-faced pricks,” Tanner heard from some hungry men.

The Armadans were traumatized by the starving ferocity of the she-anophelii. They were conscious that their hosts’ mates lurked in the air just beyond the walls, that the placid silence of the township outside was misleading—that they were trapped.

Some of Tanner’s companions made nervous jokes about the she-anophelii. “Women,” they said, and laughed shakily about females of all species being bloodsuckers, and so on.

Tanner tried, for the sake of conviviality, but he could not bring himself to laugh at their idiocies.

There were two camps in the big, austere chamber. On one side were the Armadans, and on the other the Dreer Samher cactacae. They watched each other warily. Captain Sengka was engaged in fierce Sunglari discussion with Hedrigall and two other Armadan cactus-people, and his crew watched and listened uncertainly. When, finally, Sengka and his crew stormed out, the Armadans relaxed. Hedrigall walked slowly to the wall and sat beside Tanner.

“Well, he don’t like me much,” he said, and grinned wearily. “Kept calling me a traitor.” He rolled his eyes. “But he’s not going to do anything stupid. He’s scared of Armada. I told him we’d be gone quickly, and that we’d brought nothing and we’d take nothing, but I also implied that if he cut up rough, he’d be declaring war. There ain’t going to be any trouble.”

After a time, Hedrigall noticed how Tanner was endlessly stroking his skin, how he licked his fingers and soothed it down. He left the big chamber, and Tanner was deeply touched when the cactus-man came back, fifteen minutes later, carrying three fat leather waterskins full of brine. Tanner drooled them over himself and sluiced the water through his gills.

Anophelii men came in and watched the Armadans. They nodded to each other, and hooted and whistled. Tanner watched the herbivorous men eat, forcing handfuls of garish flowers into their tight mouth orifices and sucking, with the same force, he supposed, with which their women drained living meat. Then they would eject the spent petals with a little burst of air, crushed and tissue-thin, drained of nectar and juices, colorless.

The Armadan crew were left to thirst and sweat for hours as the Lover and Tintinnabulum made plans. Eventually, Hedrigall and several other cactacae left the chamber, led by an anophelius.

The light that came through the shafts in the rock began to ebb away. Dusk came fast. Through the little rock slits, and in reflections in mirrors, Tanner could see that the sky was violet.

They were barracked uncomfortably wherever they sat and lay. The anophelii scattered reeds thickly around the room. The night was hot. Tanner removed his stinking shirt and folded it for a pillow. He doused himself in more brine and saw that, around the room, the other Armadans were also attempting what limited ablutions they could.

He had never been so tired. He felt as if every spark of energy had been sucked from him and replaced with the night heat. He rested his head on a makeshift pillow, damp with his own sweat, and even on that hard floor, that thin and ineffectual layer of vegetation (the smell of pollen and plant dust strong), he was very quickly asleep.

When he woke he thought it was only minutes later, but he saw the daylight and groaned miserably. His head ached, and he drank desperately from the jugs of water left them.

As the Armadans woke, the Lover and Doul and Coldwine stepped from the little side room, accompanied by the cactacae who had set out the previous night. They looked tired and dusty, but they were smiling. A very old anophelius was with them, dressed in the same robes as all his fellows, and with the same expression of calm interest.

The Lover faced the assembled Armadans. “This,” she said, “is Krüach Aum.”

Krüach Aum stood beside her, bowing, his old eyes taking in the crowd.

“I know that many of you have been bemused by this trip,” the Lover said. “We’ve told you that there was something on this island that we need, that’s vital to the raising of the avanc. Well, this—” She indicated Aum. “—is what we need. Krüach Aum knows how to raise an avanc.” She waited for that to sink in.

“We’ve come here to learn from him. There are many processes involved. The problems of containment and control demand that we use engineering as sophisticated as our thaumaturgy and oceanology. Miss Coldwine will be translating for us. It’s a time-consuming process, so patience will be required.

“We’re hoping to be off this rock within a week or two. But that means working hard, and quickly.” She was silent for a moment. Her stern voice broke, and she gave an unexpected grin. “Congratulations to all of you. To all of us. This is a great, great day for Armada.”

And though most of those gathered had no real idea what was going on, her words had the intended effect, and Tanner joined in with the cheer.

The cactacae crew set up camp around the township. They found empty rooms safe from the she-anophelii, to house the Armadans in smaller groups and greater comfort.

The anophelii were as passionlessly curious as ever, keen to talk, keen to be involved. It was quickly clear that Aum had a dubious reputation: he lived and worked alone. But with the newcomers on the island, all the township’s best thinkers wanted to help. The weapons hidden on the Trident could not have been less needed. And out of politeness, the Lover allowed them all to join the consultations, though it was only Aum she listened to, and she told Bellis to précis all other contributions.

For the first five hours of the day, Aum sat in discussion with the Armadan scientists. They pored over his book and showed him the damaged appendix, and although, to their astonishment, he had no copies of the work himself, he was able to remember. With the help of an abacus and some of the cryptic engines scattered around, he began to fill in the missing information.

After eating—the cactacae had gathered for their crewmates enough edible plants and fish to supplement the dried rations—the engineers and builders studied with Krüach Aum. In the morning Tanner and his colleagues argued about strain thresholds and engine capacities, drew up rough blueprints, and came up with lists of questions that they put to Aum, shyly, in the afternoon.

The Lover and Tintinnabulum sat in on all sessions, beside Bellis Coldwine. She must be exhausted, Tanner thought with pity. Her writing hand was cramped and covered in ink, but she never complained or asked for a break. She only passed the questions and answers through herself endlessly, scrawling on innumerable reams of paper, translating Aum’s written replies into Salt.

At the end of each day came a short, fearful time as the humans, hotchi, and khepri ran in small groups to wherever they had been lodged. None had to spend more than thirty seconds in the open air, but still they were watched over by rivebow-wielding cactacae and male anophelii protecting their guests from their deadly females with sticks and rocks and klaxons.

There was another engineer already quartered in Tanner’s chambers, a woman in the further room. Tanner lay awake for a while.

“There’s another one to come,” said a cactus voice from outside his window, making them start. “Don’t bolt the door.”

Tanner blew out his candle and slept. But when, much later, Bellis Coldwine was escorted through the vestibule by a cactus guard, and crept in and bolted the door and stumbled, more exhausted than she had ever been before, through Tanner’s dark room into the one beyond, he woke and saw her.

Even in such a hot and strange a place as this, amid all the blood and the threat of violence, even so far from home, routine was powerful.

It took a day, no more, before the Armadans had their routine. The cactacae guards foraged and fished and escorted their fellow crew members, and hauled the Armadans’ rubbish, as the anophelii did, to the gorge at the rear of the village, onto the rock shelf and then into the sea.

Every morning Aum and his constantly shifting anophelii hangers-on debated and lectured Armada’s scientists, and every afternoon the same with the engineers. It was draining: intensely hot, ceaseless work. Bellis became semiconscious. She became a writing syntactical machine, existing only to parse and translate and scribble questions and read out answers.

For the most part, the meaning she imparted was opaque to her. On rare occasions she had to refer to the glossary in her own High Kettai monograph. She kept it hidden from the anophelii. She did not want to be responsible for them learning another language, breaking out of their prison.

There was no systematicity or coherence to the island’s library. Most of the works available were the most abstract theory. The authorities in Kohnid and Dreer Samher kept from their subjects any works they deemed dangerous. There was almost nothing that related the anophelii to the world outside. To find those, the anophelii had to search the ruins of their ancestors’ habitations on the other side of the island.

And sometimes they found fables, like the story of the man who raised the avanc.

Stories were self-generating. Little references in abstruse philosophical texts, footnotes, vague folk memories. The mosquito-people had their own etiolated legends.

Bellis did not see a raging curiosity about the world as she had expected. The anophelii seemed intrigued only by the most abstract of questions. But there appeared a glimmer of a more fierce, more earthed interest from Krüach Aum himself.

There are currents in the water, he wrote, that we can measure, that cannot be born in our seas.

Aum had started at the highest conceptual level and had proved to himself the reality of the avanc. The Armadan scientists sat spellbound as Bellis falteringly translated his story. From three or four scrawled equations to a page of logical propositions, mining what works of biology, oceanology, dimensional philosophy he could find. A hypothesis. Testing his results, checking the details of the story of the first summoning.

The scientists gasped and nodded excitedly at the equations and notations she copied into Salt.

And after eating, Bellis gathered her strength again and sat with the engineers.

Tanner Sack was one of the first to speak. “What manner of beast is it?” he said. “What’ll we need to bind it?”

Many of the engineers were press-ganged, and several were Remade. She was surrounded by criminals, Bellis realized, most from New Crobuzon. They spoke Salt with Dog Fenn and Badside accents, peppered with slum slang she had not heard for months, which made her blink with surprise. Their expertise was as arcane to her as the scientists’. They asked about the strength of steel and iron and various alloys, and the honeycomb structure of the chains below New Crobuzon, and the power of the avanc. Soon matters turned to steam engines and gas turbines, and rockmilk, and the gearwork of a harness, and bits and bridles the size of ships.

She knew it would be to her advantage to make sense of it all, but it was beyond her and she stopped trying.

That night, as one of the men was taken to his room, a she-anophelii came close to him, screaming gibberish, her hands extended, and a cactus guard shot her dead with his rivebow.

Bellis heard the thwacking report and watched through the window slits. The he-anophelii crooned with their sphincter mouths, and knelt beside her body, and felt her. Her mouth hung open, and her proboscis lolled like a massive stiff tongue. She had fed recently. Her still-plump body was cut almost in half by the rivebow’s massive, spinning chakri, and enormous gouts of blood were soaking into the earth and pooling in dusty slicks.

The males shook their heads. A he-anophelius beside her plucked at Bellis’ arms and wrote something on her pad.

Not necessary. She did not want to feed.

And then he explained to her, and Bellis’ head swam with the monstrousness of it.

Bellis was hungry to be alone. She had spent every minute of the day with others, and it exhausted her. So when the day’s tasks had ended, and the scientists were talking together, trying to agree on a direction for the next day’s research, she slipped briefly into the smaller side room, thinking it empty. It was not.

She made an apologetic noise and turned away, but Uther Doul spoke quickly.

“Please don’t leave,” he said.

She turned back, grasping the bag she carried, painfully aware of the weight of the box Silas had given her at the bottom of it. She stood by the doorway, waiting, her face immobile.

Doul had been training. He stood in the room’s center, relaxed, holding his sword. It was a straight blade, thin and edged on both sides, something over two feet long. It was not big or ornate or impressive, or carved with puissant signs.

The blade was white. It moved suddenly, flickered like water, soundless and impossible to follow, in a sudden murderous formation. And then it was sheathed, too fast for her to see.

“I’m done here, Miss Coldwine,” he said. “The room is yours.” But he did not leave.

Bellis nodded thank-you and sat, waiting.

“Let’s hope that unfortunate killing won’t sour our relations with the mosquito-men,” he said.

“It won’t,” said Bellis. “They hold no grudges when their womenfolk die. They remember enough to know it’s necessary.” He knows this, she thought suddenly, incredulous. He’s making conversation with me again.

But even suspicious as she was, the details she had been told were so ghastly and fascinating that she wanted to share them; she wanted to make someone else know them.

“They don’t know much history, the anophelii, but they know that the cactacae—the sapwalkers—aren’t the only people across the sea. They know about us, the bloodwalkers, and they know why usually none of us visit. They’ve forgotten the details of the Malarial Queendom, but they have a sense that their womenfolk . . . did wrong . . . centuries ago.” She paused to let that understatement sink in. “They treat them without . . . affection or distaste.”

It was a melancholy pragmatism. They bore their women no ill will. They coupled with them eagerly enough once in the year, but they ignored them where possible and killed them if necessary.

“She wasn’t trying to feed, you know,” Bellis went on. She kept her voice neutral. “She was full. They’re . . . they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding, screaming ravenous for all those weeks: it’s all they can think about. But when they’ve fed, when they’re full—really sated—there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates. And that’s the time they try to talk.

“He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are.”

Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. “They know. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

“But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours.” She saw that he understood.

“Their voices sound like ours,” she went on softly. “They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him.”

“It’s a strange sword,” she said a little later.

He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.

Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his flesh touched when he held the sword.

The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.

“May I touch it?”

Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.

“It’s ceramic,” he said. “More like china than iron.”

The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).

“It’ll cut deeper than bone,” Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. “This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give—it has no flex—but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong.”

“How strong?”

Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.

“Diamond,” he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).

“Where does it come from?” she said, but he did not answer her. “Is it from the same place as you?” She was surprised by her own persistence and . . . what? Bravery?

She did not feel as if she was being brave. Instead, she felt as if she and Uther Doul understood each other. He turned to her from the doorway and inclined his head in farewell.

“No,” he said. “It would be . . . hard to be less accurate.” For the first time, she saw a smile take him, very quickly.

“Good night,” he said.

Bellis took the solitary moments she had craved, steeped herself in her own company. She breathed deeply. And finally, she allowed herself to wonder about Uther Doul. She wondered why he was speaking to her, tolerating her company, respecting her, it seemed.

She could not read him, but she realized that she felt a faint connection to him, something woven out of shared cynicism, detachment, strength, understanding, and—yes—attraction. She did not know when or why she had stopped fearing him. She had no idea what he was doing.

Chapter Twenty-five

Two days became three, and four, and then a week had passed, every day in the inexact light of that little room. Bellis felt as if her eyes were atrophying, only able to see the earth shades inside the mountain, surrounded by halfhearted, edgeless shadows.

In the night, she would make the same short run across the open air (looking up eagerly to see naked light and colors, even the scorched colors of that sky). The mosquito whine of the women came at her sometimes, to her abject terror, and sometimes it did not. But always she huddled in the shelter of the cactus warrior or scabmettler who protected her.

Sometimes she could hear the scuffling and muttering of the she-anophelii outside the long window shafts. The mosquito-women were appalling, and strong, and their hunger was a force of almost elemental power. They would kill any bloodwalkers who landed, might drain an entire ship in a day and then lie bloated on the beach. For all that, there was something indelibly pathetic about the women of this ghetto island.

Bellis did not know what chain of circumstances had allowed the Malarial Queendom to exist, but they were unthinkable to her. It was impossible to imagine these shrieking creatures on other shores, their petty terrorism despoiling half a continent.

The food was as monotonous as the setting. Bellis’ tongue was quite numb to the fish-and-grass taste, and she chewed stolidly on whatever rust-nourished sealife the cactacae caught in the bay, whatever edible weed they uprooted.

The Samheri officers tolerated them uneasily, but did not trust them. Captain Sengka continued to curse the cactus Armadans in rapid Sunglari as turncoats and renegades.

With each morning’s fevered calculations, the scientists became more and more excited. The stacks of their notes and calculations grew massive. The ember that distinguished Krüach Aum from his compatriots—which Bellis thought of as true curiosity—waxed.

Bellis struggled but did not fail. She was translating now without even trying to understand what she said, just passing on what was said as if she were an analytical engine breaking down and reconstituting formulae. She knew that to the men and women hunched over the table, debating with Aum, she was more or less invisible.

She focused on voices as if they were music: the measured sonority of Tintinnabulum, the staccato excitement of Faber, the seesawing oboe tones of the bio-philosopher whose name Bellis could never remember.

Aum was tireless. Bellis felt faintly dismayed by exhaustion when she sat with Tanner Sack and the other engineers in the afternoon, but Aum continued without apparent difficulty, shifting his attention from the conceptual problems and philosophy of the avancs to practical issues of bait, and control, and capture of something the size of an island. And when the failing light and general fatigue forced the day’s work to end, it was never Aum who suggested it.

Bellis could not fail to realize that research problems were being overcome, one by one. It had not taken long for Aum to rewrite his data appendix, and then for the Armadans to point out errors and miscalculations, holes in his research. The excitement of the scientists was palpable; they were almost drunk on it. It was a problem—a project—of unthinkable scale, and yet one by one, the problems, the objections and obstacles, were being overcome.

They were teetering on the edge of something extraordinary. The fact of its possibility was utterly giddying.

Bellis did not fraternize with the Armadans, but she could not spend her days without speaking to them. “There you go. Get that down you,” one might say, handing her a bowl of dull stew, and to refuse a word of thanks would have been a quite unnecessary violence.

Occasionally in the evenings—amid the Armadans’ dice and singsongs, which entranced the sough-voiced anophelii—she found herself on the edge of conversations.

The only one she knew by name was Tanner Sack. The fact that she had traveled above him on the Terpsichoria, free while he had been incarcerated, had poisoned any chance of trust between them, she supposed, though she had the sense that he was an open man. He was one of those who would make a little attempt to include her when he spoke. Bellis now came closer than she had ever been to Armadan society. She was allowed to listen to stories.

Most were about secrets. She heard about the chains that dangled below Armada: ancient, hidden for tens of decades; years’ worth of work, and many ships’ worth of metal. “Long before the Lovers made up their minds what to do with them,” the teller of one story said, “this was tried before.”

Uther Doul was prey to the storytellers, too.

“He comes from the land of the dead,” someone said once, conspiratorially. “Old Doul was born more’n three thousand years ago. It was him started the Contumancy. He was born a slave in the Ghosthead Empire, and he stole that sword, Mightblade, and fought free, and destroyed the empire. He died. But a warrior like him, greatest fighter there’s ever been, he’s the only man was able to fight his way out of the shadeworld, back to the living.”

Those listening made good-humored, derisory noises. They did not believe it, of course, but then they did not know what to believe about Uther Doul.

Doul himself spent his days quietly. The main person whose company he sought, the only one who came anything close to a friend, seemed to be Hedrigall. The cactus aeronaut and the human warrior often talked quietly at the edge of the room. They muttered in quick undertones, as if they were ashamed of friendship.

There was only one other person with whom Uther Doul was prepared to spend time, and to whom he talked, and that was Bellis.

It had not taken her long to realize that the apparently chance meetings, the brief pleasantries, were not coincidental. In an elliptical and tentative way, he was trying to make friends with her.

Bellis could not make sense of him, and she did not try to second-guess him. She trusted herself to cope. Though a sense of danger always remained, part of her enjoyed the encounters—the formal air, the slightest sense of flirtation. It was hardly coquetry. She did not compromise her dignity with simpering suggestiveness. But she was drawn to him, and she scolded herself for that.

Bellis thought of Silas. Not with any sense of guilt or betrayal—the idea of that made her pout in disdain. But she remembered the time he had taken her to the glad’ fight, specifically to see Uther Doul. That’s what’s trying to stop us leaving, he had told her, and she could not afford to forget it. Why, she asked herself, would you risk spending time with Doul?

Deep in her bag, she felt the weight of the box Silas had given her. She was acutely aware that she had a job to do on this island (one she must plan soon). It placed her very directly against Doul.

Bellis realized why she let their conversations continue. It was rare that she felt herself in the company of someone with as much or more control over his own reactions to the world, and its reception of them, as she had. Uther Doul was one. That was why they respected each other. To speak simply, without smiling, to someone else with the same manner; to know that of her would have intimidated most people but did not fluster him, and that the same was true the other way round: that was rare, and a pleasure.

Bellis felt that they should be looking out over a city, at night. They should be on a balcony. They should be wandering through backstreets, their hands in their pockets.

Instead they were in a small room that jutted off the central hall. They stood near one of the window slits, and Bellis was desperately sick of the colors of rock. She stared at the little patch of night-lit black hungrily.

“Do you understand it all?” Bellis asked.

Doul moved his head ambiguously. “Enough,” he said slowly, “to know that they’re close. I have very different expertise. My research will come after this. Your job will change soon. You’ll be asked to start teaching him Salt.”

Bellis blinked, and Doul nodded.

“It’s a breach of Samheri and Kohnid laws, but we’re not bringing new knowledge to the island. Aum will come with us.”

Of course, thought Bellis.

“So . . .” Doul continued. “So we return.” His wonderful voice was low. “With our prize. It’s a monumental project, what we’re attempting. Armada’s been stationed at a seam of oil and rockmilk since we left. Drilling, storing what’s needed for the invocation. We’ll make for the sinkholes. And then we use our fuel and our bait and the shackles we’ll build, and so on, and we . . . hook ourselves an avanc.” It sounded so bathetic. There was a long silence after that.

“And then,” said Doul very softly, “our work begins.”

Bellis did not speak.

I knew you were playing games with me, she thought coolly.

What work begins?

It did not surprise her. It was no great shock to realize that the avanc was only the start of the Lovers’ project, that there was more going on, that there was some grand scheme behind all this effort, an agenda to which virtually no one—certainly not she—was party.

Except that now, in one way, she was.

She did not understand why Doul was telling her. His motives were impenetrable. All Bellis knew was that she was being used. She did not even resent it, she realized—she would expect no less.

The following morning, the sun came up on the body of one of the human engineers. His skeleton was constricted by his newly tight skin: his arms were curled tight around his chest, and his hands were claws; his spine was arced as if with great age.

In the cavity below his ribs, his skin clung to the rubbery piping of his drained intestines. His eyes were half-shriveled like drying fruit, baking in the sun. The gums in his open mouth were almost as white as his teeth.

Surrounded by crooning mosquito-men, Hedrigall turned him over (the body rocking on its curved spine like a wooden horse) and found the fat hole between his ribs where the she-anophelius had punctured him.

The Armadans had become complacent. The death dismayed them.

“Stupid fucker,” Bellis heard Tanner Sack mutter. “What was he fucking doing?” She watched him turn from the window. He did not want to see Hedrigall bending down and with a gruff tenderness picking up the pathetic remains, cradling the skin-and-bone man and walking out of the village, to bury him.

But even that tragedy could not dampen the agitation in the air. Even in that shock and grief, Bellis could feel an excitement among the scientists. Even those who had known the engineer felt their sadness vie with a very different feeling.

“Look at this!” hissed Théobal, a pirate and a theoretical oceanologer. He waved a thick document, pages sewn together at one end. “We’ve damn well got it! This is the math we need, the thaumaturgy, the biology.”

Bellis looked at the papers with a vague astonishment. All of that came through me, she thought.

When Aum entered, they had Bellis write, We need you to help us. Will you leave this place and learn our language and help us call this avanc from the sea? Will you come with us?

And though it was almost impossible to read that sphincter-mouthed face, Bellis was sure that she saw fear and joy in Aum’s eyes.

He said yes, of course.

The news passed quickly around the village, and the he-anophelii came in great numbers to croon with Aum and hiss their feelings. Their happiness? Bellis wondered. Their jealousy? Grief?

Some of them looked at the Armadan party with something akin to hunger, she thought. Their abstraction from the world was tenuous, and could be broken, as Aum appeared to have broken his.

“We leave in two days,” said the Lover, and there was a rush of blood from Bellis’ chest so quick it hurt her. She had completely neglected her commission. New Crobuzon relied on her. She felt despondency take her and begin to pull her down. This will not happen, she thought quickly. It is not too late.

The crew were delighted at the thought of leaving, of escaping this cloying air and those voracious women. Bellis, however, was desperate for more time, for a few more days. She thought again of that dried-up corpse, but not for very long. She was terrified of despairing.

That night as the scabmettlers and cactacae escorted their vulnerable comrades to their beds, she sat alone, massaging her hand, breathing deep, trying fearfully to work out some plan, some way to get to the Dreer Samher ship. For brief moments she considered deserting. Demanding Captain Sengka’s mercy and staying on board. Or stowing away. Anything to see New Crobuzon again. But she knew she could not. As soon as she was missed, the Lover would order the Dreer Samher ships searched, and the Samheri would not refuse them. And then she would be caught, and her package would be undelivered, and New Crobuzon would be in terrible danger.

And besides, she cautiously let herself remember, she still had no way of reaching the Samheri ship.

Bellis heard a faint sound from one of the adjoining rooms. She came closer to the closed door.

It was the Lover’s voice. She could not hear the words, but the firm, hard voice was unmistakable. She sounded as if she was singing gently, like a mother to her child. Hushed and very intense, there was something in those sounds that made Bellis shiver and close her eyes. She was listening to a concentration of emotion that almost made her head swim.

Bellis leaned against the wall and heard emotions that were not hers. She could not tell if they affirmed love, or the most draining kind of obsession. But still she waited, her eyes on the door, parasitic like the mosquito-women, steeping herself in stolen feelings.

And after some minutes, when the sounds were done and Bellis had moved away, the Lover emerged. Her heavy features were calm. She saw Bellis watching her, and met her eyes without shame or pugnacity. Blood was leaking sluggish as molasses from a new wound in the Lover’s face, a long split in the skin from the right corner of her lip, under her chin and down toward the hollow of her neck.

The Lover had stanched most of the blood, and only a few fat drops welled up like sweat, broke, and ran, marking her skin.

The women watched each other for seconds. Bellis felt as if they shared no language. The gulf between them giddied her.

Chapter Twenty-six

That night Bellis roused herself many hours after everyone had gone to sleep.

She removed the sweat-damp sheet that covered her and stood. The air was still warm, even in these dark hours. She picked up Silas’ package from below her pillow, pulled aside the curtain, and walked slow and quiet through the room where Tanner lay wrapped in shadows on his pallet. When she reached the wooden door she leaned her head against it and felt its grain on her skin.

Bellis was afraid.

She peered very carefully through the window and saw a cactus-man guard wandering through the deserted square, from doorway to doorway, checking them idly, moving on. He was some way from her, and she thought she could open the door and run without him seeing or hearing her.

And then?

Bellis could see nothing in the sky. There was no threatening whine, no voracious insectile woman with claw-hands and jutting mouth, hungry for her blood. She put her hand on the bolt and waited—waited to hear or see one of the she-anophelii, for confirmation, so that she could avoid her (easier to hide if you know where it is), and she thought about that leather-and-bone sack she had seen that morning, which had once been a man. She froze, her hand like wire on the door.

“What you doing?”

The words came in a hard whisper from behind her. Bellis spun, her hands gripping her shift. Tanner had sat up and was staring at her from within his dark alcove.

She moved a little, and he stood. She saw the odd encumbrances of tentacles spill from his midriff. He faced her, his stance tense and suspicious. He looked as if he was about to attack her. And yet he whispered, and something in that reassured her.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. He stood in the entranceway to hear her, and his face was as hard and untrusting as she had ever seen it. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” she whispered. “I just . . . I had to . . .” And her inventiveness fled her: she did not know what she would say she had had to do. Her words dried up.

“What are you doing?” he said. Slow and angry and curious, he spoke to her in Ragamoll.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and shook her head. “I felt . . .” She held her breath and looked at him again, her eyes steady.

“Can’t open that bolt,” he said.

He was looking at the package in her hands, and with an effort, Bellis did not try to hide it or move her fingers nervously, but kept it in plain view as if it was nothing important.

“What is it, call of nature? Was that what it was? You’ll have to use the pot, lady. You can’t be shamed of things like that here. You saw what happened to William.”

She straightened then and nodded, keeping her face immobile, and walked back to where her bed lay. “Sleep better, won’t you,” said Tanner Sack behind her, and settled himself slowly. At the curtain between the rooms, Bellis turned briefly to look at him. He sat up, obviously waiting and listening, and setting her teeth she pulled the curtain to.

For a few moments there was silence. Then Tanner heard the sound of a tiny little spray, a few grudging drops, and he grinned humorlessly into his sheet. A few feet from him, separated by the curtain, Bellis stood up from the chamberpot, her face set and furious.

Through her humiliated anger, she grasped at something. Began to shape a hope, an idea.

The next day was the Armadans’ last full day on the island.

The scientists put together their reams of paper and their sketches, talking and laughing like children. Even the taciturn Tintinnabulum and his companions seemed buoyed up. All around Bellis schedules and plans were taking shape, and it seemed like the avanc was caught in all but fact.

The Lover flitted into the discussions and out again, a heavy smile on her, her new cut red and shining. Only Uther Doul was impassive—Uther Doul and Bellis herself. Their eyes met, across the room. Motionless, the only still points in the bustling hall, they shared a moment of some superior feeling akin to scorn.

All day, the anophelii came and went, their sedate, monkish manner shaken. They were very sorry to see the newcomers go, realizing they were soon to be bereft of the sudden influx of theories and impressions that they had brought.

Bellis watched Krüach Aum and saw how like a child the old anophelius was. He watched his new companions packing what bags and clothes and books they had brought, and he tried to copy them, though he had nothing. He left the hall and returned a little while later with a bundle of rags and edges of scrap paper that he collected and tied together at the top in a crude imitation of a traveling sack. It made Bellis shiver to watch.

Deep in her own bag, Bellis could feel Silas’ package: the letters, the necklace, the box, the wax, the ring. Tonight, she told herself, and felt panic. Tonight, come what may.

For the rest of the short day she tracked the sun’s passage. In the late afternoon, when the light had become thick and slow and every shape bled shadows, dread overtook her. Because she realized that there was no way she could cross past the swamps and the territories of the murderous mosquito-women.

Bellis looked up in alarm as the door was thrown open.

Captain Sengka stepped forward into the room, flanked by two of his crew.

The three cactacae stood at the entrance, their arms crossed. They were big men, even for their race. Their vegetable muscles bunched around their sashes and loincloths. Light gleamed on their jewelry and on their weapons.

Sengka pointed his massive finger at Krüach Aum. “This anophelius,” he announced, “is going nowhere.”

No one moved. After several still seconds, the Lover stepped forward.

Sengka spoke before she could. “What did you think, Captain?” he said, disgusted. “Captain? Is that what I should fucking call you, woman? What did you think? I’ve turned a blind sun-fucked eye on your presence here, which I did not have to do. I’ve put up with your communication with the natives, which is a breach of security risking a new fucking Malarial Age . . .” The Lover shook her head impatiently at this hyperbole, but Sengka continued. “I’ve waited patiently for you to get the fuck off this island, and what? You think you can smuggle one of these creatures off-land without my knowledge? You think I’d let you go?

“Your vessels will be searched,” he said decisively. “Any contraband lifted from Machinery Beach, any anophelii books or treatises, any heliotypes of the island will be confiscated.” He indicated Aum again and shook his head incredulously. “Have you read history, woman? You want to take an anophelius out?”

Krüach Aum watched the altercation with wide eyes.

“Captain Sengka,” said the Lover. Bellis had never seen her more alive with presence, more magnificent. “No one would ever criticize your concern for safety, or your commitment to your commission. But you know as well as I that the male anophelius is a harmless herbivore. We have no intention of bringing out any but this one.”

“I will not have it!” Sengka shouted. “Sunshit, this system is absolute, and it’s absolute because we can learn the lessons of history. No anophelii are to leave this island. That is a condition of their being allowed to live. There are no exceptions.”

“I’m tiring of this, Captain.” Bellis could not but admire the Lover’s calm, cold and hard as iron. “Krüach Aum is leaving with us. We have no wish to antagonize Dreer Samher, but we are taking this anophelius.” She turned her back on him and began to walk away.

“My men on Machinery Beach,” he said, and she paused, then turned back to him. He drew a huge pistol and held it loose, dangling down. The Armadans were quite still. “Trained cactacae fighters,” Sengka said. “Defy me and you will not leave this island alive.” So slowly that the motion did not seem threatening, he raised his gun and pointed it at the Lover. “This anophelius . . . Aum, you said . . . he is coming with me.”

The guards all around the room were poised on the edge of motion. Their hands fluttered over their swords and bows and pistols. Scabmettlers in cracked armor and huge cactacae, their eyes moved quickly from Sengka to the Lover and back again.

The Lover did not look at any of them. Instead, Bellis saw her catch the eye of Uther Doul.

Doul walked forward, placing himself between the Lover and the gun.

“Captain Sengka,” he said in that beautiful voice. He stood still, the pistol now trained on his head, looking up at the cactus-man, more than a foot taller and vastly more massive than he. He stared into the barrel of the gun as he spoke, as if it were Sengka’s eye. “It falls to me to bid you good-bye.”

The captain looked down and seemed momentarily uncertain. He drew back his free hand then, his biceps knotting enormously under his skin, his meaty fist tensed and ready to swing, bristling with thorns. He was moving slowly, obviously hoping not to hit Doul, but to intimidate him into submission.

Doul reached out with both his hands, as if supplicating. He paused, and there was a sudden snapping motion of such speed that Bellis—who had expected it, who had known that something of the sort would happen—could not possibly follow it. Sengka was reeling back, shocked, holding his throat where Doul had jabbed him with stiff fingers (not hard but like a warning, finding a space between those vicious spines and taking the breath from him). Doul held the gun now, still pointing toward his own skull, trapped between his flat palms like something granted him in prayer. He kept his eyes on Sengka and whispered to him, words that Bellis could not hear.

(Bellis’ heart is slamming. Doul’s actions shatter her. Whether an attack is brutal or muted, the motion itself, its preternatural speed and perfection, makes it seem like an assault on the order of things, as if time and gravity can no more withstand Uther Doul than flesh.)

The two cactacae standing behind Sengka stepped forward, sluggish and outraged. They reached to their belts, drawing weapons, and the gun held in Doul’s frozen applause flickered and faced them, and flickered again and was clenched in his outstretched right hand, pointed directly first at one and then (instantaneously) the other sailor.

(There is no movement. The three cactacae are appalled at this velocity and control that border on thaumaturgy.)

Doul shifted again, the gun leaving his fingers and spinning out of reach. His white sword was in his hand. There were two reports, and Sengka’s crew members yelled in pain, in quick succession, their hands snapping away from their weapons, now clutched in front of them, wrists split.

The sword’s tip was at Sengka’s throat now, and the cactus-man stared at Doul with fear and hatred.

“I hit your men with the flat of my blade, Captain,” said Doul. “Don’t make me show you the edge.”

Sengka and his men backed away, retreating out of his range, through the door and into the last of the daylight. Doul waited by the entrance, his sword extended into the open air.

All around the room a sound was building, a rhythmic muttering, a triumphant, awed bark. Bellis remembered it. She had heard it before.

“Doul!” the men and women of Armada chanted. “Doul! Doul! Doul!”

As they had at the glad’ circus, as if he were a deity, as if he could grant them wishes, as if they were chanting in church. Their adorations were not loud, but they were fervent and grimly joyous, and ceaseless, and in perfect time. They enraged Sengka, who heard in them a taunt.

He glared back at Doul, framed in the doorway.

“Look at you,” he shouted furiously. “You coward, you pig-man, you fucking cheat! What demon did you let fuck you in return for those skills, pig-man? You won’t leave this fucking place.”

He was silent then, suddenly, his voice collapsing, as Uther Doul stepped out of the room, into what the cactacae had thought of as the safety of the open air. The Armadans gasped, but most of them kept chanting.

Bellis was at the door immediately, ready to slam it against any she-anophelii. She saw Doul stalking without hesitation toward Nurjhitt Sengka, his blade held poised. She could hear him speaking.

“I know you’re angry, Captain,” he said softly. “Control yourself, though. There’s no danger in Aum coming with us, and you know that. It’ll be his last contact with this island. You came to forbid it because you felt your authority leaching from you. That was a miscalculation, but so far only two of your men have seen this.”

The three cactacae were ranged a little way around him, their eyes meeting and parting again, wondering if they could rush him. Bellis was shoved aside suddenly as Hedrigall and several other Armadan cactacae and scabmettlers came to stand outside. They did not approach the stand-off.

“You will not stop us leaving, Captain,” Doul went on. “You don’t want to risk war with Armada. And besides, you know as well as I that it’s not my crew or even my boss you want to punish, it’s me. And that . . . ,” he finished softly, “will not happen.”

Bellis heard the sound, then: the high drone of anophelii women approaching. She gasped, and heard others gasp, too. Sengka and his men began to look up shiftily, as if trying to avoid being seen.

Uther Doul’s eyes did not move from Captain Sengka’s face. A scudding shape cut across the sky, and Bellis pinched her mouth closed. The chant of “Doul!” had dwindled, but it continued almost subliminally. No one yelled out to him that he was in danger. They all knew that if they had heard the anophelii, he certainly had.

As the sound of their wings approached, Doul moved closer to the captain, suddenly, till he was staring very close into Sengka’s eyes.

“Do we understand each other, Captain?” he said, and Sengka bellowed and tried to grab Doul and crush him in a thorned bear hug. But Doul’s hands flickered in Sengka’s face then swung down to block his arm, and then Doul was standing a few feet back, and the cactus-man was doubled up and cursing as sap dripped from his smashed nose. Sengka’s crewmen watched with a kind of appalled indecision.

Doul turned his back to them then, and raised his sword to meet the first of the mosquito-women who came for him. Bellis stopped breathing. The she-anophelius was suddenly visible, plummeting through screaming air, a starved shape. The jag erupted from her mouth. She skirted over the earth, irregular and very fast, her arms outstretched, slavering and starving.

For long moments she was the only thing that moved.

Uther Doul was still, waiting for her, his sword held vertically on his right. And then suddenly, when the anophelius was so close that Bellis thought she could smell her, so that her proboscis seemed to be touching Doul’s flesh, his arm was suddenly stretched across his body, the sword still vertical and immobile but on the other side of him, and the mosquito-woman’s head and left forearm were tumbling free and bloody across the dry earth as her body crashed to the ground beyond him. Thick, sluggish gore streaked Doul’s blade, and the corpse and the dust.

Doul had moved again, and was turning, leaping up, reaching with his hands as if he were plucking a fruit, spitting the second she-anophelius (which Bellis had not even seen) as she flew over his head, and then twisting, pulling her out of the air on the end of his blade and flicking her to the ground, where she lay screaming and drooling and still trying to reach him.

He dispatched her quickly, to Bellis’ appalled relief.

And then the sky was quiet, and Doul had turned again to Sengka and was wiping his blade.

“This is the last you’ll hear of me, or any of us, Captain Sengka,” he assured the cactus-man, who stared at him with more fear than hatred now, and whose eyes took in the bloody corpses of those two mosquito-women, each stronger than a man. “Go now. This can end here.”

Then again the hateful sound of the she-anophelii, and Bellis almost cried out at the thought of more carnage. The humming grew closer, and Sengka’s eyes grew wide. He stood for a moment longer, looking quickly around him for the ravenous she-anophelii, a part of him still hoping that they might kill Doul, but knowing that they would not.

Doul did not move, no matter that the sound grew closer.

“Sunshit!” Sengka shouted, and turned away, defeated, waving his hands to bring his men with him. They walked quickly away.

Bellis knew that they wanted to get away before any more of the she-anophelii attacked and were killed. Not because they cared for the terrible woman-things, but because the sight of Doul’s mastery was appalling to them.

Uther Doul waited until the three cactus-people had disappeared. Only then did he turn, calmly, resheathing his sword, and walk back to the room.

The sound of wings was very close by that time, but mercifully, they were a little too slow, and they did not reach him. Bellis heard the screaming wings dissipate as the mosquito-women scattered.

Doul reentered the room, and the shout of his name went up again, proud and insistent like a battle cry. And he acknowledged it this time, bowed his head and raised his arms to the height of his shoulders, his palms outstretched. He stood immobile, lowering his eyes, as if adrift on the sound.

And it was night again, the last night, and Bellis was in her room, on her bed of dusty straw, Silas’ package in her hands.

Tanner Sack did not sleep. He was too wired from the excitement of the day, the fights. He was caught up in astonishment at what he now knew, what he had learned from Krüach Aum. Only tiny fragments of a much larger theory, but his new knowledge, the scale of the commission expected of him, was dizzying. Too dizzying to let him sleep.

And, besides, he was waiting for something.

It came between one and two in the morning. The curtain to the women’s room was drawn back, very gently, and Bellis Coldwine crept across the room.

Tanner twisted his mouth in a hard smile. He had no idea what it was that she had been doing the previous night, but it was obvious that pissing had not been on her mind. He gave a half smile, half wince as he thought of his little cruelty, forcing her into such a performance. He had felt somewhat guilty afterward, though the thought of the prim, tight Miss Coldwine squeezing out a few drops for his benefit had kept him grinning all the next day.

He had known then that her business, whatever it was, was unfinished, and that she would come back.

Tanner watched her. She did not know he was awake. He could see her standing by the door in her white underdress, peering through the window. She was holding something. It would be that leather packet she had tried not to draw his attention to the previous night.

He felt curiosity about her actions, and a spark of cruelty, some redirected revenge for his mistreatment on the Terpsichoria settling on Bellis. Those feelings had stopped him from informing Doul or the Lover of her actions.

Bellis stood and looked, then hunkered down and rummaged silently in her package, and stood and looked again and bent and stood and so on. Her hand hovered ineffectually around the bolt.

Tanner Sack stood and walked soundlessly toward her; she was too engrossed with her indecision to notice him. He stood a few feet behind her, watching her, irritated and amused by her irresolution, until he had had enough and he spoke.

“Got to go again, have you?” he whispered sardonically, and Bellis spun around to face him, and he saw with shock and shame that she was crying.

His mean little smile disappeared instantly.

Tears were pouring from Bellis Coldwine’s eyes, but she did not utter a sob. She was breathing hard, and each deep breath shook and threatened to break, but she was quite silent. Her expression was fierce and controlled, her eyes intense and bloodshot. She looked like something cornered.

Furiously, she wiped her eyes and nose.

Tanner tried to speak, but her glare shook him, and it was only with an effort that he could utter words. “Now, there, now,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean anything by that . . .”

“What . . . do you want?” she whispered.

Chastened but not cowed, Tanner looked down at the package in her hands.

“What’s the matter with you, then?” he said. “What’s that? Trying to stow away, are you? Hoping the Samheri’ll take you home?” As he spoke he felt his anger growing again, until he had to struggle to control it. “Want to tell Mayor Rudgutter how badly you was treated on the pirate ship, is that it, miss? Let them know about Armada so’s they can try to hunt us down, and gather me and the likes of me and put us back in the fucking shit below the decks? Slaves for the colonies?”

Bellis was staring at him in a dignified, tearful rage. There was a long pause, and below the skin of her still, set face, Tanner saw her make a resolution.

“Read it,” she hissed suddenly. She slapped a long letter into his hands and slumped against the door.

“ ‘Status seven’?” he muttered. “What the fuck is a Code Arrowhead?” Bellis said nothing. She had stopped crying. She stared at him, sullen as a child (but now there is something in the back of her eyes, some hope).

Tanner continued, hacking his way through the thickets of code and finding trails of sense, places where meaning became suddenly and shockingly clear.

“ ‘Arrival of kissing magi’?” he whispered incredulously. “ ‘Canker to be clotted by wormtroopers’? ‘Algae-bombs’? What the fuck is this? This is about some fucking invasion! What the fuck is this?” Bellis watched him.

“This,” she echoed him remorselessly, “is about some fucking invasion.”

She kept him in a cruel silence for several seconds and then told him.

He leaned back, gripping the paper, staring sightlessly at its seal, running his fingers through the chain on Silas’ tag.

“You’re right about me, you know,” said Bellis. They whispered, to keep the woman in the other room from waking. Bellis’ voice sounded dead. “You are right,” she repeated. “Armada is not my place. I can see you. You think, ‘I wouldn’t trust that uptown bitch.’ ”

Tanner shook his head, trying to disagree, but she would not let him.

“You’re right. I’m not trustworthy. I want to go home, Tanner Sack. And if I could open a door and walk through and be in Brock Marsh, or Salacus Fields, or Mafaton or Ludmead or anywhere in New Crobuzon, then by Jabber I would walk through it.”

Tanner almost winced at her intensity.

“But I can’t,” she went on. “And yes, there was a time when I imagined rescue. I imagined the navy sailing in to whisk me home. But there are two things in the way of that.

“I want to go home, Sack. But . . .” She hesitated and slumped a little. “But there were others on the Terpsichoria without that urge. And I know what it would mean . . . for you, and for the others . . . for all the Crobuzoner Remade . . . to be . . . ‘rescued.’ ” She turned her eyes to him in an unflinching stare. “And you can believe me or not, as you like, but that’s not something I want. I have no illusions about New Crobuzon, about the transportation. You know nothing about my circumstances, Tanner Sack. You don’t know anything about what forced me onto that fucking loathsome ship.

“No matter how I want to return home,” she said, “I know that what’s best for me isn’t so for you, and I’d not willingly be party to that. And that’s true,” she said suddenly, as if in surprise, as if to herself. “I lost that argument. I concede. That is true.”

She hesitated, then looked up at him.

“And even if you think I’m full of nothing but lies, Mr. Sack, there’s always the second factor: There is nothing I can do. I can’t stow away with the Samheri; I can’t give directions to the New Crobuzon navy. I’m stuck with Armada. I’m damn well stuck with it.”

“So who’s Silas Fennec?” he said. “And what is this?” He waved the letter.

“Fennec is a Crobuzoner agent, no less marooned than me. Only with information,” she said coldly. “Information about a fucking invasion.”

“You want it to fall?” she demanded. “Godspit, I understand you’ve no love for the place. Why in Jabber’s name should you have? But do you really want New Crobuzon to fall?” Her voice was suddenly very hard. “Have you no friends left there? No family? There’s nothing left in the whole fucking city you’d preserve? You wouldn’t mind it falling to The Gengris?”

A little to the south of Wynion Street, in Pelorus Fields, was a tiny market. It appeared in a mews behind a warehouse on Shundays and Dustdays. It was too small to have a name.

It was a shoe market. Secondhand, new, stolen, imperfect, and perfect. Clogs, slippers, boots, and others.

For some years it had been Tanner’s favorite place in New Crobuzon. Not that he bought any more shoes than anyone else, but he enjoyed walking the short length of the mews, past the tables of leather and canvas, listening to the shouts of the vendors.

There were several small cafés on that little street, and he had known the proprietors and the regulars well. When he had no work and a little money, he might spend hours in the ivy-covered Boland’s Coffees, arguing and idling with Boland and Yvan Curlough and Sluchnedsher the vodyanoi, taking pity on mad Spiral Jacobs and buying him a drink.

Tanner had spent many days there, in a haze of smoke and tea and coffee, watching the shoes and the hours ebb away through Boland’s imperfect windows. He could live without those days, for Jabber’s sake. It wasn’t as if they were a drug. It wasn’t as if he lay awake missing them at night.

But they were what he thought of, instantly, when Bellis asked him if he cared whether the city fell.

Of course the thought of New Crobuzon and all those people he knew (whom he had not thought of for some time), and all the places he had been, all broken and destroyed and drowned by the grindylow (figures who existed only in a nightmare, shadow form in his head), of course that appalled him. Of course he would not wish for that.

But the immediacy of his own reaction astonished him. There was nothing intellectual, nothing thought out about it. He looked through the window into that sweltering hot island night and remembered looking through those other windows, of thick and mottled glass, onto the shoe market.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers? Whyn’t you think they’d help try to get a message to the city?”

Bellis shucked her shoulders in a false, silent laugh.

“Do you really think,” she said slowly, “that they would care? Do you think they’d put themselves out? Send a boat, maybe? Pay for a message? You think they’d risk uncovering themselves? You think they’d go to all that effort, just to save a city that would destroy them if it had the slightest chance?”

“You’re wrong,” he said, uncertain. “There’s enough Crobuzoners among the press-ganged who’d care.”

“Nobody knows,” she hissed. “Only Fennec and I know, and if we spread the word, they’ll discredit us, write us off as troublemakers, dump us at sea, burn the message. Godsdammit, what if you’re wrong?” She stared at him until he shifted in her gaze. “You think they’ll care? You think they won’t let New Crobuzon drown? If we told them and you were wrong, it would be over—our only chance gone. Do you see what’s at stake? You want to risk it? Really?”

With a hollowness in his throat, Tanner realized that what she said made sense.

“And that is why I’m sitting here crying like a cretin,” she spat. “Because getting this message, and this proof, and this bribe to the Samheri is the only chance we have to save New Crobuzon. Do you see? To save it. And I’ve been standing here, frozen, because I can’t think of a way to get to the beach. Because I’m terrified of those woman-things out there. I do not want to die, and dawn is coming, and I can’t go out there, and I have to. And it’s more than a mile to the beach.” She looked at him carefully, and then away. “I don’t know what to do.”

They could hear the cactacae guard walking through the moonlit township, from house to house. Tanner and Bellis sat facing each other, leaning against the walls, their eyes fixed.

Tanner looked again at the letter he held. There was the seal. He held out his hands, and Bellis gave him the rest of her little bundle. She kept her face composed. He read the letter to the Samheri pirates. The reward was generous, he thought, but hardly excessive if it meant saving New Crobuzon.

Saving it, keeping it safe from harm.

He went through each letter again, line by line. Armada was not mentioned.

He looked at the necklace with its little tag, its name and symbol. There was nothing to link this to Armada. Nothing to tell the Crobuzoner government where to find him. Bellis watched him from her silence. She knew what he was. He could sense the hope in her. He picked up the big ring, examined its intricate inverted seal, troughs for peaks and vice versa. He felt hypnotized by it. It meant more than one thing to him, like New Crobuzon.

The quiet went on while he turned the package over and over in his hands, ran his fingers over the nub of sealing wax, and the ring, and the long letter with its dreadful warning.

There was his Remaking to remember, but that was not all. There were places and people. There was more than one side to New Crobuzon.

Tanner Sack was loyal to Garwater, and he felt the passion of that loyalty inside him, beside a sad affection for New Crobuzon—a kind of melancholic regretful fondness. For the shoe market, and for other things. The two emotions flickered inside him and circled each other like fish.

He thought of his old city all blasted, destroyed.

“It’s true,” he whispered slowly. “It’s a mile or more to Machinery Beach, down the hill past the swamps and all that, where the women live.”

He jerked his head, suddenly indicating the other end of the township, the cleft in the rocks with the waves like oil below.

“But it’s only a few yards from here to the sea.”

Interlude V

Tanner Sack

It don’t take much.

Keep my eyes on the window (Bellis Coldwine herself crouched and waiting hiding behind me. Nervous I reckon that I’m playing her but still she’s alight with hope). Waiting till the guard wanders off around a corner, away from the plaza and out of sight.

—Don’t you move, I tell her, and she shakes her head most fervent.—Don’t you move an inch from here (I’m putting it off now, scared as I am). Don’t you shift a muscle till you hear me knocking.

She’s to open the bolt. She’s to watch make sure no anophelii push their way in while that door’s unlocked. She’s to wait as long as it takes till I come back.

And then I’m nodding, that leather bag of hers fastened and folded tight and rubbed with wax to keep the water out, held by my gut as if I clutch a wound, and she’s pulled that door to and I’m out, in the starlight, in the air, in the hot night, with the mosquito-women all around me.

Tanner Sack does not hesitate. He bolts toward the chasm that splits the rear of the village like its anus, from where the rubbish is thrown into the sea.

He runs with his head down, blind and quite terrified, hurtling toward the crack in the rock. His nerves scream and his body arcs as each part of him fights to be nearest to the water.

He is sure he can hear the sound of the mosquito wings.

It is only five seconds that he is out under the sky listening to the wind and the night insects until his feet touch the flat rock that perches like a balcony over the sea. The air is still, and the darkness cossets him more tightly as he plunges into the shadow-stained gap in the mountain. For a moment his feet skitter as he hesitates and considers a more laborious and careful descent by the thin path that winds in tight, back and forth, down the stone, but it is too late: his legs have taken him on and out, as if he hears the whine of a she-anophelius, and he has left the rock and is falling.

There is nothing but air beneath him, more than fifty feet of air, and then the slickly moving water that glints like iron. He has seen the movement of the sea in the chasm below. And he is a sea creature now, and he can read the shapes of the currents. He knows the water beneath is deep, and so it proves to be.

He pulls himself up tight, and the surf opens to him with a plunging sound and smashes the air from his lungs, and he opens his mouth with the shock of it and breathes the water across his poor, desiccated gills as the sea seals itself above him again, taking him into its body. It makes him welcome, little microbe that he is.

There is a blissful time, when he drifts unmoving in the dark water. The space around him is giddying, the safety of it. No mosquito-women come here (he thinks then of other predators, and is for a moment a little less secure).

Tanner feels the weight of the package in its greased pouch. He holds it against his belly and kicks out with his webbed toes. It has been so long since he has swum. He feels as if his skin is blossoming in the water, his pores opening like flowers.

The black is not absolute. As his pupils dilate, he can make out varying shades of darkness: submerged crags, the detritus of the village, the split into the open sea, and the unremitting pitch of the deep. He swims through the hole in the cliff and feels the flow of the water change. Above him the waves chew the shore like something senile and toothless.

His bearings, his directions, are clear. Little presences glide past him, little night fishes. Tanner is reaching out around him with his tentacles, swimming low until they feel the edges of rock and he begins to swim around the coil of coast. His tentacles are braver than he. He pushes them inquisitive as an octopus into holes in the stone from which he would snatch away his hands. They are the most aquatic part of him, those appendages, and he accepts their lead.

Tanner swims around the edges of the anophelii island. He feels anemones and urchins and realizes with sudden sadness that this is the first time he has swum close enough to the seabed to sense its life, and it is almost certainly the last, and it is too dark to see. He can only imagine the gnarls of sand and stone over which he swims, the spurs of rock and dead wood that must look furry with weed, the rich colors that light would reveal.

Minutes of urgent swimming pass. This coastal sea tastes different from the open ocean around Armada. These waters are a thicker stew. The taste of tiny life and death suffuses him.

And then very suddenly the taste of rust.

Machinery Beach thinks Tanner. He has swum around a convolution in the island’s outline, into the bay. His suckers caress new things: decomposing iron, engines scabbed by the sea. The water above this bed of iron is awash with metal salts and tastes to him of blood.

At the moon-glittering surface above him are three big shapes, the Samheri ships, occluding what little light there is. Their stubby chains taut in the water, their anchors at rest amid the bones of much older metal artifacts.

Tanner angles up, rising, feeling the water expand. He raises his hands, still clutching the package. The shade of the biggest ship is directly in his path.

The cactacae from Dreer Samher bluster at the sight of him, mimicking anger, threatening him with upraised fists and spined forearms, but they are dissembling. They are puzzled by this bedraggled Remade man who has scaled their chains to stand dripping on their deck, looking nervously at the sky, waiting for the sailors to take him below.

“Let me talk to the captain, lads,” he says to them in Salt again and again, fearful but determined. And after their threats do not deter him, they bring him into the ship’s candlelit darkness.

They lead him past the treasury, where the spoils of their trade and their battles are stored. The kitchen where the smell of rotting vegetation and stew is strong. They take him through corridors of cages where angry chimpanzees scream and rattle their bars. The cactacae are too heavy and their thick digits too imprecise to scuttle the rigging. The primates are trained from birth to obey whistled and shouted commands, capable of unfurling and tying and hanging sails like experts, without ever knowing what it is they do.

The bored apes are hidden here from the hunger of the mosquito-women.

Sengka sits quietly in his cabin, making Tanner Sack stand drying his face and hands nervously with a rag. With his huge green arms resting on his desk, his hands clasped, Sengka looks unnervingly like a human bureaucrat. The same suspicious patience.

He is a politician. He knows as soon as he sees Tanner’s unlikely figure that something illicit is occurring, something beyond the purview of the Armadan authorities. In case it is something that he alone can take advantage of, he dismisses the guards. They leave with sulky looks, curiosity not assuaged.

There are some seconds of silence.

“So tell me,” says Sengka, eventually. He does not bother with preamble, and Tanner Sack (skin drooling brine on the matting, hands clutching his package, feeling fearful and guilty, full of treachery that he does not want to commit) respects that.

Inside the wax-treated leather and the box, the contents remain dry.

He hands over the shorter letter, the promise to the bearer, without a word.

Sengka reads slowly, very carefully, time and again. Tanner waits.

When he finally looks up, Sengka’s face gives away nothing, (but he sets the letter very carefully to one side).

“What,” he says, “would you like me to deliver?”

Again without words, Tanner pulls out the heavy box and shows it. He removes the ring and the wax and turns the open container toward Sengka, showing him the letter and the necklace within.

The captain examines the rough necklace, pursing his lips as if unimpressed. His hand hovers over the longer letter.

“I’d carry nothing I wasn’t allowed to read,” he says. “It might say ‘Disregard the other letter.’ I’m sure you understand that. I’d only let you seal it after I’ve seen what’s within.”

Tanner nods.

It takes Captain Sengka a very long time to scan that dense, coded letter from Silas to his city. He is not reading it—he cannot; his Ragamoll is not good enough. He is looking for words that concern him: cactus, Dreer Samher, pirate. There are none. There seems to be no double cross here. When he is done, he looks up quizzically.

“What does it mean?” he says. Tanner shrugs quickly.

“I don’t know, Captain,” he says, “truly. Makes little more sense to me than you. All I know is that’s information that New Crobuzon needs.”

Sengka nods to him sympathetically, considering his options. Turn the man away and do nothing. Kill him now (easily done) and take his seal. Deliver the package; don’t deliver it. Hand the man over to the Armadan woman, the leader he is so obviously betraying, though how and for what Sengka cannot make out. But Nurjhitt Sengka is intrigued by this situation, and by this bold little intruder. He bears him no ill will. And he cannot make out for whom the man works, which aegis protects him.

Captain Sengka is unwilling to risk war with Armada, and even less with New Crobuzon. There is nothing in the letter to compromise us, he thinks, and cannot, though he tries, see a reason not to act as courier.

At the worst the letter is not honored, after he has gone a very long way out of his usual trading paths. But will that be a catastrophe? He will be in the richest city in the world, and he is a trader as well as a pirate. It would not be a good outcome, he thinks, and it is not an easy journey or a short one, but perhaps it is worth it? For the possibility?

The possibility that the letter (with the city’s seal, with the authority of its procurator) will be honored.

They stand together to complete this secret deal. Tanner seals the long letter with the ring. He nestles Silas Fennec’s necklace (And who is he? the question comes again) into the cushioned box and covers it with both letters, folded. He locks the box, and then drools more of the wax all over its seam. He pushes his old city’s ring into it as it dries, and when he pulls it away he is faced by the city’s heraldic seal in miniature, in greasy bas-relief.

He ties the fastened box back in its drab leather bag, and Sengka takes it from him and locks it in his sea chest.

The two watch each other a while.

“I’ll not go on about what I’ll do if I find you’ve betrayed me,” says Sengka. It is an absurd threat: each man knows that he will never see the other again.

Tanner dips his head.

“My captain,” he says slowly, “she can’t know.” It hurts him to say that, and he must remind himself fervently of the letter’s contents, of the reason for secrecy. He keeps his eyes level, meets Captain Sengka’s gaze, gives away nothing. The captain does not torment him with conspiratorial winks or smiles, but only nods.

“You’re sure?” says Sengka.

Tanner Sack nods. He is looking around nervously, on the prow of the ship, fearful for the telltale mosquito sounds. The captain is fascinated anew by Tanner’s refusal to accept food or wine or money. He is intrigued by this man’s impenetrable mission.

“Thank you, Captain,” says Tanner, and shakes the cactus-man’s thorn-plucked hand.

Watching Tanner as he leaps from the guardrail, Captain Sengka leans forward, half smiling, oddly warm to the fierce little human who has visited him. He stays on deck for some time, watching the ripples that Tanner leaves behind. And when they have been assimilated by the waves, he looks up into the night, untroubled by the sounds of the she-anophelii who will do no more than circle him, sniffing eagerly, failing to smell blood.

He thinks about what he will say to his officers, the new orders he will give in the morning, when the Armadans are gone. He wonders wryly how they will react. They will be aghast. Intrigued.

Tanner Sack is swimming doggedly back to the split in the cliffs. He anticipates the terrifying climb up that staggered path, practicing the movement of kicking out from the rock should the mosquito-women come, hurtling back into the sea.

He is unhappy. It does not help to think that he had to do it.

He wishes suddenly that the sea would do what poets and painters promise of it: that it would wash everything away so that he could start again, that it would make everything new. The water sluices through him as if he were hollow, and he closes his eyes as he moves, and imagines it cleansing him from the inside.

Tanner’s fist is clenched around the ugly seal ring. He wishes his memories would wash out of him, but they are tenacious as his innards.

He stops suddenly in the middle of the sea, suspended fifty feet below the surface, hanging like a condemned man in the black water. This is my home, he tells himself, but takes no comfort from it. Tanner feels a rage in him, a rage that he controls, sadness as much as anger, and loneliness. He thinks of Shekel and Angevine (as he has done scores of times).

He reaches out deliberately and opens his hand, and the heavy Crobuzoner ring pitches instantly away.

It is so black, the sense of his own pale skin is more memory than sight. He can only imagine the ring falling from his palm. Plunging. Falling for a long time. Coming to rest at last in a snarl of rock or lost engine parts. Threading perhaps by chance onto some frond of weed, some finger of coral—a mindless, contingent affectation.

And then, and then. Ground down by the endless motion of the water. Not swallowed as he tries to imagine, not lost forever. Reconstituted. Until one day, years or centuries from now, it will resurface, thrown up by submarine upheavals. Diminished perhaps by the implacable currents. And even if the gnawing of brine has been absolute, if the ring is dissipated, its atoms will rise to the light and add to Machinery Beach.

The sea forgets nothing, forgives nothing, whatever we’re told, thinks Tanner.

He should swim on, and he will soon; he’ll return and clamber up dripping into the mosquito township. Tentacles flailing like fly whisks, he will scuttle back to the door where Bellis will admit him (he knows she’ll be waiting). And the job will be done and the city (the old city, his first city) safe, perhaps. But for now he can’t move.

Tanner is thinking of all the things he has still to see. All the things he has been told are out there in the water. The ghost ships, the melted ships, the basalt islands. The plains of ossified waves where the water is grey and solid, where the sea has died. Places where the water is boiling. The gessin homelands. Steam-storms. The Scar. He is thinking about the ring below him, hidden in the weeds.

It’s all still there, he thinks.

There is no redemption in the sea.

Interlude VI

Elsewhere

The whales are dead. Without these vast, stupid guides, the going is harder.

Brother, have we lost the trail?

There are many possibilities.

Once again they are just a cabal of dark bodies above the base of the sea. They slide through blood-warm water.

Around them, the salinae are anxious. Miles off, thousands of feet below the waves, something is shaking the crust of the world.

Can you taste it?

Amid the millions of mineral particles that eddy in the sea are some in unusual strengths: splintered flint (shards and dust), little gobs of oil, and the intense, unearthly residue of rockmilk.

What are they doing?

What are they doing?

The taste of the sea here is reminiscent. This is drool that the hunters can taste; this is the world’s spittle. It dribbles (they remember) from ragged mouths cut by the platforms that suck up what they find, where beside concrete plinths men in inefficient swaddlings of leather and glass gaze wide, and are easily stolen and questioned and killed.

The floating city is drilling.

The currents here are labyrinthine, a morass of competing flows that dissipate the impurities in convoluted chains, taste-trails that make little sense, little pockets of different dirts.

They are hard to follow.

The whales are dead.

And what of others? Dolphins (willful) or manatee (slow and too stupid) or?

There are none suitable; we are alone.

There are others, of course, who might be called from the deep sea, but they are not trackers. Their work is very different.

Alone, but still the hunters can hunt. With a patience that is implacable (that does not sit well with this hot, quick place), they continue searching, teasing through the skeins of flavor and pollution and rumor, finding the path and taking it.

They are much closer to their quarry than they were before.

Even so, this warm water is hard, and sticky and prickling, and disorienting. The hunters circle, chasing ghost spoor and lies and illusions. They cannot quite, cannot quite find the trail.

Part Five:

Storms

Chapter Twenty-seven

Dockday 9th Soluary 1780/Ninth Markindi Hawkbill Quarto 6/317. Trident

He speaks to me again.

Uther Doul has decided that we will be—what? Friends? Companions? Discussants?

Since we left the island, the crew have been bustling, and the rest of us have sat quiet and watched and waited. I have been numb. Ever since Tanner Sack returned last night—wet and salt-stained and terrified by his short time under the open sky—I have been unable to settle. I shift in my seat and think about that precious letter, that ugly tin necklace—a priceless proof—and the long journey that awaits them. Tanner Sack has told me that Sengka agreed to ferry them. It is a long way, an arduous journey. I hope he does not change his mind. I pray that Silas has offered enticement enough.

Tanner Sack and I avoid each other’s eyes. We shift past each other in the Trident’s luxurious gondola, and we are stiff with guilt. I do not know him or he me: that is our consensus.

I have spent my hours watching Krüach Aum.

It is affecting to see him. It is moving.

He is shaking with fascination and excitement. His eyes are stretched wide, and his puckered sphincter-mouth is dilating and contracting with his breath. He moves—not quite running, but if it is a walk it is an undignified and frantic one—from window to window, staring at the engines that power the vessel, going to the pilot’s control booth at the front, to the privies, to the berths, and up into the great cathedral of the balloon itself, filled with the gasbags.

Aum can communicate with no one but me, and I expected him to hanker for my services. But, no, I have nothing to do. He is content to watch. I need only sit here and watch him, trotting past me this way and that like a child.

He has spent his lifetime on that rock. He is gorging on what is around him now.

Doul approached me. As before (that first time) he sat opposite me, his arms gently crossed, his eyes impassive. He spoke in his lovely voice.

This time I felt congested with terror—as if he had seen what I did with Tanner Sack—but I could face him with the calm he would expect.

I remain convinced that we understand each other, Doul and I. That this is what underlies the connection I feel, and I have used this conviction. He sees me (I am sure) struggling to control the fear I feel in seeing him, and he respects me for not giving in to nervousness at facing the legendary Uther Doul . . .

Of course my nervousness is that he will discover that I am a traitor. But that does not occur to him.

We watched Aum, without words for a long time. Eventually, Doul spoke. (I am never the one to break silence.)

“Now that we have him,” he said, “I can’t see anything that could stop the invocation. Armada will soon enter a new period.”

“What of the ridings that are unhappy about this?” I asked.

“Certainly there are some who have concerns,” he said, “but imagine it. Currently the city crawls. With the avanc at our control . . . harnessed to a beast like that, there’s nothing we couldn’t do. We could cross the world in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us now.” He paused and moved his eyes briefly. “We could go to places currently denied us,” he said, his voice lowering.

There it was again: a hint at some motive undisclosed.

Silas and I have only learnt half the story. There is more to this project than the conjuring of the avanc. Having thought myself to have uncovered Armada’s secrets, I dislike this sudden sense of ignorance. I dislike it strongly.

“To the lands of the dead, maybe?” I said slowly. “To the shadeworld and back?”

I spoke as if idly, citing the rumors I had heard about him. To bait him into correcting me. I want to know the truth about the project, and I want to know the truth about him.

Doul astonished me then. I had expected perhaps some elliptical hint, some vague suggestions as to his origin. He gave me much more than that.

It must be part of his own project, the creation of some kind of link between us (I cannot yet work out what kind) but for whatever reason, he gave me much more.

“It’s a chain of whispers,” he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private.

“When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you’re at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them.”

If these were not his exact words they are like them. He speaks like this, in monologues that sound scripted. My silence was not begrudging—it was an audience’s.

“At my end of the chain is the truth,” he continued. He took my hand suddenly and shockingly and placed my two fingers on the slow pulse in his wrist. “I was born in your lifetime. More than three millennia after the Contumancy—do they still credit me with that? There’s no coming back from the world of the dead.” Beat beat beat went the pulse, languid like some cold-blooded lizard.

I know these stories are for children, I thought. I know you’re no revenant. And you know I know that. Do you just want me touching you?

“Not the world of the dead,” he continued. “But it’s true that I come from a place where the dead walk. I was born and raised in High Cromlech.”

It was all I could do not to cry out. As it was, I am sure my eyes must have spasmed wide.

Ask me six months ago and I would not have been certain that High Cromlech existed. I knew it only as a vague half-imagined place of zombie factories and the aristocratic dead. A place where the ghouls are hungry.

Then Silas tells me that he has been, that he has lived there—and I believe him. But still, his descriptions are more dreamlike than exact. Only the most nebulous and austere visions.

And now I know a second person who is familiar with that place? And not a traveler this time, but a native?

I realized that I was pressing the artery in Doul’s pulse hard. Gently he disengaged from my fingers.

“It’s a misconception,” he said, “to think that High Cromlech is all thanati. The quick are there, too.” (I am listening intently to him now, trying to detect his accent.) “We are a minority, it’s true. And of those born every year, many are farm-bred, kept in cages till they’re of strength, when they can be snuffed and recast as zombies. Others are raised by the aristocracy until they come of age, and are slain and welcomed to dead society. But . . .”

His voice petered out, and he became introspective for a moment. “But then there’s Liveside. The ghetto. That’s where the true quick live. My mother was prosperous. We lived at the better end.

“There are jobs that only the living can do. Some are manual, too dangerous to risk giving to zombies—they’re expensive to animate, but one can always breed more of the quick.” His voice was deadpan. “And for those lucky enough, for the cream—the livemen and livewives, the quick gentry—there are the taboo jobs that the thanati won’t touch, at which a quick can make a decent living.

“My mother made enough that she chose to put herself down, so that she could have herself embalmed and revivified by the necrurgeon. Not high caste, but she became thanati. Everyone knew when Livewife Doul became Deadwife Doul. But I was not there. I had left.”

I do not know why he told me all this.

“I grew up,” he said, “surrounded by the dead. It’s not true that they are all silent, but many are, and none are loud. Where I grew up, we used to run, the boys and girls of Liveside, pugnacious through the streets past the mindless zombies and a few desperate vampir, and the thanati proper, the gentry, the liches with sewn-shut mouths, with beautiful clothes and skin like preserved leather. More than anything I remember the quiet.

“I wasn’t treated badly. My mother was respected, and I was a good boy. We were treated with nothing more overtly unpleasant than a kind of sympathetic sneer. I became involved with cults and criminals and heresies. But not deep, and not for long. There are two things that the quick are more adept at than the thanati. One is noise. The other is speed. I turned my back on the first, but not the second.”

After it became clear that his pause had become a silence, I spoke.

“Where did you learn to fight?” I said.

“I was a child when I left High Cromlech,” he said. “I didn’t think so at the time, but I was. Slipping onto the funicular railway—out, away.”

He would not tell me anything more than that. Between that time and his arrival at Armada there must have been more than a decade. He would not tell me what happened then. But that, it is obvious, is when he learnt his unfathomable skills.

Doul was quieting, and I felt his willingness to talk ebb away. I did not want that. After weeks of isolation, I wanted to keep him talking. I made a clumsy attempt, something like a witticism. I must have sounded arch and flippant.

“And when you left, you fought the Ghosthead Empire and won—what do they call it?—the Mighty Blade?” I indicated his plain ceramic sword.

His face was quite impassive for a moment, and then a sudden beautiful smile illuminated him for a second. He looks like a boy when he smiles.

“That’s another chain of meaning,” he said, “half of which has been lost. The Ghosthead are long gone, but there are remnants of the Empire all over Bas-Lag. And it is true that my sword is a Ghosthead artifact.”

I struggled through the meanings that he might be implying. My sword is an application of Ghosthead techniques, I thought, and then, My sword is based on Ghosthead designs, but I realized to look at him that he meant exactly what he said.

I must have looked shocked. He nodded briskly.

“My sword is over three thousand years old,” he said.

It is impossible. I have seen it. It is a plain, slightly weathered, and age-stained piece of clayware. If it is fifty years old I would be astonished.

“And the name . . .” He gave me another of those smiles. “Another misunderstanding. I found this sword after a very long search, after mastering a dead science. The men call it Mightblade. Not mighty.” He spoke slowly. “It might; it might not. Might not meaning potency, but potentiality. It is a bastardization of its true name. There was a time there were many weapons like this,” he said. “Now, it is, I think, the only one left.

“It is a Possible Sword.”

Even on the return journey, the scientists were making plans. They did not underestimate what they had yet to do. There was harder work ahead of them.

The Trident was not traveling in the opposite direction to the one by which it had come: Armada had moved and, by those arcane means Bellis did not understand, they were heading inexorably for it.

The dirigible began to speed up, gusted by grey clouds and bullets of rain. Bellis peered from the stateroom windows, out over the turmoil of the sea and the dark air at the edge of the sky.

A storm was coming.

They outpaced the worst of the bad weather. Within its own borders the storm was violent, but it did not move fast. It was tearing itself apart from the inside. The Trident ran at its edges, pelted by a periphery of rain, racing its shadow.

When she saw the broken mass of Armada breach the horizon and sprawl across the water below her, Bellis marveled at its scale. It looked like spillage, a slick of ruined and refitted boats, untidy across the waves, shapeless, its edges random and unchanging. The fringe of tugs and steamers that had hauled it for thousands of miles had been untethered while the city was still, and they puttered around it in great numbers, ferrying goods. Bellis thought again of the vast quantities of fuel that they must consume. It was no wonder that the pirate ships of Armada were voracious.

On seeing it, Bellis felt a great wash of emotion that she could not identify at all.

At the city’s outside edge, she saw the Terpsichoria. And with its spire flaming, its effluent warping the air, Bellis could see the complex outlines of the Sorghum rig. There was a bustle of vessels in the sea around its legs. It was drilling again, sucking oil and rockmilk out of the pressurized veins in which they had flowed for centuries. Armada had come to where there was a seam. The Sorghum was storing fuel for the almighty thaumaturgy to come.

They came in over Garwater’s aft-star’d, picking their way carefully over masts. Below them a mass of shapes followed the Trident curiously, tracking it in its shadow: aerocabs and single balloonists, odd ungainly looking airships.

The Trident docked at the Grand Easterly, at the same height as the crippled Arrogance. Bellis could see people staring from surrounding ships and little aircraft, but the Grand Easterly was sealed off. Its deck was almost empty. A small contingent of yeomanry was waiting for them, and at their head, his face alight, was the Lover.

Bellis saw a new cut on his face, a healing scab. It started at the left corner of his lips and curled below his chin. It was the mirror image of the one that Bellis had heard the Lover inflicting on herself.

When the Lovers saw each other, there was a long moment of silence, and then they crossed the distance and held each other. They gripped and tugged at each other. Their touches were passionate and intense, and went on for a minute or more. They did not look like caresses: the Lovers looked as if they were fighting in slowed-down time. The sight of them disturbed Bellis immeasurably.

Eventually they broke. Bellis was close enough to hear them hissing to each other. The Lover was slapping her man, clawing him across his neck and face, harder and harder. When she touched his new cut, her hands were suddenly as gentle as if he were a baby.

“Just as we said,” the Lover whispered, touching her own wound, “at the moment we agreed. Did you feel me? Did you? I swear I felt you, I fucking felt you—every inch, every drop of blood.”

The paneled room was filled with old oil portraits of engineers and politicians Bellis did not recognize—New Crobuzoners left to molder meaningless on the walls of their stolen craft. Around a huge horseshoe table sat the Armadan Senate; and gathered before them were Tintinnabulum, the leaders of the Trident’s scientific and engineering parties, and Krüach Aum. Beside the stunned-looking anophelius sat Bellis.

The Armadan Senate had not met for eight years. But the ridings’ rulers had been waiting for the return of the Trident to put this defining moment in Armadan history to the vote. Due process would be seen to be done.

Each riding in Armada had one Senate vote. Some ridings were represented by one person, some by a small gang. Bellis ran her eyes slowly along the long table, taking in all of the rulers. They were not hard to identify.

Braginod, the cactus queen of Jhour, with her advisors.

Booktown was represented by a triumvirate of khepri who leaned in together and conversed in motions and chymical spray translated by their human servant. Their names were unknown: they were figureheads from the changing cabal that ran the riding.

Almost at the far end of the table was a monk-robed man: the Bask contingent. Beside him sat an unkempt man of sixty or so. Bellis recognized him from posters—he was trader-king Friedrich of Thee-And-Thine. Beside him was another man, his face grey and scarred: the general of Shaddler.

The largest assembly by far was from the Curhouse. A sizable portion of the entire Democratic Council seemed to have attended—men and women of a gaggle of races, squeezed into a tight little circle abutting the main table like a cog on a gear. They whispered constantly among themselves and watched the Garwater representatives with visible hostility.

There they were, on the far right of the table: the Lovers. Watching, not speaking. Sitting beside each other quietly, their faces mirror images of violence.

And opposite them, his eyes on them with a far more careful, a far more intelligent gaze than the defensive animosity of the Curhouse Councilors, was a pale man Bellis had never seen, dressed in dark and simple clothes. His nose was broad and his lips very full. His coiled hair was all that was unruly about him. His eyes were extraordinary. Dark and intensely clear. Mesmeric.

With a little shiver, Bellis realized that he was the leader of Dry Fall riding, the greatest rival to the Lovers. He was the reason that the meeting took place after sundown. He was the vampir—the Brucolac.

It was obvious that this meeting was a formality and that the positions of the protagonists had already been decided over a long time. The arguments and discussions were stilted, the unspoken allegiances and enmities all half visible. Bellis spoke when she was addressed, offering her brief opinion on some matter of language.

There were five ridings in favor of the Lovers’ schemes. Booktown seemed genuinely enthused by the Garwater plan; Jhour and Shaddler were in its pay and would do whatever was asked of them. Friedrich of Thee-And-Thine sold his vote to the Lovers, unashamedly, knowing that they could outpay any other riding.

Only Bask and Curhouse, who acted together, and the Brucolac of Dry Fall, who stood alone, opposed the Lovers. It was five to three. The plan could go ahead immediately.

“We weren’t informed,” said Vordakine of the Curhouse Council, a hard-faced woman who excoriated the Lovers for their dishonesty. She was trying desperately to sway Friedrich, or the khepri of Booktown. “We weren’t told of Garwater’s intentions when its raiders returned towing the Crobuzoner rig Sorghum. At that time the talk was all of increased energy and power, elyctric generation and cheap oil. Rockmilk was never mentioned then. And now it appears that all that cheap power had already been allocated to this avanc project. Who’s to say what they have in mind when the avanc is secured?”

For the first time, the Brucolac sat up. He kept his eyes on the Lovers’ party—specifically, Bellis realized, on Doul.

“Well that is the rub,” he said unexpectedly. His voice was harsh and sounded torn from his throat. “That is the question.” His long, forked tongue flickered. Bellis opened her eyes wide. “What is in mind? What could one do with an avanc? Where could one go?”

Trader-king Friedrich shifted and spat. Vordakine appealed to him, reminding him of commitments and past favors about which Bellis knew nothing. He looked away. She could not change his mind. Friedrich glanced at the Lovers, and they smiled at him, and nodded simultaneously.

We will buy you, they said with that motion, and if Curhouse and Bask or anyone else wishes to oppose us, we will simply offer more than them. Name your price.

Across the room, those opposed to the avanc’s invocation looked old and tired.

The rig, the book, Krüach Aum himself—the Lovers’ plans were always, Bellis realized, bound to go ahead.

In the night outside the windows, the storm was still visible miles away, blooming briefly with lightning. Surrounded by representatives of powers she was only just beginning to understand, translating for a man of a race she had thought long-dead, Bellis felt bleak and alone.

She was one of the last to leave the room. As she reached the door, Bellis looked up at Uther Doul, who was blocking it, and realized that he was not looking at her at all. He was gazing across the room, his eyes and mouth as still as glass, meeting the eyes of the Brucolac.

The Lovers had gone. All the other representatives had gone. Only Uther Doul and the vampir were left, and between them Bellis.

She was desperate to leave, but Doul’s feet were planted as if he were about to fight. She could not push past him, and she was afraid to speak. The Brucolac stood with his unkempt hair wild and his moist lips parted, that ghastly snake tongue fluttering in the air. Bellis was trapped, motionless, between them. They ignored her completely.

“Still content, Uther?” the Brucolac said. His voice never rose above an unpleasant whisper.

Uther Doul did not respond. The Brucolac coldly mummed laughter.

“Don’t think this is ended, Uther,” he said. “We both knew the outcome of this charade. This is not where things are decided.”

“Deadman Brucolac,” said Doul, “your concerns about this project have been noted. Noted, and disregarded. Now if you will excuse me, I have to escort Krüach Aum and his translator to their quarters.” Doul did not take his eyes from the vampir’s pale face.

“Did you notice, Uther,” said the Brucolac urbanely, “that the other little squabblers have finally realized that something is up?” He walked slowly toward Uther Doul. Bellis was frozen. She wanted very badly to leave this room now. For years she had wrapped herself in layers of focus and cold control. There were few emotions she could not master in herself.

It appalled her to realize that the Brucolac was terrifying her. It was as if his voice modulated exactly with her fear.

The room was dark, the gaslights out and the few candles guttering. She could see nothing but his tall figure, moving as easy as a dancer (as easy as Uther Doul), approaching.

Doul was silent. He did not move.

“You heard Vordakine ask what was to happen next. I told you she was the best of them. They’re finally working it out, Uther,” the Brucolac whispered. “When will you tell them, Uther? When do they get to hear the plan?

“Do you really think,” he continued with sudden still ferocity, “that you could face me? Do you think you can defeat me? Do you think your project can continue without my consent? Do you know . . . what I am?”

He spoke rapidly then in a language of coughing swallows, as if the dialect itself resented every sound it allowed to escape.

The speech of High Cromlech.

Whatever he said, it opened Uther Doul’s eyes wide for several moments. Then he, too, advanced.

“Oh yes, Brucolac,” Doul said. His voice was as hard and edged as flint. He gazed over Bellis as if she were not there, straight at the vampir. “I know exactly what you are. I, more than anyone, know exactly what you are.”

The men stood a few paces apart, unmoving, with Bellis between them like a reluctant referee.

“I give you the courtesy of the gentry’s title, Deadman,” hissed Doul. “But you’re no more gentry than me. You’re ab-dead, not thanati. You forget yourself, Brucolac. You forget there’s another place where your kind are given leave to live openly. Where your refugees flee. You forget that where the dead rule and protect the quick, there’s nothing to fear from you. You forget that there are vampir in High Cromlech.” He pointed at the Brucolac.

“They live beyond the quick ghetto. In hovels. In the shantytown.” He smiled. “And every night, after the sun’s descended, they can crawl safely out from their shacks and shuffle into the town. Stick figures in rags, leaning against the walls. Exhausted and starving, hands outstretched. Begging.” His voice was soft and vicious. “Begging for the quick to take pity on them. And every so often one of us will acquiesce, and out of pity and contempt, embarrassed by our soft philanthropy, we’ll stand in the eaves of a building and offer up our wrists. And you and your kind will open them, all frantic with hunger and fawning with gratitude, and take a few eager swigs, till we decide you’ve had enough and take back our hands while you weep and beg for more, and maybe spew because you’ve gone without a hit so long your stomach can’t handle what it craves, and we leave you lying in the dirt, blissed by your little fix.

“In High Cromlech we know exactly what you are, Brucolac.” He smiled again.

“Junkies. That some of us indulge and some of us hate and all of us, quick and dead, pity.

“So do not,” he spat suddenly, “try to intimidate me. Because, yes, Brucolac, I know exactly what you are.”

No one said any more. The two men faced each other, immobile. Only the Brucolac’s tongue moved, tasting the air.

And then he was gone.

Bellis blinked and looked around her at a trail of displaced air, where dust motes roiled and languidly followed the Brucolac’s sudden fleeting passage. She held her head. What has he done to me? she thought. How does he do that? Hypnosis? Godsdammit, he’s quicker than Doul . . .

Uther Doul was looking at her, she sluggishly realized, as her heart slowed and her breathing became normal.

“Come with me,” he said to her, his voice as bland and featureless as if nothing had happened, as if she had not witnessed anything. “You must help Krüach Aum.”

As she left the room, trying not to stumble, trembling as she was, Bellis thought about what the Brucolac had said.

Where are we going? she wondered as she followed Uther Doul.

What is the plan?

Chapter Twenty-eight

After long prevarication, the storm hit.

The tightly coiled mass of air unwound. The night was hot. The rain blasted Armada. Ropes and rigging arced and snapped against the flanks of the ships and buildings. There was thunder and lightning.

This was the first real squall that the city had faced in a long time, but the inhabitants responded with practiced expertise. Airships were quickly grounded, waiting out the weather in yards and under tarpaulins. The Trident, tethered to the Grand Easterly and too big to be covered, could only bob and shift uneasily in the gusts, its massive shadow rolling over the ships and houses below it.

Across the city, all except the very strongest bridges and tethers were unhitched at one end, in case the sea pulled the boats apart fast or far enough to snap their bonds. Traveling across Armada during a storm was impossible.

Channeled into canals between the vessels, Armada’s waters jerked and pitched violently but could not form waves. There were no such constraints on the sea that smashed against the city’s outer vessels. The boats that made the mouths of the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors were drawn together, enclosing and protecting the raiding or trading vessels—Armadan and guest—within. Beyond the city’s bounds, the fleet of fighters and tugs and pirates moved far enough away to avoid being driven into their home port’s walls.

Only those who patrolled the city’s undersides—the submersibles, the menfish, the seawyrms, and Bastard John the dolphin—were more or less untroubled. They sat below the surface and weathered the storm.

After peering from a window in the corridor of the Grand Easterly, Uther Doul looked back at Bellis.

“There’s a worse one than this to come,” he said. At first Bellis had no idea what he was telling her. Then she remembered the story in Krüach Aum’s book: the summoning of the avanc, powered by lightning elementals.

We’re going to call up a hell of a storm, aren’t we? she thought.

Bellis set to teaching Aum an understanding of Salt, as instructed. It troubled her. She was conscious that this was a breach of the fundamental rules of anophelii containment, as maintained by Kohnid and Dreer Samher. And however venal their reasons for policing them, those rules were a protective response to one of the most notorious empires in Bas-Lag’s history. She had to remind herself that Aum was male, and old, and very far from being a threat to anyone.

Aum approached the task with the rigor and logic of a mathematician. Bellis discovered, uneasily, that he had already worked out a surprising amount of vocabulary from the Armadans’ short visit (and she wondered whether they had infected the island with language).

For New Crobuzoners, or Jhesshul or Mandrake Islanders or Shankellites or Perrickish, Salt was an easy language to learn. Krüach Aum, though, knew none of its components. There were no cognates at all—vocabulary or grammar—with High Kettai. Nonetheless, he broke Salt down, made careful lists of declensions and conjugations and grammar. His method was very different from Bellis’, without intuition, without the training of the language trance to make his mind receptive; but still, he made quick progress.

Bellis looked forward eagerly to the time that she would be redundant; when she would not have to sit endlessly scribbling notes in a scientific register she did not understand. She had been released from her job in the library. Now her mornings were taken up with teaching Aum, and her afternoons with translating between Aum and the scientific committee of Garwater. She enjoyed none of it.

During the day she ate with Aum, and during the evenings she sometimes accompanied him throughout the city, with a guard of Garwater yeomanry. What else, she thought, can I do? She escorted him to Croom Park, to the colorful thoroughfares and shopping streets of Garwater and Jhour and Curhouse. She took him to Grand Gears Library.

While she stood and spoke in a low voice to Carrianne, who seemed sincerely delighted to see her again, Krüach Aum wandered from shelf to shelf. When she came to tell him that they must go, he turned to her and she was truly alarmed at his expression—a reverence and joy and agony like religious ecstasy. She pointed out the High Kettai books to him, and he reeled, as if drunk at the sight of all that knowledge in his grasp.

She felt a constant low-level unease at spending her days in the presence of the Garwater authorities: the Lovers, Tintinnabulum and his crew, Uther Doul.

How did it come to this? she wondered.

Bellis had been cut off from the city since the first moment, and she had assiduously kept that wound raw and bloodied. She defined herself by it.

This is not my home, she had said to herself again and again, endless repetitions. And when the chance had come to make some connection with her true home, she had taken it with all its risk. She had not renounced her claim to New Crobuzon. She had discovered a terrible threat to her city, and had (at great risk, with careful planning) worked out a way to save it.

And somehow in that very action, in the very act of reaching out to New Crobuzon across the sea, she had tied herself closely in to Armada, and to its rulers.

How did it come to this?

It made her laugh humorlessly. She had done what was best for her true home, and as a result she spent her days working for the governors of her prison, helping them gain the power to take her anywhere they wanted.

How did it come to this?

And where is Silas?

Every day, Tanner thought about what he had done on the anophelii island.

It was not something he felt comfortable considering. He was not sure what his emotions were. He probed the memory of what he had done, as if it were a wound, and discovered a reserve of pride inside him. I saved New Crobuzon, he thought, not quite believing it.

Tanner thought carefully about the few people he had left behind there. The drinking partners, the friends and girlfriends: Zara and Pietr and Fezhenechs and Dolly-Ann . . . He thought of them with a sort of abstracted fondness, as if they were characters in a book of whom he had grown affectionate.

Do they think of me? he thought. Do they miss me?

He had left them behind. He had been so long in that stinking prison in Iron Bay, and in that drab place in the Terpsichoria, and then his life had been so suddenly and extraordinarily renewed, that New Crobuzon had attenuated as a memory in him.

But still there was a wellspring of feeling for it, a recognition that the city had shaped him. He would not have seen it destroyed. He could not think of the men and women he had known there, murdered. So—it bewildered him to consider it—he had given them a valedictory gift that they would never know they had received. New Crobuzon had been saved. He had saved it.

The awareness of that gnawed at him. It troubled him and made him sheepishly proud. It was such a huge thing he had done, something to change the tide of history. He imagined the city preparing for war, never knowing who had saved it. It was such a big thing, and here he was remembering it with a little arch of his eyebrows, not sure how much mind to pay it, as if it were a detail.

It wasn’t a betrayal of Armada, not really. No one was hurt; it was just a little thing to them—a quick night’s absence. He had taken a few hours to slip away and save New Crobuzon. And he was glad of it. It made him happy to think of what he’d done. Despite the magisters and the punishment factories.

He had saved it. Now tell it good-bye.

The avanc was a rare visitor to the seas of Bas-Lag. The intricacies of transplanar life were abstruse and uncertain. Neither Tanner Sack nor any of his colleagues knew whether the creature that breached in Bas-Lag was a partial or a total manifestation, a confusion of scale (some protozöon, some plankton from a huge brine dimension), a pseudoorganism spontaneously generated in the vents between worlds. No one knew.

All they knew was what Bellis Coldwine told them, as she read the intricate scribbles of Krüach Aum.

The anophelius was clearly stunned by his new environment, but it did not affect his ability to focus, to provide answers to their questions. Every day Aum gave his new workmates enough information for their purposes.

He drew designs for them, designs for the harness (bigger than a battleship), the bit, and the reins. Even though the engineers did not understand exactly what of the avanc would go where, what flesh exactly would be trapped by what clasp, they took Aum’s word that the mechanisms would work.

The science, the plans, were moving at a stunning pace. The engineers and scientists had to remind themselves of how far they had come, how fast, and how they continued to move. It was obvious to all of them that without Aum they could not have succeeded, despite what they might once have thought. It was only working with him that they came to see how much they needed him.

They incorporated engines burning in sealed containers at the yoke’s joints, triple-exchange boilers and complex pulley systems to regulate movement, all suspended in the freezing darkness of the deep sea, at the end of the miles of colossal chain links suspended below the city.

And what if they went wrong? Garwater’s ancient bathypelagicrafts would have to be refitted.

There was an extraordinary amount to be done.

Tanner almost rubbed his hands with happiness.

Armada had taken only a morning to recover after the storm: clearing broken slates and wood away from decks; reattaching bridges; counting and mourning the few missing or drowned, those who had been trapped outside during the deluge.

And when that was done, Garwater turned, with more of the incredible speed, to manufacturing what it needed for its historic project.

There were five of the ancient, hidden chains under Armada. Tanner Sack and the teams traced them, plotted their end points. All industrial capacity in Garwater, and what little there was in Booktown and Shaddler and Thee-And-Thine, was turned over to the direct control of Tintinnabulum and the project committee. The work of building began.

Several recently press-ganged metal ships were designated scrap. Piece by piece, they were taken apart. Thousands of men and women swarmed over them: the regular dock work was relegated to skeleton crews, and huge day rates were offered to the city’s casual workers. The iron exoskeletons of warships, the girders and innards of steamers, the enormous tempered metal masts, were stripped. The vessels were peeled and disemboweled, and all the tons of metal were shipped by barge and airlifted by convoys of dirigibles to the factories.

The avanc’s harness would sport girders and screws still marked with the scars of previous service. In foundries, iron too ruined to be reshaped was melted down.

Armada was not a city with a grand tradition of thaumaturgy. But there were competent metallo-thaumaturgists among the pirates, and gangs of them entered the factories. They worked closely with the engineers, mixing arcane compounds in great vats to strengthen and lighten and bind the metal. At last, some of Garwater’s stores of rockmilk were used. The liquid was brought in vials, vastly heavy and dense. When it was unstoppered it gave off disorienting vapors like spice and oil. It moiled behind the glass, a cold mother-of-pearl.

The metallo-thaumaturges would add measured drops of it as they mouthed incantations and passed their hands over the melting metal in puissant currents, charging it and sealing it.

And after rolling out the metal and hammering and more arcane procedures, the components of the avanc’s bridle began to be dragged by submersibles into place below the city. An army of divers worked on them with chymical welders that sputtered colorfully in the water, and wielded hammers and wrenches with water-slowed motions.

It was an incredible, sudden industry.

The chains were anchored in the bases of five ships. The Psire of Booktown; Jhour’s Saskital; the big steamer Tailor’s Moan, the capital ship of Bask; the Wordhoard in the haunted riding; and Garwater’s Grand Easterly. From the keels and sloping flanks of each of these old, massive ships curved an arc of iron the size of some great church doorway, bolted on and veiled thaumaturgically. And from each of those stretched links the size of boats.

The guard sharks were let free. It seemed impossible that the chains had ever been hidden. The rumors spread—about what had been done before and what might happen now. It was said that Bask riding had tried to sever the chain below their vessel, to scupper Garwater’s plans, but that it had been too strong, too massive, too protected by puissant charms.

In a big, windowless chamber at the bottom of the Grand Easterly, a new engine was being built. The redundant boilers and their tangle of head-height pipes were stripped away, like clearing a rusty forest. When the ghosts of engines were gone, two great stamped-flat discs of iron were visible, embedded in the floor. Waist-high and many yards around, encrusted with age and grease. They were the ends of the chain attached to the ship, pushed through its hull, then hammered and flattened to attach them tight, centuries ago. The first time this had been tried.

Someone planned this before, Tanner Sack thought. He was stunned by the hours of work, the thaumaturgy that had been tried, the industry, the planning, the effort that had been made, generations ago, and then deliberately forgotten.

Between these two chain stubs, Tanner Sack and his colleagues began to build an extraordinary engine. They worked to specifications calculated over long hours by Krüach Aum.

Tanner examined the plans carefully. The motor they constructed did not work to any rules that he understood. It would be huge: it would fill the room with pounding hammers and ratchets, powered by some source that he did not fathom.

He worked from the base of what would be the piston-pounding boilers, upward. He started with the stumps of giant chain, drilling into them and embedding them with molten alloys, into which he plunged wrist-thick wires in rubber and tar. They passed through transformers the size of his leg, ribbed columns of white clay, and on to thickets of cables and insulators and difference engines.

This was the pacific engine, by which complex energies would be transmitted along the Grand Easterly chain, into that great bridle and whatever it contained, miles below the surface. A goad. Bait and whip.

The sea was clear. Divers thronged the huge underwater construction site. Components were lowered from the cranes of factory ships. The massive harness was taking shape at the end of the huge chains, still tethered scant scores of feet below the surface, its scale troubling to the eye, its outlines exotic and unfathomable, surrounded by the vividly colored fish of this sea, and by submarines and cray craftsmen and suited workers and Tanner Sack all moving with the slow fluidity of the submerged.

Sometimes there was a vibration through the water. The legs of the rig Sorghum disappeared into the cylindrical iron floats that supported it below the surface like suspended ships. The shaft of its drill plunged straight down, dim through the tons and tons of water, disappearing, to puncture the seafloor like a mosquito and feed.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Silas came to Bellis three days after she returned.

She had been expecting his visit—waiting with one eye on the door every evening—but still he managed to surprise her.

Bellis had had supper with Carrianne. She liked her ex-colleague sincerely, finding her perceptive and humorous. But still, as she made an effort to smile, Bellis’ sense of loneliness was unabated. Is it a surprise? she asked herself ruthlessly. You court it; you milk it; you make it.

She remembered how things had been in New Crobuzon and admitted to herself that they were not so different. At least here her isolation had a reason; it was a fuel that she burned.

Carrianne had demanded detailed descriptions of the anophelii island, and the weather, and the behavior of the mosquito-people themselves. There was melancholy in her manner—however reconciled Carrianne was to her life aboard, it had been many years since she had set foot on solid land, and Bellis’ stories could only make her feel nostalgia.

Bellis had found the recent trip hard to talk about. She remembered it as if at a great distance, as a monotony of frightened boredom interspersed with grander emotions. There were some things, of course, that she could not discuss. She was deliberately vague about the anophelii, about the Samheri pirates, and most of all about Krüach Aum.

After the altercation she had witnessed between the Brucolac and Uther Doul, Bellis had become fascinated by Dry Fall’s ruler. Carrianne told her what she wanted to know, about the political structure of the riding, the cadre of vampir lieutenants under the Brucolac, and the riding’s goretax.

“That’s when you usually get to meet him,” Carrianne said. She tried to be matter-of-fact, but Bellis could hear the awe in her voice. “Not always—often it’s taken by some lieutenant—but sometimes. They cut you, here or here or here.” She indicated her thigh and breast and wrist. “They paint it with an anticoagulant, and vacuum it into a belljar.”

“How much do they take?” said Bellis, aghast.

“Two pints. The Brucolac is the only one who drinks his fill. The rest of the cadre are restricted—they dilute it. The more they drink, the stronger they grow—that’s the word. And even though the Brucolac chooses his lieutenants carefully, it’s possible that one or other might get power-hungry.

“If they took it traditionally, straight from the vein, they might not be able to control themselves—and they don’t want to kill. And even if they did break away, there’s the contagion. In the spit. So everyone they drink directly from and leave alive, they risk turning into a competitor.”

Bellis left Carrianne at the borders of Dry Fall—“I could not possibly be safer than here,” Carrianne said, smiling—and walked home.

She could have taken a cab; the winds were not strong, and she heard shouts from above as the aeronauts touted for custom. Two days previously, when her day’s work with Aum was finished, she had been wordlessly handed a packet of flags and finials that represented a good deal more than her weekly wage at the library.

I’ve been given a raise, she thought dryly, now that I work for Garwater.

The consciousness of her hidden centrality to all that had happened, the awareness that without her, Armada would not be where it was, doing what it was doing, oppressed her, even though her reasons had been clear and good at every stage.

She walked home not to save money but to experience Armada again. Locked in a room full of incomprehensible conversations all day, she felt herself losing contact with the city around her. And any city, she told herself, is better than none.

The walk took her through Shaddler’s cool, quiet streets and into Garwater via the Tolpandy. Past the quiet bickerings of the monkeys that nested in building sites and rooftops, and deserted berths and the canopy of rigging; past the city’s cats (glancing at her, predatory) and its rare dogs and the masses of rats and the nightwalkers; around hen coops; lifeboats and steam launches rusted into position and remade as flower beds; homes cut into the sides of gun batteries, pigeons cooing from the bore of a twelve-inch gun; under wooden huts built onto foretops and yards which met masts like tree houses; through the light of gas and phlogistic cells and oil lamps; and through darkness tinted in various colors, squeezing along the corridors of damp brick that covered Armada’s vessels like a fur of mold. Back to her rooms in the Chromolith Smokestacks, where Silas Fennec was sitting, waiting for her.

She was shocked by his unclear figure sitting in the dark. She hissed at him, and turned away until her heart had slowed.

He studied her. His eyes were big and calm.

“How did you get in?” she said. He waved the question away like an insect.

“You know your apartment’s still watched,” he said. “I can’t exactly come knocking.”

Bellis walked over to him. He was motionless except for his face and eyes, tracking her progress. She came close—she came within his space—and leaned toward him slowly, examining him like some scientific specimen. She was ostentatious about it: she inspected him coolly and intrusively. It might have been designed to intimidate, to put him off his ease.

As she bent over him, as if cataloging his aspects, he caught her eye, and for the first time in some weeks, he smiled at her eagerly and openly. She remembered the reasons that she had had for kissing him, and fucking him. Not just loneliness or isolation, though they were paramount. But there were other factors, more centered in him. And although as she stood there she felt not the slightest urge to touch him, although she felt only a ghost of the affection that had once motivated her, she did not regret what had happened.

We both needed it, she thought. And it helped; it really did.

She patted the back of his head as she turned away. He accepted that with good grace.

“So . . .” he said.

“It’s done,” she said. He raised his eyebrows.

“As simple as that?”

“Of course not as simple as that. What do you damn well think? But it’s done.”

He nodded slowly. When he spoke his tone was neutral, as if they discussed some academic project. “How did you manage it?”

How did we? Bellis thought in the silence. Did we? I have no evidence, no proof of anything.

“I couldn’t do it on my own,” she began slowly, and then she sat upright, shocked by Silas’ look of stricken anger.

“You what?” he cried. “You fucking what?” He was on his feet. “What did you do, you stupid godsdamned cunt . . . ?”

“Sit . . . down . . .” Bellis was standing now, pointing at him, her fingers shaking with rage. “How dare you?”

“Bellis . . . what did you do?”

She glared at him. “I don’t know,” she said coldly, “how you might have managed to cross a swamp crawling with six-foot mosquitos, Silas. I don’t know how you would have managed that. We were a mile or more from the Samheri ships—oh, they were there, don’t fret about that. Now maybe you are a cactus-man or a fucking scabmettler or something, but I’m blood, and they would have killed me.”

Silas remained quiet.

“So . . .” Bellis’ voice was measured now. “I found a man who could travel to the ships, without danger, without being detected. A Crobuzoner, prepared to do the whole deal on the hush, just to stop his first home being devastated.”

“Did you show him the stuff?” said Silas.

“Of course I did. You think he’d swim off blithely at midnight taking only my word as to what he was carrying?”

“Swim? It was Tanner fucking Sack, wasn’t it? Do you think, if you’d looked long and hard”—his voice was strained—“you could have found someone more loyal to Garwater?”

“But he did it,” said Bellis. “He wasn’t going to do anything without proof. I showed him the letters, and yes, Silas, he’s loyal to Garwater. He’s no intention of ever going back. But, dammit, you think he doesn’t have friends left behind? You think he relishes the idea of the grindylow taking New Crobuzon? Godspit!

“For the sake of the people he left. For the sake of memories. Whatever. He took the box, the seal, the letters, and I told him what to do. It was a last good-bye to his fucking city. From him as much as from me and you.”

Silas was nodding slowly, acknowledging that perhaps she had had no choice.

“You gave him the stuff?” he said.

“Yes. But it all went ahead, no problems. Silas . . . we owe Tanner Sack.”

“But does he know . . .” said Silas hesitantly, “who I am?”

“Of course not.” He relaxed visibly at her words. “Do you think I’m stupid? I remember what was done to the captain. I’d not have you killed, Silas,” she said. Her voice was soft but not warm. It was a statement of fact, not of closeness.

After some moments of reflection, Silas seemed to finish his deliberations.

“I suppose it was the only choice,” he said, and Bellis nodded curtly.

You ungracious fuck, she thought, furious. You weren’t there. . .

“And you say the Samheri have the package? Sealed and ready to deliver?” He was grinning furiously. “We’ve done it,” he said. “We’ve done it.”

“That was more the reaction I was expecting,” Bellis said unpleasantly. “Yes, we have.” They looked at each other for a long time. “When do you think they’ll reach New Crobuzon?”

“I don’t know,” said Silas. “Maybe it won’t work. Maybe it will, and we’ll hear nothing. We’ll save the city, and hear nothing about it, ever. I may see out my days on this fucking tub, desperately scheming to get off. But godsdammit, isn’t it something to know what we’ve done?” He spoke fervently. “Even without response, even without thanks, isn’t it something to know that we’ve saved them?”

And yes, thought Bellis Coldwine, it was something. It was certainly something. She felt a wave of loneliness breaking over her. Was it worse? she wondered. Could it be worse? To never know? To send that message across the world, through so many hazards, through such danger, for it to disappear without a sound? To never know?

Gods, she thought, bereft and stunned. Is that the last of it? Is that the end?

“What happens now?” he said. “With me and you?”

Bellis shrugged. “What did you want?” Her voice was more tired than scornful.

“I know it’s hard,” he said gently. “I know it’s more complicated than we’d thought. I don’t expect anything from you. But Bellis . . . there are things we share, things between us—and I don’t think that’s the only reason we spent time together. I would like us to be friends. Can you really afford not to have me? To have no one who knows? How you really feel? Where you want to be?”

She was not quite sure of him, but it was as he said: they shared things that no one else did. Could she afford to lose him? There might be years ahead of her in this city (she shudders to think it). Could she afford to have no one to whom she could speak the truth?

When he stood to go, he held out his hand, his palm open and up, expectantly.

“Where’s the New Crobuzon seal?” he said.

Bellis had been afraid of this. “I don’t have it,” she said.

He did not get angry this time, just closed his hand with a soft clap and raised his eyes to ask her what had happened.

“It was Tanner,” she said, ready for him to fly at her. “He dropped it in the sea.”

“It’s a ring, Bellis,” Silas said quietly. “It sits safe on your finger. You don’t lose it. He hasn’t lost it. He’s kept it, gods know why. Souvenir from home? Something to blackmail you with? Gods know.” He shook his head and sighed, and she was furious with his manner, which said I am disappointed in you.

“I’d better leave, Bellis,” he said. “Carefully—you’re watched, remember. So don’t be surprised if I come and go by . . . unconventional means. Would you excuse me a moment?”

He descended the spiral stairs. Bellis heard the sound of his feet dissipating on the metal, ringing hollow like thin tin on tin. She turned at the weird sound, but he had gone. She could still hear the slightest ring of his feet on her staircase, descending, reaching the bottom step, but there was nothing to be seen. He was invisible or gone.

Bellis’ eyes widened very slightly, but even in his absence she begrudged Silas any awe.

He comes and goes like a rat or a bat, now, she thought. Keeping out of sight. Been learning thaumaturgy, has he? Got some facility, a little puissance?

But she was unnerved and somewhat intimidated. His departure suggested a charm of exceptional subtlety and strength. I didn’t know you had that in you, Silas, she thought. She realized again how little she knew of him. Their conversation was like an elaborate game. Despite his words, despite the fact that she knew they shared secrets, she felt alone.

And she did not think that Tanner Sack had kept the New Crobuzon seal, though she could not say why.

Bellis felt as if she were waiting.

The man stands waiting with wind gusting him on the staircase that spirals the height of her absurd chimney-pot apartment, and he knows that the eyes that might watch her door cannot see him at all.

In his hand is the statue, its filigree of fin folded like layers of cake pastry, its round betoothed remora mouth pouting upward, and his tongue is still cold where he has kissed it. He is much quicker now; he finds it much easier to accept the cold stone’s flickering little tonguing, and he can direct the energies their passionless coupling unleashes far more adroitly.

He stands at angles to the night at a place the statue shows him and where its kiss allows him to stand, at a place or a kind of place where the beams of lights intersect and he is unnoticed, as doors and walls and windows do not notice him so long as he is the brine-stinking statue’s lover.

The kissing is never a pleasure. But the power that he has, that enters him with the stone thing’s spit, is a wonder.

He steps out into the night, unseen and emboldened, with arcane energies in him, to look for his ring.

Chapter Thirty

Armada lolled in the sun. It was getting hotter.

The frantic work continued, and below the water, the shape of the avanc’s harness grew slowly more solid. It was ghosted, its outlines in girders and wooden supports, like an abstract for some implausible building. As the days went on it grew a little more substantial, its intricate spines and gears more like something real. It grew through the extraordinary efforts of the crews. The city was on something like a war footing, every iota of industry and effort commandeered. People understood that they were careering at breakneck speed into a new epoch.

The scale of the harness always staggered Tanner Sack. It loomed below the ecology of scavenger fish that never left the city’s underside, larger by a long, long way than any ship. It dwarfed the Grand Easterly, which bobbed above it like a bath toy. And the bridle was to be completed within weeks.

The work was constant. During the dark hours, the sputtering illumination of chymical flares and welding torches attracted night fish. They surrounded the chains and gangs of divers, schools of them staring big-eyed, agog at the lights.

There were moving parts, and joints, and rubberized gasbags cannibalized from old dirigibles. There were sealed motors. But essentially it was just a vast halter, its links and segments stretching more than a quarter of a mile long.

Ship after ship was gutted, stripped from the inside, scuttled, and melted down. The fleet of warships and traders that surrounded the city and its ports was thinned, for the sake of this project. A frontier of smoke plumes enveloped the sacrificed vessels while heat torches took them apart.

As Shekel made his way along the aft of Garwater one evening, to Bellis’ house, he looked out toward the horizon and saw a half-gone ship at the edge of the city. It was the Terpsichoria: its outlines crumbled and broken; its bridge, most of its superstructure, and its deck gone; its metal viscera taken to the factories. The sight brought him up short. He had no affection for the vessel; he was not dismayed—but astonished, for reasons he could not articulate.

He stared down at the water that turned below him. It was hard to believe that it was happening, that such colossal efforts were taking place, link after link slotted together in a vast series under the fabric of the city.

There were several languages active in Bellis’ life. She felt exhilarated to relearn her disciplines: the nameless technique she had perfected for segmenting her mind, keeping her internal dictionaries distinct; the language trance she had last used in Tarmuth.

Aum made quick progress with Salt. Her pupil was talented.

During the afternoon’s discussions with Tintinnabulum and the other scientists, every so often—to Bellis’ pleasure—Aum would intercept some question before she had translated it and written it down. He would even write down some of his own answers, in basic Salt.

It must be extraordinary for him, Bellis thought. Salt was the first language he was conscious of having both spoken and written dimensions. It was unthinkable to him to hear High Kettai—it had been a meaningless concept. To hear Salt questions and to write the answers in the same language must be an astonishing mental leap, but he dealt with it with aplomb.

Bellis did not warm to Krüach Aum. She found his constant wide-eyed curiosity draining, and she felt no strong sense of personality beneath it. He was a brilliant, boring man whose culture had made him like a precocious child. She was cheered by the speed with which he learned Armada’s language; she suspected that she would be mostly redundant soon.

High Kettai and Salt surrounded her every day.

Her own head was the preserve of Ragamoll. She had never been one of those linguists who thought in the language she was using at the time. Silas was the only person to whom she spoke in her first language, in the rare times that she saw him.

There was a day when a fourth language entered her life, briefly. Quiesy—more popularly known as Deadish. The language of High Cromlech.

She still did not really understand Uther Doul’s reasons for talking to her about his home tongue. After one of her sessions with Aum, he had asked her if she enjoyed learning new languages, and she told him truthfully that she did.

“Would you be interested to hear a bit of Quiesy?” he said. “I don’t often get to speak my own tongue.”

Dumbfounded, Bellis had agreed. That evening she had gone with him to his quarters aboard the Grand Easterly.

The sounds of Quiesy were formed in the back of the throat, softly barked, the noises swallowed, and interspersed with precisely timed silences as important as the sounds. It was, Doul warned her, a language of strange subtleties. Many of the thanati gentry had sewn-shut mouths, he reminded her, and others had voice-boxes too rotted to work. There were modes of Quiesy spoken with hands and eyes, as well as written forms.

Bellis was fascinated by the gentle language, and was held by Uther Doul’s performance. In his quiet, controlled way he was enthusiastic as he recited several passages of what sounded like poetry. Bellis realized that she was not there to learn the language, but to appreciate it as an audience.

There was still a foreboding in her at being in Doul’s company, alongside other emotions. Alongside excitement.

He wordlessly handed her a glass of wine. She recognized this as an invitation to stay. She sat and sipped and waited, looking around his room. She had expected some hidden stronghold, but he lived in a berth like thousands of others. It was sparse: there were a desk and two chairs, a shuttered window, a chest, one small black-and-white etching on the wall. Below the window was a weapons rack, full of familiar and arcane armaments; and in the corner of the room a complex musical instrument, with strings and keys, like a harp-accordion hybrid.

When probably a minute had passed, and Uther Doul had said nothing, Bellis spoke.

“I was . . . very interested to hear the story of your youth,” she said. “I admit that I hadn’t previously been sure of High Cromlech’s existence—until I met you. However, apart from the whispers about the land of the dead and defeating the Ghosthead Empire, I’ve lost your trail of rumors.” She was not practiced at the kind of hard humor for which she was trying, but he moved his eyebrows to signify a pretense at amusement. “I’d be very pleased if you wanted to tell me more about what happened after you left High Cromlech. I doubt I’ve ever met anyone so traveled. Have you ever . . . ?” She paused, suddenly anxious, and he replied to her.

“No. I’ve never visited New Crobuzon,” he said. He seemed to be fretting, in his poised, silent way.

“You aren’t sure you believe what I told you about my sword, are you?” he said suddenly. “I don’t blame you. It isn’t nearly old enough, you were thinking. What do you know about the Ghosthead Empire, Miss Coldwine?”

“Little,” she admitted.

“Of course, though, you know that they were in no way human—or khepri, vodyanoi, strider, or what have you. These were not xenian in the sense we usually mean it. Whatever prints and descriptions you may have seen are fallacious. The question What did they look like? has no straightforward answer. This weapon—” He indicated his belt. “—is so obviously shaped for human hands, you might have thought my claims about its provenance a lie.”

Bellis had had no thoughts at all about the shape of the Possible Sword, as Uther Doul must have known.

“You’re not seeing the sword,” he went on softly. “Only one aspect of it. It’s contextual—as was so very much for the Ghosthead. I take it you’ve read some of their Imperial Canon? Even as translations of translations of translations, even with all the additions and omissions and commentary that implies, there are some extraordinary things there. Especially the Covertiana.” He sipped his wine.

“Some purport to be passages from the earliest days of the arrival of the Ghosthead in Bas-Lag, before the Empire began.” He blinked at Bellis. “Certainly,” he said as if she had disputed him. “Arrival. The Ghosthead were not native to this world.”

Bellis knew the myths.

“There is one passage . . . ,” Doul mused (and Bellis realized with consternation how his wonderful voice was lulling her). “ ‘The Verses of the Day.’ Perhaps you know them? ‘Redoubtable, tail flicking, swimming over a plain of worlds, past orbs, lights in the night’s blindness.’

“That describes the Ghostheads’ journey from . . . their place to Bas-Lag. In the belly of a metal fish swimming through a dark sea of stars. But what’s most interesting is the description of their home, where they came from. It has been confused with hell.”

Uther Doul sat on his crib, and did not speak for some time.

Is this why I’m here? thought Bellis suddenly. Is this what he wants to tell me? He was like a boy, wanting her there but quite uncertain what to do.

“It describes the morning coming with ‘ferrous cataracts and a wall of fire,’ ” he said eventually. “The entire eastern sky was ablaze with light and heat enough to blind anyone looking up even from the bottom of a sea, to ignite the air, burn the mountains, liquefy metal. Far, far hotter than the heart of any foundry. Morning broke, and the world burned.

“Within minutes the wall of heat had risen and curved above them, directly overhead, blotting out the sky and burning every atom of gas in the air. And then, as the minutes went on, the fire shrank, until its edges became visible, and it was a disc. And the heat began to ebb away a little, though the oceans were still molten iron.

“The fire in the sky receded, moving west, as the day passed. By midmorning, the disc had shrunk further, and it was the sun, nearly at the far horizon. By noon it was much smaller, and the land was very cold.

“The sun shrank and traveled west in a long, drawn-out dusk, and the Ghosthead homeworld became icier than the Rime Ocean. By nightfall, the sky was already dark, and the sun was no more than a moving star.

“And it was cold—colder than anything we could imagine. The world was enveloped in layers of ice and frost—the very gases, the very aether piled up in bergs and walls, chilled more solid than stone.”

He gave Bellis a faint smile.

“That was the Ghosthead homeland. Imagine what kind of creatures might live, might survive in such a place; how hungry they might be for rest. That’s why they left.”

She said nothing.

“Do you know what I mean,” Doul said, “by the belief in the Broken Country?”

Bellis furrowed her brow, then suddenly nodded. “In New Crobuzon we call it . . .” She thought for the translation. “The Fractured Land Hypothesis. I once had a friend who was a scientist. He was always talking about things like this.”

“The Broken Country, across an impossible sea,” said Doul. “I spent a long time, in youth, studying myths and cosmogony. Fractured Land, Ghosthead Country, the Verses of the Day.

“The Ghosthead came here from the universe’s eastern rim. They passed the rock globes that circulate in the sky—another, more evanescent kind of world than ours on the infinite plateau—and came here, to a land so mild it must have seemed like balm: an endless, gentle midmorning. And its rules were not theirs. Its nature was debatable.

“There are some who say that when they landed, the force of it was enough to unleash the chaos of Torque, up from the vent. That’s fable. But their arrival was violent enough to smash open the world—reality itself. The Fractured Land is real, and was their doing. You break something . . . what’s inside spills out.

“When I left my first home, I spent years studying that breakage. Searching for techniques and instruments to make sense of it, control it. And, when I came here, the Lovers saw things in what I’d learnt that I hadn’t imagined.

“Think of the Ghostheads’ power, their science, their thaumaturgy. Imagine what they could do, what they did do, to our world. You see the scale of the cataclysm of their arrival. Not just physically—ontologically. When they landed, they fractured the world’s rules as well as its surface. Is it a surprise that we whisper the name of the Ghosthead Empire in fear?”

And yet, thought Bellis, reeling with the heretic philosophy, and yet it was we who put paid to the Ghosthead. Through the Contumancy, and then the Sloughing Off. Weak as we are.

“They say you led the Contumancy,” she said.

“I lead nothing,” said Doul sharply, surprising her, “not anymore. I’m a soldier, not a leader. High Cromlech . . . it’s a caste world. You grew up in a mercantile city, so you take it for granted. You can have no idea of the liberation of selling your services, doing what your employer tells you. I am not a leader.”

Uther Doul walked with her through the Grand Easterly’s corridors.

When he stopped at one of the numerous intersections, she thought for a sudden second that he would kiss her, and her eyes widened. But that was not his intention.

He put his finger to his lips. “I want you to learn something,” he whispered, “about the Lovers.”

“What are their names?” Bellis said in tired anger. “I’m sick of the . . . the mystery, and I don’t believe you can’t remember.”

“I can,” said Uther Doul. “Of course I can remember. But what they were once called is not at all the point. They’re the Lovers now. You’d better learn that.”

Doul led her into the lower decks. He took her away from sound, away from the patrols. What is this? thought Bellis, excited and unnerved. They were now in dark, very quiet portions of the ship. There were no windows; they were below the waterline, in a long-deserted place.

Finally Doul ducked below a snarl of pipes and ushered her into a tiny chamber. It was not a room, just a little found space. All the surfaces were dusty, and the paint was peeling.

Doul gently put his finger in front of her lips.

Bellis was aware that meekly following Doul, fraternizing with him, was not sensible behavior from one who had been deeply involved in counter-Garwater activities. What am I doing here? she thought.

Uther Doul was pointing up at the ceiling, only an inch or so above her head. He cocked an ear expressively. It took some seconds before Bellis heard anything, and when she did, she was not at first sure what it was.

Voices. Muffled by layers of air and metal. Half-familiar. Bellis turned her head up. She could almost make out words now. This was an accidental little listening post. By quirk of architecture and materials, the sounds from the room above issued (by pipes, hollow walls?) through the ceiling.

Voices from the room above.

The Lovers’ room.

She started in astonishment. It was the Lovers that she could hear.

Cautious and slow, as if they might somehow see her, Bellis craned her neck and listened.

Words fluttering across registers, uttered with quick breaths. Mewing, pleading, delighting. Gasps of sexual closeness and pain and other intense emotions. And words coming through the metal.

. . . love . . . soon . . . fuck . . . yes and . . . cut . . . now . . . love . . . cut . . . yes, yes . . .

Yes.

The words were thick. Bellis recoiled from them—physically, literally, stepping away from the weak spot in the metal. The words, the sounds, were crooned quickly, so steeped in passion and need that they had to be bitten out or they would become a wordless shriek.

cut yes love cut

Two streams of words, male and female, overlapping and interweaving and inextricable—their rhythms inextricable.

Dear Jabber! thought Bellis. Uther Doul watched her, expressionless.

Cut and cut and love and cut! she thought, and went for the door, appalled. She thought of what they were doing, in their room, a few feet away.

Doul led her away from that terrible little cubbyhole. They ascended through layers of metal toward the night air. Doul still did not speak.

What are you doing? she thought, staring at his back. Why show me that?

There had been nothing prurient in his demeanor. She did not understand. Stiff, eloquent, and formal in his own room, uncovering extraordinary stories and theories to keep himself talking, he had become, in these corridors, a truculent child with a secret hideaway. And with something like the wordless, inarticulate pride she would expect from such a child, he had led her to his private den and shown her its secret. And she could not fathom why.

She shuddered at the memory of those breathy exclamations, the Lovers’ twisted declarations of passion. Of love, she supposed. She thought of their scars, the cutting. The blood and split skin, the fervor. She felt as if she would sick up. But it was not the violence, not the knives they used or what they did, that horrified her. It was not that at all. Peccadillos did not disturb her at all—those, she could understand.

This had become something else. It was the emotion itself, the intense, giddying, slick, and sick-making ardor she had heard in their voices that appalled her. They were trying to cut through the membrane between them and bleed one into the other. Rupturing their integrity for something way beyond sex.

That violent, moaning thing that they thought was love, she thought was something akin to masturbation, and it disgusted her.

Bellis was left aghast by it. Nauseated and threatened and aghast.

Chapter Thirty-one

During the days, Shekel was free.

Like most of the young bravos who hung out around the Basilio docks, he made his living as he had in New Crobuzon—running errands, delivering messages and goods, keeping his eyes and ears open, for whatever handful of change his momentary employer chose to give him. His Salt was game and comprehensible, if not fluent.

A little more than half of his evenings he spent with Angevine. She berthed in Tintinnabulum’s Castor, below its belfry. She often returned very late at night, since Tintinnabulum spent long hours in the meetings with his colleagues, and with Krüach Aum and Bellis and the Lovers, and Angevine fetched books or materials for him, from the library or from his hidden laboratory at the back of his ship. She would return tired, and Shekel would soothe her with supper and inexpert massages.

Angevine did not speak much about the avanc project, but Shekel could easily sense her tension and excitement.

Other evenings he spent at what he still thought of as his own home, which he shared with Tanner Sack.

Tanner was not always there—like Angevine, the project was keeping him at work long and difficult hours. But when he was present, he spoke more about what he was doing. He described to Shekel the extraordinary look of the bridle, stretching out in the clear water, the schools of bright tropical fish circulating through its links, which were scaling already with the plants and tenacious shellfish; picked out at night with cold lights. All the hours of work, of welding and testing and suggesting, acting as designer, foreman, and builder, left Tanner exhausted and very happy.

Shekel kept the rooms clean and warm. When he was not cooking for Angevine, he cooked for Tanner.

He was troubled.

Two nights previously, on Luddi, Shekel had woken suddenly a little after midnight, in his old rooms on the factory ship. He had sat up and stayed quiet and unmoving.

He had looked around the room, in the pale half-shadow shed by lights and stars outside: at the table and chairs, the bucket, the plates and pans, at Tanner’s empty bed. (working late again). Even swaddled in shadows, there was nowhere for anyone to hide, and Shekel could see that he was alone.

And yet he had felt as if he was not.

Shekel lit a candle. There were no unusual sounds or lights or shadows, but he kept thinking that he had just a moment before heard or seen something—again and again, as if his memories were outpacing him, reminding him of something that had not yet happened.

He went back to sleep eventually, and woke the next morning with only a vague sense of the foreboding he had felt. But the next night, the same sense of intrusion came with dusk, long before he had gone to bed. He stood—with a concentrated, silly stillness—looking about him vaguely. Had those clothes been moved? That book? Those plates?

Shekel’s attention switched rapidly from one object, one drawer or collection or pile of things, and the next, his eyes moving across them, exactly as if he were watching someone move through the room, touching or rummaging in each place in turn. He grew angry and afraid at once.

He wanted to flee, but loyalty to Tanner kept him in those rooms. It made him light the lamps and sing loudly, and cook expansively and quickly until Tanner returned—mercifully, before the late evening, when the sounds outside faded away.

To Shekel’s relief and surprise, when he broached the subject of his strange intuitions, Tanner reacted with interest and seriousness.

He looked around the little room and muttered carefully. “It’s a peculiar time, lad.” Exhausted as he was, he raised himself and followed the route that Shekel described around the room. He picked up the items he passed, carefully checking them. He hummed and rubbed his chin.

“I can’t see a sign of nothing, Shekel,” he admitted. His eyes did not relax. “It’s a peculiar time. There’s all manner of types trying all manner of things at the moment—there’s lies and rumors, and Jabber knows what. Thus far, those who’ve problems with Garwater and the project ain’t spoken of it too loud—that’ll come later, I shouldn’t doubt. But maybe there’s some who’re trying other ways of undermining things. It ain’t as if I’m a bigwig in this, Shekel, lad, but I’m known to have gone to the island, and I’m known to be helping build the bridle. It might be someone’s made their way in here to try to . . . I don’t know . . . undermine things. To look for something to strengthen their side. As if I’m stupid enough to keep any plans here.

“People are tense. Things are moving too quick. It’s like it ain’t in anyone’s control.” He looked around him once more, then caught Shekel’s eye.

“I’m tempted to say let ’em come. If you’re right, then so long as they take nothing and leave us alone, then fuck ’em. I ain’t scared.” He grinned with bravado, and Shekel smiled back.

“All the same,” Shekel said quietly. “All the same.”

When he spoke to Angevine about his experience the next day, she echoed Tanner Sack almost exactly.

“Might be there’s something in it,” she said slowly. “It’s a strange time, you know. People are excited, and some are scared. I doubt that unseen intruders’ll be the strangest thing we have to face over the next weeks, lover. With the factories working overtime for the bridle, people are grumbling. There’s no time or engineers to fix up machines elsewhere, no engine parts or metalwork being built. ‘With all the power from that rig,’ people are saying, ‘when’ll we see it put to our use? How much does the damn avanc need, anyway?’

“Well, it needs a lot, Shekel. A damn lot, now and always.” She met his eye and took his hand. “And the rumblings that you can hear now—in Bask and Curhouse and Dry Fall, most especially, but all over—are bound to grow. When people get to understand that there’s other things more important to put the oil and rockmilk to than all their schemes.”

She spoke absently, recalling conversations that she had overheard between Tintinnabulum and others, and Shekel could do little more than nod.

“They’re appearing already, the troublemakers,” she mused. “Vordakine in Curhouse, Sallow in Bask. The mysterious Simon Fench. Pamphlets, graffiti, whispers. And good people have their doubts, too. I heard that Hedrigall, who’s loyal to his wooden bones, even knows this Fench, drinks with him sometimes. People’ll get fired up if the avanc is called—something so wonderful as that, it’ll excite them. But that won’t be the end, Shekel, believe me.”

In the blazing heat of Armada’s accidental, equatorial summer, Croom Park blossomed.

When last Bellis had visited it, it had been all-over green: wet, and lush, and sap-stinking. Now the green was overlaid with spring and summer colors: a mulch of hurried blossom underfoot, and here and there still frosting the tips of trees. The first bright summer flowers vied with vivid weeds, dogwood, and daffodils. The woods rustled with small life.

Bellis came to the park not with Silas, but with Johannes Tearfly, and she was wryly amused that she felt as if she were being somehow unfaithful.

She walked her favorite route, along what had once been a corridor between ship’s cabins and was now an ivy-smothered canyon. The walls were studded with passion flowers, broken windows just visible beneath a mesh of roots. Where the old cabin-hills sank into the grassy surface and the pathway opened out into the sun, there was a fringe of pungent honeysuckle purring with bees.

This is a good moment, thought Bellis carefully as she walked, Johannes shy and wondering behind her. But you’ll have to spoil it in a moment, Johannes—you’ll have to speak.

And after some more minutes of flowers and grass, when the only sound was the vibrato of warm insects, he did.

They talked for a long time about the work below the city.

“I’ve been down in a submersible a couple of times,” Johannes told her. “It’s extraordinary, Bellis. The speed with which they’re constructing it—it’s truly amazing.”

“Well, I’ve seen the rate they’ve decommissioned the Terpsichoria, among others,” she said. “I can just imagine.”

Johannes was wary of her, still, but he was eager to feel the connection they had once had. She could feel him reaching to her, explaining away to himself any curtness she might display.

“You’ve not told me much about the island,” he said.

Bellis sighed. “It was hard,” she said. “I don’t relish discussing it.” But she gave him a little more than that: told him of the excruciating heat, the constant fear, the gurning curiosity of the he-anophelii and the murderous hunger of their mates.

He tried to gauge her. She wondered whether he thought he was shrewd and subtle.

“They took Aum away, yesterday,” she continued, and he turned to her, startled. “I’ve been teaching him Salt for a couple of weeks, that’s all. He learns at a rate that frightens me. He takes notes on everything I say—he’s already amassed enough for a textbook. But, still, I didn’t think he was capable of conversing without my help—not yet. But yesterday afternoon, when we’d concluded with Tintinnabulum and the engineers’ committee, they took him away and told me I wasn’t needed for a while.

“Perhaps their opinion of his Salt is higher than mine. Or perhaps one of their other High Kettai experts has practiced enough to come in useful.” This she said with a superior sneer, and Johannes laughed briefly. “They’ve been telling me for some time that I’m to bring him to fluency in Salt at the very earliest possible time; that he’ll be needed for projects that don’t concern me. They’re trying to get rid of me.”

She turned to Johannes and held his gaze. They were alone in a clearing, ringed by trees and briars, stunted spring roses.

“My usefulness is ending, and I’m delighted, because I’m so godsdamned tired. But Aum’s is only just starting, it appears. And it wasn’t any of the usual group who took him away. It was Uther Doul, and it was men and women I’d never seen. I don’t know what that’s all about. Seems to me that calling the avanc is not the end of it.”

Johannes turned away from her and fingered the flowers.

“Only now realizing that, Bellis?” he said quietly. “Of course you’re right. There’s more to come. Given the scale of what we’re attempting with the avanc, it’s difficult to imagine, but it seems that perhaps that’s just a . . . prelude to whatever’s really going on. And what that is, I don’t know. It’s been decided it should not involve me.

“You know,” he said, “it was just luck, really, that I ever got my commission here.”

Luck? thought Bellis, incredulous.

“Of those in the know,” he continued, “who’d seen the old chains, there’ve been some arguing for decades that Armada should try to call the avanc. But the Lovers ignored them, had no interest in it for years—that’s what I heard.

“It changed when Uther Doul came to the city, came to work for them. I don’t know what he did or said to them, but all of a sudden the avanc project was revived. Something he told them meant those old plans got dusted off, for the first time since those chains were built—and no one knows how long ago that was, or what happened.

“And after all that, it’s just over for me. They’ve moved on to other things.”

Jealous, realized Bellis. Spurned, deserted, and pissed off. Johannes’ work—and Johannes himself—was invaluable to conjure up the avanc, but whatever came after that did not require him.

Gently, subtly, Bellis probed his wound. Moment by moment, interspersing her investigation with meaningless minutiae.

In his anger, Johannes was willing to talk seriously about the doubts that had been raised over the Lovers’ plans.

They strolled through the wooded boat, past reclaimed funnels and bulkheads, while Bellis fed Johannes’ resentment in a coy and sly interrogation, learning things piece by piece.

Once she started listening, Bellis heard the same names, the same rumors, everywhere. The veneer of loyalty that had been painted over Armada was thin. Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish.

She was startled to realize that it was not only the worthies of Bask and Curhouse who were linked to such dissident voices. Some of Garwater’s longest-loyal servants were doubters, linked to the renegades.

The Lovers’ consensus, she realized, was not stable. And, as she half expected, the name that recurred most often, that came up again and again as a focus for this discontent, was Simon Fench.

Bellis began to search for him.

She asked all the people she knew after Simon Fench. Carrianne shrugged, but said she would keep her ears open. Johannes looked askance and said nothing. Shekel, at one of their infrequent meetings, nodded. “Ange mentioned him,” he said. Feigning faint interest, Bellis asked Shekel to find out more.

Her query was tossed around on street corners, among the youths who hung over ship railings, firing catapults at the city’s monkeys, or sat in pubs, playing dice and arm wrestling. Each had their own friends, their own contacts, men and women who might slip them coins and food and favors in exchange for whatever trivial services the boys and girls might perform. Bellis’ question passed through them, through the drinking halls of Garwater and Shaddler and Booktown and Thee-And-Thine.

In New Crobuzon, what was not regulated was illicit. In Armada, things were different. It was, after all, a pirate city. What did not directly threaten the city did not concern its authorities. Bellis’ message, like other secrets, did not have to strive to be covert, as it might back home to avoid the militia. Instead, it sped through this wrangling city with ease and speed, leaving a little trail for those who knew how to look.

“You wanted me.”

Silas was standing by Bellis’ bed. She had not yet undressed. She was sitting with her knees up, reading a book by gaslight. A moment before, she had been alone.

More thaumaturgy, Silas? she thought.

It was the evening of the tenth Scabdi of Hawkbill, the last day of the quarto—a festival. The streets were loud; people were drunk, shouting and laughing. The ships and streets were draped with colored bunting. The air was full of fireworks and confetti (and still the work went on below the water).

“I do,” she said.

“You want to be careful. You don’t want to advertise yourself as dealing with dissidents.”

Bellis laughed. “Jabber and fuck, Silas. You should see the list of your—or Mr. Fench’s—supposed friends. They include bigger fish than me, by far. Is it true you drink with Hedrigall?” He did not reply. “So I don’t think anyone’s going to care about me.”

They eyed each other quietly. How many times have we done this? Bellis thought hopelessly. Communed secretively—over tea, in my room, at night, to discuss what we do and don’t know . . . ?

“They’re planning something,” she said, and her own conspiratorial tone almost reduced her to bitter laughter. “The avanc’s not the end of it. Aum’s learning Salt in double-quick time, and they’ve taken him off to some new secret project. Even some of the scientists involved are feeling cut out. There’s a core—Tintinnabulum, the Lovers, Aum—and this time Uther Doul’s part of it. They’re planning something.”

Silas nodded. It was obvious that he already knew.

“So?” Bellis demanded. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and she could not tell if she believed him.

“If we can work out what they’ve planned,” she said, “we might still be able to . . . to get out of here.”

“Sincerely,” he said slowly, “I can’t work out what their plan is. If I find out, I’ll tell you. Of course.”

They studied each other.

“I gather Uther Doul’s courting you,” he continued. He was not trying to be unpleasant, but his smirk was irritating.

“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Bellis said curtly. “Sometimes I think that’s exactly it—he’s courting me—but if so, by gods he’s out of practice. Sometimes I think he has other motives, but I can’t make sense of them.”

Again silence. Outside, a cat began to wail.

“Tell me, Silas,” Bellis said. “This is your world. Is there any kind of serious opposition to their project? Serious, I mean? And if there is, could we use it to get out of here? Can it help us?”

What exactly might I have in mind? she wondered. We’ve sent a message to our home port. We’ve saved it, for Jabber’s sake. There’s nothing else to be done. There are no factions to win over. There’s no one we might persuade to take us home.

Whatever Silas claimed about trying to escape, the way he submerged into Armada’s hinterland, ducked out of sight, became Simon Fench, suspended himself in a web of deals and rumors and favors and threats—these were survival tactics. Silas was adjusting.

There was nothing for Bellis to do. No schemes she could engage in, no secret plans.

She still dreamed of that river between New Crobuzon and Iron Bay.

No, she thought fiercely, uncompromisingly. Whatever the truth, whatever the case, however hopeless the cause—I do not give up on escape.

It had taken her quite some effort to reach this coldly burning pitch of anger, of desire for escape, and to relinquish it now would be unbearable.

And so she kept that No loud in the back of her head, undiluted by doubt.

She woke the next day and leaned from her window into the warm wind, watching the exhausted, hungover crews clear the detritus of last night’s party from the streets and decks. They swept up huge piles of dust and colored paper, costumes and disguises from the masque parties, the debris of drug-taking.

The bilious flames had stopped rolling from the top of the Sorghum’s derrick. The rig had gone cold, its harvest of oil and rockmilk siphoned up and stored. Over the ships’ roofscape, the steamers, the tugs, the squat industrial vessels were moving back toward the city, like iron filings toward a magnet. Bellis watched their crews attach them again to the edge of Armada.

When all the servant ships had attached themselves to the city, they bore off to the southeast, venting black smoke, their gears grinding, devouring huge quantities of stolen coal and anything else that might burn. With appalling slowness, Armada began to move.

Below, in the clear water, the divers continued working. The stripping down of ship after ship continued, their substances delivered to the industrial works. An endless train of dirigibles passed between the vessels’ corpses and the forges.

The sea moved in faint currents around the massive bridle hidden below the waves. Armada’s pace was almost imperceptible: only a mile or two every hour.

But it did not slacken. It was ceaseless. Bellis knew that when it reached the place it sought, when the chains were lowered, when the thaumaturgy was attempted, everything would change. And she heard herself again, No, refusing to acquiesce, refusing to make her home here.

As her days passed, she was needed less and less. Her translation sessions with the engineers were fewer, as the bridle’s crews worked their endless hours and problems of design were reached, one by one, and solved. Bellis felt herself slipping from the core of things.

Except for Doul. He still spoke to her, still gave her wine in his cabin. There was still something shadowy between them, but Bellis could not make it out. And Doul’s conversations were as cryptic as ever, and she took no comfort in them. Once, twice more, he took her again to that little room, the sound box below the Lovers’ chamber. Why she went with him she could not say. It was always at night, always a secret. She heard their gasping declarations, their mews of pain and desire. The emotion still appalled and nauseated her, like something rotting in her stomach.

The second time she had heard them hiss with whatever passed for pleasure in their minds, and the next day, when she entered the meeting room with Aum, the Lovers stared at her with fresh wounds, blood crusting on their foreheads, scored deep in mirror images across their faces.

And Bellis had faltered. She could not bear the thought that she was at the mercy of people hooked on the emotion she had heard.

No.

Even as the weather grew hotter still, day after day till a week and then two had passed, and the bridle was nearly done, and Silas had not come to her, and Doul still made no sense; even as she slipped from the center of power, and her relief that she need not see the Lovers every day was effaced by the fear of her own growing ineffectuality; even as she lost the last semblance of power she had had; even as it became clear that she was trapped, the voice inside Bellis hardened and was absolutely clear.

No.

Chapter Thirty-two

Armada found the place it was looking for.

The city was near the southern border between the Swollen Ocean and the Black Sandbar Sea. Bellis was stunned when she heard that. Have we really come so fucking far? she had thought.

They lay absolutely still in the water. By arcane techniques like echo-catching and sensory projection, Armada had found its way to the center of a deadeye. These existed randomly across the oceans—patches of water a few miles across, where there were no currents or winds. Without motive power, things floating on the surface of deadeyes would bob up and down with waves, but would not move an inch in any compass direction.

They were signs of sinkholes.

In this region, the ocean was between three and four miles deep. But below the deadeye the seafloor fell away in a steep cone, into a circular hole that stretched down below the reach of any geo-empath.

The sinkhole was a mile and a half wide, and bottomless.

It stretched so deep that Bas-Lag’s dimension could not possibly contain the water’s gravity and density, and reality was unstable in the shaft’s lower reaches. The sinkhole was a duct between realms. Where the avancs breached.

There was not a time when Krüach Aum and his new subordinates declared their researches over—there was no sudden announcement, no claim that the last problems had been solved. Bellis could not say exactly when she knew that Armada was ready.

Doul did not tell her. The knowledge soaked into her, and into all the other citizens. In rumor and guesswork, in triumphant speculation and then in triumph, the word spread. They’ve succeeded. They know how to do it. They’re waiting.

Bellis wanted not to believe it. The awareness that the scientists had perfected the techniques they needed took her so gently that there was no sudden shock, just a slowly waxing foreboding. How? she thought, again and again. She considered the scale of what was to be attempted, and the question overwhelmed her. How can they do it?

She considered everything that had to be done, all the knowledge that they had had to amass, the machines to be built, the puissance to channel. It seemed impossible. Is it down to me? she wondered incredulously. Without Aum, without his book, could this be done?

With every hour, Bellis could feel the tension, the anxiety and excitement, increasing all around her.

Days after they reached the deadeye, finally, the announcement was made that everyone had been expecting. Posters and criers warned people to be ready, that the research was over, that an attempt was to be made.

As momentous, as extraordinary, as it was, it surprised no one. And after such long official silence, even to Bellis, that final confirmation was almost a relief.

Tanner Sack found the bridle and the now-visible chains a great pleasure to his eye. He had been born and raised in New Crobuzon, where mountains picked out the western sky and the architecture was complex and encompassing. There were times, he would admit, when the endless open skies of Armada, the unbroken water below, troubled him.

He found a comfort in the submerged harness. It gave him something big and real to stare at, breaking the monotonous deeps.

Tanner hung in the still waters of the deadeye.

There were a very few figures in the water—Tanner, Bastard John, the menfish—watching from below.

Everything had been prepared.

It was almost midday. The city was as still as if it were before dawn.

On neighboring ships, Bellis could see people watching from their roofs, or peering from behind railings or from the city’s parks. But there were not many. There was almost no noise. There were no dirigibles in the sky.

“Half the city’s indoors,” she hissed to Uther Doul. He had found her on the deck of the Grand Easterly, gathered with the few Armadans who, like Bellis, felt compelled to watch the attempt from the flagship itself.

They’re frightened, she thought, staring over the empty streets on vessels below. They’ve realized what’s at stake here. Like shipwrecked sailors in a jolly boat tethering themselves to a whale. She almost laughed. And they’re afraid of the storm.

The citizens of Armada dreaded severe storms. The city could not avoid or ride the weather’s tempers, and the worst winds could tear vessel from vessel, throw them together no matter how strong their buffers. Armada’s history was punctuated with the stories of terrible and deadly squalls.

Never before had anyone deliberately called one down.

To puncture the membrane between realities, even at a weak point, to entice the avanc into this plane, a burst of colossal energy was required. Something like that required not just an elyctric storm, but a living one. An orgy, a frenzy of fulmen, lightning elementals.

And given that living storms were—thankfully—almost as rare as Torque rifts, Garwater would have to create one.

The Grand Easterly’s six masts, particularly its towering main mast, were swathed with copper wiring, insulated with rubber, that stretched down and disappeared into the ship itself, passing down corridors and stairs, carefully guarded by the yeomanry, winding through the vessel until it slotted into the esoteric new engine running on rockmilk at the Grand Easterly’s base, ready to send extraordinary charges into the stub ends of the colossal chain, down through the metal into the bridle and the deep sea.

Somewhere, scholars and pirate-thaumaturges from Booktown and Shaddler and Garwater were gathered: meteoromancers and elementalists with weird engines, furnaces, unguents, and offerings. Perhaps a sacrifice. Bellis could imagine their frantic work gauging aetherial currents, stoking and conjuring.

For a long time there was only whispering and the faint noises of gulls and the waves. Everyone who stood in the bleak heat strained to hear something that they had not heard before, but they had no idea what they were waiting for. When it finally came it was a sound so monolithic that they felt it, deep below, resonating through the ships.

Bellis heard Uther Doul exhale, then he whispered “Now,” his voice thick with emotion she did not recognize.

The deck of the Grand Easterly moved suddenly below their feet, with a cracking percussion.

Armada vibrated violently.

“The bridle, the chains,” Doul said quietly. “They’re being lowered. Into the hole.”

Bellis gripped the rail.

Below the water Tanner gasped, water rushing over his gills, as the vast pulleys turned and the restraining bolts on the harness were burst with explosive charges. In carefully choreographed sequence, displacing great tides of brine, the metal ring more than a quarter of a mile across, studded with cruel hooks and collars, began to descend.

It slid in stages through the water, reaching the limit of its freedom as each section of boat-long links ended. And then another charge would detonate, and huge gears would turn, and a few more hundred feet of metal would sink.

As each length of chain reached its end, the city above moved, and reconfigured a little, its dimensions shifting under the strain. The chains were so huge, they operated at a geographic scale, each weighty tug a seismic trauma. But Armada was buoyed by careful design and gas and thaumaturgy, and though the sudden jolts shook it as if in a high storm, and strained at those few wickerwork-and-rope bridges that were not uncoupled, and snapped them, they could not capsize the city.

“Jabber and fuck,” Bellis shouted. “We have to get below!”

Doul held her, gripped her hard and kept her feet flat.

“I’ll not miss this,” he said, “and I don’t think you should, either.”

The city bucked appallingly; then, suddenly.

The bridle’s descent began to speed up. Tanner Sack realized he was shouting soundlessly, airlessly, his jaw biting out silent profanities at the sight. He was hypnotized by the scale of what he saw, the rapid disappearance of the huge harness into the absolutely dark sea. Seconds and minutes passed. The city stabilized a little and there was only the continuing unfolding of the great tethered chains, five lines of links descending into the hidden deeps.

Colonies of barnacles and limpets had scabbed the chains over generations, and as the links ripped free of the ships’ undersides, they sent clouds of dying shellfish into the abyss.

After many minutes had passed, Armada was almost still again, undulating very slightly with the last reverberations of the chain. Birds shunted mindlessly back and forth overhead. The huge weight of the metal settled. There was a tense expectancy.

And everyone held their breath, and nothing happened.

The bridle now dangled below miles of chain. The city above moved on the swell, peacefully.

Armadans were braced and waiting. But the water of the deadeye remained peaceful, and the sky clear. Slowly, more and more people began to emerge onto the decks. They were nervous and hesitant at first, still waiting for an occurrence the parameters of which they could not imagine. But nothing happened.

Bellis did not know precisely what manner of crisis had overtaken the scientists and thaumaturgists. The promised storm did not appear. The rockmilk engines did not move.

It was no surprise, she reflected. The techniques were unique, unproven and experimental. It was no surprise that they did not work straight away.

Still, the anticlimax was overwhelming. Within two hours the city was as it had been. The unnatural hush abated.

Disappointed pirates bickered and told jokes about the failure. No one from Garwater, no scientist or bureaucrat, made any announcement about what had happened. Armada sat in the gentle water and the heat, and the hours of official silence became half a day, and continued.

Bellis could not find Doul, who had gone to find out what had happened. She spent her evening alone. She should have been delighted at Armada’s failure, but a ruefulness infected even her. A curiosity.

Two days passed.

In the deadeye’s still water, some of the city’s effluent congealed around the city, and lolling in the sun, Armada began to smell. Once, Bellis and Carrianne walked in Croom Park, but the odor and the raucous cries of too-hot animals, feral and in farm-ships, made the atmosphere unpleasant. It was not refreshing to be out of doors. Bellis confined herself and her smoking to her room.

Apart from that brief meeting with Carrianne, she spent the hours alone. Doul did not reappear. Bellis fidgeted in the heat and smoked and waited, watching the city return to its raucous routine with willful speed. It infuriated her. How can you all pretend that nothing’s going on? she thought, watching the vendors in Winterstraw Market. As if this is just a place like any other, as if this is a normal time?

There was still no word as Krüach Aum, his assistants, and the crews of engineers and hunters, all unseen, worked over their calculations again, took measurements, tinkered with their engines, as Bellis was sure they must be doing.

Two days passed.

Tanner lay under the city, floating motionless, facing down. It was as if he stood at the entrance to a dark pentangular tunnel edged with chains. In line with his head, each arm and each leg, the five great fetters soared downward, converging with perspective and disappearing into the dark.

He was exhausted. The frantic repairs since the first attempt had robbed him of sleep. He had been yelled at by overseers livid from failure.

The enormous chain corridor stretched out below him was more than four miles long. Hanging absolutely motionless in the darkness at its end was the bridle, bigger than any ship. It dangled into the pit below, investigated, perhaps, by the oarfish and huge-mouthed eels that frequented that depth.

Sitting and reading beside her window, Bellis became slowly aware of an odd stillness: a silence and a shift in the quality of the light. A neurotic pause, as if the air and the bleaching sun were waiting. She knew with a shock of amazed fear what was happening.

At last, she thought. Gods help me, they’ve done it.

From her front step, high up on the Chromolith chimney, she looked out over Armada’s gently bobbing vessels, at the Grand Easterly’s masts. She stared into the crowded city. There had been no warning that another attempt was to be made: there were people everywhere. They were standing still in the markets and streets, peering up, trying to work out what they had sensed.

The sky began to change.

“Dear Jabber,” whispered Bellis. “Oh my gods.”

In the middle of the sun-bleached blue stretched out over Armada, a darkness unfolded. Thousands of feet above them, the clear sky spasmed for an instant and shat out of nothingness a tiny smear of cloud, a mote, an atom of impurity that unfurled like a flower, like a trick box—a conjuror’s prop that opened again and again, multiplying itself with its own substance.

It spread quickly like squid ink, uncoiling, staining the sky, spreading in a circle, an expanding disk of shadow. It emitted ominous sounds.

There was a wind, suddenly, slapping Armada’s shanks and towers, strumming the city’s rigging. Something was drifting down around Bellis, minuscule particles like mist, an arcane stink descending from the Grand Easterly’s funnels and spreading out, the effluent of whatever forces were tearing the clouds out of nothing. Bellis recognized the smell: rockmilk. Some aeromorphic engine was being boosted.

The sun was completely occluded. Bellis shivered in the newborn dark and cold. Beyond the city limits, the sea had become choppy, seesawing with foam. The sound from the sky increased: from low vibrations it became purring, and then a drawn-out shout, and finally a bark of thunder, and with that percussive noise the storm erupted out of the cloudmass.

The wind went berserk. The sea pitched. Thunder again, and with it the oily darkness over the city shattered a thousand ways, and through every crack lightning glared incandescent. Rain raced in screaming swells, dousing Bellis in moments.

Across all the ridings of the city, Armadans scrambled to get below. The decks emptied fast. Men and women struggled to uncouple the bridges as the vessels they linked began to buck. Here and there stood people transfixed like Bellis, in fear or fascination, staring into the storm.

“Godspit!” shouted Bellis. “Sweet Jabber protect us!” She could not hear her own voice.

The storm was muted for Tanner, cosseted deep as he was in the water of the deadeye. The surface above him lost its integrity in the rain. The city rose and fell as if the sea were trying to shuck it off. The huge chains moved below it.

Even through the tons of water, Tanner realized, the sound of thunder and the water’s motions were increasing. He swam, agitated, waiting for the storm to reach its final pitch, growing more and more nervous as the violence did not dissipate, as it continued to increase.

’Stail, he thought in awe and fear. They’ve done it this time, ain’t they? What the fuck kind of storm is this? What the fuck have they done?

Bellis held tight to the rail, terrified that the wind would pull her out and over, to be crushed between vessels.

The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes.

Even with air rinsed by the torrent, the weird stink of rockmilk vapor was strong and increasing. Bellis could see ripples distorting the air. Lightning struck the city’s masts again and again, lingering around the huge copper-shrouded column on the Grand Easterly.

Armada danced as the sky boiled. As the aeromorphic engine vented ever more power, the lightning patterns began to change. Bellis watched the clouds, mesmerized.

At first the streaks and jags were random, snapping and shivering like brilliant snakes in the darkness. But they began to synchronize. They grew closer in time, so that the light from one still scored Bellis’ eyes while the next fired, and their movements grew more purposeful. The lightning bursts bolted toward the center of the cloud, vanishing at its core.

The thunder grew more intense. The rockmilk smell was nauseating. Bellis was hypnotized by what she saw through the deluge, capable only of thinking come on come on! without consciousness of what she was waiting for.

And then finally, with a single stunning report of thunder, the lightning reached phase.

They burst out of nothing at the same moment around the storm’s edge, scored through the dark air together toward its heart as if they were spokes, meeting at the axis of the tempest in a single, painfully intense point of light that crackled and did not dissipate.

Energy burst up, invisible, amplified through the valves and transformers of occult engines, spurting out of the Grand Easterly’s smokestacks, racing skyward into the storm.

The invocation burst in the heart of the cloud.

The crackling star of lightning shone cold and intense and blue-white, trembling, glowing brighter, taut as if pregnant as if full as if ready to explode and then it

burst

and a swarm of shrieking presences coalesced out of its shreds and were about the ship, crackling apparitions outlined in energy, in elyctricity, leaving trails of burned air as they raced with intent through the sky, informed and capricious and purposeful.

Fulmen. Lightning elementals.

They screamed and laughed as they zigzagged, their cries something between sound and current. The fulmen tore with astonishing speed over the skyline, metamorphosing in arcs of current, trailing a slew of ghost shapes formed in their discharge, mimicking the outlines of the city’s buildings, mimicking fish and birds and faces.

A cluster swept down to the Chromolith deck, shrieking past Bellis and almost stopping her heart. They gusted around the funnel.

From somewhere in the Grand Easterly came a pulse of power, and all over the city the elementals snapped up from their games and eddied in agitation. Again the hidden machines gave out a jolt of energy, sending it coursing along the wires to the tip of the mast. The fulmen howled, and danced along chains and metal railings. They began to swarm. Bellis turned her head and watched them go, out over the body of her ship, through the channels of water between vessels, up and over reconstituted decks toward the huge steamer’s mainmast.

Bellis did not notice the rain or the thunder. All she could see or hear were the living lightnings that outlined Armada with their blazing cold, squabbling and spasming in and out of existence by the city’s tallest roofs. She peered through the storm, over the intervening vessels. Like bait, a flow of energy dangled at the tip of the Grand Easterly’s towering mast.

We fish for a storm to fish for the elementals to fish for the avanc, thought Bellis. She felt drunk.

The fulmen circled the mast, a sheet of bristling presences, spinning into a vortex. They spat in the storm’s darkness, illuminating the city negatively, as if with black sunlight, until a last great gout of binding energy burst out of the wires.

The fulmen shrieked and gibbered and began to pour into the metal.

With hexes and machinery, the elementalists reeled them in.

The elementals screamed as they were taken, their forms conducted through the thick cabling, lights snuffed out in rapid succession. In half a second the sky was dark again.

The elyctric elementals coursed as supercharged particles along the network of copper, bleeding one into the other and becoming a stream of living power, racing down stairs and into the Grand Easterly’s guts, to the rockmilk engine, into the stump ends of the chain that stretched down into the rift below the sea.

Below millions of tons of brine, this condensed substance of a tribe of lightning elementals burst through the links of chain, through prongs the size of masts, out into the water in a bolt of massively potent energy that blazed white light and spasmed instantly into the deeps of the sinkhole, bleaching and destroying what rude life it passed, until it lanced the membrane between dimensions, many miles down.

In the bottom of the Grand Easterly, the rockmilk engine hummed, and sent potent pulses out along the chain.

Only now there was a rent beneath the sea, and now the enticing signals the machine sent out, inaudible to anything born in the seas of Bas-Lag, might be heard.

Tanner Sack heads down into the twilit water. The storm has dissipated, almost instantly, and the sea above him is bright. Tanner is testing himself, pushing on and down, as far as he can go, into the disphotic zone.

There are others around him: cray and menfish and Bastard John, he supposes, curious to plumb as far as they are able, but he cannot see them. The water is cold, and silent, and dense.

He felt the jolts of energy pass him through the huge links of chain. He knows that astonishing events are unfolding directly below, and like a child he indulges himself, sinking toward the dark. He has never swum so deep before, but he follows the enormous chain links as far down as he can go, steeling himself, acclimatizing as the pressure wraps him tight. His tentacles reach out and seem to grasp, as if he can pull himself deeper, gripping the substance of the water.

His head hurts; his blood is constricted. He hangs still in the water when he can go no further. He does not know how far he has come down. He cannot see the great chain by his side. He can see nothing. He is suspended in the cold and the grey, and he is quite alone.

A long time passes while the signals from the rockmilk engine continue to reverberate enticingly into the deep water. Everything is still.

Until Tanner’s eyes snap open (he did not know they were closed).

There has been a sound, a sudden feeling of slick grinding, like the snapping of bolts, things slotting into grooves. A long, rumbling report that travels through the water like whalesong, that he feels in his stomach more than he hears.

Tanner is still. He listens.

He knows what he has heard.

It was the restraints on the quarter-mile bridle—the jags and pegs and pins and rivets, the bolts as long as ships—sliding into place. Something has come snuffling up through layers of water and reality, he thinks, to investigate the delicious rockmilk pulses, and has slipped its neck or some part of itself into the collar until the harness is around it, and the spines and studs like tree trunks have jutted forward, piercing its flesh, and the cinctures have tightened, and the thing is trapped.

There is silence again, and stillness. Tanner knows that above him, the thaumaturges and engineers are sending carefully measured signals into what approximates the creature’s cortex, soothing, suggesting, cajoling.

He feels minute shifts of tide and temperature—thaumaturgic washes rolling up at him.

Tanner feels vibrations against his skin and then, harder, inside him.

The thing is moving, way below the dying fringes of sunlight, in the midnight water miles down, past lantern fish and spider crabs, eclipsing their feeble phosphorescence. He feels it creeping nearer, displacing great gouts of cold water and sending them rolling up and out of the abyss in uncanny tides.

He is enthralled.

There is a lazy booming that makes the water shudder. Tanner imagines some monstrous appendage casually slapping the continental shelf, an unthinking apocalypse wiping out scores of crude bottom dwellers.

The water around him swirls. Thaumaturgic tides wash dissonant up from the hole. There is a sudden spasm of water pressure, and then a very faint sound of pounding reaches Tanner’s ears. Uncertain, he strains to hear.

It is a faint, regular beat that he feels in his innards. A ponderous, smashing stroke. His stomach pitches.

He hears it only for an instant, a quirk of space and thaumaturgy, but he knows what it is, and the knowledge stuns him.

It is a heart the size of a cathedral, beating far below him in the dark.

On the rain-wet steps, below a fierce sun and cloudless skies, Bellis waited.

Armada was like a ghost town. All but the most enthralled of its inhabitants hid, still terrified.

Something had happened. Bellis had felt the shifting of the Chromolith and the knocking of the chains. There had been many minutes now of silence.

She started, once again hearing metal on metal: a slow, threatening percussion as the chains below the city shifted, moving up and stretching out, emerging from the sinkhole below the world, returning to their home dimension, immersing themselves fully in the waters of the Swollen Ocean.

They angled slowly away from vertical, extending until they were stretched taut out in front of the city. Miles below, the bridle was just above the ocean floor.

There was a sudden juddering noise, and Armada shifted violently against itself, its ships shifting into subtly new positions, pulled in new directions from below, altering its outlines.

The city began to move.

The spasm almost knocked Bellis down.

She was agog.

The city was moving.

Cruising southward at a leisurely pace that easily eclipsed anything that had ever been achieved by the scores of tugboats.

Bellis could see the waves against the flanks of the outside vessels. She could see the turmoil of the city’s wake. They were traveling fast enough to leave a wake.

From the edge of Armada to the horizon, the city’s fleet of untethered ships—merchant-pirates, factories, messengers and warships and tugs—were now frantically moving. They were turning to face the city, starting their motors, unfurling their sails to catch up with their mother port.

Oh dear gods, Bellis thought, stunned. They must not be able to believe what they’re seeing. From the nearest of them, Bellis heard a chorus of delight. The sailors were standing on deck cheering.

The sound was taken up, slowly, all over Armada as people began to appear: opening windows and doors, emerging from bunkers, standing up at the railings behind which they had cowered. Everywhere Bellis looked, the citizens were shouting. They were toasting the Lovers. They were screaming with delight.

Bellis looked out to sea, watching the waves pass by as the city moved. As it was towed.

At the end of its four-mile reins, coddled by the rockmilk engine, held tight by hooks like recurved steeples, the avanc progressed steadily and curiously through what was, to it, an alien sea.

Interlude VII

Basilisk Channel

For over four weeks, the Tetneghi Dustheart has been at sea.

The galleon has faced dreadful summer storms. It has been becalmed between Gnurr Kett and Perrick Nigh. In the dangerous channels of the Mandrake Islands it sailed too close to some nameless rock and was beset by marauding flying things that tore the sails and pulled several apes from the rigging to their deaths. In the cold waters by the Rohagi eastern coast, the ship was met and attacked—by nasty chance—by a Crobuzoner navy ship. With lucky winds, the Tetneghi Dustheart outran the ironclad, sustaining damage that slowed but did not destroy it.

Its cactacae crew whistle instructions to the exhausted simians above, and the gaudy vessel approaches port-peace, winds through the channel toward Iron Bay.

The day after his meeting with Tanner Sack, when Captain Nurjhitt Sengka announced his new orders to his crew, they reacted with the astonishment and bad feeling that he had expected. The relaxed discipline of Dreer Samher vessels had allowed them to express themselves more or less freely, and they had told Sengka they disapproved, they were pissed off, they did not understand, they were deserting their posts, that the anophelii needed more guards than the skeleton crew that would be left there.

He was implacable.

With every misfortune on the way, with every hold-up, every dragging minute of the month, the crew’s grumbling grew louder. But Sengka, having decided to risk his career on the written promises Tanner had given him, did not deviate from his plan. And his standing with his crew is good enough that he has been able so far to contain their anger, to keep them waiting with hints and winks.

And now the Tetneghi Dustheart crawls toward the Gross Tar. The galleon’s ostentatious gold and sweeping curves are dulled by brutal spring weather that shocks the cactacae, their garish southern esthetic absurd beside the dark browns and blacks and muddy greens and faint blossom colors of the islands they pass.

They are weather-beaten, dilapidated. The crew are impatient. Sengka fingers the sealed pouch.

There is not long now. They are close to the bay and the river, the bricks and bridges. There are more and more rocks in the waters around them. The channel is shallowing. The coast is very close.

Captain Sengka looks closely at the New Crobuzon seal on the little cargo he is delivering. He hefts it in his big hands: the leather, the box bound in wax; the offer of a reward that New Crobuzon will honor; the letter of alarm, its melodramatic warning of war in obscure, absurd, quite meaningless code; the stubby, worthless little necklace that justifies the jewelry box; and beneath that box’s velvet padding, sealed in its false bottom, cossetted in sawdust, a heavy disk the size of a large watch, and a long dispatch in tiny calligraphy.

Procurator Fennec’s secret gift to New Crobuzon, and his real message.

Interlude VIII

Elsewhere

There has been some stunning irruption into the world. The sea tastes of something new.

What is this?

None of the hunters knows.

What was that shattering that sudden shift the opening up the intrusion the trespass the arrival? What is it that has come?

None of the hunters knows. They can only tell that the sea has changed.

Signs are everywhere. The currents are tentative, shifting direction minutely, as if there is some new obstacle in their path that they do not know how to avoid. The salinae scream and gibber, desperate to communicate what they know.

Even such a massive new presence as this is a tiny change, on a world scale. Almost infinitely small. But the hunters are sensitive to water at a level smaller than atoms, and they know that something has happened.

The new thing has its own unique spoor, but it is a trail of particles and dung and taste that do not operate according to the physics of Bas-Lag. Gravity, random motion, physical existence do not work quite as they should around the intruder. The hunters can taste it, but not track it.

Yet they do not stop trying. Because it is obvious that this is the work of the floating city, and that if they can find the slow, huge thing, they find their quarry.

Time moves quickly.

There are bubbles of water, fresh and brine. They are breathed out by siblings many miles away, they rise, maintaining their integrity even surrounded by the stuff of their own substance, slip through little thaumaturgic vents and are displaced, continuing their upward motion without interruption, vast distances from where they started. They burst by the hunters’ ears, bearing messages from home. Rumors and stories spoken as water. From the groac’h and magi in The Gengris, from the spies in Iron Bay.

We hear things, says one voice.

The hunters commune, and pour out their energy, tremulous and effortful, using their foci, the preserved relics of their dead. Their leaders whisper in response, and the hunters’ own speech bubbles cross the distance back again, home.

Something new has entered the sea, they say.

And when the conversation is done, the magi, quiet in the darkness very far below the surface of the Swollen Ocean, three thousand miles from their home, blink and shake their heads, and the sound that has reached them from across the world dissipates with the water that carries it.

Boats are coming, they tell their hunters. Many. Quickly. From Iron Bay. Hunting, too. Searching, like us. Crossing the sea. Our sisters and brothers are with them, clinging like remora, singing to us. We can find them easily.

The boats. The boats seek the same thing we do. They know where they are going. They have machines to find it.

We track them, and they will track for us.

The hunters grin with their very long teeth and emit the barking gasps of water that are their laughter, folding their limbs away into streamlined shapes and setting out for the north, in the direction they have been given, aiming for where New Crobuzon’s flotilla will be. So they will intercept it, and join their other troops, and at last find their quarry.

Part Six:

Morning Walker

Chapter Thirty-three

The avanc, and Armada behind it, maintained an unchanging, steady speed—always northward. Nothing like as quick as a ship, but faster by many times than the city had ever been able to travel before.

Armadan vessels were returning every day. Their secret mechanisms had shown them their home port’s unprecedented pace, and they were racing across the sea in panic or jubilation to their city with booty of jewels and food and books and earth.

The returned sailors found the city an astounding sight. Surrounded by the fleet of tugs and steamboats that had always pulled it but that now followed it in a huge disparate mass like a second, disintegrating city, loyal and useless, Armada was powering slowly through the sea as if by its own will.

Some of those now-redundant ships were being integrated into the city’s substance, hooked and welded into place, stripped and refitted, built up. Others were converted into pirate vessels, outfitted with armor and guns of a hundred different kinds. They were crossbred, bristling with found ordnance.

The city’s bearing was north-northeast, but there were deviations this way and that, to avoid some storm or rocky island, or some irregularity in the ocean floor that the citizens of Armada could not see.

The pilots on the Grand Easterly were equipped with a rack of pyrotechnic flares in a variety of colors. When the avanc’s course needed correcting, they would fire them in combinations, in prearranged signals. Engineers in the other ridings would respond, firing up the massive winches that would haul back on one or other of the submerged chains.

The avanc responded, uncomplaining and accommodating as a cow. It altered its course (with a flickering of its fins or filaments or paws or gods knew what) in response to the faint tugging. It allowed itself to be led.

In the bottom of the Grand Easterly, the work of the engine room quickly become routine. All day the juddering boilers were fed a thin stream of the rockmilk the Sorghum had drawn up, and they sent a steady pulse of coddling through the chain and the spines and into what approximated the avanc’s cortex.

The huge creature was drugged, drowsy with contentment, mindless as a tadpole.

At first, after the avanc was called, when it became clear that the thaumaturgy, the hunting, had actually worked, that the fabled beast had entered Bas-Lag, Armada’s citizenry were hysterical with excitement.

That first night had been a spontaneous party. The quarto’s-end decorations were brought out again, and the boulevards and plazas across the city were filled with lines of dancing people, men and women, khepri and cactus and scabmettler and others, carrying aloft a variety of papier-mâché models of the avanc, as unlikely as they were inconsistent.

Bellis spent the evening in a pub with Carrianne, buoyed up by the revelry despite herself. The next day she was tired and downcast. It was the third Markindi of Flesh Quarto, and Bellis referred to the New Crobuzon calendar she had scribbled down and discovered that it was the fifteenth of Swiven—Badsprit Eve. This realization depressed her. It was not that she thought the baleful influence of the festival would extend this far, but the near coincidence of the avanc’s arrival with that night was discomfiting.

As the days wore on, even with the excitement still fresh, even with the astonishment of waking each day to a sea slapping against a city in motion, Bellis sensed an anxiety growing in Armada. Central to that was the realization that the Lovers of Garwater, who controlled the avanc, were heading north and would not say why.

Discussions about where the avanc would take the city had so far been in general, nebulous terms. Garwater’s representatives had stressed the creature’s speed and power, the ability to escape storms and barren seas, to make for fair weather, where crops would thrive. Many citizens had assumed that the city would head for somewhere warm, where there were few naval powers, where goods and books and soil and other plunder could be taken from the shore with ease. The southern Kudrik, or perhaps the Codex Sea. Somewhere like that.

But as the days went on, the city continued north, without slowing or deviating. Armada was heading somewhere definite at the Lovers’ behest, and nothing was being said.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” was what the loyalists said in the dockside pubs. “They’ve nothing to hide from us.”

But when finally the news sheets and journals, the street speakers and polemicists composed themselves enough to ask the question on everyone’s minds, there was still no answer. After a week, The Flag’s front page consisted of just four huge words: Where Are We Going?

Still there was no answer.

There were those for whom this silence did not matter. What mattered was that Armada was a great power controlling something more astonishing than they could have imagined. The specifics of their journey were of no more concern to them than they ever had been before. “We’ve always left it to them who make the decisions,” some said.

But there had never been really serious decisions before, only the vaguest agreement that the steamers would haul roughly in such-and-such a direction, in the hope that in a year or two—currents, tides, and Torque permitting—the city might reach congenial water. Now, with the avanc, came a new kind of power, and there were some who realized that everything had changed—that there were now real decisions to be made, and that the Lovers were making them.

In the absence of information, rumor flowered. Armada was heading for Gironella’s Dead Sea, where the water was ossified in its wave forms, entombing all the life within. It was heading for the Malmstrom, for the edge of the world. It was heading for a cacotopic stain. It was heading for a land of ghosts, or talking wolves, or men and women whose eyes were jewels or who had teeth like polished coal, or a land of sentient coral, or an empire of fungus, or it was heading somewhere else, maybe.

On the third Bookdi of the quarto, Tintinnabulum and his crew left Armada.

For the best part of a decade, the Castor had been embedded near Garwater’s foremost point, where it met Shaddler riding. Lashed beside the Tolpandy, it had sat for a long time beside an iron-clad warship that had become a shopping district, its greys mottled with commercial coloration, the byways between its derelict guns surrounded by alleys of tin-shack shops.

People had forgotten that the Castor was not a permanent fixture. Bridges had linked it to its surrounds, and chains and ropes and buffers had tethered it. Those links were cut, one by one.

Under a hot sun, the hunters swung machetes and removed themselves from the flesh of Armada, till they were free-floating, a foreign body. Between the Castor and the open sea a pathway was cleared between vessels. Bridges were uncoupled, tethers were broken on a route leading by the barge Badmark into Shaddler, then alongside the Darioch’s Concern with its cheap houses and raucous industry. It continued past the Dearly, a submersible long surface-bound, its interior a theater, and twisted starboard between an ancient trading cog and a big chariot ship, its rein stubs refitted to hold colored lights; then there was an open patch of water and beyond it the Shaddler Sculpture Garden on the Thaladin, the outer edge of Armada.

Beyond that was the sea.

The vessels that lined the pathway were crowded as people leaned over to shout good-bye at the Castor. Yeomanry and Shaddler guards kept the new channel free of traffic. The sea was calm and the avanc’s passage steady.

When the first of the city’s clocks began to strike noon, the Castor’s motors started up, to a great squall of excitement from the crowd. They cheered raucously as the vessel, a little over a hundred feet long, topped by its absurdly tall bell tower, began to putter forward.

The bridges, lines and chains and girders, were reconnected in the vessel’s wake. The Castor slipped like a splinter from the city’s flesh, which reknitted behind it.

In many places the route was only a little wider than the Castor itself, and it bumped against its neighbors, its swaddling of rope and rubber absorbing the impact. It progressed sluggishly, thumping its way toward the open sea. Beside it, the crowds were shouting and waving, as triumphant as if they had freed the hunters after years of imprisonment.

The ship finally slipped past the Thaladin into the ocean, traveling in the same direction as the avanc but outpacing it in order to emerge from the city. In that wide water, the Castor kept its speed up. It skirted around the front edge of Armada, turning to the south, letting the city drift past it as the avanc continued onward. Armada moved on, till the Castor was by the outskirts of The Clockhouse Spur; and then by the open entrance to the Basilio docks, thronging with free boats; and then it was past Jhour, and the Castor’s engine sounded again and it headed away, in among the free vessels that surrounded and followed the city. Tintinnabulum’s boat passed through them, shedding its protective buffers as it went, dropping rubber and tar-soaked cloth overboard, before disappearing toward the southern horizon.

Many people watched the Castor from the Sculpture Garden until it disappeared around Armada’s curve. Among them were Angevine and Shekel, holding hands.

“They did their job,” said Angevine. She was still shocked to find herself out of a job, but she sounded only very slightly regretful. “They finished what they were brought here to do. Why would they have stayed?

“Do you know what he said to me?” she continued to Shekel impatiently, and he could tell that she had had this on her mind. “He said they might’ve been tempted to stay longer, but they didn’t want to go where the Lovers are going.”

Tanner watched the Castor’s progress from below.

He was not perturbed that the city was heading north, or that he did not know where it was going. He found a great pleasure in the realization that the summoning of the avanc was not the end of Garwater’s project. He found it hard to understand those who saw in this some betrayal, who were angry, intimidated by their own ignorance.

But don’t you think it’s wonderful? he felt like saying to them. It ain’t over! There’s more to be done! The Lovers’ve got more up their sleeves. There’s more we can do; there’s bigger things at stake. We can keep at it!

He spent more and more hours under the surface, emerging to spend his time alone, or occasionally with Shekel, who was growing more closemouthed as the days passed.

Tanner grew closer to Hedrigall. Ironically, Hedrigall was a voice of opposition to the city’s northerly trajectory, and to the Lovers’ silence. But Tanner knew that Hedrigall’s loyalty to Garwater was as strong as his own, that there was nothing snide in his disquiet. Hedrigall was an intelligent and careful critic who did not deride Tanner’s loyalty as blind or unthinking, who understood the trust and commitment Tanner placed in the Lovers, and who treated Tanner’s defense of them seriously.

“You know they’re my bosses, Tanner,” he had said, “and you know that I ain’t got any soft feelings for my so-called home. Dreer fucking Samher means shit to me. But . . . this is too much, Tanner, man—this silence. Things were working, Tanner. We didn’t have to do all this. They should tell us what’s happening. Without that, they lose our trust; they lose their legitimacy. And godsdammit, mate, that’s what they depend on. There’s only two of them, Croom knows how many thousands of us. This ain’t good for Garwater.”

These sentiments made Tanner uneasy.

He was happiest below the water. The submerged life of the riding continued as before: the clouds of fish, Bastard John, the leather-and-metal-clad divers at the end of their guy ropes, the flickering menfish of Bask, the cray, the shadows of submersibles like stubby whales beyond the city. The sunken supports of the Sorghum, its girder-legs poking from them. Tanner Sack himself, swimming from job to job, mouthing instructions or advice to his colleagues, taking orders and giving them.

But nothing was the same; everything was utterly different. Because at the edges of all that banal activity, framing the mass of keels and undersides like the points of a pentacle, the five great chains angled in a steep slope down and forward into the pitch, tethering the avanc miles below.

Tanner’s days were harder than before. He kept swimming all the time, simply to keep up with Armada. He often found himself grabbing hold of jutting pillars, barnacle-crusted timbers, to allow himself to be towed. At the end of the day, when he hauled himself out of the water and returned to his rooms, he was utterly exhausted.

Thoughts of New Crobuzon clouded his mind more and more. He wondered if the message he had delivered had got through. He hoped it had, very much. He could not think about his erstwhile home ruined by war.

The temperature did not waver. Each day was sweaty and bleached by light. When there were clouds they were fraught, stormy and elyctric.

The Lovers, the anophelius Aum, Uther Doul, and a cabal of others retreated into the Grand Easterly to work on their new secret project. The wider circle of scientists was cut loose, to wander disconsolate and aggrieved.

Bellis’ job was over. During the working hours, for want of other friends, she began tentatively to speak again with Johannes. He too was cast-off, like her. The avanc was caught—his role was over.

Johannes was still wary of her. They would wander the swaying streets of Armada, stopping at pavement cafés and little gardens, while pirate children played around them. They both still received stipends and could live easily from day to day, but their hours were endless and purposeless now. There was nothing ahead of them except other days, and Johannes was angry. He felt deserted.

For the first time Bellis could remember, he began to mention New Crobuzon regularly.

“What month is it at home?” he asked.

“Swiven,” Bellis replied, chastising herself silently for not appearing to have to work it out.

“Winter’s over,” he said, “back there. Back in New Crobuzon.” He nodded toward the west. “Spring now,” he said quietly.

Spring. And here am I, thought Bellis, who had winter stolen from me. She remembered the river journey to Iron Bay.

“Do you suppose they know by now that we never arrived?” he said quietly.

“Nova Esperium must do,” said Bellis. “Or at least they assume we’re very severely delayed. Then they’ll wait for the next New Crobuzon boat, probably in another six months’ time, to send them word. So they won’t know for sure back home for a long time.”

They sat and drank their thin city-grown coffee.

“I wonder what’s been happening there,” Johannes said eventually.

They did not say much to each other, but the air was pregnant with their quiet.

Things are speeding up, Bellis said to herself, not quite understanding her own thought. She did not think of New Crobuzon as Johannes seemed to: when she imagined it, it was preserved as if in glass, quite unmoving. She did not think of it now. Perhaps she was afraid to.

She was nearly alone in knowing what might have happened, what wars might be being fought on the banks of the Tar and the Canker. It was bewildering to think that if the city was saved it was down to her. Or that it might not, in fact, have been saved.

The uncertainty, she thought, the silence, the potentiality of what might have happened, what might be happening . . . it should crush me. But it did not. Instead, Bellis felt as if she were waiting.

She spent that evening with Uther Doul.

They would drink together perhaps one night in three. Or they might walk through the city, directionless, or they might return to his room, or sometimes to hers.

He never touched her. Bellis was exhausted by his reticence. He would spend minutes without speaking, only to embark on some mythic-sounding story or other in response to some vague statement or question. His wonderful voice would subdue her then, and she would forget her frustration until his story ended.

Uther Doul clearly drew something from his time with her, but still she could not be sure what. She was not intimidated by him anymore, even carrying her secrets. For all his deadly skills, his brilliance in branches of obscure theology and science, she thought she saw in him someone more lost and confused than she, someone removed from all societies, uncertain of norms and interaction, retreated behind cold control. It made her feel safe in his presence.

She was drawn to him, powerfully. She wanted him: his power and his grim self-control, his beautiful voice. His cool intelligence, the obvious fact that he liked her. The sense that she would be more in control than he, should anything happen between them, and not just because she was older. She would not coquette, but she engineered enough of a dynamic that he must know.

But he never touched her. Bellis was unsettled by that.

It made little sense. His behavior clearly spelled out battened-down, incompetent desire, but there was something else as well. His manner was like some chymical compound, most of the ingredients of which she could identify instantly. There was, though, some mysterious component she could not make sense of, that modified everything that made him. And when Bellis became flushed with lust or loneliness for Doul, when she would otherwise have set matters in motion between them, she held back, flustered by his secret. She was not certain her advances would be reciprocated. And she would not risk that rejection.

Bellis’ desire for sex with him became almost petulant—added to her physical attraction she felt a desire to clarify matters. What is he doing? she thought, time and again.

She had heard nothing from Silas Fennec for many days.

His toes touching the cold foot-wide barrel jutting from an ancient gunboat, his head staring down from higher than the Grand Easterly’s mainmast, the man stands still and gazes and the scud of waves beside the boats makes him feel as if he is falling.

He is stronger with every day that passes. More puissant, more controlled and controlling, more exact in his machinations.

His kisses grow more languorous.

The man holds the statue in his hand, and he caresses the flap of fin-tissue with his fingertips. His mouth is still bloody and salty from the last tonguing kiss.

He moves about the city in the impossible ways that the statue has granted him. Space and physical forces loosen their weft to him when his mouth and tongue tingle from the cold salt press of the stone. The man steps forward and straddles the water between vessels, unseen, and steps forward again and hides in the shadow of a yeoman’s shoe.

Here and there and back again. He travels the city, tracing the rumors and information that he has set in motion. He watches his own influence spread like antibiotic in diseased flesh.

It is all true. Everything he says is true. The discord he leaves behind him in the trail of whisper and pamphlet and paper is a correct reaction.

The man slips under the water. The sea opens to him, and he drifts down past the huge links of chain, toward the unthinkable beast of burden that stretches its limbs in the deepest reaches. When he needs breath he pulls the statue to him, the little grotesquerie hunched and glowing in the night sea with faint biotic light, the toothed osculum a puncture-hole of dark, the open eye wide and mocking, tar-black, and he kisses it deeply and feels its flickering tongue-thing with the disgust that he can never banish.

And the statue breathes air into him.

Or it bends space again and lets him lift his chin—yards deep as he is—and break the water with his face and gasp a lungful.

The man moves through the water without his limbs shifting position, the statue’s filigree of once-living fin moving, as if that is what propels him. He weaves in and around the five great chains, moving downward until he becomes frightened by the dark and cold and silence (even powerful and puissant as he is) and he rises again to walk in the secret compartments of the city.

All the ridings are open to him. He enters all the flagships with ease and without hesitation, except one. He visits the Grand Easterly and the Therianthropus in Shaddler, and Thee-And-Thine’s Salt Godling and all the others—except for the Uroc.

He is afraid of the Brucolac. Even flushed with his statue’s kiss as he is, he will not risk facing the vampir. The moonship is out of bounds to him—that is a promise he has made himself, and that he keeps.

The man practices the other things the statue has taught him while he licks at its mouth. It allows him more than travel and infiltration.

It is true what they say about the haunted quarter: it is inhabited. But those presences in the old ships see what he is doing, and they do not trouble him.

The statue protects him. He feels like its lover. It keeps him safe.

Chapter Thirty-four

Since it had been stolen, the Sorghum had drilled for many weeks, and there were now great stores of oil and rockmilk in Garwater’s reserves. But Armada was hungry, almost as voracious for fuel as New Crobuzon.

Before Garwater had the Sorghum, Armada’s boats had got by only with careful husbanding of what resources they stole. Now their demand increased with the available supply. Even the ships allied to Dry Fall and Bask took the oil that Garwater provided.

The rockmilk was more precious by far, and rarer. In guarded storerooms in the Grand Easterly the heavy liquid slopped in rows of jars. The rooms were secured and earthed by careful geo-thaumaturgic processes, to dispel any dangerous emanations. The engine that sent the lulling pulses into the avanc’s brain was powered on the stuff, and the thaumaturges and technicians who ran it kept a careful eye on their reserves of fuel. They knew exactly how much they needed.

Tanner and Shekel and Angevine studied the air over the Sorghum’s cold derrick and saw there was no effluent.

They sat together in a beer tent on the Dober, under a sprawl of tarpaulin-covered poles. The Dober would not support more solid buildings. It was the body of a blue whale, disemboweled, its top half removed, its carcass preserved by some long-forgotten process. It was quite hard and inflexible, though its floor was disturbingly organic: the remnants of blood vessels and viscera varnished as solid as glass underfoot.

Tanner and Shekel were frequent visitors here. Its beer tent was good. They sat facing the whale’s frozen flukes, which jutted from the water as if about to slap its surface and swim free. The Sorghum was directly in their line of sight, framed by the pointed edges of the whale’s tale. The enormous, ugly presence lolled silently.

Angevine was quiet. Shekel was solicitous, making sure her glass was full, murmuring to her quietly. She was still somewhat shocked. Everything had changed for her since Tintinnabulum left, and she had not yet adapted.

(Tanner had no doubts that she would be alright. Gods knew he did not begrudge her a few days’ befuddlement. Tanner just hoped Shekel himself was alright. He was glad the lad was spending a little time with him.)

What will I do? thought Angevine. She kept thinking that she would go along to see what Tinnabol had for her . . . and then of course she remembered that he was gone. It was not that she missed him. He had been courteous and pleasant to her, but there had been no closeness. He had been her boss, and he had given her orders that she had obeyed.

But even that was an overstatement. He had not really been her boss. Her boss was Garwater—the Lovers. It was Garwater money that paid her wages, Garwater that had commissioned her, in the first days after her arrival, to serve the strange, muscular, white-haired hunter. And having disembarked from a ship taking her away to slavery, from a city where her Remaking had stripped her of rights, made her work a duty, to be told that she would be paid as if she were any other citizen had stunned her. It was that which had bought her loyalty.

And now Tintinnabulum was gone, and she was not sure what she would do.

It was hard, having taken pride in work, to be reminded that it did not matter what she did, so long as she labored, for money. Eight years of her history had sailed with Tintinnabulum and his hunters.

It was just a job, she told herself. Jobs change. Time to move on.

“Where are we going?” Bellis asked Uther Doul.

She had finally given in and asked him.

As she had expected, he did not answer her. He looked up at her question, then down again without a word.

They were in Croom Park, in an evening darkness stained with the colors and the strong smell of flowers. Somewhere nearby, an inbred nightingale sounded its attenuated song.

I want to know, Doul, Bellis felt like saying. There are ghosts clinging to me, and I want to know if the wind wherever we’re going will blow them away. I want to know which way my life is likely to turn. Where are we going?

She did not say any of that. Instead they walked.

A path was visible in the moonlight. It was rough, formed by footsteps rather than design. It wound up the steep slope of bushes and trees that rose above them, broken here and there by the remnants of architecture—railings and stairways, their shapes visible like optical illusions below the garden’s surface.

They climbed the incline onto the raised, tree-shadowed plateau that had once been the poop deck. It looked down over the ships of Curhouse, lit up with their traditional green-and-white lanterns. Bellis and Uther Doul stood in the darkness below the trees. The park moved sedately beneath them.

“Where are we going?” said Bellis again, and again there was a long time when all they could hear were the boat sounds of the city.

“You told me once,” she continued hesitantly, “about your life in High Cromlech. You told me about when you left. What happened then? Where did you go? What did you do?”

Doul shook his head, almost helplessly. After a time, Bellis gestured at his scabbard.

“Where did you get that sword? What does it mean, its name?” she said.

He drew his bone-white weapon. He held it flat in the air and stared at it, then looked up at Bellis and nodded once again. He seemed pleased.

“It’s a large part of why they trust and fear me as they do: the Possible Sword.” He moved it slowly in a precise, curving sweep. “How I got this sword? At the end of a long search . . . and a great, a phenomenal amount of research. Everything’s there, in the Imperial Canon, you know. All the information you might need, if you know how to read it.” He watched Bellis calmly. “The work I’ve done. The techniques I’ve learnt.

“The Ghosthead broke open the world, when they arrived. They made the Fractured Land with the force of their landing, and it was more than physical damage.

“They used the break. You’ve heard the refrain about the Ghosthead always ‘digging for their chances’? It’s normally taken to mean that they had an uncanny kind of luck, that they gripped every chance they had, no matter how tenuous.” He smiled slowly.

“Do you really think that would be enough to keep control of a continent?” he said. “A world? To hold absolute power for five hundred years? You think they could do that by keeping a lookout for opportunities? It was much more than that. ‘Digging for chance’ is a clumsy rendition of what the Ghosthead really did. It was an altogether more exact science.

“Possibility mining.”

Uther quoted something like a singer. “ ‘We have scarred this mild world with prospects, wounded it massively, broken it, made our mark on its most remote land and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea. And what we break we may reshape, and that which fails might still succeed. We have found rich deposits of chance, and we will dig them out.’

“They meant all that literally,” he said. “It wasn’t an abstract crow of triumph. They had scarred, they had broken the world. And, in doing so, they set free forces that they were able to tap. Forces that allowed them to reshape things, to fail and succeed simultaneously—because they mined for possibilities. A cataclysm like that, shattering a world, the rupture left behind: it opens up a rich seam of potentialities.

“And they knew how to pick at the might-have-beens and pull out the best of them, use them to shape the world. For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers—and one comes true.

“But the Ghosthead knew how to tap some of those that might have been. To give them a kind of life. To use them, to push them into the reality that in its very existence denied theirs, which is defined by what happened and by the denial of what did not. Tapped by possibility machines, outcomes that didn’t quite make it to actuality were boosted, and made real.

“If I were to toss a coin, most certain it would land on one side or the other; it’s just possible it might land on its edge. But if I were to make it part of a possibility circuit, I’d turn it into what the Ghosthead would have called a coin of possible falls—a Possible Coin. And if I toss that, things are different.

“One of either heads or tails or just maybe edge will come up as before, and lie there as strong as ever. That’s the fact-coin. And surrounding it, in different degrees of solidity and permanence, depending on how likely they were, are a scattering of its nighs—close possibilities made real. Like ghosts. Some almost as strong as the factual, fading to those that are just barely there. Lying where they would have fallen, heads and tails and a fair few edges. Possibilities, mined and pulled through into the light. Fading as the possibility field shifts.

“This—” He indicated his sword again, seeing Bellis begin to understand. “—is a sword of possible strikes. A Possible Sword. It’s a conductor for a very rare kind of energy. It’s a node in a circuit, a possibility machine. This—” He patted the little pack strapped to his waist. “—is the power: a clockwork engine. These,” the wires stitched into his armor, “draw the power up. And the sword completes the circuit. When I grip it, the engine’s whole.

“If the clockwork is running, my arm and the sword mine possibilities. For every factual attack there are a thousand possibilities, nigh-sword ghosts, and all of them strike down together.”

Doul sheathed the blade and stared up into the trees’ pitch-black canopy.

“Some of the most likely are very nearly real. Some are fainter than mirages, and their power to cut . . . is faint. There are countless nigh-blades, of all probabilities, all striking together.

“There’s no martial form I’ve not studied. I’m proficient with most of the weapons I’ve ever encountered, and I can fight without any weapons at all. But what most people don’t know is that I’ve trained with this sword twice. I’ve mastered two kinds of technique.

“This engine . . . It’s not tight. And it can’t just be wound again, either—there’s more to it than that.

“So I have to husband what seconds I have. When I fight, I rarely switch on the Possible Sword. For the most part, I fight with it as a dumb, purely factual weapon: a diamond-hard blade with edges finer than honed metal. And I wield it precisely. Every strike I make is exact, and lands where I wish it to land. It’s what I trained for so many years to do.”

Bellis could hear no pride in his voice.

“But when the situation’s severe, when odds are very bad, when a display’s needed, or I’m in danger . . . then I switch on the motor for a few seconds. And in that situation, precision is the one thing I cannot afford.”

He was silent as a gust of warm wind shook the trees, making them sound as if they shivered at his words.

“A headsman knows where his blade must land. With every nuance of skill, he aims for the neck. He narrows the possibilities. If he were to use a Possible Sword, the vast bulk of the nighs would exist within an inch of the factual strike. The rub is this: the better the headsman, the more precise his strike, the more constrained potentiality, the more wasted the Possible Sword. But, obviously, put a weapon like this in the hands of an amateur, it’s as lethal to him or her as to any quarry—the possibilities that’ll manifest include self-harm, unbalancing, dropping the weapon, and so on. A middle way is needed.

“When I attack with a dumb weapon, I’m an executioner. My blade lands in the space I decide, and not to either side. That’s how I learned to fight; it would be a stupid waste of power to use the Possible Sword so. So when I finally found it, after a very long time of searching, I had to learn swordsmanship again. A very different art: skill without precision.

“Fighting with a Possible Sword, you must never constrain possibilities. I must be an opportunist, not a planner—fighting from the heart, not the mind. Moving suddenly, surprising myself as well as the opponent. Sudden, labile, and formless. So that each strike could be a thousand others, and each of those nigh-swords is strong. That’s how to fight with a Possible Sword.

“So I am two swordsmen.”

When his lovely voice ebbed away, Bellis was aware again of the surrounds of the park, the warm darkness and the noise of roosting birds.

“What’s known about possibility mining,” he said, “I know. That’s how I knew of the sword.”

Uther Doul was stirring things in Bellis’ mind. In New Crobuzon, during her time when the scientist Isaac was her lover, Bellis had observed his obsessions, and had learned certain things.

He had been of chaotic and heretical inclinations. Many of his projects came to nothing. She had watched him chase ideas. And during the months they had spent together, the one that she had seen him worry at with the greatest tenacity was the investigation of what he called crisis energy. It was theoretical physics and thaumaturgy of astonishing complexity. But what she had taken from Isaac’s frantic, off-color explanations was his conviction that underlying the facticity of the world, in all its seeming fastness, was an instability, a crisis pushing things to change from the tensions within them.

She had always found it an idea that accorded with her own instincts. She drew obscure comfort from the sense that things, even while as they were, were always in crisis, always pulled to become their opposite.

In the possibility mining that Uther Doul had just described Bellis saw a radical undermining of crisis theory. Crisis, Isaac had once told her, was manifest in the tendency of the real to become what it was not. If what was and what was not were allowed to coexist, the very tension—the crisis at the center of existence—must dissipate. Where was that crisis energy in the real becoming what it was not, if what it was not was right there alongside what it was?

That was nothing but a vague, pluralist reality. Bellis disliked the notion, intensely. She even felt, bizarrely, some kind of weird residual loyalty to Isaac pushing her to disapprove of it.

“When I first came here,” Doul went on, “I was very tired. Tired of making decisions. I wanted to be loyal. I wanted a wage. I’d learnt and sought and found whatever I’d wanted. I had my sword, I had knowledge, I’d seen places . . . I wanted to rest. To be a henchman, a paid soldier.

“But the Lovers, when they saw my sword, and the books I brought with me, they were . . . fascinated.

“Especially the Lover.

“They were fascinated by what I could tell them. By what I’d learnt.

“In a few places in Bas-Lag,” he said, “possibility machines still remain. There are different kinds, to do different things. I’ve studied them all.

“You’ve seen one of them: the perhapsadian, the instrument in my room. It was used to play possibilities. In an aether rich in potentiality, a virtuoso could once play particular facts and nighs into existence—choose certain outcomes. Quite useless now, of course. It’s old and broken—and anyway, we’re not in a possibility seam.

“This sword . . . you only see an aspect of it. The warrior who once used it and the people it killed, millennia ago, wouldn’t recognize the weapon I carry. When the Ghosthead ruled, they used possibility in architecture, in medicine, in politics and performance and all other spheres. Possible Sonatas, the ghost-notes winking out of existence in echoes above and around the fact-score, changing with every performance. I have been inside the ruins of a Possible Tower . . .” He shook his head slowly. “That is a sight you do not forget.

“They used the science in fighting, in sport and war. There are passages in the Covertiana describing a bout between Possible Wrestlers, a shifting multitude of limbs flickering in and out of existence with every moment, nigh grappling nigh grappling fact grappling nigh again.

“But all of this, the technique of the mining, was a product of the Ghosthead’s arrival—the detonation of their landing. It was through the rent they left that the possibility seams were tapped. That wound,” he said, his eyes flickering over to Bellis and away, and back again, “that scar, left by the Ghosthead . . . that’s where the seam is. If the stories are true, it’s on the far side of the world, at the end of the Empty Ocean.

“No ship’s ever crossed that sea. The waters there . . . they militate against ships. And who’d want to go there? If it exists, it’s thousands of miles away. And there are stories of what lives in the Fractured Land: terrible things, a dreadful ecology. Lightfungus. Dreadcurs. Butterflies with unholy appetites. Even if we could,” he said with strong sincerity, “I’d not want to try to reach the Fractured Land.”

He was staring at Bellis and, under the superb modulations of his voice she sensed a tremulous feeling. She swallowed, trying to concentrate. This is important, now, she told herself. Listen, make sense of this. I don’t know why, but he’s telling me something, he’s letting me know—

And then—

oh good gods above, can that be what he I don’t, is that possible, that he, surely, have I, have I misunderstood?

Is that what he means?

Her face was set, and she realized she was staring at him, and he her, both mute, staring through the gloom.

Certainly, she thought, giddy, what boat could make it over the ocean to the Fractured Land? Who’d want to go to the Fractured Land? The Land’s not worth it. It’s too far, too dangerous, even for this. Even for this. But what was it he told me, what did they say, how did it go . . . ?

“We have scarred this world, wounded it, made our mark on its remote land . . . and stretching for thousands of leagues across its sea.”

There’s something in the sea. Nothing to hurt us there, not like the land. No monsters there, no lightfungus or butterflies to threaten the miner—the possibility miner. And what’s in the sea is much closer—the Fractured Land would be at the very edge of the world, but the Ghosthead lays say the sea’s scar stretches for countless miles. In toward the world’s center. Toward us. Closer.

No ship has ever made it across the Empty Ocean . . . I believe that. I know the stories, the currents and wind that push incomers away. No ships could cross that ocean.

But what could stop an avanc?

Why is he telling me?

Is that where we’re going, Uther? Across the sea? Across the Empty Ocean, to the remnants of that wound, that fracture? It’s not just the land that was broken open—the sea, too. So is that where we’re going? To mine the possibilities in what’s left of that great . . . cosmic laceration, Uther?

That’s what the Brucolac meant, isn’t it, Uther? That’s what he was talking about.

Why are you telling me? What have I done? What are you doing? Why do you want me to know?

The avanc can take us to see what happened to the wound in the sea. That’s why it was summoned. That’s why Tintinnabulum was employed; and why the Sorghum was stolen for fuel; and why we went to the island and brought back Aum; and why you, Doul, have been working on a secret project, because of your sword, because of your expertise in this science. This is what everything leads to. This is why the avanc was summoned. It can cross the water that Armada would never breach without it.

It can cross that ocean.

It can take us to the Scar.

Chapter Thirty-five

“How the fuck did you find me?” Silas Fennec was clearly troubled.

“You speak like I’m some ingenue,” whispered Bellis. “What, you think you’re invisible? You think I’m incapable?”

She was dissembling: tracking Fennec had been mostly luck. She had been listening out for word of Simon Fench for days. Since her conversation with Doul, she had redoubled her efforts.

Eventually it had not been she who had tracked him at all, but Carrianne. In response to Bellis’ continuing requests for help, her friend had told her, with her usual sly cheerfulness, that she had heard that the mysterious Mr. Fench had been seen at The Pashakan. It was a pub built belowdecks in the Yevgeny, a hundred-foot sloop in Thee-And-Thine.

Bellis had not ventured much into King Friedrich’s riding since her trip to the glad’ circus. She made her way toward its raucous byways with concealed trepidation.

She had passed along the streets of the Sudden Understanding, the many-masted clipper that formed part of the edge of Urchinspine Docks and that linked Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings. The enormous vessel was one of the few in Armada that did not rest clearly in the control of one or the other ruler. The main bulk of its body was Dry Fall, but toward its forecastle, responsibility and control blurred with Thee-And-Thine. The streets became more boisterous and untidy.

Bellis had picked her way through rubbish where the feral monkeys bickered with cats and dogs, through the tumbling streets, and into what was indisputably Thee-And-Thine.

This was the most ill-kempt of Armada’s ridings. Its buildings were mostly wood, and many were moldering or salt- and water-stained. It was not that the area was poor—there were plenty of riches, in the gold and silver and jet visible through the windows of some houses, in the vivid silks and satins that were worn by some of its inhabitants, in the quality of goods available. But in a place where everything was for sale, certain goods—such as the right to maintain the architecture and the streets—were not attractive buys.

Slums and factories and shabby opulence bobbed sedately side by side. Finally, Bellis had passed the Salt Godling, Friedrich’s flagship, and had walked into the Yevgeny’s creaking, smelly innards, unclearly torchlit, to The Pashakan.

On her third visit, Silas was there. Bellis was angry at his surly surprise to see her.

“Will you listen to me?” she hissed at him. “I know where we’re going.”

He looked up, sharply, and caught her eye.

She laughed suddenly and unpleasantly. “Do you have déjà vu, Silas?” she said. “Jabber knows I do. Understand that I do not relish this relationship. I seem to find myself doing this with disturbing regularity: telling you that I know a secret, giving it to you to pass on, to make plans with, to do something with. I do not enjoy that. This is the last fucking time, you understand me?” She meant it, absolutely. No matter what might happen, she would not deal with Silas Fennec like this again. There was nothing, less than nothing, between them anymore.

“But whether I like it or not,” she went on, “I have little choice here. I need your help. The only way anything can be done about this is if . . . the word is spread, if more people know. And though no one listens to Bellis Coldwine, it seems that a growing minority are prepared to listen to the troublemaker Simon Fench.”

“Where are we going, Bellis?” Fennec asked.

She told him.

“I wondered why you were fraternizing with that fucking lunatic Doul. Does he know you know?” Fennec seemed stunned.

“I think so,” she said. “It’s hard to tell. It was as if . . . He obviously wasn’t supposed to tell me. But maybe he was so . . . caught up in it, he couldn’t resist. So instead of coming out with it, which would be disloyal, he told me just enough.

“All the time I’d thought he was accompanying the Lovers and Aum and the scientists into those secret meetings because he’s their bodyguard. But it wasn’t that—he’s an expert on this thing, on possibility mining. He knows everything about it, because of once researching that sword of his.

“This is what they’ve been working on. The Lovers want to get to the Scar; they want to tap possibilities, Silas.” Her voice remained cool, though she did not feel it. “Like the Ghosthead Empire, do you understand?”

“That’s why the avanc,” he breathed, and Bellis nodded.

“That’s why. It’s just a means to an end. The Lovers must have been . . . entranced when they saw his sword, when he first came to the city. They heard his stories of the Fractured Land, and the Scar—all the secrets he knows—and it was nothing but a dream, then. But then they think of Tintinnabulum and his crew, who could be enticed. This is the ultimate big game, after all.” She stared out of the little window at a sea that churned slowly by as the avanc progressed.

“And the Lovers already knew about the chains. Armada tried to capture an avanc before. That was a long time ago, and they don’t give a cuss for tradition. But when Doul came, it was different. Before he came, calling the avanc would’ve been . . . a stupid, grandiose, pointless gesture. But now? Everyone knows no ship can cross the Empty Ocean. But what fucking force in Bas-Lag could stop an avanc? All of a sudden, there’s a way to get to this Scar that Doul’s told them all about, the thing that the Ghosthead left behind.”

The scale of the project was staggering. The realization that all the misery and money and terrible effort that the Lovers had gone to to secure the avanc, the realization that that was only the first part of their plan, was incredible.

“All this,” breathed Silas, and Bellis nodded.

“All of it,” she said. “The rig, the Terpsichoria, Johannes, the anophelii island, the chains, the fulmen, the fucking avanc . . . all of it. This is what it’s about.”

“Naked power.” Silas mouthed it as if the words were dirty. “I assumed the avanc was to do with the piracy. That’s what they implied: that it would make them more efficient thieves, for Jabber’s sake! That at least would have made some kind of sense. But this . . .” He looked incredulous. “You can tell they’re press-ganged, the Lovers; no fucking serious pirate would pursue this idiocy.”

“They’re dangerous,” said Bellis simply. “They’re fanatics. I’ve no idea if they can really cross the Empty Ocean, but godspit! I do not want to find out. I . . . I’ve heard them, Silas, when they’re alone.” He looked at her piercingly, but did not ask her how. “I know what they’re like. I’m not letting people like that—visionaries, gods help us—command me to the other end of the world, to a place that may not even exist, and that if it does is the most deadly place in Bas-Lag. We’d be traveling further and farther from New Crobuzon. And I’ve still not given up on getting back there.”

Bellis realized she was shaking at the thought of leaving her home so far behind. And if Uther and the others were right? If they survived the crossing?

A multitude of possibilities. The thought chilled her. She found it utterly threatening, existentially undermining. It made her feel so completely contingent that it offended and frightened her.

Like some waterhole in the veldt, she thought unclearly, where the weak and the strong and predatory drink together in a truce: the gazelle, the wildebeest, the mafadet, and the lion. All the possibilities lined up together in fucking harmony, and the winner, the strongest, the fact, the real, letting the others that have failed live, letting them all live. Pacifist and pathetic.

“That’s why they’re not telling,” she said. “They know people won’t stand for it.”

“They’re afraid,” Silas murmured.

“The Lovers are strong,” said Bellis, “but they couldn’t face all the other ridings. And, more to the point, they couldn’t face their own people.”

“Revolt,” breathed Silas, and Bellis smiled without humor.

“Mutiny,” she said. “They’re afraid of mutiny. And that’s why we need Simon Fench.”

Silas nodded slowly; then there was a long silence.

“He’s got to spread the word,” he said eventually. “Pamphlets, rumors, and all. That’s what he does best; I can make sure he does that.”

“I’m sorry, Bellis,” Silas said when she stood to go. “I’ve not been a great friend. I’ve been so . . . Things have been busy, and difficult. I was rude when I saw you, and I’m sorry.”

Observing him, Bellis felt dislike—as well, paradoxically, as the last faint stirrings of what had once been affection. Like a shred of memory.

“Silas,” she said, smiling coldly, “we owe each other nothing. And we’re not friends. But we have a shared interest in the Lovers’ failing. And I can’t stop it, and it’s just possible that you might be able to. I expect you to try, and to tell me what’s happening, and that’s all. That’s all the communication I expect from you. I don’t want you to contact me as a friend.”

Silas Fennec remained in The Pashakan for a long time after Bellis left. He read through some inky pamphlets and newspapers, watching the sky darken. The days were noticeably longer now, and he thought about summer in New Crobuzon.

He waited there a long time: this was where people determined enough to find him were directed. But he drank and read alone. One woman, dressed in rags, looked up at his back curiously as he left the room—that was all the notice that was paid him.

Fennec wound home through the circuitous routes and byways of Thee-And-Thine to the oily iron ship Drudgery. It was in a quiet part of town. Beside it loomed a big old factory ship—Armada’s asylum.

He waited at home in one of the nondescript concrete blocks built beside the Drudgery’s funnel, directly in the asylum’s shadow. At eleven o’clock there was a knock at his door: his contact had arrived. For the first time in many days, they had something serious and important to talk about. Fennec walked slowly to answer the door, and his gait, his expressions, his demeanor shifted fractionally.

By the time he opened the door, he had become Simon Fench.

Waiting on his doorstep was a big, aging cactus-man, looking nervously about him.

“Hedrigall,” said Fennec quietly, in what was not quite his own voice. “I’ve been waiting for you. We must talk.”

In the jagged and obscure architecture of the moonship Uroc, the vampir were gathering.

The Brucolac had called a conclave of his ab-dead lieutenants, his cadre. As the light shifted from drab dusk to night, they settled as lightly and soundlessly on the moonship as leafs.

All the citizens of Dry Fall knew that their vampir were always watching. They wore no uniform; their identities were not known.

The bacillus that induced photophobic haemophagy—the vampir strain—was capricious, and weak, carried solely in spit and quick to denature and collapse. Only if a vampir’s victim did not die, and if the bite had been direct, mouth to skin so that some of the ab-dead’s spittle entered their prey’s bloodstream, was there a small chance that the survivor might be infected. And if they survived the fevers and the delirium, they would awaken one night, having died and been renewed, ab-dead, with a raging hunger, their bodies reconfigured, stronger and quicker by many times. Unaging, able to survive most injury. And unable to bear the sun.

Every one of the Dry Fall’s cadre had been carefully chosen by the Brucolac. The goretax was decanted before drinking, to avoid inadvertent infection. Those from whom the Brucolac drank directly were his most trusted servants, his closest supporters, to whom he gave the honor of a chance at ab-death.

There had been occasional betrayals, of course, in the past. His chosen ones had turned against him, giddy with power. There had been unauthorized infection and attempts on his ab-life. The Brucolac had quashed them all, sadly and effortlessly.

His lieutenants surrounded him now, in the Uroc’s great hall. Scores of them, freed from the necessity of disguise, allowing their serpentine tongues to unroll luxuriously, tasting the air with relish. Men and women and androgynous youths.

At the front, almost beside the Brucolac, stood the ragged woman who had watched Fennec in The Pashakan. Every one of the vampir stared at their master with wide, light-enhancing eyes.

After a very long silence, the Brucolac spoke. His voice was quiet. Had those in the room been human, they would not have heard him.

“Kin,” he said, “you know why we’re here. I’ve told you all where we are heading, where the Lovers would have us go. Our opposition to their plans is well known. But we’re in a minority; we’re not trusted; we couldn’t mobilize the city behind us. We can’t usefully speak; our hands are tied.

“However, things may be changing. The Lovers are banking on momentum, so that by the time their aim becomes plain, it’ll be too late to oppose it. And by that time, they hope, people will become willing abductees.” The Brucolac sneered, and licked the air with his great tongue.

“Now, it appears, word may be about to get out. A fascinating conversation was overheard tonight. Simon Fench knows where we’re going.” He nodded at the woman in rags. “Doul’s Crobuzoner dollymop, of all people, has worked out what’s happening, and she’s told Mr. Fench—or Fennec, or whatever he calls himself. We know where he lives, do we not?” The woman nodded.

“Fench is planning to put out one of his inflammatory pamphlets. We’d try to intervene if we could, to help him, but he’s a solo operator, and if he discovered that we’d identified him, he’d shun us and disappear. We don’t want to risk interfering with his efforts. We can hope,” the Brucolac stressed, “that he’s able to get this done soon, and that it’ll cause a crisis for Garwater. After all, we’ve not yet reached the Empty Ocean.

“But.” He made the word cold and hard, and his lieutenants were rapt.

“But we must make preparations, in case Fench fails. Kin . . .” He prodded at the air as he spoke in his guttural whisper. “Kin, this is not a fight we will lose. We hope that Fench succeeds. But in case he does not, we must be ready to put another plan in motion.

“I will take this fucking city by force, if I must.”

And his ab-dead cadre hissed and muttered their agreement.

Chapter Thirty-six

North, slow and inexorable. They were pulled on, days becoming weeks. The city waited. No one knew what would happen, but there was no way this steady gait could continue without incident. Armada became tense.

Bellis waited for word of Fench’s pamphlet. She was patient, envisaging him in the belly of the city, deep in some ship, collating information, controlling his informants.

Some nights, drawn by queasy fascination and shocked at herself, Bellis made her own way into the Grand Easterly’s lower decks and huddled in the room below the Lovers’. In their spat and breathless love talk she heard a new tension.

“Soon,” Bellis heard one Lover hiss, and “Fuck yes, soon,” a whimpered response.

There were differences between their little cries, Bellis could now discern. The Lover seemed more intense, more committed. It was she who seemed impatient, hungry for resolution, it was she who whispered soon most often; she was the more engaged with the project. Her lover was engaged with her. He fawned and murmured in the wake of her words.

Time stretched out. Bellis became more and more frustrated with Uther Doul.

With the city’s passage north, it had passed quickly out of the storms and the heat and into a more temperate zone, warm and breezy like New Crobuzon’s summer.

Five days after Bellis and Silas met in The Pashakan, there was a commotion above Armada’s skyline, in the dirigible Arrogance.

While Bellis stood with Uther Doul on the Grand Easterly, looking over to the fringe of Croom Park, Hedrigall was on deck duty, working with others near the great ropes that tethered the Arrogance to the aft of the ship.

“Mail drop,” he yelled, and the crews quickly cleared the area around the rope. A weighted satchel plummeted its length, landing with a bang on the cushioning of rags.

Hedrigall’s motions, when he pulled open the sack, were routine, and Bellis began to look away. But when the cactus-man unfurled the message within, his demeanor changed so violently that her eyes snapped back. Hedrigall ran toward Bellis and Doul with such astonishing speed that she thought for a second he was about to attack them. She stiffened as his great muscular body slammed down the boards of the deck.

Hedrigall held out the lookout’s message in a rigid arm.

“Warships,” he said to Doul. “Ironclads. A New Crobuzon flotilla. Thirty-five miles off, incoming. Be here within two hours.” He paused, and his green lips moved without sound, until finally he spoke with a tone of absolute incredulity.

“We’re under attack.”

At first, people were bewildered, disbelieving of their orders. Great masses of men and women gathered in every riding, on every flagship, fingering weapons and pulling on pieces of armor, surly and confused.

“But it don’t make any sense, Doul, sir,” one woman on the Grand Easterly argued. “It’s almost four thousand miles from New Crobuzon. Why’d they come so far? And how come the nauscopists didn’t see anything? They would’ve noticed yesterday. And anyway, how’re the Crobuzoners supposed to have found us—?”

Doul interrupted her, shouting loud enough to shock everyone in earshot into silence.

“We do not ask how,” he bellowed. “We do not ask why. Time enough after the killing. For now we have only time to fight, like fucking dogs, like sharks in frenzy. We fight or the city dies.”

Doul stilled all argument. People set their faces and prepared for war. And in every head the question How have they done this? was remembered, and put aside for later.

The city’s five warships steered westward a handful of miles, presenting themselves like a curving wall between Armada and the approaching force.

Around and between them steamed Armada’s smaller ironclads, squat vessels swathed in grey gunmetal, windowless, bristling with stubby cannons. They were joined by those of the city’s pirate vessels that had been in dock. Their crews set their teeth and tried not to contemplate their suicidal bravery—they were armed and armored to defeat merchant vessels, not naval gunners. Few of them, they realized, would come home.

There was no division between the ridings. Crews loyal to every ruler tacked and stoked and armed themselves, side by side.

The lookouts in the Arrogance sent down more messages as they saw the Crobuzoner ships more clearly. Uther Doul read them out to the Lovers.

“They must be here for their fucking rig,” he said quietly, so that only the two of them could hear. “Whatever it’s about, they outgun us. We’ve got more vessels, but half of ours are just wooden freebooters. They’ve seven warships, and many more scouts than us. They must have sent nearly half their fleet.”

Tanner Sack and the menfish of Bask; Bastard John; cray; the shadowy submersibles. Armada’s underwater troops waited, suspended, the great chains moving slowly away from them. Armada was moving on, the avanc now slowed to a crawl so that the troops could regain the city, after the fight.

Nearby, a small group of cray huddled in tight communion on one of their submerged rafts. Witch-conveners, summoning their beasts.

When Tanner had faced the dinichthys, he had hurled himself unthinkingly into the water. He had not had time then to contemplate his fear. But it was almost another hour before the warships from his old home would arrive to destroy his new one. The purpose and intelligence that directed their propellers was much more terrifying than the imbecilic malice in the bonefish’s eyes.

The minutes were very slow. Tanner thought about Shekel, at home where Tanner had ordered him to stay. Waiting with Angevine: both being armed, no doubt, by the yeomanry left behind. But he ain’t yet sixteen, thought Tanner desperately. He wanted very much to be back there with them, with Shekel and his lady. Tanner hefted his huge harpoon and thought about the fighting that was coming, and he pissed suddenly in his fear. His urine warmed him briefly, then dissipated with the current.

Everywhere, throughout Armada and across all the free-floating ships preparing to defend it, there were weapons.

The city’s armories and arsenals were unlocked, and the military technologies of thousands of years and hundreds of cultures were brought out and wiped clean: cannons, harpoons, and flintlocks; swords and crossbows and longbows and rivebows; and more esoteric weapons: stingboxes, baan, yarritusks.

Across the city, dirigibles of all sizes were rising slowly above the rooftops and rigging, like sections of architecture broken free. Over the horizon to the west, smoke could be seen from the Crobuzoner engines.

There was a huge scrum on the deck of the Grand Easterly as all the lieutenants, officers, captains, and rulers of all the ridings jostled to hear Uther Doul, the soldier, give them orders. Bellis stood motionless nearby, ignored by everyone around her, and listened.

“Their gunboats outnumber ours,” he said tersely, “but look around.” He pointed out at the morass of steamers and tugs that had until recently spent their days pulling Armada across the ocean, and that now circled it in aimless freedom. “Tell the crews manning those vessels to turn them by gods into gunboats.

“Word’s been sent to the Brucolac and his cadre: they’ll be informed as soon as they wake. Send some fast boats or airships to the edge of Dry Fall, to wait for them.

“We don’t know the Crobuzoners’ strength underwater,” Doul continued. “Submariners, you’ll have to judge when to attack. But they’ll have no airships. The likes of that are our only real strength.” He indicated the Trident bobbing from the Grand Easterly’s tail. It was being loaded with gunpowder and fat bombs. “Send them in first and fast. Don’t hold back.

“And listen—concentrate on the warships. The ironclads and scouts will hurt us, but we can withstand their firepower. Those warships . . . they could sink the city.” A rill of horror ran over the deck. “They’re carrying the fuel reserves: the Crobuzoner fleet is depending on those warships to get home.”

With a stunned jolt, Bellis realized what was happening. Her mind slipped like a broken gear, ignoring the rest of Doul’s instructions and grinding over and over the same pattern of thought. A ship from home a ship from home . . .

With sudden, desperate eagerness, she gazed out at the faint shading of smoke in the west. How do I reach them? she thought, disbelieving, exultant, and giddy.

The Crobuzoner ships finally came close enough to be seen: a long line of smoke-spewing black metal.

“They’re running up flags,” said Hedrigall from the top of the superstructure at the Grand Easterly’s stern. He was staring through the ship’s huge fixed telescope. “Sending us a message while they get good and close. Look: the name of their flagship and . . .” He hesitated. “They want to parley?”

Doul had dressed for war. His grey armor was studded with straps and with holstered flintlocks—on each hip, each shoulder, each thigh, in the center of his chest. About his body, the handles of daggers and throwing knives protruded from their scabbards. He looked, Bellis realized with a shiver, as he had when he came aboard the Terpsichoria.

She did not care; she was not interested anymore. She looked away and back toward the Crobuzoner ships, in agonies of excitement.

Doul took the telescope.

“ ‘Captain Princip Cecasan of the N.C.S. Morning Walker,’ ” he read slowly, and shook his head slowly as he scanned the pennants. “ ‘Parley requested regarding New Crobuzon hostage.’ ”

For one stunned instant, Bellis thought it was a reference to her. But even as her face spasmed with astonished joy, she realized how absurd that was (and something deep in her mind waited to inform her of another explanation). She turned and looked at the faces of Uther Doul, Hedrigall, the Lovers, and all the gathered captains.

She shivered to see them. Not a single one, she realized, had reacted to the Morning Walker’s offer to talk with anything but hard contempt.

In the face of that collective emotion, that absolute antagonism, the certainty of those before her that New Crobuzon was a power to be distrusted, fought against, destroyed, her own joy ebbed away. She remembered what she had read of the Pirate Wars, and New Crobuzon’s attack on Suroch. She remembered, suddenly, her conversations with Johannes and with Tanner Sack. She remembered Tanner’s rage at the thought of being found by Crobuzoner ships.

Bellis remembered her own terrified flight from New Crobuzon. I crossed the sea because I was afraid for my life, she thought. Seeing the militia everywhere I looked. Afraid of the agents of the government. Agents like the sailors in those ships.

It was not just the pirates—New Crobuzon’s maritime rivals—and not just the fRemade who had reason to fear the oncoming ships, Bellis realized. All her certainty left her. She, too, should be afraid.

“They’re armed enough to level a city,” Doul said to the assembled captains. “And they tell us they want to bargain?”

There was no one in the crowd who needed convincing. They listened silently.

“They’ll destroy us, if they have any chance at all. And they can find us, gods know how, across half the world. If we don’t take them now, they can come back again and again.” He shook his head and slowly spoke a last sentence, to a cheer that was more tense than rousing. “Send them down.”

The commanders were gone, carried to their vessels by aerocabs. Those rulers who would fight had been taken to their ships or dirigibles; those too frail or cowardly had been returned to their flagships in the city. Only Doul, Bellis, and the Lovers remained on the raised platform—and Bellis was ignored.

The Lovers were to fight in separate arenas: he from the warship Cho Harbor, she from the airship Nanter. They were taking their leave of each other. They kissed, tonguing deeply and murmuring the ecstatic sounds that Bellis recognized from her eavesdropping. They muttered to each other, telling each other they would be together again very soon, and Bellis realized that there was nothing touching about their parting, nothing tragic. They did not kiss as if it was their last chance, but hungrily and lasciviously, eager for more. They felt no fear; they seemed to feel no regret: they seemed to long to part, so that they might come together again.

She watched them with the disgusted fascination she always felt. Their scars twitched like little snakes as their faces moved against each other.

The Crobuzoner ships were less than ten miles away.

“Some of them will get through, Uther,” said the Lover, turning to Doul. “We can afford to lose ships, aerostats, submersibles, citizens. We can’t afford to lose the city, and we need you here to protect it. As our . . . last line.

“And Doul,” she said finally, “we can’t afford to lose you. We need you, Doul. You know what to do. When we get to the Scar.”

Bellis did not know if the Lover had forgotten that she was present, to have spoken so openly, or if she no longer cared.

The last dirigible had gone, taking the Lovers to their stations. The avanc had been reined in, and the city had slowed. Doul and Bellis were alone. Below them, women and men armed themselves on the broad deck of the Grand Easterly.

Doul did not look at Bellis or speak to her. He stared out past the Sorghum. Less than five miles now separated the Armadan navy and the wedge of snub-nosed Crobuzon battleships. The distance was reducing.

Eventually Doul turned to Bellis. His jaw was clenched, his eyes open a little too wide. He handed Bellis a flintlock. She waited for him to tell her to get below, or to stay out of the way, but he did not. They stood together and watched the battleships closing.

The man kisses his statue, and strolls unseen behind Bellis and Uther Doul.

His heart is beating quickly. He is packed and ready. He is carrying everything he owns in his pockets and hands. The man is disappointed but not surprised that Armada did not agree to parley. This way will be slower—though perhaps, he acknowledges, ultimately no more bloody.

So close, so close. He can almost step onto the deck of the Morning Walker. But not quite. It has a few miles yet to come. They’ll send a boat for me, he thinks, and prepares to receive them. I told them where I’d be.

Uther Doul is speaking to Bellis now, motioning to the frantic throng below. He is taking his leave of her; he is leaving her behind on the raised roof, descending to be with his troops, and she is watching him, hefting the gun, keeping her eyes on Doul as he descends.

The man knows that those who are coming, his compatriots, will have no trouble finding him. His descriptions were clear. There is no mistaking the Grand Easterly.

Separated by three miles of sea, the two navies faced each other. The Armadans in a mongrel mass of vessels in all colors and designs, sails and smoke billowing above countless decks. Opposite them, the Morning Walker and its sister-ships approached in formation, grey and darkwood blistered with large-bore guns.

A swarm of dirigibles approached the Crobuzoner ships: warflots and scouts and aerocabs weighed down with rifles and barrels of black powder. The air was still, and they made quick progress. At the front of the motley air force was the Trident, surrounded by smaller vessels, and aeronauts in single-pilot harnesses, swaying below their small balloons.

The Armadan captains knew that they had the weaker guns. Their ships were more than two miles from the enemy when the New Crobuzon ships began to fire.

Sound and heat burst over the sea. A fringe of explosions and boiling waves advanced way out in front of the Morning Walker like outriders. The Armadan guns were primed and stoked, but remained silent. There was nothing their crews could do but urge their vessels forward through the onslaught, to bring their enemies into their own shorter range. There were more than a thousand yards of fire to cross until they could retaliate, and they slipped into the one-sided battle with grim bravado, and time changed.

Metal and metal meet, and black powder ignites, and oil combusts and flesh bursts and burns.

Below the water Tanner rocks violently, stunned by ripples of pressure. He hemorrhages, blood gouting from his gills.

Above him, Armadan ships are shadows on illuminated water. Their formations are breaking down into chaos. Some of them are eddying in confusion, and (Jabber) breaking apart (Jabber help us), breaking in two or three, slipping closer, growing bigger as they descend toward him slow as nightfall, so slow he’s imagining it, but then around him the menfish scatter and (Godspitshitno) broken slabs of metal are plummeting like comets with trails of grease oil dirt shrapnel blood.

The fall of broken ships howls past him spewing bubbles and bodies and disappears into the dark.

From the airships, the carnage is distant and muted: little puffs and booms, and the black-crusted glow of oil fires, and ships that are there and then are not. The Armadan fleet continues like a pack of stupid blind dogs through that merciless onslaught, diminishing as it goes, until at last its guns can reach the Crobuzoner fleet.

Seen through hundreds of feet of air, the war is like a diorama. It seems a reconstruction. It does not look real.

The screaming cannot be heard over the explosions.

Blood sluices over the sides of Armadan ships. Metal bursts and tears, and the ships are suddenly serrated, murderous to their own sailors. The Armadan gunners fire, and their shells arc in fiery parabolas into their enemies. But those thousand yards have been merciless, and the Armadan fleet is already half broken.

The sea has become charnel. The water is littered with bodies. They move with the swells and currents, in a macabre dance. They emit clouds of blood like squid ink. They are transformed by the sea: entrails fan like coral; torn swathes of skin become fins. They are broken by jags of bone.

Tanner is very slow and cold. As he rises he passes a woman who still moves, too weak to swim up but not quite dead. He turns to her with soundless horror and hauls her skyward, but her movements become the juddering of dead nerves before they reach the air. And as Tanner lets her go he sees that there is more movement all around him, that there are men and women drowning as far as he can see, that he cannot help them, that they are too weak to live. He sees their ghastly desperate motions everywhere he looks, and he feels suddenly removed, conscious not of men and women, khepri and cactacae and scabmettler and hotchi, but only of countless, mindlessly repetitive motions, winding slowly down, as if he stares into a vat of rainwater at slowly dying insects.

He reaches the surface in a moment of calm, a chance stillness in the carnage, in the middle of what was the Armadan fleet. Around him vessels are breaking up with ugly noises. They are floundering, retching smoke and fire, hissing as they slip into the cool water, sucking their dying crews with them.

Tanner struggles. He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

The air sparks. Elyctro-thaumaturgic quarrels burst from the Crobuzoner vessels; arbalests hurl vats of strong acid. But now, even broken as they are, the remnants of the Armadan fleet fight back.

They fire shells the size of men, which smack into the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts and open in ragged metal flowers. Wooden warships sail into range, weaving between enemies, and their cannons sound, denting slabs of armor, breaking through smokestacks, and snapping the moorings of guns.

The Trident and its airborne flotilla have reached the sky over the Crobuzoner fleet. They begin a sporadic deluge of missiles: gunpowder bombs; oil skins that burst open as they fall, raining sticky fire; weighted darts and knives. Aeronauts snipe at Crobuzoner captains and gunners. The heat from the explosions rocks the dirigibles and knocks them off-course.

Still the Armadan ships approach. They fire and come closer and explode and capsize and burst into flames and still come closer, their crews doggedly driving them toward the dreadnoughts.

A mass of dark bodies rises.

Crobuzoner thaumaturges, channeling puissance from batteries and their own bodies, have animated flocks of golems: clumsy constructions of wire and leather and clay, inelegant and rough-hewn, with claws like umbrella’s innards and clear glass eyes. Their ugly wings beat frantically to bring them skyward. They are strong as monkeys, mindless and tenacious.

They grip the ankles of the Armadan aeronauts and scrabble up their bodies, ripping open their flesh and tearing their balloons apart, sending them bleeding into the decks below.

Golems rise like smoke from the Crobuzoner fleet and slam themselves into the steering cabins and windows of the Armadan airships, blinding them, shattering their glass, slicing the fabric of their gasbags. Many fall, their bodies broken by gunfire and swords and gravity, collapsing into their lifeless inanimate components on their way down; but scores stay airborne, harrying the Armadan air fleet.

The air above the battle seems as thick as the sea. It is viscous and sluggish with the discharge from guns and fire-throwers and catapults; with sinking dirigibles bleeding dry of gas; with hunting golems and blood-mist and gouts of soot.

There is a terrible slowness, a solemn care behind every motion. Every cut, every crushing blow, every bullet boring into eye and bone, every belch of fire and bursting vessel seems planned.

It is a sordid pretense.

Through the murk Tanner can see the undersides of the enemy’s boats, and surrounding them a hundred shapes: darting spiral vessels, single-person subs in the shells of giant nautili. The Armadan submarines scatter the little craft, ram the iron flanks of the dreadnoughts, rear up like whales.

Tanner is out, suddenly, in the open water, among the darting Bask menfish who have let him into their ranks. He has reached out with his long tentacles and gripped the chitinous shell of one of the little nautilus subs. He faces the little glass porthole, and he can see the man inside stare out aghast, thinking he has gone mad to see this savagely wailing face, this New Crobuzon face, in the water, mouthing curses at him in his own language, raising a stubby weapon level to his face and firing.

The bolt bursts the glass and drives on into the New Crobuzon sailor’s face, its reinforced jag splintering his cheekbone and the base of his skull and pinning his head to the back of his tiny craft. Tanner Sack stares at the man he has killed, no, who is not yet dead, whose mouth spasms with agony and terror as the sea vomits into his ruptured sub and drowns him.

Tanner kicks backward, shaking violently, watching the man die, watching the nautilus fill with water and begin to spin and descend.

The dead and torn-apart are scattered across all the ships and across the sea as if they are scraps of burned paper distributed randomly by fire.

Tanner Sack hunts men.

Around him, vessels plummet. He is surrounded by dying men from what was once his home. They bleed and scream bubbles. They are too far down to reach the surface. None of them will breathe again.

Tanner spews suddenly, the sick forcing his throat open and billowing out from him. He feels nauseous, unstuck in time, drunk or dreaming, as if this is not real but a memory, already, even as it happens.

(Below him pass dark curious things that he thinks are his allies the menfish, and then knows immediately are not.

They are gone, and Tanner does not have the time, the luxury, to wonder what they were.)

The fighting progresses in spastic jerks. A clockwork ship from Booktown is torn open, and it sheds its gears and its massive coiled springs and the ruined bodies of khepri. The waters around Jhour vessels move oily with sap from slaughtered cactacae. Where scabmettlers are torn apart by bombs, the clouds of their blood harden as they burst, into a shrapnel of scabs. Hotchi are crushed between hulls.

The beasts summoned by the Armadan cray witches slam their fletches into Crobuzoner ships and tip the crews into the water, to snatch them up with sudden scissoring jaws. But there are too many to control, and they become a danger to their own witch-masters.

In the smog, Armadan shells find Armadan decks, and New Crobuzon javelins and bullets burst through the flesh of their own troops.

At different times, all across the battle, women and men look up and see the sky, the sun, through red clouds, through water, through films of their own and others’ blood. Some lie where they have fallen, dying, knowing that the sun is the last light they will see.

The sun is low. Dusk is perhaps an hour away.

Two of Armada’s great war steamers are destroyed. Another is badly damaged, its rear guns twisted like palsied limbs. Scores of its pirate ships and its smaller fighters are gone.

Of the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts, only the Darioch’s Kiss is ruined. Others are torn, but they are fighting on.

The Crobuzoner fleet is winning. A wedge of their scouts, ironclads, and submersibles have broken through Armadan ranks and are bearing down on the city itself, a few miles beyond. Bellis watches them approach through the huge telescope on the Grand Easterly.

The Grand Easterly is the redoubt, the heart of the city.

“We stand,” Uther Doul is shouting to those around him, to the snipers in the rigging.

No one has suggested anything else. No one has suggested that they goad the avanc and escape.

The Crobuzoner ships endure the barrage from the guns on the Sorghum (and do not return fire, Bellis notices, do not risk damaging the rig itself). They are close enough now that their structures can be seen: their bridges, their turrets and railings and their guns, and the crews who prepare, check weapons, gesticulate, and get into formations. Cordite billows over the deck, and Bellis’ eyes water. The small-arms fire has begun.

This is an organized raid. The invaders do not land ragged across the aft edge of the city: they maintain formation, an arrowhead, and steam directly into the bay of boats around the Sorghum. The Crobuzoners are intently making their way toward the Grand Easterly.

Bellis backs away from the railing. The deck below her raised roof boils with Armadans ready to fight. She realizes that she is trapped on this platform by a flood of armed bodies, that it is too late to run.

Part of her wants to yell in greeting—in desperate welcome—when the Crobuzoners arrive. But she knows that they have no interest in taking her home, that it is irrelevant to them if she lives or dies. She is desperately uncertain, realizing that she does not know which side she wants to win this confrontation.

As she steps back, Bellis feels suddenly as if she has walked into somebody, that she has felt a disturbance in the air, heard someone retreat from her with a quick step. She twists quickly to see, panic punching her, but there is no one. She is alone above the fray.

She looks down into the seething, armed men and women and finds herself staring at Uther Doul. He is perfectly still.

Flintlocks firing, the Crobuzoner navy boards Armada. At the point where the two forces meet, there is the most savage bloodletting. The Armadan cactacae are at the front, and the Crobuzoners are faced by a line of their massive, thorned bodies. The cactacae split men with great strokes from their war cleavers.

But there are cactus-people on the New Crobuzon side, too; and men firing rivebows with weighted, spinning chakris that smash like axe blades into the vegetable-muscles and bones of the cactacae, severing limbs and cutting fibrous skulls; and there are thaumaturges on the invading vessels who link hands and send bolts of darkly glowing unlight into the Armadan mass.

The Crobuzoners are forcing the Armadans back.

Around the base of Bellis’ squat platform, now, is the New Crobuzon navy. She is paralyzed. Part of her wants to run to them, but she waits. She does not know how this will turn. She does not know what she will do.

Once again, someone is on the platform with her. That feeling comes and goes.

With a drab and bloody inexorability, the New Crobuzon troops encroach across the Grand Easterly’s deck.

Uniformed men approach Uther Doul from aft, port, and star’d. He is waiting. Armadans are falling around him, pushed back, felled by flintlock bullets and a cascade of blades.

Bellis is watching Uther Doul when finally, suddenly, sur-rounded now by fast-encroaching enemies, by pistols and rifles and curving sabers, he moves.

He calls out: a long bark that is savage but musical, that takes shape and becomes his own name.

“Doul,” he cries, repeating it, drawing it out like a huntsman’s call. “Dooooouuuuul!”

And he is answered. Armadans around the deck take up the call as they fight, and his name echoes across the ship. And as the Crobuzoners try to encircle him, try to pen him in with their weapons, Uther Doul finally attacks.

Suddenly he holds a pistol in each hand, drawn from his hip holsters, and they are raised and firing in quite different directions, each one bursting open the face of a man. Their bullets spent, he hurls the guns away from him as he twists (the men around him looking quite still), and they spin through the air at speed and smash into one man’s chest and another’s throat, and Doul has two more flintlocks in his hands, and is firing again simultaneously (and only now do his first two victims finish falling), sending two more men away in ugly cartwheels, one dead, one dying, and he is turning and the guns are missiles again, clubbing a man unconscious.

Every motion Doul makes is perfect: flawless and straight-lined. There is no excess; there are no curves.

The men around him are beginning to scream, but they are pushed on by the force of their fellows behind. They move sluggishly toward Doul, who is in the air, his legs bent under him, turning amid a pattering of bullets. He fires with new guns and hurls them away into the faces of more enemies, then lets his feet touch down again. He has a last pistol in his hand and is moving it from face to cringing face, firing, leaping, and throwing it aside, kicking out with bent legs, a stampfighting move, breaking a cactus-man’s nose and pushing him back into the bodies of his Crobuzoner comrades.

Bellis watches, breathing hard, unmoving. Everywhere else the fighting is ugly: contingent and chaotic and stupid. She is aghast that Doul can make it beautiful.

He is still again for a moment as the Crobuzoner troops regroup and surround him. He is hemmed in. Then Doul’s ceramic blade flashes like polished bone.

His first strike is precise, a thrust too fast to see that pushes into a throat and flicks out again in a spray of sap, drowning a cactus-man in his own life. And then Uther Doul is tightly encircled and he cries out his own name again, quite unafraid, and his stance changes, and he reaches across his body, releasing the pent-up motor on his belt, turning on the Possible Sword.

There is a crack like static, and a hum in the air. Bellis cannot see Doul’s right arm clearly. It seems to shimmer, to vibrate. It is unstuck in time.

Doul moves (dancing) and turns to face the mass of his attackers. His left arm flails backward with loose, simian grace, and with shocking speed he raises his weapon arm.

His sword blossoms.

It is fecund, it is brimming, it sheds echoes. Doul has a thousand right arms, slicing in a thousand directions. His body moves, and like a stunningly complex tree, his sword arms spread through the air, solid and ghostly.

Some of them can hardly be seen; some are quite opaque. All move with Doul’s speed; all carry his blade. They overlap and move through each other—and bite where they land. He cuts left to right and right to left, and down and up, and he stabs and parries and slashes savagely, all at once. A hundred blades block every attack that his enemies make, and countless more retaliate brutally.

The men before him are carved and lacerated with a palimpsest of monstrous wounds. Doul strikes, and blood and screams welter up from around him in unbelievable gouts. The New Crobuzon sailors are frozen. For a second, they watch their comrades fall in bloody death. And Uther Doul moves again.

He calls his name, he turns, he leaps and coils above them, kicking and spinning, always moving, and everywhere he faces he lashes out with the Possible Sword. He is surrounded, shrouded, hidden by nigh-swords, his grey armor half visible through a translucent wall of his own attacks. He is like a spirit, a god of revenge, a murderous bladed wind. He moves past the men who have boarded his ship and sends up a mist of their blood, leaving them dying, limbs and body parts skittering over the deck. His armor is red.

Bellis sees his face for one instant. It is ruined with a feral snarl.

The Crobuzoner men die in great numbers and fire their weapons like children.

With one stroke and countless wounds, Doul tears open a thaumaturge who is trying to slow him, and the woman’s puissance makes her blood boil as it dissipates; and he fells a huge cactus-man who raises a shield that deflects many hundreds of Doul’s attacks but cannot protect him from them all; and he murders a fire-throwing sailor whose tank of pyrotic gas splits open and bursts, igniting even as his face is cut apart. Countless cuts with every stroke.

“Gods,” Bellis whispers to herself, unhearing. “Jabber protect us . . .” She is awed.

Uther Doul lets the Possible Sword run for less than half a minute.

When he thumbs it off, and is suddenly absolutely still, and turns to the remaining Crobuzoner sailors, his face is calm. The cold, still solidity of his right arm is shocking. He looks like some monster, some gore-ghost. He breathes deeply—wet, slick, dripping with other men’s blood.

Uther Doul calls his own name, breathless, savagely triumphant.

Unseen in Bellis’ shadow, the man moves the statue down from his lips.

He is horrified. He is utterly aghast. I didn’t know, he thinks, frantic. I didn’t know it could be like that . . .

The man has watched his liberators board and has seen them slowly break through those who opposed them, winning the Grand Easterly, taking charge of the vessel, of Armada’s heart . . . And now he has seen them withered and bloodied and destroyed in seconds, at the hands of Uther Doul.

He looks out frantically at the frigates wedged between the Sorghum and the city, and he tongues the statue again and feels it spit power into him. He debates racing over the side of this superstructure, over the corpses below, and onto the New Crobuzon ships.

“It’s me!” he might call. “I’m here! I’m the reason you’re here! Let’s go, let’s run, let’s get out of here!”

He can’t take all of them, the man thinks, his courage returning as he stares at the red-drenched figure of Uther Doul below. Even with that godsdamned sword, there are too many, and the Armadan ships are being wiped out. Eventually more Crobuzoner troops will get here, and then we can leave. The man turns and looks out, to where the dreadnoughts are pounding the remnants of the Armadan fleet.

But even as he readies himself again to leave, he sees something.

The legions of tugs and steamers that have surrounded Armada like a corona, hauling it for decades, and that have now been left redundant by the avanc, are beginning to pull away from the city’s orbit and head for the Crobuzoner fleet.

They have been refitted by frantic crews over the last few hours: built up with guns; stuffed full of black powder and explosives, with harpoons and phlogistic cells and batteries and jags welded, bolted, soldered, and screwed into temporary place. None of them is a battleship: none is any match for an ironclad. But there are so many of them.

Even as they approach, a volley from the Morning Walker destroys one with a contemptuous blast. But there are many, many more behind it.

Unseen, the man’s face falters, frozen. I didn’t think . . . he stutters to himself, silently. I didn’t think of them.

He has told his government everything—he warned them of the nauscopists, so that the Crobuzoner meteoromancers could hide their fleet’s approach; of the airships, so that golems were prepared; and of how many ships they would have to face. The Crobuzoner forces have been calculated to defeat the Armadan navy, which this man has researched and communicated to them. But he did not think to count those useless, age-pocked tugs and steamers, trawlers and tramps. He did not imagine them reckless and stuffed with explosives. He had not pictured them driving across the sea, into the path of an ironclad or a dreadnought, as they do now, firing their pathetic guns like pugnacious children. He did not imagine their crews abandoning them when they were mere yards away, hurling themselves from the sterns of the smoke-spewing ships and onto rafts and lifeboats and watching as their abandoned vessels ram the flanks of the Crobuzoner ships, breaching their inches of iron and igniting, exploding.

There is a smear of dirty colors to the west, and the sun is very low. The crews of the two dirigibles waiting by Dry Fall’s Uroc are impatient.

The Brucolac and his vampir cadre will soon be awake and ready to fight.

But something is changing in the sea aft of the city. The Crobuzoner sailors who have boarded the city are staring in horrified astonishment, the Armadans watching with fierce hope.

The tugs and steamers continue to plow toward the oncoming Crobuzoner fleet—driving on toward the battleships, their engines overheating, their wheels locked into position, their throttles wedged full ahead—until, in ones and twos, they impact. Several are blown from the water in fountains of metal and flesh before they can reach any quarry. But there are so many.

When they reach the towering sides of a dreadnought, the prows of the empty tugs and trawlers crumple, buckling backward. And as they compress, their red-hot engines burst, and the oil or gunpowder or dynamite wedged beside the engines ignites. And with ugly, oily flames; with great gouts of smoke and dragged-out explosions that dissipate some of the energy into useless sound; with one-two-threes of smaller detonations in place of one solid blast, the ships explode.

Even such imperfect torpedoes as these begin to hole the Crobuzoner dreadnoughts.

Way behind them, the broken Armada force starts to regroup. The New Crobuzon vessels are being slowed, and slowly ruined, by the onslaught of sacrificed vessels. The Armadan battleships rally their fleet and begin to fire on their stalled enemies.

The sea is full of lifeboats: escapees from the abandoned vessels that shudder their way toward the dreadnoughts. The crews row frantically, striving to avoid other oncoming Armadan ships. Some fail: some are crushed and sunk; some are swamped by the enormous bloody waves, or are caught in the heat of depth charges or are broken up by cannonballs. But many escape into the open sea, back toward Armada, watching their ugly little tugs smack into the invaders and explode.

These unexpected attackers—a ridiculous, wasteful line of defense—have stopped the Crobuzoners, ship after ship immolating itself, melting their target’s iron sides.

The dreadnoughts are stopped.

The Morning Walker is sinking.

There is a cheer, a rising yell of astonished triumph, from the aft edge of Armada, where the citizens can see what is happening only a handful of miles out to sea.

The roar is picked up by those who hear the cry of triumph and mimic it; and then by those behind them, and behind them. It sweeps across the city. Within a minute, men and women in the far reaches of Dry Fall and Shaddler and the Clockhouse Spur, on the other side of Armada, are screaming their ecstatic approval, though they are not sure of what.

The Crobuzoner troops stare in total horror. A great crack spreads up the side of the Morning Walker. More of the little ships smash into it and explode, even as it begins to buckle, even as its magisterial outline begins to twist; and it starts to angle its massive length down, as if purposefully; and frantic little figures begin to hurl themselves from its sides; and the explosions continue until its stern rises suddenly from the sea and, with a terrible shattering explosion, breaks off, spewing men and metal and coal—tons and tons of coal—into the sea.

The New Crobuzon crews watch as their chance to return home disappears. The Armadans scream their approval again, as the huge shape rolls over in the sea, ponderous and regretful, resenting every movement, and burps up fire as it is dragged below.

The Crobuzoner flagship has gone.

Frantic, its fellow dreadnoughts begin to level volleys too soon at Armada itself, churning the sea and making the city pitch as if it were in a storm. But some of the smaller ironclads are now in range, and their heavy shells shatter masts and tear through the fabric of the city.

A bomb swamps Winterstraw Market, tearing apart a circle of stallholder’s boats. Two shells arc chillingly overhead and break a hole in the side of the Pinchermarn, sending hundreds of library books flaming into the water. Ships are sunk, the bridges that tether them on all sides splintering.

Angevine and Shekel comfort each other, hiding from the remnants of the invading Crobuzoners. Shekel is bleeding profusely from his face.

But terrible though these attacks are, only the dreadnoughts could destroy the city, and they are not in range. They are being harried, contained, broken by the onslaught of gunpowder-stuffed tugs. The Armadan vessels keep coming. After a fifth explosion rocks its bows, the Bane of Suroch begins to buckle, to crack, to list, to collapse into the water.

Ironclads and scouts mill solicitous and useless around it, drones around a dying queen. Under renewed onslaught from the remnants of the Armadan fleet, but most of all under the unexpected and suicidal attacks of all those refitted steamers, the New Crobuzon dreadnoughts are, one by one, being destroyed.

From the raised deck above the Grand Easterly, the man screams in unheard horror.

The man tenses and kisses his statue with a fervent frenzy, then prepares to leap out and down, folding space a little, and land on that frigate below, which is rumbling and gearing up to leave. But he stops as a terrible realization shakes him.

He watches the last two dreadnoughts quiver under the attacks and fire their vicious guns at their tormentors. And even though those retaliations cost several Armadan vessels, the ugly explosions that rock the dreadnoughts’ flanks continue until the Crobuzoner vessels go down.

The invaders’ coal has been sunk. The man watches, quite numb. There is no point now in him jumping ship or swimming out for his home vessels. Even if the Armadans do not destroy every single ship, even if one or two fast-running ironclads escape, this is the middle of the Swollen Ocean, uncharted waters, almost two thousand miles from the nearest land and twice that far to home. Within a few hundred miles their boilers will grow cold, and the Crobuzoner vessels will be calmed.

They have no sails. They will rot and die.

There is no hope for them.

This rescue has failed. The man is still trapped.

He looks down and realizes with a dull shock that he has slipped back into phase with Bellis’ space. If she turned now, she would see him. He mouths the statue again, numbly, and disappears.

Dusk fell, and finally the Dry Fall dirigibles lifted off, each containing its murderous crew. They sailed low and fast over the last dregs of battle, their vampir passengers ready. Long tongues flickered in the night air as the ab-dead prepared to hurl themselves into any fray.

They were too late. The fight was over.

The airships meandered pointlessly over water fouled with coaldust and twisted metal and acid and oil, and here and there the shimmering residue of rockmilk, and sap, and many gallons of blood.

Chapter Thirty-seven

At first the city welled up with exhausted delight, a kind of ragged, wounded euphoria.

It did not last long. In the days that followed, Bellis was acutely conscious of silence; Armada was endlessly quiet. It started after the battle, when the roars of triumph died out and the scale of devastation became clear.

Bellis had not slept in the night after the carnage. She stumbled out with the dawn, with thousands of other citizens, and walked, dumb, across the city. The skyline she knew was broken in strange new ways. Ships in which she had bought paper, or drunk tea, or walked across, unthinking, a hundred times, were gone.

Croom Park was quite untouched. The Chromolith, the Tolpandy, the Grand Easterly itself were quite whole.

Many times in the days that followed, Bellis would turn a corner in some backstreet maze—or cross a wooden bridge, or come into a well-lit plaza—and see people crying, mourning the dead. Some were staring at one piece or another of the damage to their city—a blank, wave-flecked hole where their home ship had been, a shattered mess of a marketplace, a church crushed by fallen masts.

It was quite unfair, Bellis thought nervously, that so few of her own haunts had been harmed. By what right was that? She, after all, did not even care.

A huge number of Armadans had died. Several members of the Curhouse Council and Queen Braginod of Jhour were among them. The Council voted in replacements, and the stewardship of Jhour passed quietly to Braginod’s brother, Dynich. No one cared, particularly. Armada had left thousands of bodies in the sea.

People stared at the Sorghum, muttering that it was not worth it.

Bellis wandered through the brutalized cityscape as if she were dreaming. Even where no shells had fallen, the stresses caused by the bucking sea had ruined architecture. Arches were shattered, their keystones now resting on the ocean floor. There had been fires; narrow streets had crumbled, the rows of houses that seemed to lean into each other shifting, touching, their roofs cracking and collapsing. The city seemed to tremble with kinds of damage that would have been impossible on land.

As she wandered, Bellis heard hundreds of stories: exaggerated tales of heroism and ghoulish descriptions of injuries. She began to dig for specific information, tentatively. Moved by curiosity she did not understand (feeling in those hours like an automaton, moving without her own consent), Bellis asked what had happened to the other passengers from the Terpsichoria.

There were conflicting stories about the Cardomiums. Bellis heard about those crewmen still imprisoned, their commitment to Armada not yet trusted, having failed to make peace with their press-ganging. She heard that there had been an almighty ruckus from the prison ships in the fore of Garwater when the shelling began, and that the imprisoned men had screamed and screamed for their compatriots to come for them.

The boarders, of course, had never come close, and the shouts had gone unanswered.

Sister Meriope was dead. Bellis was shocked by that—in a horrible, abstract way—as if at seeing an unexpected color. In the chaos, she heard, several prisoners had escaped from the asylum, Meriope among them. The massively pregnant nun had made her way to the city’s aft edge, where she had run toward the New Crobuzon boarding party, shouting ecstatic greetings, and been shot down. It was impossible to tell whose guns had killed her.

That was the kind of story that Bellis heard again and again—the press-ganged who, faced with what seemed a sudden chance to go home, had tried desperately to switch sides in the battle, and had died. Several of those from the Terpsichoria had been killed in such a way, it seemed. And even if their numbers were exaggerated, even if the details were embellished as a moral caution about disloyalty, Bellis was sure that many must have died as described.

It was obvious to Bellis—no great revelation—that her safety would have been very, very far from secure had she sought refuge with the New Crobuzon troops. She had decided long ago that her return to her city would have to be her own doing. Bellis knew how little her government would care about her survival. She had fled them, after all, and for good reasons.

During the fighting, Bellis had felt paralyzed, had been numb to any kind of desire for one side or the other to win. She had watched like a chance spectator at a bloody prizefight. Now that Armada had triumphed, she felt no relief or happiness, nor any despair.

After the destruction of the dreadnoughts, the other Crobuzoner ships had sailed away to the northwest. They fled in a panic, too terrified to surrender, to beg quarter from the Armadans. They escaped, pretending that there was some hope for them, that they might make it to a port. Everyone knew that their crews would die.

Three Crobuzoner ironclads and a frigate were captured. Instantly, they became the most advanced ships in Armada, but still they were hardly recompense for the scores of vessels that Armada had lost. A good portion of its fleet, two submersibles, and half the hastily rebuilt steamers had been sacrificed to destroy the dreadnoughts. The Trident and tens of smaller airships were gone. The massive aeroflot had been weighed down by golems like attacking rats, brought into the rage of fire that had taken its hide and burst its skeleton.

Armadans had taken many hours to return to their city, paddling in their life rafts, swimming, clinging to debris. The thaumaturges and engineers in the base of the Grand Easterly kept the avanc slow for more than a day. It had made its dumb way on, untroubled by the murderous chaos above it.

Inevitably, some of those who reached the city were New Crobuzon troops. Perhaps an enterprising few stole the clothes off Armadan corpses and simply hauled themselves aboard into a new life—as sailors, all spoke at least passable Salt. But most were too traumatized to calculate like that, and in the hours after the battle, Crobuzoner sailors began to appear on the decks of Armada in sodden, ruined uniforms, miserable with fear. Their dread of drowning was stronger than that of Armadan revenge.

In those ruined days immediately after the war, under red- and black-smoked skies, those terrified Crobuzoner sailors caused a political crisis. Of course, in their rage of loss, the Armadans punished their bedraggled captives. The newcomers were beaten and whipped—some to death—while their tormentors howled the names of dead friends. But eventually weariness, disgust, and numbness set in, and the Crobuzoners were taken away and held on the Grand Easterly. After all, Armada’s history was built on the assimilation of strangers and enemies—after any battle, any time a ship was taken.

This had been a more violent, a more terrible set of circumstances than any in the city’s past, but still, there was no question as to what must be done with captured enemies. As with the Terpsichoria, those who could be won over were to be made Armadans.

Only this time, the Lovers said otherwise.

The Lovers had come back from the fighting enraged and elyctric, exhilarated, scarred all anew with random markings that did not match each other’s (something they would fix over the nights to come). The whole riding, the whole city, was shocked when the news leaked that the Lovers intended to have the Crobuzoners cast out.

At a hastily convened mass meeting on the Grand Easterly, the Lover put her case. She declaimed violently against the Crobuzoners, reminding her citizens that their missing families had been slaughtered by such as these, their city blasted, half their Armadan ships destroyed. There were now many times more press-ganged aboard than Garwater or any other riding had had to take in at one time before. With their resources stretched, with Armada vulnerable, with New Crobuzon having declared war, how could they possibly absorb so many enemies?

But many of those who were Armadans now had once been enemies. For as long as the city had existed, Armadans had held that once the fighting stopped, there was no quarrel with its enemies’ foot soldiers. They were to be welcomed, and hopefully transformed, and made citizens. That, after all, was what Armada was—a colony of the lost, the renegade, the absent-without-leave, the defeated.

The New Crobuzon sailors shivered in their prisons, unaware of the controversy that surrounded them.

It would not be murder, the Lover claimed. The prisoners could be put aboard a ship, with provisions, and pointed in the direction of Bered Kai Nev. It was not impossible that they would make it.

That was a poor argument.

She changed her tack, arguing angrily that with the avanc, the city must go on, that it had the power to go to places Armadans had never dreamed of, to do unimagined things, and that to waste their resources wiping the noses of a thousand blubbering newcomers—murderers—was idiocy.

Even with their wounds still bleeding and fresh, even with the memory of war still painful, the mood of the crowd was turning against the Lover. She was not convincing them. The other rulers held their peace, watching.

Bellis understood. It was not that those gathered had any love, any particular pity or compassion, for their captives. It was not about those bloody, wounded troops holed up in agony and squalor below. The Armadans were not concerned for those captives, but for their own city. This is Armada, they were saying. This is how it is what it is. Change that, and how do we know what we are? How do we know how to be?

With one speech, the Lover could not defeat so many centuries of tradition—tradition thrown up for the city’s survival. She was alone on the stage, and she was losing her argument. With a sudden, rocking uncertainty, Bellis wondered where the Lover was, whether he agreed.

Sensing the discontent, those among the crowd who agreed with the Lover’s line began to shout, spontaneously offering support, crying revenge against the captured. But more voices rose in opposition, and quieted them.

Something shifted, decisively. It was obvious, suddenly, that this gathering would not allow the Crobuzoners to be murdered, even through the drawn-out pretense at mercy the Lover had suggested. It was obvious that the long, sometimes easy, sometimes cruel process of press-ganging would have to begin, and that many months of effort would be expended on the men and few women imprisoned below, and that eventually many of them would reconcile themselves to their new life, and some would not. The latter would remain imprisoned; and only eventually, after long efforts at persuasion, might they, perhaps, be executed.

“What’s the fucking hurry?” someone shouted. “Where you fucking taking us, anyway?”

The Lover gave in then, swiftly, with charisma; shrugging in exaggerated humility, she acquiesced, announced her order rescinded. She won a ragged cheer from an audience still eager to forgive a bad suggestion made in anger. She did not answer the heckler’s question.

Bellis remembered that moment later, and saw in it a fulcrum. That was the moment, she would tell herself in the weeks to come, that everything changed.

Vessels now too broken to sail hitched themselves to the city and were pulled on by the untiring avanc. It swam at a steady pace, without sudden darts or caprice, a little more than five miles an hour.

North.

The days were full of services for the dead: homages and homilies and prayers. Rebuilding began. Cranes twitched; the city bustled with subdued crews refitting the broken buildings, restoring what they could and changing what they could not. In the evenings, the pubs and drinking dens were full but quiet. Armada was not convivial, in those awful days. It was still bleeding, had not yet scarred.

People began to ask questions. Delicately, very carefully, they probed those wounds in their minds, tender places that the war had left. And when they did, terrible uncertainties arose.

Why did they come? people began to say to themselves and to each other (with shaking heads and lowered eyes). And how, across half a world, did they ever find us?

Can they do it again?

This slow, burgeoning spirit of anger and query raised wider issues than the war itself. Each question bore others.

What did we do to attract their notice?

What are we doing?

Where are we going?

With the days and insomniac nights, Bellis’ numbness began to ebb. She had spoken properly to no one—she had spent time with no one—since the battle. Uther Doul had done without her; she had not found Carrianne or Johannes. Except to rake through the rumors that proliferated like weeds, Bellis had hardly spoken for days.

On the second day after the fighting, she began to think. Something in her woke, and she viewed the damaged city with the first emotion she had felt for some time—a cold horror. Bellis realized curiously that she was aghast.

As she lifted her eyes to the sun, she felt the stirrings of emotions and uncertainties and terrible certainties she had been storing.

“Oh gods,” she said quietly. “Oh gods.”

She knew so many things, she realized. So much was clear to her now—and so much that was terrible, that she balked at confronting, that she could not think about just yet. She had understanding and knowledge inside her, but she shied away from it as if from a bully.

That day, Bellis ate and drank and walked as if nothing had changed, her motions as jerky and fumbling as those of all the other traumatized around her. But at odd moments she would wince—she would blink and hiss and grit her teeth—as the knowledge inside her moved. She was pregnant with it—a fat, malign child that she was desperately ignoring.

Some part of her knew that she could not batten it down, but she played herself for time, never vocalizing, never thinking in words, always closing off the understanding she carried with an angry, frightened sense of Not now, not now . . .

She watched the sun set from her rough-cut windows and read and reread her letter, trying to steel herself to write something about the battle, not knowing what to do. At ten o’clock she heard a peremptory knocking, and opened the door onto Tanner Sack.

He stood on the little platform that jutted from the smokestack beyond her door, at the top of the stairs. He had been wounded in the fighting; his face was cut and septic, his left eye puffed closed. His chest was bandaged, the ugly tentacles springing from it wrapped close to him. Tanner was holding a pistol aimed at Bellis’ face. His hand was unwavering.

Bellis stared into it, into the pit at its end. The fat, hateful understanding that she had nurtured came out of her, unstoppable. She knew the truth, and she knew why Tanner Sack was ready to kill her. And with an exhaustion she knew that if he pulled the trigger, if she heard the blast, that in the sliver of a second before the bullet burst her brain, she would not blame him.

Chapter Thirty-eight

“You murderous fucking bitch.”

Bellis gripped the back of her chair, gasping with pain, blinking to clear her eyes. Tanner Sack had hit her once, a hard backhanded slap that had sent her into the wall. The blow seemed to have taken the physical anger out of him and left him with only the strength to speak to her, hatefully. He kept his gun aimed at her head.

“I didn’t know,” said Bellis, “I swear to Jabber I didn’t know.” She felt little fear. Mostly, she felt a thick shame and a confusion that slurred her words.

“You fucking evil shit,” said Tanner, not loud. “You fucking bloodsucker, you bitch, you bitch, fuck you . . .”

“I didn’t know,” she said again. The gun did not waver.

He swore at her again, a drawn-out drawl of invective, and she did not interrupt. She let him speak until he was tired. He cursed her for a long time, and then suddenly changed his tack, speaking to her in what was almost a normal tone.

“All them dead. All that blood. I was under the waves, you know that? I was swimming in it.” He whispered the words at her. “I was swimming in the fucking blood. Killing men like me. Stupid New Crobuzon boys that might’ve been my mates. And if I’d been took back, if they’d got their way, if they’d done what they wanted, if they’d taken this fucking city, then the killing wouldn’t have stopped. I’d be on my way to the colonies now. A Remade slave.

“My boy,” he said, suddenly hushed. “Shekel. You know Shekel, don’t you?” He stared at her. “He helped you a few times. Him and his lady, Angevine, got caught up in the fighting. Ange can take care of herself, but Shekel? He got himself a rifle, stupid lad. A bullet hit the rail under him, and the splinters tore open his face. It’s a mess. He’ll always be marked—always. And there am I, thinking that if that Crobuzoner had moved his gun an inch—a fucking inch—then Shekel’d be gone. He’d be gone.”

Bellis could not insulate herself from his desolate tone.

“Like all the others who’ve gone.” Tanner’s voice was drab. “And who killed them, all the dead crews? Who killed ’em? Had to call for help, didn’t you? Did you even think about what might happen? Did you? Did you care? Do you care now?” His words hammered her, and even as she shook her head—that’s not how it was—she felt deep shame. “You killed them, you traitor fuck.

“You . . . and me.”

He kept the gun steady, but his face distorted.

“Me,” he said. “Why’d you bring me in?” His eyes were bloodshot. “You nearly killed my boy.”

Bellis blinked away her own tears.

“Tanner,” she said, and her voice was throaty. “Tanner,” she said slowly, raising her hands in a helpless gesture. “I swear to you, I swear to you, I swear . . . I didn’t know.”

She supposed that he had always had some vestige of doubt, some uncertainty, or he would have simply blown her away. She spoke to him for a long time, stumbling over her words, trying to find ways to express what sounded impossible, utterly untrue, even to her.

All the time she spoke, his gun never left her face. As she told Tanner what she had realized, Bellis stopped speaking, from time to time, as the truth of it sank into her.

The window was visible over Tanner Sack’s shoulder, and she stared through it as she spoke. That was much easier than meeting his eyes. Whenever she glimpsed his face, she burned. The outrage of betrayal, and most of all the shame, scoured her.

“I believed what I told you,” she told him, and remembering the carnage, she winced so hard it hurt. “He lied to me, too.”

“I don’t fucking know how they found Armada,” she said, a little time later, still in the face of Tanner’s scorn and livid disbelief. “I don’t know how it works; I don’t know what they did; I don’t know what information or machinery he stole to let it happen. There was something . . . He must have hidden something; he must have given them something they needed, something to track us, in that message . . .”

“The one you gave me,” Tanner said, and Bellis hesitated, then nodded.

“The one he gave me, and I gave you,” she said.

“I was convinced,” she said. “Jabber, Tanner, why do you think I was on the Terpsichoria? I was a fucking exile, Tanner.” He kept quiet at that.

“I was running,” Bellis went on. “I was running. And damn, I don’t like it here, this isn’t my place . . . But I was running. I wouldn’t call those bastards; I wouldn’t trust them. I was on the run because I was scared for my fucking neck.” He looked at her curiously. “And anyway . . .” She hesitated to say more, fearing that she would sound ingratiating, though she wanted to tell him the truth.

“Anyway . . .” she continued, keeping her voice calm. “Anyway, I wouldn’t have done that. I’d not do that to . . . to you, to any of you. I’m not a fucking magister, Tanner. I’d not wish their justice on any of you.”

He gazed back at her, his face like stone.

What decided him, she realized later, what led him to believe her, was not her sadness or her shame. He did not trust those, and she did not blame him. What convinced him that she was telling the truth, that she had been as duped as him, was her rage.

For a long, wordless, miserable time, Bellis felt herself trembling, and her fists clenched bone-hard and white.

“You fucker,” she heard herself say, and shook her head.

Tanner could tell she was not speaking to him. She was thinking of Silas Fennec.

“He told me lies,” she spat suddenly to Tanner, surprising herself, “after lie after lie . . . so that he could use me.”

He used me, she thought, like he used everyone else. I watched him at work; I knew what he did, how he used people, but . . .

But I didn’t think he was doing it with me.

“He humiliated you,” Tanner said. “Thought you were special, did you?” he sneered. “Thought you could see through him? Thought you was in it together?”

She stared at him, white-hot with rage and self-disgust at being gulled by Silas like some stupid naïve, like his puppets, like everyone else. Me more than all the poor fools reading Simon Fench’s pamphlets; me more than every poor stupid fuck acting as his contact. She was sick at the contempt, the ease, with which he had lied to her.

“You piece of shit,” she muttered. “I’ll fucking destroy you.”

Tanner sneered at her again, and she knew how pathetic she sounded.

“Do you think any of what he said was true?” Tanner Sack asked her.

They sat together, stiff and uncertain. Tanner still held the gun, but loosely. They had not become coconspirators. He looked at her with dislike and anger. Even if he believed that she had not set out to harm Armada, she was not his comrade. She was still the one who had persuaded him to be message-boy. It was she who had implicated him in the butchery.

Bellis shook her head in slow dudgeon.

“Do I think New Crobuzon is under attack?” she said disgustedly. “Do I think the most powerful city-state in the world is being threatened by malevolent fish? That two thousand years of history is about to end, and that only I can save my home? No, Tanner Sack, I don’t. I think he wanted to get a message home, and that was all. I think that manipulative fuck played me like a fiddle. Like he plays everyone.” He’s an assassin, a spy; he’s an agent, she thought. He’s exactly what I was running from. And still, lonely and credulous like some fucking lost fool, I believed him.

Why would they come for him? she thought suddenly. Why would they cross four thousand miles just to rescue one man? It wasn’t for him, and I don’t think it was for the Sorghum.

“There’s more to this . . .” she said slowly, and tried to form thoughts. “There’s more to this than we can see.”

They wouldn’t come this far, risk this much, just for him, no matter how good an agent he is. He has something, she realized. He has something they want.

“So what are we going to do?”

It was growing light. The city’s birds were sounding. Bellis’ head ached; she was terribly tired.

She ignored Tanner’s question for a moment. As she looked out of the window, she could see the sky paling and the silhouettes of rigging and architecture etched in black. It was very still. She could see the waves against the city’s sides, could make out Armada’s faint northern passage. The air was cool.

Bellis wanted one more moment in this time, one more suspended second, when she could breathe, before she spoke, and answered Tanner, and set in motion a clumsy, claustrophobic endgame.

She knew the answer to his question, but she did not want to give it. She did not look at him. She knew he would ask again. Silas Fennec was still free in the city, having seen his attempted rescue fail, and there was only one thing that could be done. She knew that Tanner knew it, that he was testing her, that there was only one possible answer to his question and that if she failed to give it, he might still shoot her dead.

“What are we going to do?” he said again. She looked up at him, weary. “You know that.” She laughed unpleasantly. “We have to tell the truth.

“We have to tell Uther Doul.”

Chapter Thirty-nine

Here we drift, near the northern rim of the Swollen Ocean, and only—what?—a thousand, two thousand miles to the west, the northwest, is the Cunning Sea. And nestled in the crooks of its coast, on the shoreline of an unmapped continent, is the colony of Nova Esperium.

Is it the small, bright, glittering city of which I have seen pictures? I have seen heliotypes of its towers, and its grain silos, and the forests that surround it, and the unique animals of its environs: framed and posed, sepia, hand-colored. There’s a new chance for everyone in Nova Esperium. Even the Remade, the indentured, the laborers, can earn freedom.

(Not that that is true.)

I have pictured myself looking down at the settlement from the slopes of the mountains I can see in those pictures (washed out by distance, out of focus). Learning the languages of the natives, picking over the bones of old books that we might find in the ruins.

It is ten miles from New Crobuzon to the estuary, to the edge of Iron Bay.

I keep finding myself in that place, in my memories, beyond the city, poised between the land and the sea.

I have lost my seasons. I left when autumn became winter, and that is the last strong sense I have of time. Since then the heat and cool and cold and heat again have been chaotic, ill-mannered, random, to me.

Perhaps it is autumn again in Nova Esperium.

In New Crobuzon, it is spring.

I have knowledge that I cannot use, on a journey I cannot control, the aims of which I do not share or understand, and I am longing for a home I fled, and for a place I have never seen.

There are birds beyond these walls, sounding to each other, violent and stupid, wrestling with the wind, and with my eyes closed I can pretend to watch them; I can pretend to be on any ship, anywhere in the world.

But I open my eyes (I must), and I am still here, in this Senate chamber again, standing beside Tanner Sack, and my head is lowered, and I am in chains.

A few feet in front of Bellis and Tanner, Uther Doul was concluding his address to the city’s rulers: the Lovers, Dynich, the new Curhouse Council, and all the others. It was after dark. The Brucolac was also attending. He was the only ruler not marked by the war—all the others bore scars or blasted expressions. The rulers listened to Uther Doul. Now and then they glanced at the prisoners.

Bellis watched them watching her and saw the anger in their eyes. Tanner Sack could not look up. He was wrapped very tight in misery and shame.

“We’re agreed,” said Uther Doul. “We must move quickly. We can assume that what we’ve been told is correct. We must bring Silas Fennec in, immediately. And we can also assume that if he hasn’t yet worked out that we’re hunting him, he will do so soon.”

“But how did he fucking do it?” shouted King Friedrich. “I mean, I understand about this fucking package, this fucking message . . .” He glared at Bellis and Tanner. “But how did Fennec get hold of a fucking lodestone? The compass factory, for fuck’s sake . . . it’s guarded tighter than my fucking treasury. How did he get in?”

“That we don’t yet know,” said Uther Doul, “and it is one of the very first things we’ll ask him. As far as possible, we have to keep this business quiet. As Simon Fench, Fennec . . . is . . . not without supporters,” Doul went on. The Lovers did not look at each other. “We shouldn’t risk . . . angering any citizens. We need to move now. Does anyone know how we might start?”

Dynich coughed and raised his hand. “I have heard rumors,” he began hesitantly, “that Fench operates out of certain drinking holes—”

“King, let me speak,” the Brucolac interrupted in his scraped-up voice. Everyone looked at him in surprise. The vampir seemed unusually hesitant. He sighed and unrolled his flickering tongue, then continued.

“It’s no secret that Dry Fall riding has strong differences with the rulers of Garwater over the summoning of the avanc, and the city’s trajectory—which is still undisclosed,” he added with a brief flash of anger. “However—” His tan eyes took in the room like a challenge. “—I hope it would never be alleged that the Brucolac, or any of my cadre, are less than absolutely loyal to this city. It’s a matter of deep regret to us that we weren’t able to fight for Armada in the war that’s just passed.

“I know,” he went on quickly, “that my citizens fought. We have our share of the dead—but not me and mine. And we feel that. We owe you a debt.

“I know where Silas Fennec is.”

There was a quick chorus of gasps.

“How do you know?” said the Lover. “How long have you known?”

“Not long,” said the Brucolac. He met her eyes, but he did not look proud. “We found out where Simon Fench rested his head and printed his works. But you know . . .” he said with sudden fervor. “You know that we had no idea of his plans. We would never have allowed this.”

The implication was obvious. He had allowed “Simon Fench” to spread his influence, to print his dissident literature and unleash damaging rumors, so long as he had thought the victim of that activity would be Garwater rather than the city as a whole. He had not known about the Crobuzoner fleet that Fennec had called. Like Tanner and Bellis, he found himself implicated in what had happened.

Bellis watched, sneering inwardly at the Lovers’ ostentatious outrage. As if you’ve never done the same or more, she thought. As if that’s not how all of you bastards operate against each other.

“I’m aware,” hissed the Brucolac, “of how this stands. And I want this bastard brought down as much as any of you do. Which is why it will be a pleasure, as well as a duty, to take him.”

“You don’t take him,” said Uther Doul. “I take him—my men and I.”

The Brucolac turned his yellowing eyes to Doul. “I have certain advantages,” he said slowly. “This mission is important to me.”

“You do not get absolution this way, Deadman,” Doul said coldly. “You chose to let him play his games unimpeded, and this is the result. Now, tell us where he is, and then your interference ends.”

There was silence for several seconds.

“Where is he?” shouted the Lover suddenly. “Where’s he been hiding?”

“That’s another reason it makes sense for my cadre to hunt him,” the Brucolac replied. “He’s in a place many of your troops might refuse to go. Silas Fennec is in the haunted quarter.”

Doul did not flinch. He stared at the vampir. “You do not take him,” he said again. “I am not afraid.”

Bellis listened with shame, and a slow-burning hatred for Fennec. You fuck, she thought with savage satisfaction. Let’s see you lie your way out of this.

Even though he might still be her best hope to get out, she could never allow that fucking pig to lie to her, to use her. That could not go without payback, no matter the cost. She would rather take her chances in Armada, or at the Scar.

You should have fucking told me, Silas, she thought, breathing hard with fury. I wanted—I want—to get away, too. If you’d told me the truth—if you’d been open, if you’d been honest, if you’d not used me—I might have helped you, she thought. We might have done it all together.

But she knew that was not true.

Desperate as she was to get out of this place, she would not have helped him had she known his plans. She would not have been party to that.

With dreadful self-disgust, Bellis realized that Silas had judged her well. His job was to know what he could tell to whom, to know how far those around him would go, and to lie to them accordingly. He had to judge what to tell each of his pawns.

He had been right about her.

Bellis remembered Uther Doul’s rage when she and Tanner had come to him.

He had stared at them as they explained, his face growing stiller and more cold, his eyes darker, as they spoke. Flustered, Bellis and Tanner in turn had tried to explain to him that they had known nothing, that they had both been used.

Tanner had gabbled, and Doul had been impassive, waiting for him to finish and punishing him with silence, saying nothing at all. But then he had turned to Bellis and waited for her explanations. He had unnerved her—he was quite unmoving when she told him that she knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench. He had not seemed surprised at all by that. He had stood quietly, waiting for more information. But when she told him what she had done, what she had couriered for Fennec, then quite suddenly Doul had exploded with anger.

“No,” he had shouted. “What did he do?”

And when she had murmured something to him—some shamefaced, stuttered assertion that she had had no idea, that she had never dreamed, that she could not have known—he had stared at her very hard, with an expression of cold dislike and cruelty that she had never seen him wear before and that had cut her to her innards.

“Are you sure?” he had said to her, appallingly. “Is that so? No idea? None at all?”

He had birthed a maggot of doubt in her head that grubbed pitilessly through her remorse and misery.

Did I never know? Did I never doubt?

The rulers were arguing about the geography of Armada’s haunted quarter, about the ghuls and the tallow ghast, about how they should set their trap.

Bellis spoke loud enough to interrupt them all. “Senate,” she said. They were silent.

Doul took her in, his eyes absolutely unforgiving. She did not flinch.

“There’s something else that should be remembered,” she said. “I don’t believe that New Crobuzon would cross so many thousands of miles out of love. They wouldn’t risk all those ships, and all that effort, not even for the Sorghum, and certainly not just to bring their man home.

“Silas Fennec has something they want. I don’t know what it is, and I . . . I swear to you that I would tell you if I knew. I believe . . . One thing I believe is true, that he told me, is that he spent time in High Cromlech, and most recently in The Gengris. I saw his notebooks, and I believe that.

“He told me that the grindylow had hunted him. And maybe that was true, too. Perhaps because of something he’d taken: something that New Crobuzon would risk crossing the world for, when they found out he had it. Perhaps that’s why they came.

“You’ve all agreed that he’s done things he should never have been able to do: stolen things, broken into impregnable places. Well, perhaps whatever Silas Fennec has—whatever he stole, whatever the Crobuzoners came to fetch—is behind all that. So I suppose I’m saying . . . remember that, when you track him down, that he might be using something . . . And be careful.”

There was a long, unbending silence after she spoke.

“She’s right,” someone said.

“And what of her?” said a pugnacious youth from the Curhouse Council. “Do you—do we—believe them? That they knew nothing? That they were just trying to save their own city?”

“This is my city,” shouted Tanner Sack suddenly, to shocked silence.

Uther Doul looked at Tanner, whose head slumped slowly back down.

“We deal with them later,” Doul said. “They’ll be incarcerated for now, until we bring in Silas Fennec. Then we can question him, and we can judge.”

It was Uther Doul himself who led Tanner and Bellis to their cells.

He took them from the meeting room into the warren of tunnels that riddled the Grand Easterly. Through the darkwood paneled corridors, past ancient heliotypes of New Crobuzon sailors. Down gaslit tunnels. Where they eventually stopped, there were strange sounds of settling metal and laboring engines.

Doul pushed Tanner (gently) through a door, and Bellis glimpsed a sparse berth within: a bunk, a desk and chair, a window. Doul turned away from Bellis and walked on. He judged correctly that she would follow him: even like this, toward her own imprisonment.

In the cell, the darkness beyond the window was not cloudy night. They were lower than the waterline, and her porthole opened onto the unlit sea. She turned and held onto the door, stopping Doul from pushing it closed.

“Doul,” she said, and looked for any sign of softness, or friendship or attraction or forgiveness, and saw none.

He waited.

“One thing,” she said, meeting his eyes resolutely. “Tanner Sack . . . he’s a bigger victim here than anyone. He’d do nothing to endanger Armada. He’s in hell; he’s broken. If you’re going to punish anyone . . .” She drew shaky breath. “I’m trying to say, if you’re interested in justice, you’ll . . . not punish him, at least. Whatever else you decide. He’s the most loyal Armadan—the most loyal Garwater man—I know.”

Uther Doul stared at her for a long time. He twisted his head slowly to one side, as if curious.

“Goodness, Miss Coldwine,” he said eventually, his voice level: softer, more beautiful than ever. “By the gods. What a display of bravery, self-sacrifice. To take onto yourself the largest share of blame, to altruistically beg mercy for another. Had I suspected you of base motivations and manipulations—of deliberately and cynically or uncaringly bringing war to my city—had I been considering treating you severely for your actions, I believe I would have to rethink now, in the light of this, your obvious . . . selfless . . . nobility.”

Bellis had looked up sharply as he began to speak, but her eyes widened as he continued. His level voice became sour as he mocked her.

She burned, utterly dismayed. Shamed, and alone again.

“Oh,” she breathed. She could not speak.

Uther Doul turned the key and left Bellis alone to watch the fishes that swarmed stupidly to whatever light spilled from her window.

There was no such thing as silence in Armada. In the quietest part of the longest night, without a soul on any side, the city was full of noises.

The wind and water played it incessantly. Armada rode on swells, and compacted, and spread its substance wide and brought it tight again. The rigging whispered. Masts and smokestacks shifted uncomfortably. Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.

The city came closest to true silence in its empty haunted quarter. The tapping and grating and slopping of water seemed more hollow there. But in that place there were other, more obscure sounds that frightened those who heard them, and kept intruders away.

A slow crackling, like a tower of kindling collapsing. The rhythmic thudding of something mechanical piercing wood. A faint crooning like a mistuned flute.

The haunted quarter lolled among its odd noises, and moldered and swelled faintly with years of water, and continued its long, drawn-out collapse. No one knew what was hidden there in its age-blistered boats.

The Wordhoard was the largest vessel in the haunted quarter. An ancient ship more than four hundred feet long, carved in ocher wood, once deep-stained with intense colors, all blasted now by age and salt air. It was littered with the debris of five masts and a profusion of derricks and stays and yards. The staves and poles lay across the deck like crosshatching. They were losing their shapes, rotting and worm-eaten into nothing.

It was almost midnight. Sounds came from Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine ridings: drinking and everything that went with it; mechanical noises of reconstruction from the building sites created by the war. There were still bridges linking the ridings to the haunted quarter, old and unused, put in place unknown numbers of years ago and tenaciously refusing to become dust.

From a rude little barge at the edge of Thee-And-Thine, a man crept across water to the derelict vessels beyond. He walked without fear through a shipscape of decay: mildew, and rust corrosive as frostbite. There was only starlight to see by, but he knew his way.

At the fore of an iron trawler, the great winches were split, and they splayed their mechanical innards as if they had been butchered. The man picked a way through the greased carnage and crossed onto the Wordhoard. Its long deck reared out before him, listing a little off true.

(It was held below by the vast chain, fitted long ago, that stretched down into the water and held the avanc in place.)

The man descended into the darkness at the haunted vessel’s core. He was not quiet. He knew that if he was heard, he would be thought a phantom.

He moved through half-lit corridors, their contours outlined with thaumaturgy or phosphorescent mold.

The man slowed and looked around him, his face creasing in hard concern, his fingers tightening on the statue he held. When he reached age-slimed steps leading down, he stopped, resting his free hand on the banister. He held his breath and turned his head slowly around him, staring hard into every dark place, listening.

Something was whispering.

That was a sound the man had never heard before, even on these ghost-infested decks.

The man turned. He gazed into the pitch-black at the end of the passageway as if it were a battle of wills, as if he tried to stare down the darkness, until eventually he won, and it gave up what it had been hiding.

“Silas.”

A man stepped out of the shadow.

Instantly Silas Fennec brought up the statue in his hand and slammed his tongue deep into its gorge. The figure was running at him, covering the distance in the darkness, a sword extended.

And suddenly there were others. Hard-faced figures emerged from boltholes in the wood, all around, and came at him with shocking speed. They bore down on him with guns and weapons outstretched.

“Keep him alive!” shouted Doul.

Silas Fennec felt a tremor from the lascivious tongue of his stone icon, and puissance roared through him. He stepped up—up onto spaces that he would not have seen or been capable of treading a moment before. Fennec twisted as the first Garwater man passed stupidly below him, then he opened his mouth and gasped as his gut spasmed. With a retching growl he spewed up a bolt of green-black glowing bile, a mouthful of thaumaturgically charged plasma that was not quite viscous liquid and not quite energy. It burst from him and landed foursquare in his attacker’s face.

Silas Fennec stepped quickly through ways of seeing, leaving the corridor, rising through the boat, the man on whom he had spat shrieking weakly and clawing himself, and dying.

The yeomanry were everywhere, emerging from doors and clutching at his clothes. They burst from closed spaces like rats or dogs or worms or gods knew what, reaching out for him and swinging their blades. They were quick, chosen for skill and courage: a plague, an infestation, an invasion, hemming him, penning him in, hunting him down.

Jabber and fuck they’re all around me, Fennec thought, and hungrily pressed his mouth again to the statuette. Planes and angles folded around him, reconfiguring in his path and wake, and he twisted and bolted up stairs feeling like a drowning man, reaching for air. He was angry.

The Garwater crew grabbed for him, gripped hold of what they could. You do not fuck with me, he thought, and felt a swell of power. I can do more than fucking run. He turned, snarling, spat and spewed and puked at his attackers, venting the baleful coagulum that collected in him with the statue’s kiss. He rolled his tongue and hawked snotty jets of the stuff at the faces around him.

Where the sputum hit, it corroded normal space like a dimensional acid, and the yeomen cried out in dreadful alien pain as their eyes and bones and flesh folded in on themselves and out of corporeality, dissolving, dissipating, torn away in impossible directions. They lay wounded and wetly screaming, and Silas looked at them without pity as he passed, seeing their faces flayed of reality, bleeding a viscous nothingness that spat and sizzled, their heads and chests punctured with holes into a void. They hemorrhaged into that unspace, a deadening vacuity spreading like gangrene from the edges of their wounds so that their flesh became hard to notice, vague and irrelevant, and then suddenly did not exist.

His attackers rolled and screamed as long as they still had mouths.

Fennec kept running, his heart hammering. He ran and kissed and bent space with his intricate steps, unfolding the planes around him.

Uther Doul followed him grimly, with such tenacity that even confined to conventional space, he stayed on Fennec’s tail.

Doul was relentless.

Fennec burst from the dark confines of the Wordhoard and slammed into the air. He hung poised for a moment, tongue bloody from the statue’s marble teeth.

Fuck you all, he thought fiercely, all his fear running out of him. He plunged his tongue deep into his statue, felt power coruscate him, felt aglow with it like a dark star. Whirling, he skittered through a fringe of torn rigging, moving up by the shadows of wires, bending reality around him, buckling it and sliding along the fold he had created—up, out over the decrepit ship.

A corps of grim yeomanry rose from the hatch below and spread with expert speed across the deck. Uther Doul came with them, and he stared straight into Fennec’s eyes.

“Fennec,” he said, and raised his sword.

Silas Fennec looked down at him, grinned his rage, and answered in a voice that reverberated wrongly, sounding close up to the ear like a threatening whisper. “Uther Doul.”

Fennec was poised fifteen feet above the deck, in a corona of warping aether. Reality rippled around him. He hung unclear, his outlines oscillating between states. He moved with a slow and predatory marine grace, blurring in and out of visibility. Blood drooled from his mouth and torn tongue. He turned like a pike in the air, held suspended by the power of his statue’s kiss, staring at the men below him.

They raised their weapons. Fennec shimmered, and bullets passed through where he had been—through bristling air—and spat as they disappeared. He opened his mouth, and gobs of that corrosive spit-puke flew out of him like shrapnel from a shell.

They burst across the deck and into the faces of his attackers, and there was a percussion of shrieks. The men scattered in panic.

Fennec kept his eyes on Doul.

Doul leaped out of the path of the spittle with brutal economy, his face taut, still watching Fennec. Fennec flickered and was lower, was ghosting over the deck crooning his delight, leaving a slick of caustic drool. Any man came close to him and he spat, and they backed off, or died. He tracked Uther Doul.

“Take me, then,” whispered Fennec with drunk bravado. His throat was raw with the uncanny spit, but he felt he could do anything, burn a hole in the universe. He felt uncontainable. Doul retreated before the puissant, bristling figure, leaping, moving with terse anger, gritting his teeth against Fennec’s voice, which still muttered up close to his ear. “Come on . . .”

Then through the light and dark and the heaviness of wood, through the slap of water like little fists around him, the lights of Armada only a few yards away, Fennec heard a voice behind him.

“Siiiiiilassssss.”

Like the strike of a monstrous snake.

With his heart spasming Fennec turned, and through agitated space he saw the Brucolac—bestial, glowing, hate cast in bone. Leaping up out of darkness, his vast tongue uncoiled. Hurtling for him.

Fennec screamed and tried to kiss his grotesque again, but the Brucolac reached him and punched out, straight-fingered, lancing his hand into Fennec’s throat.

The strike sent Fennec caroming to the deck, supine, fighting to breathe. The Brucolac fell with him, his eyes burning. Still Fennec tried to bring the figurine toward his face, and with a kind of contemptuous ease, the Brucolac snatched Fennec’s free hand and held it effortlessly. He raised his foot (with humbling speed) and brought it down on Fennec’s right wrist, stamping savagely, pushing it into the deck and shattering it.

Fennec screamed in a high, silly vibrato as his ruined fingers spasmed. The statue spun across the wood.

He lay on the splinters and howled, blood leaking from his mouth and nose, and from a wrist torn apart. Fennec screamed in agony and terror and paddled his legs uselessly, trying to get away. He was fully corporeal again, broken and pathetically there. Uther Doul appeared, leaning into his field of vision.

As he floundered, Fennec’s shirt tore and flapped open, baring his chest.

It was mottled, clammy, and discolored in great patches of dirt-green and white. It glowed unhealthily like dead flesh. Here and there were ragged flanges, extrusions like catfish whiskers, like fins.

Doul and the Brucolac took in his alterations.

“Look at you . . .” murmured Uther Doul.

“Is that what it was all about?” hissed the Brucolac, looking at the statue Doul held.

Fennec continued to scream, snottily. The stone doll stared inscrutably at Uther Doul, winking at him, its open eye limpid and cold. It hugged itself with its unclear limbs cut from freezing stone, green-grey or black by turns. It gurned at him with its horrible round mouth, showing its teeth. Doul fingered the flap of skin that was folded down the statue’s back.

“That is a puissant thing,” the Brucolac said to Fennec, who shivered as shock set in. “How many Armadans has it killed?”

“Bring him,” said Doul to his unwounded men. They came forward, pausing nervously when the Brucolac did not move.

He had interfered despite Doul’s orders, and perhaps had saved his life, but Doul denied him any rueful or apologetic thanks. He simply stared at the Brucolac coldly until, defeated, the vampir moved back.

“He’s ours,” whispered Doul to the Brucolac, hefting the figurine.

There were yeomen dying in incomprehensible agony across the deck. Their comrades hefted Fennec without any shade of pity, grabbing him roughly, ignoring his screams.

The citizens at the outer edges of Dry Fall and Thee-And-Thine shivered to hear the sounds from the haunted quarter, and made warding signs.

“That’s like nothing I’ve heard before,” they whispered, or similar words, as the screams rang out thinly in the night. “That’s no ghast or ghul . . . That’s something new, that’s got no business in there.”

They could tell it was a man.

Chapter Forty

Uther Doul sat on the bed in Bellis’ cell. The room was still sparse, though the surfaces were now piled with a few accoutrements he had had brought from her rooms: her notebooks, a few clothes.

He watched her as she turned the grindylow statue in her hands. She ran her fingers over it carefully, curiously, feeling the intricacies of its carving. She stared at its twisted face, and into its mouth.

“Be careful,” Doul advised her as she touched her nail to one of its teeth. “It’s dangerous.”

“This is . . . the cause of it all?” said Bellis.

Doul nodded. “He carried it with him. He used it to kill several men. He folded space with it, performed thaumaturgy I’d never seen. That must be how he got into the compass factory.”

Bellis nodded. She understood that Doul was talking about the means by which Fennec had allowed New Crobuzon to find Armada. Some secret engine, some mechanism.

“It must be safe now,” Doul went on. “The lodestone must have been on their Morning Walker.”

Probably, thought Bellis. A device that tracked Armada. You’d better hope it’s not languishing on one of those ironclads, drifting all sunbaked and pocked, stinking by now with its dead crew, where maybe it could be found one day. She turned the statue over again and studied it closely.

“From what we can tell . . .” Doul continued slowly, “from what we’ve got out of Fennec, this statue is not the main thing. Just as the point of a gun isn’t the gun but the bullet, so with this: it’s not the statue itself that has the puissance. That’s just a conduit. This,” he said, “is the source of the power.”

Doul tickled the tough, thin strip of flesh embedded in the statue’s back.

“This is the fin of some ancestor, some assassin-priest, some thaumaturge, some magus. Housed in stone, in a shape that mimics its original form. This is a grindylow relic,” said Doul, “the remnant of some . . . saint. That’s what stinks of power.

“That’s what Fennec told us,” he said, and Bellis could imagine the techniques by which Fennec had been made to answer those questions.

“This is what’s behind it all,” said Bellis, and Doul nodded.

“It did amazing things. It allowed Fennec to do amazing things. But even so, I think he’d only just begun to understand it. I think New Crobuzon must have reason to believe that this . . . this charmed debris has far more power than Fennec had learnt to use.” He looked Bellis in the eye. “I don’t think New Crobuzon would come so far, try so hard, for anything less than the most powerful forces.”

Bellis looked reverentially at the object in her hands.

“We have our hands,” Doul said quietly, “on something extraordinary. We have found a very great thing. Gods know what it might allow us to do.”

This is the cause of it all, she thought. This is what Fennec stole. He even told me he’d stolen something from The Gengris. This is what he told New Crobuzon he had—didn’t try to pass it on to them, of course. They’d never have come looking for him if he’d given it to them. This is what he dangled in front of them, from across the world, said “Save me and this is yours,” and made them come.

This is what New Crobuzon crossed the world and waged war for. It set everything in motion. For this (unknowingly) I led Armada to the mosquito island. To send some lying message to New Crobuzon, I gave Armada the avanc instead of throwing Aum’s fucking book into the sea.

This is what everyone’s been chasing.

This magus fin.

Bellis did not know what had changed. Doul seemed to have forgiven her. His vicious demeanor had altered. He had come here to show her what they had found, to talk to her as he had done be-fore. She was nervous: she felt all uncertain of him.

“What will you do with it?” she said.

Uther Doul was rewrapping the figurine in a wet cloth. He shook his head.

“We’ve no time to examine this properly, not yet. Not now. There are too many other things to be done; too much is unfolding. We’ve been . . . distracted. This comes at a bad time.” He spoke without inflection, but she sensed that there was more than that, as he hesitated.

“And anyway, it’s done things to Fennec. It’s changed him.

“Even he doesn’t understand what, or if he does he’s saying nothing. No one knows what forces the grindylow can tap. We can’t reverse what’s happened to Fennec, and we don’t know what the full effects are. No one’s willing to become this statue’s new lover.

“So we’ll store it, somewhere safe, till we finish our project, till we reach our objective and have time and scholars to study this thing. We’ll keep all that’s happened quiet, but in case anyone did discover what Fennec brought on board, I think we’ll keep it somewhere no one would think, or dare, to look for it. Somewhere everyone knows there’s already a charmed treasure or two, and where they know the risks of trespass are just . . . too severe.”

As he said that, Doul stroked the grip of the Possible Sword for an unthinking instant. Bellis noticed it and knew where the magus fin would be hidden.

“And where,” she said slowly, “is Fennec?”

Doul stared at her. “Taken care of,” he said, and nodded briefly toward the corridor outside. “Held.”

There was a silence that stretched out.

“What are you doing here?” said Bellis eventually, quietly. “How long have you believed me?” She studied him, her confusion exhausting her. Since I stepped onto this fucking city, she thought with sudden clarity, I’ve been on the edge of my nerves, every moment. I’m tired.

“I always believed you,” he said, his voice expressionless. “I never thought you summoned New Crobuzon deliberately, though I know—I’ve always known—you have no love for this place. When you came to me before, I was expecting to hear something else.

“Listening to Fennec, hearing him talk, trying to stay silent, trying to implicate you, admitting the truth . . . He’s saying different things with every minute. But the truth is obvious: you were stupid,” Doul said without emotion. “You believed him. Thought you were . . . what? What did he tell you again? Saving your city. You weren’t out to destroy us; you were trying to save your homeland so that one day you could return to it, still whole and saved. You weren’t trying to destroy us; you were just stupid.”

Bellis’ face was set. She was burning.

Doul watched her. “You were caught up in it, weren’t you?” he said. “In the idea of . . . connecting with your home. The fact of doing something. That was enough, wasn’t it? You . . . saving your city.”

Doul spoke in a soft monotone, and Bellis looked down at her hands.

“I bet,” he continued, “that if you ever did think about what you’d been told . . . I bet you felt uneasy.”

He said it almost kindly. The maggot of doubt was alive again, grubbing through Bellis’ head.

“There was nothing of him,” said Doul, “in the Wordhoard.

“His berth down in the hold, it was clean and dry. His walls were covered with notes, pinned everywhere. Diagrams telling him who’s whose man or woman, and who runs what, and who owes whom. It was damned impressive. He’d learnt everything he needed. He had . . . spliced himself into the city’s politics. Always keeping himself hidden. Different rendezvous for different informants, and different names—Simon Fench and Silas Fennec were only two of many.

“But nothing of him. He’s like an empty doll. Those notes everywhere, like posters, and a little hand printing press, and ink and grease. His clothes in a trunk, his notebook in his bag—that’s all there was of him. It was pathetic.” Doul met Bellis’ eyes. “You could examine that room for hours, and you’d still have no idea what Silas Fennec was like.

“He’s nothing but an empty skin stuffed with schemes.”

But he’s been quieted now, thought Bellis, and we continue northward. The Lovers win. Their troubles are over, is that right, Uther? She stared at him and tried to reestablish between them something she had lost.

“What were you writing?” said Doul, shocking her, “when I came in?” He indicated her pocket, where she had stuffed her letter.

She always kept it on her, its many thick pages growing heavier. It had not been taken away from her. It could not possibly help her escape.

It had been a while since she had added to it. There were times when she wrote it as regularly as a diary, and weeks when she did nothing. In that small, featureless prison room, with her window facing out into nothing but watery dark, she had turned to it again, as if it could settle her head. But she had found it almost impossible to write.

“Ever since I first saw you,” said Doul. “You’ve always kept it. Even on the dirigible.” Bellis’ eyes widened. “What is it? What are you writing?”

What she said or did here, now, Bellis realized with a kind of cool panic, would reverberate for a long time. Things waited to fall into place. She felt as if she were holding her breath.

Bellis drew the paper from her pocket and read what she had written.

Dustday 9th Chet, 1780. Sixth Playdi of Flesh.

Hello again.

“It’s a letter,” she said.

“To whom?” said Doul. He did not lean over and peer at the paper. Instead he caught her eyes.

She sighed and leafed through the many pages of the letter, finding its beginning and holding it up to him so that he could read the first word.

Dear, the letter said, and then there was a blank. A word-hole.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“It’s not to no one,” she said. “That would be sad, pathetic, to write a letter to no one. And it’s not a letter to someone dead, or anything so . . . sad. It’s the opposite of all that, the opposite. It’s not closed down like that: it opens up; it’s a door; it could be to anyone.”

She heard herself, became aware of how she must sound, and was horrified.

“When I left,” she said, more quietly, “I’d spent many weeks, many months, in fear. People I knew were disappearing. I knew that I was being hunted. You’ve never been in New Crobuzon, have you, Uther?” She looked at him. “For all your explorations and your skills, you’ve never been there. You’ve no idea—do you have any idea? There’s a special kind of fear, a unique fear, when the militia are closing in on you.

“Who’ve they got to? Who’ve they taken, tortured, corrupted, frightened, threatened, bought? Who can you trust?

“It’s damn hard to be on your own. When I started,” she said hesitantly, “I thought I was probably writing to my sister. We’re not close, but there are times when I crave talking to her. Still, there are things I’d never say to her. And I needed to tell them, so I thought that perhaps this letter was to one of my friends.”

Bellis thought of Mariel, of Ignus and Téa. She thought of Thighs Growing, the cactacae cellist, the only one of Isaac’s friends she had remained in touch with. She thought of others. The letter could be to any of you, she thought, and knew that was not true. She had pushed most of them away in those frightened months before she had fled. And even before then, she had not been close to many. Could I have written to any of you? she wondered suddenly.

“Whoever you speak to,” she said, “whoever you write to, there are things you wouldn’t say, things you’d censor. And the more I wrote—the more I write—the more I need to say, the more I need to be quite, quite open. So I’ll write it all, and I’ll not have to close it down. I can leave that to the end. I can wait and decide who it’s to after I’ve said everything I have to say.”

She did not mention the fact that she would never be able to deliver her letter, that she would be writing it on Armada until she died.

There’s nothing strange about it, Bellis wanted to say. It makes sense, She felt fiercely protective. Don’t think about it as if there’s an emptiness at the other end, she thought at him fiercely. That’s not it at all.

“You must write carefully,” said Doul, “only about yourself. No shared jokes. It must be a cold kind of letter.”

Yes, thought Bellis, looking at him. I suppose it must.

“You exiles,” he said. “You exiles and your writing. Silas Fennec is the same. You look in there now, he’s trying to scribble in his notebook, with his left hand.”

“You let him keep it?” Bellis said, wondering what had happened to Fennec’s right hand and suspecting that she knew. Uther Doul looked ostentatiously around her room: at the clothes, the notebooks, the letter.

“You see how we treat our prisoners,” he said slowly, and Bellis remembered that she was a prisoner, just like Tanner Sack, just like Fennec.

“Why didn’t you tell the Lovers,” said Doul suddenly, “when Fennec told you that New Crobuzon was in danger? Why didn’t you try to get a message back that way?”

“They wouldn’t have cared,” she said. “They might even have been glad: one less rival on the sea. And think of the bones to be picked over. They would’ve done nothing.”

She was right, and she could sense that he knew it. Still, the maggot stirred in her again.

“Look in the letter,” she said suddenly. “It proves I knew nothing.”

For a long time, he did not respond.

“You’ve been judged,” he said at last. She felt blood cold in her stomach. Her hands trembled, and she swallowed several times and clenched her lips closed.

“The Senate’s met,” he continued, “after we’d questioned Fennec. It’s generally believed that Sack and you had no deliberate part in calling New Crobuzon here. Your story’s been accepted. You don’t need to show me your letter.”

Bellis nodded and felt her heart beat quickly.

“You gave yourselves up,” he said in a dead tone. “You told us what you know. I know you. I’ve watched you—both of you. I’ve watched you carefully.”

She nodded again.

“So you’re believed. So that’s that. You’ll be allowed to go free, if you want.” He paused then, for just a tiny second. And later Bellis remembered that pause, and could not forgive him. “You get to choose your sentence.”

Bellis looked away and smoothed her letter and breathed deeply for a while, then looked back at him.

“Sentence?” she said. “You said you believed me . . .”

“I do,” he said. “I was the main reason you were believed.” He did not say this as if he expected gratitude. “Which is why your prospective sentences are as they are. Why you’re not dead, as Silas Fennec will be dead, once we get what we need from him.

“But you knew you’d not go unpunished. Since when did intent determine judgment? Whatever you thought, or convinced yourself you thought you were doing, you’re responsible for unleashing a war that killed thousands of my people.” His voice hardened.

“You should consider yourself fortunate,” he continued, “that we want to keep the details of all this quiet. If the citizens ever heard what you’d done, you’d definitely be dead. Secrecy allows us a degree of leniency. You should be glad I’ve testified as to your character. I fought hard to have you both freed.” His beautiful voice was frightening her.

“Tell me,” she heard herself ask, and Doul met her eyes as he answered.

“I’m here representing the Senate, to see Tanner Sack and Bellis Coldwine,” he said clearly. “To sentence you both. Ten years, here, alone. Or time already served, plus lashes.

“It’s your choice.”

Doul left soon after that, leaving Bellis very alone.

Fennec had betrayed her. There would be no pamphlets from Simon Fench. No one would listen to her. The city would not turn back.

Doul had not even asked to see her letter. He did not take it from her; he did not peer over her shoulder as she held it; he did not show any interest in it at all.

Don’t you understand what I’ve told you? Bellis thought. You know what revelations are in this. This isn’t any normal kind of communication, all personal secrets and details and nods and references meaningless to any but two people. This is unique—this is my clear communication; this is my own clear voice, everything I’ve done and seen here.

Don’t you want to read it, Doul?

Doul had left once she had chosen her punishment, without glancing back at the thick sheaf of paper still in her hands. All its evidence went unread, languishing still. Uncommunicated.

Bellis turned the pages over, one by one, recounting what had happened to her in Armada. She tried to calm herself. There was something very important that she had to address. Her plans were collapsing. With Fennec caught, there was no one to put out the information she had, no one to stop the Lovers’ crazy plan to cross the Hidden Ocean. And Bellis should turn her mind to that, should try to think of some way to disclose the truth.

But she could not concentrate on that, on anything but what Doul had just told her.

Her hands were shaking. She gritted her teeth, furious at that, and ran her hands over her swept-back hair and exhaled, but she could not stop herself from trembling. She had to press her pen quite hard upon the paper so that the trembling would not make her words illegible. She scrawled a single quick sentence, then stopped suddenly, and stared at it, and could not write any more. She read what she had written, again and again.

Tomorrow they flog me.

Interlude IX

The Brucolac

Now in this deepest gutter of night where moments lie still like frightened things and we who are about are free of time I go walking.

My city moves. Its outlines shift.

Spires converge and part again and ropes coil like muscles and take the strain as Armada’s skyline breaks, heals, breaks.

Wild animals alive in shadows keep their whimpers quiet, sniff my dead smell and move on (four-footed or two) quick and cowed through a randomly serrated shipscape, along trenches of brick and wood on reshaped decks. The cadavers of vessels incorporated. Backstay stools, coaming, pawls, davits, and catheads encased in salt-aged architecture.

Behind every wall a maritime atomy, a mummy, a sacrifice, like a servant murdered in the temple’s foundations. This is a city of ghosts. Every quarter is haunted. We live like graveworms on our dead ships.

Withered flowers and weeds strain for what poor lamplight in the veins of walls, in ruts of concrete and wood. Life is tenacious, as we who have died know.

Trails of dust, parings of bone and brick, past ragged wounds of bomb-surgery: carbon and rubble, waste-ground punctuation in the city’s dull monologue. Paint, age, all the rubbish of urban chance brands squat towerblocks (on foredecks) and tenements (in the shadows of bowsprits). Flowerpots and wheels like meager tattoos, deliberate defacements. Infinite markings, sculptures accidental and made (the drabness peppered with signs of life and preference, awnings left just so, ribbons on sleeping livestock).

Where glass is, it is burst and scored—intricate with shadows. Lit windows are edged with darkness. Austere and coldly shining.

Moths and night-birds, things that move by the moon make their little sounds. What footsteps there are dissolve and are quickly formless. It is as if there is fog, though there is not. We who walk tonight come out of nowhere and return to it quickly.

Past factories, music halls, churches; over bridges rattling like vertebrae. Armada rides the waves dumb and buoyant like a rust-flecked corpse.

Through the slats of scaffold is the sea. I see myself (shadowed and unclear) and through myself into black water. Into a darkness so profound (random chymical lights like fireflies howbeit) it is an alien communication. It has its own grammar. Unseeing I look to the farmed fish circling autistic in cages, the menfish, the keels pipes crevices inked in, the spaces, the chains splinted with molluscs and algae-slick and the great unseen shape that bears us on, idiotic and futile.

History is formless and oppressive all around me, a nightmare I will make into sense.

A rhythm becomes sensible (extruded from a covert place), gives a shape to this night, gives it time again, and the clocks let out their held breaths.

I make a rooftop way to my moonship. Over torn-up slates and boards and their crossbreeds, through a low nightlit forest of flues steeples watertowers, in ridings not my own. I do not rule here, there is no goretax, it is a day since I have fed and it would take very little to slip along this drainpipe groundward like the drops of calcium that beard it. Very little to find a blood-filled nightwalker and dispose of his her husk but those days are gone, now I am bureaucrat not predator, and it is much better.

It is a long time till dawn but something has passed. We are moving on toward morning. My time is over.

I am on trawlers and houseboats and gone again (fleeting foot-strokes as if uncertain) through Shaddler and its cottages and industry (on for my fat ship). Dry Fall where scored streets are quieter and cushioned in dust.

Where does it come from? Swept hourly by neurotic sea-wind, when does dust touch down?

In some lights (reveries no less than true for that) I see it thick as snowfall and cobwebs clog my passage home. Alone I drown in dust and choke in it, in time’s desiccated exhaust.

I know when things are stirring. I know all the city’s rhythms. Something new is here.

There are tracks on the Uroc’s moon-white decks. Some hand unknown to me has held this rigging.

I watch for the newcomer.

Let us see.

What are you?

In my corridors, toward my berth, you have left your spoor. One, two drops of brine. Smears of something mucal. Scuffed varnish and iron. What are you?

You are hardly hiding from me. You are welcoming me home.

And oh see, here on my threshold you have left me blood.

Drizzled like sugar.

I can hear you behind my door.

My room smells like an estuary. River coagulate and fishgut blood. You rattle for me stranger, like a summons you shake the bones you wear. I have not pulled open any sluices to let the moon illuminate my bedchamber, but light is for the living. These that look upon you are vampir eyes.

And welcome to you.

Three of you to wait for me in a grisly tableau: reclined upon my bed and in front of my window and by me now, closing my door, ushering me respectful into my home.

Look at you.

Look at you shimmering before me great salamander tails folded in layers on my floor, blunt streamlined skulls like viperfish, your teeth protruding like fistfuls of nails, eyes black and big as tarpits, wet skin stretched on muscled bone like sap on knotted wood. See you upright in my room.

And you, recumbent on my covers like a painter’s nude, grinning at me without intent on your piscine face, your neck wrapped all about with charms and bones, beckoning me politely, whose is the face you carry in your hand?

Whose head is that you have taken, to bring blood for me? What woman was she? A guard who found you? Missing in the carnage of the New Crobuzon war, drowned or cut apart, was it you who split her neck to take that misshapen trophy? It is a frayed-enough edge, a bloody and fibrous laceration.

The tan-haired woman stares at me from your fist.

Look at you!

You drop her dead flesh and rise like something I have never seen.

—Seigneur Brucolac, you tell me in a voice colder than mine.—We must talk.

I don’t mind. I will talk to you. I know who you are. I think I have expected you.

And as the hours unfold toward the morning oh what conspiracies oh what secrets we uncover.

You have come late, riverthing. Waterman. You have come late from the Cold Claw Sea, searching these salt currents for what was taken from you. Nothing you say to me with that spastically moving blood-flecked jaw is clear. Like the riverthing you are you flicker toward your meaning and disturb a silt of effluvial words that cloud your intent. But I have dealt with seers poets and Weavers and can track your insinuations.

You have hunted on currents. Cleaved parasitic to the undersides of our attackers and then fluttered free in the squalor of battle and you have plucked bodies from the dead and dying plenty.

And then, what am I to understand? Hiding away you have used them. You have kept some alive, fed them air and questioned them (questioned them after they have died, is that? have I that right?). Learning from them (terrified on the outskirts of death they have babbled everything to you, immobile in water, trapped under their homes).

Only days here and like the subtlest spies you have learnt most everything about this place.

That is why (what is that you say?) that is why you have come to me.

One took something from your towers a world away, something precious and unique that you would have back. One has escaped you for scores of miles, for the length of continents, onto this place, to my city. And it has taken you a long a very long time but that one was a benighted fool to think you would let him run.

You tracked him. You have found his home.

But there have been commotions through the floors above you as you lie and wait and prepare and ask questions of whomever you can snatch from Armada’s decks. And cunning predatory and without fear as you may be there are too many above you, there is no way you can scour the whole city. Step from the water and you are unhidden, and hunted.

You cannot find your quarry. He has disappeared. And he will not surrender what you have come for, not willingly, not without terror. And if you were to ask for help of those who run the city and they were not to take your side, you have played up all your counters, and you could not oppose them if they turned on you. You are not so many. You cannot wage war. You cannot search for the one who has fled you.

Not without help.

Why have you come to me?

Deepling why have you come to me?

You come here kill my citizens and face me the Brucolac brazen like a blackmailer. How do you know I will not destroy you?

I understand.

Oh you are fine, you are a prodigious spy. I am in awe of you and of what you have learnt in only these few days and nights. Let me—here—bow my head to you.

Is there anything you have not learnt? Not understood?

You have come to me because you know that I am angry.

You know what the Lovers have called up. Perhaps you even know where we are going.

You know that I do not accept this. That I am the only force that stands against them.

Perhaps you know that I consider mutiny.

Have you heard my name, again and again? I am sure that is what has happened. You know that I am the most powerful person here who is hankering for something, who is angry, who wishes things were not as they are.

You know that I can be bought.

What is it you propose, hakenmann?

There are actions none but you could perform that might tip a balance. That might create new circumstances. Change forces, force changes. Create facts.

Perhaps this journey, this idiot pilgrimage, might be halted.

Oh yes, if you did that. If you could stop our progress.

Only you can help me, you tell me in your intricate ways. Only you can stop this mad journey. What then is up to me?

Even I, perhaps, could not fight my way through the gangs and gangs of guards who patrol their engines, their rockmilk spurs. I do not know what must be done. But there is another way—something else, some force—to bring us to a slow, and stop. You can halt the beast.

If you could do that.

And in return? (See? you tell me, strange pride flashing like scales, you know all about this barter by which we live.)

In return? I will help you find that hidden one who has run from you.

Perhaps you do not know what it is to laugh. Certainly you do not know why I laugh so hard so long.

You cannot know.

Whom I have held and bloodied. What I have seen him wield. You cannot know that loyal to Armada and without alternative I have put aside my anger at the Lovers and let them take him, shamed as I was, implicated in the carnage he brought us. He is no ordinary thief, this war criminal, and they hold him in limbo till we can sentence him right. When our lunatic journey ceases.

You have come just a little late.

Not too late, however. What’s done is not too late to undo.

I know where they hold him.

You cannot know that what you offer me would any other time make me kill you. You cannot know that tonight is different, that I am tired of the dangerous idiocy into which my city is being led. That if mutiny is needed to turn us back, then I will do what I must to bring it about.

This is not an ordinary time, deepling. You come to me in a time of war.

You need a blind? A decoy while you search? Something to attract attention?

I have just the thing.

Hush. Let me tell you how it will be. What you will do, what I will do. I will help you find him, and this is what you will do for me. And I will tell you where your quarry is.

Now shall we plan?

Don’t stop.

We must finish this. See, there? We have the minutes we need to finish this.

The sky is not yet light.

Part Seven:

The Lookout

Chapter Forty-one

While Armada moved north through dull air—temperate fronts so still that the weather seemed to be waiting for something—and while that expectancy communicated itself to the citizens, Bellis lay in sticky fever.

There were two days when she did not think at all. She burned up in temperatures severe enough to worry her nurses as she shied away from delirious visions, frightened into screaming fits she would never remember. The avanc pulled with its steady gait, not fast but faster by far than the city had ever traveled before. The shapes of waves changed with the currents.

(Tanner Sack is hardier than Bellis. He is released into the care of Shekel, who is crying for worry of him, who grabs him and hugs him with a bawl of relieved misery to see Tanner’s broken shuffle. Tanner shrieks as Shekel’s hands grip his lacerated back, and their two voices mingle before Shekel leads Tanner on to where Angevine is waiting.

“What they do to you?” Shekel moans repeatedly. “Why?” And Tanner shushes him and stutters that there were reasons, and that they’ll not talk about it, that it’s over now.

These are momentous days. There are great decisions taken. There are mass meetings to discuss the war and the city’s history, and the avanc and the weather and the future.

Bellis knows nothing of any of this.)

Days later, Bellis Coldwine sat up, her fever almost gone. She ate and drank for herself, spilling a great deal from her violently shaking fingers. When she moved, she bit down against the pain. She did not know that all the guards in the corridor were very used to her screams.

She roused herself the day after that, moving as slow and tentative as someone terribly aged. She half tied up her hair and draped a long, shapeless shirt over herself.

Her door was not locked. She was not a prisoner anymore. She had not been for a week.

There were guards in the corridor, in that deep prison wing of the Grand Easterly, and she called one over to her and tried to meet his eye.

“I will go home now,” she said, and felt like crying when she heard her own voice.

To Bellis’ shock, it was Uther Doul who helped her home.

The Chromolith was only two ships port of the Grand Easterly, but Doul took her by aircab. She sat away from him in the gondola, horrified to feel her fear of him—which had disappeared over the months, replaced by other emotions—returning. He studied her without visible pity.

He had not sentenced her, of course. But every time her mind returned to that extended, bloody, murderous, torturous hour a week previously, with cut-up images of pain, her own screaming, she saw Uther as what he was, an agent of Armada, the power that had done this to her. The man who wielded the whip had been irrelevant.

When she entered her rooms, Doul followed her, carrying her possessions. She ignored him. Moving carefully, she found a mirror.

It was as if the violence that had been done to her back had spread and ravaged her face. She looked drained of blood. The lines and crow’s-feet that had been slowly marking her for more than ten years had become like gashes, like the wounds cut into the faces of the Lovers. Bellis fingered her cheeks and eyes in horror.

One of her teeth was cracked open, and pieces came away as she pulled at it. That was where she had bit down on the wooden gag they had given her.

She moved, and the cloth shifted against the scabs on her torn-up back, and she hissed in pain.

Doul stood behind her, his presence like an imperfection in the glass. She wanted him to leave, but she could not bear to address him. Bellis hobbled around her room on fever-weak legs. She could feel the gauze sticking to her back, where her injuries had wept.

The pain in her back was unpleasant and constant, but it did not vary much. Bellis treated it like white noise, ignoring it until it became a kind of aching nothing to her. She stood on her doorstep and looked all around her, at the airships and birds, the light wind mindlessly knocking Armada’s walls. There was industry, men and women working furiously, as there had been on the first day, when she had drawn the curtains of Chromolith Smokestacks and seen her new city.

Something was new, she realized slowly. The air was different, the way the city rode the currents . . . the sea itself. The ships surrounding Armada no longer meandered on their own routes from horizon to horizon: the mass of vessels (still marked by war) were in tight formation behind the city, as if afraid of losing it.

There was something different about the sea.

She turned to stare at Doul.

“You’re free,” he said, not without gentleness, “and superfluous. Krüach Aum hasn’t needed you for a long time. You’ll need to heal. For the city’s sake, any information about your accidental role in the war has been suppressed. I’m sure the library would take you back . . .”

“What’s happened?” said Bellis in the plaintive croak her beating and sickness had left her. “Something’s different about . . . everything. What’s happened?”

“Two days ago,” said Doul, “insofar as one can be exact, we passed through something. Everyone can feel it. The fleet . . .” He pointed at the vessels behind the city. “They’re having a difficult time. There are strange currents. Their engines are untrustworthy.

“We’ve passed out of the Swollen Ocean,” he said, and gazed at her impassively. “We’re in the outskirts of a new sea. This . . .” The quick thrust of his arm took in the water, horizon to horizon. “This is the Empty, the Hidden Ocean.”

So far from home, thought Bellis, surprising herself with fury. Further and further they’re taking us, me, further and further. They get their way. She heard a ringing inside her like tinnitus. Everything we’ve done—right and wrong—means nothing. They took us here so easily, to this fucked-up empty edge of sea no ship can cross. In we go, and my home is gone.

Even the thought of the Lovers appalled her: their crooning lovesounds; their sick, endless, sharp-edged betrothals. She was in their power. This was where they wanted to go. Bellis had tried to turn them, and failed.

“They got us here, then?” she said to Uther, cold and suddenly unafraid of him again. She jutted her chin. “And I know what happens now—on toward the Scar.”

If he was surprised, he hid it well. He met her eyes, quite expressionless.

So Fennec was too slow with his pamphlets and rumors, she thought. That doesn’t mean it’s over; that doesn’t mean we have to accept this.

When Shekel opened his door to Bellis, he stared at her for a long and silent moment, wildly confused.

He recognized her, but was suddenly convinced that he was wrong. It seemed that this blanched lady with her dark hair all dry and tumbling over her like old grass, her expression suggesting years of pain, could not be Coldwine, must be some ruined vagrant with a similar face.

“Shekel,” she said in a voice that he could not believe was hers, “you have to let me in. I need to speak to Tanner Sack.”

Mute and appalled, he moved aside for her, and she wheezed and entered the shadow.

Tanner Sack turned in his bed, muttering in thick tongues, his eyes rheumy, then bolted up, shedding sheets. He pointed at Bellis.

“Get her the fuck away, Shekel,” he shouted. “Get her the fuck out of here . . .”

“Listen to me!” Bellis said, her voice urgent and guttural. “Please . . .”

“I got fuck-all to hear from you, bitch!” Tanner was shaking with fury. Behind Bellis was the puttering of a motor as Angevine trundled toward them.

“You have to hear me,” Bellis growled, trying to shout. “You have friends, man; you can spread the word . . .” She broke off and twisted with pain as Angevine put a hand on her back. “Do you know where we’re going?” she managed to say. “Do you know why we’re in this sea, where nothing moves like it should?”

She saw Tanner look to Shekel and then to Angevine, and watched them share a look of blank bewilderment.

“Listen,” Bellis shouted as Angevine pushed her out of the door to a final chorus of Tanner’s cursing.

By the time she had walked slowly across the city’s bridges to the library, blood had come through Bellis’ bandages, and her shirt was spotted. She found the bombed quarter of the Pinchermarn, where the librarians were recovering what volumes they could from the wreckage.

“Bellis!” Carrianne was stunned by her.

Bellis was slightly delirious again. “Now you have to listen to me,” she murmured.

And they were outside again, and Carrianne’s arm was around her, protective. Bellis’ back was dreadfully painful, and she was wincing as she said to Carrianne, “Johannes. Tearfly. Carrianne, you have to help me find Johannes Tearfly . . .”

Carrianne nodded. “I know, Bellis,” she said. “You just told me.”

They were in a room Bellis did not recognize, then another, so tired now that she felt faint. And Carrianne and Bellis were hanging over the city in the dark air, Armada’s lights going out with complex timing. Bellis heard her own voice several times, though it sounded very strange to her.

She felt an ecstatic cold pain, and looked up and was on her own bed, in her chimneytop rooms, and it came to her—more like a leap of imagination than a memory—that Carrianne had lifted the bandage from her back and was smearing unguent on her. Bellis closed her eyes. She could hear something—some soft, repetitive sound.

“Gods. Gods. Gods. Gods.”

It was Carrianne’s voice. Bellis turned her head to one side and through blurred eyes saw her friend’s face over her, staring down, wincing, biting her lip as she rubbed in the cream.

What’s wrong? Bellis tried to say, for a second thinking her friend had been hurt; but then she realized, of course, what was wrong, and could not help whimpering a little for herself.

The next time she opened her eyes, Carrianne and Johannes were both there, drinking her tea, talking awkwardly as they sat by her bed.

It was night. Bellis’ head had cleared.

Johannes started when he saw her move.

“Bellis, Bellis,” said Carrianne gently. “Gods’ sake, girl . . . what did you do?”

Carrianne was horrified. Bellis was deeply grateful for her ministrations, but she would not explain her wounds.

“She doesn’t want to talk to us about it,” Johannes said nervously. He seemed genuinely concerned, but uneasy. “I mean, you can see . . . she’s been on the wrong side of . . . She’s probably lucky to even be here.”

“Godsdammit, Bellis,” Carrianne said, furious. “Who gives a fuck about them.” The wave of her arm took in authority. “Tell us, what did they do you for?”

Bellis could not help smiling. He’s right, though, she thought, lifting her bleary eyes to Johannes. Pusillanimous coward that he is, and magnificent and brave and loyal to me (gods know why) as you are, Carrianne, he’s right about this. You should stay out of this. Like it or not, I’ll help you do that. I owe you.

“You found him then?” she managed to say.

“Carrianne’s been amazingly assiduous,” Johannes said. “She got a message to me.”

Bellis straightened a little in her bed and set her face against the movement of her broken skin.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, her voice getting stronger. She shook her head slowly. “I’ve been . . . The last week . . . I’ve been alone. And, and everything’s been changing around us. You must have seen it. But I know what it is; I know what’s going on.”

She closed her eyes and was silent for many seconds.

“You know where we are?” she said finally. “You know what waters we’ve entered?”

Carrianne and Johannes looked at each other, then back at her.

“The Hidden Ocean,” said Carrianne, her voice guarded. Bellis managed to give a little smile.

“That’s right,” she said. Damn you all, she thought. I don’t need that treacherous fucker Fennec. I will make this happen myself. “And do you know where we’re heading?” She paused again, and in the silence, Johannes spoke.

“The Scar,” he said, and Bellis’ words withered in her throat. She stared at him, saw him watch her with concern and confusion and look to Carrianne, who nodded.

“The . . . Scar,” Bellis heard herself say, all hesitant and stupid. Not a revelation but an absurd echo.

They had broken her. They had won. There was nothing left in her, nothing at all.

When Johannes left, Bellis and Carrianne sat up late, talking. Carrianne told her everything.

What a week, Bellis kept thinking with absurd understatement. What a week to miss.

The Lovers had announced it.

It could not be kept from the pilots and captains and nauscopists of Armada that the water and the air were changing. There was no disguising the sudden crosscurrents, the hidden streams that ran below the surface, counter to the waves. Compasses had begun to veer maniacally, losing north for minutes at a time. The winds were utterly unpredictable. The horizon’s distance varied. Armada’s fleet had begun to struggle.

The avanc, of course, was quite unconcerned by these forces. It plowed its undeviating course far below, with the city in its wake.

There had been a plethora of rumors, but there were enough experienced, well-read sailors in the city that the truth was impossible to hide. The avanc, directed by the Garwater pilots, was pulling Armada into the Hidden Ocean. About which, it seemed, all the stories were true.

And then, four days previously, on Flesh Quarto’s sixth Khandi, the Lovers had held a series of mass meetings across Garwater and its allied ridings.

“He’s a fucking fine speaker, the Lover,” Carrianne said. “I heard him in Booktown. ‘When I came here I was nothing,’ he said, ‘and I began to make me, and that was finished by my Lover, who made me and made herself and made this city,’ his voice all trembling. ‘And haven’t we brought Armada power?’ And people loved it. Because, you know, he has. These have been good years, great harvests and booty. And the Sorghum—you weren’t here for that, were you? You weren’t here when they took that.” Carrianne smiled and shook her head appreciatively.

“He’s made us a power, there’s no denying it. And then the fucking avanc . . .”

“I thought you were loyal to Dry Fall,” said Bellis, and Carrianne nodded hard.

“So I am, but I’m saying that here . . . I think the Brucolac may be . . . wrong about their plans. I mean . . . it does all fit into place.”

There is a source of power, the Lover had told the crowds, on the edge of the world. An awesome place: a rip through which great waves of puissance pounded reality. One man in Armada has the proof, said the Lover, and knows how to tap that power. But for many years it could not be reached.

There is a beast, the Lover had told them: a stunning kind of thing, an animal that breaches into Bas-Lag and slips away again from time to time. And Armada had called to it certain famous men who could learn how to trap that animal.

The woman who made me, the Lover had thundered, pointing to the Lover, realized that the second fact meant the first could be acted on.

On the far side of the Hidden Ocean, the Lover had said, is the source of that power. But no ship has crossed the Hidden Ocean, they say. Friends—he had spread his arms with triumph, as Carrianne imitated to Bellis—the avanc is no ship.

And so, Bellis realized, the Lover had admitted the truth that he and his had kept from the city for years, the plans that they had already had in place when they employed Tintinnabulum, snatched the Sorghum, traveled to the anophelii island, raised the avanc. He had admitted the truth of those plans, and had done so in such a way that he was not stoned for his manipulation and lies, but was buoyed up by applause.

We can cross the Hidden Ocean, he had shouted to cheers. We can tap the Scar.

“That was when we learnt its name,” Carrianne said.

“But it’s so uncertain,” said Bellis, and Carrianne nodded.

“Of course.”

“The ships, the fleet . . .”

Carrianne nodded again. “Some are already tethered to the city. And when the others can’t follow us, that’s alright. Our ships have always sailed alone for months at a time, and they always find their way back to us. Those following us now know what’s happening, and those that are away, well, this is nothing new. The city’s always had its own movements. We’re not going to disappear in the Hidden Ocean, Bellis. We’re not here to stay . . . We’re here to find the Scar, and then leave again.”

“But what the fuck kind of place is this?” said Bellis thinly. “We’ve no idea what’s here, what kind of powers, what creatures, what enemies . . .”

Carrianne frowned and shook her head. “That’s all true,” she said. “I understand.” She shrugged. “You’re against the idea. Alright, you’re not alone. There’s a vessel leaving in two days, I think, heading back to the Swollen Ocean, crewed by naysayers, to wait for the city’s return. Though . . .” Her voice petered away. They both realized that Bellis was not one of those who would ever be allowed off-city. “Most of us,” continued Carrianne, “think this is worth doing.”

“Not at all,” Carrianne said quietly, a little later. “I trust the Brucolac, and I’m sure he has reasons for opposing the plans. But I think he’s wrong. I’m excited, Bellis,” she said. “Why shouldn’t we try this? This could be . . . this could be the most exciting time, the finest hour in our history. We have to try.”

Bellis felt something that at first she did not recognize. Not depression or misery or cynicism, but despair. The feeling of all plans, all options, dying.

I’ve lost, she thought, without melodrama or even anger.

Carrianne was not a brainwashed fool, someone unthinking and buffeted by rhetoric. She had heard the arguments—even partial and partisan as they had undoubtedly been. She must have realized that this venture had been a long time in the planning, and that therefore she and those around her had been deceived.

And still, considering all that, she had decided that the Lovers’ plan was a good one. One that was worthwhile.

That was a sneaky trick, thought Bellis to the Lovers. That was below the belt. I didn’t foresee this.

Lies, schemes, manipulations, bribery, violence, corruption—I expected all that, she thought. But I never expected you simply to have the argument, and to win.

The thought of Fench’s stillborn pamphlet fleeted through her mind, and she moved her shoulders in a dead kind of laugh. THE TRUTH! she imagined. GARWATER DRAGS ARMADA TO THE SCAR!

The truth.

You win, she thought, and let go of hope. I’ll be here till I die. I’ll grow old here, a crabby old lady imprisoned on a boat, and I’ll scratch the scars on my back (dear gods they will be wicked) and mutter and complain. Or perhaps I’ll die with the rest of you, and with you my rulers, in some stupid, terrible accident of the Hidden Ocean.

Either way, I’m yours, if I like it or not. You’ve won.

You are taking me with you. You are taking me to the Scar.

Chapter Forty-two

Where for the longest time there had been a shadow, the sky was clear.

The Arrogance was gone.

A rope stub lay on the deck where the airship had been tethered to the Grand Easterly. It had been severed, and the aerostat had flown free.

“Hedrigall,” Bellis heard from all around her. She stood amid the crowd that had gathered, gaping at the hole in the skyscape. The yeomanry had made brief attempts to keep onlookers back, but had given up in the face of their numbers.

Bellis could move more freely now. She still recoiled at pressure on her back, but there was no more bleeding. Some of the smaller scabs were beginning to peel at the edges. She shifted slightly at the edge of the crowds.

“Hedrigall—and he was alone.” Everyone was saying it.

As Armada slipped farther into the Hidden Ocean, its vessels had more and more difficulty keeping up with it. They trailed behind it like anxious ducklings, and several tethered to the edges of the city switched off their motors and were borne on by the avanc.

The second day after Bellis’ shocking, revelatory discussion with Carrianne, the remaining ships and submersibles in Armada’s orbit had turned back. They could no longer fight the Hidden Ocean. They gathered into a nervous convoy, tacking with the fractious winds, then steamed back to the south. They stayed together for protection, and to drag each other on, back to the Swollen Ocean, with its safer, comprehensible waters, where they would wait.

The city would return for them, within a month, or two at most.

And after that? If Armada had not returned? Well, they were to consider themselves free. That dispensation was given like an afterthought, and its implications were not discussed.

From her window, Bellis had watched the retreat of Armada’s vessels. Others were left behind, now chained like limpets to the city’s flank, or in the Basilio and Urchinspine harbors. They eddied apprehensively, surrounded by the vessels making up wharfs and quays, but they were trapped. They had waited too long to sail away, and they could only bob pointlessly, tied up as if loading or unloading, and wait.

Armadans had never seen their city without its nimbus of ships. They had crowded to the city’s margins to gaze out at the sea. The emptiness had subdued them. But even those acres of vacant water were not so disturbing as the missing airship.

No one had seen anything; no one had heard a sound. The Arrogance had crept away in secret. To Garwater it was a stunning loss.

How was it possible? people asked. The dirigible itself was crippled, and Hedrigall was known to be absolutely loyal.

“He had doubts,” Tanner told Shekel and Angevine. “He told me. He was loyal, ain’t no doubt, but he never thought this avanc business was best for the city. I suppose the Scar thing was even worse, but he weren’t winning any arguments.”

Tanner was horrified by Hedrigall’s flight. It wounded him. But he talked his thoughts out loud, trying hard to see things as his enigmatic friend had seen them. Must’ve felt trapped, Tanner thought. All the years he lived here, to suddenly see the place doing things in a new way. He don’t belong in Dreer Samher no more, and if he thought that he didn’t belong here neither . . . what must that’ve done?

He imagined Hedrigall fixing the Arrogance’s broken motors in some of the spare hours he spent aboard it on his own. Everyone knew that Hedrigall was a loner who spent a deal more time in the Arrogance than he needed to. Had he untwisted the girders in the Arrogance’s fins? Tested the pistons that had not moved for decades?

How long you been planning this, Hedrigall? thought Tanner Sack.

Couldn’t he have had an argument? Did he feel so strongly? Did he feel that there was no point even fighting for his home? Did he doubt that that’s what it was any longer?

Where you now, man?

Tanner imagined that big ungainly aerostat heading south, Hedrigall alone at its wheel.

I bet he’s crying.

It was suicide of sorts. Hedrigall couldn’t have amassed enough fuel to reach land, not anywhere. If he reached Armada’s waiting fleet, they’d want to know what had happened and why he’d left the city, so he’d avoid them.

The winds would take him over the empty sea. The gasbags were very strong; they might keep him buoyant for years. How much food did you store, man? Tanner wondered.

An image came to his mind, of the Arrogance adrift for years, four or five hundred feet above the water, with Hedrigall’s corpse rotting slowly in the captain’s cabin. A windblown sepulchre.

Or maybe he could stay alive. Maybe he would unroll a great, absurdly long fishing line from the Arrogance’s bay doors. Tanner imagined it cascading through the air like a spring unwinding, till its baited hook reached the water. By choice the cactacae were vegetarians, but they could survive on fish or flesh if they had to.

There Hedrigall could sit, on the edge of the hatch, his legs swinging like a child’s, reeling in fish. Rubbery bodies flapping on the journey up, air-drowned and long dead when they reached him. He could live for years, blown around the world. Slipping into the roundstream winds that circled the Swollen Ocean, growing old and obstreperous on his unchanging diet, his skin wrinkling and his thorns turning grey. Alone, going mad. Talking to the portraits and heliotypes on the Arrogance’s walls.

Till one day some chance might push him out of that great belt of wind, and his craft might eddy out into free air and be carried south or north or gods knew where, until one day, maybe, he might come into sight of land.

Drifting over mountains. Throwing down the anchor, snagging a tree and descending. Touching the ground again.

Is it such a bad fucking plan, Hedrigall, to search for the Scar?

Hedrigall was a traitor, Tanner supposed. He’d done a bunk; he’d stolen Armada’s crow’s nest and lied to his rulers and friends. He’d been too cowardly to have the argument. He was a renegade, and Tanner knew that as a loyal Garwater man, he should condemn him. But he could not.

Good luck, mate, he thought after some moments, hesitantly raising his hand and nodding. I can’t not wish you luck.

Garwater’s champions felt Hedrigall’s absence like a rebuke.

He was known to have been loyal, and he left in the wake of his passing more disturbed discussion, more uncertainty and condemnation of the Lovers’ project than had so far existed.

Miles below the sea, the avanc continued its journey. It had slowed only a little on entering the new waters.

Tanner Sack swam and bathed his ravaged back in the sea. There were few divers below and few swimmers above, in these days. They had been scared away, terrified that they might be swept away on some unforeseeable current, borne off to some deadpool in the Hidden Ocean.

Tanner found nothing wrong. He and the menfish and Bastard John flitted from place to place, around and between those enormous chains angling down. They swam quickly, careful not to let the city leave them behind, but there seemed to be no new hazards in the water. The chaos inhered at a larger scale—for the great intruders like ships and submersibles. Even the seawyrms had not been able to continue pulling their now misbehaving chariot ships, and they had swum back with the fleet, back out of the Empty Ocean.

It was peaceful now, with fewer people and fewer things to distract Tanner. Much of Armada’s activity had ceased.

Of course the farmers still cared for their crops and flocks, above water and below, and harvested them when they could. There were still a thousand little jobs of repair and maintenance. The internal workings of the city continued, as they had to: bakers, moneylenders, cooks, and apothecaries put out their signs and took in money. But Armada was a city that had looked outward, to piracy and trade. The industries around the docks, the loading and unloading and counting and refitting and outfitting, were all in stasis now.

So Tanner did not dive daily to work on cracks or breaks or faults or anything like that. He swam for himself, and for his back, and felt the salt bring his skin back to life.

“Come in, Shek,” he said.

He was aware of the tension that was spreading through Armada, the uncertainty, as if Hedrigall had spilled a poison behind him as he left. Tanner wanted to offer Shekel a place where it could dissipate.

There were reasons for people’s growing fears. Tanner had heard strange rumors. Three times now he had heard that some man or woman, some yeoman or Garwater engineer, had disappeared, their house and things left untouched (food half-eaten, in one story). Some said they, too, had fled, and others claimed that these were the depradations of spirits from the Hidden Ocean.

When he was in the water, Tanner’s sense that things were wrong, dangerous, or uncertain dissipated with the currents. He offered Shekel the same respite. He persuaded the boy to swim with him. The pools between Armada’s vessels were almost empty now. Shekel was excited to be one of those brave enough to go in. The great flitches of the ships moved above and around them sedately: they would not be left behind. Shekel struggled with his aggressive, ugly paddle, and Tanner tried to show him better strokes and realized that he did not know any suitable for those who had to breathe air.

Shekel slipped heavy goggles over his eyes and plunged his head below for as long as their imperfect seal kept out the water. He and Tanner would stare at the shoals of fishes, species they had never seen. Colored and finned intricately, as intense and bizarre as tropical species, here in these more temperate waters. Like scorpion and ratfish, their forms were broken with spindly appendages, and eyes that glowed with unlikely colors.

When Shekel and Tanner hauled themselves out again, Angevine would be waiting, with maybe a bottle of beer or liquor. And even if Tanner and Angevine still spoke to each other a little warily, and realized that they always would, what they shared in Shekel, and the way they had learned to share it, gave them a respectful connection.

It’s kind of a family, Tanner thought.

It was not hard for Bellis to find Uther Doul again. She had only to wait on the deck of the Grand Easterly, knowing he would appear eventually. She was stiff with resentment and incensed by her own hurt. She could not believe how he had dropped her.

As she approached he stared at her, but not with the disgust that she feared. Not with hostility, or with interest, or any kind of connection or recognition. He simply stared.

She drew herself up. She had tied back her hair again, and she knew that the look of stunned pain was ebbing gradually from her face. She still moved stiffly, but nearly two weeks since her flogging she had regained much of herself.

Bellis did not greet Doul. “I want to see Fennec” was all she said.

Doul thought for a second, then inclined his head. “Alright,” he said.

And although this was what she wanted, Bellis hated him for that, because she knew that he allowed it because there was nothing she could do or say to Fennec that could now come in Armada’s way at all. Now that she was not any kind of threat, now that all her cards had been played.

Bellis was quite meaningless now, so she could be indulged.

His magus fin had been taken from him, but it was clear that Garwater was still afraid of Silas Fennec. The corridor along which he was imprisoned was thick with guards. All the doors could be sealed tight: it was below the waterline.

A man and woman sat outside Fennec’s door, fussing over some arcane machine. Bellis felt the dry charge of thaumaturgy against her skin.

Inside, it was a large room, broken by a few portholes through which dark eddies could be seen. Half of the room was sectioned off by iron bars, and beyond them, in a little alcove, hunkered away from the windows and the entrance, Silas Fennec sat on a wooden bench, watching her.

Bellis took in the sight of him. She was caught in a quick kaleidoscope of images of him (their times together, friendly, cold, sexual, surreptitious). Her mouth twisted to see him, and she tasted something very sour.

He was thin, and his clothes were dirty. He met her eyes. She realized, with a sudden shock, that there was a bandage wrapped tight around his right wrist and that his right hand was gone. He saw her notice his injury, and his face twisted before he could control it.

Fennec sighed and stared straight at Bellis.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. He spoke with a drab hostility.

Bellis did not answer. She examined his cell. She saw a heap of unkempt clothes, paper, charcoal, his fat notebook. She studied the bars that kept him from her. They were wrapped around with cables that coiled away and under the door into the room. Fennec watched her trace them back to their source.

“Linked up to those machines out there,” he said to her. He sounded tired. “It’s a dampener. Sniff the air. You can even hear it. Kills the thaumaturgons. No one could do the slightest little hex in here now.” He sniffed and smiled without humor. “It’s in case I’ve got some secret plan. I’ve told them I can only do about three little charms, and none of them would get me out of here anyway but . . . Guess what? They don’t believe me.”

Bellis glimpsed weird flesh under his shirt. It looked necrotic, speckled with amphibian markings. It pulsed, and Fennec pulled his shirt closed.

Her eyes widening, Bellis turned her back on him and paced.

“Don’t,” Fennec said to her suddenly. He sounded almost kind.

“What the fuck do you mean?” she said, and was pleased to hear her voice was cold.

He looked at her with an infuriating, knowing look.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t come here; don’t ask me; don’t do this. What are you here for, Bellis? You’re not here to rail at me—that’s not your style. You’re not going to crow. They caught me; so what? They fucking caught you, too. How’s the back?”

That so stunned her that for a moment she could not breathe. She blinked rapidly, bringing him back into focus. He watched her without any particular cruelty or maliciousness in his face.

“You’re not going to learn anything from me, Bellis,” he said, his voice unchanging. “You’re not going to get anything out of this. This won’t be catharsis, and you won’t feel better when you leave. Yes, do you understand? Yes, I lied to you; I used you. And a lot of other people. I did it without thinking twice. I’d do it again. I wanted to go home. If you’d been there and it was easy, I’d have taken you with me, but if you weren’t, I wouldn’t. Bellis . . .” He leaned forward on his bench and rubbed his wrist stump. “Bellis, you have nothing to confront me with.” He shook his head slowly, utterly unabashed by her.

She was shaking with hatred. He had been right not to tell her the truth about what he was doing. She would never have helped him then, even desperate as she was to get home.

“There’s nothing special about you, Bellis: you were one of many. I treated you no differently from anyone else. I thought of you no more and no less. The only difference between you and any of the others is that you’re here now. And you think there’s some point to you being here. That you had to . . . what? Have it out?” Silas Fennec, procurator for New Crobuzon, shook his head, pitying.

“There is no it, Bellis,” he said. “Go away.” He lay down and gazed at the ceiling. “Go away. I wanted to get home, and you were useful. You know what I did, and you know why. There’s no mystery, no resolution to be had.

“Go away.”

Bellis stayed a few seconds longer, but managed to leave before speaking again. She had said only six words. She felt her stomach churn with a strong feeling to which she could not put a name.

They won’t kill him, she thought bleakly. They won’t even punish him. He’s not even been flogged. He’s too valuable, too scary. They think he can teach them things, that they can get information out of him. Maybe they can.

As she left, she could not help realizing that Fennec was right about at least one thing.

She felt no better at all.

Bellis was surprised to discover Johannes remaining in her life. There had been a time when he had seemed disgusted with her, not concerned ever to see her again.

She still found him spineless. Even when her own loyalty to New Crobuzon was such an odd, unsystematic thing, she could not help thinking of Johannes as a kind of turncoat. The speed of his accommodation with Armada disgusted her.

But now there was something plaintive in him. His rediscovered eagerness to be her friend was a little pathetic. And though Bellis spent what time she could with Carrianne, whose irreverence and affection were genuine pleasures, and though Carrianne did not much like Johannes, there were times when Bellis let him stay a while. She felt pity for him.

With the avanc caught, trapped, and tethered, and with Tintinnabulum’s crew gone, Johannes’ job was done. Now, after all Johannes’ work, Krüach Aum was working with the Lovers’ thaumaturges and Uther Doul, ushered into the new inner circle to discover the secrets of possibility mining. Johannes had realized, Bellis supposed, that there were very many years ahead of him as a captive in the city.

Johannes still worked with a group overseeing the avanc: plotting its speed, estimating the biomass in the area, and the thaumaturgic flows. But it was make-work half the time. When drunk, he would whine about how he had been used up and dispensed with. Bellis and Carrianne would sneer at him behind his drink-fuddled back.

Johannes voiced cautious uncertainties about their trajectory, about their presence in the Hidden Ocean. To find any sign of dissonance, of opposition to the Lovers’ journey, warmed Bellis with surprise. That was part of why she tolerated Johannes’ presence.

He was too cowardly to admit it, but he wished they would turn back, as Bellis did. And as the days passed and Armada slipped further and further into uncharted waters, into the Hidden Ocean, Bellis discovered (with stabs of unexpected hope) that she and Johannes were not alone.

Hedrigall’s desertion was a trauma that did not heal.

Armada moved on into seas that did not obey laws that any oceanologer understood. It could have seemed an adventure or some god-granted destiny to a citizenry still grimly fired up by triumph in war and by the rhetoric of Garwater’s greatest-ever leaders. But then loyal, reliable Hedrigall had run, and that gave a terrible coloration to the city’s journey.

The Arrogance had quickly been replaced. Now another airship hung over the Grand Easterly, watching the horizons. But it was not so large or quite so high. It did not have the Arrogance’s range of vision, and the metaphors thrown off from that fact troubled men and women otherwise loyal.

“What did he see coming?” they muttered. “Hedrigall, what did he see coming?”

The city’s motion was its own dynamic. There were no strong voices arguing to turn back. Even those other rulers who disapproved of the Lovers’ plans had given in, or only spoke their criticisms in camera. But Hedrigall’s dissident ghost stalked the ridings, and the triumph, the excitement with which the journey had started, was gone.

Tanner and Shekel gave new names to the creatures they saw below the water: runrunners and dancing flies and yellowheads.

They watched Armada’s naturalists drifting over the curious new animals, snatching a few in nets, keeping their distance from the big, snub-faced yellowheads, heliotyping them with unwieldy waterproof cameras and phosphoric flares.

Schools of the animals gusted through the pipes and hulls that jutted below like roots. They mixed with more recognizable fish—there were whiting and baitfish even in the Hidden Ocean—eating them or being eaten.

Tanner dived and teased a couple of hand-sized specimens with his tentacles. At the surface, Shekel looked down on Tanner’s scars.

Further and further into that sea.

There were strange sounds at night: the rutting calls of unseen animals with voices like bulls. Some days there was no swimming at all, not by the hardiest or most inquisitive diver, and even the menfish hid themselves in their little city-bottom caverns. These were dangerous waters. Armada passed through the unpredictable edges of boiltides, by the hunting grounds of piasa, living whirlpools that circled the city hungrily but kept their distance.

In moonless dark, lights pulsed below the waters, like the bioluminescence of benthic things magnified many hundreds of times. There were times when the clouds above the sea moved much faster than the wind. One day when the air was dry as elyctricity, shapes appeared off the city’s star’d edge, like tiny islands. They were rafts of unknown weed, great clots of mutant bladderwrack that moved suddenly away from the city under some motive power of their own.

Across the whole of Armada, in every riding, in tumbledown slums and the most elegant townhouses, there was a tension, a neurotic expectancy. People did not sleep well. Bellis blenched when that began, remembering the misery of the nightmares that had racked New Crobuzon and that ultimately had led her here. From one set of ruined nights to another, she thought after several miserable, insomniac hours.

During some of those dark times, Bellis walked to the Grand Easterly to watch the city’s journey through mysterious, faintly moving seas. She would stare out at the remorseless miles of water until, cowed by the scale of it, she fled into the corridors of the great ship, moved by a compulsion she did not understand.

She would wind through its warren of empty passages, into the forgotten zone of the steamer, to the little cubbyhole that Doul had shown her. And there she would perch, uncomfortable and disturbed, eavesdropping on the fucking and the bedroom talk of the Lovers.

It was a habit that revolted her, but she could not shake off the sly sense of power it gave her. My little rebellion, my little escape—someone’s listening, and you don’t know, she would think, and hear the Lovers mutter wetly to each other and grapple with an abandon that still appalled her.

They never gave her any revelations. They never spoke of anything important. They only rolled and lay together, and murmured their fetishistic connection. The Lover sounded more and more febrile with every night, her voice growing harder, and the Lover debased himself to her, eager to dissolve into her.

I do not want to be here, Bellis thought, fervently and repeatedly. She spoke it aloud, finally, to Carrianne one night, knowing that her friend would not agree.

“I do not want to be here.” Bellis swilled the wine in her glass. “Now there’s nightmares, and what comes next are fugues. I’ve seen it before. And we can’t be heading anywhere that’s any good—and what can happen then? Either we die . . . or the Lovers get control of the most . . . terrible, terrible power. Would you really trust them, Carrianne?” she demanded drunkenly. “That cut-up fuck and his psychopath woman? You’d trust them with power like that? I do not want to be here.”

“I know, Bellis,” Carrianne said, searching for words. “But I want to see what’s out there. I think this is something amazing, you understand? Whether or not the Lovers get hold of . . . whatever’s there. And no, I don’t really trust them. I’m Dry Fall, remember? But I’ll tell you what . . . Since Hedrigall did a runner, I think there’s a lot of people who are starting to agree with you.”

And Bellis nodded in sudden surprise, and raised her glass in a toast. Carrianne responded sardonically.

She’s right, thought Bellis suddenly. Godsdammit, she’s fucking right. Something’s changing.

The avanc began to slow.

Perhaps ten days after Armada entered the Hidden Ocean, people began to notice.

At first it was Bastard John, the menfish and the cray, Tanner Sack and the other few upsiders who still swam. It was growing easier for them to keep up with the city. At the end of a few hours’ immersion, skittering below the city’s barnacle-scaled underside, their muscles burned less than they would have expected. They were not traveling so far, so fast.

It was not long before the air-breathing citizens noticed. Without land, in cryptic seas, it was not so easy to chart the distances the city was traveling. But there were methods.

Something was happening to the mile-long creature hidden in the deep. Something had changed. The avanc was slowing down.

At first it was hoped that it was a temporary change, that the avanc’s pace would increase again. But the days went on, and still the beast slowed.

With delight and triumph, Johannes found himself suddenly back in favor. His old team was reassembled by the Lovers, to make sense of what was happening.

Bellis was surprised to discover that he still talked to her and Carrianne about his work, now that he had been brought back into the inner circle.

“There can’t be anyone in the city who hasn’t noticed,” he told them one night, exhausted and mystified. “The Lovers are waiting for us to solve it.” He shook his head. “Even Aum can’t fathom it. The rockmilk engine’s still controlling it; the avanc’s still traveling . . . It’s just slowing.”

“Something in the Hidden Ocean?” suggested Bellis.

Johannes bit his lip. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “What in Bas-Lag can fuck with an avanc?”

“It must be sickening,” said Carrianne, and Johannes nodded.

“I think it must be,” he agreed slowly. “Krüach’s confident that we can fix whatever’s wrong. But I’m not sure we know enough to cure it.”

The air above the Hidden Ocean was desiccated and suddenly hot. The city’s crops became brittle.

All the ridings withdrew into themselves, and the ridiculous semblance of normality that Armada had recently affected began to break down. There was little work done. The pirate-citizens waited, motionless in their homes beneath a punitive sky. The city was bleached and vague. Marooned. Lolling like a lifeboat, almost immobile.

Its wake grew daily more faint as the avanc slowed.

A slow-burning panic began to spread. Meetings were called. For the first time, they were not organized by the rulers, but by popular committees operating across the ridings. And if at first they were made up almost totally of men and women from Curhouse and Dry Fall, the minorities from Jhour and Booktown and Garwater grew each day. They discussed what was happening, urgently, seeking answers no one was able to give them.

A nightmare image was recurring in people’s heads: Armada, adrift, without motive power, in the barren waters of the Hidden Ocean. Or tethered by the motionless avanc, an anchor of unimaginable weight.

The city’s speed was still decreasing.

(Much later, Bellis realized that the day when the avanc’s condition became shockingly clear, the day that so many people died, was in Crobuzoner terms the first of Melluary—a Fishday. That fact made her cough with a desolate approximation of laughter, when she realized it later when the killing was over.)

It was midmorning when the impurities appeared in the sea.

At first, those who saw them thought they were more aggregates of the semisentient weed, but it became quickly obvious that they were something else. They were lighter, and lower in the water—sprawling patches of color, liquescent at the edges.

The blemishes appeared miles off, in the city’s path. As they came gradually closer, word spread, and crowds gathered in Shaddler’s Sculpture Garden, at Armada’s fore, to watch whatever it was approach.

It was a mass of some viscous liquid, thick as dense mud. Where waves reached its outer edges they reduced to ugly ripples that crawled weakly across the surface of the substance and were swallowed up.

The stuff was the pallid yellow-white of a caveworm.

Bellis swallowed, feeling sick with anxiety, and then realized very suddenly as the wind shifted that it was not anxiety at all. It was the stench.

A rolling mass of smell oozed over them. The citizens blenched and puked. Bellis and Carrianne staggered and stared at each other, paling, managing not to spew even amid a chorus of retching. The wobbling white mass stank of the worst, most septic rot, air-starved flesh gone putrid.

“Jabber preserve us!” gasped Bellis. Above her head Armada’s carrion birds wheeled, coiling excitedly like some living cloud toward the rank stuff, then arcing suddenly away as they grew close, as if its degree of corruption defied even them.

The city reached the outer edges of the reeking substance. There were great swathes of it ahead, a bobbing purulent mass.

Most of those who had gathered to watch had run back to their houses to burn incense. Bellis and Carrianne remained, watching Johannes and his colleagues at the edge of the park. With perfume-soaked rags around their faces, Garwater’s investigators leaned over the rail, trolling a bucket on a rope into the substance. They hauled it up and began to examine it.

Then recoiled from it, violently.

When Johannes saw Bellis and Carrianne, he ran over to them and tore off his mask. He was white and trembling, his skin reflective with sweat.

“It’s pus,” he said, and pointed to the sea with an unsteady finger. “It’s a slick of pus.”

Chapter Forty-three

The avanc is sick.

Trying to continue its mindless motion at the rockmilk engine’s command, it slows and slows. It is—what? Bleeding, wounded? Fevered? Chafed sore by the alien reality around it? Too mute or stupid or obedient to feel or show its pain, the avanc’s lesions are not healing. They are shedding their dead matter in suppurating clots that eddy free and drift up like oil, expanding as the crushing pressure lessens, enveloping and suffocating fish and weed, until what breaks the waves with a mucal slurp is a noisome coagulate of infection and smothered sea-life.

Somewhere between two and three thousand miles into the Hidden Ocean, the avanc is sick.

A few miles clear of the repulsive pus-flats, the avanc came to a stop.

Desperately, signals from the rockmilk engine were increased, sent down repeatedly, but there was no response. The avanc was absolutely still.

It hovered, static, unable or unwilling to move, miles down.

And when everything that the avanc’s protectors and doctors knew how to do had been done, and nothing had happened; when all the different wavelengths had been tried to entice the great creature back into motion, and it had not responded; there was only one option left. The city could not be allowed to molder motionless.

The avanc was sick, and none of the scholars knew why. They would have to examine it, from close quarters.

Garwater’s bathyscaphos swung like an unwieldy pendulum from a crane on the Hoddling, a factory ship at the Grand Easterly’s bow. The submersible was a stubby sphere, broken by pipes and rivets, random extrusions in reinforced iron. Its engine bulged at its rear like a bustle. Handspan-thick glass fronted its four portholes and chymical lamp.

Engineers and work crews were hurriedly checking and refitting the deep-water vessel.

The crew of the bathyscaphos Ctenophore were preparing on the Hoddling’s deck, pulling on overalls and checking the books and treatises they had with them. A scabmettler pilot, Chion, her face puckered by the remnants of ritual cuts; Krüach Aum (and Bellis, watching, shook her head to see him, her erstwhile pupil, his tight sphincter-mouth dilating with agitation); and at the front, looking excited, proud, and terrified in equal parts, Johannes Tearfly.

He had no choice but to go—he more than anyone but Krüach Aum understood the avanc, and it was imperative that the creature be tended as expertly as possible. Bellis knew that Johannes would have gone even without the Lovers’ coercion.

“We’re going down,” he had explained to Bellis earlier, staring at her with the same expression he wore now, while he kitted up on the Hoddling’s deck. “We’re going to take a look. We have to cure it.” And if he looked aghast, he looked no less excited.

As a scientist, he was fascinated. She saw fear in him, but no foreboding. Bellis remembered him describing the scar he carried, where he was once gored by a sardula. He could be utterly craven, but his cowardice was only social. She had never seen him flinch from the dangers his research entailed. He did not balk now at this appalling commission.

“Well,” Bellis had said, carefully. “I’ll see you in a few hours, I suppose.” And Johannes was so excited that her measured voice, the careful neutrality of her tone, which undermined the meaning of her words and stressed the danger he was in, passed him by. He nodded naïvely and gripped her shoulder, an awkward gesture, then left.

The preparation took a long time. There was not much of a crowd around the city’s aft edge to watch them and see them off. The strained air of the city kept people away—it was not that they did not care, but they felt without energy, as if they were sucked dry.

Johannes glanced up toward the few onlookers and waved. Then he climbed into the cabin of the Ctenophore.

Bellis watched the hatch being screwed down tight on the cramped vessel. She watched the bathyscaphos being tugged up above the water, lurching sickeningly, and she remembered that same motion from when she had been lowered into Salkrikaltor City. A huge wheel on the Hoddling, reeling out reinforced rubberized cable, began to revolve as the deepwater submersible descended.

It touched the waters of the Hidden Ocean with a muted splash and sank below without pause. It would take at least three hours for the bathyscaphos to reach the avanc. Bellis watched the ripples from the disappearing submersible till she felt someone behind her and turned to face Uther Doul.

She set her mouth and waited. He studied her calmly and did not speak for several seconds.

“You’re worried for your friend,” he said. “The Grand Easterly is out of bounds during this emergency, but if you’d like, you can wait there for him to return.”

He took her to a small room at the rear of the Grand Easterly, whose porthole looked out over the Hoddling, which was suspending the submersible. Doul left her without a word, closing the door behind him. But he had taken her to a room more comfortable and better furnished than her own quarters and, five minutes after she arrived, one of the Garwater stewards brought her tea, unbidden.

Bellis sipped it as she watched the water. She was bewildered and untrusting. She did not understand why Doul was indulging her.

At first it was merely warm in the tiny spherical cabin of the Ctenophore, with three breathing bodies pushed together. They crushed each other uncomfortably, negotiating around each other’s arms and legs to peer through the little portholes.

The light fell away with astonishing speed, and Johannes checked this waning visibility with nervous fascination. They descended by one of the great chains that tethered the avanc, slipping past one massive link after another, psoriatic with shellfish and generations of weed. Placid fish with eyes like cows’ investigated their light, peering in at the intruders on their way down, spiraling the tubes that fed them air, shying away from the bubbles their vessel exhaled.

As the light in the sea declined, the chain became baleful. Its black shafts plumbed almost vertically, plaiting one into the other in patterns that seemed suddenly obscure and sinister, the links suggestive as hieroglyphs.

At the edge of absolute darkness, the sea seemed absolutely still, uncut by the Hidden Ocean’s predatory currents. The crew did not speak. The cabin was now quite black. There were chymical lights and lanterns aboard, but they could not risk exhausting them during their descent—it was at the bottom that they must be able to see. So they sat, pressed together, in the most profound darkness any of them had ever experienced.

There was only the wheeze of breath and a faint percussion as they moved their cramped limbs and knocked them against metal or each other. The whisper of pumped air. The engine was not running—gravity took the vessel down.

Johannes listened to his own breath, and that of those around him, and realized that they were unconsciously synchronizing. Which meant that after every exhalation there was a pause, a moment when he could pretend for a fraction of a second that he was alone.

They were far beyond the sun’s reach now. They warmed the sea. Heat leached through from the boilers into the cabin, through the vessel’s metal skin into water that ate it hungrily.

Time could not survive this unbroken dark heat and monotonous susurrus of air and creaking leather and shifting skin. It was broken and bled. Its moments did not segue into each other, but were stillborn. I am out of time, Johannes thought.

For a shocking instant he felt claustrophobia like bile, but he held himself still and closed his eyes (uncomforted by the darkness he found there, no more or less profound than that he had shut out), swallowed, and defeated it. Stretching out his hand, Johannes found the glass of the porthole, and was shocked by its cold, condensation-wet surface—the water outside was like ice.

After uncountable minutes, the darkness outside was momentarily broken, and the crew gasped as time returned to them like an elyctric shock. Some living lamp was passing them by, some tentacular thing that inverted its body with a peristaltic wave, enveloping itself in its luminescent innards and shooting away, its austere glimmer snuffed out.

Chion ignited the lamp at the bathyscaphos’s front. It stuttered on, its phosphorous glow casting a cone of light. They could see its edges as clearly as if they were marble. There was nothing visible in the lamp’s field except a soup of minute detritus, particles that seemed to eddy upward as the Ctenophore plunged. There was nothing to see: no ocean floor, no life, nothing. That crushing emptiness they had illuminated depressed them more profoundly than the darkness. They descended unlit.

The iron carapace began to creak under the pressure. Every ten or twelve seconds there would be another sudden shuddering creak, as if the pressure increased in sudden, discrete zones.

The percussive stroke became stronger the lower they went, until suddenly Johannes realized that it was not just their own craft, not just the metal around them that shook, but the sea—the whole sea, the tons of water to all sides—vibrating, spasming with sympathetic shock, in echoes of the thunderous strokes rising from below.

The avanc’s heart.

When miles of wire had been played out by the huge wheel on the Hoddling, a safety catch snapped into place and halted their plunge. The Ctenophore jerked, buffeted by the arterial booming around them. The avanc’s heart felt solid through the metal.

Chion lit a lantern. The three bathynauts stared at each other’s sweat-moist, sepia faces. They looked grotesque, drowned in shadows. With every heartbeat that made the bathyscaphos tremble, a tic of fear and awe passed over every one of them. Darkness flickered around the close cabin, over its gauges and dials.

Chion began to work at the levers, pushing cards into the analytical engine by her side. There was a heart-stopping moment when nothing happened, and then the sphere began to shudder with the sound of its engines.

“It should be a couple of hundred yards below us,” said Chion. “We’ll take it slowly.”

With a puttering groan, the Ctenophore curved down, pulling toward the avanc.

The lamp flared into life again. The cold beam speared into the unceasing marine light. Johannes studied the water, its suspension of particles, and saw it judder with the avanc’s heart. His mouth was thick with saliva at the thought of the millions of tons of water eager to crush them.

Something became sensible below them, like a ghost. Johannes was chilled. They descended toward a great flat zone of lighter darkness—a ruptured, pebbled field that insinuated itself into visibility. At first utterly faint, it grew in solidity, its random, rugged contours sliding into sight in the phosphor beam. Slimed and rocky, it stretched out on all sides, broken by stains, lichen growths of the deepest sea. It harbored deepwater animal life. Johannes saw the faint flickerings of blind, eel-like hagfish; squat echurians; thick, blanched trilobites.

“We’re in the wrong place,” said Chion thickly. “We’re coming down above the ocean floor.” But as she spoke the last word her voice broke and became a trembled whisper as she realized her mistake. Johannes nodded with a kind of triumph and awe, like a man in the presence of his god.

The avanc’s heart beat again, and a huge ridge cracked the vista, reconfiguring it suddenly, rising twenty feet high, sending dust and muck particles spinning. The thick crest burst up across the surface of the gnarled plain, scoring as far as Ctenophore’s lamp could pierce, and branching, splitting into two or three, tracing pathways across the plateau.

It was a vein.

Filling with blood, pulsing, protruding, and sinking slowly back again.

The submersible was perfectly positioned. They were above the avanc’s back.

Even Krüach Aum, emotionless as he was, seemed stunned. They hunkered together and muttered for comfort.

The landscape below them was all beast.

The Ctenophore cruised slowly, twenty-five feet above the avanc’s surface, over a valley between two veins. Johannes gazed down through the dense water. He was mesmerized by the creature’s colors. He would have expected an anemic white, but the thing’s mottled hide contained striations in hundreds of shades, coiled in whorls as distinct as fingerprints: pebbled grey, reds, ocher.

In places the avanc’s skin was broken by jags that looked like rock or horn—whiskers reaching up around the Ctenophore like ossified trees. Chion steered the submersible carefully between them.

They passed over orifices. Puckered impurities in the avanc’s flesh that would suddenly and randomly dilate, open gaping pits, smooth-edged, pulsing tunnels into the interior of the carcass, lined with alveoli bigger than men.

The Ctenophore drifted like dust over the skin.

“What in the gods’ names are we doing?” Johannes whispered.

Krüach Aum was sketching rapidly, making notes, as Johannes stared at what he had helped conjure.

“We don’t have more than a couple of hours’ light,” said Chion anxiously.

The submersible edged up, over a little copse of those steeple-sized hairs, and descended again between two extrusions—maybe the ends of gills, or scars, or fins. The skinscape heaved and rippled with subcutaneous motion. Its contours were slowly changing, the plain sloping away and down.

“We’re coming to its flank,” said Johannes.

Quite suddenly the corium below them was precipitous, a callused dermal cliff into dense darkness. Johannes heard his breath come shaky as the avanc fell away and the Ctenophore descended by its side. Light played over strata of cells and parasitic life that were suddenly sheer beside them, an organic precipice.

The geography of their patient humbled them.

Wrinkles began to appear, scores of great rucks like the edges of tectonic plates, where the avanc’s skin rode over itself in slablike folds, curving to what might be a haunch, a paddle, or a tail.

“I think . . .” said Johannes, pointing for the others. “I think we’re coming to a limb.”

The water spasmed and was still, again and again. The corrugations of skin grew tighter. Here, with every beat of the avanc’s heart, great networks of the huge veins appeared, as intricate as shattered glass, tracing muscles like mountains. Crabs scuttled out of the light, into their burrows in the avanc’s skin.

There were impurities in the water. The lamp caught on a billow of opaque liquid like ink.

“What’s that?” whispered Johannes, and Krüach Aum wrote something down for him.

Blood.

The heart beat again, and the water was full of the dark stuff. It dissipated quickly, folding in all directions. The lamplight broke through the blood’s tentacles and glinted on something beyond: a hard, regular surface.

The bathynauts gasped. It was the massive iron edge of Armada’s harness. Crusted with the remains of limpets long-killed by pressure, and the rude life native to these deeps. One corner, one clasp, folding around the avanc’s body.

“Gods,” whispered Chion, “maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s just the buckles, the bridles—maybe they’ve been rasping it sore.”

The Ctenophore bobbed through currents of displaced blood, back over the avanc’s body. The blood welled up from behind hills in its hide.

“Look there!” shouted Johannes suddenly. “There!”

Twenty feet below them, the avanc’s skin was raw and seeping. It was like an excavation: a wide, ragged trench at least thirty feet deep and many yards long, curling into the darkness. Its inner walls were a crumbling mess of shattered cells fouled with the residue of that oily pus. Even as they watched, clots of the semiliquid broke away and began to rise, strings of matter stretching and snapping behind them.

In the deepest part of the gash, at its base, the phosphor illuminated a wet flesh-red.

“Jabber and fuck,” hissed Johannes. “No wonder it’s been slowed.”

Krüach Aum was scribbling madly, and he held up his paper to the lantern light. Is nothing, Johannes read. Think of avanc size. Must be more.

“Look,” hissed Chion. “The edges of that cut . . . they don’t meet the bridle. It’s not the metal that’s caused this.” There was a silence at that. “We’re missing something.”

The avanc’s lacerated epidermis rose to either side of them as they descended into the trench.

Like explorers in some lost river, they traced the wound toward its source.

The V of split flesh disappeared in sharp perspective before them, but was swallowed by darkness long before any vanishing point. With every heartbeat, a wash of blood welled up around them, blinding them for seconds till it evanesced.

There were small motions below them, and on either side, as scavengers ate at the exposed meat.

The submersible moved slowly in the shadows of this meat ravine. And everyone in the little bubble of metal and air thought and did not say, What did this?

They turned as the split turned, as hard corners of ruined skin reared before them. The Ctenophore swiveled in the water.

“Did you see something move?”

Chion’s face was white.

“There! There! Did you? Did you see it?”

Silence. The stroke of blood. Silence.

Johannes tried to see what Chion saw.

The gulch is widening. They are at the edge of a deep pit. Its base is blood and pus. It stretches out, a hollow scores of yards across. This is the avanc’s wound.

Something moves. Johannes sees it and cries out, and the others answer him.

There is motion in the blood below them.

“Oh dear gods,” he whispers, and his voice dies and becomes a thought. Oh gods. Something inevitable and very bad is unfolding.

The Ctenophore rocks, to more screams. Something buffets it.

A part of Johannes’ mind is frozen, and he thinks, We must find it and cure it, find what’s wrong and cure it, cut out what’s bad, cure it, but on top of that, and smothering it, a shock of fear descends as they enter the pit, the heart of the malady.

(It’s been in me since the waves closed over my head.)

The rotten blood below them is pulsing with strange tides. The submersible shudders again as something heavy hits it, unseen. Chion begins to keen.

Moving his head slowly, through time suddenly congealed, Johannes watches the scabmettler’s hands, as sluggish and clumsy as stumps, grappling with the controls, hauling backward, tugging to pull the vessel away; but it is hit again, and it eddies unsteadily.

Johannes hears himself shrieking with Chion to get out get out.

Something outside is knocking at the Ctenophore’s hatch.

Johannes cries out, staring aghast at the blood-plain below.

A dark harvest, a thicket of black flowers, has burst from it in the oscillating glare of the lamp, blossoms that thrust upward toward that cold false sun on thick stems, muscled and veined, that are not stems but arms, those are not flowers but hands; claws, crooked, and arms spread wide and predatory, and now chests and heads and bodies rise, shoved up from below the slick of blood where they have been gnawing and spitting venom.

Like spirits rising from graveyard earth, bodies are ascending, dissipating the blood with their tails, staring up at the newcomers with colossal eyes into which Johannes gazes with awe and horror. Their faces are fixed in unwitting grins that mock him, flesh scraps fluttering free from teeth bigger than his fingers.

They swim with the grace of eels toward the vessel, which rolls under their weight, which is borne down by their outstretched hands, whose portholes sway and face suddenly up, tipping the three within into each other, where they lie screaming, staring up and screaming in the dying lantern light at the faces at their windows, the scrabbling hands.

Johannes feels his mouth stretched wide, but he can hear nothing. His arms smash against the bodies of his crew, and they beat him in terrified turn, and he feels nothing.

The light pours up from the Ctenophore and is eaten by the abyss. Johannes watches the creatures press down on the portholes, and a rage of thoughts arc through him. These are the sickness, he keeps thinking hysterically. These are the sickness.

The sickness crowd around the submersible. They burst the phosphor lamp, which douses in a rush of bubbles, and now all that illuminates their distended faces is the faint yellow from the lantern within.

Johannes is staring up through the cabin into a pair of eyes outside, four miles below the sea. For a tiny fraction of a second he sees, absolutely vividly and clearly, how he must appear to those eyes, his own face bloodied from the tumbling and stark with lines and lantern light, his frozen, stricken expression.

He watches as the battered portholes vein. He watches the cracks crawl like busy things over and around each other, tracing pathways, riddling the glass until it creaks and the submersible shakes. He crawls backward from the ruined window, as if another handful of inches might save him.

As the Ctenophore stutters in its last moments, as the blood-smeared creatures and the sea outside eddy with hungry expectation, the lantern winks out, and in the middle of the heat and chaos and the three voices, three bodies fumbling together, Johannes is absolutely alone.

Chapter Forty-four

The sun was gone, but the water was still warm. It was very still. Below its surface the constellation of cray lightglobes picked out Armada’s underside.

Tanner and Shekel swam between the Hoddling and the Dober, the ossified whale, in a runnel of water forty feet wide. They were cosseted from the city’s sounds, only the debris of which floated down to their heads, bobbing on the surface like seals’.

“We’ll not go too close,” warned Tanner. “It could be dangerous. We’re staying on this side of the ship.”

Shekel wanted to dive the few feet he dared, and see through his goggles the line running down to the bathyscaphos. Tanner’s descriptions of the avanc’s chains had always held him transfixed, but they were invisible to him except as faint dark shapes even if he held his courage and swam below the lowest ships in the city. He wanted to see such a cord stretching from the air into the darkness. He wanted to be faced by the scale of it.

“I doubt you’ll see it,” warned Tanner, watching the boy’s enthusiastic, inefficient strokes. “But we’ll see how close we can get, alright?”

The sea lapped at Tanner. He unstretched in it, unrolled his extra limbs. He dived below into the rapidly darkening water and felt himself framed by the cool cray lights.

Tanner breathed water and swam a few feet below Shekel, watching his progress. He thought he could feel something vibrating in the water. He had grown sensitive to the sea’s little shudders. Must be the cable, he thought, still letting the sub down. That’s what it must be.

Three hundred feet from them, the bulky girdered legs of the Sorghum rose from the water. The sun had set behind the rig, and the plaited metal of its struts and derricks were dark stitches in the sky.

“We’ll not get too close,” warned Tanner again, but Shekel was not listening.

“Look!” he crowed, and pointed for Tanner, losing his momentum and sinking momentarily, coming up laughing, pointing again toward the far end of the Hoddling. They could see the thick wire, taut and rigid, descending into the water.

“Keep away, Shek,” warned Tanner. “No closer now.”

The cable penetrated the water like a needle.

“Shekel.” Tanner spoke decisively, and the boy turned, spluttering. “That’s enough. Let’s see what we can see while there’s still a bit of light.”

Tanner reached Shekel and sank below him, staring up as the boy pulled the goggles over his eyes, took a lungful of air, and kicked down, holding Tanner’s hand.

The outlines of the city rose, ominous like storm clouds. Tanner was counting down in his head, allowing Shekel twenty seconds of stored air. Tanner peered through the Hidden Ocean’s dusk, still watching for the shaft of the cable.

When he veered up and hauled the boy into the air, Shekel was smiling.

“It’s fucking brilliant, Tanner,” he said, and coughed, swallowing seawater. “Do it again!”

Tanner took him deeper. Seconds moved slowly, and Shekel showed no discomfort.

They were ten feet below, by the crusted slope of the Hoddling. Some shank of moonlight splashed down, and Shekel pointed. Forty, fifty feet away, the submersible’s cable was momentarily clear.

Tanner nodded, but turned his head to the blackness con-gealed below the factory ship. He had heard a sound.

Time to rise, he thought, and turned back to Shekel. He touched Shekel and pointed up, reaching out with his hands. Shekel grinned, parting his lips and showing his teeth, even as air slipped from his mouth.

There was a sudden spurting rush of water, and something sinuate and very quick punched in and out of Tanner’s vision. It was gone and there and gone like a fish flashing in to feed. Tanner blinked, stunned. Shekel still stared at him, his face collapsing into perturbation. The boy frowned and opened his mouth as if to speak, and in a great belching roar released all his air.

Tanner spasmed with shock and reached out, and saw that something followed the racing bubbles from Shekel’s mouth, billowing up darkly. For a moment Tanner thought it was vomit, but it was blood.

Still staring with an expression of confusion, Shekel began to sink. Tanner grappled with him, hauling him up with his tentacles, kicking out for the surface, his mind filled up with a shattering sound. And blood smoked up ferociously not only from Shekel’s mouth but from the massive wound on his back.

It seemed so far to the surface.

There was only one word in Tanner’s mind. No no no no no no no no no no no no.

He shrieked it without sound, his suckered polyp arms gripping Shekel’s skin, pulling him fitfully toward the air, and indistinct shapes gusted around Tanner, in and out of shadows, baleful and predatory as barracuda, jackknifing and twisting away, there and gone, moving with an effortless piscine ease that made him feel clumsy and heavy, fumbling with his boy, fleeing the sea. He was an intruder, disturbed and making an escape, cowed by real sea-things. His reconfigured body was suddenly a terrible joke, and he cried and floundered with his burden, struggling in water suddenly quite alien to him.

When he broke the surface he was screaming. Shekel’s face came up in front of him, twitching, leaking brine and gore from his mouth, emitting little sounds.

“Help me!” screamed Tanner Sack, “Help me!” But no one could hear, and he clamped his ridiculous suckered limbs to the side of the Hoddling and tried to drag himself from the water.

“Help me!”

“Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!”

For hours, the laborers on the Hoddling’s deck had tended the great steam pumps that sent air to the Ctenophore, and prepared themselves to haul it back. One by one they had slipped into a kind of torpor. They had noticed nothing at all until the cactus-woman greasing the safety wire began to bellow.

“Something’s fucking wrong!” she yelled, and they came running, panicked by her voice.

They watched the wire, their hearts slamming. The great wheel—almost empty now, its harness almost all played out—was shaking violently, juddering against the deck, trembling the screws that held it down. The cable began to shriek, tearing its way past the guard-piece.

“Bring them up,” someone shouted, and the crews ran to the massive winch. There was a snap and the noise of slipping gears. The pistons punched into each other like boxers. The engine’s cogs bit down and tried to turn, but the cable fought them. It was taut as a treble string.

“Get them out get them out,” someone screamed uselessly, and then with a hideous cracking sound the huge winch rocked backward violently on its stand. The engine smoked and steamed and whined childishly as its guts began to spin freely. Its complex of ratchets and flywheels blurred, revolving so fast they were as dim as apparitions.

“It’s free!” the cactus-woman reported to a hysterical cheer. “It’s coming up.”

But the bathyscaphos was never designed to rise that fast.

The wheel accelerated in ridiculous haste, hauling up the cable at dizzying speed. The gears gave off the dry stink of burning metal and grew red-hot as they whirred.

It had taken three hours to send the Ctenophore to the bottom. The disk of rewound cable increased so quickly they could watch it grow, and they knew it would be no more than minutes before it was all pulled back.

“It’s coming up too fast! Get away!”

A mist of brine boiled where the thigh-thick cable was torn from the sea. It scored through the water. Where it met the Hoddling’s side, it wore a deep groove in the metal, howling in a monsoon of sparks.

Engineers and stevedores scrambled to get away from the machinery, which struggled with its remaining bolts like a terrified man.

Tanner Sack hauled himself onto the Hoddling’s deck, dragging Shekel’s wet, cooling shape behind him.

“Help me!” he screamed again, but still no one heard a word.

(At the edge of Dry Fall, the Brucolac was leaned over the edge of the Uroc, watching the water intently. A domed, toothed head rose before him, framed by ripples, nodded once, and disappeared. The Brucolac turned to his cadre, on the deck behind him.

“It’s time,” he said.)

With a vaulting plume of water, the end of the cable burst from the sea and arced over the spinning winch, heavy metal cordage whipping toward the deck, its end splayed jagged where the submersible had been pulled free.

The Hoddling’s workers watched, aghast.

The frayed end of the wire slammed into the deck with a cataclysmic sound, leaving a long stripe of shattered wood and metal shavings, and the winch kept turning. The end of wire lashed around and under it and flogged the ship again and again.

“Turn it off!” the foreman screamed, but no one could hear him over the punishment, and no one could get close. The motor kept the great wheel spinning, flagellating the Hoddling, until the boiler exploded.

When it did, and showered the factory ship with molten detritus, there was a moment of still and shock. And then the Hoddling lurched again, from more fire and explosions within.

Alarms were sounding across the city.

Yeomanry and armed cactacae from Garwater and Jhour were taking up positions on the vessels around the Hoddling, which glowed and boomed as the great bonfire on its deck spread. Its crews raced, frantic, away from it, over the rope bridges and into the city. The Hoddling was a huge ship, and there was a steady stream of men and women surging up out of its guts, through the smoke and away from its ruins.

Etched in black against the flames, a figure could be seen shambling slowly in a vague path toward a bridge, bent under a burden that lolled and dripped. His mouth was open wide, but what he said could not be heard.

“Do you all know what to do?” whispered the Brucolac, tersely. “Then go.”

Moving too fast for the eye easily to follow, a swarm of figures spread out from the Uroc.

They raced like apes, swinging with easy speed over roofs and rigging, their passage soundless. The unclear garrison fractured into smaller forces.

“Bask and Curhouse won’t help, but they won’t hinder, either,” the Brucolac had told them. “Dynich is young and nervous—he’ll wait and go where the wind blows. Shaddler’s the only other riding with which we have to concern ourselves. And there’s a quick way of taking them out of the equation.”

A small group of the vampir made their uncanny way toward Shaddler, toward the Therianthropus and Barrow Hall, toward the general’s court. The main force loped and leaped aft, stretching their limbs, febrile and excited, heading for Garwater.

Behind them, walking briskly but without any attempt to rush or hide, came the Brucolac.

There was something on the Hoddling. The men and women who escaped and collapsed on the surrounding vessels gasped for breath and shrieked warnings.

Something had burst through the ship’s hull, somewhere in its lowest quarters, and scored a tunnel up through the metal. As the engine had spun and lashed the deck with the stub of the Ctenophore’s cable, things had emerged from the hidden decks, attacking those on the bridge and in the boilers and engine rooms, tearing the ship apart.

Things that were hard to describe—there were reports of chattering teeth like razored slabs, vast corpsy eyes.

The deck of the Grand Easterly was almost empty, only crossed occasionally by some running servant or bureaucrat. The yeomanry guarded its entrance points, where the bridges rose to it from below—they could not allow such chaos to spread to the flagship. The crowds gathered as close as they could get to the violence, on roofs and balconies, towerblocks, thronging the vessels that surrounded the Hoddling. They surged forward like waves. Aerostats came near the gusting updraft from the fire.

Forgotten in her room at the Grand Easterly’s rear, Bellis watched in horror as the crisis took shape.

Johannes is gone, she thought, staring at the shattered ruins of the winch engine.

He was gone—and she had no words for the weird, muted shock and loss she felt.

She looked down on the trawlers that abutted the Hoddling. Their decks thronged with injured, terrified men and women being dragged to safety from the flames.

On one of them, Bellis saw Uther Doul. He shouted, moving sparely, his eyes darting ceaselessly.

The fire on the Hoddling was abating, though the Armadans had not put it out.

Bellis gripped the windowsill. She could see shadows moving through the windows of the factory ship. She could see things within.

Armed pirates were arriving from all over the city. They took up positions, checking their weaponry and massing by the bridges leading to the Hoddling.

Something streaked from the factory ship’s smoke-fouled bridge: a jet of disturbance that buckled the air as it lanced out. It struck the wooden mast of a schooner just beyond the Hoddling.

Agitated particles coiled around the mast and soaked into it, and then Bellis let out an astonished sound. The mast was melting as if it were wax, the great pillar of wood bending like a snake, its substance oozing over itself as it spat and drooled downward, spitting in and out of existence, leaving an effervescence in the air—a blistered reality through which Bellis caught glimpses of a void. Folds of denaturing wood slid like toxic sludge over the crowded deck.

Uther Doul was pointing with his sword, directing a group of cactacae to bring their rivebows to bear on the Hoddling’s windows, when a chorus of cries rose away from the factory ship, out of Bellis’ sight. She saw the men and women below shift their attention, watched an expression of horror and astonishment pass through them like a virus.

Something was approaching from the city’s fore, bearing down on the assembled pirates—something Bellis could not yet see. She saw the armed groups splinter, some turning to face the new threat with terror scrawled all over them. Bellis ran from the room, heading up to the deck to see.

The Grand Easterly was all confusion. The bridges were still guarded by nervous patrols, unclear on their orders, desperately watching the storm of arrows and cannonfire that assaulted the Hoddling. Pirates were leaving the Grand Easterly, running to join their comrades.

Bellis ran to the edge of the deck, past the bridge, hiding in the darkness beside its raised quarters. She was at the level of Armada’s roofs. She tried to make out what was happening in the city.

Firepower was beating down on the Hoddling, and on whatever it contained. The hidden enemy sent out more of their bizarre and murderous thaumaturgic strikes, like fireworks, dissolving the substance of the surrounding vessels and the attacking Armadans. But beyond the nearby vessels, Bellis could see an indistinct second front spreading into the city. She could see undisciplined, chaotic attacks, could hear the irregular staccato of gunfire.

The new attackers grew closer to the tight tangle of boats below her, where most of Garwater’s yeomanry had been waiting to retake the Hoddling. She could see, suddenly, who had launched the second assault, from within the city. The Garwater forces were suddenly hemmed in and stormed by Dry Fall’s vampir.

Bellis peered around, her hand held tight to her mouth, breathing hard. She did not understand what she was seeing—some collapse of trust, some revenge? Mutiny, at the Brucolac’s hand.

She could not keep the vampir in her eyes. They moved like nightmares. Congregating and atomizing and re-forming, moving with feral speed.

They would swing down with terrifying grace in some cul-de-sac where only five or six or seven armed fighters at a time could attack them, and would dispatch the defenders with appalling ferocity, punching horn-hard nails through throats, savaging with their predatory teeth until their chins were sopped with blood, salivating and growling with bloodlust. And then they were gone, bounding over the collapsing bodies and onto some other concrete block or bridge or gun tower or ruin. Rustling like lizards they would disappear from sight.

Bellis could not tell how many there were. Wherever she looked, there seemed to be fighting, but she could only ever see Garwater’s troops clearly.

Uther Doul, she realized, had turned his attention to the vampir. She saw him shoving people out of his way and sprinting back onto the Grand Easterly’s deck, to stare down onto the zones of battle. He spun and screamed orders, directed reinforcements toward the various combats. Then he hurled himself toward the rear of an ancient war trimaran by the Grand Easterly’s side, lumpen with brick housing, where through a thicket of ragged washing Bellis glimpsed a brutal melee.

It was only two hundred feet from her, and she could still see Doul. She could watch him sliding down the steeply angled bridge, thumbing on the Possible Sword, which shimmered and became a thousand ghost-swords as he ran. She watched him disappear behind a billowing sheet, as if it had swallowed him up. The sheet gusted and cracked with the wind, and beyond it there were a series of sudden noises.

The stark white linen was streaked from behind with red.

It fluttered twice, as if wounded, and then was torn down as a staggering body collapsed into it and gripped it in death, staining it bloodier and twisting it into a makeshift shroud, revealing the scene behind. Doul stood among a mass of wounded, who were cheering and kicking the swaddled vampir corpse.

Their triumph was brief. Thaumaturgic energy spat like hot fat across from the Hoddling, and the wood and metal around the men and women began to buckle and ooze. Uther Doul pointed with his red-dripping sword, sending the exhausted fighters running from the boat.

The vampir they left behind was not the only one to fall. Bellis could not see much of the fighting—her view was interrupted by cobbled streets and building sites and cranes and avenues of stumpy trees. But she thought she could see, here and there, other vampir succumbing. They were terrifyingly fast and strong, and they left a trail of punctured bodies, bleeding and dead, but they were vastly outnumbered.

They used the architecture and the shadows as their allies, but they could not avoid every one of the deluge of bullets and sword strokes that followed them. And though those wounds might not kill them as they would an ordinary woman or man, they hurt and slowed them down. And inevitably there were places where a gang of terrified pirates closed in on one of the buckling, snarling figures and hacked the head from its shoulders, or savaged it so remorselessly that they destroyed its bones and innards beyond even the preternatural vampir capacity for self-repair.

Alone, the vampir might eventually have been contained, but too many of Garwater’s fighters were engaged with the unseen enemy on the Hoddling.

Small, low boats had been launched, forty-footers with cannons and fire-throwers on their decks. They raced across the little bay toward the factory ship, to cover it from its open sides, to surround it.

But in the water around the Hoddling, shapes were rising.

The sea was illuminated by the glow from the fires and the firepower, and through a few feet of brine Bellis could make out the outlines of the things below: bloated bodies wobbling like sacks of rotten meat; malignant little pig eyes; degenerate fin stubs. Splitting them wide open, mouths mounted with irregular footlong teeth of translucent cartilage.

They breached fleetingly. What in Jabber’s name are they? thought Bellis, dizzily. How can the Brucolac control those? What’s he done? The men who approached them fired volleys of missiles at them, and the things disappeared again.

But when the little boats came close and the men within leaned out to take aim again, there was a quick organic twitching and they were in the sea, in stunned shock, and with an inrush of water and a quick glare of teeth, they were taken down.

Armada was tearing itself apart. Bellis heard gunshots and saw a flickering of flames where Dry Fall met Garwater. A human mob was approaching, and there were running fights between them and the Garwater sailors. It was not now the city against the vampir alone—as news of the rebellion spread, those who opposed the Lovers’ plans had come out to fight. Hotchi slammed their spines against men; cactacae hurled their great bulks against each other in ugly combat.

There was no structure to the fighting. The city was burning. Dirigibles moved overhead in ungainly panic. Above it all towered the Grand Easterly. Its dark iron was still silent and empty, still deserted.

Bellis became sluggishly aware that this was bizarre. She stared at the trireme below her. The rope bridge that had linked it to the Grand Easterly had been severed, and so, she realized, had the one beyond it.

Bellis flattened herself carefully against the wall, inched forward, and peered out of the darkest shadows onto the main deck. She saw three dim figures moving with vampir speed, hacking at the chains and knots that attached the bridges to the ship. They split one and sent it swinging into the sea, its far end slapping the flank of the vessel to which it was attached, and then they flitted to the next and began again.

Bellis’s stomach lurched. The vampir were cutting her off, confining her on the ship with them. She pressed against the wall and could not move, as if a film of ice held her.

On an old trawler, below mildewing eaves, Uther Doul put his blade through a man’s face. He turned away from the split, screaming thing he had made and raised his voice over the sounds of violence.

“Where,” he bellowed, “is the fucking Brucolac?”

And as he spoke, he was facing the Grand Easterly. He paused for a second at his own words and looked up at the steamer’s rail, toward its invisible deck and its miles of corridors, where he had left the Lovers in emergency session with their scientific advisors, and his eyes widened.

“Godsdammit!” he shouted, and began to run.

Bellis could hear a voice.

It came from very close to her, just around the corner from where she stood frozen, by the doors to the raised section. She held her breath, her heart quite cold with fear.

“Do you understand?” she heard. The voice spoke tersely, hoarse and guttural. The Brucolac. “He’ll be somewhere in that section—I don’t know exactly where, but I’ve no doubt that you can find him.”

“We understand.” Bellis closed her eyes at that awful second voice. It sounded as if the whispered words were chance echoes in parting slime. “We will find him,” it continued, “and take back what was stolen, and then we will leave, and the avanc will move freely again.”

“Well, I’ll be quick then,” the Brucolac said. “There’s two people I still have to kill.”

Footsteps receded. Bellis risked opening her eyes and moving her head a tiny way, and she saw the Brucolac stalking calmly and at speed toward the raised section of superstructure below which were the Grand Easterly’s meeting rooms.

Bellis heard the door open, and quick wet sounds brushing the threshold as the intruders entered.

Understanding and amazement hit her so hard she reeled. She knew in a sudden gust of insight what those newcomers were, and what—and whom—they were seeking.

So far . . . ? she thought, giddy. So far? But she had no doubt.

Holding her breath so that her terrified hyperventilation would not betray her, Bellis looked around the corner. There was no one in sight.

She tried desperately to think of what to do. She heard a rushing sound and a series of terrible screams from the ships below. She could not help but give a quiet cry when she saw what the intruders’ thaumaturgy had done, what was now happening to the men and women of Armada. She shook her head and moaned, stupefied by the blood and disfigured corpses she saw.

Another burst of energy crossed the air from the Hoddling, and a vivid anger settled very suddenly in Bellis’ guts, making her tremble. Her fear remained, but this new rage was much stronger.

It was directed at Silas Fennec.

You fucking bastard! she thought. You fucking stupid selfish swine! Look what you’ve done! Look what you’ve brought here! She watched the carnage, her own hands bloodless.

I have to stop this.

And then she knew how.

She knew what had been stolen, and she knew where it was.

As the vampir sawed at the age-fused rope of the last of the Grand Easterly’s bridges, a sword-wielding figure hurled himself up the slats. The vampir stepped back in surprise and fumbled for their weapons.

Uther Doul reached the deck. The vampir closest to him brought out her flintlock and turned it on him, flickering her tongue and snarling, her fangs extending like a snake’s. Doul beheaded her with a kind of contempt.

Her two fellows watched the tattoo of her heels on the wood. Doul walked toward them without hesitation, and they ran.

“Where,” Uther Doul bellowed after them, “is the Brucolac?”

Crying out with every stroke, Bellis battered at the handle and lock with the candlestick she had grabbed, swinging it with all her strength. She wedged it into the crack and levered. The wood splintered and dented, but the door was thick and well made, and it was several loud minutes before the lock gave way. Bellis bayed in triumph as the door swung open, bleeding wood chips.

She threw open Doul’s cupboards and rummaged under his bed, kicking at floorboards, searching for the statue. It was not in the weapons rack, or by the weird instrument he had said was a Ghosthead artifact. Minutes passed and kept her in agonies as she imagined the bloodshed that must be continuing outside.

Bellis found the statue suddenly, wrapped in its cloth at the bottom of a cylinder in which Doul stored arrows and javelins. With a sudden reverential fear, she cradled the heavy thing as she ran through the Grand Easterly’s empty corridors, finding her bearings, remembering where she herself had been held in jail, searching for the secure wing of the old ship, looking very much as if she held a baby.

The Lovers were gathered in a meeting room with those few of their advisors they could find. The fighting was not yet an hour old.

The Lover was yelling uselessly at the frightened scientists, telling them that Aum and Tearfly were dead, and that there was something tearing their city apart, and that they had to know what it was, to fight it, when the door flew open, its bolt disintegrating.

In the shocked silence, everyone in the room turned to face the Brucolac.

He stood in the doorway, breathing heavily, his jaw stretched wide and his teeth wicked. He tasted the air with his serpent’s tongue and cast his yellow eyes over the assembled. Then he swept his arm quickly, encompassing everyone in the room except the Lovers.

“Leave,” he whispered.

The exodus took only a few seconds, and the Lovers and the Brucolac were left alone.

They watched the vampir, not fearful but wary, as he stalked toward them.

“This ends,” he whispered, “now.”

Without speaking, the Lovers moved slowly apart, making themselves two targets. Each had drawn their pistols; neither spoke. The Brucolac made sure neither could get past him to the door.

“I don’t want to rule,” he said, and there seemed to be a quite genuine note of despair in his voice, “but this ends. This isn’t a plan; it’s fucking lunacy. I won’t let you destroy this city.” He drew back his lips, and he hunkered down to leap. The Lovers hefted their weapons, knowing that it was pointless. They stole a glance at each other but looked quickly back at the Brucolac, who was ready to take them.

“Stand down.”

It was Uther Doul. He stood in the doorway, his sword glinting bone-white in his hand.

The Brucolac did not turn around. His eyes did not leave the Lovers.

“I know one thing about you, Uther,” he said, “one thing at least. Armada’s your home, and you need it. And I know that for all your stiff-faced shit about loyalty”—his voice became very hard for a second—“the city’s the one thing you won’t betray. And you know that they will destroy it.”

He waited, as if for a response.

“Stand down,” was all Doul said.

“If the fucking Scar exists,” whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, “and if they get us there and by some gods-fucked miracle we survive, then they’ll still destroy us. We are not an expeditionary force; we are not on some fucking quest. This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures.” He turned and faced Uther Doul with his eyes caustic. “You know that. That’s why you came here, dammit, Uther. Because you were sick of adventures.

“Let’s have some rationality . . . We don’t need the fucking beast. We don’t need to haul arse across the world—we never have. The point’s not that some fucker centuries ago built those chains; the point is that they were left empty. And if we survive this lunacy, as long as we’re tethered to the bastard avanc these two will take us on another fucking voyage, and another, until we all die.

“That’s not our logic, Doul; that’s not how Armada works. That’s not why we came here. I will not let them end this.”

“Brucolac,” Doul said, “you do not make this choice.”

Slowly, the vampir’s eyes widened, and hard lines broke his face.

“Gods . . . You know I’m right, Uther, don’t you? I can fucking see it on you. So what are you doing?” he hissed. “What do you have planned?”

“Deadman,” Doul spoke softly. “You will stand down.”

“You think so, Liveman Doul?” the Brucolac whispered. His voice was coarse with swallowed rage. Long strings of slaver stretched down from his extended teeth. The bones in his hands cracked as he closed his fists. “You think so? You’re a fine soldier, Liveman Doul. I’ve seen you fight. I’ve fought beside you . . . But I’m more than three centuries old, Doul. You take on a couple of my cadre, and you think you can face me? I killed my way to this city before you were born. I won my riding in war and fire. I’ve butchered things no liveman has even seen.

“I am the Brucolac, and your sword won’t save you. You think you can face me?”

The corridors of the Grand Easterly were absolutely empty. Bellis wound through the passageways, down stairways toward the jailhouse, her footsteps coming back to her in echo.

Even the hallway where Fennec was imprisoned was deserted, its guards summoned to defend Garwater like all the others. That was the bargain, Bellis understood suddenly. That was the deal. These empty corridors were what the Brucolac had delivered to the intruders.

Only the two thaumaturges outside Fennec’s cell had been left, and they were dead. Blood was still slicking across the floor as Bellis approached the corpses. The man had been attempting some hex, and little arcs of energy spat and dissipated like static from his fingers, which spasmed as his nerves died. The woman was next to him, splayed and opened.

Bellis was clumsy with fear, which welled up like vomit in her. She hovered outside the cell, standing in the blood, her hand poised to open the door, held back by terror. She battled with herself, utterly unsure of what to do.

Just throw it in there, a part of her said. Just leave it by the door, just run, just get out. And at that second there was a scream from inside the room, a dreadful panicked noise all full of terror. Bellis echoed it, crying out in horror, and she threw open the door and stepped in.

“It’s here!” she screamed, ripping the cloth from the hideous statue and holding it like an offering. “Stop! I’ve got it here. Stop! Take it; you can take it and go!”

At the far side of the room, separated from her by the bars, Silas Fennec was crawling backward, screaming again, driving himself into a corner of his cell. He did not even look at her. He was scrabbling like a child, gazing in a stupefaction of terror at what had come for him.

With a horrible slowness, turning her head through thick air, Bellis followed his line of vision, and with a spasm of cold shock that made her stumble, she saw the grindylow.

There were three. They were staring at her.

They jutted prognathous jaws, their bulging teeth frozen in meaningless grimaces, massive eyes absolutely dark and unblinking. Their arms and chests were humanoid, tightly ridged with muscles and stretched skin, grey-green and black, shiny as if with mucus. And narrowing at the waist, the grindylow bodies extended like enormous eels into flat tails several times longer than their torsos.

The grindylow swam in the air. They flickered, sending quick S-curves down the lengths of their extended tails, rippling them liquidly. They moved their arms in a random dance, like submerged swimmers controlling their buoyancy, clenching and unclenching their webbed claws.

They were absolutely quiet. Even with their hideous faces turned to her, Bellis was wooed by their languid, constant, silent motion. Their bodies were level with hers as their tails eddied in the air, suspending them above the floor.

One of them was adorned with a mass of necklaces in stone and bone. It was streaked with human blood.

Oh gods and Jabber look at you, thought Bellis in a kind of frantic croon. Look at you. You’ve come so fucking far . . .

The grindylow waited.

“Here . . .” Bellis’ voice was spastic with fear. She held out the statuette to them, gripping it carefully, scared that it would slip from her violently shaking hands. “I have it for you here,” she whispered. “I brought it. So you can leave now. You can go.”

Cold and quiet as abyssal fish, the grindylow merely watched her, flicking their tails.

“Please take it,” she said. “Please, I brought what was stolen from you. Take it, and . . . you can leave. Back to The Gengris.” Leave us alone, she prayed. Leave us be. The statue was heavy in her outstretched hands.

With a swift flash of his tail, the necklaced grindylow swam closer to her through the air, close enough to touch.

Bellis flinched violently as Silas Fennec screamed at her, “Bellis get out!”

The grindylow twisted its head toward her, quizzical, the blood that fouled it running in all directions across its skin, against gravity. With a languid yawn it opened its jaws.

Bellis flinched, let out a cry.

But from within its throat came a deep, breathy cough. Beadlets of blood from its teeth spattered the statue that Bellis held. Then another cough, and another, in careful rhythm: uh . . . uh . . . uh.

The grindylow was laughing.

A horrible, incompetent parody of human laughter.

The grindylow stared at her, unblinking, as she lowered her quivering hands. It clenched its teeth with a stone sound, then opened them again, and with its mouth held open and still, its throat flexed with the precision of human lips, it spoke.

“You think this?” the voice whispered, without nuance or intonation. “You woman think this is what was taken? For this you woman think we cross a world?

“We siblings cross from the dark cold of the lake, from pabulum towers and the vats, the algae palace, from The Gengris. We track this place across two four eight many thousands miles, many thousands. Tired and hungry and very angry. Many months. We siblings sit and wait under your place, and hunt, and at last find word, always looking for this man. This robberman, thief. For this?”

The grindylow began to ebb back and forth in front of Bellis, watching her, still pointing at the figurine.

“For this you think we came? This stone thing? Our magus fin? Like primitives you think we abase before gods carved in rock? For hocus-pocus in trinkets?”

The grindylow snatched out, and Bellis gasped and pulled back her hand, letting go of the statue as if it were hot, and the grindylow caught it before it had begun to fall. It hefted the rock figure, holding it up to its face. It stroked its cheek with the filigree of skin.

“There is essence here, but still, for this?” The throat gasped. “You think we are children, we siblings, to cross the world for a puissant toy?”

With a long, exaggerated, slowed-down motion, the grindylow swung its arm in a great arc, curling the figurine through the air with a dramatic, petulant movement, releasing it. It must have been traveling very fast, but Bellis could see it clearly as it spun toward the bars, its arms tucked tight around a coiled-up tail, exquisitely and unpleasantly rendered, its gross mouth puckered and ready, its one eye glinting at her with cold humor.

The figurine hit the iron with a massive sound and broke apart.

Shards scattered, and cold drops of something like oil.

Bellis was stunned. She watched the particles settle and felt something in the aether resonate and go out.

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by stone dust and gelatinous residue, was a sliver of flesh. The magus fin, looking like some rotten wrinkled fillet.

The grindylow ignored it, and fluttered their tails, and approached Silas Fennec behind his bars.

“We have found what was stolen from us,” the grindylow whispered. And then it moved with a strange violence, wriggling through air as if the air fought back, and reaching up, it parted the bars as if they were waterweed, pulling them apart so that it seemed they might tear into stringy fronds. But they held; they oozed back and were solid and upright once more, and the grindylow had passed through them to the other side.

It hovered quite still over Silas Fennec, and he flailed in its shadow.

Bellis could not watch Fennec’s degradation, see him so stripped. She could not have imagined that he could be so afraid.

“We have what was taken,” the grindylow murmured, and it pulled back knife-sharp fingers and stabbed them down, and when she did not hear a cry or some wet sound Bellis opened her eyes again and saw that grindylow had rummaged in the rags that lay on the floor like castoff skins, and from them had pulled Silas Fennec’s notebook.

Bellis remembered it well: black-bound and thick, distended with inserted papers. She recalled its reams of nebulous jottings, heliotypes and inexpert sketches, notes, questions, and mementos.

The grindylow turned slowly through the pages. Periodically it would turn and hold up a page to the bars, showing Bellis something that told her nothing.

“The salp vats. The weapon farms. The castle. Our anatomy. A gazetteer of the second city. And see here,” it said with opaque triumph, “coastline maps. The mountains between the ocean and the Cold Claw Sea. Where our placements are. Where there are fissures, where the rock is weakest.” And something moved in Bellis’ mind: the first stirrings of comprehension.

“Would you tell your masters where is best for their excavations, robberman?” it asked. Cradling the stump of his arm, Fennec tried to move further away.

Bellis could see the page the grindylow had opened. She had seen it before, in her room, and in Croom Park, months before. Rough scribbles suggesting engines, red lines of force and striae of rock types crosshatched in ink. The hidden positions of The Gengris on the Cold Claw side; the paradoses and defenses; the traps.

Understanding was uncoiling in Bellis like cold water. She remembered the conversations she had had with Fennec, when they had first grown close. She remembered his stories, the extraordinary tales of his travels. She remembered what he had said.

If you can get across the Cold Claws, if you can reach the islands and the far shores, if you can trek across those miles and miles of punitive geography, to the Shatterjack Mines and Hinter, to those hungry trade partners and those untouched miles of resources, then you are made. But most can’t make it, because the route is so terrible; because you can’t come at it from the south, because The Gengris are in charge of the southern tip of the Cold Claw Sea and won’t let outsiders pass.

But what if you could reach it from the south, directly, Bellis thought, coming straight? Not into some tumbling fucked-up overland caravan shedding its goods and machines and crews like spoor across the mountains and the grasslands, but by ship. What if you could sail from New Crobuzon, safely past The Gengris in safety, and straight up to the north?

“My good gods,” she murmured, and stared at Fennec. “A canal. They’re planning a canal.”

It made such sense. The rock ridge between the freshwater of the Cold Claw Sea and the Swollen Ocean’s brine was only thirty, forty miles wide in places, its ridges wrinkled with valleys. Bellis could picture the work. A prodigious project, true, but what a prize.

Ships sail north from Iron Bay, skirting the harsh coastline of Lubbock Scrub and the Bezheks, then out to sea to avoid the ruins and residuum of Torque by Suroch, skirting the straits between the Pirate Islands and the mainland; and then a week’s sailing north of New Crobuzon, the flint spines that shield the Cold Claw Sea would rise to port, to the west.

But no longer impenetrable. Breached.

A wide runnel scored at the bottom of a strath. Tall ships and steamers passing sedately between overhangs and scree landscapes.

And there would be locks. Huge locks segmenting the canal, raising the brackish water in stages, massive wooden doors and careful engineering, bringing the ships closer to the Cold Claws, step by ponderous step. They would ascend the strata of the canal while the ocean barnacles clinging to their hull grew weak and died as the water lost its salt.

Until—what?

Out.

The rock monoliths part before the ships, and the canal bleeds into the deep waters of the freshwater sea: the Cold Claw Sea.

Perhaps Fennec’s papers, his researches, planned for a passage that emerged north of The Gengris and its wider borders. Perhaps the traders and industrialists and soldiers of New Crobuzon could ignore the grindylow, sail blithely past them to the pickings beyond, leaving them raging, pathetic and ignored, in their little corner to the south.

But surely that was not enough. Fennec’s book contained too many details, assiduously and covertly collected, of grindylow strategies, weapons, and plans. Perhaps any such incursion by New Crobuzon would necessitate war, and Fennec had gathered the information to ensure that his paymasters would win it.

A constellation of places that were so far little more than myth would open to New Crobuzon. With trade, colonies, and all that they entailed. Bellis remembered the stories she had heard about Nova Esperium, the riches and the brutality.

Whatever happened, the grindylow monopoly on terror in the Cold Claw Sea would be broken. New Crobuzon’s canal would open up a free market in power—control of which only New Crobuzon could possibly win.

Bellis shook her head, astonished. This hadn’t been some dramatic, romantic escapade. Fennec’s theft had been planned carefully, an analysis of costs and difficulties carried out by an expert. And how much more sense this made of the grindylow. They were not like the vengeful bugaboos of the stories she had read to Shekel, chasing a symbol. Their motivations were clear. They were protecting the source of all their power, their interests, and existence.

“The statue was just a trinket, wasn’t it?” Bellis said, and even in his fear Fennec met her eyes, for a second. “A bonus just for you? That wasn’t why New Crobuzon sent you there, or why the grindylow came.

“You were doing a feasibility study . . .”

He could have sent it home. He could have hidden his papers in the message he had given Bellis, to courier for him like a fool, but then, of course, his masters would not have come to rescue him. So he had held on to his research, knowing what it was worth, knowing that for those scrawls New Crobuzon would send its navy across the world.

But they had failed to recover him, or his precious notes. There would be no canal, thought Bellis, watching the grindylow. Not now.

Fennec was jabbering. For a moment Bellis thought he was having a fit and venting random sounds, but she realized that he was speaking in some attenuated, human version of the grindylow tongue. He leaned back against the wall for strength and held forth with controlled panic. Pleading, Bellis supposed, for his life.

But the grindylow had what they wanted, and he had nothing to offer them.

The figure eddying before him in the cell raised its claws. It spoke, slowly and loudly, in its own language, and Silas Fennec let out a shriek.

Bellis felt the air beside her twitch, disturbed, as the other two grindylow wriggled their bodies, sending a ripple from their shoulders through their taut bellies and down their elongated tails. They moved with that same marine suddenness to the bars. Their leader moved his hands in brute arcana till the iron became flaccid again, and they squeezed through.

Fennec began to shriek louder as the three grindylow surrounded him.

With a horrible sense of nausea, Bellis was certain that she was about to see him butchered, and she heard herself protest weakly. No more, she thought.

But the grindylow reached out and gripped him, and he screamed and battered at them, but they plucked at him easily with their intricate cruel fingers and, linking together in an unsettling, ill-defined morass, the three deepwater creatures locked him into a tangle of limbs, and began to rise.

They were suspended above the floor. Fennec’s shrieks were muting. His feet did not touch the ground. He was being borne up, across the little cell, swaddled in limbs and thick eel tails.

The grindylow magus gripped the notebook hard in one hand, and with the other he reached out, for a moment releasing his grip on his companions and his captive, and gesticulated at the largest porthole that broke the wall of the little prison. She heard the bones around his neck rattle balefully.

As if it were liquid, as if it were a still pool into which someone had slipped a stone, the glass in the porthole rippled, and Bellis realized what the grindylow was doing as the glass began to vein. She pulled herself from her daze—a torpor of disgust and shock and fear—and slipped in blood as she scrambled for the door.

She heard Fennec cry out once, and then a moist exhalation and the sound of wetness as the magus clamped his massive mouth over Fennec’s, lacerating his face with sharp teeth but breathing air into him as the hexed glass burst like a boil and the sea blasted into the room.

In seconds the room was inches deep, and the cannoning water did not slow. Bellis’ fingers were numb as she pulled at the door handle, the water pushing against the hatch. She hauled it open and turned for half a second at the threshold, her skirt wrapping her wetly, cold water bleeding torrentially past her feet into the corridor and chilling her.

The grindylow floated, poised, in this gush of ocean. Fennec’s hands extruded from their tight-cloyed mass, clenching and unclenching. As the water level grew higher beneath them, with stunning speed the grindylow triumvirate moved together in the air, congealing tightly, impossibly tightly, until with a perfectly timed spasm of their tails they jetted for the porthole, passing through it without pause, and on, and out, taking Fennec away, carrying what was stolen from them—information, secrets—into the sea.

As Bellis spun the lock on the door, sealing off that ruptured room, the corridor around her swilled with water. It swept in a thin layer back and forth, illustrating all the Grand Easterly’s movements.

She leaned back, sat back, her thighs and arse splashing down, feeling nothing as a wave of trembling took her over. She did not weep, but as the adrenaline dissipated through her body, she let out the most bestial croaking cries, absolutely without control, retching as all the pent-up fear in her spewed out.

She sat like that for a long time.

Somewhere out in the night, in the cold and the dark of deep water, was Silas Fennec. Borne away. For interrogation or unthinkable punishment. Alive.

It took Bellis a long time to retrace her steps, up out of the Grand Easterly’s jailhouse cellars. She moved doggedly, her long salt-wet skirt abrading her skin. Assiduously, she thought of nothing. She had never been so tired, or cold.

When finally she emerged into the night air, below the gently swinging old rigging and the enormous iron masts, she felt a drab surprise that everything was still as it had been, that everything was still there.

She was alone. The sound of shouts and fire could still be heard, but were very distant to her now.

Breathing hard and walking slowly, Bellis made her way to the boat’s edge and leaned her head against the rail, pushing it against her cheek, closing her eyes. When she looked up, she realized that she was watching the Hoddling. The outlines of the fat ship came into slow focus. Its fires had gone out.

There were no jets of weird energy emitted from behind its walls. There were no deep-sea monstrosities guarding it like a moat. There were men and women on its decks, moving without urgency, but with exhaustion and despondency.

She saw the waves nodding against the sides of the city, and with a sensitivity that had grown inside her without her knowing it, Bellis became aware that Armada was moving again.

Very slowly, as yet no faster than it had when the masses of tugs had hauled it. But it was being borne forward again. The avanc was moving, the pain of its wound receding.

The grindylow had gone.

(And Silas is alive.)

Walking forward, clutching the rail, Bellis headed toward the Grand Easterly’s great prow, and as she rounded a low set of cabins, she heard sounds. There were people ahead of her.

She gazed out over Garwater and Dry Fall and Jhour and Booktown. The sounds of the fighting were subdued. She could no longer hear the great massed movement of crowds, the constant drum of gunshots. Only a few ragged shouts and isolated attacks.

The war was dying. The mutiny was over.

She heard no declamations of revolt or stability; there was nothing around her that might hint at which side had won. And yet somehow when she rounded the last wall and witnessed the scene on the Grand Easterly’s foredeck, she felt no surprise.

Around the edges of the deck stood grim-faced men and women of all races, carved and bloodied. They carried their weapons drawn.

Before them lay a mass of corpses. Many were shattered, their chests torn open and burned dry or emptied out. Most had been decapitated; heads littered the charnel ground randomly, all gaping, fanged, and snake-tongued.

The vampir. Tens of them. Beaten. Executed and dispatched. Overpowered when the tide turned, when their mysterious allies had disappeared and the spontaneous small riots supporting them had petered out in confusion. It was a doomed adventure without the people of their own riding behind them, without a movement of revolt. Eventually the Garwater fighters had lost their fear, and terrorism could not win once the real terror went.

There was a weak movement above her. Looking up at the foremost of the Grand Easterly’s masts, Bellis widened her eyes in shock. And she thought, Oh . . . so that was when it was over.

That was when the Dry Fall cadre lost. After that, they couldn’t win. With that macabre pennant swinging there, the fear they spread must have faded like an echo.

Ten feet up, lashed cruciform to a crossbar, his heels and hands tied tightly with great thick skeins of rope, his snarls pathetic, tongue lolling like a dead animal’s, the blood that discolored his teeth and lips his own, was the Brucolac.

Chapter Forty-five

When day broke, the Brucolac found the strength to scream.

The sun bleached him. He closed his eyes and shook his head pointlessly, trying to get his eyes out of the light. His skin began to welt, as if some punishing chymical had been poured on him. His grave-pale face reddened, blistering, suppurating in the daylight.

He flopped with ugly motion, like a sea-thing beached. His strength leached from him, and he emitted little gasps of pain.

The sun might not kill him for some time, strong as he was: but it disabled him, and more than anything it hurt mercilessly. Two hours after dawn he was too groggy to make a sound. His spittle and venom drooled from him, denaturing.

The sunlight scalded the flesh of his slaughtered cadre, too. As the day crawled on, the tens of frozen bodies became blebbed and misshapen. At dusk, they were swept together and tipped into the sea.

Darkness came like unguent to the Brucolac. The pain began very slowly to bleed from him, and he cracked open his rheum- and pus-locked eyes. His body began to repair, but the sun’s depredations were severe, and it was not till nearly midnight that he found the strength to speak.

His ruined croaking was ignored. He was not tended; he was not fed. Cramp and pain ossified his limbs. Throughout the night he bayed for help or mercy; he tried to issue threats. But his words broke down into a despairing animal wail as the hours sluggishly passed and he saw the darkness diluting in the east.

He had only started to heal. His wounds were still raw when the sun reached out and probed them with its sadistic fingers as, like a cog in some remorseless engine, the day came round again.

The clean-up began quietly. Crews entered the cooling Hoddling and gauged the damage, trying to see how much could be salvaged.

Whole rooms and corridors had been reshaped by the heat, their edges made fluid. There were many bodies: some pristine, some variously disturbed.

Across Garwater, and in the fringes of its neighboring ridings, the conflict was manifest in broken glass and bullet holes, and bloodstains in the city’s gutters. What rubble there was was swept up and taken to foundries and factories, to be broken down or resmelted.

Garwater loyalists patrolled the streets. Bask and Curhouse ridings were quiet. Their rulers had known nothing of the revolt, and they had waited, paralyzed, watching it, carefully gauging the forces, ready to join against a defeated Garwater. But the vampir had been defeated. Their rulers kept themselves low, cowed by the Lovers. Quiescent.

The general of Shaddler was dead, killed by the vampir who had held him hostage, acting in their panic when they heard their ruler was captured. They had been killed in turn, at great cost to the scabmettlers. The walls of Barrow Hall were disfigured with great streaking sculptures in dark red, where scabmettler blood had spattered.

No one knew exactly how many vampir had made up the Brucolac’s cadre, and no one was exactly sure how many had been killed. Without question, some had survived. Defeated, they must have gone underground, become nondescript new citizens. Squatting in ruins, lodging in flophouses. Invisible.

They would have to be careful when they fed. They would have to be selective, and restrained, and quite brutal—they could leave no prey alive. Because when they were found—and they would be found, the Garwater crews swore implacably—they would be killed.

The fear of them was gone.

And meanwhile the arch traitor, the Brucolac himself, was stretched out on his metal cross, slowly scorching and starving to death.

The avanc had picked up its stupid, ponderous progress. But it remained slow, and its pace was not so steady. It swam, and dragged the city, and sped up and slowed, and never achieved the speed it had previously reached.

As the hours and days passed, the navigators became convinced that its wounds, sustained in mysterious circumstances known only to a small clutch of Armadans, were not healing. It was bleeding, weakening, still.

No revenge was taken against the citizens of Dry Fall, whom the Lovers announced curtly to be innocent of their ruler’s guilt. There was even amnesty for those who had rioted. It was a chaotic time, the Lovers ruled, and no one had known what was happening; there was confusion. This was a time to bring the city together, they said, and blame was not appropriate.

Still, the patrols of Garwater’s yeomanry and armed citizens were kept largest and best-armed in Dry Fall. The Dry Fallen watched them resentfully, staring from doorways, hiding bruises and wounds sustained that night, not trusting the Lovers’ mercy.

Like smoke from the riots’ fires, something had spread over the city that night, and it remained: a traumatizing uncertainty, a rancor. And even many of those who had fought hard to repulse the Brucolac were touched by it.

Blood, violence, and fear—they seemed the legacy of the Lovers’ projects. After centuries of peace, Armada had been twice to war in less than thirty days—once with itself. Armada’s intricacies of diplomacy had collapsed under the Lovers’ fervor, the networks of obligations and interests splitting, tearing the city apart.

The Lovers were subordinating everything to their search for the abstract power of the Scar. This was a break with Armada’s mercantile venality: that kind of intrepidity, that kind of voyage, was governed by an other, older logic. The citizens of Armada were pirates, and as their understanding of the Lovers’ project grew, so did their alienation. The Lovers were not proposing thievery or usury, nor even a tactic for survival. This was something very different.

While Armada was riding high, while its power was growing and feat after incredible feat was performed, the Lovers had buoyed up the citizens with their rhetoric and zeal.

When the Sorghum had been stolen, it was the greatest military feat of Armada’s recent history, and everyone could see that it gave the city power, that their ships and engines were better fueled. When the avanc had been raised, the Lovers had spoken of the ancient chains; of fulfilling Armada’s secret, historic mission; of the swift sailing from port to port that was now a possibility; of the quick, worldwide search for booty.

But now all that was shown to be deceit. The purpose instead was this opaque quest. And though there were still thousands of Armadans excited by what they undertook, there were thousands more who no longer cared, and a growing number who felt duped.

And with the avanc so weak—everyone could tell—even the real purpose of all this, the search for the Scar, might come to nothing. If the avanc kept slowing, who knew what might happen?

In the aftermath of the Brucolac’s mutiny, and the deaths and broken trust that came out of it, morale in Armada was low and worsening. The loyal Garwater patrols felt the growing hostility, the shapeless anger—even in Garwater.

Hundreds of Armadans were dead. Torn open, caught in crossfires, bitten and paralyzed and drained by the vampir, crushed by collapsing architecture, burned in fires, beaten to death. It was far fewer than had been killed in the battle against New Crobuzon, but the trauma of these deaths was vastly larger. This had been a civil war; these people had been killed by their own. People were numbed and blasted by it.

There were those who had seen glimpses of the grindylow and who realized that there was no way the Brucolac could ever have stopped the avanc moving, and no way he could have warped reality with those thaumaturgic blasts. But in the whole of Armada, only a handful knew the truth of the deal that had been struck. For the most part people made vague, curt references to weird vampir magic and did not press discussion further.

The grindylow had come and gone, and of those few who had seen them, almost no one knew what they had been. Their presence remained inexplicable and overshadowed by the civil war.

Hundreds of Armadans were dead, killed by their own.

Krüach Aum was dead. Bellis did not mourn him—he had unsettled her with his sociopathic calm and his brain like a difference engine—but she felt a sense of pathos at his murder.

Escapee from a prison island locked down by its own history. Stepping out into the strangest city of Bas-Lag, used as ruthlessly as he had previously been used by the Kettai authorities, killed investigating the creature he had helped conjure. What a weird, etiolated life.

Johannes Tearfly was dead. It was a surprise to Bellis how that affected her. She was truly sad, truly sorry that he was gone. She remembered him with a catch in her throat. The manner of his death was unthinkable—so fearful it must have been, so dark and cold, so claustrophobic, so far below the world. She remembered him preparing to descend, all excitement and fascination. It had been impressive, for a coward.

Shekel was dead.

That shattered her.

In the day after the mutiny, when her legs had strengthened enough to walk, she had wandered random and dumb through the battle sites.

There was nothing to stop her shuffling through scenes of war, past the cadavers, trailing blood on her shoes.

On one of the trawlers by the ruined Hoddling, in the shadow of a wooden warehouse that belled over gory cobblestones, Bellis found Tanner Sack. She saw him bent double, by a wall. Beside him was Angevine, the Remade woman, tears cutting the filth on her face.

Bellis realized then, but she could not stop herself running forward with her hands over her mouth, wincing at Tanner Sack’s grief. As she had known it would be, the thing on his lap was Shekel’s corpse. Eviscerated. He looked dumbstruck, astonished at his own state.

She had to walk through her memories of him. She hated it. She hated the sadness. She hated the misery, the astonishment she felt when she thought of him dead. Bellis had liked the boy a great deal.

More than anything she hated the guilt. She was awash in it. She had used him. Without ill-feeling, of course, but still she had used him. She was aware in a hateful, inchoate way that had it not been for things she had done, Shekel would be alive. Had she not taken the book from him and used it; had she only thrown the fucking thing away.

Aum was dead, Johannes was dead, Shekel was dead.

(Silas Fennec is alive.)

Much later, Bellis found Carrianne wandering stunned through the streets around her house. She had hidden throughout the night, with her door locked, and had emerged to discover herself a citizen of a non-riding.

She could not believe the Brucolac had tried to take control, and she could not believe that he had been captured. She was as confused as a child, watching events she did not understand.

Bellis could not tell Carrianne anything about what she herself had done and seen in the bottom of the Grand Easterly. All she told her was that Shekel had died.

They went together to see the Lovers speak.

It was two days since the mutiny, and Garwater’s rulers called a public rally on the Grand Easterly’s deck. At first Carrianne said she would not go. She had heard what had been done to the Brucolac, and she said she would not see him like that. It was a violence he did not deserve. Whatever he had done, she insisted, he did not deserve that.

But finally it was not hard for Bellis to persuade her. Carrianne had to come—she had to hear. The Lovers knew what was at stake; the Lovers knew what was happening in their city. This was their attempt to regain control.

The foredeck was very full: men and women massed in ranks, bruised and wounded, every one haggard and unsmiling, waiting.

Above them all, the Brucolac gibbered and whined thinly in the sun. His skin was burn-scarred and stained as a map.

When Carrianne saw him she cried out in disgust and unhappiness, and she turned her head away and told Bellis tersely that she would leave. But after a minute she glanced back at him. She could not take seriously the notion that the emaciated, festering figure drooling and champing slack jaws was the Brucolac. She could look up at the jabbering husk with nothing but pity.

The Lovers stood on a platform and addressed the crowd, with Uther Doul beside them. They looked careworn and terribly tired, and the assembled citizens stared up at them with a weird spirit of respect and challenge.

So, they said in their stares. Tell us. Convince us all over again. Tell us that this is worth it.

And they did an impressive job. Bellis listened and watched the mood soften.

The Lovers were clever. They did not start with bombast, or claims of power and prowess that they had repelled the threat from traitors.

“Many of those who are dead,” the Lover began, “many who our fighters killed . . . were loyal. They were good people doing what they were sure was right for our city.” And in that way, respectfully and mindful of the tragedy, he continued.

They spoke in turns, imploring those who were gathered not to lose heart now. “We are very close,” the Lover said, and an edge of excitement crept into her voice. Very close to powers that could never have been imagined before. Very close to making Armada truly great, a dynamo powered by potentiality, able to do anything—able to do contradictory things at once.

“Mutiny is not the way,” said the Lover. “If this project is not all of ours, it cannot go ahead.” You brought us here, she told the crowd. This is your doing, and it is great work.

This was not any time for division, the Lovers said, and unity meant unity in purpose, and the purpose of the moment was to find the Scar.

There would be rewards. It would be so fantastically, incredibly worthwhile.

The rhetoric grew stronger as their overlapping speech progressed. From the eulogies to the dead, the crowd’s children were invoked—skillfully, with promises about what their young lives, their city could be like, after it had mined possibilities from the Scar.

It was a good speech, sensitive and sincere. The Lovers’ fascination with the Scar was affecting. And when the speech was done the crowd’s respect, though subdued, was distinct and meant. The mood had lifted, a very little. The Lovers had won a reprieve—the argument was not finished.

All they have to do is keep the naysayers talking, thought Bellis. We can’t be so far from the Scar now. If they’re right, if it exists, we must be going to get there soon.

Standing a little behind the Lovers, Uther Doul met her eye. She realized for the first time what she had done the night of the mutiny, what she had risked. She had broken into his room and stolen an alien artifact, then delivered it to the marauders. But she was simply too tired of fear to feel it now.

When the talk was done, and as the crowd dissipated, Doul crossed the deck and stood still before Bellis, without sign of rancor or friendship.

“What happened?” he said softly. “It was you, in my room. You took it. I found the shards, at the bottom of the jail. The magus fin was there, rotting. I burned it. So that wasn’t what they wanted, after all?”

Bellis shook her head.

“They came,” she said, “but not for that. I thought it was, which is why . . . I’m sorry about your door. I was trying to get rid of them. They said they’d leave when they had what was taken from them. But that wasn’t what they wanted. It was they who . . . Fennec . . .”

Doul nodded.

“He’s alive,” Bellis whispered, wondering whether that was still true.

Doul’s eyes flashed wide for a moment.

Bellis waited. She wondered with tired nervousness what he would do. There were many things he could punish her for. She had lost Armada the grindylow figurine, for nothing at all. Needlessly. Or was there a trace of the old closeness in him?

But there seemed nothing but a flatness, a resignation in his manner, and Bellis was not surprised when finally he nodded and turned from her, walked back across the deck. She felt deflated, watching him. What do the Lovers think of that? she wondered. She could not imagine the Lovers giving up the magus fin without some rage. Don’t they care?

Do they even know? she thought suddenly. And if they know it’s gone, do they know it was me?

That night, Tanner Sack came to her door. She was astonished.

He stood on her doorstep, staring at her with eyes so bloodshot, in skin so grey, he looked like a junkie. He stared at her with dislike for several silent seconds, then pushed a sheaf of papers at her.

“Take these,” he said. They were used and reused scraps on which she recognized Shekel’s enthusiastic script. Lists of words he had found, that he had seen and wanted to remember, to cross-reference, to look for in the storybooks he pillaged.

“You taught the boy to read,” Tanner said, “and he loved that.” He kept his eyes on hers and his face expressionless. “You might want to keep some of these, to remember him by.”

Bellis was shocked and embarrassed. She was not constructed that way. It was absolutely against her instincts to accumulate mawkish, morbid remembrances of the dead. Not even when her mother or father had died, and certainly not at the death of this child she had barely known, no matter how she felt his loss.

She almost refused the papers. She almost framed some cant about not deserving them—as if one could deserve these ragged scraps!—but two things stopped her.

One was guilt. Don’t run from it, you coward, she thought. She would not allow herself to escape it. Her personal taste in death, she told herself, was not the issue—how convenient it would be for that to let her reject these evidences. And besides her guilt was her respect for Tanner Sack.

He stood there, holding out these things that must be precious to him, offering them to someone who had caused him so much pain. And not because they shared some spurious community of grief. He offered the papers to her because he was a good man, and he imagined that she had lost Shekel, too.

Shamed, she took them, and nodded thanks to him.

“One more thing,” Tanner said. “We bury him tomorrow.” His voice skipped only a moment on the word bury. “In Croom Park.”

“How . . . ?” Bellis began, surprised. Armadans gave their dead sea burials. Tanner gesticulated the question away.

“Shek weren’t a . . . a sea animal at heart,” he said carefully. “He was a city boy more than anything, and I suppose there are traditions I thought I’d left . . . I want to know where he is. When they told me I couldn’t do it, I told them to try and stop me.”

“Tanner Sack,” she said as he turned to go, “why Croom Park?”

“You told him about it one time,” he said. “And he went to see for himself and he loved it. I think it reminded him of Rudewood.”

Bellis cried when he had gone, could not stop herself. She told herself furiously that it was for the last time.

It was a brief service, clumsy and poignant. A mongrel of theology, gods of New Crobuzon and Armada asked humbly to look after Shekel’s soul.

No one was sure what gods, if any, Shekel had respected.

Bellis brought flowers, stolen from the colorful beds elsewhere in the park.

The city was dragged on, east-northeast, decelerating very gradually as the avanc slowed. No one knew how badly it was wounded. They would not risk sending another crew down.

In the days after the war, and especially after Shekel’s funeral, Bellis felt unable to focus. She spent much of her time with Carrianne, who was as subdued as she, and who refused even to discuss where the city was going. It was hard to concentrate on the journey, and impossible to imagine what would happen when they arrived.

If the Garwater scholars were correct, the city was drawing close. Perhaps two weeks, perhaps one; that was what was whispered. A few days more until Armada reached the wound in this empty sea; and then the hidden engines and arcane science would be let loose, and all the possibilities that swarmed around the Scar would be mined.

The air was tense with expectancy, with fear.

When Bellis opened her eyes in the morning, sometimes she felt that the aether bristled, as if forces she did not understand coursed around her. Strange rumors began to spread.

First it was the gamblers, the cardsharps in the late-night games at Thee-And-Thine. There were stories of hands changing in the instant they were raised, the colored costumes of the suits shimmering like kaleidoscopes, dimly glimpsed for the tiniest moment, freezing into a configuration after they had been dealt.

There were stories of intrusive spirits, browners or kelkin, fleeting invisibly through the city, moving things. Objects put down were discovered again inches from their place—in places where they might have been left, but had not been. Things that were dropped broke and then were not broken, and perhaps had not been dropped but waited on the side.

The Scar, Bellis thought with dull wonder. It’s bleeding.

The sea and sky became very suddenly dangerous. Rain clouds appeared and raged and very suddenly went again, not quite hitting the city, skirting it. The avanc dragged Armada through violent patches, where the waves were suddenly choppy and high, in a tightly circumscribed area, with gentle waters clearly visible to either side.

Tanner no longer swam, but only dipped himself daily. He was afraid to immerse himself for long. The sounds and lights from beneath the water were strong enough now that even those on the city above could hear and see them—ejections from unseen things.

Sometimes clots of the sentient weed passed by Armada, and sometimes there were other shapes on the waves—they moved and could not easily be identified, that looked at once organic, random, and made.

Still the Brucolac floundered and did not die. The deck below him was stained with his emissions.

Walking the decks and corridors of the Grand Easterly, over the quiet city noise Bellis heard faint and cryptic music. It was hard to trace, evanescing across frequencies, audible at random moments and places. She strained and made it out in snatches. It was ugly and uncanny: a web of halftones and minor chords, mutating rhythms. A dirge overlaid with plucked strings. On the second night she heard it, she was sure that it came from Uther Doul’s room.

The flotsam, the strange currents in the sea, and odd events in Armada grew more frequent and powerful as the avanc plowed on. When, on the fifth morning after the mutiny, something was seen bobbing within two miles of the city, no one was surprised. But when telescopes were turned to it, a great screaming cacophony of excitement began. The lookouts on the Grand Easterly barked for people’s attention and ran madly from room to room, looking for the Lovers.

Word swept the city with startling rapidity through every riding, and a great rush of citizens congregated in Jhour’s aft edge. A small aerostat set out overhead, over the treacherous currents, toward the speck that eddied closer and closer to the city. Those in the crowd were gazing out at it, sharing their telescopes and jabbering in incredulity as its outlines became clear.

Clinging to a ragged raft of wood and ocher canvas, staring up exhaustedly at his home, was Hedrigall the cactus-man, the renegade.

“Bring him here!” “What the fuck happened?” “Where’d you go, Hed? Where’ve you been?” “Bring him the hell here!”

As soon as it was obvious that the airship that had gone to fetch him was returning to the Grand Easterly, there were angry cries. Wedges of people tried to run from whatever vessel they were on, through the obstructed streets, to intercept the dirigible. Crowds collided chaotically.

Bellis had been watching from her window, her heart hammering with foreboding. She joined the rush toward the flagship, impelled by motivations she did not fully understand. Bellis reached the foredeck of the steamer before the airship had come low enough for anyone within to disembark. A crowd of loyalists were waiting, surrounding Uther Doul and the Lovers.

Bellis joined the growing crowd, who jostled and pushed at the yeomanry, trying to see the returned man.

“Hedrigall!” they shouted. “What the fuck happened?”

There was a roar as he stepped down, gaunt and exhausted, but he was quickly enveloped in armed men. The little group began to approach the doorways to the lower decks, with Doul and the Lovers at its head.

“Tell us!” The shouts were insistent and turning ugly. “He’s one of us; bring him back.” The guards were nervous, drawing their flintlocks as the Armadans pressed in on them. Bellis saw Angevine and Tanner Sack at the front of the crowd.

Hedrigall’s head was visible, bowed and sun-bleached, his spines withered and snapped. He looked around him at the congregated citizens, staring and reaching out for him, calling solicitous, and he drew back his head and began to howl.

“How are you all here?” he bellowed. “You’re dead. I saw every one of you die . . .”

There was a shocked silence, and then a cacophony. The throng began to push in again. The yeomanry shoved them back. The masses grew hushed and menacing.

Bellis watched Uther Doul draw the Lovers aside and whisper to them sharply, then indicate the door. The Lover nodded, then stepped forward with his hands outstretched.

“Armadans,” he shouted, “for gods’ sakes wait.” He sounded sincerely angry. Behind him, Hedrigall began to shout again, as if in a fever, You’re dead, you’re all dead, and he was bundled back toward the door, the yeomen hissing as his thorns pierced their skins. “None of us know what’s happened here,” the Lover said. “But look at him, by Croom. He’s a wreck; he’s ill. We’re taking him below, to our own berth, away from everything, for him to rest, to recover.”

Blazing with displeasure, he moved back, toward where Hedrigall lolled in yeomen’s arms and Uther Doul swept his eyes quick and hard over the crowd.

“It ain’t right,” someone suddenly shouted, forcing his way forward. It was Tanner Sack. “Hed!” he called. “He’s my mate, and Jabber knows what you’re going to do to him.”

There were shouts of agreement around him, but the crowd’s momentum was draining away, and though there were some curses, no one tried to follow and intercept Hedrigall or the Lovers. There was too much uncertainty.

Bellis realized that Uther Doul had found her in the crowd, and was watching her carefully.

“It ain’t right,” yelled Tanner, veins protruding with rage as the party entered the doors and the guards moved in behind them. Uther Doul still did not move his eyes. Bellis could not help but meet them, uncomfortable in his gaze. “He’s my mate,” said Tanner. “It’s my right. It’s my right to hear what he has to say . . .”

And as he spoke, at that moment, something extraordinary happened.

Bellis still met Doul’s unshaking stare, and as Tanner claimed his right to hear Hedrigall, Doul’s eyes spasmed and opened wide with an almost sexual intensity. Bellis watched, stunned, as his head inclined a fraction of an inch, as if in invitation, or agreement.

He gazed at her even as his party entered the corridors, walking backward to join them, holding her attention, raising his eyebrows a tiny bit, suggestive, as he disappeared.

Oh my gods.

Bellis felt as if she had been punched hard in her solar plexus.

A great revelatory wave washed over her: a stunned appreciation, an insinuation of the layers and layers and layers of manipulation in which she was caught, frozen, maneuvered and exploited, used and supported and betrayed.

She still understood virtually nothing of what was happening around her, what was being done, what had been planned, and what was contingent.

But some things she knew, humbly and suddenly.

Her own place. So much, so many plans, so much effort had been expended to bring her to this place at this instant, to hear the words that she had heard. Everything came together here and now; everything coalesced and became clear.

And in her astonishment and awe, and in her humiliation, and despite her anger, feeling herself danced undignified as a marionette to her allotted mark, Bellis bowed her head and readied herself, knowing she had one more job to do, to effect a change she wanted, and knowing she would not spite herself for revenge, and that she would do it.

“Tanner,” she said to him as he raged and cursed, arguing furiously, shouting against the majority, at those who told him he was overreacting, that the Lovers knew what they were doing.

He paused and stared at her in angry bemusement. She beckoned him.

“Tanner,” she said, unheard by any but him. “I agree with you, Tanner,” she whispered. “I think you have every right to hear what Hedrigall might say, down there in the Lovers’ berth.

“Come with me.”

It was not hard to find a way through empty hallways in the Grand Easterly. The loyal guards were stationed at points by which someone might make their way to the Lovers’ quarters, down in the boat’s low reaches. But only those corridors, and that was not where Bellis and Tanner were heading.

She took him down other passageways she had learned very well over the weeks of indulging what she could only think of as her perversion.

They passed storerooms and engines and armories. Walking quickly but openly, not like trespassers, Bellis led Tanner lower and lower, into a dimly lit zone.

She did not know it, but Bellis took Tanner close by the way to the rockmilk engines that were churning and whirring and sparking, driving the avanc on.

And eventually, in a dark and narrow passage where the walls were free of aging wallpaper and heliotypes and etchings, were lined instead with knotted pipework as intricate as veins, Bellis turned to Tanner Sack and gestured him to enter. She stood in the cramped and cosseted environs, turned her head to him, and kept him silent with a raised finger.

They stood without movement for some time, Tanner looking around him, at the ceiling at which Bellis stared, at Bellis herself.

When finally they heard the sound of a door opening and closing, it was so loud and flawless to the ear that Tanner stiffened violently. Bellis had never seen the room above, but she knew its echoes well. She knew where above her were chairs, and tables, and a bed. She followed the four sets of footsteps above with her stare—light, heavier, heavier, and massive and slow—as if she could see through the ceiling-floor the Lover, the Lover, Doul, and Hedrigall.

Tanner followed her example, his eyes widening. He and Bellis could trace the bodies above them. One was by the door; two ranged near the bed, sinking now into chairs; and the fourth, the big one, shuffled back and forth toward the far wall, locking his legs as the cactacae did in sleep or exhaustion, his weight driving down through the wood.

“So,” said Uther Doul, his voice astonishingly clear. “Tell us, Hedrigall.” He was hard. “Tell us why you ran. And how you ended back here again.”

“Oh, gods.” Hedrigall sounded drained and shattered. It was just barely his voice. Tanner shook his head in amazement.

“Gods, dear gods please don’t start that again.” Hedrigall sounded as if he would cry. “I don’t understand you. I’ve never run from Armada in my life. I never would. Who are you?” he screamed suddenly. “What are you? Am I in hell? I saw you die . . .”

“What’s happened to him?” whispered Tanner, appalled.

“You’re talking fucking dung, Hedrigall, you treacherous shit,” the Lover exclaimed. “Look at me, you dog. You were scared, weren’t you? Too frightened, so you patched up the Arrogance in secret and cut loose. Now, where did you go, and how did you get back here?”

“I’ve never betrayed Armada,” Hedrigall shouted, “and I never would. Croom, look at me . . . disputing with a dead man! How can you be here? Who are you? I saw all of you die.” He sounded quite mad with grief or shock.

“When, Hedrigall?” It was Doul’s voice, clipped and dangerous. “And where? Where did we die?”

Hedrigall whispered his answer, and something in his voice made Bellis shiver, though she had expected it. She nodded as she heard it.

“The Scar.”

When they had calmed him, Uther Doul and the Lovers conferred quietly, moving away from him.

“. . . mad . . .” said the Lover, not quite audible. “Either mad . . . strange . . .”

“We have to know.” Doul’s voice. “If he’s not mad he’s a dangerous liar.”

“It makes no sense,” said the Lover furiously. “Who is he lying to? Why?”

“Either he is a liar, or . . .” said the Lover.

Tanner and Bellis could not tell if she said more, quietly, or if her words petered out.

“How has this happened?”

“We’d been a month, more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”

Many minutes had passed. Hedrigall had been silent for a long time while the Lovers debated what to do, whispering so low that Bellis and Tanner could not hear them. When suddenly he spoke, it was unbidden, and his voice was low and unchanging, as artless as if he were drugged.

The Lovers and Uther Doul waited.

Hedrigall spoke as if he knew it was expected of him.

He spoke for a long time, and he was not interrupted. He spoke with unnatural grace, with a trained fabler’s eloquence; but there was in his careful monotone a hesitance, and underlying that a trauma that was frightening to sense.

Hedrigall stumbled on his words, and paused suddenly, sporadically, and drew shaking breaths; but he spoke for a long time. His audience—those in the room with him and those below—were absolutely silent and attentive.

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean.”

Chapter Forty-six

“We’d been more than a month in the Hidden Ocean, and the sea was in chaos. We couldn’t plot a course, we couldn’t keep north at the top of our compasses, we couldn’t navigate. Every day I’d stare out from the Arrogance, looking for sign of the Scar, the Fractured Land, anything at all. And there was nothing.

“You kept us moving.

“You insisted; you fired us up. You told us what we’d do when we reached the Scar. What powers it would give you, give us. You told us that we would all have power.

“I’ll not pretend there was no dissent. As we went on, people were more and more . . . fearful. And they began to whisper that maybe the Brucolac had been right to mutiny. That maybe there wasn’t so much wrong with the way the city was before.

“They came to you . . . we came to you and asked you to turn back. Said we were happy with how things had been. That we didn’t need this, that too much had gone wrong already, and that we were fearful there was worse to come. Some of us had been having terrible dreams. The city was . . . so tense. Like a cat, fur all sparking and jagged.

“We asked you to turn us back. Before it was too late. We were afraid.

“I don’t know how you did it, but you kept . . . for just enough time, you kept us . . . I’ll not say happy; I’ll not say willing. You kept us obedient; and we waited, and let you take us further in, fearful as we were.”

“If it had been another week, I don’t think we would have put up with any more. I think we would have turned back, and then you all wouldn’t have died.

“But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was too late.

“At six in the morning, on the ninth Playdi of Flesh, from the cabin of the Arrogance I saw something, forty miles ahead, at the edge of the horizon. A disturbance in the air, very faint, very frightening. And there was something else.

“The horizon was too close.

“An hour, five miles later, I knew we were definitely approaching something. And the horizon was still too close, and getting closer.

“I sent messages down below. And I could see them all preparing. I could look down and see the mass of ships all pushed together—all colors, all different shapes. I could see the crews setting up the cranes on the city’s edge, and firing up engines and gods knew what else. Getting ready with all the sciences they’d been preparing. Little aerostats belting from one end of the city to another. Way below me.

“I was watching where the sea and sky met. I didn’t believe it for the longest time; I kept thinking I must have it wrong and that any moment I’d see it right, make sense of it, but I didn’t. And finally I couldn’t deny what I saw.

“The horizon was only twenty miles away. I could see it clear, jagging across the face of the sea. The Scar.

“It was like seeing a god.

“You’d told us almost nothing, when you described it.

“It was a big wound in reality, broken open by the Ghosthead, you told us, thick with seams of what might be, all the possible ways. A big wound in reality, you said, and I thought you were speaking . . . like poetry.

“When the Ghosthead touched down in that continent, the force of it split the world right open, broke a fissure right through Bas-Lag. A split. Jagging in from the world’s rim for more than two thousand miles, splintering the continent.

“That’s the Scar. That crack. Teeming with the ways things weren’t and aren’t but could be.

“We were only a few miles away.

“It was a crevice in the sea.

“It was uneven, listing across us as we approached it, so the horizon seemed tilted. And because it was irregular, not guillotined but cracked, jutting a bit this way and the other, serrating back on itself here and there, there were places I could see over the edges. I could see the sides of the split. They were sheer.

“The ocean was choppy, a strong current heading north even though the wind went south. All the waves washed up past the city, carrying it along, and where they reached the edge of the Scar it was a wall, a clear wall. The water right-angled sharp and plunged down, vertical and split-smooth perfect as glass. Dark, moving water, pressing up against nothing and holding fast. And then . . .

“Empty air.

“A precipice.

“And way, way beyond it, scores of miles, a hundred miles away, only just visible on the other side of that empty gulf, there was a matching face. Hazy with distance. The other side of the crack.

“In between, that emptiness that I could still feel kicking out all manner of puissance. Welling out of the fucking lesion. The Scar.”

“I can’t hardly imagine what it must have been like on the city. They must have been able to see it. Was there panic? Were you excited?”

Of course the Lovers did not answer.

“I knew what the plan was. In sight of the Scar we’d stop at five miles’ distance. And from there a dirigible would set out, and see if it could cross just that short distance to the Scar. And I was the lookout. Any sign of danger, I was to fire my flares, hang out my flags, call the airship back in.

“I don’t know what danger you thought we might face. You had no idea. I don’t think you knew what the Scar was. What did you think might happen? Did you think it might be crawling with Possible Beasts? Things that might have evolved but didn’t, patrolling?

“It was nothing like that.

“The scale of it. The scale of that fucking thing. It was humbling.

“The city didn’t slow,” he said.

He was silent then, for several seconds. He had spoken his last sentence in the same hypnotic monotone he had been using for a long time, and it took Bellis a few heartbeats to realize what it meant.

Her heart spasmed and began to hammer.

“It didn’t slow,” Hedrigall said. “The avanc wasn’t slowing down at all. The avanc was speeding up.

“We were ten miles away, then we were five miles away, and then four, and the city didn’t stop, and didn’t slow down.

“The world was foreshortened . . . The horizon was only a few thousand yards away, and it was growing closer, and Armada was accelerating.

“I began to panic then.” There was no emotion in Hedrigall’s voice, as if he had bled dry of it in the sea. “I began to fire off my flares, trying to warn you of what you must have known.

“Probably . . . probably there was panic then,” he said. “I wouldn’t know; I couldn’t see. Maybe you were all mesmerized, glass-eyed and stupid. But I bet not. I bet there was panic, as the end of the world crept up. With my flares bursting over you, ignored.

“Three miles, two.

“I was unmoving for a long time. Frozen.

“The southerly wind was strong, so the Arrogance was lowering, stretching back away from the Scar as if it was afraid, as afraid as me. That woke me.

“Who knows what happened? Maybe you knew, before you died. I wasn’t there.

“Maybe it was the avanc. Maybe after weeks of obedience it broke free of the impulses being fed into it. Maybe some spine that was supposed to plug into its brain snapped off, and the beast woke, confused and snared, and it tugged to try to free itself, careering on.

“Maybe the rockmilk engines failed. Maybe some possibility spilt out from the Scar, a possibility that the engines didn’t work. Gods know what happened.

“When I looked down I saw flotillas of little boats being dropped over the sides of the city, and tiny frantic crews hauling at oars and throwing up sails to get away. But the sea fought them, and I saw their sails bellying in all directions. The lifeboats, the yachts, the little skiffs began to eddy in those waters and curl around the city, overtaking it northward, even as they fought to go the other way. But the currents and the waves pulled them on like they were hungry.

“It was only minutes before the first of them reached the Scar. I watched that little dinghy spinning toward the edge, and saw specks that must have been the people inside it jumping out into the sea, and then the stern of the boat tipped suddenly and went over and was gone. Into that airy emptiness.

“There was a trail of them, little boats peppering the sea between the city and the Scar, sliding north toward it. And dirigibles, too. A flock of them, trying to get airborne. Men and women were weighing them down, trying to get aboard, clinging to ropes to drag themselves in. All overloaded, they hauled themselves over the city’s edge and flopped into the sea, where the current took them and they spun like dead whales, shedding their crews, heading for the Scar.

“Armada began to spin, slowly. The horizon lurched and angled as the city coiled clockwise in the water.

“We were half a mile away now and my mind went all cold and I suddenly knew what I had to do. I ran to the Arrogance’s bay and looked down through the hatches. I took up my rivebow and steadied myself on the edge of the bay doors and fired at the rope that held me tethered.

“It was thick as a thigh, attached to the aerostat thirty feet from me, swinging like a python. I had six chakris. Three of them I sent wide, way wide. The fourth connected, but not cleanly—cut half the rope’s width. The fifth went wide, and I only had one more chance.

“But even though my aim felt good, and I’d steadied my hands, I missed.

“And I knew that I was dead. I dropped my rivebow, my fingers all thick and stupid, and I clung to the bars at the edge of the hatchway. I could only watch. I could feel the wind buffeting me, up through the doors, and I watched the rope fray too slowly to save me.

“The roofs, the slates, the towers, the aircabs, the flags, the monkeys all frantic with fear they didn’t understand, the citizens running stupid from one place to the next as if anywhere would be spared.

“I watched them all through my telescope. I wonder what it was like, under the sea. I wonder how the cray and the menfish and Bastard John were acting. Maybe they’re still alive, who knows? Maybe they could swim free. Maybe they quit the city as it went on toward its end.

“The Sorghum rig and Croom Park and the Grand Easterly and me were first to reach the edge.

“The wind changed for a moment, and the Arrogance drifted out over the cliff of water, and looked down into the chasm.

“Time was very slow as the Arrogance passed above the Scar. Just handfuls of seconds, but they lasted a long time.”

“I crossed past the rim of the sea and looked down, over my knees dangling from the hatch, at the edges of the water. They were vertiginous.

“The sun angled down through the surface of the sea, filtered and refracted by the waves, and passed out again through the vertical face. I could see fishes bigger than me nosing up to the edge where it met the air, a hundred feet below the surface. Light bathed into it. There must be a whole ecology around the edges of the Scar. Even two, three miles down, where the pressure’s merciless, the water there’s sunlit.

“That sheer face of water, colors and eddies moving in strata, extended down miles. Perspective defeated me.

“And then mud. I could see it: a thick, sandwiched band of mud, black, at the bottom of the sea. And then rock. Rock extending down for so many miles that it dwarfed the layer of water. Red and black and grey rock, split wide, clean-edged. And many miles down a glow that moved and burned, showing dimly through the air. Magma. Rivers of molten stone, geothermal tides.

“And then? Below that?

“Then the void.”

Hedrigall’s voice was hollow and appalled.

“It must have been seconds I saw it,” he said, “but I remember every layer, like colors of sand drooled into a bottle. It defeated the eye. It was too big to see.

“Armada paused, poised for seconds on the edge of that abyss, and the avanc gave a final push forward.

“I saw it first through the water. I saw it four miles down, a little way above the dark sea bottom. I saw a shape appear in the deeps, unclear through the sea, suddenly nearer, its outline visible, as it powered itself forward. Until with a sound like a cataclysm it began to breach. To push itself through the brine cliff.

“A mile of flesh.

“Its head was through, water splintering, shattering around it, cataracts thousands of yards long booming and splitting, drops of water the size of houses spinning and disintegrating, falling voidward, into the Scar.

“I could see the first of its chains, colossal, bursting through the water in a four-mile straight tear, splitting the sea between the avanc and the city above. Other chains came through after it, so that the sea wall was scored with parallel vertical rips, like a claw wound.

“The avanc’s body continued through, indescribable, fins and spines, cilia, and as it came through into the air gravity took it, and it began to pitch forward. The chains tightened on the city, and the edges of Armada reached the edge and were pulled on, over.

“The avanc gave out a sound that burst all the glass around me.

“I saw the submarine hulks on which the Sorghum rested welling up toward the flat cliff face of water and then burst through, and all around them, hundreds of feet away on either side, the aft of Garwater and Bask and Curhouse reached the end of the sea, and jutted out, and trembled, and fell.

“There are so many ships in Armada.

“Steamers reached the edge flat-on, and rolled terribly and ponderously over, houses and towers spilling from them like crumbs, a rain of masonry and bodies, hundreds of bodies, pitched kicking and convulsing into the air and down, down many miles. Past all the inner layers of the world.

“I wasn’t even praying. I had no will. I could only watch.

“Bridges and tethers snapped. Trawlers came apart as they fell. Barges and lifeboats, and tugs and wooden warships. Splintering. Bursting, exploding, on fire as boilers spun and red-hot coals spewed through them. Ships six hundred feet long and centuries old cartwheeled as they went down.

“The Grand Easterly’s aft was over the Scar now, jutting out into the air.

“Armada spilt over the lip of the ocean and broke down into a random, plummeting constellation of parts, the live and the dead falling through an avalanche of bricks and masts. I could hear nothing except the splintering water and the avanc’s cry.

“Three hundred feet of the Grand Easterly was jutting over the void now, and all around it much smaller ships spewed into the ravine. And suddenly its weight told, and I heard a cracking like some god’s bone breaking, and the rear third of the ship, to which I was tethered, split and hinged down, hauling me with it, clinging with my arms locked around a girder, down, into the Scar.

“You wonder how you’re going to die, don’t you? Bravely, screaming, unaware, or what? Well, I met my death in a stupor, my mouth hanging like a fucking fool, as a steamer’s arse pulled me down.

“The edge of water rose up past me as I plummeted past the Scar’s lip, below the surface level of the sea.

“For a second I could see through water to the keels of ships that were above me, watch them plow on to their destruction. I was rushing down, and the rest of the Grand Easterly and every ship of the city was collapsing toward me.

“Once or twice, for moments, I saw dirigibles. Little cabs, men in harnesses, who’d managed to leap from the decks of their vessels as they went over, and were caught in the slipstream fighting to haul their balloons skyward. They were crushed and killed, again and again. A falling hull or shards of towerblocks would smash them out of the air.

“The Arrogance was accelerating down. I closed my eyes and tried to die.

“And then, four miles below me, the avanc moved.

“It must have been in agony, its body bursting and hemorrhaging in the air, folding over and bending double as it came out of the water wall. Half a mile of its back was through into the Scar, now. Maybe it was spasming in pain. It pushed itself very suddenly out, bursting right out of the sea, into the Scar, and down.

“It cried out again as the whole of its fucking bulk emerged, and its thrust shoved it down faster than gravity would have taken it. The avanc lurched; its chains went suddenly taut and tugged the rest of the city over the edge. The aft of the Grand Easterly was wrenched down, too, and the Arrogance was snatched so suddenly that the tattering rope that held it snapped.

“It snapped.

“My eyes flew open as the aerostat hurtled skyward, up past the falling city, up and out of the shadow of that wall of ocean, pelted by metal and sharp-split wood, out of the Scar, into the sky.

“I roared out of that crevice and careered into the sky. My arms were locked tight, holding me into place. I was going to live.

“Below me, the last of Armada slipped into the Scar. Winterstraw Market in a rain of little vessels. The Uroc, the Therianthropus, the asylum, the old sawdust boats of the haunted quarter—all become nothing. Tipping up, in sheets of spray, and going over, till the surface of the Hidden Ocean was left undisturbed.

“As I rose, I looked down directly into the Scar and saw an interference, a haze like dust, as Armada fell, and far below that the avanc, spinning as it went, wrapping itself in twenty miles of chain, moving pathetically, trying to swim out of that endless fall. Even it looked small and dwindling.

“Eventually I fell back, exhausted and stunned to be alive, and when I looked down again I could see nothing at all.”

Hedrigall’s voice ebbed away. He spoke again after several seconds of quiet.

“I went higher than I’ve ever been before. High enough to look down and see the Scar as it really is. A crack, that’s all. A crack in the world.

“I don’t know if any other aeronauts got free. But I was more than a mile up, and I saw nothing.

“The wind that high was strong, gusted me south for hours. It took me away from there. Out of that murderous place in the water, where all the currents lead to the Scar. The Arrogance was leaking. Split and burnt by debris. I was coming down.

“I sawed myself some hide from the dirigible, lashed it to wood from the cabin. Made myself a raft, knowing what was coming. I waited by the bay doors till we were scudding low and fast, and I threw out the raft and leapt after it.

“And then finally, only then, curled in my little raft, I let myself remember what I’d seen.

“I was all alone with those memories for two days. I thought I’d die.

“I thought for a moment that maybe if I could stay alive for long enough, the currents might take me and shove me out into the Swollen Ocean, where our other ships are waiting. But I’m not a fool. I knew there was no chance of that.

“And then . . . this.”

For the first time in his extraordinary story, Hedrigall sounded as if he would break down again.

“What is this? What is this?” The hysteria in his voice grew louder. “I thought I was dying. I thought you were a dying man’s dream. I saw you die . . .” He whispered it. “I saw you die. What are you? What city is this? What’s happening to me?”

Hedrigall became dangerous then, shouting, feverish, and terrified. The Lovers tried to soothe him, but it was some time before his rantings became subdued and he fell into a stupefied sleep.

A long silence followed—a long, stretched-out quiet—and Bellis felt herself back in her own skin again as the spell of Hedrigall’s story slowly faded. Her skin was elyctric; she bristled with tension. She felt all drunk on awe from his telling.

“What,” hissed the Lover coldly, his voice fraught, “has happened?”

“It’s the Scar,” Tanner whispered to Bellis. “I know what it is. This close to the Scar, it’s leaking. And that Hed up there . . .” He paused and shook his head, his face haggard and bleached with wonder. Bellis knew what he would say.

“That ain’t the real Hedrigall,” said Tanner, “not the factual one, not the one from . . . from here. Our Hedrigall ran away. That Hedrigall’s leaked out . . . from another possibility. He’s from one where he stayed on, and where we traveled that bit faster, got to the Scar earlier. He’s what happened . . . what will happen.

“Oh my Jabber, oh dear Jabber and shit.”

Above them, the Lovers and Uther Doul were arguing. Someone—Bellis had not heard who—had said the same thing as Tanner. The Lover was reacting violently.

“Dung!” she spat. “Fucking dung! It doesn’t work that way; that’s not what happens. Out of the whole sea, you think we’d happen to find him, even if he had leaked through? This is a fucking setup. That’s Hedrigall, alright. It’s our Hedrigall, and he never left. This is a setup to turn us back. He is not effluvium from the Scar.”

She was furious. She let no one else speak. She raged at Uther Doul, and even at the Lover, to Bellis’ amazement; he was asking her to calm down, to just think . . . So close to what she sought, the Lover felt it threatened, and she was thundering.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “This is shit, and we will keep this lying bastard locked up until we get the truth from him. We say he’s recovering; we wait; we find out what really happened. We don’t accept this crap he’s spouted to us.”

“Is she mad?” hissed Tanner Sack to Bellis. “What’s she talking about?”

“This is obviously designed to create panic,” the Lover continued. “This is a plan to ruin everything. He’s in fucking league with gods knows who, and we can’t let them win. Uther, take him away. Brief the guards—and pick them well; pick those you’re certain of. Brief the guards about the lies he might shout to them.

“We will stop this, right here,” she said, hard. “We’ll not let this seditious shit succeed. This goes no further. We bury this story, right now, right here, and we go on. Agreed?”

Perhaps the Lover and Uther Doul nodded to her. Bellis heard nothing.

She had turned her face to Tanner at those last words. She watched him listen to his ruler—to whom he had committed himself absolutely, declared himself utterly loyal—announce her plans to deceive everyone in the city. To keep secret everything she had heard. And to drive on to the Scar.

Bellis watched a cold, a dead and frightening cast come over Tanner’s face as he listened. The muscles of his jaw clenched, and Bellis knew that he was thinking of Shekel.

Was he remembering how he’d said and thought that this—what had happened to them, being found—was a blessing? Bellis did not know. But something had set in Tanner’s face, and he looked at her with murderous eyes.

“She,” he hissed to her, “will bury nothing.”

Chapter Forty-seven

Tanner Sack was known. He was the one who had fought a bonefish to save a dying man. He had Remade himself into a kind of manfish, the better for life in Armada. He had lost his boy.

Tanner was known, and he was respected.

You listened to Tanner, and you believed him.

Bellis could tell no one anything. Her mouth was hard and cold as a stone.

She had to turn to others to spread words.

Everyone knew Tanner Sack.

If Bellis had tried to tell what she had heard in that unpleasant little cubbyhole, if she tried to tell the secrets she had listened to, she would not be believed. She would not be heard. But she had introduced someone else to her room, so that he could speak for her and tell the story.

She could not help nodding. Smiling without warmth. Gods, it’s well done, she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing.

Oh, it’s well done.

It started almost as soon as she and Tanner came up out of the lower decks.

She blinked, and looked around her at the flags and the washing and the bridges and the towers, still all strong and knotted together with mortar. She was haunted by the images from Hedrigall’s story. She saw the city shattering and falling so clearly that it was a true relief to emerge and see it all solid.

Tanner began. The Lovers were still below, still organizing, trying to hide Hedrigall. While they secreted themselves below the air and schemed, Tanner began.

He looked first for the people he knew well. He spoke quickly and fiercely. One of the first he found was Angevine, and he involved her carefully with the group of dockers to whom he was speaking, who did not know her.

His passion was genuine, utterly guileless. He did not orate.

Bellis watched him move through the crowd still milling on the Grand Easterly’s decks, arguing in angry tones about what it was they had heard, about what Hedrigall had seen—how and why he had come back. There were still a good number of pirates on the huge old ship, and Tanner spoke to them all.

He trembled with rage. Bellis followed him by an irregular and discrete course. She watched him, and was impressed by his fervor. She watched the stunned reactions move like a disease through the masses. She watched the disbelief quickly become belief and frightened anger, and then resolve.

Tanner insisted—she heard him—that they had the right to know the truth, and something uncertain moved inside Bellis.

She did not know what the truth was; she was not sure what she believed. She was not sure what lay behind Hedrigall’s extraordinary story. There were several possibilities. But it did not matter. She refused to think about that now. She had been brought to this place, and she would do what was required, and bring this to an end.

Bellis watched as those whom Tanner had told then told others, and they told more, until it was quickly impossible to track the story. It moved under its own momentum. Very soon, most of those who told a garbled story of Hedrigall’s escape from the Scar could not have said how they knew it.

The Lovers had told a great deal of the truth about the Scar, as they understood it, in a popular form. There were few people in Armada who did not know that possibilities spilled from it, that that was the source of its power. Several had seen Uther Doul’s sword switched on: they knew what probability mining did. And here, so deep in the Hidden Ocean, so close to the Scar itself, with its seepage, with probabilities welling up from it like plasma, it was not hard to believe that Hedrigall—this Hedrigall, raving in the lower decks of the steamer—was telling the truth.

And while their own Hedrigall might be thousands of miles away, fled weeks ago, adrift above the ocean or crashed or surviving as a hermit on some foreign land or drowned in the sea, the Armadans accepted that the one they had picked up was a nigh-man. A refugee from a terrible Bas-Lag in which Armada had been lost.

“Two days ago,” Bellis heard one woman say with a dreadful awe. “All of us, we’ve been dead for two days.”

It was a warning. No one could possibly miss that.

While the sun crossed toward the lowest quarter of the sky, the story spread its fingers, passing into all the ridings. Its presence clogged up the atmosphere.

Hedrigall was hidden, and the Lovers made a stupid mistake by staying below, trying to work out plans. Over their heads, Tanner vented and ran from ship to ship, spreading word.

On the Grand Easterly, Bellis waited, remembering Hedrigall’s story—remembering it so that it filled her head, and she saw all the dreadful collapse again. She did not try to evaluate what he had said. It was a story, an awesome story, awesomely told. That was all that was important.

She watched the Armadans come and go around her, debating and conferring darkly. There were plans, she could see that; there was movement. Something was coming to a close.

Time moved quickly. The sun was low. All over Garwater, workshops were closing, their workers amassing, converging on the Grand Easterly.

At six o’clock the Lovers emerged. Some sense of what was happening had filtered down to them, some inchoate awareness that their riding and their city were in crisis.

They came out into the light, followed by Uther Doul, wearing hard and nervous expressions. Bellis saw them blink with shock at the ranks of their citizens who faced them. Scores lined up like a ragged army: hotchi and cactacae among the humans, even the Garwater llorgiss.

Above them, twitching as his nerves died in the light, was the Brucolac. And at their head, standing a little forward, his chin pushed out, facing the Lovers, was Tanner Sack.

The Lovers looked out at their men and women, and Bellis was certain that she saw them flinch. She glanced at them and then ignored them, staring past them at their mercenary. Uther Doul did not meet her eyes.

“We have spoken to Hedrigall,” the Lover began, her voice not showing any anxiety.

Shockingly, Tanner Sack interrupted her.

“Spare us,” he said. All around him, people glanced at each other, held by the force of his voice.

The Lovers stared at him, their eyes widening very slightly, their faces inscrutable.

“Enough lies,” Tanner said. “We know the truth. We know where Hedrigall—this maybe-Hedrigall, the one you’ve locked away, hiding him from us—we know where he’s been. Where he’s from.”

He moved forward, and the mass moved up behind him, shuffling, determined.

“Jaddock,” Tanner shouted, “Corscall, Guddrunn, you lot, go find Hedrigall. He’s down there somewhere. Bring him out here.” A group of cactacae stepped forward nervously toward the Lovers and Uther Doul, and the door behind them.

“Stop!” shouted the Lover. The cactacae halted and looked to Tanner. He moved forward, and the crowd came with him. Emboldened, the cactus-people moved on.

“Doul . . .” said the Lover, her voice dangerous. Everyone stopped, instantly.

Uther Doul stepped forward, between the Lovers and the advancing Armadans.

And after a second, Tanner came to meet him.

“All of us, Uther Doul?” he said, loud enough for everyone around him to hear. “You want to take every one? You think you can do that? Because we are fetching Hedrigall up here, and if you threaten them—” He indicated the cactacae. “—then the rest of us are coming with them, and you threaten all of us. Think you can take us all? Shit, maybe you can, maybe you can. But if you fucking do . . . what then? Who are your bosses going to rule?”

There were hundreds of Armadans behind him, and they nodded as he spoke, and some of them shouted their agreement.

Uther Doul looked from Tanner to the masses behind him, back to Tanner again. And then he showed weakness, his command broke, he hesitated and turned his head. Uncertain, he turned, to look to his bosses, to seek clarification. His shoulders moved in a minuscule shrug; he tilted his head in a question: He’s right, what do you want me to do, do you want me to kill them all . . . ?

When he turned like that, when he showed doubt, Tanner won. He moved his hand again, and the cactacae moved past Doul and the Lovers and into the corridor, setting out to find Hedrigall, uneasy but not afraid, knowing that they would be safe.

The Lovers did not even look at them. They stared instead at Tanner Sack.

“What more could you ask?” said Tanner, his voice hard. “You’ve been shown what’ll happen to us. But you’re so fucking insane with this, so fucking caught up in it, that you’d ignore this? You still want to go on.

“And you’d keep this quiet from us. You’d lie to us, let us drive ourselves, mute and stupid as the fucking avanc, over the edge. That’s enough. This stops here. You take us no further. We are turning back.”

“Dammit!” The Lover jabbed her hand at Tanner, meeting his eye. She spat on the deck before him. “You fucking coward! You fool! Do you really think that story he told is the truth? Think about it, godsdammit. You think that’s how the Scar really is? And you think that out of all the ocean, out of the entire fucking Hidden Ocean, we found him by sheer chance? You think it’s a fucking coincidence that our own Hedrigall runs and then we meet another, from some other place, with stories to scare us stupid?

“It’s the same man! This was always his plan. Can’t you fucking see? We thought he’d left us, but he didn’t. Where would he go? He cut loose the Arrogance, and he hid somewhere. And now, when we get so close, so fucking close to the most amazing place in our world, he comes out to frighten us away. Why? Because he’s a coward, like you, like all of you.

“That was his plan. He didn’t even have the courage to run away in shame. He waited to take all of you with him.”

There were those who wavered at that. Even in her blistering rage, her points scored home.

But Tanner gave her nothing.

“You were going to keep it from us,” he said. “You were going to lie. We’ve come so far with you, and you were going to lie to us about this. Because you’re so blinded by some greed you couldn’t risk us facing you down. You know nothing about the Scar,” he shouted. “Nothing. Don’t tell me coincidence; don’t tell me unbelievable—maybe this is how it works. You don’t even know.

“All we know is that one of the best fucking Garwater men I ever knew is down there in your jail, warning us that if we go to the Scar we’ll die. And I believe him. This ends here. We say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed . . . are in-fucking-validated. You can’t jail or kill us all.”

There was a roar at that, a mass exhalation of excitement, and people began sporadically to chant Sack Sack Sack.

Bellis paid no attention. Something extraordinary was happening, something almost inaudible under the noisy approval around her.

Behind Uther Doul, the Lover had been watching and listening with a terrible uncertainty in his eyes. He had reached forward, touched the Lover, and turned her around, then had said something low and urgent to her, something inaudible that had made her react with incredulity and rage.

The Lovers were arguing.

Quiet came down over the crowd as they realized what was happening. Bellis held her breath. It shocked her deeply. That they could whisper to each other, their faces growing red, their scars white-scored with anger, their voices hissed, muttered curt, growing slowly louder until they shouted, ignoring those around them, who stared at them in stupid amazement.

“. . . he’s right,” Bellis heard the Lover shout. “He’s right. We don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” the Lover shouted back. Her face was outraged and terrible. “Don’t know what?”

Overhead, a little flock of cowed city birds cut across the sky, touching quickly down, somewhere out of sight. Armada creaked. The silence went on and on. Tanner Sack and his mutineers were frozen. They watched the argument between the Lovers unfold with an awe more fitting to a geological event.

As Bellis watched the last of the birds, her eyes came to the Brucolac’s blasted figure and stayed there, though the vampir disgusted her. His convulsions were dying down, his body calming. He opened eyes seared milk-white and blind by the daylight, and turned his head slowly.

He was listening. Bellis was sure of it.

The Lovers ignored everything outside them. Uther Doul moved silently aside, as if to give those assembled a better view.

There was no other sound at all.

“We don’t know,” said the Lover again. Bellis felt as if an arc of heat or electricity spat between the Lovers’ eyes. “We don’t know what’s ahead. He might be right. Can we be sure? Can we risk it?”

“Oh . . .” the Lover responded, her voice coming out of her in a querulous sigh. She stared at her lover with a terrible disappointment and loss. “Oh, godsdammit,” she breathed quietly. “Gods rot and fuck you dead.”

Again there was quiet, and palpable shock. The Lovers stared at each other.

“We cannot force them,” the Lover said finally. His voice shook violently. “We can’t rule without concord. This isn’t a war. You can’t send Doul to fight them.”

“Don’t turn away from this now,” the Lover said, her voice unstable. “You’re turning from me. After what we’ve done. After I made you. After we made ourselves together. Don’t deny me . . .”

The Lover glanced up around him, at the encircling faces. A visible panic came over him. He held out his hands. “Let’s go inside.”

The Lover was rigid, her scars glowing. She was tense with self-control. She shook her head at him, tightly raging. “Who the fuck are we to care who hears? What is this? What’s happened to you? Are you as stupid as these fools? You think the lying cant that returned bastard told us rings true? Do you? You believe him?”

“Am I still you,” the Lover screamed back at her, “and are you me? Or not? That’s the only question here!”

He was losing something. Something was slipping from him. Bellis watched a connection as vital as an umbilicum attenuate and wither in him, and dry up and snap. Flailing, raging, terrorized very suddenly, alone for the first time in many years, he tried to say more.

“We can’t do this; we can’t. You’ll lose us everything . . .”

The Lover watched him, and her face set dead cold.

“I thought more of you,” she said slowly. “I thought I’d made my soul whole.”

“And you have, you have, you did,” said the Lover frantically, so pathetic that Bellis turned her face away in shame.

They brought Hedrigall up from belowdecks, draped over the shoulders of the cactacae who had gone after him, and he was greeted with a wave of welcoming joy.

Everyone shouted questions at him that he shied away from and could not answer. People danced and shouted and called his name while he stared at them, drunk with what seemed disoriented terror. Cactacae, untroubled by his thorns, grabbed him and rode him on their shoulders, where he bobbed unsteadily and stared bewildered about.

“Turn!” shouted Tanner Sack. “We turn the city! Get the Lover! Get someone who knows how. Get crews to the rein-winches. We’re sending a signal to the fucking avanc; we’re turning.” Buoyed up, the throng looked around for the Lovers, demanding that they tell how it was done, but the Lovers were gone.

In the crush surrounding Hedrigall, in that carnival, the Lover had turned fiercely and run back toward her room, the Lover behind her.

And watching them carefully, following a little behind them, getting ready to take a different route, for one final time to try to understand what she had done and what had been done to her, was Bellis Coldwine.

As she stepped into the passageway, she heard another exchange.

“I rule here,” she heard the Lover say, his voice thick and careful. “I rule this place; we rule it. That’s what we do; that’s what we fucking are . . . Don’t do this. You’ll lose it all for us.”

The Lover turned to him, and Bellis was suddenly in plain view. But the Lover took her in for only a second, then turned her scarred face away, uncaring. Not giving a damn who heard.

“You . . .” she said, touching the Lover’s face. She shook her head, and when she spoke again it was with great sadness and resolve. “You’re right. We don’t rule here anymore. That was never why I was here.

“I won’t ask you to come with me.” For a second, her voice almost broke. “You’ve stolen yourself from me.”

She turned, and with the Lover pleading with her, begging her to listen to him, to hear reason, to understand, she walked away.

Bellis had heard enough. She stood alone for a long time in between old heliotypes stripped of meaning before turning back to the celebrations outside, where Tanner was trying to give orders, trying to have the city turned.

Raucous gangs, reeling at what they did, turned the winches that tugged at the avanc’s reins. And slowly, over miles, the avanc turned its nose in dumb obedience, and the city’s massive wake began to arc, and Armada turned.

It was a long, very shallow curve that took the rest of the day’s light to complete. And while the city turned tail on the featureless sea, the pirate-bureaucrats of Garwater ran frantic through their riding, trying to discover who was now in control.

The truth terrified them: in those anarchic hours there was no one giving orders. There was no chain of command, no order, no hierarchy, nothing but a rugged, contingent democracy thrown together by the Armadans as they needed it. The bureaucrats could not accept this, and they saw leaders in Tanner Sack and Hedrigall. But those two were participants, nothing more: one enthusiastic, the other looking bewildered, dragged about on shoulders like a mascot.

Is this how it ends?

Bellis is lost with excitement. She is weak with it. It is night now, and she is running with a crowd of smiling citizens along the edge of Jhour, to watch the crews come in from the winch-boats. She realizes that she is smiling, too. She does not know when that began.

Is it finished?

Is this how it ends?

The authority that kept Garwater in control, and which spread beyond that to assert its will on all Armada, is gone. It was so strong, so powerful, for so long, and now it has melted with a speed and a quiet that leave Bellis stunned. Where have they all gone? she wonders. The rulers have disappeared, and their integument of law and control, their yeomanry and their authority, have gone with them.

The rulers of the other ridings have wisely remained silent and hidden. It would not work for them to try to take control of this, this popular rage and exhilaration. They are not so stupid as to try. They are waiting.

All the fears and resentments and uncertainties, everything that has welled up in the citizens for weeks and months, the residue from every time they had doubts and said nothing: that is what powers this movement. This mutiny. Hedrigall’s extraordinary, improbable story has set them free, given them the certainty they needed.

They pull the city around.

There is no looting that Bellis can see, no violence, no fires or gunshots. This is about a single issue. This is about not dying, about escaping this dreadful sea alive. The avanc is still injured, but it is progressing, and Bellis can see the stars, and she knows that the beast is heading back toward the Swollen Ocean.

This is what she has wanted. Every mile that took her away from New Crobuzon was a defeat. She had tried everything to get the fucking city to turn, to take her back toward her home; and now, suddenly and utterly unexpectedly, she has succeeded.

How did this happen? she thinks, feeling as if she should be triumphant or proud, not like a bewildered, happy bystander.

She knows why she is troubled. She has questions and resentments. She remembers what she saw in Doul’s eyes. Used again, she thinks, aghast and wondering. Used again.

It is a complex chain of manipulation, what has been done to her. She cannot untangle it now. Now is not the time.

Flares, the pilots’ signals to the winch-boats, were set off in a big vulgar display. It was a celebration and a defiance—we do not need these anymore, the mutineers were saying.

There were men and women still out, in frenetic celebration, when the sky first lightened in the east.

Bellis stood on the Grand Easterly, near the entrance to the corridors where the Lovers’ quarters were. She had been waiting for some time. She remembered what the Lover had said: I will not ask you to come. Something was ending, and Bellis wanted to witness it.

There were others on the deck, mostly tired and drunk, singing and watching the sea, but they quieted when the Lover appeared on deck with Uther Doul beside her. There was a moment, an ugly moment, when the bystanders remembered their anger and something might have happened, but it went quickly.

The Lover carried packs that bulged oddly. She did not look at anyone but Doul. Bellis saw that one of the packs contained the perhapsadian, Doul’s weird instrument.

“This is all of it?” the Lover said, and Doul nodded.

“Everything I collected,” he said, “except my sword.” The Lover’s face was set. Calm and hard.

“Is the boat all ready?” she said, and Doul nodded.

They walked together, unmolested, watched by all the pirates, toward the Grand Easterly’s port side, and the streets that wound over a tight crush of vessels, and Basilio Harbor beyond.

Bellis kept looking back to the doorway. She expected the Lover to appear, to call his lover back or to run to her and tell her he would go, too, that nothing would part them, but he did not.

They had never been each other. They had never been doing the same thing. Perhaps it was only chance that they had traveled together so far.

At the edge of the Grand Easterly, the Lover stopped Uther Doul and turned for a last look at the ship. The sun was not yet up, but the sky was light, and Bellis could see the Lover’s face clear.

Cutting across it, scored over her right cheek from the hairline to her jaw, was a new wound. It glistened with a faint coating of salve like varnish. It was deep, and dark red, and it sliced straight through several of her other, older scars, as if it were brushing them aside.

Bellis never heard any stories about that last journey, which astonished her. In all the days and weeks that followed, when everyone was talking about the night of the mutiny, she never once heard about the Lover and Uther Doul moving sedately through a city tired and drunk on its rebellion.

She could imagine it, though. She saw them progressing sedately, the Lover sad and pensive, looking around her, memorizing the details of the city she had helped rule for so long. Hefting her pack, feeling the weight of all the books of arcane science, the tracts on possibility mining, the ancient machines that Doul had given her.

Doul beside her, his hand ready by his sword, to protect her in her last minutes in Armada. Was it necessary? Did he need to step in? Bellis heard no stories of him cutting Armadans down.

And was the Lover really alone?

It seemed hard to believe that after the years of her presence she would have no one ready to follow her. Her narrative logic was not the brutal mercantilism that drove Armada, but could it be alien to all its citizens? She could not have controlled a ship, even a small one, on her own. Bellis found it easier to imagine that as she walked through the city, she drew certain men and women out of their hiding places, that they sensed her passing and came to her. Alienated from their neighbors, impelled by other motivations, a gathering come out to drift in behind the Lover and Uther Doul, walking at her pace, themselves packed and ready to leave their city.

Romantics, storytellers, misfits, the suicidal and the mad. Bellis imagined them behind the Lover.

She could not help thinking that there was a small crew of them by the time the Lover emerged from below the eaves and crossed the deserted warehouses of the docks. She imagined that they must have joined the Lover on the deck of the prepared ship, helping her to stoke the engines, casting off, saying good-bye.

But Bellis did not know. The Lover might have gone alone.

All Bellis knew was that after almost an hour, with the sun very low and its light thick, a sail passed unmolested through the narrow entrance to Basilio Harbor and out into the sea. It was not large. Its deck was equipped with little cranes and winches and all manner of engines and boilers, the purposes of which Bellis had no idea of. It seemed well equipped and clean.

Bellis could not see it clearly. She was watching over the irregular contours of Armada’s roofs, all those flats and slopes in grey and red, slate, concrete, iron. She could just make out the vessel’s progress through oily morning sunlight, past the other vessels tied up carefully in the harbor, out through the gap in the city’s ship matter. She could see the woodsmoke it vented as the strong, strange currents of the Hidden Ocean took it away.

A little way from Bellis, the Lover was watching.

His eyes were so raw with tears it looked as though they had been rubbed with dust. And of course, his cheek had only its old scars.

The boat powered on. It moved with an undeviating speed that Bellis had never witnessed on the Hidden Ocean. Without fuss, without a fusillade of shots or fireworks, it headed north, directly away from the city, slipping into Armada’s wake and heading for the horizon, toward the Scar.

A long time after that, after it had disappeared from sight, Uther Doul came back to the Grand Easterly, alone.

Doul stood below the mast on which the Brucolac was crucified, the vampir’s early-morning shrieks beginning weakly with the sun.

“Cut him down,” said Uther Doul with authority to a nearby group of men and women. They looked up, startled, but did not question him. “Cut him down and take him home.”

And on that extraordinary morning, while the city felt its way toward new rules and nobody knew what was permissible or normal or acceptable or right, Uther Doul’s merciful order was obeyed.

Not the Lover anymore, thought Bellis suddenly. She stared out toward the horizon’s rim, where the little vessel had disappeared. She thought of the Lovers’ argument, and of the new wound—a newborn scar that tore across the Lover’s face, re-creating and separating her. You’re not the Lover anymore.

Bellis tried to reconceive of the Lover, out there at the helm of her ship, heading toward the most extraordinary place in the world. Bellis tried to rethink her, to be clear, to give credit or blame where it was due and think about the woman piloting that lost vessel toward the edge of the world according to no one’s plans or desires but her own.

But Bellis kept thinking of her as Lover Lover Lover, even as she tried not to.

She did not know the woman’s name.

Coda

Tanner Sack

It’s been bloody mad here. You’d never believe what I’ve been doing.

We ain’t heading for the Scar no more. We’re heading back for waters way back the way we came. We’re going back to how things were.

Strange. I put it like that, but I never knew this place when it wasn’t hankering for the Hidden Ocean. Neither did you. Everything that happened, it was all geared up to getting us out there. I’ve never lived here when it was just a pirate port.

Neither have you.

I’ve been spending time with your Angevine. I’ll be lying if I tell you we’re best friends. We’re a bit shy, you might say. But we see each other, and talk about you, mostly.

We were lied to, and we had enough, and they were risking our necks, dammit, so we made them turn back.

It doesn’t go away, that you’re gone.

I don’t live here anymore. I live nowhere. This place killed you.

I don’t know what it was, the things in that water. I know that what we fought in the water that night was no vampir. No one talks about them. No one knows what they were. Only that they helped to try to turn us.

Bastard John saw them. I see it in his little piggy eyes. But he says nothing.

It was me who turned the city. Those things, the things that took you, the vampir man who fought beside them, they failed.

I did the job for them. Turned us round.

I don’t know if that’s funny. I only know I don’t want to live here anymore, and I can’t go.

I’m a sea-thing now. It’s a bad joke. We both know what real sea-things are, how they move, how fast. Not like me, heavy clumsily stolen fins flapping, slimy sweating, Remade.

And I’m scared, now. I put myself in the sea I sweat. Now every little blenny looks like one of the things that took you.

But I can’t live in the air now. I ain’t got that option no more.

What’ll I do? I can’t go back to New Crobuzon, and if I could I’d rot, without brine.

I’ll make myself swim. It’ll get easier again. I’ll get it done.

They can’t hold me. I can leave. Maybe we’ll go near some coast one day, and there I’ll slip away. There I’ll go and live alone in the shallows so I can see rock under me, where trees and scree meet in the water. I can live there alone. I’ve had enough of it, I tell you.

I ain’t got nothing. I’ve got nothing.

In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.

I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.

I can’t say good-bye.

Dustday 2nd Tathis, 1780. Armada.

The avanc is slowing again, one final time.

It is still wounded from the grindylow’s abuse. Whatever they did to it has not healed, not scarred, but remains raw and unpleasant. We pass from time to time by messes of its pus again.

Its heart, I think, is winding down.

We all know that the avanc is dying.

Perhaps it is looking for its home. Perhaps it is trying to find its way back to the universe of lightless brine from where we fished it. And all the time it grows ill, and weak, its blood thickening, decaying and clotting, its great flukes moving more slowly.

Never mind. We are very close to the edge of the Hidden Ocean. We will emerge soon—any day, perhaps within hours—and there the Armadan fleet will be waiting. The avanc will live till then.

The day is close, though, when the city will come to a final stop.

We will be stranded, attached to an organic anchor, millions of tons of corpse rotting on the floor of the abyss.

Five chains, five links to sever. For each link, two cuts. Each link many feet thick, and thaumaturgically tempered. It will take some time, but eventually, one by one, the miles of metal will fall free.

What a catastrophe that will be, to the bottom dwellers—like divine anger. Tons of metal falling, accelerating, through four, five miles, eventually to slam into the ooze at the sea’s bottom, cutting through to the rock below. Landing across the poor avanc’s corpse, perhaps, bursting it open, its miles of intestines littering the dark mud.

Perhaps in time whole ecosystems will evolve around that unprecedented richness.

We will be gone.

We will have reached the fleet, and they will reattach themselves, and Armada will be as it was. There will be less vessels to drag it, of course, after the carnage of the Crobuzoner War, but the city will have shed countless thousands of tons of chain. It will balance.

Armada will be as it was.

Back across the Swollen Ocean, back toward the richest shipping lanes, back toward the ports and traders. The Armadan pirates who have waited for months, tracking the city with strange devices, will find it again. We will go back toward the Gentleman’s Sea, the Hebdomad, Gnurr Kett, the Basilisk Channel.

Back toward New Crobuzon.

It has been a month since the woman left, whose name I did not know. Things have changed.

It did not take long for the mutineers to relinquish control. They had no program, no party. They were only ever a disparate group who found out they had been lied to, who did not want to die. They snatched power in an anarchic and momentary coup, and gave it up easily.

Within days, the Lover reemerged. He came out of the Grand Easterly and issued orders. People were glad to carry them out. No one has a quarrel with him.

He is lost, though. Everyone knows it. His eyes do not focus, and his orders are vague. Uther Doul whispers to him carefully, and the Lover will nod and issue some meaningful command, Doul’s words through the Lover’s mouth.

Doul will not allow that to continue. He is a mercenary: he works for money; he sells his loyalty. If he must have control, I do not believe he wants it to be so unsubtle. If he rules, he hides it, for the freedom of paid subordinance. I have learnt that, if nothing else.

I do not know what happened to him, to make him flinch from naked power so much.

I have never met a more complicated man, or, I suspect, a more tragic one. His own history planted the ideas that brought us all here, so far from what he himself sought in Armada. It is hard to tell what in him has been intent, and what reaction. I cannot believe that this is satisfactory for him: that he looks at his position, and that of the Lover, and he nods, and says, “This is what I wanted.”

Either he spends his life in control of everything, or in panicked fear. Either he has planned everything to a dizzying degree, or he moves us all desperately from crisis to crisis, not knowing what he wants, showing nothing on his face.

The Lover keeps his dead gaze on the horizon. Although at the end, the woman was despised and feared as a liar, she was never pathetic, and her erstwhile lover has become so. I suspect that he will not survive this. Perhaps one day he will discover that Doul is no longer at his side. Especially now that the Brucolac controls Dry Fall again.

Few actually saw the grindylow, and fewer talk about it. It is only I who cannot forget them.

I have seen the Brucolac at night. He walks free.

He is sun-scarred, and will always be. He is subdued. Carrianne talks of him with an austere kind of affection. His citizens have rallied to him, and most others were fast to forgive him—even those who lost lovers on the night he rebelled. After all, he led his cadre against Garwater because he said we must turn the city around. And he was right, and that has now been done.

There is no war between Dry Fall and Garwater. Doul visits the Brucolac, at night, on the Uroc, Carrianne tells me.

I spend many of my days with Carrianne. She is quiet about her one-time support for the Lovers’ project. For almost a fortnight she did not speak much at all. Perhaps she was ashamed, to have found herself on the side of that woman who was so ready to lie, to lead us to our deaths.

That is the accepted story, apparently. We believe what the returned Hedrigall said. That is what people believe; that is why the city was turned.

Tanner Sack and I—we see each other, from time to time. He has begun to work again, under the city. He never mentions the time I took him to the little room and spurred a rebellion.

Did I do that?

Was this mutiny my doing? This city heading southward again, toward the waters we have passed through before, to the places that mean something to me—was this my doing?

And does that mean that I have won?

Perhaps she made it safely, the woman, and moored herself at the water’s rim, and lowered her equipment into the chasm and extracted all the energies she needed, and is now as powerful as a god.

Perhaps she fell in.

Perhaps there was nothing to fall into.

Hedrigall is ill, delirious from his ordeal, we are told, somewhere in the innards of the Grand Easterly. When I hear that I think: we were not told the truth.

The woman was right. What kind of stupid, idiot coincidence would we have to believe—what chain of unlikeliness—to think that our Hedrigall leaves, and in a nigh-world another stays, and is lost—and found again, in the whole of the sea, by us. We have not been told the truth.

I remember the look Doul gave me.

He looked for me and found me, on the Grand Easterly, and told me with his eyes to come, listen, and finish this. He told me so much with that glance, and left so much unexplained. So much was clear: What he had done. His games, his manipulations.

I picture him, meeting with Hedrigall, the loyal cactus-man frightened and appalled by the Lovers’ plan. Doul, making his suggestions. Hiding Hedrigall somewhere secret and quiet. Slipping out silently as only he could move, cutting the Arrogance free; bringing Hedrigall out again, later, to terrify the populace with his stories of canyons in the sea. So that Doul would have to say nothing. Safe in his loyalty.

Or perhaps it was Fennec who suggested that Hedrigall hide: a plan in case the Crobuzoner rescue failed to turn us back to home waters.

But I saw Doul’s look. If all this was Fennec’s doing, then Doul knew of it, and helped it run.

I think of all the times that Doul told me things, and hinted to me, letting me know where we would go, what we would do. Knowing that I knew Silas Fennec, Simon Fench, knowing that I would spread the word to him. Angry only when I spread the wrong sedition.

Spending time with me, and bringing me close. I came close. Using me as a conduit.

I am agog with how much he knew, and watched. I wish I could know when it started—whether I have been used for many, many months, or only in the final days. I do not know how much of what Doul does is strategy, and how much is recoil. Certainly he has known far, far more than I had thought.

I am left uncertain of how much I was used.

There is another possibility. It disturbs me.

I have heard again and again, from many people, many times, that this Hedrigall is not quite the same as ours. His manner is different, his voice more hesitant. His face, they say, is more—or perhaps less—scarred. He is a refugee from another world. People believe that.

It is possible. It is possible that he told us the truth.

But even so, it could not be luck alone. I saw Doul: he was waiting for this Hedrigall, and for me. So it cannot be chance that this Hedrigall came. There is another explanation.

Maybe it was Doul’s doing. I heard music. Maybe this was Doul, playing possibilities, making a concerto of likelihood and unlikelihood.

Did he play his perhapsadian at night, as we approached the Scar, as the possible worlds around us grew more intrusive? Finding the one where Hedrigall survived, pulling him out of it, pulling him here to be found?

Such a tenuous chain: that I would be there with someone who would be believed, that Doul could find me with his eyes. So many chances: Doul must be the luckiest man in Bas-Lag. Or he planned the unplannable. Preparing me for that moment.

Could he play possibilities like a virtuoso, making sure the one that occurred was the one that had me there, beside Tanner, watching and listening as Hedrigall arrived, ready?

And what if fact-Bellis would not be there at that time? Did he bring out another? Bring out me? The one who would be in the right place at the right time, for his plans?

Am I a nigh-Bellis?

And if I am, what happened to the other? The fact?

Did he kill her? Is her body floating somewhere, rotting and eaten? Am I a replacement? Pulled through into existence to replace a dead woman—to be where Doul needed her to be?

All that so that he could turn the city around, and never come forward. Was this the only way? He would do all this to have his way, and to seem to have no will at all.

I will never be certain of what happened, of exactly how and how much, amid all the chaos and the blood and fighting, I was used.

That I was used, I have no doubt.

Doul has no interest in me now.

All the time we were together, he was playing me, making me his agent to turn the city around, so that it was not him that did it. A loyal mercenary, making the city merely pirate again.

Now that I have done what I was required to do, I am less than nothing to him.

It is strange to find yourself a game piece. I am humbled by him, but I am too old to be wounded by betrayal.

Still, twice now I have tried to see him, to understand what it was he did. Twice I have knocked and had him open the door to me, and stare at me unspeaking as if I am a stranger. And both times my words have gone sour in my mouth.

There is no “it,” I remember Silas Fennec scolding me.

It is probably the best advice.

Right now, there are a small handful of possibilities that can explain what happened. Any of them might be true. And if Doul were to claim innocence of all of them, I would have less to make sense with, less than I have now. I would have to contemplate the possibility that there was no plan—that there is nothing to be explained.

Why would I risk that? Why in the world would I relinquish what understandings I have?

Tanner Sack came to my rooms. Angevine waited for him below on the Chromolith’s deck. Her treads could not take my stairs.

I am sure that they are a comfort to each other. But what I heard between them was uncertain and careful, and I think they will move apart. Sharing loss, I suspect, will not be enough.

Tanner brought me a heliotype he had found: of Shekel, holding two books, grinning outside the library. Tanner has decided that everything to do with Shekel and books is mine. I am embarrassed. I don’t know how to tell him to stop.

After he left, I looked at the sepia scrap he had left me. It was not a good print. Vague suggestions of architecture and biology burnt onto the paper, scarring it. Wounding it and healing it in a new configuration. Scars are memory.

I carry my memories of Armada on my back.

I took the dressings off some weeks ago, and with angled mirrors I have seen what Garwater has written on me. It is a breathtakingly ugly message, in a brutal script.

Contours ridge my back, lines stretched horizontal across it, roughly parallel, where the whip landed. They seem to emerge from one side of my back, break my skin, and descend on the other.

Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

I look at them with wonder. It is as if they are nothing to do with me. Armada is sewn fast onto my back, and I know that I will carry it with me everywhere.

So many truths have been kept from me. This violent, pointless voyage has been sopping with blood. I feel thick and sick with it. And that is all: contingent and brutal without meaning. There is nothing to be learnt here. No ecstatic forgetting. There is no redemption in the sea.

Carrying it on my back, I will take Armada home with me.

Home.

The second time Doul found me at his door, he must have seen something in my face. He nodded once and then spoke.

He said: “Enough is enough. We will take you back.”

Back again.

I was stunned. I bowed my head, nodded, and thanked him.

He gave me that. And not for any residue of what he once pretended was between us.

He is rewarding me. He is paying me.

For the jobs I have done. Since he has used me.

Doul passed messages to Fennec through me, for Fennec to give the city. But Fennec did the wrong thing, and the Lovers outmaneuvered us all by telling the truth. So Doul found other uses for me.

And now he will take me home. Not for warmth or out of justice. He is offering me a wage.

I will accept.

He is not stupid. He knows that nothing I could do in New Crobuzon could undermine or threaten Armada in any way. I would not be listened to if I tried to tell Parliament, and why would I do that, renegade that I am?

Eventually there will be a ship charged to rob the Basilisk Channel. And I will be on it. I will be taken on some tiny boat, perhaps, dropped in that ugly port Qé Banssa that I saw from the Terpsichoria’s deck. And I will wait there until a New Crobuzon ship appears, heading home for Iron Bay and the Gross Tar, and the city.

Uther Doul will not deny me that. It costs him nothing.

It is many months since we left Iron Bay. By the time we are dragged back again, it will be much more than a year. I will take another name.

The Terpsichoria is lost. There is no reason for the city to chase Bellis Coldwine anymore. And even if some interfering swine back in New Crobuzon were to remember, were to recognize me and pass information on to some uniformed bastard, I have had enough of running. And I cannot find it in me to believe they will. That part of my life is over. This is a new time.

After all that has happened—after all my frantic, fruitless efforts to escape—I find that quite unwittingly I have done what was necessary for me to go home, carrying the memories of Armada stitched to my flesh.

I am surprised to find myself writing this letter to you again. Once I told Uther Doul the truth about it, I felt that it was closed to me.

Hearing myself admit it, I felt like a lonely child. Was there anything more pathetic than these scraps of paper that I was so eager to post, not even having decided yet to whom they would go?

I put them away, then.

But this is a new chapter. The city is going back in time, readying itself to start again with its simple piracy in the rich shores near my home. Everything has changed, and I find myself trembling, excited, biding my time, eager to finish this letter.

It does not embarrass me. I am opened up by it.

This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,” all those sheets and months ago, this is a Possible Letter, pregnant with potentiality. I am very powerful right now. I am all ready to mine the possibilities, make one of them fact.

I have not been the best friend to you, and I need you to forgive me that. I think back to my friends in New Crobuzon, and I wonder which of them you are to be.

And if I want this letter to be a remembrance, to be something with which to say good-bye instead of hello again, then you will be Carrianne. You are my dear friend, if that is so, and the fact that I did not know you when I started to write you this letter means nothing. This is a Possible Letter, after all.

Whoever you are, I have not been the best friend to you, and I am sorry.

Now we approach the fleet that is ranged just beyond the waters of the Hidden Ocean, like a phalanx of anxious guards, and I write this letter to you, to tell you everything that has happened to me. And as I tell you, I come to understand that I have been manipulated, used at every step of the way, that even when I was not a translator, I passed on others’ messages. I find myself detached from such knowledge.

It is not that I do not care. Not that I am not angry at being used, or, gods and Jabber help me, for the awful, brute times I was used to bring about.

But even when I spoke for others (wittingly or not), I was doing things for myself. I have been present throughout all this, my own fact. And besides, as I sit here, ten thousand miles from New Crobuzon, on the other side of foreign seas, I know that we are heading slowly home. And though sadness and the guilt are stitched indelibly to me with my scars, two things are clear.

The first is that everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me. And I feel, for all that has happened, as if it is now, only now in these days, that my journey is beginning. I feel as if this—even all this—has been a prologue.

The other is that all my anxiety to send this letter off, to get it to someone—to you—to cut a little mark upon New Crobuzon, all that neurotic eagerness has blown away. The desperation I had, in Tarmuth, in Salkrikaltor, to post this, to decide at the last minute who you were and send it, so that I might be noted, all that frantic fear is gone.

It has become nothing. It is not necessary anymore.

I am coming home. I will amass much more to tell you on the return journey, which will be long, but will end. I do not need this letter delivered. Whoever I decide you are, dear friend, I will give it to you myself.

I will deliver it by hand.

CHINA MIÉVILLE was born in London in 1972. When he was eighteen, he lived and taught English in Egypt, where he developed an interest in Arab culture and Middle Eastern politics. Miéville has a B.A. in social anthropology from Cambridge and a master’s with distinction from the London School of Economics. He is also the author of King Rat, which was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the Bram Stoker Award. Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award. He lives in England.

It is a time of revolts and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming metropolis to the brink. In the midst of this turmoil, a mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places.

In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope, an undying legend.

In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the Iron Council…

China Miéville

Iron Council

Bas-Lag (EN) 3

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 27.04.2025

Original title: Iron Council

China Miéville, 2004

Cover design: David Stevenson and Carl D. Galian

Cover photograph: Robert Llewellyn/SuperStock

Digital editor: Titivillus

ePub base r2.1

To Jemima, my sister

Erect portable moving monuments on the platforms of trains.

—VELIMIR KHLEBNIKOV, Proposals

Acknowledgments

For all their help with this book, I owe my deepest gratitude to Emma Bircham, Mark Bould, Andrew Butler, Mic Cheetham, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Claudia Lightfoot, Farah Mendelsohn, Jemima Miéville, Gillian Redfearn, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, and Jesse Soodalter. Huge thanks also to Nick Mamatas and Mehitobel Wilson, and to everyone at Macmillan and Del Rey for all their work.

Though as always I am indebted to countless writers, for this book I must especially thank William Durbin, John Ehle, Jane Gaskell, Zane Grey, Sembène Ousmane, Tim Powers, T. F. Powys, and Frank Spearman.

In years gone, women and men are cutting a line across the dirtland and dragging history with them. They are still, with fight-shouts setting their mouths. They are in rough and trenches of rock, in forests, in scrub, brick shadows. They are always coming.

And in years long gone someone stands on a knuckle of granite, a clenched-up mountain fist. Trees cover the peak as if a spume of forest has settled. He is above a green world while feathered and tough-skinned fauna speck the air below him and pay no mind.

Up past pillars of batholith is the path he has made, and abutting it tarpaulin bivouacs. There are men and fire, little neutered cousin to the conflagrations that fertilize woodlands.

The man apart is in wind that frosts this old moment in place forever while breath cold-congeals on his beard. He consults mercury sluggish in its glass, a barometer and inch-marked cord. He locates himself and the men with him above the belly of the world and in a mountain autumn.

They have ascended. Columns of men have faltered against gravity, tight-knotted dangling in the lee of silicate walls and corners. Servants of their equipment, they have carried the brass, wood and glass oddments like dumb nabobs across the world.

The man apart breathes in the moment long gone, listens to the coughs of mountain animals, the beat of jostling trees. Where ravines are he has plumbed lines to bring them to order and know them, has marked them and annotated his drawings, and learning the parameters of the peneplain or open-sided corries, the tributary canyons, creeks, rivers and fern-scruffed pampas, he has made them beautiful. Where pines or ash are tethered and he notes the radius of a curve, the land humbles him.

Cold takes six of his men and leaves them white and hard in make-do graves. Githwings rinse the party with blood, and bears and tenebrae leave them depleted and men broken and crying unfound in darkness and mules fall and excavations fail and there are drownings and indigens who trustlessly murder but those are all other moments. In this long-gone time there is only a man above the trees. West, mountains block his way, but in this moment they are miles yet.

Only wind speaks to him, but he knows his name is raised in abuse and respect. His wake is disputation. In the built hilltops of his city his endeavours split families. Some say they speak for gods and that he is proud. He is an insult on the world’s face and his plans and route are an abomination.

The man watches night colonise. (It is a long time since this moment.) He watches the spits of shadows, and before he hears the tin clatter of his men at supper or smells the cooked rock vermin he will eat with them, there is only he and the mountain and the night and his books with renderings of everything he has seen and measurements of these disinterested heights and his want.

He smiles not cunning nor sated nor secure, but in joy because he knows his plans are holy.

Part One:

Trappings

Chapter One

A man runs. Pushes through thin bark-and-leaf walls, through the purposeless rooms of Rudewood. The trees crowd him.

This far in the forest there are aboriginal noises. The canopy rocks. The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun. He is trying to follow a trail.

Just before dark he found his place. Dim hotchi paths led him to a basin ringed by roots and stone-packed soil. Trees gave out. The earth was tramped down and stained with scorching and blood. The man spread out his pack and blanket, a few books and clothes. He laid down something well-wrapped and heavy among loam and centipedes.

Rudewood was cold. The man built a fire, and with it so close the darkness shut him quite out, but he stared into it as if he might see something emergent. Things came close. There were constant bits of sound like the bronchial call of a nightbird or the breath and shucking of some unseen predator. The man was wary. He had pistol and rifle, and one at least was always in his hand.

By flamelight he saw hours pass. Sleep took him and led him away again in little gusts. Each time he woke he breathed as if coming out of water. He was stricken. Sadness and anger went across his face.

“I’ll come find you,” he said.

He did not notice the moment of dawn, only that time skidded again and he could see the edges of the clearing. He moved like he was made of twigs, as if he had stored up the night’s damp cold. Chewing on dry meat, he listened to the forest’s shuffling and paced the dirt depression.

When finally he heard voices he flattened against the bank and looked out between the trunks. Three people approached on the paths of leaf-mould and forest debris. The man watched them, his rifle steadied. When they trudged into thicker shanks of light, he saw them clearly and let his rifle fall.

“Here,” he shouted. They dropped foolishly and looked for him. He raised his hand above the earth rise.

They were a woman and two men, dressed in clothes more ill-suited to Rudewood than his own. They stood before him in the arena and smiled. “Cutter.” They gripped arms and slapped his back.

“I heard you for yards. What if you was followed? Who else is coming?”

They did not know. “We got your message,” the smaller man said. He spoke fast and looked about him. “I went and seen. We were arguing. The others were saying, you know, we should stay. You know what they said.”

“Yeah, Drey. Said I’m mad.”

“Not you.”

They did not look at him. The woman sat, her skirt filling with air. She was breathing fast with anxiety. She bit her nails.

“Thank you. For coming.” They nodded or shook Cutter’s gratitude off: it sounded strange to him, and he was sure to them too. He tried not to make it sound like his sardonic norm. “It means a lot.”

They waited in the sunken ground, scratched motifs in the earth or carved figures from dead wood. There was too much to say.

“So they told you not to come?”

The woman, Elsie, told him no, not so much, not in those words, but the Caucus had been dismissive of Cutter’s call. She looked up at him and down quickly as she spoke. He nodded, and did not criticise.

“Are you sure about this?” he said, and would not accept their desultory nods. “Godsdammit are you sure? Turn your back on the Caucus? You ready to do that? For him? It’s a long way we’ve got to go.”

“We already come miles in Rudewood,” said Pomeroy.

“There’s hundreds more. Hundreds. It’ll be bastard hard. A long time. I can’t swear we’ll come back.”

I can’t swear we’ll come back.

Pomeroy said, “Only tell me again your message was true. Tell me again he’s gone, and where he’s gone and what for. Tell me that’s true.” The big man glowered and waited, and at Cutter’s brief nod and closed eyes, he said, “Well then.”

Others arrived then. First another woman, Ihona; and then as they welcomed her they heard stick-litter being destroyed in heavy leaps, and a vodyanoi came through the brush. He squatted in the froggish way of his race and raised webbed hands. When he jumped from the bank, his body—head and trunk all one fat sac—rippled with impact. Fejhechrillen was besmirched and tired, his motion ill-suited to woodland.

They were anxious, not knowing how long they should wait, if any others would come. Cutter kept asking how they had heard his message. He made them unhappy. They did not want to consider their decision to join him: they knew there were many who would think it a betrayal.

“He’ll be grateful,” Cutter said. “He’s a funny bugger and might be he’ll not show it, but this’ll mean a lot, to me and to him.”

After silence Elsie said: “You don’t know that. He didn’t ask us, Cutter. He just got some message, you said. He might be angry that we’ve come.”

Cutter could not tell her she was wrong. Instead he said: “I don’t see you leaving, though. We’re here for us, maybe, as well as for him.”

He began to tell them what might be ahead, emphasising dangers. It seemed as if he wanted to dissuade them though they knew he did not. Drey argued with him in a rapid and nervy voice. He assured Cutter they understood. Cutter saw him persuading himself, and was silent. Drey said repeatedly that his mind was made up.

“We best move,” said Elsie, when noon went. “We can’t wait forever. Anyone else is coming, they’ve obviously got lost. They’ll have to go back to the Caucus, do what’s needed in the city.” Someone gave a little cry and the company turned.

At the hollow’s edge a hotchi rider was watching them, astride his gallus. The big war-cockerel plumped its breastfeathers and raised one spurred claw-foot in curious pose. The hotchi, squat and tough hedgehog man, stroked his mount’s red comb.

“Militia coming.” His accent was strong and snarling. “Two men militia coming, a minute, two.” He sat forward in the ornate saddle and turned his bird around. With very little sound, with no metal to jangle on wood-and-leather straps and stirrups, it picked away high-clawed and belligerent, and was hidden by the forest.

“Was that—?” “What—?” “Did you fucking—?”

But Cutter and his companions were shushed by the sound of approach. They looked in unsaid panic, too late to hide.

Two men came stepping over fungused stumps into view. They were masked and uniformed in the militia’s dark grey. Each had a mirrored shield and ungainly pepperpot revolver slack at his side. As they came into the clearing they faltered and were still, taking in the men and women waiting for them.

There was a dragged-out second when no one moved, when befuddled and silent conference was held—are you, are they, what, should we, should we—?—till someone shot. Then there were a spate of sounds, screams and the percussion of shots. People fell. Cutter could not follow who was where and was gut-terrified that he had been hit and not yet felt it. When the guns’ heinous syncopation stopped, he unclenched his jaw.

Someone was calling Oh gods oh fucking gods. It was a militiaman, sitting bleeding from a belly-wound beside his dead friend and trying to hold his heavy pistol up. Cutter heard the curt torn-cloth sound of archery and the militia man lay back with an arrow in him and stopped his noise.

Again a beat of silence then “Jabber—” “Are you, is everyone—?” “Drey? Pomeroy?”

First Cutter thought none of his own were hit. Then he saw how Drey was white and held his shoulder, and that blood dyed his palsying hands.

“Sweet Jabber, man.” Cutter made Drey sit (Is it all right? the little man kept saying.) Bullet had taken muscle. Cutter tore strips from Drey’s shirt, and wound those cleanest around the hole. The pain made Drey fight, and Pomeroy and Fejh had to hold him. They gave him a thumb-thick branch to bite while they bandaged him.

“They must’ve fucking followed you, you halfwit bastards.” Cutter was raging while he worked. “I told you to be fucking careful—”

“We were,” Pomeroy shouted, jabbing his finger at Cutter.

“Didn’t follow them.” The hotchi reappeared, its rooster picking. “Them patrol the pits. You been here long time, a day nearly.” It dismounted and walked the rim of the arena. “You been too long.”

It showed the teeth in its snout in some opaque expression. Lower than Cutter’s chest but rotundly muscular, it strutted like a bigger man. By the militia it stopped and sniffed. It sat up the one killed by its arrow and began to push the missile through the body.

“When them don’t come back, them send more,” it said. “Them come after you. Maybe now.” It steered the arrow past bones through the dead chest. It gripped the shaft when it came out the corpse’s back, and pulled the fletch through with a wet sound. The hotchi tucked it bloody into his belt, picked the revolving pistol from the militiaman’s stiffening fingers and fired it against the hole.

Birds rose up again at the shot. The hotchi snarled with the unfamiliar recoil and shook its hand. The arrow’s fingerthick burrow had become a cavity.

Pomeroy said: “Godspit . . . who in hell are you?”

“Hotchi man. Cock-fighting man. Alectryomach. Help you.”

“Your tribe . . .” said Cutter. “They’re with us? On our side? Some of the hotchi are with the Caucus,” he said to the others. “That’s why this place’s all right. Or was supposed to be. This lad’s clan got no time for the militia. Give us passage. But . . . can’t risk a real fight with the city, so they’ve to make it look like it was us killed the officers, not their arrows.” He understood as he said it.

Pomeroy and the hotchi rifled the killed men together. Pomeroy threw one of the pepperpot revolvers to Elsie, one to Cutter. It was modernistic and expensive and Cutter had never held one before. It was heavy, with its six barrels arranged in a fat rotating cylinder.

“They ain’t reliable,” said Pomeroy, harvesting bullets. “Fast, though.”

“Jabber . . . we better fucking go.” Drey’s voice went up and down with pain. “Fucking guns going off going to call them for miles . . .”

“Not so many nearby,” said the hotchi. “Maybe none to hear. But you should gone, yes. What you for? Why leave city? You looking for him come by on the clay man?”

Cutter looked to the others and they watched him carefully, letting him speak.

He said: “You seen him?” He stepped toward the busy hotchi. “You seen him?”

“I not seen him, but I know them as has. Some days, week or more gone. Man come through the wood on a grey giant. Running through. The militia come after.”

The light of afternoon came down to them all and the forest animals began to make their noises again. Cutter was locked in by miles of trees. He opened his mouth more than once before he spoke.

Cutter said: “Militia followed him?”

“On Remade horses. I heard.”

On Remade horses with hammered metal hoofs, or with tiger’s claws or with a tail prehensile and coated in poison glands. With steam-pistons giving their legs ridiculous strength or with stamina from a boiler-excrescence behind the saddle. Made carnivorous and long-tusked. Wolf-horses or boar-horses, construct-horses.

“I didn’t see,” said the hotchi. He mounted his cockerel. “Them went after the clay-man rider, south in Rudewood. You best go. Fast now.” He turned his fight-bird and pointed a smoke-brown finger. “Stay careful. This is Rudewood. Go now.”

He spurred his gallus into the undergrowth and dense trunks. “Go,” he shouted, already invisible.

“Damn,” said Cutter. “Come on.” They gathered their little camp. Pomeroy took Drey’s pack as well as his own, and the six of them went up out of the cock-fighting pit and into the forest.

They went southwest by Cutter’s compass, along the path the hotchi had taken. “He showed us the way,” Cutter said. His comrades waited for him to guide them. They drove between rootmasses and blockages of flora, changing whatever they passed. Quickly Cutter’s tiredness was so profound it was an astonishing, alien sensation.

When they noticed darkness they fell where they were, in a pause between trees. They spoke in puny voices, affected by the undertones of the wood. It was too late to hunt: they could only pull biltong and bread from their packs and make weak jokes about what good food it was.

By their little fire Cutter could see that Fejh was drying. They did not know where there was any freshwater, and Fejh poured only a little of what they had on himself though his big tongue rolled for it. He was panting. “I’ll be all right, Cutter,” he said, and the man patted his cheek.

Drey was paper-white and whispering to himself. Seeing how blood had stiffened his sling, Cutter could not imagine how he had kept going. Cutter murmured his fears to Pomeroy, but they could not turn back and Drey could not make the return on his own. He stained the ground below him.

While Drey slept, the others pulled around the fire and told quiet stories of the man they were following. Each of them had reasons for answering Cutter’s call.

For Ihona the man they sought had been the first person in the Caucus who had seemed distracted, who reminded her of herself. His unworldliness, the quality that some mistrusted, made her feel there was room for imperfection in the movement: that she could be part of it. She smiled beautifully to remember it. Fejh, in turn, had taught him as part of some investigation of vodyanoi shamanism, and had been moved by his fascination. Cutter knew they loved the man they followed. Of the hundreds of the Caucus, it was no surprise that six loved him.

Pomeroy said it aloud: “I love him. It ain’t why I’m here, though.” He spoke in terse little bursts. “Times are too big for that. I’m here because of where he’s going, Cutter, because of what he’s after. And what’s coming after that. That’s why I’m here. Because of what was in your message. Not because he’s gone—because of where he’s gone, and why. That’s worth everything.”

No one asked Cutter why he was there. When it came to his turn, they looked down and said nothing while he studied the fire.

A war-bird woke them, wattle rippling, blaring a cock’s crow. They were stunned by their uncivil wakening. A hotchi on his mount watched them, threw them a dead forest fowl as they rose. He pointed eastward through the trees and disappeared in the green light.

They stumbled in the direction indicated through underbrush and the morning forest. Sunlight flecked them. It was warm spring, and Rudewood became dank and heated. Cutter’s clothes were sweat-heavy. He watched Fejh and Drey.

Fejh was stolid as he moved by kicks of his hind legs, by lurches. Drey kept pace, though it seemed impossible. He leaked through his leather and did not scatter the flies that came to taste him. Blooded and white, Drey looked like an old meat-cut. Cutter waited for him to show pain or fear, but Drey only murmured to himself, and Cutter was humbled.

The simplicity of the forest stupefied them. “Where we going?” someone said to Cutter. Don’t ask me that.

In the evening they followed a lovely sound and found a burn overhung by ivy. They hallooed and drank from it like happy animals.

Fejh sat in it and it rilled where it hit him. When he swam, his lubberly motion became suddenly graceful. He brought up handfuls and moulded with vodyanoi watercræft: like dough the water kept the shapes he gave it, coarse figurines shaped like dogs. He put them on the grass, where over an hour they sagged like candles and ran into the earth.

The next morning Drey’s hurt was going bad. They waited when his fever made him pause, but they had to move. The treelife changed, was mongrel. They went by darkwood and oak, under banyan hirsute with ropy plaits that dangled and became roots.

Rudewood teemed. Birds and ape-things in the canopy spent the morning screaming. In a zone of dead, bleached trees, an ursine thing, unclear and engorged with changing shapes and colours, reeled out of the brush toward them. They screamed, except Pomeroy who fired into the creature’s chest. With a soft explosion it burst into scores of birds and hundreds of bottleglass flies, which circled them in the air and recongealed beyond them as the beast. It shuffled from them. Now they could see the feathers and wing cases that made up its pelt.

“I been in these woods before,” said Pomeroy. “I know what a throng-bear looks like.”

“We must be far enough now,” said Cutter, and they bore westward while twilight came and left them behind. They walked behind a hooded lantern hammered by moths. The barkscape swallowed the light.

After midnight, they passed through low shinnery and out of the forest.

And for three days they were in the Mendican Foothills, rock tors and drumlins flecked with trees. They walked the routes of long-gone glaciers. The city was only tens of miles away. Its canals almost reached them. Sometimes through saddles in the landscape they saw real mountains far west and north, of which these hills were only dregs.

They drank and cleaned in tarns. They were slowing, pulling Drey. He could not move his arm and he looked bled out. He would not complain. It was the first time Cutter had ever seen him brave.

There were insinuations of paths, and they followed them south through grass and flowers. Pomeroy and Elsie shot rock rabbits and roasted them, stuffed with herb-weeds.

“How we going to find him?” Fejh said. “Whole continent to search.”

“I know his route.”

“But Cutter, it’s a whole continent . . .”

“He’ll leave signs. Wherever he goes. He’ll leave a trail. You can’t not.”

No one spoke a while.

“How’d he know to leave?”

“He got a message. Some old contact is all I know.”

Cutter saw fences reclaimed by weather, where farms had once been. The foundations of homesteads in angles of stone. Rudewood was east, weald broken with outcrops of dolomite. Once, protruding from the leaves, there were the remnants of ancient industry, smokestacks or pistons.

On the sixth day, Fishday, the 17th of Chet 1805, they reached a village.

In Rudewood there was a muttering of displaced air below the owl and monkey calls. It was not loud but the animals in its path looked up with the panic of prey. The empty way between trees, by overhangs of clay, was laced by the moon. The tree-limbs did not move.

Through the night shadows came a man. He wore a black-blue suit. His hands were in his pockets. Stems of moonlight touched his polished shoes, which moved at head-height above the roots. The man passed, his body poised, standing upright in the air. As he came hanging by arcane suspension between the canopy and the dark forest floor the sound came with him, as if space were moaning at his violation.

He was expressionless. Something scuttled across him, in and out of the shadow, in the folds of his clothes. A monkey, clinging to him as if he were its mother. It was disfigured by something on its chest, a growth that twitched and tensed.

In the weak shine the man and his passenger entered the bowl where the hotchi came to fight. They hung over the arena. They looked at the militiamen dead, mottled with rot.

The little ape dangled from the man’s shoes, dropped to the corpses. Its adroit little fingers examined. It leapt back to the dangling legs and chittered.

They were as silent for a while as the rest of the night, the man knuckling his lips thoughtfully, turning in a sedate pirouette, the monkey on his shoulder looking into the dead-black forest. Then they were in motion again, between the trees with the fraught sound of their passing, through bracken torn days before. After they had gone, the animals of Rudewood came out again. But they were anxious, and remained so the rest of that night.

Chapter Two

The village had no name. The farmers seemed to Cutter mean as well as poor. They took money for food with a bad grace. If they had healers they denied it. Cutter could do nothing but let Drey sleep.

“We have to get to Myrshock,” Cutter said. The villagers stared in ignorance, and he set his teeth. “It’s not the fucking moon,” he said.

“I can take you to the pig-town,” said one man at last. “We need butter and pork. Four days’ drive south.”

“Still gives us, what, four hundred miles to Myrshock, for Jabber’s sake,” said Ihona.

“We’ve no choice. And this pig place must be bigger, maybe they can get us farther. Why ain’t you got pigs here?”

The villagers glanced at each other.

“Raiders,” said one. “That’s how you can help,” said another. “Protect the cart with them guns. You can get us to pig-town. It’s a market. Traders from all over. They’ve airships, can help you.”

“Raiders?”

“Aye. Bandits. FReemade.”

Two scrawny horses pulled a wagon, whipped on by village men. Cutter and his companions sat in the cart, among thin vegetables and trinkets. Drey lay and sweated. His arm smelt very bad. The others held their weapons visible, uneasy and ostentatious.

The rig jarred along vague paths as the Mendicans gave way to grassland. For two days they went through sage and greenery, between boulders overhanging like canalside warehouses. Rock took sunset like a red tattoo.

They watched for air-corsairs. Fejh took brief visits to the waterways they passed.

“Too slow.” Cutter spoke to himself, but the others heard him. “Too slow, too slow, too godsdamn slow.”

“Show your guns,” said a driver suddenly. “Someone’s watching.” He indicated the low rises, copses on the stone. “If they come, shoot. Don’t wait. They’ll skin us if you leave them alive.”

Even Drey was awake. He held a repeating pistol in his good hand.

“Your gun shoots widest, Pomeroy,” said Cutter. “Be ready.”

And as he spoke both the drivers began to shout. “Now! Now! There!”

Cutter swung his pistol with dangerous imprecision, Pomeroy levelled his blunderbuss. A crossbow quarrel sang over their heads. A figure emerged from behind lichened buhrstone and Elsie shot him.

He was fReemade—a criminal Remade, reconfigured in the city’s punishment factories, escaped to the plains and Rohagi hills.

“You fuckers,” he shouted in pain. “Godsdammit, you fuckers.” They could see his Remaking—he had too many eyes. He slithered on the dust, leaving it bloody. “You fuckers.”

A new voice. “Fire again and you die.” Figures stood all around them, raised bows and a few old rifles. “Who are you? You ain’t locals.” The speaker stepped forward on a table of stone. “Come on, you two. You know the rules. The toll. I’ll charge you a wagonload of—what is that stuff? A wagonload of crappy vegetables.”

The fReemade were ragged and variegated, their Remakings of steam-spitting iron and stolen animal flesh twitching like arcane tumours. Men and women with tusks or metal limbs, with tails, with gutta-percha pipework intestines dangling oil-black in the cave of bloodless open bellies.

Their boss walked with a laggard pace. At first Cutter thought him mounted on some eyeless mutant beast but then he saw that the man’s torso was stitched to a horse’s body, where the head would be. But, with the caprice and cruelty of the state’s biothaumaturges, the human trunk faced the horse’s tail, as if he sat upon a mount backward. His four horse’s legs picked their way in careful reverse, his tail switching.

“This is new,” he said. “You brought guns. This we ain’t had. I seen mercs. You ain’t mercs.”

“You won’t see anything ever again, you don’t piss off,” said Pomeroy. He aimed his big musket with amazing calm. “You could take us, but how many of you’ll go too?” All the party, even Drey, had a fReemade in their sights.

“What are you?” said the chief. “Who are you lot? What you doing?”

Pomeroy began to answer, some bluster, some fighting pomp, but something abrupt happened to Cutter. He heard a whispering. Utterly intimate, like lips breathing right into his ear, unnatural and compelling. With the words came cold. He shuddered. The voice said: “Tell the truth.”

Words came out of Cutter in a loud involuntary chant. “Ihona’s a loom worker. Drey’s a machinist. Elsie’s out of work. Big Pomeroy’s a clerk. Fejh is a docker. I’m a shop-man. We’re with the Caucus. We’re looking for my friend. And we’re looking for the Iron Council.”

His companions stared. “What in hell, man?” said Fejh, and Ihona: “What in Jabber’s name . . . ?”

Cutter unclenched his teeth and shook his head. “I didn’t mean to,” he tried to tell them. “I heard something . . .”

“Well, well,” the bandit chief was saying. “You’ve a long way to go. Even if you come past us—” And then he broke off. He worked his jaw, then spoke rhythmically in a different, declamatory voice. “They can go. Let them pass. The Caucus is no enemy of ours.”

His troops stared at him. “Let them pass,” he said again. He waved at his fReemade, looking quite enraged. His men and women shouted in anger and disbelief, and for seconds looked as if they might ignore his order, but then they backed away and shouldered their weapons, cursing.

The fReemade chief watched the travellers as they continued, and they watched him back until their route took him out of sight. They did not see him move.

Cutter told his comrades of the whispered compulsion that had taken him. “Thaumaturgy,” said Elsie. “He must’ve hexed you, the boss-thief, gods know why.” Cutter shook his head.

“Didn’t you see how he looked?” he said. “When he let us go? That’s how I felt. He was glamoured too.”

When they came to the market town they found tinkers and traders and travelling entertainers. Between dry earth buildings were battered and half-flaccid gas balloons.

On Dustday, as they ascended over the steppes of grass, stones and flowers, Drey died. He had seemed to be mending, had been awake in the town, had even haggled with the air-merchant. But in the night his arm poisoned him, and though he had been alive when they went up, he was dead not long after.

The nomad tradesman tended the gondola’s droning motor, embarrassed by his passengers’ misery. Elsie held Drey’s cooling body. At last with the sun high, she extemporised a service and they kissed their dead friend and entrusted Drey to gods with the faint unease of freethinkers.

Elsie remembered the air-burials she had heard of among northern tribes. Women and men of the tundra, who let their dead rest in open coffins under balloons, sent them skyward through the cold air and clouds, to drift in airstreams way above the depredations of insects or birds or rot itself, so the stratosphere over their hunt-lands was a catacomb, where explorers by dirigible encountered none but the aimless, frost-mummified dead.

They gave Drey an air-burial of another kind, of necessity, hauling him with tenderness to the edge of the carriage, bracing him between the ropes and letting him go.

It was as if he flew. He soared below them and his arms seemed to spread. Air pummelled him so he moved as if dancing or fighting, and he spun as he dwindled. He passed birds. His friends watched his flight with awe and a surprise elation, and turned away while he was seconds from the ground.

They went over swale and grass that grew drier as they went south. Rudewood receded. The wind was with them. Cutter heard Elsie whispering to Pomeroy, crying over Drey.

“We can’t stop now,” Pomeroy murmured to her. “I know, I know . . . but we can’t now.”

Three times they saw other balloons, miles away. Each time their pilot would look through his telescope and say whose ship it was. There were not so many of the aeronautic peddlers. They knew each other’s routes.

The man had demanded a lot of their money to take them to Myrshock, but when they had heard that the militia had come past Pigtown not long before, a hussar unit on altered mounts, they could not turn him down. “We’re coming the right way.” And travelling now not quickly but with a relentless pace, for the first time they felt something like hope.

“Hard to believe,” said Cutter, “that there’s a fucking war on.” No one answered. He knew his bile tired them. He watched patchworked land.

On the third morning in the air, while he was rubbing water into Fejh’s wind-chapped skin, Cutter bellowed and pointed to where, miles ahead, he saw the sea, and before it in a depression of wheat-brown grass, the dirigible moorings and minarets of Myrshock.

It was an ugly port. They were wary. This was not their territory.

The architecture looked thrown together, chance materials aggregated and surprised to find themselves a town. Old but without history. Where it was designed, its aesthetic was unsure—churches with cement facades mimicking antique curlicues, banks using slate in uncommon colours, achieving only vulgarity.

Myrshock was mixed. Human women and men lived beside cactacae, the thorned and brawny vegetable race, and garuda, bird-people freebooters from the Cymek over the water, who dappled the air as well as the streets. Vodyanoi in a canal ghetto.

The travellers ate street food by the seawall. There were ranks of foreign craft and Myrshock ships, steamers with factory towers, cogs, merchant ships with great bridles for their seawyrms. Unlike the river docks of their home this was a brine harbour, so there were no vodyanoi stevedores. Lounging against walls were the mountebanks and freelance scum of any port.

“We have to be careful,” Cutter said. “We need a Shankell-bound ship, and mostly that means cactus crew. You know what we have to do. We can’t face cactacae. We need a small ship, and small people.”

“There’ll be tramp steamers,” said Ihona. “Pirates, most of them . . .” She looked vaguely around her.

Cutter spasmed and was quite still. Someone spoke to him. That voice again, up close whispering into his ear. He was iced in place.

The voice said: “The Akif. Steaming south.”

The voice said: “Routine run, small crew. Useful damn cargo—sable antelopes, broken for riders. Your deposits are paid. You sail at ten tonight.”

Cutter stared at each passerby, each sailor, each waterfront thug. He saw no one mouthing words. His friends watched him, alarmed at his face.

“You know what to do. Go up the Dradscale. That’s the way the militia went. I checked.

“Cutter you know I could make you do this—you remember what happened in the Mendicans—but I want you to listen and do it because you should do it. We want the same thing, Cutter. I’ll see you on the other shore.”

The cold dissipated, and the voice was gone.

“What in hell’s wrong?” said Pomeroy. “What’s going on?”

When Cutter told them, they argued until they began to attract attention.

“Someone is playing with us,” said Pomeroy. “We don’t make it easier for them. We don’t get on that godsdamned boat, Cutter.” He clenched and unclenched his bulky fist. Elsie touched him nervously, tried to calm him.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Cutter said. The close-up voice had exhausted him. “Whoever it is, it ain’t militia. Someone from the Caucus? I don’t see how, or why. Some free agent? It was them who held off the fReemade: that backward horse-man got whispered, like I did. I don’t know what’s going on. You want to take another boat, I ain’t going to argue. But we best find one soon. And seems to me we might as well find this one, just to know.”

The Akif was a rusted thing, little more than a barge, with a single low deck and a captain pathetically grateful for their passage. He looked uncertain at Fejh, but smiled again when they mentioned the price—yes, already half-paid, he said, with the letter they had left for him.

It was perfect, and it decided them. Though Pomeroy raged against the decision, Cutter knew he would not desert them.

Someone’s watching us, thought Cutter. Someone who whispers. Someone who says they’re my friend.

The sea, then the desert, then miles of unmapped land. Can I do this?

Only a small sea. The man they searched for left trails, left people affected. Cutter could see his friends’ anxieties and did not blame them—their undertaking was enormous. But he believed they would find the man they followed.

He went with his friends to search for rumours of a clay-rider or militia hunters, before they sailed. They went to send a letter back to the city, to their Caucus contacts, saying they were en route, that they had found tracks.

The drifting man passed through arcane geography, between fulgurites and over alkaline pools. He stood still while he drifted, folding and unfolding his arms. He picked up speed, gliding full of wrongness.

A bird was his companion but it did not fly, only clung to his head. It opened its wings and let the air spread its feathers. There was a growth on it, something that mangled its outlines.

The man passed villages. What animals were there to see him howled.

At the stub-end of the hills, in a drying landscape, the drifting man neared an interruption. Something embedded in the dirt, a star of rust-red and ragged brown-black cloth. A dead man. Come from very high and ironed down into the land. A little blood had soaked into the ground and blackened. The meat was tendered and flattened into outlines.

The man who drifted above the earth and the bird who rode him paused above the dead. They looked down at him, and they looked up with unnatural perfect timing into the sky.

Chapter Three

On the second day out, in the grey waves of the Meagre Sea, Cutter’s party hijacked the Akif. Pomeroy held a pistol at the captain’s head. The crew stared in disbelief. Elsie and Ihona raised their guns. Cutter watched Elsie’s hand shake. Fejh reared out of his water-barrel with a bow. The captain began to cry.

“We’re taking a diversion,” Cutter said. “It’s going to take you a few extra days to get to Shankell. We’re going southwest first. Along the coast. Up the Dradscale River. You’ll make Shankell a few days late, is all. And minus a bit of stock.”

The crew of six men sulked and surrendered their weapons. They were all casuals on a daily rate: they had no solidarity with each other or their captain. They looked at Fejhechrillen hatefully, out of some prejudice.

Cutter tied the captain to the wheel, by the dehorned sables the Akif carried, and the travellers took turns to menace him while the mounts watched. His blubbering was embarrassing. The sun grew harsher. Their wake widened as if they unbuckled the water. Cutter watched Fejh suffer in the hot salt air.

They saw the north shores of the Cymek on the third day. Merciless baked-clay hills, dust and sandtraps. There were scraps of plantlife: dust-coloured marram, trees of hard and alien nature, spicate foliage. The Akif churned past brine marshes.

“He always said this would be the only way to get to Iron Council,” Cutter said.

The minerals of the Dradscale estuary made lustre on the water. The brackish slough was full of weed, and Cutter gave a city-dweller’s gape to see a clan of manatees surface and graze.

“Is no safe,” said the helmsman. “Is with—” He gave some obscenity or disgust-noise, and pointed at Fejh. “Up farther. Full of riverpig.”

Cutter tensed at the word. “On,” he said, and pointed his gun. The pilot moved back.

“We no do,” he said. Abruptly he tilted backward over the rail and into the water. Everyone moved and shouted.

“There.” Pomeroy pointed with his revolver. The pilot had surfaced and was heading for one of the islands. Pomeroy tracked him but never fired.

“Godsdammit,” he said as the man reached the little shore. “Only reason the others haven’t gone after him is they can’t swim.” He nodded at the cheering crew.

“They’ll fight back with their fucking hands if we push this,” Ihona said. “Look at them. And you know we won’t shoot them. You know what we have to do.”

So in ridiculous inversion, the hijackers ferried the crew to the island. Pomeroy waved his gun as if carrying out necessary punishment. But they let the sailors off, and even gave them provisions. The captain watched plaintively. They would not let him go.

Cutter was disgusted. “Too fucking soft,” he raged at his friends. “You shouldn’t have come if you’re so soft.”

“What do you suggest, Cutter?” Ihona shouted. “You make them stay if you can. You ain’t going to kill them. No, maybe we shouldn’t have come, it’s already cost us.” Pomeroy glowered. Elsie and Fejh would not look at Cutter. He was suddenly fearful.

“Come on,” Cutter said. He tried not to sound wheedling or scornful. “Come on. We’re getting there. We’ll find him. This bloody journey’ll end.”

“For someone so known not to give a damn,” Ihona said, “you’re risking a lot for this. You want to be careful, people might think you ain’t what you like to think.”

The Dradscale was wide. Ditches and sikes joined it, channelling in dirty water. It was unbending for miles ahead.

On the east bank, dry hills rose behind the mangroves, wind-cut arids. It was a desert of cooked mud, and way beyond it was Shankell, the cactus city. On the west the land was altogether harsher. Above the fringe of tidal trees was a comb of rock teeth. A zone of vicious karst, an unbelievable thicket of edged stone. By Cutter’s imprecise documents it stretched a hundred miles. His maps were scribbled with explorers’ exhortations. Devils’ nails said one, and another Three dead. Turned back.

There were birds, high-shouldered storks that walked like villains. They flew with languid wingstrokes as if always exhausted. Cutter had never suffered in so brute a sun. He gaped in its light. All of them were pained by it, but Fejh of course most of all, submerging again and again in his stinking barrel. When eventually the water around them was saltless he dived with relief and refilled his container. He did not swim long: he did not know this river.

The man they followed must have been a vector of change. Cutter watched the riverbanks for signs that he had passed.

They steamed through the night, announcing themselves with soot and juddering. In the hard red light of dawn the leaves and vines dandled in the current seemed to deliquesce, to be runoff streams of dye, matter adrip into meltwater.

While the sun was still low the Dradscale widened and bled into a pocosin. The marsh-lake was met by the end of the karst, uncanny fingerbones of stone. The Akif slowed. For minutes, its motor was the only sound.

“Where now, Cutter?” someone said at last.

Something moved below the water. Fejh leaned up half out of his barrel.

“Dammit, it’s—” he said but was interrupted.

Things were surfacing ahead of the Akif, broad-mouthed heads. Vodyanoi bravos waving spears.

The captain came upright and shrieked. He shoved down on his throttle, and the water-bandits scattered and dived. Fejh upset his barrel, spilling dirty water. He leaned out and yelled in Lubbock at the vodyanoi below, but they did not answer.

They came up again, burst out of the water and for a moment were poised as if they stood upon it. They threw spears before they fell. Spumes of water arced from below their outflung arms so that their shafts became harpoons, riding it. Cutter had never seen such watercræft. He fired into the water.

The captain was still accelerating. He was going to drive the Akif onto the shore, Cutter realised. There was no time to moor.

“Brace!” he shouted. With a huge grinding the boat rode the shallow bank. Cutter pitched over the prow and landed hard. “Come on!” he said, rising.

The Akif jutted like a ramp. The antelopes’ pen had broken and, tethered to one another, they were hauling off in a dangerous mass of hooves and hornstubs. Fejh vaulted the listing rail. Elsie had hit her head, and Pomeroy helped her down.

Ihona was cutting the captain’s bonds. Cutter fired twice at oncoming swells. “Come on!” he shouted again.

A spire of water rose by the broken boat. For an instant he thought it some freakish wave, or watercræft of an astonishing kind, but it was more than twenty feet high, a pillar of utterly clear water, and from its top jutted a vodyanoi. He was a shaman, riding his undine.

Cutter could see the vessel distorted through the water elemental’s body. Its thousands of gallons pushed down on the boat with strange motion, and bucked it, and Ihona and the captain fell down the sloping deck toward it. They tried to rise but the water of the undine flowed up and lapped at their feet then broke, a wave, and engulfed them. Cutter shouted as his comrade and her prisoner were buffeted into the undine’s belly. They kicked and clawed, trying to swim out but which way was out? The undine gave its innards currents that kept them in its core.

Pomeroy bellowed. He fired, and Cutter fired, and Fejh let an arrow go. And all three missiles hit the elemental with splashes like dropped stones, and were swallowed up. The arrow was visible, vortexing in the liquid thing, coiling down to be voided like shit. Again Cutter fired, this time at the shaman atop the monstrous water, but his shot was wide. With idiot bravery Pomeroy was pummelling the undine, trying to tear it apart to get at his friend, but it ignored him, and his blows raised only spray.

Ihona and the captain were drowning. The undine poured itself into the cargo hold, and the shaman kicked down into its bowels. Cutter screamed to see Ihona’s still-moving body carried in the matter of the undine belowdecks and out of sight.

The vodyanoi were all over the Akif. They began to throw spears again.

Water poured up out of the boat, the undine geysering from the hold, and it carried within it engine parts—iron buoyed on its strange tides. And rolling like motes were the bodies of its victims. They moved now only with the water that bore them. Ihona’s eyes and mouth were open. Cutter saw her only a moment before the elemental came down in a great arch into the lake, water in water, carrying its loot and dead.

All the travellers could do was curse and cry. They cursed many times, they howled, and moved at last into the grasslands, away from the boat, away from the rapacious water.

At night they sat exhausted in a motte of trees beside their sables and watched Elsie. The moon and its daughters, the satellites circling it like tossed coins, were high. Elsie, cross-legged, looked at them, and Cutter was surprised to see her calm. She moved her mouth. A shirt was tied around her neck. Her eyes unfocused.

Cutter looked beyond her through the canebrake at the veldt. In the night light the tambotie trees and ironthorns were silhouetted like assassins. Baobabs stood thickset with their splintered crowns.

When Elsie stopped she looked defensive. She untied their quarry’s shirt from her neck.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It weren’t clear. I think maybe something that way.” She gestured at a distant rise. Cutter said nothing. She was pointing north-northeast, the way they knew they had to go. He had been relieved that Elsie had come, but he had always known she had only hedge-charms, no mirific strength. He did not know if she was sensing true emanations, and neither did she.

“We’ve got to go this way, anyway,” said Cutter. He meant it kindly—nothing’s lost even if you’re wrong—but Elsie would not look at him.

Days they rode through landscape that punished them with heat and plants like barbed wire. They were inexpert with the muscular mounts but made a pace they could not have done on foot. Their guns dipped in exhaustion. Fejh languished in a barrelful of the lake tethered between two sables. It was stagnant; it made him ill.

They were made to panic by gibbering from above. A brood of things came at them out of the sky, snapping and laughing. Cutter knew them from pictures: the glucliche, hyaena hunching under bone and leather batwings.

Pomeroy shot one and its sisters and brothers began to eat it before it reached the ground. The flock came together ravenous and cannibal, and the party got clear.

“Where’s your damn whisperer, Cutter?”

“Fuck you, Pomeroy. I find out, I’ll be sure to tell you.”

“Two already. Two comrades dead, Cutter. What are we doing?” Cutter did not answer.

“How does he know where to go?” Elsie said. She was talking about their quarry.

“He always knew where it was, or thereabouts, he told me,” Cutter said. “He hinted he got messages from it. Said he heard from a contact in the city that they’re looking for the Council. He had to go, get there first.” Cutter had not brought the note, had been so hurt by its terse vagueness. “Showed me on a map once where he thought it was. I told you. That’s where we go.” As if it were just like that.

They reached the base of a steep rise at twilight, found a rivulet and drank from it with vast relief. Fejh wallowed. The humans left him to sleep in the water, and climbed the shelf in their way. At its ragged cliff-edge they saw across miles of flattened land, and there were lights the way they were heading. Three sets: the farthest a barely visible glinting, the closest perhaps two hours away.

“Elsie, Elsie,” Cutter said. “You did, you did feel something.”

Pomeroy was too heavy to take the steep routes down, and Elsie had not the strength. Only Cutter could descend. The others told him to wait, that they would find a way together the next day, but even knowing it was foolish to walk these hostile plains alone, at night, he could not hold back.

“Go on,” he said. “Look after Fejh. I’ll see you later.”

He was astonished by how glad he was to be alone. Time was stilled. Cutter walked through a ghostworld, the earth’s dream of its own grasslands.

There were no nightbirds calling, no glucliches, nothing but the dark vista like a painted background. Cutter was alone on a stage. He thought of dead Ihona. When at last the lights were close he could see a kraal of heavy houses. He walked into the village as brazen as if he were welcome.

It was empty. The windows were only holes. The big doorways gaped into silent interiors. Each of them was stripped.

The lights were clustered at junctions: head-sized globes of some gently burning lava, cool, and no brighter than a covered lamp. They hung without motion, dead still in the air. They muttered and their surfaces moiled: arcs of cold pyrosis flared inches from them. Tame night-suns. Nothing moved.

In the empty alleys he spoke to the man he followed. “Where are you then?” His voice was very careful.

When he went back to the cliff, Cutter saw a light on its edge, a lantern, that moved slowly. He knew it was not his companions’.

Elsie wanted to see the empty village, but Cutter was firm that they had no time, they had to see the other lights, to see if there was a trail. “You picked up something,” he reminded her. “We better see. We need some fucking guidance.”

Fejh was better, his water renewed, but he was still afraid. “Vodyanoi ain’t supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m going to die here, Cutter.”

Midmorning, Cutter looked back, pointed into the brightness. Someone, some speck figure, sat on horseback on the shelf they had reached the previous night. A woman or man in a wide-brimmed hat.

“We’re being followed. It’s got to be the whisperer.” Cutter waited for a mutter in his ear, but there was nothing. Throughout the day and in the early night the rider tracked them, coming no closer. It angered them, but they could do nothing.

The second village was like the first, Cutter thought, but he was wrong. The sables wheezed and slowed through deserted squares and under the sputtering light-globes and found a long wall all bullet-scarred, its mortar punctured and stained with sap. The travellers dismounted, stood in the cold remains of violence. In the township’s outlands Cutter saw tilled land; and then he felt the moment still, realised it was not a field but was disturbed in another way, turned over and charred. It was the topsoil on a grave. It was a mass grave.

Breaking the soil like the first shoots of a grotesque harvest were bones. They were abrupt and blacked by fire, fibrous like dense wood. The bones of cactus-people.

Cutter stood among the dead, above their moulding vegetable-flesh. Time came back. He felt it shudder.

Planted scarecrow in the middle was a degraded corpse. A human man. He was naked, slumped, upheld by spikes that pinned him to a tree. Javelins pierced him. One emerged point-first from his sternum. It had been forced up his anus and through him. His scrotum was torn off. There was a scab of blood on his throat. He was leathered by sun and insects worked on him.

The travellers stared like worshippers at their totem. When after many seconds Pomeroy moved he still looked carefully, as if it would be a disrespect to break the dead man’s gaze.

“Look,” he said. He swallowed. “All cactacae.” He poked at the earth, turned up bits of the dead. “And then there’s him. What in Jabber’s name happened here? The war ain’t reached here . . .”

Cutter looked at the corpse. It was not very bloody. Even between its legs there was only a little gore.

“He was already gone,” Cutter whispered. He was awed by the brutal tableau. “They done this to a dead man. After they buried the others.” Below the corpse’s chin was not a clot but blooded metal. Cutter looked away while he worked it from the dead man’s neck.

It was a tiny escutcheon. It was a badge of the New Crobuzon Militia.

The dangling man crossed the water. His hair and clothes gusted in his motion. The Meagre Sea chopped scant feet beneath him, and spume spattered his trousers.

A body like a bolt breached abruptly, a swordfish arcing up beside him, reaching high enough for him to touch at the keystone of its leap then curving down to stab back under with its body-spear. It kept up with him. It kept pace with his uncanny motion.

When it came up, when it vaulted into the sun, it caught the dangling man’s eye with its big sideways stare. Something dark clutched its dorsal fin. Something that shifted and dug under its fish’s skin.

Chapter Four

They went off-map, toward the third set of lights. Beyond them was a wall of stone like spinal scales, through which they must find a way.

Cutter held the blood-rusted badge. He felt sick, knowing the militia were ahead of them. We could be too late.

There were sinkholes full of water, though it was dirty stuff. Fejh replenished his barrel, but his skin was scarring. They shot little jackrabbits and slow birds. They passed antelopes, went cautiously by coveys of tusked hogs the size of horses.

Cutter felt as if the path they left was an infection in the land. At dawn on their third day out from the cruciform militiaman, they approached the last village. And as they came nearer the sun crested and they were washed in roseate light and something moved, that they had thought a rock spur or a thinning tree.

They cried out. Their mounts stumbled.

A giant came at them, a cactus figure far greater than they had seen before. Cactacae stood seven, eight feet tall, but this one was more than double that. It was like an elemental, something base and made of the land, the grassland walking.

It jerked on twisted hips, its vast legs and toeless stump-feet ricketed. It swayed as if it would fall. Its green skin was split and healed many times. Its spines were finger-long.

The massive cactus staggered at them, fast for all its palsied gait. It held a cudgel, a slab of tree. It raised it as it came, and from a face that hardly moved, it began to shout. It called words they did not understand, some variant of Sunglari, as it lurched murderously toward them.

“Wait, wait!” Everyone was shouting. Elsie pointed, her eyes bloodshot, and Cutter knew she was trying to reach its mind with her feeble charms.

The cactus came in unstable strides. Fejh fired an arrow that hit it with a moist drum-sound and remained dripping and painless in its side.

“Kill you,” the cactus crooned in its feeble voice, in an ugly Ragamoll. “Murder.” It heaved its enormous weapon.

“It weren’t us!” shouted Cutter. He threw the militia insignia in the cactus-giant’s path, and fired his repeater at the badge, making it dance and ring until all six barrels were empty. The cactus was still, its shillelagh paused. Cutter spat at the badge until his mouth was dry. “It weren’t us.”

He was something they had never seen. Cutter thought he must be Torqued, cancered by the bad energy of a cacotopic zone, but that was not right. In the last empty village, the vast cactus-man told them of himself. He was ge’ain—between them they rendered it “tardy.”

By arcane husbandry, cactacae of the veldt kept a few of their bulbs nurtured in a coma for months after they should have been born. While their siblings crawled squalling from the earth, the ge’ain, the tardy, slept on below in their chorions, growing. Their bodies distended as occult techniques kept them unborn. When finally they woke and emerged they were mooncalf. They grew prodigal.

Their aberrance afflicted them. Their woody bones were bowed, their skins corticate and boiling with excrescence. Their augmented senses hurt. They were the wards, the fighters and lookouts for their homesteads. They were tabooed. Shunned and worshipped. They had no names.

The fingers of the tardy’s left hand were fused. He moved slowly with arthritic pain.

“We not Tesh,” he said. “Not our war, not our business. But them come anywise. Militia.”

They had come from the river, a mounted platoon with rivebows and motorguns. The cactacae had long heard stories from the north, where militia and Tesh legions skirmished. Exiles had told them of monstrous acts at militia hands, and the cactus villagers fled the snatch-squad.

The militia reached one village before it was emptied. Those cactacae had sheltered northern refugees full of carnage stories, and they had determined to fight first. They met the militia in a fearful band, with their clubs and flint machetes. There had been butchery. One militiaman body was left behind, to be punished by the ge’ain amid the ripped-up cactus dead.

“Two weeks gone they came. They hunt us after that,” the tardy said. “They bring Tesh war here now?” Cutter shook his head.

“It’s a fucking mess,” he said. “The militia we’re following—they ain’t after these poor bastards, they’re after our man. These cactacae’ve panicked because of what they’ve heard, and made themselves targets.

“Listen to me,” he said to the leviathan green man. “They who done this to your village, they’re looking for someone. They want to stop him before he can give a message.” He looked up into the big face. “More of them’ll come.”

“Tesh come too. To fight them. Fight us on both sides.”

“Yes,” said Cutter. His voice was flat. He waited a long time. “But if he’s to win . . . if he can get away, then the militia . . . maybe they’ll have other things to think on than this war. So maybe you want to help us. We have to stop them, before they stop him.”

With misshaped hands to his mouth the tardy gave a cry as base as animal pain. His lament rumbled over the grass. The animals of the hot night paused, and in the still there was an answer. Another cry, from miles off, that Cutter felt in his guts.

Again and again the tardy sounded, announcing himself, and over the hours of that night a little corps of the ge’ain came to him on huge and painful steps. There were five, and they were various: some more than twenty feet tall, some barely half that, limbs broken and reset, unshapely. A company of the lame, the crippled strong.

The travellers were cowed. The tardy mourned together in their own language. “If you might help us,” Cutter told them humbly, “maybe we can stop the militia for good. And either way, it’ll mean a reckoning, and that can mean revenge.”

The tardy spent hours in a circle, talking with brooding sounds, reaching out to each other. Their motions were careful under the weight of their limbs. Poor lost soldiers, thought Cutter, though his awe remained.

At last the convenor of the parley said to him: “Them gone, one militia band. They gone north. Hunting. We know where.”

“That’s them,” said Cutter. “They’re looking for our man. They’re the ones we have to reach.”

The tardy plucked handfuls of their spines and lifted Cutter and his comrades. They carried them, easily. The deserted sables watched them go. The cactacae took mammoth strides, swayed across terrains, stepping over trees. Cutter felt close to the sun. He saw birds, even garuda.

The ge’ain spoke to them. The feathered figures circled when they passed, with a sound like billowing. They jabbered in severe avian voices. The ge’ain listened and crooned in reply.

“Militia ahead,” said Cutter’s mount.

They staggered, resting rarely, their legs locked in the cactus-manner. Once they stopped when the moon and its daughters were low. At the very edge of the savannah, west, there was light. A torch, a lantern moving.

“Who is he?” said Cutter’s tardy. “Man on horse. Follows you?”

“He’s there? Jabber . . . get to him! Quick. I need to know his game.”

The ge’ain careened in drunken speed, eating distance, and the light went out. “Gone,” the tardy said. A whisper sounded in Cutter’s ear, making him start.

“Don’t be a damn fool,” the voice said. “The cactus won’t find me. You’re wasting time. I’ll join you by and by.”

When they continued the way they had been going, the light came back, kept pace with them to the west.

After two nights, breaking only for brief rests or to sluice Fejh with what water they found, the ge’ain stopped. They pointed at a track of pulped greenery and ploughed-up landscape.

Over miles of dried grass, before greener hills, a haze was rising, what Cutter thought was dust-smoke, then saw was mixed with darker grey. As if someone had smudged an oily finger on a window.

“Them,” said Cutter’s ge’ain. “Militia. Is them.”

The tardy did not plan. They uprooted knotted trees of the prairie and made them bludgeons, then continued toward the murderers of their kin.

“Listen!” Cutter and Pomeroy and Elsie shouted, to persuade them of the sense in a strategy. “Listen, listen, listen.”

“Keep one alive,” said Cutter. “For Jabber’s sake let us talk to one,” but the tardy gave no sign that they heard or cared.

The veldt buckled; heat reverberated between stones like houses. Animals scattered at the ge’ain oncoming, loud as the fall of trees. The tardy stamped up a fold of land and became still. Cutter looked down over the militia.

There were more than a score, tiny figures in grey, and they had dogs, and something expressing the smoke: an ironclad tower as tall as the tardy pulled by Remade horses. Its summit was corbelled, and two men looked out from between battlements. It tore up the bushes and left ruined land and oil.

Very slowly the tardy put their passengers down. Cutter and his comrades checked their weapons.

“This is idiocy,” said Pomeroy. Some dusty bird of prey went over, sounding excitement. “Look at their firepower.”

“What do they care?” Cutter nodded at the tardy. “They only want revenge. It’s us who want more. I ain’t going to stand in the way of this lot getting what’s theirs. As if I could.” The tardy lumbered down the slope toward the militia. “We best get going.”

The companions spread out. They did not need to hide. The militia had seen the tardy, and could see nothing else. Cutter ran in the dust that the cactus-giants left.

A motorgun fired. Bullets purged from the rotating barrels. The militia were running their horses in panic. They had left the cactacae regions and thought themselves safe. Their bullets pattered like gravel against the tardy, with little bursts of sap, not even slowing them.

One ge’ain hurled her weapon like a trebuchet. It was a club in her hand, but as it spun it was visible again for what it was: a tree. It hit the minaret and bent its plating. Cutter lay on his belly and fired his repeater into the milling militia.

They fired; they showed impressive and stupid bravery, standing their ground so that a tardy could lift his leg high and stamp them down, crushing them and their mounts in a brutal two-step. The cactus-man swept his huge sapper, cracked a man’s neck with the fringe of its roots.

The militia with rifles fell back behind those carrying rivebows and tanks of pyrotic gas. The tardy raised their hands. The fire-throwers made them dance back, their skins black and spitting.

The smallest ge’ain staggered as rivebow chakris of sharpened metal spun into his vegetable muscle and severed his arm. He held his left hand against the stump, kicked at the dismounted men and sent two dead or broken-boned; but his pain took him to his knees, and a marksman killed him with a chakri to his face.

Fejh’s arrows and the growl of Pomeroy’s blunderbuss uncovered them. The tower’s guns fingered at the copse where Fejh hid. Cutter shouted as the motorgun spun, its chains and gears loud as hammers, and a storm of bullets tattered the vegetation.

There were four tardy now in an ecstasy of murder, stamping and grabbing. The tower pitched and moved. Its motorgun took another ge’ain, a line of bullets perforating her hip to breast, so she staggered then hinged in gross unnatural movement along her new seam.

Pomeroy was standing. He was shouting and Cutter knew he was shouting Fejhechrillen’s name. Pomeroy rammed shot down and fired repeatedly. The dogs were frantic, snapping pointlessly with misshapen jaws.

From a long way off, there was a shot. Again, and a man fell from the top of the iron tower.

That voice spoke up close in Cutter’s ear. “Down. You’re seen.” Cutter dropped, and watched through gaps in the wiry grass and heard another of those far-off shots. A militiaman fell from his horse.

Cutter saw a captain-thaumaturge, watched veins and tendons score his skin while dark sparks dissipated from him. Cutter fired and missed, and it was the last bullet.

The thaumaturge shouted and his clothes smouldered, and a lance of milky energy spurted from the ground below the largest ge’ain’s feet and punctured her right through, soared skyward and was gone. She flailed as her sap poured. Black flame immolated her. The thaumaturge stood bleeding from his eyes but triumphant, and he was shot down by the unseen marksman. The last two ge’ain were treading the militiamen to death.

One hugged the gun-spiked tower, wrestling it, twisting it violently. While his sibling crushed the last men and horses and mutant dogs, he shoved and grappled the column. It reared, grinding, overbalanced, panicking the horses that dragged it. It fell slowly, smashed and split, spilt men living and dead.

They ran, those who could, and the two tardy ran after them, stamping very much like grotesque children. A horseman was visible beyond the battleground, galloping toward them. Cutter heard his whisper again—“Keep the dogs alive, don’t let them kill the dogs for Jabber’s sake”—but it was not a command, he ignored it and was running, as his friends were, for the rough where Fejh had been. They found him spread across the green.

He went and went, the dangling man, he flew, and his stance was stiff and he sped through the air. Through the byways of the swampy estuary, between stubbish islands, past mangroves and through the arches of their vines, over banks of mulch and mud into karst, rock splints, a serrated landscape.

His companion was a bird, a hare, a jag-wasp the size of a dove, a rockling a fox a cactus-child, always with its tumour of mottlesome flesh moving upon it as it clung to the dangling man or kept pace with him, impossibly pushing whatever its body was from spire to spire of stone. The dangling man emerged into grassland. For a time the beast below him was an antelope that ran like none of its kind had ever run.

They went and went, they tore through the scorching scrubland in sped-up time. They went north through little trees and the burnt villages and onward north and their pace was up and whatever the animal was that followed the man or held to him or flew above him their speed increased and they hunted, watching signs in the earth and air that only they could see, narrowing in, following, coming after.

Chapter Five

They gathered Fejh to bury. The strange dogs surrounded the militia bodies and howled for their masters.

The two tardy remaining stood with their legs locked, in slumber. Not all the militia were dead. There was a thin screaming, and fast breathing from those too broken to crawl away. There were no more than four or five, dying slowly but with all their energy.

As Cutter dug, the horseman came through the frantic dogs. The companions turned their backs on their dead friend, to face him.

He nodded at them, touching the front of his brimmed hat. He was the colour of the dust. His jerkin sun-bleached, his trousers of buck leather and the chaps smoking with dirt. He had a rifle below his shabrack. On each hip he wore a pepperpot revolver.

The man looked at them. He stared at Cutter, held his right hand cupped by his lips and muttered. Cutter heard him, close-up, as if the mouth was by his ear.

“Best hurry. And we’d best get one of the dogs.”

“Who are you?” Cutter said. The man looked to Pomeroy, Elsie, Cutter again, mouthing. When it was his turn Cutter heard: “Drogon.”

“A susurrator,” Pomeroy said with distrust, and Drogon turned to him and whispered something across the air. “Oh aye,” Pomeroy answered. “You can be damn sure of that.”

“What you doing here?” said Cutter. “You come to help us bury—” He had to stop and could only gesture. “Why you been following us?”

“Like I told you,” Drogon whispered. “We want the same thing. You’re exiles now, and so am I. We’re looking for the same thing. I been looking for the Iron Council for damn years. I wasn’t sure of you, you know. And maybe I still ain’t. We’re not the only ones looking for the Council, you know that. You know why these fuckers are here.” He pointed at a militiaman supine and bloody. “Why’d you think I followed? I needed to know who you-all are looking out for.”

“What’s he saying?” said Elsie, but Cutter waved her quiet.

“I still don’t know I trust you, but I been watching you and I know the best chance I got’s with you. And I showed you your best chance is with me. I’d have gone with your man if I’d been able, after I heard he’d gone.”

“How do you know . . . ?” Cutter said.

“You ain’t the only one with your ear to the ground, who knows what he is. But listen, we ain’t got time: it ain’t just him who’s being followed. This lot were after your man—they don’t know any more than we do already—and there’s others are after you. Been tracking you since Rudewood. And they’re gaining. And they ain’t just militia, either.”

“What? What’s coming?” And what Cutter heard he repeated in terror.

“Handlingers,” he said.

More frightened of dying alone than of the anger of their enemies, those militia still alive began to call out. They were without plan or intrigue—they cajoled not to any end but only eager to be spoken to as they lay in the heat.

“Hey, hey, hey mate, hey mate.” “Come on. Come on, then, come on.” “Jabber, my arm’s gone man, Jabber, Jabber it’s gone.”

They were mostly men in their thirties with expressions of pride and resignation that seemed scoured-on; they did not expect or even want quarter, only to be acknowledged before they died.

The dogs still screamed and circled. Drogon corralled three of the weird-skulled things, herding them with his big horse. He calmed the frantic animals with inaudible commands.

“Why’s he helping?” Elsie said. “What does he want?”

Pomeroy was for killing him, or at least constraining him and leaving him behind.

“Dammit, I don’t know,” said Cutter. “Says he heard what was happening. That he’s out for the Council, too. I don’t know. But look what he’s done—he could’ve killed us by now. He saved my life—took out the man who’d sighted me. You saw how he used them guns. And you said yourself, Pom, he’s a thaumaturge.”

“He’s a susurrator,” said Pomeroy with scorn. “He’s just a whispersmith.”

“I been whispered to by him, brother. Remember? This ain’t a little susurrus to make a dog lie down. He sounded across miles, put me and that fReemade highwayman in thrall.”

It was a petty field, subvocalurgy: the science of furtive suggestions, a rude footpad technique. But this man had made it something more.

The dogs were Remade. The olfactory centres of their brains had been hugely enlarged. Their crania were doughy and distended, as if their unshaped brains bubbled over. Their eyes were tiny, and at the end of their jaws their nostrils were dilated and set in flared and mobile flesh like pigs’. Their wrinkled snouts wore wires and they carried batteries, making thaumaturgic circuits. Each had a rag in its collar.

“Oh Jabber, those are his damn clothes,” said Cutter.

“These’ll track across continents,” whispered Drogon. “That’s how they were following him.”

They did not kill the militia left alive, nor spit in their faces nor give them water, only left them stone ignored. Drogon concentrated on the dogs. He was whispering, and they were calming. They were eager to trust him.

“Them dogs is ours,” Pomeroy said. Drogon shrugged and held out the leash, and the distorted animal looked at Pomeroy and showed its teeth. “What’s your story?” Pomeroy said.

Drogon pointed at Elsie, whispered, and she walked toward him. He took her hands and put them on his forehead, and she went into her hexing state. He kept speaking, enunciating something only she could hear.

When he was done she opened her eyes. “He told me to read him. He told me to verity-gauge. And he said, ‘I want what you want, I want to find the Council.’ He said he’s from the city, but he sure isn’t bloody Parliament, and he isn’t militia. Says he’s a vaquero, a horseman. Lived nomad for twenty years.

“He says there are too many stories for the Council not to be real. And it’s precious to wilderness-men. Iron Council. Like a promised place. So when he got word what was happening—when he heard who’d gone to protect it—he had to come after him to help. To find it. He followed us. Till he was sure he could trust us.”

“You ain’t a truesayer,” Pomeroy said. “This don’t mean shit.”

“No I ain’t, but I’ve got something.” Elsie glowered. “I can feel. I was verity-gauging.”

The whispersmith replaced his hat and turned back to the dogs, subvocalising till they skittered for his affection among the bodies of their handlers.

“She ain’t got the puissance to be sure, Cutter,” Pomeroy said.

Why am I supposed to fucking decide? thought Cutter.

Drogon held the cloths to the dogs’ absurd noses, and the animals slobbered and wheeled north. “We have to go.” Drogon spoke to Cutter. “We’re still being followed. We’re close, now, we’re close.”

Elsie tried to thank the tardy, with no reaction. “You have to go,” she shouted. “Handlingers are coming.” But the ge’ain did not answer. They stood among their revenge and waited for nothing. The humans could only shout their thanks and leave the plant-giants in stupor. Cutter saluted Fejh’s grave.

The dogs fanned on their leads ahead of Drogon, sniffing urgently. Sometimes he let them career through the hard vegetation, their outsized heads swinging. While Cutter and the others continued their trudging, he would ride out.

He whispered to the travellers each in turn, from miles ahead. He let the dogs run, their leads trailing behind them, and when they went too far he would whisper commands and they would come back.

“Keep walking,” he told Cutter. “Handlinger’s behind you.”

Handlingers. The malefic hands of history. Five-fingered parasites, come out now to the light.

Up through a col in the hills. Cutter thought of Fejh slowly baking in the earth. He looked at the mark they had left, the dead and nearly dead, the two tardy standing like trees, the ruins of the skirmish like a soot stain.

The land before them was more wooded, the ground become peaked, slopes of scree gripped in the roots of olives. Drogon’s dust scattered into a low cloud. He was ahead, his path visible like a seam. There was sage, and dog-rose. Each of Cutter’s steps dispersed a gathering of cicadas.

It was not the only moment of the journey when time clotted, and Cutter was stuck fast. A day was only an instant drawn out. Motion itself—the putter of insects, the appearance-disappearance of a tiny rodent—was an endless repetition of the same.

They did not sleep long that night for the sounding of the bloodhounds and Drogon’s whispers from his camp ahead. They were weighed down by weapons they had taken from the militia, and they left a trail of boot-knives and heavy rifles.

Once they saw a garuda way above them, stretched out like someone on a cross. They saw her dip, lurch earthward, veer toward Drogon, then break and ascend.

“He tried to whisper her,” Cutter said. “But she got out of it.” He was pleased.

Their rhythms were not the day’s: they slept for minutes while the sun was up, as well as at dusk and night. If the whispersmith slept it was in the saddle. On the sierra they passed smudged pebblebeasts, something between giraffes and gorillas, knuckle-walking and eating low leaves.

“You have to speed,” the whispersmith told Cutter. “The handlinger’s coming.”

By moonlight they followed Drogon and their quarry toward a hill-line topped by plateau. They saw dark, a corridor through the butte. They would reach it in daylight, and Cutter could imagine the relief it would be, the punishing hot sky just a band seething above lichened rock walls and stone stiles.

Elsie said: “Something’s coming.” She looked gaunt. She looked horrified. “Something’s coming from the south.” There was a disturbance behind many waves of landscape, beyond sight. Cutter knew that Elsie was a weak witch, but she felt something.

The east was weakly shining, and in the first light Cutter saw the dust of Drogon’s horse below the mesa. The whispersmith was almost at the entrance to the chine.

“Follow the way through,” Drogon said to Cutter. “Quick. The handlinger’s closing, but you can make it here if you keep on. The dogs’re howling. They can smell our man, he’s close, through here. Make it here, maybe we can . . . maybe we can face the handlinger, an ambush.” A weak plan.

Drogon must have turned then and hauled behind the pack as they bayed and ran into the split rock path. Cutter thought of the overhangs they would pass and saw with clarity what he had seen in the room of his runaway friend, that had sent him here. Cutter saw the tripwire and the men dead and stoved in, lying under anthropoid outlines in random materials.

“Godsdammit. Get back! Get back!”

He shouted as loud as he ever had. Pomeroy and Elsie staggered; they had been sleeping as they walked. Cutter made his hands a trumpet and roared again.

“Stop! Stop!” He fired his repeater into the air.

Drogon was in his ear. “What you doing? The handlinger’ll hear you . . .” But Cutter was speaking, and lurching on exhausted legs. “Stop stop stop!” he shouted. “Don’t go in, don’t go in. It’s a trap.”

Dust came toward him and reconfigured as if moulded by the growing heat, and became a man on a horse. Drogon was riding back. Cutter shouted.

“You can’t go in,” he said. “It’s a trap. It’s a golem trap.”

Drogon rode around them as if they were steers, and when they buckled he would whisper to them, to their underbrains, and they could only obey. “Run,” he whispered, and they were helpless not to.

By the raised plain were slippy scree paths, so they held onto boscage while they climbed toward the dark. Drogon took his horse at speed along a route that looked impossible. The dogs, tied by the crack’s entrance, pulled, imbecilic with their porcine eyes and bared teeth. They were in agony to enter, to reach what they could smell.

“He knows,” Cutter said. He leaned against his knees to cough up the stuff of the path. “He knows they’re coming for him.”

“Handlinger,” said Drogon. A fleck at the edge of the plain. “We have to go.”

Cutter said: “He knows they’re coming and he’s not tried to hide his scent. He thinks it’s the militia after him, and he’s funnelled them here. It’s a trap. We can’t go in there. We have to go over. He’ll be on the other side, waiting.”

They did not debate long, with the handlinger curdling the air as it approached. The dogs bayed and Drogon shot them dead inside the tunnel. The others followed him up a steep root-ladder to the rocktop plateau. Drogon whispered to them “Climb,” even suspended as he was himself, and they found their footing and their grip.

Drogon led them by the edge of the crack. They saw his horse and the carnage of dog-flesh below them. He whispered to the horse, and it snorted and turned as if to go through the conduit.

“What you doing?” said Cutter. “If you don’t keep it still I’ll shoot it, I swear. We can’t risk it triggering anything.” There was an instant when it seemed the whispersmith might fight, but he turned and ran again, and the horse was still.

Cutter looked back and cried out. What followed them, dangling, had the shape of a man. It carried a burden. It was scant miles off, arrowing with grim unnatural motion toward the wall and the shaft.

On the other side they looked down across sierras, a slowly rising landscape. In the full sun of dawn Cutter saw runt trees.

“We have to wait until that bastard thing’s gone,” said Pomeroy.

“We can’t,” Drogon said to Cutter and Pomeroy in turn. “It’s not tracking your friend, it’s tracking us. By our mind-spoor. We have to get beyond. Turn and fight it.”

“Fight it?” Pomeroy said. “It’s a handlinger.”

“It’ll be all right,” Cutter said. He felt a great and sudden conviction. “It’ll be taken care of.”

It was he, not Drogon, who found a way down. One by one they descended, the whispersmith last. “Damn handlinger’s so close,” he said to Cutter. “He’s by the entrance, he’s seen the dogs, he’s going in.”

Cutter looked around them. Come see, he thought. Come look at your trap. He ran toward the tunnel exit. “What you doing?” his comrades shouted. “Cutter get back!”

“Stop,” the whispersmith said, and Cutter had to stop. He screamed in anger.

“Let me go. I have to check something,” he said. His feet were rooted. “Godsdammit, let me fucking go.”

The whispersmith set him free. He stumbled up to the breach. With terror and care he came closer to the opening strewn with stone debris, the trash of boulders. He leaned in. He said, “Come help me. Help me find it.”

There was a sound. He could hear air moving. An exhalation from the stone.

“It’s coming,” the whispersmith said. Drogon did not move, nor did Pomeroy or Elsie; they only watched Cutter as if they had forsaken any idea of escape.

“Come help me,” Cutter said, and peered into the dim. The crooning of what approached buckled him.

He saw a glistening of light. A wire taut across the threshold, extending into piled-up rocks at either side, tethered to batteries and engines Cutter knew were hidden within.

“I found it,” he shouted.

Cutter looked up and heard the dismal howling. Leaves and shreds of moss were pushed through the cleft. The noise of the handlinger was very bad. In the fissure Cutter saw swirls of leafmould gust. He could hear staccato, a snaredrum beating and a horse’s exhalations. He slid back to his companions. “Be ready to run,” he said. “Be ready to fucking run.”

It came. Loud. A horse galloped for them. Its legs moved with such mutant rapidity that they sounded like a company. Drogon’s mount. It tore itself faster than any horse had ever run, over jags and unstable ground that turned its ankles and splintered its hoofs but it ran on through these injuries, and sweat and blood from its abrasions streaked its body. Something clamped to it. A mottlesome thing grasping its neck, a stub-tail growing maggotlike and nosing into horse-flesh.

Behind it a man emerged. A man. He stood in the air, his arms folded; he guttered toward them at dreadful speed. He saw them. He angled down, his body motionless. They began to fire, and the man came at them so the tips of his toes bumped on the rock.

Cutter stood and fired and fell backward and slid on shale. They were all firing. The whispersmith had his feet apart and sent off rounds like an expert, a gun in each hand, Pomeroy and Elsie shot wildly, and their lead hit; they saw blood burst from the horse and the impassive man, but nothing slowed them.

The dangling man opened his mouth and spat fire. The searing breath licked the wire and made it glow, so there was an instant, a fragment of a second when the handlingers saw the metal, and their momentum took them toward it and man’s mouth and horse’s opened in alarm but they could not stop. They breached it, and came into the sun.

Rocks unfolded. The rocks turned to them. Coils unwound and sent thaumaturgic current through circuits, a stutter of valves, and a mass of pent-up energy released and did what it had been hair-trigger-primed to do, which was to make a golem.

It made with what was around it. The substance of the gap. All the matter in that puissant field was charged instantly into motion. The rocks unfolded and seemed always to have been shaped vaguely like a human, recumbent, twenty feet high, these slopes of stone-shard an arm and these brittle dried-up bushes another, and these great boulders a paunch with rock legs below and a head of baked earth.

The golem was crude and instructed with murderous simplicity. Moving with assassin speed it reached arms that weighed many tons and held the handlingers. They tried to face it. It took only minute beats of time for the golem to drive stone into the animal and break its neck, crushing the handlinger, the hand-parasite squirming in the horse’s mane.

The man was quicker. He spat fire that billowed without effect over the golem’s face. With impossible strength the man wrenched at the arm of coagulated stone and dislocated it, so the golem moved clumsily. But its grip held. Even with its arm falling off in grots, the golem pulled the dangling man down, gripped his legs with one pebbled hand and his head with another and twisted him apart.

As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse.

The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit.

“Get away,” Cutter said. “It wants another host.”

Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with arachnid gait.

They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up, and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody.

It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew. It swung deadweight and dripping.

“Dextrier,” the whispersmith said to Cutter. “Warrior caste.”

There was another commotion, like some big animal was shifting through trees. Cutter turned and tried to bring unloaded guns to bear.

The noise again, and something shifted in a grove a half mile off. Something came out into the sun. A giant, an immense grey man. They watched without knowing what to do or say as it walked toward them. Cutter cried out and began to run. He picked up speed as the clay man approached and he saw someone waving to him from its back: a man who leapt down and came toward him with his arms wide, shouting something no one could hear, every one of his steps, and Cutter’s, sending up pollen and sticky insects that stained them.

Cutter ran up; the man ran down. Cutter called out; he called the man by name. Cutter was crying. “We found you,” he said. “We found you.”

Part Two:

Returns

Chapter Six

A window burst open high above the market. Windows everywhere opened above markets. A city of markets, a city of windows.

New Crobuzon again. Unceasing, unstintingly itself. Warm that spring, gamy: the rivers were stinking. Noisy. Uninterrupted New Crobuzon.

What circled around and over the city’s upreached fingers? Birdlife, aerial vermin, wyrmen (laughing, monkey-footed things), and airships of cool colours, and smoke and clouds. The natural inclines of the land were all forgotten by New Crobuzon, which rose or fell according to quite other whims: it was mazed in three dimensions. Tons of brick and wood, concrete, marble and iron, earth, water, straw and daub, made roofs and walls.

In the days the sun burned away the colours of those walls, burned the raggedy ends of posters that covered them like feathers, making them all slowly a tea-yellow. Oddments of ink told of old entertainments, while concrete desiccated. There was the famous stencil-painting of the Iron Councillor, repeated in incompetent series by some dissident graffitist. There were skyrails, strung between jags of architecture like the broken-off pillars of some godly vault. The wires sliced air and made sound, so wind played New Crobuzon as an instrument.

Night brought new light, elyctro-barometric tubes of glowing gas, glass in convolutes, made to spell out names and words or sketch pictures in outline. A decade gone they had not existed or had been very long forgotten: now the streets after dark were all dappled by their distinct and vivid glare, washing out the gaslamps.

There was such noise. It came without remorse. There were always people everywhere. New Crobuzon.

“. . . and then the other op-er-at-or told the formal in-stee-gay-tor that his suit could not be heard the very thought was quite absurd . . .”

On stage chanteuse Adeleine Gladner, under her singing name Adely Gladly (pronounced to rhyme, Aderly Gladerly), yelled and crooned through her number “Formal Instigation” to applause and catcalls drunken but loud and totally heartfelt. She minced, kicking under her skirts (her costume a long-dated exaggeration of a streetwalker’s flounces, so she looked more coy than libertine). She shook her lace trimmings at the punters and smiled, scooping up the flowers they threw without breaking her song.

Her celebrated voice was everything it was held to be, raucous and very beautiful. The audience were hers completely. Ori Ciuraz, at the rear of the hall, was sardonic but by no means immune. He did not know the others at his table well, only to tip his glass to. They watched Adely while he watched them.

Fallybeggar’s Hall was huge, clogged with smoke and drug smells. In the boxes and raised circle were the big men and their hangers-on, and sometimes the big women too. Francine 2 the khepri queenpin came here. Ori could not see well over the fringe of plaster drakows and obscene spirits, but he knew that the figure he saw moving in that box was a player in the militia, and that that one was one of the Fishbone Brothers, and that in that one was a captain of industry.

Up close to the orchestra by the stage it was a cramped clot of men and women, polyglot and many-raced, gazing at Adely’s ankles. Ori tracked tribal boundaries.

A slick of vagabonds, petty thieves and their bosses, discharged foreign soldiers, discharged jailbirds, dissolute rich and tinkers, beggars, pimps and their charges, chancers, knife-grinders, poets and police agents. Humans, here and there cactus-heads poking over the crowd (allowed in only if their thorns were plucked), the scarab-heads of khepri. Cigarillos hung from mouths, and people banged their glasses or cutlery in time while waiters went between them on the sawdusted floor. At the room’s edges small groups coagulated, and one like Ori—well-used to Fallybeggar’s—could see where they overlapped and where they separated, and make out their composition.

There must be militia in the hall, but none wore uniforms. At the back the tall and muscled man, Derisov, was an agent—everyone knew it but did not know how high or how connected he was, so would not risk killing him. Near him a group of artists, debating their schools and movements with sectarian passion.

Closer to Ori and watching him, a table of well-turned-out young men, New Quillers, dry-spitting ostentatiously when any xenian came too close. They would hate Ori more than khepri or cactus, as he was race-renegade; and emboldened suddenly by the environs, by cosmopolitan and raucous Fallybeggar’s, Ori raised his head to meet their gazes and put his arm around the old she-vodyanoi beside him. She turned in surprise but, seeing the Quillers, gave a grunt of approval and leaned into Ori, making exaggerated eyes at him and them in turn.

“Good lad,” she said, but with his heart fast Ori would only stare at the four men who watched him. One spoke angrily to his companions but was hushed, and the one who quieted him raised his eyebrows to Ori and tapped his watch and mouthed later.

Ori was not afraid. His own tribe were near. He almost nodded at the Quiller in sarky challenge, but such complicity revolted him and he turned away. He could see his friends and comrades at their arguments, disagreeing more fiercely than the painters, but they would come together to fight with him if needed. And there were several of them. The Quillers could not face the insurrectionists.

The crowd were raving for Adely by now, singing along with her show-opener and making delighted pitter-patter motions with their fingers as she concluded—“once again, in the raaaaain”—and then becoming delirious with applause. The Quillers, artists, and all the other grouplets joined in with no restraint.

“Oh now thank you all, oh you’re my darlings, oh you are,” she said into the cheers and, professional as she was, they could hear her. She said: “I came out here to say good evening and ask you all to show a bit of willing to them who’s come up here tonight, give ’em a good welcome, let ’em know you love ’em. It’s their first time, some of ’em, and we all know what the first time’s like, don’t we? Bit of a disappointment, ain’t it, girls?” They broke up with laughter at that, and in anticipation because it was so obvious a lead-in to her song “Are You Done?” And yes, there was the familiar comedy hoboy quacking like a duck, the opening bars, and Adely drew in a big breath, paused, then shouted “Later!” and ran offstage, to lighthearted boos and shouts of tease!

The first act came into the lights. A singing family, two children done up as dolls and their mother playing a pianospiel. Most of the audience ignored them.

Cow, thought Ori. She came on, Adely, and seemed so generous ushering in the beginners. But the crowd were there for her, so her little surprise opener could only weigh heavy on those who had to follow. She’d made them disappointments, no matter how good they were. Hard enough to come before a big name without sabotage like that, however sweetly done. Everyone would be limping through their acts, the audience eager to get back to Adely.

The harmony threesome gave way to a dancer. He was aging but agile, and Ori out of politeness paid attention, but he was one of only a few. Then a singing comedian, a poor hack who would have been jeered with or without Adely’s intervention.

All the entertainers were pure, unRemade human stock. It concerned Ori—he did not know if it was coincidence that with these Quillers looking on there were no xenian performers. Was the New Quill Party pulling strings at Fallybeggar’s? The suspicion was hateful.

At last the useless comedian was done. It was time for the final warm-up. THE FLEXIBLE PUPPET THEATRE, it said on the handbills. PERFORMING THE SAD AND INSTRUCTIONAL TALE OF JACK HALF-A-PRAYER. It was them Ori had come to see. He was not there for Adely Gladly.

There were minutes of preparations behind the curtain, while the audience chatted about the main event, the Dog Fenn Songbird. Ori knew what the Flexible Puppet Theatre were getting ready, and he smiled.

When the velvet finally parted it did so without brass or percussion, and the performers waited, so for seconds there was no notice, until a couple of little gasps as the tobacco smoke seemed to clear and show the stage-within-a-stage. There were oaths. Ori saw one of the Quillers stand.

There was the usual—the cart-sized puppet theatre with its little carved figures in garish clothes stock-still on their stage—but the miniature wings and proscenium arch had been torn off, and the puppeteers stood in plain view dressed too-nearly like militia officers in dark grey. And the stage was littered with other things, strange debris. A sheet was stretched and hammered taut and on it some magic lantern was projecting newspaper print. There were people onstage whose roles were unclear, a gang of actors, and musicians, the Flexibles disdaining the house orchestra for an unkempt trio who wore pipes and flutes and held drumsticks by pieces of sheet steel.

Ori flashed his upturned thumb at the stage. His friends were standing dead still and silent until the mutters grew intrusive and slightly threatening, and from the back came a shout of piss off. And then with a massive, painful sound, someone pounded the metal. Instantly and underneath that still-reverberating noise another music-man struck a lovely, lively tune half-modelled on street-chants, and his companion played the steel gently like a snare. An actor stepped forward—he was immaculate in a suit, waxed moustaches—bowed slightly, tipped his hat to the ladies in the front row, and bellowed an obscenity just-hidden from the censor by a consonant inserted at its beginning, an unconvincing nonsense-word.

And there was outrage again. But these Flexibles were consummate—arrogant pranksters yes but serious—and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition was quick and funny dialogue, or jaunty music, and it was hard to sustain anger. But it was an extraordinary challenge or series of challenges and the crowd vacillated between bewilderment and discontent. Ori realised it was a question of how much of the play they could get done before it was unsafe to perform.

No one was sure what it was they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvred, but they should have been—were designed to be—wooden players in traditionalist moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow.

Images, even animations—pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns—came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and the other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form. This stilled the angry crowd somewhat—it was a popular story, and they wanted to see what this anarchic Nuevist crew would do with it.

The barebones introduction was familiar. “No one of us’ll forget, I’m sure,” the narrator said and he was right, no one could, it was only twenty years ago. The puppets sketched it out. Some obscure betrayal and Jack Half-a-Prayer, the legendary Jack, the fReemade boss, was caught. They cut his great mantis claw from his right hand—they’d given it to him in the punishment factories, but he’d used it against them, so they took it away. The puppets made this a scene gruesome with red-ribbon blood.

Of course the militia always said he was a bandit and a murderer, and he did kill, no one doubted that. But like most versions of the story, this one showed him as he was remembered: champion-rogue, hero. Jack got caught and it was a sad story, and the censors let the people have it so.

It wasn’t quite a public hanging they gave him—that wasn’t in the constitution—but they found a way to show him off. They’d tethered him on a giant stocks in BilSantum Plaza outside Perdido Street Station for days, and the overseer had used his whip at the slightest wriggle, deeming it resistance. They paid people to jeer, it was mostly agreed. Plenty of Crobuzoners came and didn’t cheer at all. There were those who said it was not the real Jack—he’s no claw, they’ve found some poor bugger and lopped off his hand, is all—but their tone was more despairing than convinced.

The puppets came and went in front of the little plywood whipping post to which the wooden Jack was strapped.

And then da-da-da-da-da went the metal drum. All of the actors on the stage began to shout and gesture at the militia-puppets, and the screen came up with the word EVERYONE! and even the sceptical audience played along and began to shout over here, over here. That was how it had been—a diversion from some in the crowd, orchestrated or chance was debated, though Ori had his own thoughts. As the militia dangled across the little puppet-stage, Ori remembered.

It was a young memory, a child’s memory—he did not know why he had been in the plaza or with whom. It was the first time for years the militia had been seen like that in their uniforms, had been a forerunner of their turn from covert policing, and in a grey wedge they had targeted the shouting segment of crowd. The overseer had drawn a flintlock and dropped his whip and joined them, and left the tethered figure.

Ori did not remember seeing the rough man who had ascended toward Jack Half-a-Prayer until he was near the top. He had a vivid image of him, but he did not know if that was his six-year-old’s memory or one constructed from all the reports he had later heard. The man—here came his puppet now, look, on the stage, while the militia’s backs were turned—had been distinctive. Hairless, viciously scarred, pocked as if by decades of ferocious acne, his eyes sunken and wide, dressed in rags, a scarf pulled over his mouth and nose to hide him.

The puppet that skulked exaggeratedly up the steps called out to Jack Half-a-Prayer with a harsh voice, a twenty-year-old echo of the real man’s loud and piercing call. He called Jack’s name, as he had that day. And neared him and pulled out a pistol and a knife (the puppet’s little tinfoil constructions glinted). Remember me, Jack? he had shouted, and his puppet shouted. I owe you this. A voice like triumph.

For years after the murder of Jack Half-a-Prayer the plays had followed the first conventional understanding. The pockmarked man—brother, father or lover to one of the murdering Man’Tis’s victims—was too moved by rage to wait, overcome and righteous and straining to kill. And though it was understandable and no one could blame him, the law did not work that way; and when they heard and saw him it was the militia’s sad duty to warn him off, and when that didn’t work to fire at him, putting an end to his plans, and killing the Half-a-Prayer with stray bullets. And it was regrettable, as the legal process had not yet been completed, but it could hardly have been in any doubt that the outcome would soon have been the same.

That was the story for years, and the actors and puppeteers played Jack as the pantomime baddie, but noticed that the crowds still cheered him.

In the second decade after the events, new interpretations had emerged, in response to the question, Why had Half-a-Prayer shouted in what sounded like delight when the man came for him? Witnesses recalled the torn-skinned man raising his pistol, and thought that they had perhaps seen Jack strain as if to meet him and then of course a mercy killing. One of Jack’s gang, risking his own life to bring the humiliations of his boss to an end. And maybe he had succeeded—could anyone be sure it was a militia bullet that had ended the Remade captive? Maybe that first shot was a friend saving a friend.

The audiences liked that much more. Now Jack Half-a-Prayer was back as he had been in graffiti for decades—champion. The story became a grand and vaguely instructional tragedy of hopes noble-but-doomed, and though Jack and his nameless companion were now the heroes, the city’s censors allowed it, to the surprise of many. In some productions the newcomer took Jack’s life then ended his own, in others was shot dead as he fired. The death scenes of both men had become more and more protracted. The truth, as Ori understood it—that though Jack had been left dead and lolling in his harness the pock-faced man had disappeared, his fate uncertain—was not mentioned.

Up the little stairs ran the scarred-man puppet, his weapons outstretched, scooping up the overseer’s dropped whip (a complicated arrangement of pins and threads facilitating the movement), as tradition said he had done. But what was this? “What is this?” the narrator shouted. Ori smiled—he had seen the script. He was clenching his fists.

“Why pick up the whip?” the narrator said. Having been caught in the rude charm of the Nuevist production, the Quillers were definitely standing now, shouting again shame, shame. “Iber gotter gun,” said the scarred-man puppet directly to the audience over their rising cries. “Iber gotter knifey. Whybe gonner pick anubber?”

“I’ve an idea, pock-boy,” said the narrator.

“Ibey idear already too, see?” the puppet said back. “One an dese,” holding out the gun and the whip, “tain’t fer me, see?” An elegant little mechanism spun the pistol in his wooden hand so that suddenly he held it out butt-first, a gift for his tethered friend, and he took his knife to Jack Half-a-Prayer’s bonds.

A heavy glass trailed beer as it arced over the crowd to burst wetly. Treason! came the calls, but there were others now, people standing and shouting yes, yes, tell it like it is! Dogged, only dancing over the skittering glass, the Flexible Puppet Theatre continued with their new version of the classic, where the two little figures were not doomed or cursed with visions too pure to sustain or beaten by a world that did not deserve them, but were still fighting, still trying to win.

They were inaudible over the shouting. Food pelted the stage. A disturbance, and the master of ceremonies came on, his suit rumpled. He was hurried, almost pushed on by a thin young man—a clerk from the Office of Censorship who listened backstage through all registered performances. His job had abruptly stopped being routine.

“Enough, you have to stop,” shouted the MC and tried to pull the puppets away. “I’ve been informed, this performance is over.” He was shocked out of his pompous patter. Thrown scraps hit him, so he cowered even more than he already was. The supporters of the Flexibles were few but loud, and they were demanding the show continue, but seeing Fallybeggar’s man lose control the young censor himself stepped up and spoke to the audience.

“This performance is cancelled. This troupe is guilty of Rudeness to New Crobuzon in the Second Degree, and is hereby disbanded pending an enquiry.” Fuck you, shame, get off, show must go on. What rudeness? What rudeness? The young censor was quite unintimidated, and was damned if he’d put this dissidence into words. “The militia have been called, and on their arrival, all still here will be deemed complicit with the performance. Please leave the premises immediately.” The mood was too mean for dispersal.

There was more glass in the air and the screams that told it had landed. Quillers were targeting the stage, Ori saw, heading to beat the performers, and he pushed himself up and indicated to nearby friends and they headed off to intercept the knuckle-cracking Quillers, and the riot blossomed.

Adely Gladly ran out, already in her risqué costume, and shouted for peace. Ori saw her, just before he split his fist on the back of some Quill-scum head, then looked back at the matter in hand. On the stage the Flexible Puppet Theatre were scooping all their props out of the way. Over the noise of beating and shouts and percussions of glass the wonderful voice of the Dog Fenn Songbird begged for the fighting to stop, and no one paid her any notice.

Chapter Seven

The play was defunct and done, and the militia when they came were more concerned with clearing the building than with making arrests. Ori blocked the Quillers long enough for the puppeteers to clear their pieces, and with the Flexibles he ducked backstage past brawls that were now mostly drunken, without political hatreds to refine them.

They came out into an alley, bloodied but laughing, a mass of theatre people stuffing costumes into carpet bags, and one or two like Ori, observers. It had rained a little moments before, but the night was warm, so the film of water seemed like the city’s sweat.

Petron Carrickos, who had been the narrator, pulled his moustache off, leaving its ghost in spirit gum above his lip, and stuck it on the alley’s lone poster, giving the revivalist whose sermons it advertised thick eyebrows. Ori went west with him and several others to Cadmium Street. They would double back and head for Salacus Fields Station without passing Fallybeggar’s entrance.

Late but not so late, the streets where Salacus met Howl Barrow were full. There were militia on corners. Ori jostled through late window-shoppers and theatre-goers, the music-lovers at voxiterator booths, a few golems like giant marionettes, wearing their owners’ sashes. There were markings on walls. Illicit galleries and theatres, artists’ squats, signposted by graffiti for those who could read it. Salacus Fields itself was becoming colonised by the weekend bohemians. There had always been moneyed slummers, bad-boy younger children seeking tawdry redemption or dissolution, but now their visits were temporary and their transformations tourist. Ori felt contempt. Artists and musicians were moving out as agents and merchants moved in and rents rose, even while industry floundered. So to Howl Barrow.

The streets sputtered under the bilious elyctro-barometric shopsigns. Ori nodded at the faces he knew from meetings or performances—a woman by the silversmith’s door, a thickset cactus-man handing out flyers. Brickwork buckled and held on, and leaned house on house, repaired in a patchwork of metal and cement, paint in anarchic styles, and spirals and obscenities; and coming out and over into the sky were temple spires and lookout pitches for the militia, and towerblocks. The crowds were thinning as the evening went toward deep night.

By raised train through the roofs to Sly Station, changing platforms and bidding friends goodnight, till even Petron had gone for Mog Hill, and Ori was alone among late-night travellers sprawled on seats and smelling of gin. He stepped past some in overalls from late shifts, who turned to not look at the drunkards. Ori sat next to an older woman, and followed her gaze through dirt-stained glass into the miles of city, a fen of buildings thick with glints. The train crossed the river. The woman was staring at nothing in particular, Ori realised, and it caught his attention too—just a juddering of lights at some intersection, a kink of city.

The windows of Ori’s street in Syriac were mostly uncurtained, and when he woke he looked out and in gaslamp-light saw large still figures standing in their houses, sleeping. It was a street colonised by cactacae. He rented from a kind, gruff she-cactus who had effortlessly hefted his bags in one greenling hand when he had moved in.

The small-hours’ trains passed the top windows shining dimly. They went to The Downs southerly or on north up to their huge terminus, that synapse of troublesome architecture between the city’s rivers, Perdido Street Station.

The business of night continued. The air was warm and wet, and it unstuck glue and ate at brickwork’s pointing. From the oldest parts of the city, tough hut-work, ivy-swaddled ruins in Sobek Croix. Families slept rough in warehouses at the edges of Bonetown. Brock Marsh was crossed by cats, then by a badger waddling home under cluttered shop facades. Sedate and baleful aerostats waited below clouds.

Two rivers ran, and met, and became one big old thing, the Gross Tar, guttersome and groaning as it passed out of city limits through the stubs of a bridge, through shantytowns in New Crobuzon’s orbit, looking for the sea. The city’s illicit inhabitants came out briefly and hid again. There was midnight industry. Someone was always awake, countless someones, in towerblocks or elegant houses or the redstones of Chnum or in the xenian ghettos, in the Glasshouse or the terraces of Kinken and Creekside, configured by the khepri grubs, reshaped with brittled insect spit. Everything continued.

There was nothing of the riot in any news-sheets the following day, or the next. It did not stop people hearing something had happened.

Ori made it known to the right people that he had been there. Passing the shops and pubs of Syriac he saw that he was seen, and knew that some who glanced at him—the woman here, the vodyanoi, the man or cactus-man, even the Remade there—were with the Caucus. Not showing his excitement, Ori might pat his chest gently with a fist in surreptitious greeting, which they might ignore or might thump back at him. Between themselves the Caucusers flashed complicated finger-shapes, messages in downtown handslang Ori could not decipher. He told himself they were perhaps about him.

The Caucus, in its closed and hidden session, talking about him. He knew it wasn’t so, but it delighted him to think it. Yes, his friends were Nuevists, but not decadent or wastrel nor satisfied only to shock. He thought of the Caucus, delegates from all the factions, breaking off from consideration of strategy and rebellion, breaking off from evasion of the militia and their informers, to commend Ori Ciuraz and his friends for a fine provocation. It wouldn’t happen, but he liked it.

In Gross Coil, Ori took what day-work came his way. He hauled and delivered for food and poor pay. Gun-grey components of some military machine that must be heading around the coast and through the Meagre Sea and the straits and on to the distant war. He worked at whatever siding or yard, whatever wreckers would take him, unloading barges by Mandrake Bridge, and when the days were done he drank with workmates become temporary friends.

He was young, so the foremen bullied him, but nervously. They were edged with unease. There were all the troubles. Tense times for the factories of Gross Coil, for Kelltree and Echomire. Past the foundry on Tuthen Way, Ori saw scars from fires on the ground, where in recent weeks pickets had been. The walls were marked with sigils of dissidence. Toro; The Man’Tis lives!; the stencilled councillor. Bullet holes marked walls at the Tricorn Fork, where less than a year before the militia had faced down hundreds of marchers.

It had started at the Paradox Concerns, in unorganised complaint at some dismissals, and then had been on the streets with great speed, and shop floors in the surrounds were fractured as others joined the demonstrators, whose slogans had veered from reinstatement of friends to increased wages, then were suddenly denunciations of the Mayor and of the suffrage lottery, were demands for votes. Bottles were thrown, and caustic phlogiston; there were shots—the militia shot back or started it—and sixteen people were dead. Chalked homages appeared regularly at the junction and were cleaned away. Ori touched his fist gently to his chest as he passed the site of the Paradox Massacre.

On Chainday he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. A bit before eight, two men left the taproom and did not come back. Others followed, in casual and random order. Ori drank the last of his beer and went as if for the privy, but seeing he was not followed he turned down a damp-mottled corridor, lifted a trapdoor down into the basement. Those assembled in the dark looked and did not greet him, almost as much suspicion as welcome on their faces.

“Chaverim,” he said to them. A category stolen from an old language. “Chaver,” they said back—comrade, equal, conspirator.

One Remade man, and it was the first time he had come. His arms were crossed at the wrists and were fused, and when he clenched and unclenched his fingers it was as if he imitated a bird.

There were two women from a sweatshop under the Skulkford railway arches, knit-machine workers, by a docker and a machinist, and a vodyanoi clerk in light-cloth mimicry of a human suit that he could wear in the water, complete with stitched-on tie. A cactus-man stood. The barrels of cheap beer and wine served as tables for dissident publications: a crumpled Shout, The Forge, and several copies of the best-known seditionist sheet, Runagate Rampant.

“Chaverim, I want to thank you for coming.” A middle-aged man spoke with calm authority. “I want to welcome our new friend Jack.” He nodded at the Remade. “War with Tesh. Militia infiltration. Free trade unions. The strike at Purrill’s Bakery. I’ve word on each of those. But I want to take a few minutes to talk about my approach—our approach, Double-R’s approach—to the question of race.” He glanced at the vodyanoi, at the cactus-man, and began to speak.

It was these introductions, these discussions, that had first brought Ori close to the Runagate Rampant circles. He had bought a copy every fortnight for three months from a fruit-seller in Murkside, and eventually the man had asked him whether he was interested in talking through the issues covered, had directed Ori to these hidden meetings. Ori had been a regular, raising more points and objections, engaging with more enthusiasm—and eventually less—until after one meeting, while they were alone, with affecting trust the convenor had told Ori his real name, Curdin. Ori had responded, though like everyone they still went by Jack to each other within the meetings.

“Yes, yes,” Curdin was saying, “I think that’s right, Jack, but the question is why?”

Ori unfolded his Runagate Rampant, read it in snippets. Exhortations for unity in action that he had seen before, angry and illuminating analyses, columns and columns of strikes. Each workplace, each two or three people who had put their tools down, won or lost, a gathering of twenty or a hundred, a half-hour walkout, the disappearance of every guildsmember or suspected unioner. A catalogue of every dispute, murderous or paltry. It bored him.

There were stories missing. Ori’s frustrations with the meetings was growing. Nothing was happening here. It was elsewhere, though, fleetingly. As in Fallybeggar’s.

He tapped his Runagate Rampant. “Where’s Toro?” he said. “Toro took another one. I heard it. In Chnum. Him and his crew took out the guards, shot the magister that lived there. Why’s that not in here?”

“Jack . . . it’s clear what we say about Toro,” Curdin said. “We had the column last-but-one issue. We don’t . . . it ain’t the way we’d do things . . .”

“I know, Jack, I know. You criticise. Carp at him.”

The convenor said nothing.

“Toro’s out there and he’s doing something, yeah? He’s fighting, and he’s not waiting like you keep waiting. And you sit and wait, and tell him he’s getting ahead of himself?”

“It’s not like that. I won’t snip at anyone fighting the magisters, or the militia, or the Mayor, but Toro can’t change things on his own, or with his little crew, Jack . . .”

“Yeah but he’s changing something.”

“Not enough.”

“But he’s changing something.”

Ori respected Curdin, had learnt so much from him and his pamphlets, he did not want to alienate him. But the complacency of his convenor had begun to infuriate him. The man was more than twice his age—was he just old? They sat and glowered at each other wordlessly while the others looked back and forth between them.

Afterward Ori apologised for his bad temper. “It’s nothing to me,” said Curdin. “Be as rude as you want. But I tell you the truth, Jack”—they were alone and he corrected himself—“I tell you the truth, Ori. I’m worried. Seems to me you’re going down a certain road. All your plays and puppets . . .” He shook his head and sighed. “I ain’t against it, I swear to you, I heard what happened at Fallybeggar’s and, you know, good on you, on your friends. But shock and shooting ain’t enough. Let me ask you something. Your friends the Flexible Puppeteers—why’d they choose that name?”

“You know why.”

“No I don’t. I know it’s a homage, and I’m glad for that, but why him, why not Seshech or Billy le Ginsen, why not Poppy Lutkin?”

“Because we’d get arrested if we tried that.”

“Don’t play stupid, lad. You know what I mean—there’s scores of names you could’ve chose to send a message, to piss in the Mayor’s bath, but you honoured him. The founding editor of Runagate Rampant—not The Forge or Toilers’ War or The Bodkin. Why him?” Curdin tapped his paper against his thigh. “I’ll tell you why, lad—whether you know it or not, he’s the one scares the powers. Because he was right. About factions, about war, about the plurality. And Bill and Poppy and Neckling Verdant, and them others—Toro, Ori, Toro and his band and all, even Jack Half-a-Prayer—good people, chaverim, but on stuff like this their strategy’s for shit. Ben was right, and Toro’s wrong.”

Ori heard arrogance, or commitment, or fervour, or analysis in Curdin’s voice. Angry as he was, he did not care to disentangle them.

“You going to sneer at Half-a-Prayer now?”

“I didn’t mean that, I ain’t saying that . . .”

“Godspit, who you think you are? Toro’s doing things, Curdin. He’s making things happen. You—you’re talking, Double-R’s just talking. And Benjamin Flex is dead. Been dead for a long time.”

“You ain’t being fair,” he heard Curdin say. “You ain’t hardly got fluff on your chin, and you’re telling me about Benjamin Flex, for Jabber’s sake.” And his voice was not unkind. He meant it lightly, but Ori was outraged.

“At least I done something!” he shouted. “At least I’m doing something.”

Chapter Eight

No one seemed to know what had started the war with Tesh. The Runagaters had their theories, and there were official stories and the unseen machinations behind them, but among Ori’s circle no one knew quite what had started it, or even exactly when it had begun.

As the long recession had bitten, years before, merchant ships from New Crobuzon had started returning to dock reporting piratical manoeuvres against them, sudden brigandry from unknown ships. The city’s exploration and its trade were under attack. History was marked by New Crobuzon’s oscillations between autarky and engagement, but never, its wounded captains said, had its emergence into mercantilism been so punished, so unexpectedly.

After centuries of uncertainty and strange relations, the city had made understandings with the Witchocracy, and the passage of New Crobuzon ships through the Firewater Straits had been unhindered. So a sea-route was open to the grasslands and islands, the legendary places on the far side of the continent. Ships came back and said they had been to Maru’ahm. They sailed for years and brought back jewelled cakes from thousands of miles away, from the crocodile double-city called The Brothers. And then the piracy had begun, hard, and New Crobuzon came slowly to understand that it was being attacked.

The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased coming to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour that through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war.

Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newsposters. The Mayor had promised revenge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori heard, with “booze recruitment”—press-ganging.

It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on their doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of “temporary suspension of industry.” The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home.

Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them.

Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if at their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey.

“You know what this is!” he was shouting at them. “You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see . . .” He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlookers’ terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?

So many uncertainties, a spiralling-down of morale, fear in the city. New Crobuzon’s government had mobilised. For two, three years now it had been the time of the Special Offensive. There was more death and more industry. Everyone knew someone who had gone to war, or disappeared from a dockside pub. The shipyards of Tarmuth, that estuary satellite town, had begun to push out ironclads and submersibles and had spurred something of a recovery, and the mills and forges of New Crobuzon followed, war turning their gears.

Guilds and unions were outlawed capriciously, or restricted and emasculated. There were new jobs now for some of those grown used to pauperism, though competition for them was cruel. New Crobuzon was stretched out, pulled taut.

Every age had its social bandits. Jack Half-a-Prayer when Ori was a boy, Bridling in the Week of Dust, Alois and her company a century ago. Jabber himself, if one looked at it a certain way. Made strange by their context, overthrowing rules: the crowds who would spit on the Remade would have sworn themselves to Half-a-Prayer. Doubtless some were imagined by history, mean little cutpurses embellished through centuries. But some were real: Ori would swear by Jack. And now there was Toro.

Skullday, Ori ran with the Nuevists. He took his day-wages and joined them in The Two Maggots pub by Barrow Bridge, and with the beetle-spit-smeared rooftops of Kinken visible over the river they played games and argued about art. The students and exiles of the arts quarter were always happy to see Ori because he was one of a handful of real labourers in the circle. In the evening Ori and Petron and several others staged an art-incident, dressing as pantomime pigs, parading to Salacus Fields and past The Clock and Cockerel, long fallen on its honour, where the parvenus and uptown posers came to play at bohemia. The Nuevists grunted at the drinkers and shouted “Ah, nostalgia!” in porcine voices.

Dustday Ori stevedored, and drank in the evening in a workers’ pub in Skulkford. Among the smoke and beer-laughter, he missed the flamboyance of The Two Maggots. A barmaid caught his eye, and he recognised her from some illicit meeting. She folded back her apron for him to see the Runagate Rampants in her pinny pocket, inviting him to buy, and the resentment and frustration he had felt for Curdin came back to him hard.

He shook his head so brusquely she obviously thought she had misremembered. Her eyes widened. Poor woman, he had not meant to scare her. He persuaded her that he was safe to talk to. He called her Jack. “I’m tired of it,” he whispered. “Tired of Runagate Rampant, forever saying what’s what but never doing anything, tired of waiting for change which don’t come.” He executed a ridiculous handslang parody.

“What’s the point, you saying?” she said.

“No, I know there’s a point . . .” Ori poked the table in fervour. “I been reading this stuff for months now. I mean . . . but the militia are doing something. Quillers are doing something. And the only ones on our side doing anything are nutcases like the Excess League or bandits like Toro.”

“But I mean you ain’t serious, right?” Jack let her tone come down carefully. “I mean, you know the limitations . . .”

“Godspit and shit, Jack, don’t start with ‘the limits of individual action’ right now. I’m just tired. Sometimes, don’t you sometimes wish you didn’t care? I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain’t godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn’t care.”

Fishday evening Ori disembarked at Saltpetre Station. In the smoggy gloaming, he went through the brickwork warrens of Griss Fell, past householders scrubbing their porches of the grit of machinofacture and graffitied coils, chatting from window to window across the little streets. In an old stable, a soup kitchen doled out bowls to a line of destitutes. Nominally the charity was run from Kinken, and keeping order were a trio of khepri armed in imitation of their guard-gods, the Tough Sisters, with crossbow and flintlock, spear and hooknet, and one with the metaclockwork stingbox.

The khepri stretched their lean and vivid women’s bodies. They spoke to each other without sound, moving the antennae and headlegs of their headscarabs, the iridescent two-foot beetles at the top of their necks. They vented chymical gusts. They turned to Ori—he was reflected in their compound eyes—and recognised him, waved him to one of the cauldrons. He began to dole out soup to patient tramps.

Kinken money had started the service, but it was kept running by locals. When the Mayor said the city could not provide for the needy, alternative structures arose. To shame New Crobuzon’s rulers or out of despair, various groupings provided social programs. They were inadequate and oversubscribed, and one spawned another as the sects competed.

In Spit Hearth they were run by the churches: care of the old and the orphaned and poor was in the hands of hierophants, monks and nuns. With their ersatz hospitals and kitchens, apostate and zealot sects built up trust that a thousand years of preaching would not have gained them. Seeing that, the New Quill party had started its own human-only relief in Sunter, to complement its street-fighting. The insurrectionists, who would be arrested instantly they went public, could not follow.

They followed Kinken money instead—it came, they heard, from Francine 2, the khepri crime-queen. It was not unknown for the captains of illicit industry to subsidise such charities: in Bonetown Mr. Motley was reputed to keep local loyalty with his own goodwill trusts. But wherever the money came from, the Griss Fell Retreat was run by locals, and the Caucus tried carefully to be known to be involved.

With a few Caucusists from various tendencies working together alongside the unaffiliated, it could be fractious. The activists had to whisper their tea-break debates.

Ori spooned broth into bowls. He recognised the faces of many of the outcasts; he knew some of their names. Many were Remade. A woman whose eyes had been taken in punishment, her face a skin seal from nose to hairline, shuffled past holding the rag-coat of her companion. Mostly human but not all, there were other races too, on hard times. An ancient cactus-man, his spines withered and brittle. Men and women scarred. There were some whose minds were gone, who sang hymns or yammered nonsense words, or asked questions that made no sense. “Are you a doubler?” a lank-haired oldster asked everyone who passed, the ancient remains of some accent still audible. “Are you a doubler? Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler, son?”

“Ori. Come for absolution?” Ladia was the full-timer on duty. She teased all the volunteers that they came only to unload guilt. She was not stupid—she knew their allegiances. When Ori took a break, she joined him and poured liquor in his tea. He knew their conversation could not be heard over the table manners of the starving.

“You’re like Toro,” he told her. “You’re the only ones doing anything, making changes here, now.”

“I knew it. I knew you was here because you felt guilty,” she said. She made it light. “Doing your bit.”

He finished his shift, and kept his patience. Ori muttered to those momentarily in his care. Some smiled and spoke back to him; some cussed him with alcohol or very-tea on their breath. “Are you excessive? Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” the insistent old man said to him. Ori took his bowl away.

“You are,” the old man said. “You are a doubler. You’re a doubler, you little terror.” The man smiled like a saint and was pointing at Ori’s midriff, where his shirt had fallen forward and exposed his belt, and tucked into it a folded copy of Runagate Rampant, Double-R.

Ori tucked his shirt back in, careful not to be furtive. He washed the bowls at the pump (the man chuckling and pulling at his beard, and saying you are, you doubler at Ori’s back). He did another round of the room, made it slow, offering last dabs of bread, and came back to the laughing man.

“I am,” he said, conversational and quiet. “I’m a doubler, but it’s best you keep that down, mate. I’d rather not everyone knows, understand? Keep it secret, eh?”

“Oh yes.” The man’s manner changed quite suddenly. The cunning of madness came over him, and he lowered his voice. “Oh yes, we can do that, isn’t it? Good people them doublers. You doublers. And them excessive, and free and proscribed.”

The Excess Faction, the Free Union, the League of the Proscribed—it was not just Runagate Rampant; the old man was itemising groups in the Caucus.

“Good people but blather,” he said and snapped his hand open and shut like a talkative mouth. “All a bit blatheration.” Ori smiled and nodded. “They like talking. And you know, that’s all right, talking’s good. Ain’t always . . . blather.”

“Who’s the old boy?” Ori said to Ladia.

“Spiral Jacobs,” she said. “Poor old mad sod. Has he found someone to talk to? Has he decided he likes you, Ori? Decided you’re proscribed, or free, a doubler?” Ori stared at her, could not tell if she knew what she was saying. “Has he started on at you about arms or tongues?” She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral!” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’ ”

As Ori left that evening, another of the volunteers met him at the door, a kind and stupid man. “Saw you talking to Ladia about Spiral Jacobs,” he said. He grinned. He whispered, “Heard what they say about him? What he used to do? He was with Jack Half-a-Prayer! Swear to Jabber. He was in Jack’s crew, and he knew Scarface, and he got away.”

Chapter Nine

The next night Spiral Jacobs was not at the shelter, nor the next. The pleasure and surprise with which Ladia greeted Ori began to change. He saw her watch him to make sure he was not dealing drugs or contraband, but he worked hard, and she could only be puzzled.

On Skullday, as Ori swept the shelter floor, he heard, “Are you proscribed? Are you a doubler?” Spiral Jacobs saw him and smiled and said, “There’s the boy. There you are, ain’t you, you—” and he blinked and raised one finger and winked. He leaned in and whispered “You doubler.”

One try, thought Ori. He made himself sceptical. One piece of indulgence for this casualty. Only when the food was all distributed and the first homeless families were coming in from begging or thievery to doss down did Ori idle to Spiral’s side.

“Buy you a drink sometime?” Ori said. “Sounds like you and me’ve interests in common. Could chat about stuff. About doubling. About our friend Jack.”

“Our friend, yes. Jack.”

The man lay down in a blanket. Ori’s patience diminished. Spiral Jacobs was digging something out, a bit of paper, dirt ground into its cross of folds. He showed Ori, with a child’s grin.

It was cool when Ori walked home. He traced the route of the railway, by tracks carried over the slates on loops of brick, arches like a sea-snake. Light like gaslight or candlelight spilt from a train’s dirty windows and sent shadows convulsing over the angled roofscape to hide, darkness creeping out again from behind chimneys in the engine’s wake.

Ori walked fast with his head down and hands in pockets when he passed militia. He felt their eyes on him. They were difficult to see, their uniforms woven through with trow yarns that ate what light there was and excreted darkness. At night the clearest thing about them was their weaponry: they were armed, it seemed, at random, and in the dim he could see their batons or stingboxes, their dirks, rotating pistols.

He remembered twelve years ago, before the slump, to the Construct War, when for the first time in a century the militia tradition of covert policing—networks of spies, informants, plainclothes officers and decentralised fear—had become inadequate, and they had gone unhidden and uniformed. Ori did not remember the roots of the crisis. A child among others, with his boisterous gang he had mounted the roofs of Petty Coil and Brock Marsh on the Tar’s north shore, and watched the militia barrage the Griss Twist dumps.

With children’s aggression they had joined in the purge of the city’s constructs, the panicked hounding of the clockwork and steam-powered cleaners suddenly deemed enemy. Mobs cornered and destroyed the welded, soldered things. Most of the constructs could only stand patient while they were torn apart, their glass trod into dust, their cables ripped.

There were some few that fought. The reason for the war. Infected with viral consciousness, programmes that should not be, that had infected New Crobuzon’s constructs, the gears of their analytical engines turning in heretic combinations to spin a cold machine sentience. Thinking motors for which self-preservation was a predicate, that raised their metal, wood and pipework limbs against their erstwhile owners. Ori never saw it.

The militia had levelled Griss Twist’s jungle of trash. They shelled it, rinsing it with fire, advancing in wrecking teams through the melt and ash-scape. There had been some kind of factory there for the pernicious programmes, and it and the monstrous mind behind it were destroyed. It had been a demon or something, or a council of the aware constructs and their flesh followers.

There were still constructs and difference engines in the city, but far fewer, strictly licenced. An economy of golems had half replaced them, making a few thaumaturges rich. Griss Twist’s dumps were still bone-white and blackened wreckage. They were out of bounds, and New Crobuzon’s children would climb or creep in and take souvenirs, and tell each other that the dumps were haunted by the ghosts of the machines. But the most lasting result of the crisis, Ori thought, was that the militia still went unhidden. It was only months after the Construct War that the recession riots had begun, and few of the militia had ever afterward gone back to plainclothes disguise.

Ori could not decide if it was better or worse. There were those among the rebels who argued each way, that emerging was an expression of militia strength or of weakness.

The paper Spiral Jacobs had showed Ori was a heliotype, taken long ago, of two men standing on the rooftops by Perdido Street Station. A poor print, washed out by light and feathery with age, its exposure too slow, its subjects wearing motion-coronas. But recognisable. Spiral Jacobs white-bearded, looking old even then, wearing the same madman’s grin. And beside him a man whose face was turning and hazed, who raised his arms to the camera, stretched the fingers of his left hand. His right arm was unfolding, was a brutal and massive mantis claw.

Early the next morning, as the tramps were ushered out of the centre, Ori was waiting.

“Spiral,” he said as the man came out scratching and wrapped his blanket around him. The old man blinked in daylight.

“Doubler! You the doubler!”

It cost Ori a day’s wages. He had to pay for a cab to take the weak old man to Flyside, where Ori did not know anyone. Spiral prattled to himself. Ori bought breakfast in a square below the Flyside Militia Tower, with the skyrails hundreds of feet overhead linking the tower to the Spike in the city’s heart. Spiral Jacobs ate for a long time without speaking.

“Too much yammering, not enough hammering, Spiral. Ain’t that the truth? Too much of this—” Ori stuck out his tongue. “—not enough of this.” He clenched his fist.

“Hammer, don’t yammer,” the tramp said agreeably and ate a grilled tomato.

“Is that what Jack said?”

Spiral Jacobs stopped chewing and looked up slyly.

“Jack? I’ll Jack you,” he said. “What you want to know about Jack?” The accent, that indistinct trace of something foreign, resonated for a second more loudly.

“He hammered not yammered, didn’t he, Jack did?” Ori said. “Ain’t that right? Sometimes you want someone to hammer, to do something, don’t you?”

“We had half a prayer with Jack,” said the old man, and smiled very sadly, all the madness momentarily gone. “He was our best. I love him and his children.”

His children?

“His children?”

“Them as came after. Bully for them.”

“Yes.”

“Bully for them, Toro.”

“Toro?”

In Spiral Jacobs’s eyes Ori saw real derangement, a dark sea of loneliness, cold, liquor and drugs. But thoughts still swam there, cunning as barracuda, their movements the twitchings of the tramp’s face. He’s sounding me out, thought Ori. He’s testing me for something.

“If I’d been there a little older, I’d’ve been Jack’s man,” Ori said. “He’s the boss, always was. I’d have followed him. You know, I saw him die.”

“Jack don’t die, son.”

“I saw him.”

“Aye like that maybe, but, you know, people like Jack they don’t die.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I think Jack’s looking and smiling at you doublers, but there’s others, friends of ours, mates of mine, he’s thinking, ‘Bully for them!’ ” The old man clucked laughter.

“Friends of yours?”

“Aye, friends of mine. With big plans! I know all about it. Once a friend of Jack’s, always, and a friend of all his kin too.”

“Who are you friends with?” Ori wanted to know, but Jacobs would say nothing. “What plans? Who are your friends?” The old man finished his food, running his fingers through the residue of egg and sucking them. He did not notice or care that Ori was there; he reclined and rested, and then, without looking at his companion, he shuffled into the overcast day.

Ori tracked him. It was not furtive. He simply walked a few steps behind Spiral Jacobs, and followed him home. A languorous route. By Shadrach Street through the remnants of the market to the clamour of Aspic Hole, where a few fruiterers and butchers had stalls.

Spiral Jacobs spoke to many he passed. He was given food and a few coins.

Ori watched the society of vagabonds. Grey-faced women and men in clothes like layers of peeling skin greeted Jacobs or cursed him with the fervour of siblings. In the charred shade of a firegutted office, Jacobs passed bottles for more than an hour among the vagrants of Aspic Hole, while Ori tried to understand him.

Once a group of girls and boys, roughnecks every one, a vodyanoi girl kick-leaping and even a young city garuda among them, came to throw stones. Ori stepped up, but the tramps shouted and waved with almost ritualised aggression and soon the children went.

Spiral Jacobs headed back east toward the Gross Tar, toward the brick holes and the Griss Fell shelter that were as much as anything his home. Ori watched him stumble, watched him rifle through piles of rubbish at junctions. He watched what Jacobs picked out: bewildering debris. Ori considered each piece carefully, as if Spiral Jacobs was a message to him from another time, that he might with care decrypt. A text in flesh.

The wiry little figure went through New Crobuzon’s traffic, past carts piled with vegetables from the farmlands and the Grain Spiral. Hummock bridges took him over canals where barges ferried anthracite, and through the afternoon crowds, children, bickering shoppers, the beggars, a handful of golems, shabby-gentile shopkeepers scrubbing graffitied helixes and radical slogans from their sidings, between damp walls that rose and seemed to crumble, their bricks to effervesce into the air.

When after a long time deep colours leeched across the sky, they had reached Trauka Station. The railway cut overhead at an angle that ignored the terraces below it. Spiral Jacobs looked at Ori again.

“How did you know him?” Ori said.

“Jack?” Jacobs swung his legs. They were on the Murkside shore, their thighs under the railings. In the river a tarred frame broke water, an unlit vodyanoi house. Jacobs spoke with a lilt, and Ori thought he must be hearing a song-story tradition from Jacobs’ homeland. “Jack the Man’Tis, he was a sight for sore eyes. Come through on the night-stalkers. It was him stepped up, saved this place from the dream-sickness all them years ago, ‘fore you was born. Scissored through the militia.” He snip-snipped his hand, hinging it at the wrist. “I give him things he needed. I was an informationer.”

By the light of the gaslamps, Ori was looking at the helio. He ran his thumb over Jack Half-a-Prayer’s claw.

“What about the others?”

“I watch all Jack’s children. Toro’s a one with fine ideas.” Jacobs smiled. “If you knew the plans.”

“Tell me.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“Ain’t me should tell you. Toro should tell you.”

Information—a place, a day—passed between them. Ori folded the picture away.

The New Crobuzon newspapers were full of stories of Toro. There were fanciful engravings of some terrible muscled bull-headed thing, descriptions of feral bovine roars over Mafaton and The Crow, the uptown houses and the offices of the government.

Toro’s exploits were all named, and the journals were addicted to mentioning them. A bank’s vaults had been breached and slathered with slogans, thousands of guineas taken, of which hundreds had been distributed among the children of Badside. In The Digest Ori read:

By great fortune, this, THE CASE OF THE BADSIDE MILLIONS, has not had so bloody an outcome as THE CASE OF THE ROLLING SECRETARY or THE CASE OF THE DROWNED DOWAGER. These earlier incidents should remind the populace that the bandit known as TORO is a coward and a murderer whose panache is all that grants him a degree of local sympathy.

Messages reached Ori through New Crobuzon’s intricate and secret conduits. He had waited three times at the corner that Spiral Jacobs had told him, in Lichford, beneath signs to Crawfoot and Tooth Way, by the old waxwork museum. He had leaned in the sun, back against the plaster, and waited while street-children tried to sell him nuts and matches in twists of coloured paper.

Each time cost him wages and his profile among the day-recruiters of Gross Coil. He had to space them out or he would starve, or his landlady’s indulgence would dry up. He returned to the Runagate Rampant reading group, to sit, a Jack among Jacks, and talk of the city’s iniquities. Curdin was pleased to see him. Ori was much calmer in his disagreements now. He felt his secret with pleasure. I’m not quite with you any more he thought, and felt himself a spy for Toro.

At the street corner he was greeted by a girl in a torn dress, no more than ten years old. She smiled at him as he leaned against the museum, endearing with her missing teeth. She handed him a paper cone of nuts, and when he shook his head she told him, “The gen’man already paid. Said they was for you.”

When the packet unfolded, even greasy from the roasted nuts the message written on it was legible. Seen you waiting. Bring vittles and silver from a rich man’s table. Below was a little horned circle, the sigil of Toro.

It was easier than he had thought. He watched a house in East Gidd. Eventually he paid a boy to break the windows in front, while he vaulted into the shrubbery, forced the garden door, grabbed knives and forks and chicken from the table. Dogs came, but Ori was young and had outrun dogs before.

No one would eat the greasy mess that marinated overnight in his sack. This was an examination. The next day at the usual spot he put his bag at his feet, and when he left he did not take it. He was well excited.

Mmm good, said the next note, uncurled from more street food. Now we needs money my frend forty nobles.

Ori fulfilled his commissions. He did what he was told. He was not a thief, but he knew thieves. They helped him or taught him what to do. At first he did not enjoy the anarchic adventures, running down alleys at night with bags bobbing in his hands, the shrieks of well-dressed ladies behind him.

He loathed being a lumpen cutter of purses, but he knew that anything more refined risked bringing the militia. As it was when he careered down crowded streets at twilight, the street gangs filled his wake as arranged and the officers would only plunge a little way into the rookeries, swinging truncheons.

Twice he did it, and could hardly stop his trembling. He became energised, vastly excited to be committing these acts, to be doing something palpable. The third time and the times after that, he had no fear.

He never took a stiver from the money he stole. He delivered it all to his unseen correspondent. It took several deliveries. He lost track. The robberies became routine. But he must have made his forty nobles: a new commission appeared. This time it was a wax tube, scored with grooves, that he had to take to a voxiterator booth.

Over the spit of the needle he heard a voice, faded through crackles: “All good my boy now let’s get serious let’s you bring us a militia crest.”

He saw Spiral Jacobs every week. They had developed a language of ellipsis and evasion. He was not categorical—he admitted to nothing—and Spiral Jacobs still spoke with erratic logic. Ori saw the old man’s madness was at least in part a mime.

“They’ve got me doing things,” Ori said, “your mates. They’re not the most welcoming coves, are they?”

“No they ain’t, but when they make friends with you they’re friends for life. Been at that shelter a long time. Been there a long time, wondered if I’d find anyone to introduce them to.”

Ori and Spiral Jacobs discussed politics in this careful and mediated way. Among the Runagate Rampant chaverim, Ori was quiet and watchful. Their numbers dwindled, rose again. Only one of the women from the Skulkford sweatshop still came. She spoke more and more often, with increasing knowledge.

He listened with a kind of nostalgia and wondered, How am I going to do this?

He went to Dog Fenn, where he knew the militia would be harder to find but where he could hide. It took two attempts, a lot of planning and several shekels in bribes. By night in the darkness of Barley Bridge’s girdered underside. A two-man patrol lured by a breathless street-boy telling them someone had been thrown in, while a gang of his fellows shouted. A young streetwalker wailed in the black water while trains wheezed overhead. She thrashed with genuine fear (she could not swim but was kept afloat by two vodyanoi children below her who swilled water in their submerged equivalent of giggles).

The first night the militiamen only stood at the edge and shone their lanterns at the bobbing woman while the children hollered at them to save her. They shouted for her to hang on and went to find help; and Ori emerged, dragged the disgusted prostitute out and hurried everyone away.

On the second night, an officer left his jacket and boots with his companion and waded into the cool water. The vodyanoi descended, and the woman panicked very badly and began to sink. The chaos in the water was not feigned. The children milled shrieking around the remaining militiaman, clamouring for him to help, jostling him until he bellowed and swung his truncheon, but it was too late by then. They had opened the bundle of his partner’s clothes, even still in his grip, rifled its contents.

Ori left the badge in an old shoe at Toro’s corner. When he came back two days later, someone was there to meet him.

Old Shoulder was a cactus-man. He was thin and dwarfed for his kind, shorter than Ori. They walked through the meat-market. Ori saw that prices were still rising.

“I don’t know who pointed you our way and I ain’t going to ask you,” Old Shoulder said. “Where you been before now? Who you been with?”

“Double-R,” said Ori, and Old Shoulder nodded.

“Yeah, well I ain’t going to moan about them, but you better make your choice, lad.” He looked at Ori with a face bleached the faintest green by years of sun. He made Ori feel very young. “Things go very different with our friend.” He scratched the side of his nose, extending his first and last fingers splayed into horns. “I don’t give spit about what Flex or any of his lot would have said. You can kiss good-bye to philosophising. We ain’t interested in the toil concept of worth, or graphs of the swag-slump tendency and whatnot. With Double-R it’s just more and more notions.

“I don’t care if they can lecture like we was at the university.” They stood still among the flies and the warm smell of meat, among the cries of the sellers. “What I care about’s what you do, mate. What can you do for us? What can you do for our friend?”

They had him as a messenger. He had to show his worth, picking up packages or messages that Old Shoulder left for him, ferrying them across the city without investigating them, delivering them to men or women who eyed him without trust and sent him away before they would open them.

He drank in The Two Maggots, keeping his friends among the Nuevists. He went to the Runagate Rampant discussions. Hidden histories: “Jabber: Saint or Crook?”; “Iron Councillor: The Truth behind the Stencil.” The hard young machine-knitter had become a political authority. Ori felt as if he watched everything through a window.

In the first week of Tathis, at a time of sudden cool, Old Shoulder had him as lookout. It was only at the last second that he was told what his job would be, and all his excitement came back.

They were in Bonetown. They watched evening come in livid shades through the silhouettes of the Bonetown Claws, the Ribs. The ancient bones that gave the area its name curved more than two hundred feet into the air, cracking, yellowed, mouldering at a geological pace, dwarfing the houses around them.

There was to be a delivery to the kingpin Motley. Ori could not even see where his gang would intercept it. He was exhilarated. He watched and watched, but no militia came. He could see to the clearing below the bones, to the city scrub where acrobats and print-vendors were counting their takings, oblivious to the monstrous ribcage above them.

He watched nothing, frantic, wishing he had a pistol. Young men passed in a gang and eyed him, decided not to bother. No one approached. The whistle stayed in his tense fist. He had no idea anything had even started till Old Shoulder tapped him from behind, jerking him violently, and said, “Home again, boy. Job’s done.” That was all.

Ori could not have said when he was made a member. Old Shoulder began to introduce him to others, to muttered discussions.

In the pubs, in the tarry shacks and mazes of Lichford, Ori talked tactics with Toro’s crew. He was a probationer. He felt a queasy guilt when his new companions mocked the Caucus—“the people’s pomp” they called it—or Runagate Rampant. He still went to Double-R’s under-pub discussions, but unlike his many months there, he could see the impact of his new activities immediately. They were in the papers. Ori had been lookout on what they called the Case of the Bonetown Sting.

He was paid, with each haul. Not much, but enough to compensate for the wages he was missing, and then a little more. In The Two Maggots and Fallybeggar’s, he bought generous rounds, and the Nuevists toasted him. It made him feel nostalgic.

And in Lichford, he had new companions—Old Shoulder, Ulliam, Ruby, Enoch, Kit. There was an élan to Toro’s outlaw gang. Their lives were different, were richer and more tenuous, because they were being risked.

If they catch me now they won’t just lock me up, Ori thought. They’ll Remake me for sure, at least. Probably I’m dead.

There were strikes most weeks in Gross Coil now. There was trouble in Smog Bend. Quillers had attacked the khepri ghetto in Creekside. The militia went into Dog Fenn, Riverskin and Howl Barrow, took unioners and petty crooks and Nuevists away. The foremost exponent of DripDrip poetry was beaten to death in one such raid, and his funeral became a small riot. Ori went, and threw stones with the mourners.

Ori felt as if he were waking. His city was a hallucination. He could bite down on the air; he could wring tension out of it. Daily he passed pickets, chanted with them.

“It’s gearing up,” Old Shoulder said. He sounded gleeful. “When we get it done—when our friend can finally get through and, uh, meet up with you-know-who . . .”

The gang glanced, and Ori saw several quick looks his way. They were not sure they should be speaking in front of him. But they could not keep themselves quiet. He was careful, did not give in to his desire to ask them Who? Who is I-know-who?

But Old Shoulder was staring at a streetside fixing-post, its fat pillar many-skinned in ancient posters. There was one block-printed heliotype, a stark rendition of a familiar face, and Old Shoulder was looking at it as he spoke, and Ori understood what he was being told. “We’ll finish it all off,” the old cactus-man said. “We’ll change everything when our friend meets a certain someone.”

He had not seen Spiral Jacobs for days. When at last Ori tracked him down, the tramp was distracted. He had not been to the shelter in a long time. He looked exhausted, more unkempt and dirty even than usual.

Ori followed leads from other forgotten men and women to find him, at last, in The Crow. He was shuffling between the great shops of the city’s central district, its statues, facades of grand marble and scrubbed white stone. Jacobs had chalk in his hand, and every few steps he would stop and murmur to himself, and draw some very faint and meaningless sign upon the wall.

“Spiral,” Ori said, and the old vagrant turned, his rage at the interruption making Ori start. It was a moment before Spiral Jacobs composed himself.

They sat in BilSantum Plaza among the jugglers. In the warm colours of the evening, Perdido Street Station loomed beside them, its variegated architecture unsettling, massive and impressive, the five railway lines spreading out of its raised arch-mouths like light from a star. The Spike, the militia minaret, soared up from its western side. Perdido Street Station seemed to lean on it like a man on a staff.

Ori looked at the seven skyrails that stretched from the Spike’s summit. He looked along one tugged to the southeast, over the red-light district and the salubrious Spit Hearth, over the scholars’ quarter of Brock Marsh, to another tower, and on to Strack Island, to Parliament itself, surrounded by the conjoining rivers.

“It’s the Mayor,” said Ori, while Spiral Jacobs seemed not to listen, only to play with his chalk and think whatever he wanted to think. “Toro’s crew are fed up with taking out militia corporals and what-have-you. They want to kick things off. They’re going to kill the Mayor.”

It might have seemed that Spiral Jacobs was too gone to care, but Ori saw his eyes. He saw that gummy mouth open and shut. Was it a surprise? What else was there for the people’s bandit to do?

And though Ori might have told himself that he let Spiral know only for some kind of duty, out of some sense that the old fighter, Jack Half-a-Prayer’s comrade, deserved to know, there was more than that. Spiral Jacobs was involved, had in his random way ushered Ori to this brutal and liberatory political act. A plan like this, Ori said, would take guts and strength and information and money. This was the start. Come for the soup tomorrow, said Spiral Jacobs suddenly, promise me.

Ori did. And perhaps he knew what was in the bag that Jacobs brought him. Opening it in his room much later, alone by his candle, he could not silence his gasps.

Money. In rolls and tight wraps. A huge haul of coins and notes, in scores of currencies. Shekels, nobles and guineas, yes, the newest decades old, but there were ducats too, dollars and rupees and sandnotes and arcane bawbees, square coins, little ingots from maritime provinces, from Shankell, from Perrick Nigh and from cities Ori was not sure he believed in. It was the dregs of a highwayman’s life, or a pirate’s.

A contribution, said the note enclosed. To help with a Good Plan. In Jack’s memory.

Part Three:

Wine Land

Chapter Ten

The golem watched the sleeping travellers. It stood by the embers taller than a man or a cactus-man. Thickset, with arms too long that hung in front of it, vaguely simian. Its stance was buckled, its back hunched into a saddle. Its clay skin was sun-cracked.

With dawn the golem was blundered across by woken insects. It did not move. Burrs and spores blew over the sleepers in their hollow. Breezes prickled their flesh. They were north of the relentless heat.

Drogon rose first. When the others woke he was gone, scouting, and Pomeroy and Elsie went too, to leave Cutter alone with the golem’s master.

Cutter said, “You shouldn’t have left. Judah, you shouldn’t have gone.”

Judah said, “Did you get the money I left?”

“Of course I got the money, and I got your instructions too, but I fucking didn’t follow them, did I? And ain’t you glad? With what I brought you?” He slapped his pack. “They weren’t ready when you left.”

“And now one’s broken.” Judah smiled sadly. “One’s not enough.”

“Broken?” Cutter was stricken. He had dragged the equipment so far.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Judah, not without me.” Cutter breathed hard. “You should have waited for me.”

Cutter kissed him, with the urgency that always came when he did, a desperation. Judah responded as he always did—with something like affection and something like patience.

Even now, Cutter realised with wonder, Judah Low seemed not quite focused on what was before him. It had been that way as long as Cutter had known him. A typical distracted researcher in something or other, Cutter had thought at first. Cutter’s shop was in Brock Marsh, and scholars were his customers. He had been surprised when he traced the remains of some downtown accent in Judah’s voice.

More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.

The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time—stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay—Cutter asked his name.

“And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?” Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.

Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.

They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh’s. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.

He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.

They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.

“I rode,” he said to them. “On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter.” A brief terrible look went over him.

He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.

Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. “Let it go, Judah,” he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.

“Rest,” Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.

Cutter felt an urge to push it over and watch it break apart, to save it from being stuck like that in time, but he let it stand.

“Who’s Drogon?” Judah asked. The susurrator looked lost without his horse. He was busying himself, letting them discuss him.

“He’d not be here if I’d my way,” Pomeroy said. “For a whispersmith he’s got a damn lot of power. And we don’t know where he’s from.”

“He’s a drifter,” said Cutter. “Ranch-hand, tracker, you know. Some horse tramp. He heard you’d gone—gods know what the rumours are now. He’s attached hisself to us because he wants to find the Iron Council. Out of sentiment, I think. He’s saved us more’n once.”

“He’s coming with us?” Judah said. They looked at him.

Carefully, Cutter said: “You know . . . you don’t have to go on. We could go back.” Judah looked oddly at him. “I know you think you burnt your bridges with the golem trap in your rooms, and it’s true they’ll be watching for you, but dammit, Judah, you could go underground. You know the Caucus would protect you.”

Judah looked at them and one by one they broke his gaze, ashamed. “You don’t think it’s still there,” he said. “Is that what this is? You’re here for me?”

“No,” said Pomeroy. “I always said I wasn’t just here for you.”

But Judah kept talking. “You think it’s gone?” He spoke with calm, almost priestly certainty. “It hasn’t. How can I go back, Cutter? Don’t you realise what I’m here for? They’re coming for the Council. When they find it, they’ll bring it down. They came for the Teshi, but now they found it they can’t let the Council be. I heard it from an old source. Told me they’d found it, and what they’ll do. I’ve to warn them. I know the Caucus won’t understand. Probably cursing me.”

“We sent them a message,” Cutter said. “From Myrshock. They know we’re after you.”

From his satchel Judah brought out papers and three wax cylinders.

“From the Council,” he said. “The oldest letter’s near seventeen years old. The first cylinder’s older’n that. Almost twenty years. The last ones arrived three years ago, and they were only two years old when they came. I know the Council’s there.”

The messages had travelled by unknown routes. Fellid Forest to the sea, by boats to the Firewater Straits, Shankell and Myrshock, to Iron Bay and New Crobuzon. Or through byways in the hills, or through woods by paths hundreds of miles into the swamps below Cobsea. To Cobsea itself in the great plains. Or by air, or thaumaturgy, somehow making their ways at last to Judah Low.

And could you write back, Judah? Cutter thought. You know they’re waiting. Do they know you’re coming? And how many of their messages were lost? He saw austere gullies strewn with fragments of wax. Gusts sending scraps of encoded paper like blossom across the grassland.

He was awed to see the paper, the grooved cylinders, sound fixed in time. Artefacts from a Caucus rumour, from the stories of travellers and dissidents.

What would he know? When first he had heard of Iron Council he was a boy, and it was a folktale like Jack Half-a-Prayer, and Toro, and the Contumancy. When he grew old enough to know that his Parliament might have lied to him—that there might have been no accident in the quagmires to the south—the Iron Council some said had been born there could never be found. Even those who said they had seen it could only point west.

Why did you never show me those, Judah? he thought. Through all their discussions, through all their growing closer. Judah had taken Cutter’s cynicism and tried to do something to it, tried to tell Cutter that it had clogged him. There were other ways of doubting everything that need not sullen him, Judah had said, and sometimes Cutter had tried.

A dozen years they had known each other, and Cutter had learnt many things from Judah, and taught him a few. It was Judah had brought Cutter to the fringes of the Caucus. Cutter thought of the debates in his shop and in his small rooms, in bed. And in all those political ruminations—Judah a most unworldly insurrectionist, Cutter never more than a suspicious fellow-traveller—Cutter had never seen these stocks from the Iron Council itself.

He did not feel betrayed, only bewildered. That was familiar.

“I know where the Council is,” Judah said. “I can find it. It’s wonderful that you came. Let’s go on.”

Judah spoke to the whispersmith. No one but Judah could hear Drogon’s replies, of course. At last Judah nodded, and they understood that Drogon was coming with them. Pomeroy glowered, despite all the susurrator had done.

Judah the somaturge did not seek leadership, did nothing but say he would continue and that they could come, but they became his followers, as they always did. It had been the same in New Crobuzon. He never ordered them, often seemed too preoccupied to notice they were with him, but when they were they attended him carefully.

They prepared. There must be weeks of travel. Miles of land, and more land, and rocks and more trees, and perhaps water, and perhaps chasms, and then perhaps the Iron Council. They slept early, and Cutter woke to the sound of Pomeroy and Elsie’s lovemaking. They could not help their little exhalations, nor the scuffing of their bodies. The noise aroused him. He listened to his friends’ sex with lust and an upswelling of affection. He reached for Judah, who turned to him sleepily and responded to his tonguing kiss, but gently turned away again.

Below his blanket Cutter masturbated silently onto the ground, watching Judah’s back.

Chapter Eleven

A week they went north and northwest into greening. It was exhausting. The plains buckled. Sloughs and cenotes in the landforms grew deeper, and hills flecked with chaparral and heat-stunted trees. They walked gulches. Three times the whispersmith showed them they had found their way unknowingly onto a trail, that they walked in the ghosts of footprints.

“Where do we go?”

“I know where it is,” Judah said. “In what part.” He checked maps, and conferred with Drogon, the plains-traveller. Judah rode with an implacable wilderness calm.

“Why are you here?” Judah said to Drogon. The susurrator answered straight into Judah’s ear. “Yes,” said Judah, “but that tells me nothing.”

“He ain’t doing it to you now,” Cutter said. “He can take you over with his bloody voice. At least twice that’s how he kept us alive.”

Cougars and githwings eyed them from the low hills or the air, and the party sounded their weapons. Copses of waxy plants like bladed succulents menaced them, moved not by breeze.

“See there.” Drogon’s whisper. He hauled the accoutrements of nomadism. He was a man of these ranges, anxious without a horse. He pointed to things they would not have seen. “A village was there,” he said; and yes, they learnt to see it in the ground, walls and foundations sketched in regolith, a landscape’s memory of architecture. “That ain’t no tree,” he said, and they realised that it was the barrel of some ancient gun or gunlike thing, swaddled in ivy and the scabs of weather.

One night while the others slept off their gamy supper, Cutter sat up hours before dawn and saw that Judah was gone. He rifled stupidly through Judah’s bedcloth as if he might find him there. The whispersmith looked up, his face soured to see Cutter needily gripping Judah’s wool.

Judah was off in the direction the wind was going, in a little hillside rincon. He had taken from his pack a cast-iron apparatus, so heavy a thing Cutter was astonished he had brought it. Judah motioned Cutter to sit by the voxiterator. One of his wax cylinders was inserted, and his hand was on the crank.

He smiled. He replaced the plectrum-needle at the top of the grooves.

“You may as well,” he said. “Seeing as you’re here. This keeps me going.” He turned the handle and in the sputter and random tuts from the trumpet, a man’s voice sounded. It was bled of bass, and it sped and slowed gently as the crank’s pace varied, so his inflection was hard to gauge. The wind took the voice as soon as it emerged.

“. . . don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family sister so I thought you should hear this from family not wrote down fact is he’s dead Uzman’s dead and gone I’m sorry you’ve to hear it like this I’m sorry you’ve to hear it at all truth is weren’t a bad passing mind he was at peace we buried him ahead and now he’s in our tracks there was those said we should put him in the cemetery but I weren’t having that I said to them you know it ain’t what he wanted he told us do it right do it like it used to be done so I made them we’re mourning him he told us not to don’t mourn organise he said when we was fighting they told me and after the stain he told us don’t mourn celebrate but sister I can’t help it we’re allowed to mourn you mourn sister go on you mourn and I will too it’s me it’s Rahul I’ll say good-bye . . .”

The needle snapped stop. Judah was crying. Cutter could not bear it. He reached out, faltered when he saw that his touch would not be welcome. Judah did not sob. The wind sniffed them both like a dog. The moon was faint. It was cool. Cutter watched Judah weeping and he hurt, he was fervent to hold onto the grey-haired man, but he could do nothing but wait.

When Judah had finished and wiped himself dry he smiled at last at Cutter, who had to look away.

Cutter spoke carefully. “You knew him, the one he’s talking about. I see. Whose was that message? Whose brother was that?”

“It’s for me,” said Judah. “I’m the sister. I’m his sister, and he’s mine.”

Hills rose shallowly, pelted with flowers in regal colours. Dust stuck to Cutter’s sweat, and he breathed air thickened with pollen. The travellers stumbled through strange landscape, weighed down by dirt and the sun as if they had been dipped in tar.

They tasted carbon. Somewhere above the bluffs before them the sky was discoloured by more than summer. Lines of dark smoke were drawn up and dissipating. They seemed to retreat like a rainbow as the party approached, but the next day the smell of burn was much stronger.

There were paths. They were entering inhabited lands, and approaching the fires. “Look there!” said the whispersmith to each of them in turn. On downs miles off there was movement. Through Drogon’s telescope Cutter saw that it was people. Perhaps a hundred. Hauling carts, hurrying their meat-beasts: fat cow-sized birds, thick and quadruped, scrawny featherless wings stumping as forelegs.

The caravan was decrepit and desperate. “What’s happening here?” Cutter said.

At noon they came somewhere the earth had split, and they walked the bottom of arroyos much higher than houses. They saw something dun and battered, bound, like a giant brown-paper parcel in string. It was a wagon. Its wheels were broken and it leaned against the rock. It was split and burned.

There were men and women around it. Their heads were stove in or their chests opened up and emptied by bullets, the contents spilt down their clothes and shoes. They sat or lay in neat order where they had been killed, like a troop waiting instructions. A company of the dead. A child spitted on a broken sabre huddled at their front like a mascot.

They were not soldiers. Their clothes were peasants’ clothes. Their belongings littered the chine floor—irons, pots and kettles, all alien designs, cloth made rags.

Cutter and his companions stared with their hands at their lips. Drogon wrapped his kerchief around mouth and nose and went into the deads’ stench through the billows of insects that ate them. He took a wooden spoke and poked at the bodies so carefully he looked almost respectful. They were sunbaked, their skins cured. Cutter could see their bones in ridges.

The cart listed as Drogon leaned in. He squatted and looked at the wounds, probing them as the others watched and gave off sounds. When the whispersmith took gentle hold of the sabre that protruded from the child, Cutter turned away so he would not see the dead boy move.

“Days gone,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation. “One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade.”

It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.

“I told you.” Judah spoke very quietly.

Can’t we get out of here? Cutter thought. I don’t want to talk in front of them. He looked up, breathing fast, saw Pomeroy and Elsie holding each other.

“In my letter, Cutter. You remember?” Judah held his gaze. “I told you I was going because of this.”

“We’re near the outskirts of Tesh lands,” Cutter said. “This don’t mean the militia are onto the Iron Council.”

“They’ve a base by the coast, from where they send these squads out. This . . . work . . . This is only half of what they do. They’re going north. They’re looking for the Council.”

Beyond the dead was open country. They knew that the militia that had done this to these runaways might be close, and they moved carefully. Cutter saw those patient dead when he closed his eyes. Drogon took them on a path through the sagebrush. On the hills ahead were scraps of farmland, of a half-wild, scrubby kind, from where the smoke came.

It was a day to the depredation. The air was clogged with smouldering. They entered the first little field with their guns drawn.

Through ridges of turned-over earth into what had been a copse of olives. They trod over the spread claws of roots where the little trees had been torn down. Drying olives scattered like animal pellets. There were craters, where stumps were made carbon sculptures. There were bodies cooked down to skeletons.

There had been huts, and they were burnt. On a plain of scrub and drying creeks were mounds of black rubbish that smoked like slag. A rank, meat and sweet smell. Cutter hacked through dried summer boscage.

For seconds he could not make sense of what he saw. The mounds were heaped-up carcasses, a charnel mass—blacked remnants of snouted ungulates, tusked, big and heavy as buffalo. They were encased in ash and crisped leaves. Roots spread out in their pebbled flesh.

“Vinhogs,” said Judah. “We’re in Galaggi. We’ve come so far.” The wind moved and hilltop dust and the burnings of olives, vines and vineleaves hurt their eyes. The dead animals rustled.

Pomeroy found a trench, where scores of men and women rotted. The decay of days had not yet disguised their crosshatched tattoos. Their pumice-colour skins were death-besmirched, stone jewels piercing them.

They were the wineherds. The clans, the Houses, nomads of this hot northern steppe, custodians of the vinhog coveys. They tracked them, protected them and, at harvest time, leapt in dangerous brilliant husbandry between the horns of the aggressive herbivores to prune the fruit that plumped on their flanks.

Cutter swallowed. They all swallowed, staring at the dead ragged with gunfire. Judah said, “Maybe this is House Predicus. Maybe it’s Charium or Gneura.” The vinhogs, the animal-hosts and their harvest, mouldered and burned away.

All day they walked swells of ruined land, through olive groves ground to nothing, and despoiled crop-herds, and great numbers of scorched cadavers from the winemaker tribes. A corral of the huge meat-birds gone to maggots. The soft spit of embers and the knock of dead wood surrounded them. On some corpses the specifics of murder were still clear. A woman, her skirt rucked up and stiff red; a big wineherd man, his belly flyblown, stabbed in both eyes. Rot made Cutter gag.

They found one vinhog alive, fallen in a stone basin. It shook with hunger and infection. It limped in circles and tried to paw the ground. Its skin was ridged with rootwork and a leaf-pelt from its symbiotic vines. Its lichen-grapes were wizened. Cutter shot it in pity.

“This is why the cactacae fought, down south,” said Pomeroy after a long silent time. “This is what they heard about. They saw the militia, thought this was what they’d get too.”

“Why this? Why this?” said Elsie. She struggled. “Galaggi ain’t Tesh land, it’s wild. These ain’t Tesh tribes.”

“No, but it’s Tesh they’re hurting,” Judah said. “Galaggi wine and oil goes through it. They aren’t strong enough yet to hit the city, but do this and you hit Tesh in the coffers.”

They were way beyond their mapped world. Tesh was there, two or three hundred miles south and west on the coastal plain. Cutter thought of it, though he did not know what it was he should picture. How should he think it? Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. Its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.

Thousands of sea miles from Iron Bay to the remote coast, to the foothold that New Crobuzon had established north of Tesh. The militia had to go past Shankell, past seas thick with piasa and pirates, through the Firewater Straits where the Witchocracy backed their Tesh neighbours. There were no land-routes across Rohagi’s wild interiors, no shortcuts. It was a desperately hard war to wage. New Crobuzon had to send ships across months of hostile waters. Cutter was awed at the brute vigour.

That night they ate unripe fruit they found unspoiled on a dead vinhog and made forlorn jokes about what a good vintage it was. Their second day on the vintners’ land they found wreckage of the marauders. The New Crobuzon militia had not had it all their way. It was the remains of a nashorn, a rhino ironclad and Remade into a veldt tank. Two storeys high, a raised arse-end gunnery, a piston-strengthened neck. Its horn was corkscrewed, a huge drillbit. The nashorn was burst and savaged with peasant weapons. Its gears and innards lay about it.

There were six militia dead. Cutter stared at the familiar uniforms in this unlikely place. The officers were killed with blades. There were wineherds’ sickles on the ground.

The land was full of scavengers. Dead-eating fox-things dug at the earth. That night Drogon woke the travellers with a shot. “Ghul,” he whispered to each in turn. They did not believe him, but in the morning its corpse was there: grave-pale and simian, its toothy mouth wide, blood drying on its eyeless forehead.

There was the start of a cooling as they went north, but only the very start. In the heat, among the ghuls and the dead and the dizzying smell of rotting fruit and the smoke, in a land become a torn-up memory of itself, Cutter felt as if he were walking in the outskirts of some hell.

In days through rugged transverse rises, a haze of forested hills became just visible to the north, and Judah was elated. “We’ve to go through that,” he said. “It’s the end of the veldt; it’s the far edge of Galaggi.”

Behind them the earth was broken by the tracks of militia. They had passed out of that crushed zone of husbandry and feral wine, those few score of miles once worth something. This was a wetter reach of hills all summered, copper and slick. It rained warm rain—virga that did not reach the ground.

They were in places only antique sages and adventurers had been. They had heard about these strange reaches—patches of ice in deep summer, the hives of dog-sized termites, clouds that fossilised into granite. On a Dustday, new smoke and a smell reached them. They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them. One by one they let out sounds.

A few miles off. A chelona. Its titan legs were splayed, its plastron flattened to the ground. Its sides rose vastly, and from halfway up were gnarls of carapace-matter coaxed over generations into overhangs and towers, the walls of a keratin village. The great tortoise was more than a hundred yards long, and over the centuries of its life it had accreted on its back a many-layered jag township. Brittle outgrowths of its scute had been grown and carved into blocks, ziggurats and spires, their planes and lines imperfect, cut with windows, belfries connected by rope bridges, coursed with horny streets and tunnels; everything made, paved and walled in the mottlesome tortoiseshell. The chelona was dead and on fire.

It reeked of burning hair. Smoke rose from the walls in a thionic gush. Muck and gore dripped from its cave mouth.

Milling at its base were fastnesses on wheels and tracks, mobile guns—a New Crobuzon force. Crews rode two nashorns, the captains in sunk seats behind the rhinos’ heads, gripping controls sutured directly to ganglia. The militia cannon must be more powerful than they appeared to have blasted such wounds.

Militia infantry were heading in the travellers’ direction. They followed a line of refugees fleeing the remains of their chelonatown.

Drogon and Judah led them on through scrub, until a sharp coughcoughcough sounded, and there was screaming, and the echoes of bullets. They lay where they had thrown themselves until it was obvious that they were not targets, continued, staying low, to the base of a hill where they bunkered behind a marl barricade. Above them, out of the tree-cover, was a line of broken-down families. Not all were human. Some were behind fallen trunks or in hollows; some were running. Their shouts of fear were like the sounds of scraping.

At the hilltop, a corps of militia took positions. They were just discernible. They kneeled before motorguns; there was a monsoon of noise and bullets and many of the refugees fell.

Cutter watched in rage. More bullets pressed down the earth, and the dying twitched and tried to crawl away. A chelonaman raised something to his lips, and there was a thin noise, and way above there were cries and some of the militia stumbled at some thaumaturgy in the trumpet.

Drogon was watching the hilltop through his telescope. Judah turned to him in response to a whisper, and said, “She’s unpacking what?”

From the hilltop unfolded a shape of wire and dark leather, taller than a man. It became in a stutter of extending metal. Like a music stand, it unfurled many times. A humming of thaumaturgy made the air thin as a militia officer made shapes on the thing, and there was crackling, and the wire-and-hide moved.

It threw back a head with glass eyes, and its skin wings beat twice and it was airborne and careering down the hill toward the Galaggiites. Its limbs were not legs or arms but knifed extensions, insectan and agleam. They slid together with the sound of sharpening.

The ugly sculpture flew toward those cowering. Judah’s eyes were wide, and when he spoke he was choked with rage and contempt. “A prefab,” he said. “You use a damned ready-made?” He stepped up and onto the shallow hill, and Cutter stayed with him and aimed.

The militia’s gliding assassin passed over the wailing wounded and reached the trumpeter. He blew another thin note, but the thing had no life for him to disrupt. It rived him with its bayonets, and he screamed and bled out quickly.

Judah was growling. Cutter fired up the hill to protect him. Judah howled and stared not at the wired monstrosity but at the officer controlling it. The thing rose from the meat mess of its victim and beat its built wings. Judah puffed his chest like a pugilist.

No one fired. They watched—even the Galaggiites, astonished by this bizarre figure—while the cutting leather bird swept down on Judah, wings spread. Cutter fired and could not even tell if his bullet hit.

Judah picked up stones and dust. His growl grew louder and became a shout as the shadow rolled over him.

“On me?” His voice was splendid. “You use a golem on me?”

Like a child he threw his handful of charged dirt into the thing’s path. There was a stunning detonation of energy. The golem dropped instantly. It fell straight out of the sky, the momentum of its flight dissipated.

Judah stood over the collapsed metal, all its little borrowed life gone. For seconds there was no sound. Rage made Judah shake. He pointed up the hill. “You use a golem on me?”

The motorgun swung toward him but there were rifle-shots and the gunman barked and died at Drogon’s hidden hand. Suddenly there were scores of bullets in the air, from the whispersmith, Pomeroy’s blunderbuss, Elsie and Cutter and the appalled militia.

Judah strode through the fusillade. He was bellowing but Cutter could no longer hear what he said, only ran to protect him. The New Crobuzon militia, yards off, were shouting and firing blindly down the hill. Judah Low reached a pile of Galaggi dead.

The somaturge shoved his hand among the cadavers and barked. There was a fermentation as the world’s energy was channelled, the moment bowed and swelled and spat out strangeness. And the corpse-pile stood in a new configuration, a golem of flesh still twitching as the nerves within it died.

It was a shambles of the recent dead, gory and dripping. It walked in the base shape of a human: five, six bodies pushed together without respect for their outlines. The golem’s legs were stiffening corpses, one inverted, its dead head become a foot, crushed and made more shapeless with every step; the trunk a coagulate of arms and bones; the arms more dead; the head more of the Galaggi dead; the whole aggregate stamping at terrible speed up the hill, leaving a trail of itself. Leaving screams from the vineyard workers who saw their lost lovers and children reanimated into this grotesquerie. It walked quickly with Judah behind it, energies spitting from him, connecting him to his monstrosity with an uncanny funiculus.

The militia were pinned by gunshot, and the charnel golem reached them. The thing shed matter as it crested the hill, and the New Crobuzon soldiers who emptied their rifles and motorguns into it bloodied and desecrated it further. But it lasted long enough to smother and punch them to death. It beat them down with blows from the dead men and women that made its fists.

When the hilltop was quiet and the last of the soldiers had fallen, the flesh golem collapsed. It was carcasses again by the time it hit the ground.

The militia dead wore ragged, guerrilla versions of their uniforms, adorned with ears and teeth and obscure symbols for how many dead they had taken. They still wore their masks, every one of them.

Two were still alive. One whom the trumpet had struck down was delirious, raging with occult fever the music weapon had given him; the other had taken Pomeroy’s shot through his hands, and he screamed at his fingerless red messes.

Drogon went through the corpses. It would not be long before the main force at the chelona sent scouts after this little death-squad.

Judah was tired. The golem he had made—so big, so quickly—had taken energy. He searched the dead captain-thaumaturge whose fold-up golem he had so easily deactivated. He took her accoutrements: batteries, chymical vials, and hexstones.

He would not meet Cutter’s eye. He’s shamefaced, Cutter thought. Because of his little display. Judah stalking up the hill like some vexed spirit, infecting the dead with a kind of life. Judah was a golemist of extraordinary puissance and expertise: since the Construct War had forced the rich to replace their steam-driven servants, his skills had made him wealthy. But Cutter had never seen Judah Low acknowledge his power or revel in it until that deadly walk behind the corpse-giant.

You use a golem on me? There had been an ease to his rage. Now Judah Low was trying to fade.

The refugees watched. There were people from the chelona, men and women with skins of varied colours and clothes of astonishing designs. There were beetles the height of a child, walking upright. They stared with iridescent eyes, and their antennae swung toward Cutter. Their dead were cracked open and smeared with their ichor.

Among the humans there were a few dressed in the natural colours of hunters. They were taller than the chelonans, their skin a stark grey.

“Wineherds,” Cutter said.

“Twice refugees,” Elsie said. “Must have run from the militia to the shelltown, and then run again.”

A wineherd spoke, and he and the travellers and the chelona renegades went through what languages they knew and found only a few cognates. There were trails of dust in the bush as refugees made for the warm forest while Drogon searched and Judah sat. Behind them, the surviving militiamen made sobby sounds.

“We have to move,” said Elsie.

They went on with the last chelonans, a few of the silent insect people, two exile wineherds. They walked into the forest. Behind them, the New Crobuzon militiaman spasmed and raved in his hexed sickness.

It was nothing like Rudewood. These selva trees were tougher, draped with vines and succulent leaves, hanging with dark foreign fruits. There were alien animal sounds.

The lost chelonans were cowed, and looked with open-eyed hopelessness at Judah. They tried to stick to the power they had seen save them. They walked, though, with a clumsiness Cutter and his companions had shed, and that now angered them.

They could not be delayed, and they left the refugees behind, simply by pacing with their lean, wood-hard muscles. Cutter knew the militia would follow them, and that those they left would not do well if they were found. He was too tired to feel much guilt.

Without ever speaking, the insect people found their own forest paths and went. When the warm night came, only the two wineherds had kept up. They moved with hunters’ stamina. Finally, far enough from the exhausted chelonans they had shed, the travellers stopped. They made an odd community, the wineherds and Cutter’s party staring at each other as they chewed, each grouplet counting the other’s oddities, companionable and unspeaking.

For the first two days they heard munitions behind them. For days after that they heard nothing, though they were convinced they were still followed, and they kept their pace quick, and tried to hide their trails.

The wineherds accompanied them. They were named Behellua and Susullil. They often became melancholy, weeping half ritually, lamenting the loss of their wine-beasts. In the evenings they would talk lengthily in singsong by the fire, untroubled by their companions’ lack of understanding. Judah could only translate snips.

“It’s something about the rain,” he would say, “or thunder maybe, and . . . there’s a snake and a moon and bread.”

Elsie had spirits: the wineherds got drunk. They told a story in dance. At one point they performed a complex little double slap and turned to their audience with new faces—clannish thaumaturgy made them playfully monstrous, splayed their teeth like uncouth tusks. They gurned and pulled out their ears into batwings while the charm lasted.

The wineherds asked where they were going. Judah spoke in pidgin and pantomimed, told Cutter he had said they were looking for friends, for a myth, for something missing, for something they had to save, that would one day save them, for the Iron Council. The wineherds stared. Cutter did not know why they stayed. In the evenings, the wineherds and the travellers learned and taught a little of each other’s languages. Cutter watched Susullil close, and saw Susullil notice him.

It rained warmly each morning, as if the jungle sweated with them. They cut through lianas and the chaparral, and batted off mosquitoes and vampiric butterflies. At night they fell where they dropped their packs, dirty and exhausted and flecked with blood. Pomeroy and Elsie would smoke, and use their cigarillos to burn off leeches.

Their elevation rose and the forest changed, cooled gently and became montane. The canopy lowered. Ibises and sunbirds watched them. The wineherds cooked tree crabs. Behellua was nearly killed by a pangolin rex that whipped at him with its poisoned tongue. Rarely, when one of them became very tired, Drogon would ask permission, which all but Pomeroy gave, and would whisper them, telling them walk so they had to obey.

“Do you know where we’re going, Judah?”

Judah nodded to Cutter, conferred with Drogon, nodded again; but Cutter saw anxiety in him. He checked his compass and dampening maps.

Cutter felt a sudden and very great weariness, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him and wherever he went he dragged it after him. As if every new place he saw became infected by where he had been.

Pomeroy and Elsie renewed their lovemaking. Judah slept alone. Cutter listened, and saw Behellua and Susullil listening too, and then watched astonished as they chatted quietly in their wineland language and sitting up began offhandedly to masturbate in time, touching each other. They saw him watching and paused, and then he closed his eyes hurriedly as Susullil gestured to himself like someone offering a glass of wine.

In the morning Behellua was gone. Susullil tried to explain.

“Gone to tree town,” Judah said, after a long attempt. “There’s a township. Where those who’ve been displaced by the militia go. All the remnants from a clutch of villages, chelona, nomads from the bushveld. An outcast town in the forest. Where they found a god who can tell you anything you want to know. He says . . . Behellua’s gone, to tell them about . . . us.”

About you, Cutter thought. About what you done. To the militia. You’re coming to be a story. Even out here.

“So why’s he staying?” said Elsie.

“Judah done inspired him, didn’t he?” said Cutter quietly. “Inspires us all.” He did not speak unpleasantly.

Cutter was close behind Susullil. With night they came into a clearing, and had Susullil not pushed him aside, Cutter would have trudged into the fringe of mossy bones that telltaled a wake-tree. The tree’s willowy tendrils were feathered and bracken-thorned. He could not tell what animals had given their bones, but he could see that some were recent, without lichen.

A man—someone strayed from the deep forest—sat in the tree’s lower branches. His body and head disappeared into thicket. His legs dangled, swinging and kicking randomly from the attentions of the tree digesting him. Susullil stepped into the reach of the tree and Cutter wailed.

The wake-tree reached down with tentacle boughs that bloomed open with motion that might, almost, be nothing but the random waving of foliage. The wineherd rolled below the grab and flicked his sickle. He somersaulted and crawled back out of the anemone shadow. The legs of the caught woodsman shuddered.

“Oh that’s disgusting,” Elsie said. Susullil was holding up the fruit that he had cut. It was small and browning, lumpy skinned. It took the rough shape of a human head. Of all the prey-fruit on the tree, Susullil had taken one of the humans.

Another cultural difference, Cutter thought that night as they sat around the fire and Susullil ate what he had taken. Pomeroy and Elsie, even quiet Judah, made revolted sounds. They would no more eat prey-fruit than dogshit. It turned Cutter’s stomach to see Susullil swallow and lie back to dream the dregs of the dead man’s mind. Susullil looked at him once, carefully, before he closed his eyes.

Pomeroy and Elsie withdrew, and Judah and Cutter talked a little more. When, finally, he lay down, Cutter caught Judah’s appraising glance and was certain Judah knew what he would do. He felt a familiar mix of emotions.

He waited many minutes until everyone but he breathed steadily with sleep, and their camp was very moonlit. When he touched Susullil to wake him and kissed him deeply, he could still taste the dead man on the wineherd’s tongue.

Chapter Twelve

And then sunlight came through the thick and ropy canopy. Elsie and Pomeroy saw Cutter, lying close to Susullil. They gathered the camp without speaking or meeting Cutter’s eye.

If Susullil was conscious of their embarrassment, he made no sign of it, nor did he show Cutter any affection now night was gone. While Cutter rolled the blanket that had been a pillow for him and Susullil, Judah came to him and gave a slow beatific smile. A benediction.

Cutter burned. He swallowed. He stopped to stow his kit. He leaned in close and said quietly just for the somaturge: “I don’t, not now, not ever, need your fucking blessing, Judah.”

It was like the times in New Crobuzon he had been taking men home and met Judah in the street. In Cypress Row, in Salom Square Casbah. Once Judah had come to Cutter’s rooms early on a Shunday, and the door had been opened by the black-haired boy Cutter had woken up with. Then, as always when he saw Cutter’s partners, Judah had smiled with peaceable pleasure, with approval, even when Cutter pushed the young man aside and stood before Judah, closing the door behind him.

When Cutter went looking he found himself glancing backward in case Judah was there to see him.

Cutter imagined being an artist or a musician, or a writer or libertine pamphleteer, one whose life was a scandal, a Salacus Fields man, but he was a shopkeeper. A Brock Marsh shopkeeper whose customers were scholars. Brock Marsh was a strange and quiet district; its excitements were not those of the artistic southern bank.

In Brock Marsh, renegade hexes might make doors where there should be no doors. Entities cultured in thaumaturged plasm might escape and make the streets deadly, and debates could go murderous as rival thinkers sent bleakly charged ab-ions at each other. Brock Marsh had history and a sort of glamour, but there were no places for Cutter to find men. When there were familiar Brock Marsh faces in the southside inns he would not acknowledge them nor they him.

Cutter despised the dollyboys in their petticoats and painted faces, the aesthete inverts draped in flowers in the Salacus Fields night. He would scowl and walk the canalsides of Sangwine past the she-men whores to whom he did not speak. He would not go into bawdy houses, would not rent some man’s arse. Not anymore. He only rarely visited the warrens by the docks where those sailors who did not just make do at sea, but preferred it that way, would tout for men.

Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain inns with half-hidden entrances, thin rooms, thin bars and lots of smoke, older men watching each newcomer eagerly, men in groups laughing raucous as hell and others sitting alone and not looking up, and what women were there were men, dollyboys, or were Remades who had once been men and whose in-between status was a peccadillo to some.

Cutter was careful. Those he chose would never be too handsome: who knew if they were militiamen on honey-trap duty offering a stint for Gross Depravity to any who approached them, or if their squad outside might indulge in an ad hoc punishment of beating and rape.

Neither ashamed nor indulgent, Cutter would simply wait, hating the place and feeling provincial for that, until someone like him came in.

It was twelve years since Cutter had met Judah Low. He had been twenty-four, angry much of the time. Judah was fifteen years his senior. Cutter had quickly loved him.

They hardly ever touched. No more than a few times each year, Cutter had been with Judah Low, every time because of his insistence, never quite begging. More often in the early days, until Judah had become harder and harder to persuade. It seemed, Cutter thought, less a waning of whatever desire was there in Judah than something more thoughtful, to which Cutter could not give words. Each time they were together Cutter felt very strongly that from Judah it was an indulgence. He hated it.

He knew Judah went with women too, and he supposed perhaps with other men, but from what he imagined and heard it was no more often, with no more or less enthusiasm than Judah had for their own encounters. I will make you cry out, Cutter thought as they sweated together. He went at it with passion bordering violence. I will make you feel this. Not with vindictiveness but a desperation to inspire more than kindness.

Judah had taught him, put money into his business, taken Cutter to Caucus meetings for the first time. When Cutter understood that their sex would only ever be an act of patrician friendship, profane and saintly generosity, would only ever be a gift from Judah, he tried to bring it to a close, but could not sustain the abstinence. As he grew he left behind some of his young man’s snarling, but there was anger he would not slough off. Some the Caucus directed at Parliament. Some, beside the fervent love he felt for him, would always be raised by Judah Low.

“Cutter, chaver,” Pomeroy had said to him once. “I don’t mean it badly, excuse me asking, but are you . . . omipalone?” Pomeroy said the slang inexpertly. It was not a bad term and it was meant almost kindly—a playground nomenclature. Cutter wanted to correct him—No, I’m an arsefucker Pomeroy—but it would have been cruel and a complex affectation.

All the chaverim had known for a long time and studiously did not judge Cutter, but only, he had twice been told, because good insurrectionists did not blame victims for being distorted by a sick society. He did not bring it up but nor would he by Jabber apologise or hide.

They knew Judah lay with him, but to his anger there were no careful hesitations around the older man, even on the day they came to a meeting wearing each other’s clothes.

“It’s Judah.”

When Judah did it, sex was not sex any more than anger was anger or cooking was cooking. His actions were never what they were, but were mediated always through otherworldly righteousness. Cutter was an invert but Judah was Judah Low.

Elsie and Pomeroy were shy with Cutter, now. Travel did not allow awkwardness: soon they were gripping hands with him and hauling him and being hauled down loose and rooted banks.

The encounter had little effect on Susullil. He seemed neither to regret it nor to court a repeat. Cutter was self-deprecating enough to find humour in that. Three nights on, Cutter went to him again. It was an awkward coupling. Cutter had to learn his partner’s proclivities. Susullil liked to kiss, and did it with a novice’s enthusiasm. But he would only use his hands. He reacted to Cutter’s insistent tonguing descent with distaste. Cutter tried to present his arse, and when the nomad finally understood he laughed with sincere hilarity, waking the others, who pretended to sleep.

They became inured to strange fauna. Things like limbed fungus that made sluggish progress half-climbing half-growing on bark. Chaotic simians that Pomeroy called “Hell’s monkeys,” clutches of gibbon limbs exploding from conjoined cores, in varying numbers, that brachiated at insane speed.

“You know where we are, yes?” Cutter said to Judah and to Drogon.

The woodland density was lessening. Rain kept coming, and it was cooler. The air was less like steam, more like mist. “We’re still on the paths,” Drogon said. Do you know where we’re going? Cutter thought.

When they heard something approach they held up their guns; but there was shouting, no attempt to hide, and Susullil answered excited and accelerated. When the others reached him he was slapping hands with Behellua, and behind him were two cowed-looking men in forest camouflage who nodded careful greeting.

The returned man smiled at the travellers. The wineherds talked.

When at last Susullil turned he spoke carefully to Judah, though they all understood some now. “He’s come from the forest town,” Judah said. “They want help. Something’s coming for them . . . wiping them out. Behellua told them about us, what we did for them. They think we’ve powers. They’re offering something. If we help them . . .” He listened again.

“If we help them their god will help us. Will give us what we need. They say their god’ll tell us the way to the Iron Council.”

Hiddentown was huts in a clearing. Cutter had visioned an arboreal metropolis, with raised walkways between boughs and children spiralling down vines from the leaf sky.

At the edges of the village were attempts at stockades. Hiddentowners in forest-coloured clothes stared at the travellers. Much of the village was tents tarred or painted with gutta-percha. There were some warped wood huts, damp fires, a midden pit. Most of the inhabitants were human, but several of the child-high insects scuttled through the mud trails.

They were making quarters of their own in the corners of the town. They were chitin gardeners. They herded millions of insects, arachnids and arthropods, nurturing them through quick generations till they had colossal numbers of pinhead-sized ants, foot-long millipedes, and crawling wasps of countless species. With strange techniques they turned their flocks into walls, pressing them gently together, merging them and smoothing them, squeezing the still-living, conjoined mass of chitin-stuff into a kind of plaster. They made bungalows and burrows of their living mortar, feeding it carefully, so the tiny lives that made it did not die, but wriggled, embedded and melted with others, become architecture, a ghetto of living houses.

The human Hiddentowners spoke Galaggi in various forms, and here and there Tesh, and made a mongrel language. The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.

Cutter supposed those refugees who could look after themselves would not waste time with this settlement. Hiddentown was a convocation of the hopeless. No wonder they were desperate. No wonder they were such simple meat-stuff for some beast.

Jabbered at and bowed to with cursory politesse, the travellers were hustled to a long-hut with a tower of stakes, a rude minaret in split wood. It was a church, symbols cut and stained in the walls. There were tables with blades of mirror on them, papyrus. A robe of fine black wool. The chief left them.

For some seconds there was silence. “What are we fucking doing here?” Cutter said.

There were echoes; shadows moved that should not have been there. Cutter saw Elsie shiver. They moved into a circle, back-to-back.

“There’s something,” Elsie whispered. “Something’s here . . .”

“I am here.” The voice was throaty and snarled. They dropped with bushrangers’ speed. They waited.

“What are you?” Judah said.

“I’m here.” It was accented, glutinous as if words were congealing in a throat. There was a movement they could not follow. “They brought you here for my blessing, I think. A minute. Yes, yes they did. And to tell you what to do. You’re here to hunt for them.”

Drogon pointed at the table. The woollen robe was gone.

“You speak our language,” said Cutter.

“I am a little god but still a god. You are champions. That’s the idea, you know. Did you reckon yourselves champions?” The voice seemed to bleed from the walls, seemed to be in several places.

“That’s what they have in mind, yes,” said Pomeroy. “What’s wrong with that?” He circled slowly, a pugnacious godless man in the presence of a god. Drogon was turning his head by little increments, his lips moving.

“Nowt,” the voice said. “At all. Only . . . a waste of your efforts, really. You, mmm, you, you have a little daughter, by a whore in a place called Tarmuth. You should go. This town’s doomed. Save them from this, there’ll be another thing to get them.”

Pomeroy’s mouth worked. Elsie watched him. She kept her face motionless.

“So why are you here?” said Cutter.

“Because this is my town I had them build for me. They want me. Mmm, you, you aren’t sure of your Caucus, are you, shopkeeper?”

Cutter was stricken. The others looked at him. Drogon’s head jerked forward. He made a motion like spitting. The disembodied voice gave a hard gasp. There was a commotion, something fell and there was puking, the substance of things jerked and then, shaking with effort, someone cowled rose from behind the table. A thin and jaundiced face, deep lines and shaven head, mouth adrip with vomit, staring in horror.

She or he stood for moments, quivering as if in ice, then retched and ran across the room to a pillar, behind it and out of sight. Cutter followed, and Pomeroy went the other way; but they came to each other and found nothing. The figure had disappeared.

The voice returned, angry and afraid.

“You never do that to me again,” it said. Drogon was speaking secretly into Cutter’s ear.

“Found it. Guessed where it was and whispered to it. Ordered it. ‘Don’t read us,’ I said. ‘Show yourself,’ I told it.”

“Wait, whispersmith,” Cutter said. “Fucking god, eh?” he said to the room. “What’s your name? How do you speak our tongue? What are you?”

There was silence for seconds. Cutter wondered if the figure had slipped out under thaumaturgic caul. When the voice come back it sounded defeated, but Cutter was sure there was relief there too.

“I speak Ragamoll because I learned to read it, for all the hidden things in your books. I’m here because . . . like everyone else who’s here, I ran. I’m a refugee.

“Your militia are steering clear of Tesh, yet, but they’ve come up close to the Catoblepas Plain. They’ve attacked our towns and outposts. Tesh monasteries. I’m a monk. For the Moment of Lost Things. Moment of the Hidden.”

The militia had rampaged in the shadow of Tesh. The city had closed its doors and refilled the moatlands. The monastery was beyond, in the briarpits. It should have been safe.

When they realised a New Crobuzon slave squad of Remade assassins was coming, the monks had waited for Tesh to send protection. It had been days before they had realised that no one was coming; they’d been deserted. They panicked up desultory plans. They were a temple consecrated to the Manifold Horizon, with cadres of monks dedicated to its various Moments, and each of these Moments became a brigade.

Some fought; some went seeking holy death. The monks of Cadmer, Moment of Calculation, knew they could not win and waited in the briarpits to receive the bullets. The monks of Zaori, Moment of Magic Wine, drank themselves to visionary death before a militiaman could touch them. But the Moment of Doves sent its birds to destroy themselves in the militia’s wheels and stop their engines; the Moment of Desiccation turned militia blood to ash; Pharru and Tekke Shesim, the Moments of Forgotten Snow and of Memory, came together and made ice storms.

But the militia thaumaturges were expert, the slave-officers relentless, and in the end the monastery could not hold out. And when it fell, it was only the monks of Tekke Vogu, the Moment of the Hidden and Lost, who escaped.

Their neophytes were murdered, but the monks’ devotions hid them. They were lost to their attackers. They crept away—away from the burning ruins of their temple and from Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, which was closed to them, which had been ready to let them die. They had gone out into the land.

The monk told them everything. Was eager to, somehow, Cutter could tell. “We’re hidden. We know hidden things. They’re entrusted to us. We find lost things. I travel quick: I travel by hidden passages, lost ways. When I came here, I had them build this place. It’s easy to be a god here. Whoever comes I tell a little secret, something hidden. So they believe in me.”

“What’s your name, monk?” Cutter said.

“Qurabin. Eighth-ring red monk of Tekke Vogu.”

“Is that a man’s name?” There was a laugh.

“Our names don’t discriminate. Are you asking am I a man?” The voice was suddenly very close. “I don’t know.”

Every monk of Tekke Vogu was enfolded within the Moment, but it was a bargain. They would learn the hidden, and how to find the lost. But Vogu’s sacrament was sold, not given. The price for the Moment’s protection was something made lost, something hidden from the devotee, given to Vogu.

“I know monks who don’t know their names. Who had them hidden. Who lost their eyes. Their homes, or families. Me—when I submitted to Vogu it was my sex went hidden. I remember my childhood, but not if I was a boy or a girl. When I piss I look down but it’s hidden from me. My sex is lost.” Qurabin spoke without rancour.

“So you want us to clear out this thing that’s attacking?” Cutter said.

“Not me,” said Qurabin. “They want you, they want champions. There’s no point protecting this hovel.”

The party looked at each other.

“As gods go, you ain’t much by way of a protector, are you?” Elsie said.

“I didn’t say I was, did I? It’s them—they built the stupid town around me, and they keep wanting things from me. I didn’t ask this. Where was my protector? What Tesh did to me, I can do. Let the town burn.”

“That ain’t what you said before,” Cutter said, but Judah interrupted him.

“And who are you to say?”

He stepped forward and stared at the makeshift altar as if he could know that was where Qurabin hid. “Who are you to say?” His voice rose. “They come here, make what they can of this place, running from those who’d kill them because they live close to Tesh; they try to build something, and they make one mistake. To look for a god, and find one in you.

“They promised us help—promised us a guide. So tell us. We’ll find whatever it is and help them. And you can find us what we’re looking for.”

The forest wetness drip-dripped in the makeshift church.

“Tell us where it is. I don’t damn well believe you don’t care. You care. You want to tell us. You want to look after them. You know it. So tell. We got your offer. They need us to kill this thing, and then you give us what you promised.”

“I won’t take anything out of Vogu’s house for you—”

“I don’t want to hear about your damn piety, when you’ll take snippets out of your god’s house to impress the damn natives. Tell us where the beast is, and we’ll fix it, and then you tell us where the Iron Council is.”

“I don’t betray,” said Qurabin. “I buy. Everything I learn, I lose something. And it hurts. Vogu don’t give it up free. I unhid your man’s whore and daughter it stings, and I lose something. Lost and hidden by the Moment. I’m naked in front of you. I unhide this? Iron Council? It’ll cost me.”

There was silence and the dripping again.

“The beast,” Judah said. “Where is it?” There was long quiet.

“Wait,” said the voice, and again there was relief under the resentment. Tired of being a god, thought Cutter. He looked at Judah, who stood trembling and splendid. Qurabin was lost, Cutter saw. Broken. Eager for something, deserted and newly eager, before righteous Judah.

“I try,” said the voice, and gave a glottal retching. When Qurabin sounded again, it was with pain, in the voice of one used to pain.

“Damnfire. Damn. It’s unhidden. The beast.”

“What did you lose?” said Cutter.

“Someone’s name.” Someone who mattered, Cutter could hear.

Chapter Thirteen

It was dawn when they reached the dank place. Mud and dangerous paths, and stripped white trees. The marsh sweated. Trees rustled but barely.

They came, the New Crobuzon outcasts, Susullil and Behellua, a tiny number of brave Hiddentown men. Qurabin was with them, unseen.

Cutter was eager for sound. He wanted to sing or laugh. The landscape ignored him and he felt offended. He tried to think himself a presence, and could only be conscious of the parings of New Crobuzon left behind him. He befouled where he was with where he had been.

Judah walked in front. An enormous golem walked with him. Eight feet tall, of wood, and what blades Hiddentown could spare. Judah had hammered it together with hinged joints, a crude swivel neck. He could have manifested something with a touch on a woodpile, but with only thaumaturgy holding it it would have drained him quicker or fallen apart.

Judah had played the wax cylinder again. Don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family, the voice said. He’s dead, Uzman’s dead. Cutter saw Judah’s sadness at the old message, and wondered what Uzman had been to him.

“D’you know why I became a golemist, Cutter? Years before the Construct War. There was no money in it when I started. It was the arcane end of golemetry that was a draw. Not even in matter. D’you know there’s such a thing as a sound golem? It’s hard, but you can make one. You’ve never seen a shadow golem, have you? This kind of golem—” He indicated the wood. “All this is really a by-product, for me. This isn’t what it’s all about.”

Perhaps. But still, the thing they had made was powerful and fine. It swung its head so the faint sun touched its cheap bead eyes. Rusted knives made its fingers.

“The beast’s close,” came Qurabin’s voice. There was pain in it: he had exchanged something for the knowledge.

Cutter prodded his toe at a lump of sickly colours, cussed in shock. It was animal remains. They came unstuck with an unrolling of stench. He tripped, and Pomeroy turned and was shouting as Elsie said something.

“Here!” Elsie said again. She stood over a body. Cutter saw the sheen of decomposition. Most of the chest was gone.

“Dear Jabber,” Cutter said. “We’re in its godsdamned parlour.”

“Quick!” said Judah. “Quick, here!” He was at the swamp’s edge, reaching out toward a young man who sat flecked with leeches. The boy was hideously thin. He did not look up, kept his eyes on the greying meat he gnawed.

Cutter broke off a cry. He saw an emaciated man, camouflaged by weeds and knubs of wood. The man was chewing. Beside him was a deep-jungle tapir. Its jaws moved.

“Judah,” Cutter said. “Judah, get back,” and Judah turned. There were bodies all around in the water, motionless but for chewing. Men and women, a shivering dog. Each was smeared with old matter around their mouths, and seemed to trail a vine.

Gases moiled, and what Cutter had thought a coagulate of muck began to rise. It blinked. What he had thought stones or holes were eyes. A tight studding of black eyes. It rose.

Those were not vines but the thing’s sucker-studded limbs. One stretched from each scrawny figure—each adult or child, each animal, tethered by the back of their necks. What they ate was rerouted into those grotesque intestinal leashes, passing peristaltically. They were made mindless conduits for food. And suspended at the centre of the arms, and shaggy with others whipping free, was the thing that ate through them.

Corpulent as an obese man, vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons.

The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders.

The Hiddentowners ran, pursued by ghosts of warm fog and by the creature’s arms. It gripped trees with its bird claws and scobs of flesh budded from it like snails’ eyes. Cutter’s repeater felt tiny. He ran toward Judah. The creature’s appendages seemed to fill the air. Cutter saw little eyes at one limb’s end, a flexing orifice, concentric rasp-teeth like a lamprey’s.

Cutter fired at the flanged body, hit and did nothing but burst a little piece with milky bleeding. A snare of arms crawled over each other for him like bickering worms.

“Kill it!” Qurabin spoke from somewhere. There were more shots.

Cutter heard Judah—“Wait, wait”—and then wood and leather and he saw the golem. It cut across the plait of tentacles, severed some right through. Others wrapped around it, ground into the golem’s neck. The ropy limb twitched. It shuddered for several seconds, flexed glands, spurted enzymes into the wood. It paused as if confused.

The golem attacked in its simple way, beating down with its knives and great hexed strength. Gouts of matter and the thing’s blood burst up and it staggered, and every one of its tethered creatures stopped eating. Pomeroy ran up, jabbed his muzzle into its fat. The explosion was muted by flesh, but the fist of bullets punched into innards.

Even then it did not fall, only staggered with its prim little steps and reeled, but the golem was on it again. Cutter watched Judah move. The somaturge moved his own body, a little, and the wood-and-knife golem echoed him. Handful by handful the golem took the predator apart.

The creature’s victims were dead or comatose. They had long been only eating machines for the insatiable thing.

Susullil and Pomeroy were wounded. Susullil let Cutter clean his gashes. Two of the Hiddentowners had been killed. One had fallen near enough to the unnaturally famished men and women in the animal’s thrall that they had reached for him weakly, and bitten.

The Hiddentowners took organic trophies, rooting in the creature’s flesh for its beaks or talons. Cutter was disgusted. He wished that he had a camera. He imagined a heliotype: Susullil by Judah by Elsie by Pomeroy with his blunderbuss, and he Cutter at the end beside the golem, all of them with the set-faced pride of the hunter.

That night there was rude conviviality in a Hiddentown long-hut. Men and women who had been gatherer-hunters and the inhabitants of chelonas danced, drunk on poteen.

The room was crisscrossed with the little beetle-people. They never spoke; they did nothing to get in anyone’s way. They came, silently picking up discarded food, gently fingering the cloth of clothes, sawing their antennae together.

Susullil was with Behellua. Cutter watched them and knew that night they would have the friendly encounter he could not but think of as sex, though he doubted they did.

Around the table, people were telling stories. To the Hiddentowners, Qurabin was a god become suddenly interventionist and earthly. The monk moved unseen among the diners, translated for them.

Through Qurabin, Susullil the wineherd told a story of the best harvest House Predicus had ever seen, of the culling of the vinhog bull prime, to let bull secundus, whose fruit was drier and better, stud. He told of the struggle it had been, the sadness he had felt at the bull’s passing. When the story was done, the New Crobuzoners applauded with everyone.

It was their turn, and it fell to Cutter. The Hiddentowners chanted softly, in a drumbeat, so when he spoke it took their rhythm. He stalled, looked down and up again and—contrary and drunk, with a pleasure of bravado—he spoke.

“This is a love story,” Cutter said. “That shouldn’t ever have been. It lasted a night and a morning.

“Five years ago. I found a man. We was in a pub in the docks. I asked him home with me. That night we was on very-tea and shazbah, and we did what we all want to do, you know, and it was fine.” There were laughs from the wineherds as Qurabin translated. Elsie and Pomeroy were looking down. “And then later while he slept I turned him over and went to the pisspot, and I saw his clothes. And coming out of his pocket was some little tiny pistol. I’d never seen nothing so clever, and though it weren’t my business I pulled it out, and with it comes a little sigil.

“It’s militia. He’s a militiaman. I don’t know what to do. What duty’s he on? Is he a drugsman? Is he on Depravity watch? Either way he’s got me. I even think of shooting him, but that ain’t going to happen. So I’m thinking maybe I can get away early, and maybe I can plead him away on the way to the jail, and maybe this and maybe that. And in the end, I see there ain’t nothing I can do. So I go back to bed. And on the way I wake him up. So we do it all over again.” Again the cheers. “And then early in the morning we do it again.” I’m drunk, thought Cutter. He did not mind.

“And I’m waiting, and I’ll beg him, or bribe him—because I know what he likes, don’t I, by now? And I get up, and I run out and think maybe I just won’t stop. I’ll get to the ships, I’ll change my name, I ain’t going to jail, I ain’t going to be Remade. But then I pass a baker’s, and then a greengrocer’s, and I just can’t up and lose everything. I can’t just disappear. So instead of doing a bunk, I do some shopping. And then I come back.

“I wake him up. And we have breakfast together, over my shop in Brock Marsh . . . and then he goes. Big kiss good-bye, and gone. Never seen him again. And I’m left to wonder. Maybe he was never going to do nothing. But the way I see it, the way I like to see it, what with what I done for him that night and what with the beautiful breakfast I made—grilled fish, spiced hash and creamed fruit, with a flower in the middle of the table as if we was married—I think he fell in true love with me for a few minutes that morning. No, I mean it. I fell in love with him too. I ain’t never loved nothing like I loved him when he kissed me and said good-bye. Because I’m sure, I’m sure he knew that I knew. It was his present to me, that leave-taking, that good-bye. Just like breakfast was my present to him. I ain’t never loved anyone like that before or since, except one man.”

When it was obvious he had finished there was barking from the wineherds, and other applause sounds from here and there among the audience. Elsie and Pomeroy clapped a bit, though Pomeroy did not look at him. Watching the big man beat his palms together Cutter felt a blossom of affection. Gods bless, he thought, and to crown it Elsie even gave him a quick smile.

And then he saw Judah, and the smile on the golemist’s face was different—there was no effort or connection to it, it was like the smile on an idol, and through his passion for the older man Cutter burned.

Cutter was uninterested in gods. There were a few from New Crobuzon’s pantheons he felt some small affinity for, usually for heretic reasons: like Crawfoot, whose antics seemed not inept clownery but tactical subversions. You’re insurrectionist, ain’t you? he had always thought, while the priests affected patient indulgence with the fool-god on Crawfootfete E’en. But he did not worship. Such prayers as he offered were cynical or time-serving. But he could see the power of Qurabin’s devotions.

The monk could find the hidden and the lost, though it cost. But in Qurabin’s voice Cutter no longer heard the arrogance of that power. He could hear that something had shifted. The monk’s giving up, Cutter thought.

“Galaggi, they say it is . . . sobrech or sobrechin lulsur. It’s pun.” Qurabin’s voice came and went as the monk unhid the information. “Sobresh is ‘hateful,’ and sobr’chi, is ‘captain.’ In my language it has no name. In Tesh . . . we do not classify so much as you.” And Cutter heard the disgust, the rage in Qurabin’s voice when Tesh came up.

He was not surprised the next day, when Qurabin came to them as they rose and told them that they would not be travelling alone. That the monk would not tell them where Iron Council was but would show them.

He wants to rest, Cutter thought. And to be alone. With us. Plucking up courage. The monk’ll unhide more and more, no matter what the cost. What does it matter? What does he—she—have to live for? To be loyal to?

It rained but it was a different rain. The sun’s rays were frozen in each drop like insects in amber, so it seemed to rain light. The Hiddentowners waved them gone.

Susullil smiled at Cutter and nodded. “Never did understand each other, did we, boy?” Cutter said with true humour. Qurabin’s voice, the odd androgynous hooting, gusted good-bye. No one seemed distraught that their god was leaving.

Of course Cutter had no notion of what Qurabin was saying. “You are your own people now, you have no need of gods,” he thought. Or “Be true to my memory or I’ll come back to blind you with my rage,” or “I was never a god, I’m a bloke like you, got lost because of an idiot religion.”

The travellers went northwest and north. A day, and another, through the slowly cooling forest. The ground rose and the canopy fell.

Trees became more sparse. By pools creatures like spindly bears and serrated wasps the size of cats came to drink. Cutter thought he saw things; he thought they were watched.

In the unseen company of the monk, they moved very differently. It was Drogon who saw it first. “We’re travelling too fast,” he told Cutter. He pointed down, toward where an ancient Y-shaped tree poked clear of the surrounds. “Keep it in sight,” he whispered.

Cutter tried to watch his feet but it disoriented him; the terrain changed uncertainly as if the path were skittish. Ahead a half mile he saw the tree by a river; he heard Qurabin move and speak loudly and Cutter ducked below a thorny branch and when he released it he walked on two more steps then stopped while Drogon whispered, “I told you.”

The water was behind them. Cutter could see it through the growth, and there was the tree, black-barked, its boughs spread and thrusting skyward like supplicating arms. It was behind him too.

There had been no dislocation. He had only walked. His companions looked consternated, except Judah. “What does it cost you?” the golemist said to Qurabin. “To find these ways?”

“These are hidden ways, shortcuts—lost paths,” said the monk. “Sometimes the Moment’ll let me take them. Sometimes.” The monk sounded tired. “I said I’d take you.”

Why so fast, monk? Cutter thought. You don’t have to travel like this. What’s this costing you, all these secrets?

So they sped up though they walked, and shucked their packs and scrambled at the same pace they ever had. The everyday uncanny of the monk’s trails took them at increasing speeds. They passed pillars of rock in the middle of trees, and rounded them to emerge in dry plateau. The woods were threadbaring; it was as if they trod through an old and thinning tapestry.

“Through . . . here I think,” Qurabin would say, and their compass needles yawed haywire as they crossed leagues. They went faster than horses.

Qurabin’s efforts, Cutter understood, were apostate. Qurabin was wrenching things from the Moment’s domain of lost and hidden things. Every day Qurabin sounded lessened.

“You want to disappear.” Cutter spoke it in a tiny voice. The monk was displaced, renegade, renounced by history and home. You want to disappear. Every lost route you uncover, you lose something—something’s hidden from you. You’ve had enough. And this is how you’ll do it. To make it mean something. Their journey was Qurabin’s protracted suicide.

“You know what the monk’s doing,” Cutter said to Judah. “We better hope Qurabin don’t be all hidden or lost before we get where we’re going.”

“It’s close,” said Judah. He smiled then, a look of such joy that Cutter could not help but smile back.

The land was deep in grasses. Kettled glacial till, sloughs and dustbeds intermitted the low slopes. There had been so many weeks of journey. They saw mesquite copses and ruins. With the wind, the wild crops moved like sea. The monk grew weaker, more hidden, but cajoled and led them past water, past animal herds, python-sized centipedes wrapped around trees.

One day they saw things leave a trail of pollen and dust and shake the grasses like whales in shallows. Borinatch, strider, the ungulate plains nomads. A family clan, young at the front, the queen behind. The striders stood much taller than a man. They careered by with their tottering gallop, their legs unbending and swinging like crutches.

One of the sows turned a friendly bestial face and saw them, waved as she thundered past. Borinatch hands worked in strange ways. It looked as if her limb appeared and disappeared.

The travellers had become a tough crew. Their muscles were bunched; they were expert shots. Pomeroy’s cuts had stained inside, so he wore splendid dark scars. Elsie fastened a bandana about her wild hair. The men’s beards were long, their shag tied back with leather: only Drogon defied this, shaving dry every few days. They husbanded their dwindling bullets, carried fire-hard spears. They looked, Cutter thought, like adventurers, the continent’s mercenary freebooters.

We ain’t though. There’s a damn reason for all our travels.

“It must be nearly Sinn, ain’t it?” he said. “Or is it already? I’ve lost track.” They tried to work through the weeks on their fingers.

One night Judah made four little figures from the earth, and with muttered cantrips he had them dance while his companions clapped to give them music. When they were done he had them bow; then they fell back into earth.

He said: “I want to tell you all that I’m grateful. I want you to know that.” They drank a toast in water. “I want to tell you . . . we’ve been going so long, it’s like the journeying’s what it’s for. But that’s not so.

“I don’t even know for sure if you believe in the Iron Council.” He smiled. “I think you do. But maybe for some of you it isn’t even about that anymore. I think you’re here because of the time in the claphouse, Elsie,” he said, and she met his eyes and nodded. “I know why you’re here,” he said to Cutter.

“Even you, maybe, Drogon . . . A stravager like you . . . Myths and hopes are your currency, right? That’s what you trade in; that’s what keeps horse-tramps moving. Are you here because you think Iron Council’s like the Marzipan Palace? Are you looking for a heaven?”

“It’s not why I’m here, Judah Low,” said Pomeroy. Judah smiled. “You mean the most to me, Judah, I’d die for you, but I’d not die now. Not with what’s happening in New Crobuzon. There’s too much at stake. I’m here because of what you say’s coming for the Council. And because I think you can stop it. That’s why I’m here.”

Judah nodded, and sighed. “That’s what I want to say. This is greater than any of us. Iron Council . . .” He was silent for very long. “It’s tough, because that’s how it’s had to be. But it’s the Council. It’s Iron Council. And the governors of New Crobuzon—I don’t know how—they’ve found it. My contact, my erstwhile friend, he had every reason not to tell me but he did, thank Jabber. They’ve found it, after all this time. Long enough that plenty of citizens aren’t sure it ever existed, and thousands more think it’s long gone.

“Chaverim . . . friends . . . We’re going to save Iron Council.”

The next day Qurabin had a long conversation with the Moment. The unfindable monk cried, supplicated, made a desolate sound.

At last Cutter spoke. “Monk,” he said. “Monk, what happened? Are you there? Are you gone?”

“It’s not hidden anymore,” Qurabin said in a voice that was deadened. “I know where to find it. But it cost . . . I lost my own language.”

Qurabin had been left only with Ragamoll, the brash infant tongue of the travellers.

“I remember my mother,” Qurabin said quietly. “I remember what she whispered to me. But I don’t know what it means.” There was no horror in the voice. Only a passionless assent. “One thing is lost, another found. I know where to go.”

They went uncanny routes. The sky’s colour fluxed.

It was a Chainday when the plain fell away and they realised they had been rising a long time; the ground had angled and they walked a hackberried butte in thin air. Before them was a basin in red laterite, a canyon that widened into land too vast to be a valley, where the continent had shrugged itself apart. From behind one long stone fin, black smoke was spoiling the air.

Judah stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fumes that did not come from grassfires and howled. A noise of such pure feral joy it was as if he was thrown back through history, as if no human, no sentient thing, should feel such absolute emotion. Judah bayed.

He did not slow. He descended fast and did not wait for his companions but headed off along faint foot-lines in the prairie. Cutter caught him up but did not try to speak. Thick light like syrup went across the sierra.

Someone shouted at them and they were taunted by echoes. A query, a command in several different languages, in rapid change. And then their own. Ragamoll, nearly two thousand miles from home. Cutter gasped. Three figures stood from some hide.

“Hold it, hold it,” one shouted. “Speak Ragamoll?”

Cutter showed he was not holding his weapons. He nodded his head in strange delight. The young man spoke with a hybrid accent, something else shaping his phonemes beside the familiar snarl of the south city, of Dog Fenn, of backstreet New Crobuzon.

Judah was running toward the three: a woman, and a man, and a gnarled cactus. The sun was going down behind them, so they were shadowed, and Cutter could see them only as cutouts. Stumbling toward them his arms upraised, Judah must be drenched in late-day light as they saw him, awash with it, creasing his face against it, ambered. Judah was laughing and shouting.

“Yes, yes, yes, we speak Ragamoll!” he said. “Yes, we’re of your party! Sisters! Sisters!” He gave that cry again and was so clearly no threat, so obviously in a delirium of warmth and relief that the human guards stepped forward and opened their arms to him, to receive him as a guest. “Sisters!” he said. “I’m back, I’m home, it’s me. Long live Iron Council! Gods and Jabber and, and, and in Uzman’s name . . .” They started at that. Judah embraced them one by one, and then he turned, his eyes streaming, and smiled without mediation, without face, a smile Cutter had never seen him wear.

“We’re here,” Judah said. “Long live, long live. We’re here.”

Anamnesis:

The Perpetual Train

With each step water and the roots of waterweeds snag him. It is years ago and Judah Low is young and in the wetlands.

—Again, he says. That is all. There is no please and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions.

—Again, he says and the stiltspear child shows him what it has made. Its eyebrows flex in what he knows to be a smile and it opens its hand and a stiltspear toy made of mud and waterlilies stands between its fingers. The child pinches it to shape and sings to it in a tiny wordless trilling, and makes it move. The figurine has only one motion, flexing and unflexing its stem legs. It does it several times before bursting.

They stand at the edges of wide space edged with gnarly treelife and intricately fronded byways, random canals. Boughs hide passages, and vegetation is so thick and so heavy, so saturated with the water of the swamp it is glutinous, it is like a viscid liquid dripping from the branches and briefly coagulates in the shape of leaves.

The swamp mimics all landscapes. It opens into meadows and it can be forest. There are places where mud solidifies enough to pile into swamp-mountains. Tunnels below the rootstuff, floored in water, pitch and labyrinth. There are dead places where bleached trees jut from rank water. Tribes of mosquito and blackfly come to Judah and bleed him terribly.

To Judah the fen air is not oppressive. It is like a caul. In the months he has lived there Judah has learnt to feel cosseted by it. For all his bites gone septic and his diarrhoea, he loves the swamp. He looks up through clouds thin as watered milk, to a late sun. He feels himself greened, mildewed and inhabited by infusoria, a host, a landscape as well as a life.

The child dips its hand with the grace of its species. Its fingers are radial from its little palm, a star. It clenches in its way: hinges its tapered digits like the petals of a closing flower, into a point. Nails concatenate, its hand become a spearhead.

The stiltspear young walks quadruped from Judah Low. It turns its head on a neck that is all sinews and wordlessly queries whether he will come, and he does, with the slushing clumsiness that the stiltspear indulge as if he is neonate.

When the child walks, its limbs precisely pierce the water. Judah Low seems to drag the swamp with him and scar it with a wide wake. He is lucky the dams and sires of this stiltspear piglet let him go with it, as every moment he walks he attracts attentions it would be better to avoid. The black caiman and constrictors must hear his passage as the thrashes of something wounded.

The stiltspear commune have tolerated and even welcomed him because of the time he saved two youngsters from some rearing glade predator. It came for him, he still believes, but veered for the little duo who when it rose hissing and slick with bog had frozen and whose camouflage glands had secreted thaumaturgons such that they might have been tree-stumps not silent children, but the creature had been too close to be dissuaded.

But Judah had shouted and banged together his specimen pot and cudgel, shockingly alien in the dim quiet of the bayou. He could not have frightened the thing—a towering amalgam of sea lion and jaguar and salamander with finned flanges that could have broken his skull—but he confused it. It had burrowed below the waterweed.

Since then, since the pair he saved had run home and sang the story in a quickly constructed cavatina to stress its truth, Judah has been tolerated.

The stiltspear do not often speak. Days can pass.

Their commune has no name. Its hutlets rise from the reeds and water and are conjoined with walkways and slung with hammocks, and other rooms are sunk in pits in the sodden ground. Insects the size of Judah’s fist amble through the air, purring like big stupid cats. The stiltspear will skewer and eat them.

Stiltspears’ coats of oily down bead with swamp muck. They move like wading birds. They are like birds, and like scrawny cats, with unmoving, near-unfeatured faces.

Sires sing worshipful lays if they are red sires and build tools and reed-houses and tend the mangrove farms if they are tan sires. The dams hunt, one leg at a time raising so slow they have dried by the time the spread-out claws emerge, so no drips trouble the surface as the asterisk of fingers come together into a stiletto that poises over its reflection. Until some fat fish or frog passes and everything is still and the hand lances back into the water and is instantly withdrawn, the fingers opened, the game spiked on the stiltspear’s wrist, a prey bracelet dripping blood.

Between houses, stiltspear young play with mud-made golems as children in New Crobuzon play marbles and shove-stiver. Judah makes notes, takes heliotypes. He is no xenologist. He does not know how to decide what is important. All these charms—the stiltspears’ instinct camouflage, their golems, their herbalist physic, their unsticking of moments—he wants to investigate.

He does not know the names of any or even if they have names, but there are those according to some faint specificity of physique he christens: Red-eyes and Oldster and The Horse. Judah asks Oldster about the mud figures. Toys, his informant says, or games: something like that. —So you’d no longer make them? Judah asks, and the stiltspear snorts and looks skyward in embarrassment. Judah no longer blushes at his gaffes. So far as he can tell it is a question of propriety not ability: it would be as inappropriate for an adult stiltspear to make the little figures as for a New Crobuzon adult to demand the lavatory like a toddler.

Judah accompanies the dams. They seem glazed with the daylight. They catch armfuls of shelled waterspider larger than Judah’s spread hands. They milk their silk, weaving webs between roots and submerged boughs, turning rivulets into fish-traps.

Judah sees something uncanny. A lithe musclefish jackknifes, lapis scales vivid. And then Judah hears a moment of song, a two- or three-layered stripped-down breath of rhythm, buh buh buh buh in quick intricate time, several dams together, and the musclefish is still. It is set in its coil, unmoving, frosted in place in the water, and a hunter spears it with her jag-hand and at the instant she stabs for it she and her companions cease singing and the musclefish twitches again but too late. Judah sees it happen again, days later, a little near-silent choir, a muttered hum that for a moment keeps prey still.

Freshwater dolphin pass in deeper channels. They are ugly, inbred-looking things. The snorts of a sarcosuchus spook them. The stiltspear young try to teach Judah to make a mud-figure of his own. They have decided he is a child like them. His models are desperately crude and make them breathe the sighs that are their laughs.

When they sing to their statuettes he tries good-humouredly to copy them, knowing he can only be a clown and, performing with good grace, —Shallaballoo, he says. —Callam callay cazah! And of course nothing happens, of course all the stiltspear children set their mud walking and his own folds sticky on itself and collapses.

It is the end of summer and the paludal air is stretched thin. Shots sound. With the distant percussion of the rifle every stiltspear freezes in camouflage and for seconds Judah is alone in a copse of sudden trees. With silence the swamplanders slowly return to their appearance. Every one of them looks at Judah.

There are hunters, draped in the little corpses of swamp mammals. They are exploring and collecting in the bogland.

Judah passes one within ten yards, but he has become local, so the man does not hear or see him, only hefts his rifle and looks stupidly past Judah to the watercourses. Another man is sharper. He aims directly at Judah’s chest in expert motion.

—Godsdamn blast, he says. —Came near to killing you. There is a cautious look to him as he makes out Judah’s clothes and his swamp-pallor. He thumbs a way north. —They out that way, ‘nother three four miles, be there by sundown, he says.

The bayou animals are quiet. There is not the chittering and faint scuttle and splash. Judah slows. This is a hinge moment and though there is none to blame for getting him here save himself, he must close his eyes and think on what will be and what has been. He will not let the moment finish: by ornery bastard will he hangs onto it, like a dog worrying a man, till time drags itself away bleeding and Judah is back and sadder.

—Oh now, he says. He is some misbegot thing in time. There is a shudder.

There is a lip of earth, a jetty. There is a clearing at the edge of a big muskeg, flat and detritus-studded acres of gently moving liquid. There is a new trail through dripping trees, to a huddle of tents and wagons, sod huts roofed in moss on the tamed ground. There are shots.

Judah carries a present in his pack and a posy of swampflowers. He sees a party of men in besmirched white shirts and thick trousers. They investigate charts and are squinting at obscure instruments. They boil kettles of food over fires that roll off oily smoke like squid-ink billows. They half-greet Judah. He must look like some mud-and-slurry spirit. The Remade pack-animals tread uneasily as he approaches.

The leader stands. An older man, still scrawny and tough as a dog. Judah looks only at him, follows him into his tarpaulined room.

Light grubs dimly through the canvas. There is simple darkwood furniture, a cabinet that will fold out to a bed, in the tight confines.

The old man smells the battered bouquet. Judah becomes confused—he has forgotten his city manners. Should he be giving flowers to this aging man? But the man responds with grace, smelling the still-beautiful blooms and putting them in water.

He is poised. His hair is white and gathered in a precise pigtail. He has very vivid blue eyes. Judah rummages in his bag (the bodyguards stiffen and raise pistols) and brings out a figurine.

—This is for you, he says. —From the stiltspear.

The man receives it with what seems very genuine pleasure.

—It’s a god, Judah says. —They don’t do so much by way of art or carvings. Only little simple things.

It is a rope-swathed ancestor spirit. This one Judah made himself. The man looks into its swaddled face.

—I want to ask you something, Judah says. —I didn’t know you’d be here yourself . . .

—Always, when we break new ground. This is holy work, son.

Judah nods as if he has been told something precious.

—There are people in the swamp, sir, he says. —I’m here for them, I guess.

—Do you think I don’t know that, son? Think I don’t know why you’re here? That’s why I’m telling you this is holy work we’re doing. I’m trying to save you sorrow.

—They aren’t as you’d think from Shac’s bestiary sir . . .

—Son I respect the Potentially Wise more than most but you don’t need to tell me. It’s a long time since I’ve thought it, ah, accurate shall we say. That’s not at issue.

—But sir. I need to know, what I want to know is how . . . is exactly where you think you might go because there are, these people, these stiltspear, they, they . . . I don’t know as they could face what you might bring here . . .

—I wouldn’t mean no harm but I by gods and by Jabber will not turn away now. There is nothing harsh to his voice but the fervour makes Judah cold. —Understand, son, what’s coming. I have no plans for yon stiltspear, but if their way intersects with mine then yes, my way will crush them down.

—Do you know what you see here? he says. —Every one of us here, and every one coming, the dustiest navvy, each clerk, each camp whore, each cook and horseman and each Remade, every one of us is a missionary of a new church and there is nothing that will stop holy work. I mean you no unkindness. Is that all you have to say to me?

Judah stares at him in terrible sadness. He works to speak.

—How long? he says at last. —What are the plans?

—I think you know the plans, son. The old man is calm. —And how long? You need to ask the downs. And then you need to ask the gods and spirits of yon fen how much good clean grit they can eat up.

He smiles. He touches Judah’s knee.

—You sure there’s nothing else you’d like to tell me? I had hope of hearing other things from you, but you’d have spoken them by now. I want to thank you for the god you gave me, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll go to your stiltspear people and tell them that they have my deepest most respectful gratitude. You know I’ll be seeing them soon, don’t you?

He points to the wall, to a map that shows all the land from New Crobuzon to Rudewood, to the swamps and on to the port of Myrshock, and some hundreds of miles into the continent, into the west. Details are vague: this is debated land. But Judah can see the crosshatched levelling in the heart of the swamp.

—I know what I see, the old man says and there is real kindness in his voice. —I have in my time seen enough men go native. It’s an affectation, son, whatever you think now. But I won’t lecture you. There’s no recrimination. I will only tell you that history is coming, and your new tribe best move from its path.

—But dammit, says Judah. —This isn’t empty land!

The old man looks bewildered. —What they have, what they’ve had lying there for centuries in that marsh, whatever it is, it’s welcome to face the history I bring, if it can.

Back in deep waterland among the stiltspear, Judah does not know what to say. The fronds gather behind him, a closure he knows is a lie.

The children try to make him learn their golems again. He has never affected the smallest glamour before, has thought himself without talent. A stiltspear elder approaches while he strains, and touches Judah’s chest. Judah opens his eyes, feels things move in him. Whether it is the touch, the air of the swamp, or the raw things he has been eating, he feels a facility he never has, and in astonishment he sees that just faintly he can make his mud model move. The stiltspear children give little hums of acclaim.

—There are some coming, he says at night. The stiltspear only stare politely. —There are men coming and they will fill your swamp. They will split your wetlands, and diminish them.

Judah recalls the map. A neat trisection. Ink that will come to be a changed land, millions of tons of displaced scree and a devastation of the trees.

—They will not stop for you. They will not move for you. You must go. You must go south to where the other clans hunt, deeper, farther away.

There is nothing for a long time. Then the monosyllables of stiltspear gently.

—It is where the other clans hunt. They do not want us.

—But you must. If you do not go you will see what the men will bring. The clans must come together and hide.

—We hide. When the men come we shall be trees.

—It will not be enough. The men will make the land dry. They will cover your village.

The stiltspear look at him.

—You must go.

They will not.

In the next days Judah chews his fingernails. He eats with the stiltspear and watches them and heliotypes their activities and notes them, but with a waxing sickness he feels now that it is for their remembrance.

—There have been fights, they tell him when he demands to know of their wars. —We fought another clan three years ago and many of us were killed.

Judah asks how many and the stiltspear holds up its hands—this one has seven fingers on each—opens and closes them and holds up one more finger. Fifteen.

Judah shakes his head. —Very many, very very many more will be killed if you do not go, he says, and the stiltspear shakes its head too—it has learnt the motion from him and uses it with pride.

—We will be trees, it says.

Judah can make his mudling dance. Each day he is stronger at it. Now he makes foot-tall figures from the clay and peat. He does not know what it is he makes happen or how the stiltspear children have taught him or what the adult put in him, but his new capabilities delight him. His little model can beat others now, at the golem circus they play.

It is his only pleasure, and he hates that it feels like an evasion. Once or twice more he begs the stiltspear to come with him to the deeper swamp. It degrades him that he cannot find the words to move them. It is their culture, he says to himself, it is their way, it is their nature. They—not he—are to blame. But he does not believe his own thought.

He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere.

There are more reverberations and the explosions from hunters’ guns are audible throughout the days. Judah understands something. He watches the stiltspear corner a calf-thick amphibian, and together sing-breathe the uh uh uh uh uh rhythm and for half a second the newt-thing petrifies midflick, held in time made thick, and Judah realises the rhythm they have sung is an echo of the children’s mud-golem song. The same, made vastly more complex, given several parts.

He is obsessed with the chant. He wants to preserve the moments of its utterance, congeal the sounds, strip them down. He can only time them as closely as he can and write them to work out their relations.

Judah works fast. He feels a knot tying in him. His near-friend Red-eyes helps him. —We make shapes that move. All of us: young one way, hunters another. And Judah sees that the children’s chants are only mimicry; it is their hands that make their golems. The rhythm of the hunters does the work of the children’s pinching fingers. Both intercessions are of a kind.

There is a noise of industry, far off. A growled rhythm.

The first stiltspear to die is a young too confused to control its camouflage. It is shot by a hunter frightened by the rapid flickering between states of a four-footed animal thing and what seems a rotting tree. He does not know what he has killed and it is only chance and neophobia that he does not eat the child. The clan find the little body.

They’ve reached the lake, Judah thinks. He imagines uncountable wagonloads of nothing, of soil, stone and dirt bloating the swamp.

The time is now. To make his new clan go deep and disappear. There is no other time for this. He has been beaten down. Though every night he says again what he has said—you must go, it is not safe, more will die—he has given up. He is disengaging. An observer again.

The stiltspear debate quietly. Their food grows scarce. The fish and the food-animals are fleeing or being choked. There is venom in the swamp, the runoff of a thousand men and women, the slurry from latrines and cleaning crystals, from black powder, from make-do graves.

There is another death, a lone dam surprised. The roar of industry is always audible.

A party of stiltspear hunters return and try to say what they have seen. A drained core, something approaching. By now there are steam shovels, Judah knows, ever-growing gangs.

—One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.

After that kill the stiltspear become prey.

The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.

Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.

They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.

Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.

—Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.

They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.

—I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.

There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.

One day Judah rises and gathers all he has—notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings—and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.

There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.

The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, —This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. —Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.

Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.

Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.

—See? See? the foreman says. —This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.

This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the debris of spatterdock. It is a ribbon of flattened earth a score of yards wide and endlessly long, sweeping backward through wet thickets, purged of trees, tended by haulers and hewers as far as Judah can see.

There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.

And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.

The Remade are always various. All Judah’s life. Their bodies made impossible. On the roadbed there is a man whose front pullulates with scrawny arms, each from a corpse or an amputation. Chained to him a taller man, his face stoic, a fox stitched embedded in his chest from where it snarls and bites at him in permanent terror.

Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man—or is it a woman?—whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists.

The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.

—My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.

—My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. —I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?

Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. —Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.

The man nods and purses his lips. —And will you show us their homestead? he says. —I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?

If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.

—I’ll show you.

—Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?

—Yes. I did.

The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.

—We have so many problems, he says. —The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. —None of this surprises me.

—Welcome back, he says. —Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.

Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.

A corner and a new workforce is there. Cosseted by diminished trees, like the crew that flattens the fenland but moving with unique rhythm, a syncopation of construction.

A crowd unfolds toward him. There is a rapid thudding as sleepers are dropped and then a sound like something being sliced as girders unroll from a flatcar, crews Remade and whole picking them up with tongs, a baffling dainty motion, letting them down as sledge-wielding brawnies step in and timed as perfectly as an orchestra hammer the ties and rails. Behind them all something huge and noisy vents and watches their efforts, and edges constantly forward. A train, deep among the mangroves.

It was months earlier that he first met the old man. Weather Wrightby. Crazyweather, Iron Wright. In the offices of TRT, at the recruitment meetings, with all the other young men in starch and braces.

University boys, clerks’ sons, the adventurous rich and aspirational young men like Judah, Dog Fenn and Chimer apprentices bored by their work, fired by children’s stories and travelogues.

—I have wanted this for decades, Wrightby said. He was compelling. The recruits were respectful of this man nearly three times their age. His money did not diminish him. —Twice I went west finding routes. Twice, sadly, I had to come home. There’s a crossing that’s still to be done. That’s the big task. This that we do now is only a start. A little tinkering southerly.

A thousand miles of track. Through rottenstone, forests and bog. Judah was cowed by Wrightby’s fervour. This undertaking is so vast it could bankrupt even such a wealth as his.

Wrightby had felt him, sounded his chest like a doctor. Handed out commissions, put teams together. —You can report to us from the swamps, boy. It’ll be tough terrain. We need to know what to expect.

That is how Judah got here.

The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.

Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

—Frenzy, said one man. —Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

—Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. —Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

—Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. —Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.

They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers—Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet The Wheelhouse, thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.

The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.

They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight—deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.

There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.

The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The box capra chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.

For five days they were alone but for birds. It was an uncanny, rangy interior of slopes and little rivers. The rocks that reared like stelae were wind-carved into unplanned bas-reliefs. The roadbed tracked like a huge ruin, like the remnants of a city wall. They heard noise, approached a mouth in rock.

Tunnel-cutters had ploughed a path through the talus. There was a camp of men by the hole, and more men emerged from stone’s innards, hauling carts of the hill’s litter. They were too far from New Crobuzon for any steam-excavators to reach them. And the rock was probably too hard, though it gave Judah pleasure to imagine one of the drill-nosed things, big as a carriage, emerging from the ground. The tunnellers were alone in the wilds with picks and blackpowder, digging routes for rails that would not reach them for months.

The Remade, with limbs become pistons and jackhammers, were deafened by their own labours. One was a man whose arms were replaced with the outsized splayed claws of a mole: there was no way he could scrape through this stone but the crews had made him a mascot, and he sat in the tunnel’s core and sang encouragement. TRT gendarmes guarded.

—Where you heading? said the superintendent.

—South. Cobsea, the plains.

—The swamps, said Judah’s survey partner.

—The swamps, the supervisor said. —Be a bloody laugh when the rails get there. What the bloody hell, eh?

Judah smiled. His partner laughed. Seven weeks after that he would succumb to a wasting quag disease and leave Judah alone. Judah had thought of the heliotypes and etchings he had seen of the wetlands, the creatures emerging from the groves, the sodden plants, imagined them all set in mud made concrete, paralysed in place.

Their road ran out. They came to the graders, who dug where the land reared up, and took its excess, and poured it in where the land dipped down.

They cut a hill into receding shelves of industry. The landmass became steps, acrawl with roustabouts and pack animals. Loess dust gusted. Over the hours of work, the steps sank to the grade. There would be a ravine where the hill had been.

There are crews strung out like worry beads, Judah thought, across the downland.

Now Judah has come back. The perpetual train has caught him. It has breached the marshland.

The darker of the swamps spreads like a slick, but now it is intruded. There is a line drawn into its interior, buttressed with stone. The rails shine on it. Judah sees a split in the trees, and the black smoke of the train.

Supply trains come, weighed with sleepers and salted beef, with black iron rails. Judah could ride home to New Crobuzon. But a calm has settled him. Things are unfinished. He does not want to go back.

The saturated ground has stalled production, and the gangs have caught each other up: the graders, tie-men and the spikers before the perpetual train itself. Wyrmen scavenge. The camp followers have conjoined. A tent town has come behind the perpetual train. Beerhall tents, dancehall tents, cathouse tents, prefabricated buildings in cheap wood, circuses for the workers’ breaks.

—I was in there, Judah says to himself, looking into the fen. He says to himself, —I should go home, but, but . . . It is difficult for him to say why he does not. He is drawn to the grandeur of this intervention.

He goes back to the deserted stiltspear encampment. It is being eaten by itself, giving in to mud. A part of him wants to go deep and find the stiltspear in the middle of their shrinking wetland. But he is human, and the stiltspear kill humans now. He effects some inadequate communion. He feels hollowed out.

Judah watches the graders’ progress. He is like a seagull, a carrion-eater in the train’s slow slow wake. It and its tracks might progress only a few score yards each day in this merciless swamp. Autumn is speeding up.

The tent-town and its shanties at the boundary of the fens are a hub of commerce and crude industry. They are full of country runaways, workers not working, prospectors, the pistolled horse-wanderers who are growing in numbers across the plains opened by the iron road. Cactacae, vodyanoi, llorgiss, khepri, and races more arcane: crustaceans walking on two legs and cowled like monks, figures with too many eyes. Mercenary glory-hunters; canaille of scores of cultures.

—How can I just go back, Judah says to one as they throw bone dice, —with that thing, that train, there? How can I?

He is a tramp wandering the steam-and-piston town of the rails. There are thousands of men and women, many without work. A pitiable reserve army trudges behind the perpetual train. They beg when the gendarmes are not watching.

Judah makes golems from the trodden-down mud of the track-end. He cannot leave the tracks.

The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent—decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless—for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives.

Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon’s red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.

The train comes and changes everything. For centuries there have been communities by the scrags of forests. Wars between subsistence farmers and hunters, hermits and trappers; trade and treaties between the natives and settlers from dissident sects hiding from New Crobuzon. The city’s runaway Remade have taken to these steppes and become fReemade. Now this native economy is cut open, and New Crobuzon hears its rumours.

There are small exoduses of prospectors from the metropolis trekking from the line to where they say rockmilk or jewels or the puissant charged bones of monstrosities can be mined. Criminals have new places to run, and bounty hunters new ways to follow them. All of these newcomers, explorers and the city’s dregs and the curious from across the continent, track into the new landscape. Like tributaries, like the thread-roots of ivy, their routes spread out from and to the railroad. Judah’s is one of them.

Roaming miles of track, Judah knows he is in some low-level shock. Each night he dreams of stiltspear. He hears their staccato utterance, the chronopausal breath. In his dream they return to him bloodied and stripped of their hands.

Judah walks days, crosses a trestle bridge aswarm with workers and Remade brachiating from extending simian arms. At the end of a siding, a loop of track into a chert-rimmed dustbowl, is the town Such. It is renamed with pioneer verve: they call it Haggletown, Cardtown, the Old-Eye-In-The-Hole, and Hucksterville.

In the casinos track-laying men throw their money down alongside dandies with silver flintlocks and black silk hats: gamblers, cardsmen, aleatori. From New Crobuzon, Myrshock and Cobsea at the end of the proposed routes, and some from farther. The cactus-man from Shankell; a nameless vodyanoi said to come from Neovadan; Corosh, a shaman from the Wormseye Scrub who supplements his traditional turtle-shelled coat with slacks and spats.

Judah watches them greet each other and play.

—BarkNeck, Corosh says in unflawed Ragamoll. —Not seen you since Myrshock. Judah sees him unclip a Wormseye weapon from his belt, a gris-gris mace studded with whispersome cowries.

There are scores of styles of dice and cards. Dice with six, eight, twelve sides, lopsided dice with differing likelihoods of settling on various faces. Cards with seven suits, suits of wheels flames locks and black stars, decks of picture cards without suits at all.

There are women among the chancers: Frey with her tough and beautiful smile; the Rosa in the prettiest blood-coloured dresses, cooling herself with what is supposed to be a razored metal fan. In his second week in Such, Judah sees a Remade—no, with that bearing he is fReemade, an outlaw—acrawl on a lower body like a den of fighting snakes, pass the gendarmes, who pretend they do not see him. —Jaknest, the name is spoken quietly, —Jaknest the Free Stakesman. Jaknest leaves a trail into a back room, where there must be some high-roller game where anyone’s money is good, law be fucked.

Judah does not want to play. Instead he tries to steal. He makes a golem of sticks, has the little made man scurry beneath the table with the night’s biggest pot. It clambers up a chair’s crossbars to sit below Place How, a gambling man in black and silver who is amassing chips and promissory notes. The casino is full and loud, and no one sees the figurine save Judah.

It moves to his commands, trying to unpick Place How’s bag. There is a rushing, a red sulphur gash in the air, and the golem is smouldering carbon. A clot of smoke and dim flame crawls fast as a rat back up How’s coat, to circle his neck and disappear. Everyone rises but How pats the air to calm them.

Judah blinks. Of course a man of How’s wealth and profession goes protected. He does not rely on the casinos’ vodun to sniff out illicit augury. He has his own ward dæmon. When he has won all he wants How stands at the bar and buys drinks and tells stories of his games and the places he has been, and how the new railroad has brought him back to New Crobuzon. He is unwinding the road, Judah thinks. He’s counting it backward, telling its miles like he counts cards.

—Sir I’d like to come with you. And Place How laughs not unkind at this sullen bruised young man half his age. He does not take so much convincing: the thought of a butler appeals to his pretensions. He dresses Judah for the part, and teaches him to ride the mule he buys him. —Now you in hock to me a while, How says.

They go between trail-towns through sage and heather, sometimes overlooking the railroad and its crews. The landscape changes by the tracks: the animals are wary, the trees thin.

Judah does not golem except when he is alone. Between towns Place is loquacious and charming to him: when they reach a place where he can play he puts on a master’s face and has Judah wait behind him, bring him bonbons and kerchiefs. Judah is part of How’s uniform, as much as his velveteen jacket.

The same players recur, and Judah learns their styles. BarkNeck the cactus-man is surly and disliked, tolerated because he is not the cardsman he thinks. The Rosa is a delight to watch, to hear. And there is Jaqar Kazaan, and O’Kinghersdt, and the vodyanoi Shechester, and others, all with their preferred plays. How has his dæmon, and the others have their own protections: hexes, familiars, tamed air elementals gusting through their hair. Judah sees cheats and bad losers shot and harpooned.

Place How loses more money than Judah has ever owned, one night, and makes it up again, with more, two days later. Judah sees him play for shacks, for weapons, for embalmed oddities, for knowledge, and above all for money. Judah bleeds off a few coins when he can. He is sure that is expected.

In the wilds, Judah’s duties include the sexual. He does not mind: he feels no less or more than when he is with a woman. There is a nugget of compassion in him, and he feels it growing. He feels something inchoate, some beneficence.

A day’s ride from the railroad, they hear that Maru’ahm gamblers are coming. Everyone is excited.

—I ever was a gambling man, Place How says that night. —Ain’t a style or a way of play I ain’t come up against: I play the naturals, the numerologicians, and the graduates of academies made them gnostics of stake-raising. Won more’n I lost or I’d not be here. But Maru’ahm, oh. I been once years gone and I tell you if I’m good and say my prayers that’s where I go when I die.

Maru’ahm, the casino parliament.

—Sure it’s mostly for them as like roulette and half-a-hole snapjack and dice, but it’s not just the ally-ate-ors, they do for cardsmen too. Ten year gone, now, 1770. I was playing like La Dama Fortuna was wet for me. Staked my horse, my weapons, my life, and kept winning. And then there were stakes as they only have in Maru’ahm: I’m winning law after law, playing grandbridge and black sevens, till an all-night session of quincehand and I stake a big property law against one of the Queen’s cardsharp senators and I lose, but I seen him pull hidden cards from his sleeves to win the whole pot of legislation and I call him out, and I ain’t such a fighter but dammit I was sore, and there was a duel—ten paces and turn—hundreds of townsfolk watching and most of them cheering me, my law would be better for them. To this day I think it was one of them killed him, not me. I never was much with a gun. He smiles.

No one plays like the Maru’ahmers, and they bring their house rules with them. Gamblers congregate. In a little town where basin rivers meet, the iron road a day’s ride, the pilgrims converge. The townspeople are astonished at the rakes in their streets, well-dressed men and women carrying ornamented wicked weapons, filling taverns, bringing foreign wines, selling them to the landlords and buying them back, prostituting the local young.

Winter is in. There is snow. Judah hears that the track builders have stopped, are hunkered down, punished by the weather. He feels something eating at him. The road is a sentence written on the ground and he must parse it, and he is failing.

Something extraordinary comes out of the ice-flat sky. The Maru’ahm gamblers arrive in an outlandish biokiteship, a spindly, feathered, beetle-nacred thing. It lands and blinks its headlamp eyes, disgorges the gamblers. They wear jade- and opal-coated jumpsuits; they carry cards; their leader is a princess. In accented Ragamoll and with outrageous theatre, she raises her hand and shouts, —Let’s play!

The locals attempt country dances, a banausic and inappropriate entertainment. There are the rat-tats of dice, of shatarang discs. A syncopation like the clatter of wheels on rails. The softer shuffle of cards.

Place How faces one steadfast rebis, an androgyne cardsharp from Maru’ahm who wins unhurriedly at baccarat, at tooth bezique, at poker. How clicks his fingers for Judah to bring hot sherbert, but the swagger is merely vulgar. The he-she smiles.

They play a game Judah does not know with a deck of heptagonal cards. They turn them, discard some, concatenate others in an overlapping pattern on the tabletop. Other players come and go, raise bets by some opaque system, lose, while the pot grows, and only How and the hermaphrodite remain.

Each bet now causes How some physical pain. A crowd has gathered. With the turn of a card the Maru’ahm gambler wins the life of How’s ward dæmon, and the little presence manifests as a flaming marmoset that screams and clutches How’s lapels and makes them smoulder, but bursts and is gone in a fart of soot. How is afraid. He rallies and wins a handful of clockwork gems, but in the next round the he-she turns a triple-trick and Place How can only moan. He looks insubstantial. He is growing hard to make out as he loses.

How bets aggressively. He shouts his stake, —For my horse, a year of my thought, for my man yonder. He waves at Judah, who blinks and shakes his head—I ain’t no godsdamned stake—but it is too late, that is just what he is, and How has played and lost and Judah is forfeit. So Judah runs.

He heads back for the railroad on his harried mule, crossing trappers’ and hunters’ trails. He has money he has stolen.

Judah passes through emptied shells of towns that were tracks’-end carnivals months before. He follows freshets swollen with snowmelt. In the coils of hills he watches the railroad, the cavalier onrush of the trains, their flared stacks bellowing blackly, full of chancers for the halfway towns.

Within three days Judah discovers that the rebis who won him is on his trail. Rumours cross the distance. So south, close to the swamp again where the workforce crawl frozen on, Judah finds a gulch-town of gunmen. The plains are suddenly full of them, scapegrace bushrangers. The permanent dacoits of the region have been joined by newcomers made bandit by the iron road. It exerts.

In a tavern Judah buys the service of gun-layer Oil Bill, whose right hand had been a tool for the servicing of motors and is reconfigured by a gunsmith in brass with splayed barrel for a peppering of shot. He refuses to let Judah run, earns his protection money by letting the androgyne gambler catch them. There is a showdown in the freezing winter dust. As the townspeople of the punk village get out of range the gambler releases a brace of daggerpigeons that gust bladily at Oil Bill, but with a rate of fire Judah has never seen before (clockwork and coil mechanisms refilling his cannon-hand) the fReemade shreds them and fires through their feathers to send the Maru’ahmer sprawling wet and dead.

Judah runs with Oil Bill. He has neglected his golems, his stiltspear memories and the railroad itself. He sees in the brigand a hunger for the rails that reminds him of his own. The fReemade’s passion is less complex, and Judah wonders if it is a purer thing. Deep in himself, below the calm that has settled on him, he knows he must come to understand the rails.

They pay in some taverns, extort in others. Oil Bill sings songs of wandering renegades. Judah performs for him, makes golems—it is his only trick—out of the food they eat and has them dance across the table. He tries to breathe in time, to mimic the stiltspear.

Each dwelling makes its own rules and enforces them if it can. New Crobuzon does not claim the plains. It does not yet want them; it does not despatch militia here: it cedes the rights to policing and its spoils to the TRT, to Weather Wrightby and his monopoly railroad. The TRT gendarmes are the law here, but they are mercilessly liberal: their gunners guard only some mines and bartertowns.

Bill’s reputation means it is some time before anyone opposes him and Judah sees him kill again. When he does it is an act against someone foul, a snarling drunkard who threatens everyone he sees with his moving hexed tattoos, but still it is disproportionate. Judah stares at the corpse, stripped by the town’s gutterchildren.

The thing he has felt born within him, a creature of his congealed concern, flicks its tail. He does not like his companion.

Still he stays with Oil Bill, becomes a gunsman himself, in his duster, swaps his mule for a stolen horse. Because Oil Bill cannot leave the railroad alone. They tramp the winter hills. Bill brings them back to the rails endlessly.

—Look now, that there with them old trailers like that, them’s the work train’s supplies, goin’ all the way into the swamp. And them others we seen is for the sightseers from New Crobuzon come to see wild country, and that other’n with the guntowers ‘hind its engine . . . that’s the wages train. He smiles.

Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.

Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.

—The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. —Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.

And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.

Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach some money, and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.

The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive—Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench—to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.

He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.

—The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. —I need to get them a message.

Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.

Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters and chancers, given guns and sashes in the colours of the TRT. They have little idea of how to pursue Oil Bill, and less inclination. They put a price on him.

Judah is in danger while Oil Bill is free. He joins the bloodprice hunter.

First Judah thinks the bounty man is human, but he accepts his commission with a guttural alien chuckle, flexes his neck and closes his eyes in ways that mark him as abnatural. He rides something that is not a horse but a vague equine semblance, the impression of a horse, a horse burr under the skin of the real. He shoots with a matchlock pistol that spits and mutters and is sometimes a rifle and sometimes a crossbow. He will not tell Judah his name.

They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.

—You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.

Perhaps I will be this, Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah cannot tell if he speaks Ragamoll well or hardly at all.

He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.

Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like aggregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the entrances to tunnels where the marrow of some epochs-dead god-beast has become ore and in which a little tribe of trow live.

The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.

Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly as the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.

In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he cannot do otherwise, of the stiltspear and their hopeless unkenning resistance. He is cold, but inside him the worm of uncertainty, the oddity that is not a conscience but an awareness of wrong, a goodness, is uncoiling. He sighs. —Lie down, he tells it. —Lie down. But the oddity will not lie down.

It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.

Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.

A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.

He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.

When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.

Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.

I’m done here, thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles. I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man. He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air. I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here. He cannot believe what he has been able to do.

Judah scatters the pots and the guttering fire. He turns back for the iron road.

In something like a fugue he is taken by the wake of the trains. He meets the roadbed in some utterly lonely place. His horse is tired. It shivers in snow-dust. Judah goes to the hills, to a village overlooking the track labourers.

Though the men are provided for, though even so far from tracks’-end there is a tribe of prostitutes in their tent brothels, men from the grading teams and the rock-crushers come up sometimes to the tiny village of goatherds where Judah sits and watches. The local girls go with the New Crobuzon men, though their families impotently disapprove and fight and get beaten down. The villagers tend their wounded and weather these intrusions. —What can we do? they say. They are blighted by forbearance, by restraint.

A new calm has embedded in Judah since the line was cut into his swamps. He looks at the world through glass.

He becomes some kind of storyteller of the city to his goatherd hosts. They let him live in the wickiup encampments. They are grateful that he is not as brutish as the men of the perpetual train. They ask him questions in their barbarous Ragamoll.

—Is true the road make milk sour?

—Is true it kill young in the womb?

—Is true it make fish in river bad?

—What’s name of the road?

—I was at its end, Judah says. What is the name of the road? The question startles him.

He has found a young woman from the hillside peasants who lies with him. Her name is Ann-Hari. She is several years younger than he, farouche and pretty. He thinks of her as a girl though her enthusiasms and her stare sometimes seem to him more adult and calculating than ingenue.

Judah wants her with him. Ann-Hari is lost to her family and her village. There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets.

Ann-Hari is not Judah’s; he cannot keep her. He first finds her when she is flushed by the road, and she takes him and discards her virginity with eagerness he knows has little to do with him. For the few days that she is only his he tries to make it as much as he can; he tries to give the arc of a life’s love. It is not an affectation but a role; he gives himself over. She is looking over his shoulder while she straddles him, for something else—not even something better, but else, more. She makes friends. She comes to him in the village smelling of other men’s sex.

Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.

There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.

One cold night Ann-Hari comes to Judah terrified, blackened, bloodied and welted. There has been a fight. A gang of prostitutes has gone from tent to tent. They have pulled apart any lovers they find, overwhelming the outraged men by numbers, holding them, checking the face and voice of each woman. Those that are locals taking no pay, they have hauled outside and decorated with engine oil and feathers. The gendarmes have sympathies with the working girls, and they let them carry on.

Ann-Hari was rutting a man at the edges of camp when the raucous whores’ justice caught her. She fought back. She punched with all her peasant strength. She knocked three of them down, jabbed out with a little gimlet that punctured an older woman’s stomach. Ann-Hari ran from her whitening victim.

Judah has never seen her so meek. He knows that this is only a small thing. No one has died, and likely will not—the blade is tiny. Now the locals know the rules, and no one will remember Ann-Hari who fought back. But the fear this sudden violence has left in her does not fade, and a part of Judah is glad, because now she is afraid to stay he can persuade her to come with him. He wants out of the wilderness; he wants to buckle the iron road closed behind him, go home; and he wants another’s eyes through which to see.

They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches Ann-Hari watching the receding grass and buttes, the river they flank, the gashes, the darkness of tunnels. Hours in silence but for the complex rhythm of wheels, to the city he has not seen for many months, and that she has never seen.

He is back, and blinking like a countryman at New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari and he squat in a tent on a rooftop in Badside. They overlook the carcass of Grand Calibre Bridge, its pivoting section jammed, rusted immobile as it has long been, become only a breakwater.

All Ann-Hari’s fear went away with the miles, and there is nothing that will stop her learning New Crobuzon. Each day she comes back to him and tells him with excitement about the city.

She has never seen khepri before. —There are women here who’ve heads like bugs, she tells him. She visits the Ribs. —They’re bigger’n the biggest trees ever grew. They’re old and harder than stone, bones way up over the roofs, something dead and the whole city’s its grave.

Ann-Hari takes New Crobuzon’s trains, the five rails and their offshoots, from Abrogate Green in the east to Terminus, to Chimer’s End, to Fell Stop and the Downs. —There’s a shanty all falling down below a hill and the forest comes right up to it and the rails go on into the wood but the trains won’t go there.

There is a station in Rudewood on the useless tracks. It has long been deserted. Judah knows of it, but has never seen it. Ann-Hari goes to the dangerous ghetto of Spatters, where the city’s few garuda live above the lowest of its subcitizens, and walks blithely through its stink and middened streets into the forest, and the overgrown remnants of the station, and comes back, taking the train to Dog Fenn to tell Judah. She is teaching him about New Crobuzon.

She tells him about the Fuchsia House, about BilSantum Plaza and the Gargoyle Park, the domed cactus ghetto, the zoological gardens, and many of these things he last visited in his youth if ever. She tells him all the races that she sees. She loves the markets.

Judah makes enough to eat, entertaining crowds with his hedge-magic golemetry. One day he makes a more sturdy figure from wood, with loose chain joints. He attaches strings to her limbs and now while his thaumaturgy makes her dance, he waggles a frame as if he is manipulating her. Judah makes noticeably more when punters think him a puppeteer than when they think he is animating matter.

In rooms by the Kelltree Docks, they are woken each morning by the sirens of factories and the slow stampede of the workforce. Ann-Hari meets dealers. She comes home with wide eyes and the acid smell of shazbah on her. She stays away some nights. When she is with Judah she sleeps with him and takes money from him.

She likes to walk. Judah walks miles with her, between onlooking houses, in the shadows of all the crossbred architecture. She asks him why things are built as they are, and he does not know the answers. Once he is with her as a khepri couple pass, their sashes plaited together, their headlegs rippling and sprays of bitter air emitted around them, their chymical whisperings. Judah feels Ann-Hari tense, and for the first time in his life he sees the strangeness of the khepri, hears the scissor-sounds their gnathic movements make. He sees the strangeness of everything.

It is boomtime. There is money, and there is competition for pavement change. Judah dances his puppets beside singers and instrumentalists, tumblers and artists in chalk.

It is winter but the city is freakishly warm. It is a languid season. In the red of tinted flares Judah’s golem performs for the students in Ludmead. The undergraduates are overwhelmingly young men, well-dressed uptown boys and a few studious clerks’ sons, but there are women among them, and even a few xenians. They walk by Judah’s high-stepping wooden dancer. He is only a little older than most of them.

Some give him stivers, marks and shekels: most give him nothing. One young man attuned to the figure’s movements and the flows of thaumaturgons stops and sees that the marionette is a fake.

—This is what I do, he says. —This is what we do here. I’m in the damned somaturgy programme. You got the face to come here and palm off your jury-rigged hexes?

—Match me then, Judah says.

Which is how the stiltspear sport of golem wrestling comes to New Crobuzon.

The little crowd of students watch while the arrogant boy squints over his glasses at Judah, who is all ruddy and sinewed-muscled scrawn, dressed in third- and fourth-hand rags. Though they bray support for their classmate Judah senses their ambivalence, and realises these moneyed sons would almost rather their fellow, a middling boy from a journeyman family, lose to him the utter outsider. Sheer class sympathy almost makes him walk away, but money is being counted and his own odds are good: he bets on himself.

He whispers to his golem, stutter-hisses at it like the stiltspear, and it takes the undergraduate’s earth-man apart. It is not a hard win.

Judah counts his money. The loser swallows several times and approaches him. He has grace and intelligence. —Good win, he says. He even smiles. —You’ve some techniques, and some power to you. I never seen anyone conjure a golem like that.

—I didn’t learn here.

—I see that.

—Try again? Another match?

—Yes! Yes! Again! It is one of the other students. —Come back tomorrow, puppetman, and we’ll do it again, and we’ll find a better damn ’turge than Pennyhaugh to take you on.

Neither Judah nor Pennyhaugh look at the interrupter. They only look at each other, and they smile together.

It will never challenge the glad’ circuses, the illegal blood-halls of Cadnebar’s and its imitators, where enthusiasts of real brawl sports can watch knife bouts, two-on-cactus hack matches and bite fights. But Pennyhaugh and Judah become partners and systematise the games, and their league gains attention, and golem wrestling becomes a fashion.

At first it is mostly students in the plasmic sciences come to the meets, then some of their professors. Then as word gets out autodidact somaturges and gutter hexers from the falling-down parts of town arrive. The sport is not particularly illegal but nor is it sanctioned, and like most such activities it is always on the point of being banned. It becomes a business very fast, and there are militia informers to pay off, and porters and university officials to keep happy. Pennyhaugh takes care of this.

They are unlikely heroes, the enthusiasts: intense, nervous and studious. They meet in venues of increasing size. They specialise, stud their creations in blades or slabs of tin armour, or give them bodkin legs and serrated dorsal ridges. These are golemachs, fighting constructions, matched against each other weight for weight.

Judah tops the rankings. He does not find it hard to win. His spare and coarse stiltspear techniques work. He loses a handful of times, but in that unforgiving laboratory he is quick to improve.

—You’ve a rare talent, Judah, says Pennyhaugh.

Pennyhaugh cannot beat Judah, but he can train him. He does not understand the alien stiltspear, but he can test them, and marry them to what he does know. He straps Judah to a thaumatograph, tests his cathexis, that concentrate furrowing of mind.

—You’re strong, he says to Judah.

Twice Ann-Hari comes to watch the bouts. She cheers for Judah and smiles when he wins, but the sport does not interest her. She is more for engines. She goes to the termini of the railway lines, to watch trains slow. She goes to those factories that will let her in and wanders among the workers, watching their machines.

Judah likes winning. His skill excites him. For a while he and Pennyhaugh try the most antiquated sting, pretending to lose until his odds rise, but Judah is notorious fast.

He is a star, Swamp-Taught Low. Another is Lothaniel Durayne, a professor of somaturgy who fights his feline tar-golems as Loth the Catman. They relish these stage names. There is the Dandler, a quiet woman Pennyhaugh says is likely a militia scientist. She gives her golemachs whipping chain tails. This troika exchange the top rank between them, but Judah keeps it most.

The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.

As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pennyhaugh and Judah amass good money. Golem wrestling is noticed by New Crobuzon’s press, and there are many newcomers. Judah is growing bored. He only fights Loth and the Dandler now. He watches how they animate their constructions. He listens to their hexes. He fights enough to make money, but mostly he fights to learn.

Every time his golems move, Judah feels his connection to the stiltspear. —I want to know everything about this, Judah says. Pennyhaugh brings him to the university library, and shows him relevant texts. He reads the titles: Theories of Somaturgy, The Limits of Plasmic Range, Beyond the Abvital Debate. —I want to know everything, he says.

It is a sweet winter. Judah takes Ann-Hari ice-skating. She likes the way he is recognised by some they pass. —Swamp-Taught! one says. It makes Judah less happy.

They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. Ann-Hari is not looking at him. Her eyes pass over his and she smiles, and it is a real smile, but she is not looking at him.

Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.

When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.

Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fenn children run after him, with a few skinny cactus youths and leaping vodyanoi, and beg him to make golemachs for them. Sometimes he animates a squeezed-together handful of coins and lets it totter toward them, for them to watch and pick apart.

Ann-Hari has no interest in learning to read, but when she discovers that he plumbs the newspapers for the progress of the Transcontinental Railroad Trust, she demands Judah read to her every day she is with him (there are more and more days that she does not come home).

— . . . a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. —Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress . . .

—What is Myrshock? Ann-Hari says. Judah stares. She knows nothing of the railroad’s shape, or its future.

He makes her a map. —Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. —New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.

Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging Ann-Hari’s. He thinks of the men all the time; he thinks of what he’s seen, that community of hammer-swingers, intervening in the land.

The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.

—The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. —They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?

—No, says Ann-Hari.

Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.

She shrugs. —No, they don’t.

Judah studies. With Pennyhaugh to guide him, he not only grows his capacities but begins to understand what he is doing. His approach remains gut and intuitive, but the laborious and esoteric texts make a kind of sense to him, and better his ability.

— . . . what we do is an intervention, Pennyhaugh lectures Judah from his notes, —a reorganisation. The living cannot be made a golem—because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the static is to the active AM.

Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.

They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pennyhaugh keeps them in business, Judah thinks of other things.

Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?

He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.

It is days since Judah has seen Ann-Hari. He realises suddenly that she has not merely found someone else to be with for some days but has gone. He knows where.

She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history—its accreted stones and struggle—could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are Ann-Hari’s home.

Ann-Hari has gone home to the rails and the perpetual train. She knows no prostitute militia will punish her. The X on Judah’s mirror in her lipstick is a kiss good-bye. She helped him see the city again and he is grateful for that. He discovers that she took a deal of money from him.

The golem fights bore him. Pennyhaugh is gone more and more, liaising with bureaucrats in Parliament, which protrudes like a verdigrised nail from the meeting of the rivers. And the fights slow, and stop, and Pennyhaugh is more distracted, and has more money, and one night he takes Judah to a restaurant more sumptuous than any he has ever entered before, a sedate place in Ludmead where Judah in his street-finery feels absurd, and Pennyhaugh says to him, —There’s another way, you know, there’s another, ah, market for your golem skills.

Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pennyhaugh is a government man now. Judah is without work, without the library. He is quickly forgotten.

For some weeks Pennyhaugh sends him letters suggesting they meet. Judah declines in his ugly hand, just often enough not to be rude.

In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.

What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great deal: they tire him.

He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?

Judah thinks of Ann-Hari and reads that progress at tracks’-end is picking up again. There are questions in Parliament. The TRT and Weather Wrightby are censured for strange dealings. Workers have died in some accident, a gradient has been levelled in a way the inspectors cannot explain, and the heat-ripples and the lifeless zone for yards to either side raise questions the TRT will not answer. No one will say sacrifice, no one will say dæmon, but there is a growing sense that Weather Wrightby is a visionary of money and engineering who will not let geography or climate or politics block him. His plans are embedded in his company’s name, and they are bigger by far than this road.

Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks his name. Something will happen.

Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.

—What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.

THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.
THE PITY IT’S A DITTY
TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE

And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.

—And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poorhouse do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.

It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.

A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.

How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.

But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly innard thing.

Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.

He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pennyhaugh, thanking him for his efforts, wishing him luck, telling him they will see each other again when Judah returns, which he does not believe.

There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.

It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit connects, and then, oh, from the rocks by the door a little figure comes dancing. The girl is quite still and watchful.

The little golem is the size of her hand, and it dances as Judah instructed it to dance when he set his hex, stored his energies, ready for the trigger. It dances toward her. It is made of money. It staggers and falls down and falls apart into coins and the little girl comes forward and picks the money up.

Judah watches her from a doorway. He has stored up a golem and its orders. Has made it wait, for the little snare. He does not know if anyone has done this before.

And he is in the swamps again. There is ice, and the rags of vine from the canopies are hardened, and the animals are sleeping and the swamp is quiet. Miles off is the work camp, and the work train.

The tracks have taken him past towns become corpses. Into lands not tamed but misshapen by the work and the workers, and on at last into the trees on constructed islands, isthmuses of displaced stone, into the fens. Judah goes deep, looking for those who were once his tribe.

He is laden: his new voxiterator and its cylinders, his camera, his guns. He is careful not to sound like a hunter, is careful to make noises as he walks. He sings the songs he has learnt from his stiltspear. He sings the song of the breakfast, the song of hello, the song of a good day. He walks with his hands showing.

When they come for him they are of tribes he does not know, and he sings the song of good neighbours and the song of may I come in? They surround him as trees and stiltspear in flickering and they display their teeth and their weapon-hands, and when he still does not run they hit him and when still he does not run they take him to their hidden village. Their clans and kith-groups have broken down: these are the last of their people.

Children come to stare at him. He looks at them and sees a final generation.

His goodness moves, but Judah knows they are a dead people and nothing will change that. They take him hunting—dams and sires together, no time for traditional divisions—and he hears their uh uh uh, their counterpointed breaths and patted rhythms. The water eddies then ceases to eddy.

He thrusts out the listening trumpet and captures their sound on wax. He listens to it; he winds his handle and hears their rhythm. Judah can see it. He can see its shape. He looks through a lens and is a geographer on the wax continent of the song, tracking chasms, the coiled valley, its peaks and arêtes. He winds slowly, hears the song in sluggish time.

To his shame Judah feels drab among the doomed people. He works as best he can in the horrible wet cold, noting all the layers of the stiltspear songs, every faint and ill-performed bark, but the environs oppress him. No bower in the woods, no green den, but a frosted huddle of mulch and constant war parties, stiltspear out to fight, haunted by the ghosts they will certainly become.

Judah will not watch them. His interior thing jackknifes. He has their soul in his wax. He leaves them, for the second time.

Back to the train. It has moved. He sees a thousand faces he has never seen before. The rails have forked. A town is growing. What a wonderful thing.

Tracks slick and train-polished. They coil into half-built sheds and empty sidings, into yards, past the warping wood of this half-built town they bifurcate. One line juts into the darkest part of the wetland and stops abruptly, hemmed by trees.

Another disappears westward. Men come out of their clearing and they carry dripping hammers, and they carry nails, and they are as stained and sweating as if they have been at war. With each breath they wear and shed momentary scarves of vapour.

As he enters the clearing where Junctiontown grows, Judah’s good thing kicks happy like a baby and he knows he will stay here, that he is back and will be part of what he sees, not a parasite in its trail. He came for the interventions, of which the song is one. And this, this buckling down of rails, is another.

He is a veteran of the railroads, but he has never worked them before. The thing in him cajoles him. It wants him to join this great effort.

Judah follows the rails out of wet trees into hills, and the iron is implacable. The yellow roadbed rises. There are people everywhere. Lines of horses, the smell of fires—grass, wood, lignite. Judah comes through tents, sees them pitched on the roofs of the perpetual train. Remade and cactacae drag ploughs of chain to flatten the ground. Gendarmes walk in crews.

The perpetual train creeps forward with tiny turns of its wheels. Pushed and pulled by four hulks, diamond-stacks splaying and venting from yards up. Vastly bigger than the engines that ride New Crobuzon’s elevated railways. These wilderness versions wear cowcatchers, their headlamps burn vividly, and insects touch like fingertips against the glass. Their bells are like churchbells.

There comes an armoured car with a swaying guntower. An office on wheels, closed wagons for supplies, what seems a parlour, one at least that is blood-fouled, a rolling abattoir, and beyond that a very tall and windowed wagon painted with pinchbeck gilt, slathered with symbols of the gods and Jabber. A church. Four, five enormous carts with tiny doors and rows of little windows, triple-decked bunkrooms thronged with men. Under their own great weight the sleep-coaches sag in the middle as if they have sows’ bellies. There are flat cars, open and covered. And beyond them the crews. The music of hammers.

They are on a flat through the brush. The track-layers are speeding, closing the gap with the graders.

Judah is only one man walking beside the train. There is nothing to mark him except the sense that he is waiting. Judah is lifted. But there is sourness. He sees men and cactus-men muttering and the fear of the Remade tethered near their stockades. The foremen go armed. They did not used to.

Many miles ahead surveyors map out the land according to charts drawn a score of years before by Weather Wrightby and his crews, when the old man was a scout himself. Behind them, in the unland between the train and the explorers, graders make their fat raised line. And behind them the bridge-monkeys push trestles across impassable land, and the tunnellers keep cutting through their rocks.

All this is ahead. Judah carries ties.

This is how the laying goes. Early morning the hundreds of men wake to bells and breakfast in the dining car on coffee and meat from bowls nailed to tables, or eat in vague congregations along the tracks. First are the whole: the hard human labourers; cactus-men from New Crobuzon’s Glasshouse, a few renegades from Shankell.

Behind them, cuffed to their meal by guards, the Remade eat what is left. There are a few women among them, Remade with steam-driven integuments, iron-and-rubber or animal bulk. Those prisoners with boilers hexed to them are issued enough culm and low-grade coke to work.

The trains hang back. Horses or pterabirds or Remade bullocks drag carts from huge piles of rails along the line, to the last of the track, and back. The crews move for each other, industrial dancing. They quickstep in and down, and the hammering, and more rails come, and the carts refill and rejoin the extending road. Ten feet, hundreds of pounds of iron at a time, the road continues.

Jabber, what are we bringing? Judah thinks to see the work of all those many hundreds. What are we doing? He is awed by its raucous and casual splendour.

He sings songs to himself as he works, and invisibly he makes each cold rectangle of wood a limbless golem that for the tiny interval of its ablife strives to cross from the horse-hauled carriage of sleepers to the dust of the bed. Judah feels the thoughtless tugging from each piece, and it helps him. He carries more than he should. When the waterboys come from the train out of sight behind them there is a scramble to drink first, before dust and spit fouls the water. The many Remade wait.

Judah’s tent-mates like him. They listen to his stories of the swamps and tell him of labour troubles.

—Fuckin’ Remade been causin’ trouble too. Over food and that. And the whores’ prices goin’ up and up. Somebody said the money’s dryin’ back home. You know anything about that? Somebody told me prices are fallin’, money’s runnin’ out.

Behind the sleeper-men are the rail-layers and spikers, and behind them the intricate bulk of the train comes swaying snarling closer, tended like some steam-animal god.

Judah sees Remade chastised with whips, and the presence inside him spasms each time so he nearly falls. Once there is a fight between free workers and a Remade man with the pugnacity of the newly changed. The other Remade pull him away very quickly and only huddle under the whole men’s blows. Remade women bring the sleeper-men chow. Judah smiles at them, but they react like stone.

On paydays or thereabout a train comes like a miracle through the thawing swamp. Mostly the free men give over their money in Fucktown and in the stills and hooch-tents. Judah does not go out those nights. He lies in his tent and listens to the echoes of gunshots, fighting, the gendarmes, screams. He takes out his voxiterator and plays the breathy stiltspear songs. He annotates his notebooks.

End o’the Line is a newspaper printed on the work train. It is ill-spelt and salacious, and vulgarly partisan for the TRT who sanction it. All the men read it and argue about its worst points. Twice Judah sees people reading other journals surreptitiously.

He drifts back toward the train. He takes his turn hauling rails.

Judah draws the line. The metal is mercilessly heavy. In the flat light of the sky he feels himself watched by rocks. Each rail almost a quarter of a ton, four hundred rails to the mile. He lives by numbers.

Crews work in cadres, all convict Remade or all freemen, no mixing. With tongs or their own metal limbs they slide the rails out, five men or three cactus or big Remade to each, and lay them down with midwife gentleness. Gaugemen space the irons out, and they in turn are gone, and the spikers move in.

Judah makes each rail momentarily an absurdly shaped golem. No others on his team feel the faint fishlike flutters of the metal as it tries to help him. He lays down angles in the random land. He grows strong. Once he sleeps on the roof of the train to know what it is like. Men have tethered goats up there and even make carefully corralled fires.

A tinker-showman works the length of the road, performing. Judah watches him make his own tiny dancing dirt figures, but they are not golems. They are only matter tugged as if by hand at a little distance, direct manipulations. They have no bounded reality, no ablife, no mindless mind to follow instruction, any more than puppets do.

Slogans are written on the train and the rocks. Each morning they appear, some nothing but crudities to shock the earth, some personal, some polemical, SCREW YOU WRIGHTBY. Twice when the bell brings Judah out of sleep into the dark morning posters are slathered to the train and to trees.

Some are very simple: FAIR PAY, UNIONS, FREEDOM FOR THE REMADE, and below a little doubled R. Others are a mass of tiny writing. Judah tries to read them while the foremen tear them down.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT.
TRACKS’-END SUPPLEMENT 3.

The death toll on the TRT Railroad continues to rise, as safety is spurned in the rush for money. The rails go down on the bones of workers, free and Remade . . .

—What in Jabber’s name these fuckers on about? one man says. —Who ain’t for fair pay? And if there are them as wants guilds I ain’t got no problem, but free Remade? They’re fucking criminals, or don’t these dozy fuckers know that?

Judah is beguiled by the bravery of the dissidents. They creep at night when the gendarmes patrol. If they were caught they would not walk away. They would be made part of the landscape.

Runagate Rampants are left under tables, on rocks. It is poor distribution, but it is all they have. Judah takes copies, and reads when he is alone.

He is only just aware of the dramas of the line. He works, hardly looking up at a rain-patter of shots down the rail. Later he hears that a joint war party of fReemade and striders, a long way east of their supposed territory, attacked the crews in the rear. They were driven off, but the gendarmes are concerned that so proud a race as striders are allying with the punk fReemade against the trains.

With the weeks and the miles and tons comes spring and the slow lengthening of days. The land around the iron road becomes sparse. Judah huddles with his crew behind an overturned cart while a strider family hurls indistinct missiles. The guntower of the perpetual train swivels and lays down craters like flowers.

Judah reads Runagate Rampant.

The borinatch, striders, have reason to hate the TRT. Their land is being stolen by the businesses of New Crobuzon, and the state and militia will not be far behind. Who has not heard the stories of Nova Esperium and the carnage of the natives? Each dead railworker is a tragedy, but the blame lies not with the borinatch, whose revenge is misplaced but whose fears are real. The blame lies with Weather Wrightby, and the Mayor, and the moneyed classes of New Crobuzon suckling at the teat of corruption. We say: For a people’s railway, and peace with the natives!

Fucktown is close. Judah is not a customer there, preferring his own right hand or the guilty shut-eyed clutching of men on men in the hollows each Chainday night to the boredom of the whores.

Each week in the stockades where the Remade are kept there is a concession to conviviality, drunken parties where Remade women are given to Remade men and cheap drink is given to all under the aegis of the overseers. Judah watches the Remade women in the aftermath being bathed in the cold river, screaming at the temperature and drinking purgative to stop pregnancies. One guard oversees this. He is gentle with them. He dresses their bite marks and bruises, and punishes the Remade men who hurt too much or often. —It ain’t right how some of them women is used, he says.

It is common for the wages train to be delayed. A day or two and there are only grumbles, but sometimes as long as a week goes without money. Three times when this happens there is a strike. By some chaos of democracy the track-layers put down their tools and block the train until they have their shekels in their pockets. They are nonplussed by their own mass, by their numbers. Hundreds of muscled men, the tall green brawn of cactacae emerging from them. The prostitutes, the surgeons, clerks, scholars, off scouts, and hunters come to watch them.

Judah stands among them, ashudder with excitement. He is unlocked by this, and is briefly at one with the thing inside him. An intervention, he thinks. He is never among the first wave to put his tools down—like Thick Shanks the cactus spiker who Judah thinks is a Runagater, like Shaun Sullervan the pugnacious alltradesman—but he is always among the second.

In response to the picketing, the Remade are worked hard. The foremen assure the strikers once that every effort is being made to expedite the money, and then they turn to the Remade, who are made to make up for the strike. The chained and altered men rock from blows, from the hexes of thaumaturge-guards; they drip under the weight of their own limbs as well as the loads they carry.

—Fucking useless, one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. —What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

The free men and cactus workers watch the punitive work, and cannot stop the road unrolling. They wince and watch.

—Stupid scab bastards, a cactus-man says.

They pity the Remade, but cannot forgive them breaking the strikes. The pay train always arrives in the end.

An absurd orgy of speculation, the financiers swimming like grease-whales in a slick of stolen and invented cash, prices for land and the stocks of the TRT soaring. It will not last. As returns slow, as the stench of TRT corruption and government collusion grows overpowering, the weakness at the base will show. When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!

The Remade draw a line. One of them is beaten by the guards and dies, and though he is not the first he was old enough and liked enough that many Remade refuse to work the next day, and carry the corpse in a raucous funeral. The unprecedented situation is digested; messages are expedited back and forth along the track.

The intransigent Remade are ranged alongside the train. The gendarmes take up positions. The guntower on the perpetual train turns.

Oh my gods, Judah thinks.

—Anyone willing to return to work now, raise your hand, a captain says. The Remade are confused. He does not wait more than five seconds before turning his back. He signals someone and the tower fires.

A shell arcs into the mid of the Remade. Later, Judah will realise its load must have been reduced, not to send burning shrapnel into the train itself. Now all he hears and sees is the fire and explosion, the circle of bloody clearance in the Remade.

A strong accomplished man drives a spike down in three strikes. Many men take four swings: cactacae and the most augmented steam-strong Remade two. There are three prodigious and respected cactus-men who can push a spike home in one blow. There is one Remade woman who can do this, too, but in her the ability is judged grotesque.

Judah is a free spiker. No one on the TRT line is higher. He makes each spike a golem, tasked to hide in the earth, so that with each blow it strives to embed itself.

He hears the metal slaps of his maul as the breaths of a stiltspear. Ah ah ah. Ah ah ah. It sends him back to his voxiterator, listening and teasing apart the elements of the sounds, the overlapping beats. Judah sees Thick Shanks talking to someone without looking at them, standing with his back to the Remade stockade, a refigured man behind the chains lounging as if by chance but Judah knows he is listening.

It is in the company of Thick Shanks that Judah finds Ann-Hari again.

Judah courts the friendship of the militant cactus-man. They talk of the railroad and the uncanny dust-rock landscape and the dry cold of this late winter, and of the rumours that creep down the tracks to them like boxcars. Myrshock’s crews striking again, Cobsea’s government falling again with its meaningless regularity.

They smoke and share drugs around the Fucktown fires, and some of the women join them. It is in the shaking fireside shadows that Judah sees Ann-Hari. She is dressed in the functional provocation of a whore; she sees him as he sees her, but where he stands and cries out and runs to her, she only smiles.

She lets Judah accompany her. Ann-Hari the prostitute has become a nurse, an organiser, a grassroots madame. She has become a counsellor, her strangeness—knowing and credulous in some pastoral combination—meaning the younger and newer girls speak to her for help. Ann-Hari speaks to Shaun and to Thick Shanks. Ann-Hari organises and intervenes.

Judah watches her at the chain stockade. She comes at night to a place where the guards are not watching, and does as Thick Shanks has done, her back to the fence, a Remade man behind her, pretending to be there by chance.

Another man is there, a boy, less than twenty years old. He is propelled to Ann-Hari by the panic that sometimes overtakes Remade. Judah comes forward. In these shocks of psychotic self-revulsion they can hurt themselves or others, and the boy could reach Ann-Hari through the chain. But he hears what they are saying to each other, and he slows.

—I’ll die I’ll die, I can’t go on, I’m cold, look at me, the boy says. He scrabbles at the outsize insect arms that radiate from his neck like a ruff, that clutch and scratch at him. —I’ll run away.

—Where will you run? Ann-Hari says.

—I’ll follow the rails home.

Ann-Hari’s contact is watching. He has an integument of pipes and pistons emerging from his flesh, a steam-powered skeleton inside and outside.

—You’ll follow the rails.

—I’ll go home. I’ll join the fReemade.

—Go home to New Crobuzon? A Remade. You want to go there? Or you go fReemade? Scrabble like a bandit. They miles from here, they don’t come so close. You be killed by gendarmes within twenty mile.

The boy is quiet for a minute. —I go south. I go north. West.

—South is the sea. Hundreds of miles away. You know how to fish? North into an empty plain and to the mountains? West? Boy, west is the cacotopic zone. You choose that?

—No . . .

—No.

—But if I stay I die . . .

—Maybe. Ann-Hari turns and looks at the boy, and Judah can see her seeing him, and the thing in Judah uncoils. —Plenty of us going to die on this road. Maybe you die, be buried like a freeman under the iron. Maybe not. She reaches out and holds the chain so she is all but touching him. His insect neck-legs quiver. —You alive now. Stay alive for me.

Judah cannot speak. He does not think she has ever seen the boy before.

Ann-Hari does not lie with him, though she will kiss him, for long breathless moments, which she does not do with anyone else. But when he wants more she charges with a principled resolution that disturbs him.

—I ain’t a client, he tells her. She shrugs. He can see it is not venality that motivates her.

Spring again, and there is a strong smell of burning metal by the points. It has been slow going in the cold, but now as men shed clothes the pace improves and the railmen get closer to the graders.

They are in the great vegas that surround Cobsea. The perpetual train comes with the growing heat into a merciless flat region of alkali dust that sets in eyes and mouths like rheum, that stinks like embalming fluid. It seems to hold warmth so the crews go from winter cold and are pitched into a dry heat. The train-town is bedraggled. The herds of beef-animals develop sores. Their meat is foul. There is a constant caravan of water carts going miles to siphon off the streams and rivers they find.

The land is alive. It hollows beneath them, reveals the craw and feeders of huge dust-sucking predators. The land bucks. There is an earthstorm, disks of rock careering skyward, buffeting the train. —We’re in the badlands now. Everyone is saying it.

Research crews return from the desert of skin-soft dust, whipping their camel into spitty terror, and in their cart lies a man stiff with the muck that coats them all, no, he is a statue, no, he is covered with accretions, tumours of stone. They embed him, a man-shape whose lips are trembling.

—It came out of the ground . . .

—We thought it was mist . . .

—We thought it was smoke from a fire . . .

It is smokestone that has vented up and quickly set. They have to chisel him free. Flesh comes with the carapace.

Days later, the perpetual train comes to the residue of that drift. There are languid striae of smoke, utterly still. Stone in impossible spindly shapes, wafting, insinuate billows, coil and smog recoil. Harder than basalt, rock fumes.

It has drifted across the roadbed, and the biggest men take their mallets to the new formations. They grip fossilized moments of wind, and it looks as if they clamber the sides of a cloud. The smokestone comes away in tiny shards, and over the hours they clear a path just wide enough for the tracks. They split a passage through fog.

They are harried by fReemade who raid with what seems rampaging petulance. THE FREEMADE ARE NOT THE ENEMY! says a new spate of handwritten posters, but it is hard for the workers to hear that as they see the aftermaths of the attacks.

Judah cannot understand what the fReemade want. They die in the raids, too. Judah does not see it, but he hears that a litter of fReemade bodies and their nearly dead are laid across the line for the perpetual train to dismember. They steal odds of iron, machinery, a few cattle. Can it be worth it?

The ground kinks toward higher rocks and trees. The grading crews are nearby, slowed by the sudden gnarlings in the way; they have met tunnellers who have been rasping out a hollow in granite for two years, and who have not yet come through.

A tide approaches, a rill of brown. It is a forestful of insects fleeing the graders and the cutters.

Men swear and try to cover themselves. The insects buffet the crews, millions of tough bodies: their chitin cuts. They are big as cactus thumbs. Mindlessly they fight the train. They immolate themselves in the gears and beneath the wheels, and the tracks become slippery with oily carnage. Pipes vent sand for traction.

From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.

Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tunnellers and the bridgemen, the train and track-layers meet the graders, the whore and mendicant followers meet the train, and everything stops.

Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tunnel. Judah climbs the rise. On the other side it is sheer, edging a ravine. He can see the nearly finished bridge, girders emerging two hundred feet below him, marking where the tunnel will break through. There are men suspended in baskets, tamping charges into the holes they drill, hauled away as fuses spit.

There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.

Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.

There is a huge celebration that night, the tunnellers and bridgemen delirious with new company. Judah drinks. He dances to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy with Ann-Hari, and she with him, and then with Shaun Sullervan, and with Thick Shanks. They smoke; they drink. Men are speechless from the cheap drugs and hexed moonshine they have concocted in stills.

There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tunnellers and the bridgemen who have been trapped so long in the badland that they have become part of it do not differentiate as his workmates do. That though the Remade here are billeted separately, and there is some effort made to segregate them, the punitive landscape here does not support divisions so strongly as among his own. It is as if the iron link to New Crobuzon conducts its prejudices. The iron-road Remade watch the local Remade. Judah sees them see, sees the gendarmes and the overseers see.

Judah and his team lay tracks into the tunnel, up to its clawed end. They move very slowly. The men who have lived like worms step aside into wax-smeared alcoves. They see by fires and lux hexes in the stone. Judah’s friends are cowed. They blink under the pale wide eyes of the diggers. The slap of their hammers is horrible and loud in that darkness.

There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they cannot join the tunnellers, and they cannot build the bridge, and they can only wait, play cards, fuck and fight.

The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.

Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.

What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.

A tunnel-man is injured—an everyday terror in this blackpowder land, but he responds with an outrage as if it is the first time such a thing has happened. —Lookit, he says holding up his blooded hand. The red on the white dust that coats him is vivid. —They letting us fucking die here.

That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting. —Meeting going on, he says. —Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. —We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.

There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. —Something’s happening, says Ann-Hari to Judah. They sit on a blackened half-rock split by fire and cold water and the strikes of the biggest Remade man. —The girls are frightened.

A scattered few handwritten Runagate Rampants are left at the mouth of the hill. Each day and night another fight or some petty act of anger, a headlight of the perpetual train shattered, obscenities carved into the paint.

Daily the graders gather and refuse to cross the ravine. Their foremen find other work for them. The graders are not striking, but are refusing to do what they are supposed to. They will sweep away the detritus of the tunnel, and carry tools, but if they cross that cut they will be in perhaps the last part of their digging; they will be dragging the roadbed the last hundred-some miles to Cobsea. And they will not, not yet, not now while the iron road withholds their money. That would be a surrender.

And then there is a night. The length of the train and at the black of the tunnel there are fires. The roamstars are bright, crawling by their sedentary cousins. Judah has made a golem from thistles.

—What’s that?

Judah looks up. People are staring, heading up the rock hill. They seem pulled; they move in little stuttering steps.

—What is it? Judah says, but the man he asks only shouts and points up the hill. —Look look! he says. —Come, it’s there.

There is a noise along the ridgeback of the slope as if the stones and the very bushes are resonant, are singing an aberrant hymn. People on the incline shout and begin to scramble back again, in a river of scree. Falling men careen into their friends. Judah grips roots and keeps his feet.

The tremulous song, the sound of the wilderness anxious, is loud. There is a spider above him. No no that is not, that is not a spider that great shape that cannot be, it is the size of a tree, a fat tree with branches splayed in perfect symmetry that cannot be but that is what it is, it is a spider, so much bigger than the biggest man.

—Weaver.

—Weaver.

They say it. Their voices are beyond fear, quite stripped by awe.

Weaver. The spiders that are not gods but are nearly, that are something so other, so much farther than men or xenian, than dæmon, than archon, that they are unthinkable, their power, their motives, their meanings as opaque as iron. Creatures who fight murder die and reconfigure everything for beauty, for the intricacy of the web that is the world they see, a concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry.

Songs about Weavers fill Judah’s head. Nonsense-fears for children—He promised me her hand in mine, / then smothered her in all his twine, / the Weaver swine—absurdities and pantomime foolery. Looking up at this thing glowing unlight or is it light over the rock edge he knows the songs for the atoms, the infinitely tiny specks of stupidity they are.

The Weaver hangs in complex stillness. Body tarry black, a teardrop globe, a glintless head. Four long legs angled down to end in dagger-feet, four shorter up, as if in the centre of a web, hanging in the air. Ten, twelve feet long, and now, what, what is it, turning slowly, slightly, as if suspended, and the world seems snagged. Judah feels a tug as if the world is tethered by silks the Weaver is gathering as it turns.

Judah makes a debased throat sound. It is dragged out of him by this Weaver’s unseen threads. It is a kind of unbidden worship.

All along the slope the men and women of the railway stand seared by what they see, and some try to get away and some stupid few crawl closer as if to an altar but most, like Judah, only stand still and watch.

—Don’t touch it, don’t fucking go near it, it’s a godsdamned Weaver, someone is saying, someone a long way below. The spider-thing turns. The rocks continue to sing, and now the Weaver joins them.

Its voice comes out from under stones. Its voice is a shudder in dust.

. . . ONE AND ONE AND ONE AND TWO AND RED RED-BLACK RED-BLUE BLACK THROUGH HILLCUT WIRETRAWL AGASH AGASP AGAPE LEGATE AND CONSTRUCT MY TIES MY EYES CHILDER KINDER WHAT STONECUT AND DUSTDRUM YOU SOUND A SLOW ATRAP TRAPPING A RHYTHM IN TOOL AND STONE . . .

Its voice becomes a bark in time, a beating that makes the little rocklets dance on the slope.

. . . EAT MUSIC EAT SOUND PUSH THE PULSE PULSILOGUM THE MAGIC . . .

Thoughts and the textures of things are snared and pulled in to the Weaver.

. . . GRIND AND GROUND CARE AND UNCRUSH WHAT IS BEFORE UNCRUSH UNCRUSH YOUR NAME IS RAKAMADEVA ROCK MY DEVIL YOU FLINCH INCH ATWARD OF WHAT WILL BE YOU BUILD . . .

And the Weaver pulls in all its arms and drops lightly unreeled from its turning point in the air still sucking in what light there is and bloating on it as if it is the only real thing and Judah and the ground he stands upon and the threadbare trees he clutches are all old images, sun-bleached, on which a vivid spider walks.

The Weaver picks up its legs one by knifepoint one and treads at the edge of the ravine and it dances along it as the uncoloured women and men edge behind it and it turns its head in sly playful slide to stare at them with a constellation of eyes like black eggs. Each time it does the people who follow it freeze and haul back until it turns again and moves on and they follow it as if bound to.

It slips over the rim of the cliff and they run to see the arachnid thing pick dainty as a high-shoed girl down the sheer. It runs, it begins to run, until its huge absurd shape careers downward and it is by the roots to the bridge, the girders that spit out from the rock halfway to earth, and the Weaver leaps out and without passing through intervening space is on the half-done stump of construction, and small in the distance it begins to spin, to turn cartwheel, becomes a rimless wheel and skitters the girders where in the day the Remade bridge-monkeys hang and build.

. . . AND BREAK AND BREAK . . . The Weaver’s voice comes as loud as if it were next to Judah . . . PUSH BRUSH THEY AWAIT WITH BREATHBAIT AND ADRIP FOR YOUR INTERVENTION DEVILS OF THE MOTION ELATION CITATION CITE THE SITE TOWER SIGH NIGH VEER STAR AND CLEAR YOU ARE YOU ARE FINE IN TIME YON OF THE PLAINS STEAM-MAN . . . And the Weaver is gone and the weak night light bleeds back into Judah’s eyes. The Weaver is gone and it takes many seconds of staring at the spider-shaped absence on the bridge until the men and women of the railroad turn away. Someone begins to cry.

The next day a handful of men are dead. They stare up at their canvas or at the sky with eyes quite washed of all colour and with smiles as if of quiet pleasure.

There is an old man long gone mad who has come quietly with the railroad for miles, sitting while the hammermen swing and the whores sell relief, a man become a mascot, become a piece of luck. After the Weaver he stands above the tunnel mouth and declaims in glossolalia and then in words. He says he is a prophet of the spider, and though they do not obey the commands he gives them the workers of the iron road watch him with hesitant respect.

He walks among the forced idleness of the track-layers. He shouts at the tunnellers to put down their picks and go nude and run away north into the unknown places of the continent. He shouts at them to copulate with the spiders in the dust. They are all draped in threads from the Weaver’s spinnerets. They are knotted in a new configuration.

—We saw a Weaver, Judah says. —Most people never see that. We saw a Weaver.

The next day the women strike.

—No, they say to the men who come to their tents, and who stare at them uncomprehending. The women stand together in a militia, holding what weapons they have. A picket of rags and petticoats.

There are scores of them, determined and surprised by themselves. They turn away the hammermen, tunnel-men, gendarmes. The rebuffed gather. A counterdemonstration of surly lustful men. They mutter. Some go to masturbate behind rocks; some simply go. Many stay.

The dust of the two gatherings rises as they face each other. The gendarmes come—they do not quite know what to do; the women are doing nothing but refusing, the men are only waiting. —No pay, Ann-Hari says, —no lay. No pay no lay no pay no lay.

—We’ll not do it no more for promises, she says to Judah. —Since we come here and there ain’t no money, they been doing and doing it on credit. Our men, our gendarmes, now the new lads. And they ain’t had women here for a long time; they hurt us, Judah. They come and say put it on my tab girl and you can’t say no and you know they ain’t going to pay.

—Cyra lost her eye, she said. —Some tunnel-man comes, put it on my tab, she tells him no and he knocks her so hard it splits her eye. Belladona had her arm broke. No pay no lay, Judah. Money first from now.

The women defend Fucktown. They have patrols with sticks and stilettos; there is a frontline. They take turns to watch the children. There must be those among them who are not happy with the confrontation, but they are quietened into solidarity. Ann-Hari and the others swish their skirts and laugh while the men watch. Judah is not the only man who is a friend to these infuriated whores. He, Shaun Sullervan, Thick Shanks, a clutch of others watch together.

—Come on girls what’s this then, says a foreman. —What’s the story? What are you after? We need you, beauties. He smiles.

—Won’t be beat down anymore, John, Ann-Hari says. —Won’t take promises. You pay; until then no lay.

—We ain’t got the money Ann you know that sweetheart . . .

—Ain’t my problem. Have your man Wrightby pay his men, then . . . She jigs her hips.

That night a group of men try with something between lightheartedness and anger to push their way past the picket, but the women block them and beat them hard and the men retreat holding split heads and screaming in astonishment as much as pain. —Stupid fuckpig bitch, one man screams. —You stupid bitch, you smashed my fucking head, bitch.

They do not let the men touch them the next day and there is no longer novelty or near-humour to the situation. A man takes out his cock, shakes it at them. —Want payment? he shouts. —I’ll give you payment. Eat this you fucking dirty moneygrab sluts. There are those in the crowd of men who have enough affection for the women they have travelled with that they do not like that, and they hush him, but there are others who applaud.

—Get money, and come in, the women shout. —Don’t blame us, horny bastards.

There is another attempt on their camp. This time it is led by the tunnellers. It is a rape squad intent on punishment. But there is an alarm, a panic from Remade women sent to clean clothes near the Fucktown tents. They see the men creeping and yell, and the men are on them quickly and attacking to silence them. A squad of the prostitutes come running.

Men are stabbed, a woman’s face is broken, and when the prostitutes have overcome the intruders one of the Remade women is found concussed and leaking from her head. The whole women hesitate briefly before they carry her in to tend her.

In the morning the tunnel-men strike. They gather at the tunnel mouth. The foremen run to negotiate. The tunnellers have their spokesman: a thin man, a weak geothaumaturge, his hands stained basalt black by the stone he makes into slurry.

He says, —We go back in when them girls let us back in, too, and his men laugh. —We’ve got needs, he says.

The prostitutes and tunnellers have made demands. The graders will not work. The track-layers cannot, and only sit in the sun and play dice or fight. It is becoming violent like a prairie town. The perpetual train sits. The gendarmes and foremen confer. There is rain, but it is hot and unrefreshing.

—Mate with the spiders, the old man says. —It’s time to change.

Everything is still. Only the bridge is being built, and now in the evenings when the bridge crews come off their work, some cross the ravine to their sister encampment, because they want to see the trouble. They come—hotchi in spines, apes trained and constrained by Remaking, Remade men given simian bodies. They come to see the strikes. They tour from one to another.

The newspapermen on the perpetual train, who have been despatching their stories when there are messengers, suddenly have something new to cover. One takes a heliotype of the picket of women.

—I don’t know what I’ll say, he says to Judah. —They don’t want me talking about tarts in The Quarrel.

—Take all the plates you can, says Judah. —This is something you should remember. This is important, he says, and it is his oddity, his beatific innard that speaks. His breath leaves him a moment at the thought that he can hear its words.

—We are all spiders’ children, says the mad old man.

There are handwritten Runagate Rampants on the rocks.

This is not three strikes, or two strikes and a half. This is one strike, against one enemy, with one goal. The women are not our opponents. The women are not to be blamed. No pay no lay they tell us, and that can be our slogan too. We will not lay another tie, another rail, until the money promised is ours. They say it, and we say it too. We say: No pay no lay!

When the overseers and gendarmes realise that the disparate groups are not tiring of the strike, will not exhaust themselves with recrimination, there is a change. Judah feels it when he rises and sees the foremen moving with new purpose.

It is already hot, he is already sweating, when unbreakfasted he goes to the tunnel mouth with others from the idle workforce. The tunnellers are arranged like a fighting unit, and they carry their picks. The foremen and gendarmes are before them, with a corps of tethered Remade.

—Come on now, says an overseer. Judah knows him. He is the man they bring in to do unpopular things. There is a delegation from the prostitutes, twelve women walking close together, headed by Ann-Hari. The tunnellers begin derisive calls. The women only watch. Behind them all the train wheezes like a bull.

The overseer stands before the Remade. He turns his back on the strikers and looks at the motley Remade in their integuments of foreign flesh and metal. Judah sees Ann-Hari whisper to Thick Shanks and another man, sees them nod without turning. They are staring at the Remade who have been gathered. One of them, a man with pipes that emerge from his body and enter it again, stares back at Thick Shanks and moves his head. He stands by a much younger man with chitined legs emerging from his neck.

—Pick up the picks, the foreman says to the Remade. —Go into the tunnel. Cut the rock. We’ll instruct you.

And there is a silence and no motion. The gendarmes have interposed between the strikers and the Remade.

—Take the picks. Go into the tunnel. Follow it to the end. Cut it.

There is silence again a while. The men of the perpetual train know how the Remade are being used, and some begin to shout scab, scab preemptively. But the shouts die because none of the Remade are moving.

—Take the picks.

When there is no movement still, the overseer strikes with his whip. It lands loudly and with the blossoming of a scream. A Remade drops, hands to his opened face. There are fear noises, and some of the Remade start and begin to move but one of them makes a low command and they shudder and hold, except one who breaks and runs for the tunnel and shouts, —I didn’t want to and I won’t, you can’t make me, it’s a stupid plan, it’s a stupid plan.

The others do not look at him and he goes into the dark. The young man with the insect-leg tumours is shaking. He is looking hard at the ground. Behind him, the piped man is saying something.

—Take the picks. The overseer moves closer to the Remade.

Something rises in Judah. There is muttering and an anger around him.

—Take the picks or I’ll have to intervene to stop troublemakers. Take the picks and go in or—

People are beginning to shout now but the overseer speaks over them.

—or I will have to take action against . . . He looks slow and ostentatious over the terrified Remade, one by one, pauses while he looks at the piped man, the only one who even momentarily meets his eyes, then grabs the trembling boy, who cries and stumbles. —Or I will have to take action against this ringleader, the overseer says.

There is a moment without speech or sound, and he motions two of the gendarmes, and as they move in the crowd begins to shout again, and the gendarmes beat the young man down.

And as if he were with the stiltspear singing, Judah sees in time gone thick. He watches the descent of the billy clubs, the fumbling of the boy who covers his head and his chitin embellishments. He has time to watch the moving of birds above them. He has time and a fascination for the faces of the crowd.

They are stricken and cannot look away. The piped Remade man who was the boy’s protector has his teeth set, the track-layers are opened up with pity, the tunnel-men stare in the shadow of the rockforms with bleak astonishment, discomfort, and everywhere Judah looks as the cuffs land and the gendarmes hold back the crowd he sees a hesitation. Everyone is hesitating and tensed and looking at each other and at the howling Remade boy and the batons and looking at each other again and even the gendarmes are hesitating, each blow taking a moment longer to land than the previous, and their colleagues raise their weapons in uncertainty and there is a swelling of voices.

Judah sees Ann-Hari, held back by her friends, scratching the air, and she looks as if she will die of rage. And people hover as if steeling to dive into something cold, look to each other still, wait, wait, and Judah feels the thing in him reach out, the oddness and the good in him reach out and push them, and it makes him smile even in this blooded heat, and they move.

It is not Judah who moves first—he never moves first—or the Remade with the pipes, nor Thick Shanks nor Shaun but someone quite unknown in the forefront of the tunnel-men. He steps out and raises his arm. It is as if he pushes through a tension that has settled on the world, breaks it and pours out into time like water breaching its meniscus and others come with him, and there is Ann-Hari running forward and the Remade intervening to hold back the nightsticks and whips of the gendarmes, and Judah himself is running now and wrapping his work-hardened arms around the throat of a uniformed man.

Judah’s ears are stopped with a hot tinnitus, and all that he can hear is the beat of his own rage. He turns and fights as he has learnt to fight in brawls along the sides of the rails. He does not hear but feels the firing of guns as shoves in the air. Energy boils in him in hexes, and when he grips a gendarme, in a moment of instinct he makes the man’s shirt a golem that wriggles on his body. Judah runs and fights, and what he touches that is lifeless he gives instants of ablife and makes obey his orders, to struggle.

The gendarmes have flintlocks and whips, but are outnumbered. They have thaumaturges, but they are not the militia: there are no spit gobbets of energy or transformations on the strikers, only base charms the railroaders can match and survive.

There are more cactus-men among the track-layers than there are cactus overseers. They run huge through the TRT guards and lay green fists on them, breaking them easily. They shield their friends; the gendarmes are not carrying rivebows that can slice them apart.

The piped Remade man drags the body of the insect-altered boy. The man pulls coal from his pocket and smears it into his mouth, leaving his lips black. He runs. The gendarmes who can still move are retreating. Others litter the ground, beside broken Remade and free men. It is so fast.

Judah is running. He drips. Gendarmes swing their weapons and are overcome by Remade out of shackles. They shoot and Remade fall. By the train, the gendarmes are regrouping.

—We have to—Judah shouts, and the piped Remade man is beside him and nodding and shouting too, and there are those who obey him: Remade and free whole men and women, there is Ann-Hari, there is Shaun, and they take their orders from this nondescript Remade man.

—You, he says to Judah. —With me.

They round the curve through dead trees and there is the perpetual train. It breathes its smoke and it spits steam as they come closer in mangy army. Its cowcatcher is splayed like ruined teeth. Its chimney flares, seems a funnel sucking up the energy of the sun. And all over figures jump from it and to it, from the bunks on its roof, from the trucks where the free men sleep, from all of it, staring as those who approach, gendarmes and strikers, shout. The two sides try to win them over as they run.

—they, they—

—get down, it’s the bastard Remade—

—they shot us down, they beat us—

—disperse you bastards or I’ll godsdamned shoot—

—stop them, Jabber, fuck stop them fuck’s sake—

The gendarmes fringe the train in raggedy formation, guns out, and the surge of the curious and the angry strikers—tunnellers, prostitutes, Remade—skitters to a stop. The gendarme retreat to their teetering guntower.

Now there is a long moment between a standoff and a confusion. Ann-Hari and the piped man approach. He looks emotionless. Ann-Hari does not. Behind them is a pitching army of Remade. They do not march, they shake their legs, some still ringed by the fringes of shackles opened with stones and stolen keys. They do not march, they almost fall with every step, and the sun makes them vivid in mongrel colours. The sun cuts sharp edges around the weapons they have made.

They raise slivers of the fence that has contained them. They swing the chains that tethered their feet. They grip shivs, pot shards embedded in wood. There are scores, and then hundreds of them.

—Jabber who let them out, what you done? someone shouts hysterically.

The thing in Judah swells up to see them. It bloats him; it moves like a baby in his belly. Judah shouts for them, a welcome, an alarum.

Men on all fours become bison-men, carrying men wrapped about with limbs, and women walking on elongated arms made of animals’ parts, and men stamping on piston legs like jackhammers come alive, and women all over whiskers, or with finger-thick tendrils feeling through their skin, and tusks stolen from boars and carved from marble, and mouths become interlocked gears, and switching tails of cats and dogs frilling waists like skirts and sweating in inks from Remade glands and astream with a rainbow mess, and this aggregate of criminals, this motley comes closer in freedom.

The gendarmes have withdrawn. They are in their armoured cab, in the guntower. Some have grabbed mules and horses from the tracks’-end corral and gone.

—No no no.

Many among the tunnellers and the track-layers are aghast at the freeing of the Remade. No one is sure who did it, how. Some stolen keys, a moment that went through the kraal of tethered criminals (though still there are a few who will not emerge, who cling to their irons).

—This ain’t what we’re here for. This ain’t what this was. A tunneller is shouting at Shaun Sullervan, disdaining to speak to Ann-Hari or the host of Remade stretching their limbs. —I didn’t want that boy to be beat, it ain’t nothing he’d done, but this is stupid. What are you going to fucking do? Eh? We have . . .

He looks at the blinking Remade, who stare at him. He twists a little.

—No offence, mates. He is speaking to the Remade now. —Look, it ain’t my fucking business. You seen we won’t let them beat you down no more. But, but, you can’t, you got to go back, this is . . . He indicates the guntower.

It is late. There is a siege and a strange siege calm.

—People have fucking died, the man says. —They’ve died.

The boy with the insect additions is dead. Other Remade were dropped by bullets. A cactus-man was split by a moment of flying wood. Gendarmes have been piled up, broken on mallets, on spikes, on the ersatz weapons of the railroad. There are dazed mourners by trench graves.

Hunters return. Prostitutes sit on rocks in that deserted middle of the world and watch the train. Its firemen and brakemen agitate as the giddy Remade fill the boiler and pull levers and those with boilers of their own steal the high-grade coke. People mill bewildered and ask each other what has happened. They look at the sun and the shifting tree corpses and wait for someone to come into control.

A strange angst because there is such calm here now and it cannot sustain. The gendarmes have taken the guntower and one other car: the Remade have the rest of the train. The iron tower cracks in the heat, and the weapon at its top swivels.

The free men want to treat Shaun and Thick Shanks as leaders of a Remade rabble, but Ann-Hari stands with them, and with the pipe-woven man, whose name Judah learns is Uzman, and with other Remade.

—Take your boys back in. What you think they’re doing in there? the free workers’ speaker says. He points at the tower. —Getting ready is what. To take you. Now, we made our point. If you go back now, they’ll pay us up, and there’ll be no, no penalties . . .

He speaks to Shaun, but it is Uzman answers.

—You’ll get your money, and you’re telling us to give this back? The train?

He laughs, and the craziness of what the free men are asking is very evident. They want these Remade to unfree themselves. Uzman laughs. —We ain’t decided yet what we do here, he says. —But we decide.

There are shouted arguments like street meetings, out of the guntower’s lines, between Remade with Remade, layers, rust-eaters together, the tunnel-men. From the guntower come noises of industry. The strikers watch from behind blockades. The moon is split near exactly in half. It is waning. In its light and the lanterns’ and the phosphor of lux hexes, the men and women of the perpetual train gather.

—We can’t just wait, says Thick Shanks. —People are running already. Gods know how many gendarmes got out—too many horses are gone. Hand-trucks. And it ain’t just the overseers leaving, Uzman. We have to make them give in.

—Give in what? Ann-Hari speaks. The thing in Judah moves. —Give in what? What do you want from them, chaver? They’ve nothing to give us. They’re still scared—that’s why they’re in that tower—but when they start having to throw their shit out over the parapets, they’ll come out gunning.

They raise their voices. The crowd turns to them, slowly.

—We make demands, Thick Shanks says. —They’ll bring reinforcements. We have to have demands ready.

Shaun says, —Like what? You want them to free the fucking Remade? Ain’t going to happen. Recognise the new guilds? What is it we want?

—We have to link it up, Thick Shanks says. —We send our own riders back to New Crobuzon, talk to the guilds there, make joint demands. If we can get them to back us—

—You’re dreaming. You think they’ll do that? For us?

—We have to take control of this. This is ours, now, says Uzman.

Someone jeers and makes a noise about the godsdamned Remade. Ann-Hari shouts, and in her agitation her arcane hill Ragamoll asserts itself.

—Shut up, she says to the heckler. —You curse the Remade, as if it make you better. Why we here? You fought. You—she gestures at the tunnellers—you struck. Against us. Her lieutenant prostitutes nod. —But why did you fight the gendarmes? Because they, they Remade, wouldn’t scab. They wouldn’t. They took beating for you. To not break your strike. And they did it for us. For me.

Ann-Hari reaches out and grips Uzman and pulls him to her, he acquiescing with surprise. She kisses him on his mouth. He is Remade: it is a vivid transgression. There are shocks and exhalations, but Ann-Hari roars.

—These Remade strike for us, so you won’t be broken. You strike against us and we against you, but these Remade are on both our damn sides. You know it. You fought for them. You scorn them now? They won you your damn strike, and ours too, even though we strike against each other. She kisses Uzman again. Among the prostitutes, some are aghast and others are cheering. —I tell you, Ann-Hari says, —if anyone deserves service on credit, it’s the damn Remade.

The prostitutes closest to Ann-Hari and most militant seek out Remade ostentatiously to touch.

—We have to link up, shouts Thick Shanks, but no one is listening to him. They are listening to his friend Ann-Hari. Judah makes a golem out of the dust.

It is deep night but very few are sleeping. Judah’s golem is taller than he, held together with oil and dirty water. The old man become the Weaver’s prophet stands behind Ann-Hari and shouts obscure praise to her while she and Thick Shanks argue.

A gendarme comes to them from the direction of the train. He waves a truce flag. —They want to talk, says a woman on chitin wheels.

—Wait, he shouts as he walks. —We want to end this. No recrimination. We’ll talk to the TRT, get the money through. Everyone wins. You, Remade, we can talk. End your peonage early, maybe. We can talk about everything. Everything’s open.

Ann-Hari’s face is a joy of anger. The man cowers from her and she passes him and runs in the direction of the train, followed by Remade, Thick Shanks and Uzman, and Judah, who slaps his golem on its arse as if it is a baby and shocks it, hexes it into motion. It astonishes those it passes.

Shanks is shouting to Ann-Hari, —Wait wait, what are you going to do? Wait. And Uzman is urging something too, but where the Remade besiegers hide behind their stockades she simply steps into view of the gendarmes in the tower. She takes a man’s flintlock.

Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train. Only Judah’s golem goes with her. The tower’s guns swivel toward her. Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock. She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.

—No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets cannot penetrate the cladding. As the shot sounds, Remade run forward to protect her and Judah hears the captain at the tower’s top screaming something at his own men and it could be hold or fire. Judah has his dirty golem step before Ann-Hari as first one and then a sudden percussion of the gendarmes’ guns sound.

Everyone drops but Ann-Hari and the golem, and there are screams and blood. The gunshots dwindle. Three people lie unmoving. Others, mostly Remade but whole too, are shouting for help. Ann-Hari is still. The golem is pitted where bullets have stopped in its dense substance.

—No no no, the captain is shouting. —I didn’t—but the Remade will not wait now. They roar. Someone pulls Ann-Hari back, and Judah sees her, and she is smiling, and he feels himself smiling too.

There is a little war. —What are you doing? Shanks screams at Ann-Hari but it is a pointless question now. Gendarmes, free workers, prostitutes and Remade skirmish, and two sides assert: the Remade and their friends; the gendarmes and those opposed to this exultant hysteria. Judah is afraid of it, but he never unwishes this violent child’s birth.

Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs. They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring. A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot. Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.

He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above. An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke. Judah blinks. He sees detritus. He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat. He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he cannot hear. His ears sing. The barrel of the gun exhales like a languid smoker.

It turns. The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.

Judah stands. Slow. Steps up, and makes his golem move. The gun motors with unoiled imprecision. The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar. It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.

The towertop gun fires again. It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom. The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters. It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps. It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement. The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.

It reaches to its shoulder. The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt. It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward. The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth. Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.

Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter. The corpse of the gun sways. Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants. The rebels are cheering. He cannot hear them but he can see.

The renegades take the train. The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.

—No, no, no, Uzman shouts. He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling. With Shanks and with Ann-Hari, and with other faces that Judah now knows, the Runagaters try to stop the beatings when they look like becoming killing. They take away knives. People shout but cede to them. The gendarmes are chained where the Remade were.

—What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.

It is the Remades’ train. They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower. No one sleeps that night. The tunnellers’ overseers disappear into the barrens, and many men go with them, and some prostitutes.

—Send word back for gods’ sake, Thick Shanks says. —We have to make links, he says, and Uzman nods. Around them are other leaders of the sudden mutiny. They make their points in untrained passionate language. They decide things.

Ann-Hari tells everyone, —Not backward, we don’t go back, we go out. And she points into the wilderness.

They choose messengers. Riders. A Remade sutured to steam-and-piston legs like spread-out fingers that run with tremendous shuddering up slopes of rock, his man-torso aflail like an unwilling passenger. Another, a muscled man made a strange six-limbed thing: he is joined below his abdomen to the neck of a great bipedal lizard, one of those the badland nomads half-tame to ride. He stands high on two back-bent legs before a stiff tail, clawed forearms just below his human skin. He has been a scout for months, ridden by a gendarme with a gun to his back.

—Go, says Uzman. —Stay by the tracks. Out of sight. Get to the towns. Get to the workcamps, get to Junctiontown. And Jabber and fuck, get to New Crobuzon. Tell them. Tell the new guilds. Tell them we need help. Have them come. If they support us, down tools for us, we can win this. Remade and free—bring them all.

—Uzman, they say and nod, as if his name itself is an affirmative.

The horse riders go in wheels of dust, the steam-insect man in an instant of scuttling speed. The gnarled and reptile-paced man accelerates over shreds of heather by the roadbed. Birds and other things that fly watch them. The ones that are not birds veer with the zigzag spasms of fish in the sea.

The prostitutes let some men come to them in strict conditions, unarmed, guard-women nearby. Since Uzman and Ann-Hari, some of them have even been with Remade.

—New Crobuzon’s full of it, Ann-Hari says. —Whole-and-Remade fucking. What happens when someone gets the punishment factory, what, always his wife leave him?

—Supposed to. It ain’t decorum.

—They doing it all over the city, like they doing cross-sex, khepri, human, vods.

—True, Judah says. —But you ain’t supposed to admit it. These women . . . your women . . . they’re letting us see.

She looks to the moon. She lets the moon go over her. She watches its last light over the skeletal bridge. —City guilds can’t help us here, she says. —This is new.

Torches move on the girders below them. The bridge builders have returned to work, without overseers.

—What did you tell them? says Judah.

—The truth, says Ann-Hari. —Told them they can’t stop. Told them this is a Remaking.

Sunup, after three days, the steam-spider Remade returns. He sucks up water before he can speak.

—They’re coming, he says. —Gendarmes. Hundreds. In a new train. A commandeered passenger train, he tells them, emptied of the sightseers and chancers come to explore the continent’s interior.

Most of the freeandwhole have run. Some are members of this new town, resentful of the Remade suddenly their equals but held by a deep query, by What will happen? They are part of this train-assembly, a gathering. There are some as committed as the Remade, part of the sabotage crews who go back to tear up the tracks behind them. Those drivers, firemen and brakers left teach the Remade.

They reverse through landscape they have altered. It was never stable, afflicted with life in hex tides. They go over places where the ground, when they cut it, was stone and that is now dappled lizard’s skin, bleeding milklike blood where rails are spiked. There are places where the earth has become like the cover of a book, and shards of paper spurt from the spike-wounds. They dismantle the rails to block their pursuers.

A reversed industry. They turn their expertise to the road’s dismantling, levering up spikes, shouldering rails and ties piles, scattering the stones. They plough up the roadbed and return home.

But—They took the barricade down, the scouts soon come and tell them. —They brought rails and sleepers. They’re building the track again. Within three days the gendarmes will reach the camp.

There are lights in the tunnel; there is industry.

—What did you do? Judah says.

—We’re finishing the tunnel, says Ann-Hari. —And the bridge. We’re almost through.

Her influence is spreading. Ann-Hari is more and less than a leader, Judah thinks: she is a person, a nexus of desires, of want for change.

The last yards of rock are being ground through in the dark wet mountain. Judah looks down at the bridge. The new work is something laughable, a quick flimsy lattice of metal and wood thrown up beyond the stumps of proper construction. It is ersatz; it is only just bridge.

Judah is one of a conclave—it surprises him—struggling for strategy. They meet in the hills: Shaun, Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks, Judah. But parallel to them, something raucous and collective is emerging.

Every night in the gaslamps the workers gather. First it was convivial—liquor, dice and liaisons—but as the gendarmes come closer, and as Uzman debates strategy in the overlooking ground, the parties change. The men of the train name each other brother.

Ann-Hari comes to the meeting and invades a man’s rambled contribution. A wedge of women push into the men. There are those who try to shout Ann-Hari down.

—You ain’t a worker on this road, a man says. —You ain’t nothing but a mountain whore. This ain’t your damn congress, it’s ours.

Ann-Hari speaks something base. She talks in ragged rhetoric of thrown-together exhortations—a speech that stops Judah. It seems as if it is the train that speaks. The fire holds still.

—not to speak. she says. —If I am not to speak who has the right?—What but on us? What but on the backs of me and mine have we built these rails? We are become history. There’s no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.

When she is done no one can speak for seconds, until someone mutters respect.

—Brothers, let’s vote.

Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, Ann-Hari is telling them to run. That’s not the answer. Are they afraid?

—Ain’t running, Ann-Hari says. —We’re done here. We’re something new.

—It’s running, he says. —Utopian.

—It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes his head.

—This is running, he says.

They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tunnel. They take up the tracks behind them. There is still blasting and scraping from inside the hill, and construction on the strange new bridge. The work is frantic.

In the heat of the morning the sound of other hammers and steam comes. The gendarmes’ train. They see smoke over the heat-dead trees.

The workers gather in the tunnel, among the cleavage of chiselled edges, minutely variant planes. The light makes shadows where vectors of stones meet.

Uzman, the grassroots general, gives orders they choose to obey. A hundreds-strong army of Remade and the freeanole now committed: those few clerks, scientists and bureaucrats who have not run; weak geoempaths; a few others—the camp followers, the mad and unemployable, and the prostitutes whose exhaustion started this. They come out into the night, ready. The train hides in the hole in the hill.

It is cool before dawn. The gendarmes come over ridges and around the bend. They come on foot, in plated carts pulled by Remade horses, in single-person aerostats, balloons above them and propellers on their back. They career through the air, and bear down on the track-layers’ hides.

They drop grenades. It is astounding. The train people are shrieking. They cannot believe that this is how it starts. They are deafened and bloodied. This is how it begins. A cascade of clay splinters and sooty fire.

Those with guns fire. One, two gendarmes snap and bleed out of the sky, haul their strange aircraft out of range, or loll in death in their harnesses, flying or coming down at random. But they keep coming. They roast the air with firethrowers.

—Crush them, Uzman urges, and his troops roll down logs and boulders as the gendarmes regroup and fire arbalests. Thaumaturges on either side make the air oscillate, make patches of grey swim up from nothing to stain the real, send arrows of energy spitting like water in fat that hit and do strange things. It is a chaos of fighting. A constant coughing of shot and screams, and gendarmes fall, but the strikers do in many greater numbers.

There are moments. A troupe of cactacae step forward and only wince as bullets break their skins. They terrorise the gendarmes, who run before the huge flora, but though the officers have no rivebows they have caustics that scorch the cactus skin.

—We’re rabble, Uzman says, and looks in despair. Ann-Hari says nothing. She looks beyond the gendarmes, beyond the tower of smoke where their train is coming.

Judah has made a golem. He sends it out toward the gendarmes. It is a thing made of the railway itself. It is made of handcars, the odds of rails and ties. Its hands are gears. It wears a grill for teeth. Its eyes are something of glass.

The golem walks out of the tunnel. It is impervious. It treads with the care of a man.

As it goes, the fighting seems to quiet. The ugly and incompetent warfare pauses. The golem passes the dead. Only the railway thing seems to move.

And then it stops walking, and Judah shudders in shock because he has not told it to. A new cart comes, carrying an older man and protectors. The man halloos them kindly. Weather Wrightby.

One man beside Weather wears charms. A thaumaturge. He stares at the golem and moves his hands.

Is it you who stopped it? Judah cannot tell.

Weather Wrightby stands amid the fighting. Of course he must be cosseted in hexes to turn bullets, but it is a powerful thing to see. He talks to the hills. The golem stands yards from him, as if facing him in a gunfight, and Weather Wrightby talks to it, too, as if he is talking to the railroad.

—Men, men, he shouts. He pats the air. Slowly his gendarmes lower guns. —What are you doing? he says. —We know what’s happening here. We don’t need all this. Who ordered firing on these men? Who ordered this?

—We must fix this, he says. —This mess. It’s money, they tell me. And it’s the harshness of the overseers. He lifts a sack from the cart. —Money, he says. —We have payment for those free and whole still here. It’s time you all were paid. It’s been too long, and I’m sorry for that. I can’t control the flows of cash, but I’ve done all I can to bring you what’s yours.

Judah says nothing. He makes the golem move its head, a little piece of theatre.

—And you Remade. Weather Wrightby smiles a sad smile. —I don’t know, he says. —I don’t know. You are indentured men. I don’t make laws. You have debts to the factories that made you. Your lives are not your own. Your money . . . you have no money. But understand. Understand that I don’t think ill of you or blame you for this. I understand that you are reasonable men. We will fix this.

—I cannot pay you: the law will not allow me. But I can put money aside. The TRT cares for its workforce. I will not have my good Remade men suffer the needless harshness of ignorant foremen. I blame myself for this predicament. I was not listening hard enough, and I apologise to you for that.

—We will put structures in hand. We will have an ombudsman to listen, who can punish overseers not worthy of the badge. We will fix this, understand?

—I will put aside money that you would earn if you were free, whole men, and there will be a place for you when this railroad is done. A retreat. In the city if they’ll have it but in these wild lands, near your road, if New Crobuzon is so damned deaf as not to hear what is needed. I will not have you worked to death. There’ll be a cabin for you, and baths, and good food, and you can see out your days there. Think I’m a liar? Think I lie to you?

—No more of this, now. The road’s stalled. Would you halt it? Men, men . . . You aren’t blasphemers I don’t believe, but this is an unholy thing you do though your reasons are understandable. I don’t blame you, but you’re holding back something the world deserves. Come now. An end to this.

Judah stands. He has his golem come nearer Weather Wrightby in its stuttering railway walk.

—Don’t be fools, comes Uzman’s voice from his hide. —Are you soft, you fucking soft? You think Wrightby gives a damn? But he is cut off by other shouts. Someone is shooting. Someone is screaming.

—We can’t win this, says Judah aloud, though no one is listening. He stands on the rocks and makes his traintrack golem run.

He makes it run like a steam man, with the metal chewing sound of its gear-thighs. It stamps through an increasing bullet-rain leaving huge footprints, and it runs and leaps, throws itself, falls in a punitive wood-and-metal mass, breaking the bones of the gendarmes. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby, but he knows, as he watches the golem make its swimming motion and crush as it disaggregates, that Wrightby is alive.

—Fall back fall back, Shanks or Shaun or someone, some thrown-up general is calling, but fall back where? There is nowhere to go. The gendarmes scatter under the punishment of blackpowder, but their weapons are so much the stronger, they cannot be held off. It is a desperate, desultory standoff, the gendarmes moving in desert-fight formations, the Remade across the hills from rock to rock hiding place, half-ordered, half-routed.

But there is ruckus from around the curve. Something.

—What, what the, what is . . . ? Judah says. The TRT men are pulling back toward their train, and now there is the sound of other fighting.

From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest men, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves.

They lurch with inhuman grace closer, their faces masks between baboons and wood-carvings, and insectlike and haunting. They come among the gendarmes, dwarfing them and spinning and sending their bone-stiff legs among the axles, tottering but not falling as vehicles veer and crash. The borinatch grasp down, and their arms and hands manipulate in space and vectors other than those Judah can see.

They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punching them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.

There are scores of the striders, a fighting band. Riding among them is the Remade scout on the lizard’s body, sent from the train and ordered to reach New Crobuzon.

The gendarmes are pulling back, killed and wounded in grotesque ways by the striders’ spectral maces. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby. The Remade scout moves with the highstep of the plains lizard. The striders jostle him and mutter with their stringy mouths, and he laughs and slaps them and shouts, —Ann-Hari, I done it. They come with me. They done like you said they would. I found them.

When did she have time? Judah cannot imagine. When did she have time, when did she know, when did she go to those who might be chosen as scouts, when did she know she had another agenda, when did she suspect the gendarmes would attack, and send for reinforcements? How did she know where to send him?

The lizard-mount scout has not been on the mission he was given; he has been on a different task, on Ann-Hari’s instructions. He has saved the train.

—See, see? Ann-Hari is delighted. —I knew them strider hate the rails, the TRT.

—I told them like you said, the lizard-man says. —I told them what TRT was doing, begged help.

—You went against the council, Uzman says to her. She holds his look and waits until the silence is discomfiting, and then in her accented Ragamoll she says, —We go.

—You went against the council.

—Saved us.

People are gathering.

—This ain’t your queendom.

Ann-Hari blinks. She looks wonderingly at him, How stupid are you? her face says, but she waits a moment and speaks again slowly. —We, go, now.

—You went against the council.

Judah speaks. His own voice shocks him. Everyone looks at him. The legs of a golem in earth shift behind him and drum their unfinished heels in mild tantrum. —Uzman, he says. —You’re right, but listen.

—Without the council, what are we? Uzman says.

Judah nods. —Without it what are we? I know, I know. She shouldn’t have gone against it. But Uzman, you seen what they done. They ain’t going to hold back. They’ve come to end us, Uzman. What we going to do?

—We needed others, Uzman says. —We needed the city guilds. We could have had them . . .

—It’s too late now, Judah says. —We won’t know, will we? We won’t find out. We have to go. We can’t beat them now.

—You want us to go fReemade? Uzman says. He is loud. —I’m a fucking insurrectionist, Judah. You want me to run like a bandit? He is raging. Shooting still sounds. —You want us to take off into the damn hills like we’re afraid? That what you want? Fuck you, and you, Ann-Hari . . . Everything we have—

—We have nothing, says Judah.

—We have everything, says Ann-Hari.

They look at each other.

—We don’t give up what we have, says Ann-Hari. Judah’s golem’s legs shudder. —We give up nothing. All our blood and muscle. All the dead. Every hammer blow, the stone, every mouthful we eat. Every bullet from every gun. Each whipping. The sea of sweat that come from us. Every piece of coal in the Remade boilers and the boiler of the engine, each drop of come between my legs and my sisters’ legs, all of it, all of it is in that train.

She points into the darkness of the tunnel where the work continues. —All of it. We unrolled history. We made history. We cast history in iron and the train shat it out behind it. Now we’ve ploughed that up. We’ll go on, and we’ll take our history with us. Remake. It’s all our wealth, it’s everything, it’s all we have. We’ll take it.

The strikers of the iron council join her. Even Uzman can do nothing else.

Waving many-planed hands, the striders go. —Thank you thank you, Judah shouts.

In the mountain’s stomach, the train punches through the last veil of stone. The tunnel that has been so hadal dark is gusted full of light.

The train rolls on to the skeletal bridge that has been so quickly made to meet it. The train shudders and lists. The bridge moves. The train reels, drunkard. Judah does not breathe.

It moves firmer, continues across that so-spindly accretion of girders. The train passes high over the dreadful valley, breathing smoke above it, over the yards of swaying make-do bridge to the original structure, and the movement stops.

The train crosses. It is on the earth, on the other side of the mountain.

The rebels step over the awful trellis, children crying as their mothers hold them. With each wind the people are still, but they all of them come across, and no one falls.

They are the cactus-men, the freeanole humans, one two scarab-head khepri, camp followers and drifters, a flock of the wyrmen low in the sky staring with the enthusiasm of dogs, stranger races, renegade llorgiss and a mute hotchi, and hundreds and hundreds of the Remade, in every shape of flesh. They are firemen, engineers and brakemen, those who were clerks, the few overseers who changed sides early enough, the hunters, bridge-builders, the scouts and scientists who will not leave their laboratory, the prostitutes, tunnellers, plebeian magicians, verity-gaugers and low-grade hexers, the workless nomads who scavenge the tracks, now become something, and hundreds, hundreds of the track-layers.

Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron council. The motion of the council begins.

It is the same motion that has brought them so far. It is exactly the same. The carts full of rails and ties unload and the crews drop them in position and they are spaced and the rails are taken out and hauled and dropped and hammered with careful rhythm, one two three, down. Ahead race the grading crews; but this long flat land has only a few extrusions that are cleared easily, and they do not sweep away all the bric-a-brac of stones and nature that they would have done before.

It is just the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency is drunken. The pace faster by orders of magnitude. The ties are thrown down much farther apart, only just enough to hold the train. These rails will not last. They are not meant to. The roadbed they are building is only a sketch, a ghost in the land. The train creeps like a child.

As the rails come clear, ground clean by the weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. They are pulled by mules past the storage and workshop cars where hundreds more are stacked, past the railroad and the train itself, to the front, into the glare of the engine’s lamp eyes. And there they are unloaded. And the track-layers lay them down again.

Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.

They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.

—The gendarmes are coming.

Judah goes back with the demolishers.

—I want to do this with a golem, he says. He touches the flimsy bridge, sends his power out conducted by the metal, makes it ab-live. No one is listening to him. —I want to make this rail a golem. I want to make the rails conductors for it.

He can hear the crack of unsettling metal as the tracks try to stretch and become a giant man. He shudders. He has not the strength for this. His companions climb the shaking bridge, cross into the darkness of the hole. It is not golem they prepare but it is an intervention.

Judah rejoins the train shunting on the flat, toward Cobsea. It is turning. Some popular committee, some delegated or loudly insistent group squatting on the weather-hood, directing the track-layers. They turn from the invisible line to where that fickle town waits. With taps from the mallets, with their expertise, the perpetual train veers. Judah helps the crews take up the final rails and return them to the front. The tracks are turning.

The perpetual train deviates, west-northwest. Into wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place. The train is going feral. Judah cannot breathe.

(Much later he hears the crack and billow of explosions. He imagines the poorly built bridge folding and become spillikins. He imagines the gendarme’s train jackknifing to kiss its own tail, voiding men and ordnance, uncoiling to the chasm floor. He thinks of Oil Bill’s plan, and of the detritus that will scud across the dried-up river. The train and the skeleton of the bridge will settle, become wood-and-metal fossils.)

The perpetual train has gone wild. The iron council is renegade.

Spring is starting to sing summer, and the perpetual train is buzzed by insects Judah has never seen before, like folded paper lanterns, like tiny hooded monks. Their ichor is bloodred.

Judah hauls rails. He hauls them up, unbuckling the past. Behind him the army of camp followers are suddenly full of mission. They carry hoes and break up the earth where the tracks have been.

It is ineffective camouflage. They cannot pass without indelible marks. It will take years of earth shucking and rock rabbits and rock foxes crisscrossing ruts with their own paths, years of rain and winds before the scab left by the perpetual train is gone.

There is so much to do. It is not easy to run away.

Miles every day. Sharp turns of the reused and reused rails, and the snatch of railroad skirts impediments—pools, rock snarls. Crews of graders throw rubble into sinkholes. Behind the train is a track of dust. The train is in a sparse wood that has waited for the railroad to fill it, and the iron council meets.

—We got to get more planned. We need scouts, hunters, we need water. We have to track a route.

—Where we going then?

—Brothers, brothers . . .

—I ain’t your brother, a woman shouts.

—All right bloody hell sisters then, and everyone is laughing. —Sisters, sisters . . .

—They won’t stop, you know. It is Uzman. People quiet. —It ain’t a joke. It ain’t safe. Brothers . . . sisters . . . We crossed Weather Wrightby. He won’t forget. They’ll hunt us down.

Steam rises from his pipes. You never wanted us here, Judah thinks. This isn’t what you wanted. You wanted us to hold. Your pretty runagate dreams were of making a line to the guilds, as if they’d run come save us. Now you’re still trying. Though you’d not have chose it thus.

Uzman is a good man.

—It ain’t just the gendarmes. TRT’ll put a price on our head. We stole their train. We stole their railroad. Think they’ll let that go?

—Every bounty hunter in Rohagi’s coming for us. And godspit, you think the city’ll let this go? It is quiet but for the snap of insects against the lantern. —It’s New Crobuzon’s railway too, and we took it. You think they’ll let Remade walk away, find a place in the wilds? The militia are coming for us now, too. The militia.

—They’ll come in airships. They’ll come over land. Think they’ll let us go to ground, some fucking fReemade arcadia? They’ll bring the train back wearing our heads. We can’t just find a little valley ten, thirty, a hundred miles from here. If we do this . . . we have to go.

—We have to be gone. Bring me a damn map. Do you realise what we’ve done here? What we are now?

A scattered mess of Remade. A town of Remade and their xenian and freeanole friends. These thieves and murderers, rapists, vagrants, embezzlers, liars. —You look carved, Uzman says with a wonder they can suddenly hear. —Bits of wood, man-sized, whittled by gods. They blink up at him in the shadow of the train they have stolen.

Only three days’ deviation from their plotted route, the iron council is beyond the details of maps. These are strange lands. These are the Middling Sweeps. The Rohagi wilds.

The more intelligent wyrmen are sent out over empty geographies that make them nervous, little urban things that they are. They are charged with finding the hunters still away, the water-carriers in their carts, looking for springs. Those reconnoitring, who will return to find nothing but carnage where the tunnel once was. They will look over the moulding and sunburnt corpses of the gendarme train, and will say, —What happened here? The wyrmen are sent to gather the iron council’s own.

Systems grow. They find springs, and the water car is kept full, caulked where it bleeds. The guntower is welded and hammered into a seared approximation of its old shape. Remade are trained, hurriedly, by the scientists who have stayed, are shown how to draw charts.

—Where will we go?

At night the renegades play banjos and pipes, the train’s warning bell is struck, its boiler made a drum. Women and men lie together again. Some Chainday nights Judah goes to the wordless trackside man-meets for release, but Ann-Hari and he fuck one night and stroke each other with the most sincere, the most close affection.

The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.

They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.

The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. —Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!

Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.

—Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. —They know where we are!

They can only kill six more. The others escape. —We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. —They’ll come for us.

They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.

Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.

At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.

—It won’t be long, Uzman says. —Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.

—We can’t, Ann-Hari says. —Without it we have nothing.

A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps—sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

—Here. Uzman presses the map. —What’s this?

—Swamp.

Uzman moves his finger.

—Unknown.

—Salt flats.

—Scree.

—Unknown.

—Tar pits.

—Unknown.

—Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

—Do we have any meteoromancers?

—There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. —Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really . . .

—We need someone can raise a gale—

—No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. —I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

—There must be ways to know when it’s coming . . .

The young man shrugs. —Pressure, he says. —Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. —We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

—But there are ways of telling . . .

—Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. —See? What this is?

It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

—You know what that is?

Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

—You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

—I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

—It’s the stain.

—No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

—It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats—

—If they’re there.

—If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

—And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

—We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. —The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.

He sounds as if he is pleading.

—People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.

He pleads.

—Just the edges.

It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.

—It’s no matter, anyway, someone says. —We ain’t got no meteoromancers, and we ain’t got anyone can call up air elementals, and we ain’t going through smokestone without someone can push wind.

Judah leans on the table; his fringe dances before his eyes. He looks down at the ink landscape.

—Well, he says. —Well now.

Somaturgy, golemetry, is an intervention. Making servants from unlive matter is about persuasion, insinuation. A strategy of life-giving.

—Well now.

I can make a golem out of air, thinks Judah. A clutch of air in the air. Have it run with us. Air running through air. It will exhaust him. But he knows he can get them passage through the smoke.

Judah knows that they will go.

He walks with Uzman, and a golem walks with them. Shambling vegetable pulp. They are a strange troika: the Remade sending steam from the pipes that burrow him; Judah tall and bony, his beard like a furring of dirt; the golem putting down its shapeless feet. The train slips forward in tiny motions.

The moonlight is the colour of lipid fluid, as if the night has an unclosing wound. Behind them Judah sees the train and the train and the train farting smoke, clanging, like some lumpen orchestra of drums and bells. A half mile ahead are Remade laying track, and ahead of them the teams performing a cursory groundbreaking. Behind the railroad is disassembled, and there are hundreds of followers like pilgrims.

Judah sees everything as a city. New Crobuzon has taught him that. He watches the train skirt a curling crust of land and sees the curve and edge of river walls, the warehouse walls by the Tar. He sees a half-fallen tree and remembers a drunken New Crobuzon man leaning at the same angle.

We don’t choose what we remember, Judah thinks, what stays with us. He carries New Crobuzon with him, even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary.

—Smokestone won’t do it, Uzman says. The perpetual train sighs. —The militia’ll break that down, fly over that. It ain’t about the smokestone, it’s the cacotopic stain. That’s what’ll hide us.

The next day a sortie of the gendarmes kills fifty of the council’s stragglers and are gone before any Remade can counterattack. Wyrmen scream that they were shot at. In their rough inventive grammar they say what they have seen, spread their wings to show bullet holes in their tough skin.

It is hot. They come into a stretch of space, an upland of good thick earth.

—What are they? There is a panic. —Something’s come for us!

Animals are keeping pace with the train, snapping at the wheels. No not animals or if animals ones that melt and re-form and emerge from the ground and through which light shines. Bullets go through them ignored.

Judah watches them with building pleasure once his fear goes. Each time the train moves on again the little length of its track, the things return.

Demons of motion. They are not attacking but playing. Delighting like porpoises, they dive out of the earth and roll around the turning wheels. They eat the rhythm, the ka ka ka of turning iron on iron. After millennia of snapping up only the quickstep of plains hunters and prey, the demons are drunk on the heavy beat. They evanesce out of colours in the near-shapes of foxes and rockrats, the only animals they have seen. They learn the newcomers, and as hours pass the motion demons mimic humans and cactacae inexpertly, to the track-layers’ delight.

—Look, lookit, it’s you, that’s your ugly bonce, that is.

The skittish things manifest and dive wheelward to eat more. If Councillors detrain, demons pullulate about their feet, eating the echoes of their steps. One woman dances, and the air goes alive with the rapture of motion-demons now-seen-now-unseen gorging on her tempo. Soon the perpetual train is girdled with shuffling figures: Remade, the freeanole women who were once whores, cactacae overcoming their grimness. They dance by the train, keeping pace in capers, in barley-mows and lilly-gins. Their feet are thronged by demons catching the light. It is a contest: the most complex, repeated, perfect rhythms are the best food.

The sunlight is the colour of the grass it dries. Judah smiles at the train and the dancers, and at the motion demons. It is a strange pastoral, a harvest procession it looks like, amid scruffs of pampas grass and the dead creeks, the big train shunting in spasms toward worshippers who lay down its way. As if the tracks are a leash, they haul it in like some tamed wilderness animal, and around the suddenly docile iron beast are hundreds of celebrants kicking up summer dust. The kinetophages tremble around their ankles like spume. Judah thinks of the energy they find in rhythm. Pulse-magic. What strange calories there are in repeated sounds.

Judah looks and loves the iron council. He unfolds a tripod. He is not a good heliotypist, but he knows as he frames the shamble of legs and iron and late sun that this one will come out clean. Movement-blurred and developed crudely in the tiny darkroom, but above what will be a ghost-mass of legs and demons he knows that the perpetual train and the smiles and bodies of the dancers will be clear. He has fixed them in sepia ink, frozen them like the stiltspear with their golem song.

An aerostat comes out of the east. It approaches with its sedate, predatory bobbing, makes its way fatly toward them.

The thuggish wyrmen yelp and blather obscenities as they fly. They become specks against the distended whale of leather; they buzz its gondola, make it sway a little. Judah hears flat sounds like paper bags bursting that must be gunshot, and the wyrmen scatter. They drop. They fall where they are, folding their wings and plummeting in unison, curving toward the train, and there is a crumbling sound, a huge clearing of the throat, and glass and black smoke gust out of the aerostat windows.

—Yes, Uzman says.

The dirigible rocks. Gunpowder smog swells from the underbelly. It will limp home to New Crobuzon, or to the base over the horizon, where attack squads of militia are waiting for directions. Where other airships are stationed. Bigger warflots with bombs to drop. With windows that clay-pot grenades won’t breach.

New Crobuzon has found them. That night there is a meeting, and it is beyond chaos. Ideas clamour with ideas. It is all shouting. The women who had been whores have delegated Ann-Hari to speak for them.

Others find them. Out of the grasslands come figures. The iron council is shedding word of its own self along songlines no one can see. It draws the dispossessed, the outlawed.

FReemade. A little tribe. Escapees from New Crobuzon, feral a long time. The leader is a man without arms, with useless ornamental beetle wings. There is a man with rubberised pincers, a man who wears a crocodile’s snout, a huge cur with the head of a pretty woman. The dog’s is a male body. By the skins they wear and the jewellery of holed stones on sinews, by their complexions like wood and tea, Judah knows they have been fReemade for years.

—We heard about you, one man says. He and his family are staring at the train. They are not looking at the guards, nor at Judah, nor at his golem made of the bones of meat-birds. —You’re going west, they say. You’re crossing the world.

—They say, he says, —you’re building a new life. Out of sight.

—We come to ask, he says, and pauses. —We come to ask . . . the man says.

And Judah, mandated by the council, nods: yes you can join us.

Nomads in numbers. Criminals and runaways. Plains races and outsiders—striders who wordlessly lope trainside, even a garuda easing out of the sky and made air marshal over the quarrelsome wyrmen. The iron council absorbs them.

They are surrounded by strange, unlikely truces between armed fReemade toughs and the borinatch braves who swing by the train with their unlikely grace. We are protected, Judah thinks. They’re here to give us gods-speed. To help us go.

The bounty hunters harry them three more times in quick, vicious raids. The gunmen ride away before there can be much retribution.

—This ain’t nothing, Uzman says to Judah. —We got more coming. He harangues the iron council at night in the headlights. Ann-Hari takes his side, and though the stokers and the engineers complain that they can see their stocks of coal dwindling, though the workers are exhausted, the council agrees to more speed. The tracks are laid all night and day, by men and women in an anaesthesia of tiredness, dreaming while they swing their hammers.

The iron road eats the miles. At night the train’s moving illumination makes the rockforms shift, as if they are trying to get away. Insects and things the size of insects perform a rhythm of their bodies on lantern glass, become flame-bursts where they find a way inside. The train is a line of dark light on the night plains.

The earth feels uneasy. The council tenses. Newcomers are targeted, are told they are spies. Judah helps an intervening crowd stop one terror-struck angry man beating a fReemade newcomer to death, and in their admonishments and the counter-beating they give him, neither Judah nor any other person acknowledges that the man might be right, that there are spies with them.

At the edge of the plain is the landform they want. A smokestone range. The unmoving brume shapes grow slowly clearer. A posse treks on to blast a path through the solid mist.

The perpetual train is a fortress. Its strange guntower is scabbed with new metal. All the councillors carry clubs, sharpen them into spears, splints of stone with rag handles. Crude and eccentric rifles. The council is waiting.

Inside Judah the thing shifts, and he knows that though it is not the time yet, he will leave.

They pass the outskirts of the smokestone hills. An abrupt change of landscape into something dreamish and unsettling, where wisp-shapes rise in basalt-hard congelation, clotted clouds on which the tough fauna of the smokestone run. There are plumes, fountainheads where geysers of smoke have poured and set near-instantly. The roadbed goes between them, through a solfatara of vented gases.

The iron council graders have blasted passage. The elegance of set smokestone is interrupted with the base simplicity of jag-edged holes.

Mostly the stonemass is caught as billows, but there are pillars that corkscrew faintly and become wisps at their peak, where leaks of smokestone have gusted in very still air. The train passes under arcs where currents have blown smokestone up from the ground and down again.

The roadbed is extended, the tracks laid through, taken up again. The uncanny landscape is beautiful and discomfiting. The ground could crack and gush at them, a mist that would set in their lungs and statue them in agony. There is no smoking, no cooking; the train moves only in sudden lurches, clearing its exhaust as fast as it can: there can be no smoke distractions. Judah waits ready to release an air golem. The stone around them might evanesce again, as smokestone sometimes does, after an hour or a thousand years of being rock.

Out of the horizon the army comes on Remade horses, camels, steaming jitneys that grind on many wheels. They come in formation into the smokestone. The wyrmen of the iron council track them, flying higher than smokestone might set.

The graders blast the capricious geography. They watch anxious and inexpert for any sign that they have split a smokestone seam.

Other crews lay huge charges in holes they carefully dig, directed by the crawling geoempath. She licks the dirt with animal sounds, in some crude ecstatic trance. Hers is not a strong or focused talent, and trying for such powerful prehension of the earth debases her to it.

Iron Councillors build barricades in a yardang between set faces of cloud. A mile off are the smoke and downlaid and uptaken rails of the perpetual train. Uzman and Ann-Hari are on board, while Judah and Thick Shanks and hundreds of others are ambushers.

They can see the army now. Judah is drained after his preparations. He is already so tired that his dreams are slipping into his thoughts. He must return to iron council as soon as he can. It needs his protection. He has built a golem trap on the cowcatcher, has told them how to trip it should the silicate mist appear, but a golem of air will not last without his shepherding.

—There must be other attacks, he says, as they have all said. This cannot be the only front New Crobuzon will open. But there is no time to think of that now as the attackers come close enough, and before their first guns sound to destroy the ramparts, the iron council attacks.

The wyrmen hammer the air with their thick wings, wheel through shots and drop their clay grenades. Bullets snatch them out of the air.

Bomblets drop, made of whatever the council has: gunpowder, the shrapnel of torn-up tools, vials of crude acids, unpleasant thaumaturgic compounds, oil. Naphtha, caustics, hot smoke unfold and the militia break a little, but they re-form fast, break again at a second sortie of wyrmen. The sun is bright but seems suddenly very cold to Judah.

—It ain’t far, he is muttering. He hears himself. —Ain’t got to do this long.

He leans out, field glasses to his eyes. Wyrmen defecate their contempt on the enemy as they let their missiles go. One bursts: Avvatry, a truculent bull Judah knows enough to greet, taken apart with fusillade so he reaches the ground more rags than animal.

The Councillors fire arbalests made in iron council’s foundries. They light fuses and send rockfall down on the invaders. Judah knows this is his fight to win or to lose.

Judah stands. He stands on the rampart. Wires trail from him, to batteries, to a transformer. He trembles with bravery.

The men and women with him in his hide—all with some vestige, some trace, of hex, all joined together—cut their hands and wrap wire tight around the wounds. It is a crude engine that links them, to require so vulgar and literal a bleeding, something battered together from found materials. —Give it me, Judah shouts, and Shaun shoves the leads home, and the gutter-motor moans, and those amassed all stagger as it siphons out their strength and funnels it into the clips that puncture Judah’s chest.

A sound comes from him that is impossible to describe. His skin tightens and moves as if someone is pressing their fingers to him. From the dust, men stand. They are in the army’s path. Judah sweats. It spews from him. He moves his hands. The men, the golems, walk in ponderous stride.

There are a score or more. Bigger than humans. Premade and waiting. They walk toward the New Crobuzon Militia. Judah shakes. The weaker of his comrades are passed out. Judah is sweating blood.

The black golems stalk on. One is kicked apart by militia horses. Its torso twitches and tries to claw itself on farther, and Judah quivers as if hit with stones. He hauls on the air, pulls something immaterial into place. The dirt men-things walk into the melee, and the mounts shy around them. Bounty hunters and uniformed militia veer as the golems reach for them. Some golems stand cruciform. Some wrap their arms around struggling quarries. Where he can see to direct them, Judah has them push with their abnatural strength through bodyguards to embrace officers. Crowds of the fighters surround each one, hacking the mineral bodies, levelling their pistols.

—Shoot dammit! Judah gasps. And though his enemies cannot hear him they obey. A bullet grinds into one of the figures. The golem is made of flint and gunpowder.

There is a tremendous bay of ignition and the golem disappears in a pillar of explosion. It is a man-thing then a wind of dirt-coloured fire, the stones that were embedded in it suddenly outrushing and laying down the bounty hunters in a circle; and its heat touches one of its fellows and it too goes up, and when the smoke they have become is gone Judah sees soot-stains where they were, and around them ripples of dead men, black and bloody, becoming more solid, becoming more like bodies farther out, and those at the circumference of each crater still move, still shriek.

—Shoot, Judah says again. Gunshots, flaming arrows from ballistae. The hot missiles come in and transform the made figures into vortices of combustion.

One by one they stumble into the attackers, hug them, bury them in blackpowder and then in fire. The gunpowder golems, shambling bombs, sear holes in the army. Judah stands and hears a rhythmic roar that is his heart. His comrades shout in his honour. Blood drips from his face. The last of the golems runs into the invaders, scattering soldiers with every ungainly step. It is gone in the flame from some marksman’s arrow, and dusty fire is unrolling.

There are still hundreds of bounty-men and militia but they are reeling, their commanders screaming, their mounts’ hooves slipping on the mulch of their dead. And the wyrmen come back, and the Councillors make more rockfalls, and the arbalestiers send their huge bolts.

—Low! the men shout. —Yes! And Judah Low roars back at them.

Iron council raiders descend, the hugest Remade, cactacae braves with picks and heavy hatchets. Judah is tugged back and kissed. His comrades are sallow, trembling and cold from the energy he borrowed, but they are stronger than he. Judah closes his eyes.

He passes out, manhandled to safety. He dreams of gunpowder golems, and the sun, and then he is suddenly awake.

—What, what? he says, lurches up. —What, what?

Thick Shanks and Shaun point east, up, into the air. —There are more of them. They’ve attacked the train.

Judah and Shaun ride on a horse reconfigured for speed. Judah is numb. The loud and random bounty-men-and-militia army was an unsubtle distraction.

What will you do, golemist? he asks himself. What will you do to stop them? You ain’t going to stop them; you’re going to die. To die with his council. You’re too broken to do anything now. Look at the blood come from you. But he does not think he will die. Judah would not go if he thought he would die.

There are men in the sky, militia swinging under taut spheres. He sees the smoke of the perpetual train and he can hear explosions. The aeronauts seep bombs, breaking apart the scud-sculptures of the smokestone in a line of craters, drawing a gully toward the council.

What will you do, golemist? Judah asks himself. He will do something. The thing in him, the oddity, the good in him flexes.

People are scrambling away. Refugees again: men, the old, the terrified and wounded, newcomers without loyalty to keep them, women carrying their children, running over the ridges of hard cloud. Judah and Shaun career past them by the tracks. They ride into the battle.

There is the train, firing from its riveted-together guntower. Militia and the Councillors who outnumber but are outfought by them. The sky ahead is unnatural, a matted pewter, stained with colours that should not be there.

Out ahead, protected by cactus and Remade guards, is a track-laying team. They move frenetic, in a sped-up mumming of their usual work, over a rubble of nimbostratus stone. They are picked off by militia targeteers, falling wounded or killed over the rails, and their comrades push them aside and continue their urgent work.

Judah comes in fighting.

The militia will not stop the train: they will kill many but there are only yards left, and even with the cull of track-layers (another man down with a blood-blossom) the train will go through. It is the oncoming aerostats that make Judah afraid. There is the sound of rain in the west, but no rain appears.

Shaun relaxes. Judah feels him lean backward and puts his arm around him and feels his front slick, too wet for sweat, and Judah knows his friend is dead. The horse stumbles and stops and Judah dismounts, dragging Shaun with him, his sternum all ruptured. Judah hauls him until volleys disturb him and he must let his dead friend go and run through the lines of his comrades and along the train, staying low, grabbing a bow from a pile as he goes. A rivebow it is—he curses its weight, its limited range, but he tries to level it as he runs the length of the battered cars, toward the steaming chimney where his golem trap is set.

He fires a scalpel-edged chakri; he hunkers by Remade and edges toward the cowcatcher. There are thaumaturges among the militia, and darts of baleful energy spit at the Councillors and do arcane damage. The wyrmen perform brave and dangerous raids on the militia, and the militia begin to withdraw.

—We make them run! We make them run! screams a wyrman, hysterical with pride, but she is wrong. The militia are leaving because airships are coming.

—Move! There is a shout. —We’re through! And the segmented edifice lurches and trembles and crawls through the stone mist and up, looking as if it will derail any second, on smokestone shards. The scree moves uneasy but holds, and the carriages progress, bullets typing on their iron skin. The train pauses at the apex of the shard hill, descends. The train finds a pothole—a track cracks, carriages list, but somehow the rutted wheels keep traction and shuddering like something wounded the train rolls into the land beyond.

—Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. —Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.

The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she looks at Judah and nods before he can ask, points into the ground. —There, she says. —I think.

The train gushes steam and hisses impatient. —Get on, get on get on get on, Ann-Hari shouts from the cab. Wyrmen race across the reefs of stone to where the last Councillors hold out at the crevice. The Remade run. They are such little things. Can no one see it? Judah looks west and up. Can no one see the sky? The land?

A panorama like and unlike everything they have passed.

What are you? Miles to the west, a moment’s distance in this great stretched landscape—Gods we’re in the middle lands, we’re out of all maps, we’re nowhere—here stony ground becomes something more rippled, something rilled as if the earth were poured wax, its parameters unclear as Judah tries to focus. The land dips away. Trees puncture the plain, but they change, they are less like trees, they flicker, is it? Like some dark flame, they flicker, they phase in their substance, or is it only the eye trying to see so far off, no, there is something about these trees or are they some other thing? There is a mountain but it may be a mirage, rippling as it does, it may be a barrow and much closer, it may be a fleck in Judah’s eye. Nothing is as it should be.

Things that are not birds fly like birds above, birds like rain. While the council gathers its lost Judah looks at the sky. It moves like a baby.

Drained and bleeding fighters climb for the train. —Get on, Uzman shouts. He is standing on a crest, looking down the splits in rock at the Councillors struggling to get home. —Come on come on, Uzman says, as more find their way through, but his voice tells Judah that time will not allow them all, as the militia regroup. It is already too late. Uzman is looking to the powder-men, to the geoempath. The perpetual train moves, the track-layers continue, it crawls on, away from the last smokestone.

—This is only the edge, Judah says, looks at the sky, —of the cacotopic stain. We’re only at the outskirts. But he can feel the ground; he feels its energy in a way he should not. He sees Uzman’s despair.

In their desperation to save the last of their comrades they delay bursting the seam so late the re-formed cadres of militia catch up with the stragglers of Remade. At last there is a stuttering of three explosions, and a huge squall of smokestone kecks up from porous earth and uncoils in a smog that expands fast to clog the channel the graders have made, and moves slower as it begins to set.

Uzman cries miserably out as it enfolds the slower Remade. He looks down at the gaseous rock expanding.

In the ropes of his gut Judah feels a newness, a constructed nonlife, a giant anthropoid wind come to him, as Ann-Hari releases his golem trap. Judah flexes inside, spits out an effort and grabs control of the thing, reaches up as if he would hold its hand and together Judah and his golem run for the unfolding stone. The golem walks into it, stretches out its air arms, pushes back wafts, tries ineffectually to clear a hollow.

Judah is scores of yards from the now sluggish vapor, which is smothering as it indurates. From within its setting stone Judah hears choked calls. In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

Judah reaches them. The first man through is militia, they see through a ragged epidermis of stone, but it is impossible to feel hate or anger for him as he shivers and fights to breathe through a mouth thick with mineral curd. The other is council. There is no saving him. His comrades try to break the boulder that has settled over his face but by the time they do their efforts have cracked his skull.

—We have to go, Uzman shouts from above. He is stricken but controlled.

An enormous boiling of rock is where the train came through. The rails disappear into it, embedded forever or until it desolidifies again. Judah has his golem disaggregate, and the air currents around them change.

There is motion, and Judah’s face curls to see in the mid of the new rock geography a forearm protruding, jutted like some horizontal cliff plant, still clutching or trying to clutch as the nerves of the corpse within the smokestone die.

Though they shatter aspects of the train with their bombs the aeronauts are uncertain. The ballooners swivel to see the sudden blockage, rock all full of their colleagues. They are shot down by boldened Councillors. One falls as Judah watches, gas venting from his split globe.

In sudden formation the aeronauts hornet away over the new low hills. Uzman shouts instructions and Councillors run to strip the fallen ballooner of his equipment, to salvage the cloth of his dirigible. —We have to be scavengers, says Uzman. —We have to learn that, from now on. He looks up at the sky.

—There’ll be more, he says, before Judah can even feel relief.

But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.

—They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. —Some of them was still on the other side.

Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.

Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.

The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.

They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.

The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. —We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. —Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.

They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.

One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.

They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.

—You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. —Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.

—It isn’t finished yet.

—No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle—I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.

—But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?

—I don’t know. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get through. Judah does not know why he is speaking like a prophet. It is not him who speaks; it is his thing inside, his innard good. —They won’t follow you in. I’ll lay money.

They laughed at that. Money was ornament now. There were those who still hoarded it, but it was notepaper for the children. It was jewellery.

—And Uzman was right, even though he was wrong, Judah says. —We should have got word to New Crobuzon. Think on it. No one might know.

There is silence. —You might tell no one, just disappear, and all they’d say is that once, when they was building the railroad, the train just went. The Remade went fReemade and took the train with them. You want more than that. The Remade in the city, waiting, they deserve more.

—There’s those as know what happened . . .

—Yes but will they do it right? You’ll be rumour—that can’t be altered—but what kind of rumour? Do you want to be a rumour that won’t die? That matters? Do you want them to shout the council’s name when they strike?

Ann-Hari smiles.

Judah says, —I’ll go back. I’ll be your bard.

Some of them say at first that it is cowardice, that he is afraid to come with them across the little purlieu of the cacotopos, but none of them really believe him cowardly. They are sorry that he is leaving them.

—We need your golems, a woman says.

—How can you go? Don’t you care for the council, Judah?

Judah rounds at that.

—You ask me that? he says. —You ask me that? He shames them.

—I’ll be your bard. I’ll tell them. Stay still. The powderflash goes and each of the gathered blinks.

In so alien a place, with the foreboding of the Torque, with the unnatural sky and the alterity of the cacotopic zone, even with the smokestone behind them there are some leaving the council.

—Some’ll make it, Judah says. —Go fReemade—they won’t go back to New Crobuzon, not Remade like that.

—You will, you’ll get through, sisters. He looks at them without even uncertainty. —Take it, he says. His voxiterator. They are quizzical. —Here. This is how you make it keep what you say. They watch him load the wax and take what spare cylinders he has. —One every year, he says slowly. —Send me one back. Wherever you are. By boat, horse, foot, whatever. We’ll see if they get through. I want to hear your voices. He looks at Ann-Hari. —I want to hear your voices.

One by one he holds them. He grips each of his comrades very hard, even those whose names he does not know. —Long live iron council, he says to each of them in turn. —Long live, long live.

With sudden mischievous love Judah tongues Uzman, and the Remade jerks and is about to pull away and then does not. Judah does not kiss him for long. —Be gentle to the Chainday-night boys, he says in the Remade’s ear, and Uzman smiles.

And Judah holds Ann-Hari and she kisses him as she did when first they were lovers, and he pulls her close by the hips and she holds his face for seconds. —Long live, he whispers into her mouth. —Long live.

He has forgotten how much faster it is to travel alone. It is not a day before he is returned to the smokestone. The hand of the trapped man, egressing the rock, has been gnawed down to red bone.

Judah walks across the tops of the swells as if over the sea. He sees detritus from the fight and a scattering of corpses. At noon he feels shadows, and over him is a school of airships, moving toward the perpetual train. Judah shields his eyes and leans against his staff.

He supposes that perhaps he should be afraid for his comrades, but he is not. He reads the changing formations of the dirigibles. He smiles, alone on the ground, as they pass like slow barracuda. They seem to hesitate. He sits, his back to a granitic coil, and watches.

Judah can see the smoke of the train. One midsize warflot edges nervously into the air of the cacotopic zone. From here, the landscape seems utterly quotidian, but Judah can feel something baneful welling below the world’s skin.

The airship lets its bombs fall as it approaches the perpetual train. Judah sees little explosion-flowers over the hills. Even now he is not afraid.

In the distance the sky convulses. A bolus of something moves, a coilsome organic thing—not a cloud but an aspect of the sky itself become palpable and squidish across the land not quite seen. Sound is strange. Judah does not breathe. There is a stutter. The dirigible falters and comes clear again and then it is different—it is a splinter different, it is lower in the sky—and it turns, it removes itself with a speed that Judah would swear was panicked.

The train continues, into the stain, into the cacotopic zone that has beaten New Crobuzon back.

Judah walks for months. His life becomes a fugue of walking. Over creeks, quagmire, over rockland, through forests of vitreous trees, through forests that he thinks are fossil trees then sees are great skeletons. He walks a bonescape, an ossein ecology with its own undergrowth and scavengers.

He passes lakes that bubble with the fighting of vodyanoi tribes. He sees chimneys extruded from mountainsides where there are troglodyte villages. Judah is the guest of neglected priest-tribes. He is robbed by fReemade. He joins a fReemade band.

His body becomes a traveller’s body again. The startling muscles of his arms and chest subside and he is once again a thin mannequin tempered by travel. Garuda come to feed him, dropping from the sky with wordless charity. He checks his just-adequate maps, his compass. He does not retrace his steps the long route he has gone but goes directly east.

Judah passes through a storm, in a basalt place hundreds of miles from New Crobuzon, by blitzbaums, miles-high lightning trees. Bolts held still by cryptic forces, forking into boughs, a magnesium-bright forest.

The low rust skyline of a time-eaten iron town. And a swamp of thaumaturgically jinxed mud that degenerates his boots into worms. And a barrow and a buried church, and fields of wild berries, and beautiful hills. Five times he fights animals and three times he fights sentients. Judah runs or kills.

He is a quieter man. He moves with effortless expertise. It has been many weeks since he made a grass golem to walk with him, for him to talk to until the wind picks it apart. Judah passes cattle that were once domestic and are now feral. The ruins of fences, deserted pastures, miles by miles.

And then at last Judah comes down from the sudden hills and stands quiet like an idiot. At last he comes forward and now he stumbles. Judah goes to his knees. It is cold. What seasons have passed? Judah crawls forward and touches the rails.

It seems impossible that he can touch this metal, these iron sashes that wind around the weather and geography, that for all the blood and salt he spilled on them, the bones of all the men and women they press upon, are nothing, are a nothing, are made nothing by time and dust.

They are scavenged. Imperfect. Sections are gone. The tracks look out from the dirt and hide again. It has been a time since any train came this way.

Judah looks north along the cut. He remembers the carving of the roadbed. He is a long way north of the swamp.

When he goes back Judah will learn why the rails are still. How the money at last choked up in its sluices and died when the malfeasances grew so great that to ignore them would have shamed the state too far. That the money faltered when degraded news of the revolt, of the iron council, reached the railway’s backers. And how after panicked attempts to salvage the TRT through raised wages and a merciless expansion of Remaking the capital flight was so great that Transcontinental Railroad Trust was punctured, and the tracks became bones.

Soon, when he reaches the city again, Judah will learn that. For now he only smiles. He picks up his fallen pack, and as he stoops he strokes a rail as if it were a cat. He strokes it with affection, even with a melancholy.

He steps up and walks on over the dead rails. Around him the angles of the banks enclose him. He cannot see the wider land. This road tunnels his vision and leads him back to New Crobuzon. It has been waiting for him.

—New Crobuzon, he says, he whispers. It is the first time he has spoken for days. —New Crobuzon, I’ll always come back to you.

Not a lover’s promise, not a challenge, not resignation or pugnacity. Something of all of them.

He walks on. Helios of the iron council are in his pack. The truth, escape, a new life, a rolling democracy, Remade arcadia. —I’ll make you legend, he says and the birds listen, —and it will be true.

Judah walks on the iron road, back, to the city, back to the towers of New Crobuzon.

Part Four:

The Hainting

Chapter Fourteen

The crowd were chasing a maimed man. One of the soldiers or sailors from the Tesh War. They seemed to be on every street: they had welled up as if from under stones.

No papers would say that the war had gone bad but the upswell of the wounded and ruined bespoke disasters. Ori imagined the New Crobuzon ironclads upending and sliding under water made hot by war, imagined slicks of men on the waves, gorged on by seawyrms, by sharks. There were terrible rumours. Everyone knew something of the Battle of Bad Earth and the Fight in the Sun.

The first wave of wounded were treated with fear and respect. They were militia and so not trusted, but they had fought and been ruined for the city, and there was true rage for them, and a fashion for New Crobuzon–loyal songs. What few Teshi there were in the city were murdered or went underground. Anyone with a foreign accent risked a beating.

Increasingly, criminals were conscripted instead of being Remade and jailed. Many of the cripples begging and screaming about the Tesh soulcannon and the efrit winds had been press-ganged and recruited solely for the war. They were not career militia. They were discomfiting, shambling reminders.

The veterans were welcomed and then not welcomed, unwelcomed, spurned. The militia, their erstwhile comrades, cleared them from the parks and squares uptown. Ori had seen them take a man from the petally Churchyard Square, his skin erupted and splitting from beneath with dental wedges, as he screamed about a toothbomb.

New Crobuzoners gave alms to charities that tended the thaumaturgically afflicted. There were still speeches and marches in support of the war: freedom parades they called them with their trumpeters and military floats. But the strangely wounded returnees found they were jinxes.

And those whose hurts were simple and somatic, unhexed? Scarred, stumped rather than too-limbed, blinded, with signs TESH WAR VETEREN, BROKEN FOR N. CROBUZON. Many were doubtless the everyday maimed giving their old injuries a spurious soldier’s glamour, and the resentment and anxiety of Crobuzoners about their city’s war had an outlet.

Only one voice had to raise a jeer—you was born that way, you lying fucker—and a mob might gather, and run the orthodox wounded down. It was for New Crobuzon that they did it, of course, they said—you bastard comparing yourself to our boys fighting and dying. The Murkside crowd approached the burly armless man they accused of lying, said had never been on a ship. He shouted his rank while they threw stones. Ori walked.

Other victims knew better than to raise complaint. The Remade, slave-militia built for war, survivors of their tour. Their integrated arms were decommissioned before their release on the streets of New Crobuzon. If they tried to claim that these Remakings themselves—forgetting even the wound-cut flesh, lost eyes and ill-splinted bones—were war injuries, they would be jeered at the very best. Ori walked.

It was cool summer, and he passed under lush trees until he could not hear the shouts of crowds or the man they were beating and accusing of treachery. Breezes came with him under the arches of Dark Water Station. Streets were tight like veins, houses of darkwood and white daub next to those in brick, and here one burnt-out with carbon bones jutting from uncleared ash. The walls of Pincod, in New Crobuzon’s west, drank water from the air and sweated it out, making plaster bulge like cysts. Their damp was coloured and shining.

North to where streets widened. The Piazza della Settimana di Polvere was a trimmed garden of fox-rose and tall stones, looked on by the stuccowork bay windows of Nigh Sump. Ori did not like it here. He had grown up in Dog Fenn. Not the gang-jungle of Badside, not so bad as that, but the child Ori had run through rookeries of buildings reshaped by the ingenuity of the poor, over planks looking down on washing and outhouses. He had scavenged pennies and stivers from roadside dirt, squabbled and learned sex and the fast-spat performative slang of the Dog Fenn Dozens. Ori did not understand the geography of Nigh Sump and the uptown parts. He did not understand where children here would run. The austere houses cowed him, and he hated them for it.

He felt cocky challenge at the glances from the well-dressed locals. Night was coming. Ori fingered his weapons.

At the junction he saw his contacts. Old Shoulder and the others did not acknowledge him, but they walked at the same pace under the willows that softened each corner and on to Crosshatch Avenue.

It was one of the city’s prettiest places. Shops and houses pillared, studded with fossils in the old Os Tumulus style. They were fronted for a stretch by the famous glasheim, a facade of stained glass centuries old whose designs ranged across the divides of the buildings. Guards protected it, and no carts could pass over the cobblestones outside it and risk shards. Once, Ori had suggested trying to break it, as a provocation, but even Toro’s crew had seemed shocked. They were not here for that. Old Shoulder slouched toward an office.

And then the careful ballet that they had walked through so many times in the deserted warehouse: two steps, one two, Ori was by the door, and bumping, three four, into the woman Catlina; they shuffled as rehearsed; Ori tripped; Marcus slipped into the office with Shoulder as Ori and Catlina yelled, decoying.

Elyctro-barometric lights were spitting all around them, making the glasheim incandesce and staining Ori and Catlina ghost colours. They abused each other, and he watched the door over her shoulder, ready to call her dog, the signal for her to draw attention with screams should anyone seem ready to look inside the office where their comrades were. They must be interrogating their quarry. Who’ve you sold out? Shoulder would be saying.

The glasheim guards approached but did not look anywhere but at him and Catlina. The shopkeepers watched wary and amused, and the uptown shoppers stared from café fronts. Ori was astonished. Didn’t they know that things were happening? How did Nigh Sump shield itself?

Soon—and the thought was uncomfortable though he strained for ruthlessness—soon Old Shoulder would kill the informant. He would do it quickly, then stab his deadness with a double-horned cestus that left marks like a bull’s gore.

There’s a war, Ori wanted to shout. Outside the city. And inside too. Does it tell you that in your papers? Instead he performed.

Toro gave them instructions, was not bitter or vicious but stressed what was necessary. This was necessary. Toro had linked the man suddenly to arrest-chains, to the towers of the militia, to the snatch-squads who predated on guildsmen and activists. The man in the office was a militiaman, a backroom-man, a nexus of informers. Old Shoulder would find out what he could, and then he would kill him.

Ori thought of the first time he had seen Toro.

It had been down to Spiral Jacobs’ money. I want to make a contribution, Ori had said, and let Old Shoulder know that this was not just another week’s hoardings. I want in, he had said, and Old Shoulder had pursed his green lips and nodded and come back to him two days later. Come now. Bring the money.

Over Barley Bridge, out of Dog Fenn to Badside. An apocalypse landscape of long-deserted slag and stagnant shipyards, where the keels of vessels poked from their internment in shallow waters. No one salvaged these sculptures in rust. Old Shoulder led Ori to a hangar where dirigibles were once built, and Ori waited in the shade of its mooring mast.

The gang came. A few men and women; a Remade named Ulliam, a big man in his fifties who walked carefully, his head backward on his neck, staring behind him. More waiting. And the late light refracted by the city came through glass-fringed panes, and into its corona came Toro.

Little dusts came up with each of Toro’s steps. Toro, Ori thought, stared hard, with awe.

Toro moved like a mime, an exaggerated padding so unbullish Ori almost laughed. Toro was slighter than he, shorter, almost like a child, but walked with a precision that said I am something to fear. The thin figure was surmounted with a massive headpiece, a great bulk of iron and brass that looked too heavy to be carried by such tight little muscles, but Toro did not totter. Of course the helmet was a bull’s head.

Stylized, made from knots of metalwork, gnarled by the residue of fights. The myth, that helmet. More than dumb metal. Ori tasted hex. The horns were ivory or bone. The snout ended in a grille mimicking teeth; the exhaust pipe was a nose ring. The eyes were perfect, round, tiny portholes in tempered glass that glowed white—whether backlit or hexed, Ori could not see. He could not see human eyes behind them.

Toro stopped and raised a hand, and spoke, and from that little body had come a profound bass, an animal vibration so low that Ori was delighted. Little wisps of steam gusted from the nose ring, and Toro threw back its head. It was, Ori was astounded, it was the voice of a bull, speaking Ragamoll.

“You have something for me,” Toro said, and eager as a pilgrim Ori threw the sack of money.

“I counted it,” Old Shoulder said. “Some of it’s old, some of it’ll be a bitch to shift, but there’s a lot. He’s a good lad.”

And he was there, in. No more tests, no more fool’s jobs to prove himself.

Still junior, he was lookout or distraction, and that was enough for him. He had made himself part of something. He had not considered holding back some money, though he could live on it for a long time. Some of it came back to him anyway: they paid him to work at their crimes and insurrectionary revenge.

New Crobuzon became a new city for him. Now where he looked at streets he saw in them escapes, routes for incursions: he remembered the urban techniques of his childhood.

He had come to a more fierce existence. His heart quickened past any militia; he watched for signs on the walls. With the scatology, pornography and insults were more important marks. Chalked devices, runes and pictograms, where base thaumaturgy occurred (wards, preservers, pranks to turn milk and beer). There were sigils that were spreading by some memesis, that he saw now in all quarters: cochlear swirls and many-edged ideograms. He looked for the graffiti by which the gangs communicated. Calls to battle and parlay in terse paint slogans. Apocalypse cultism and rumour: Ecce Jabber, Vedne Save Us!, IC’s steaming home! Toro was in a hinterland between factions like the Proscribed and the Runagates, and the thief-gangs, the murderers of the east city. Toro’s crew were known to both sides.

Twice Ori negotiated with gangsters. He went with Old Shoulder and the Remade Ulliam to beg-threaten the crew of razor-eyed boys called the Murkside Shrikes, asking them to stay away from the docks where their nihilist depredations risked bringing the militia. Ori looked at the Shrikes with naked hate but paid them off as Toro had instructed. Once he went alone to Bonetown, and in the sight of the huge age-cracked chest-cage he made a careful deal with Mr. Motley’s vizier, buying a bulk quantity of shazbah. He did not know what Toro did with it.

He rarely saw Toro. For stretches it was a dull and insular life. They did not read as the Runagaters had read. His new comrades played games in the Badside warehouse, went “scouting,” which was walking without aim. No one ever quite spoke their ultimate plan, their target; no one ever quite said what they wanted to do. No one ever said the Mayor’s name or even the word mayor, but instead chair-of-the-board or pigboss: speaking the truth had become a shibboleth. When d’you suppose we might ah help our-friend-at-the-head-of-the-meeting take a permanent sabbatical downstairs? one of them might say, and they would debate the Mayor’s routine and check their weapons.

Ori did not always know what his comrades were doing. Sometimes he would learn only when he heard or read of another heist, the freeing of prisoners from a punishment factory, the murder of some rich old couple in Flag Hill. That last outraged the papers, who excoriated Toro for the killing of innocents. Ori wondered sourly what it was the victims had done, how many they had Remade or executed. He rummaged in the gang’s box of militia spoils, the badges and contracts of office, but could find nothing of the uptown couple to tell why they had been targeted.

With Spiral Jacobs’ contribution they had money to bribe, and bribe well, though the bulk of the cash Toro took for some expensive mysterious project. The Toroans trawled for information and contacts. Ori tried to rebuild his own network. He had neglected his old friends. He had not seen Petron for weeks, or any of the Nuevists. He had felt with a new dissident aggression that they were too frivolous, their interventions mannered. Eventually he sought them out, and realised how much he had missed their savage play.

And he learnt from them. Realised how fast he uncoupled from rumour when he spent all his days with the crew. So once a week he went back to the Griss Fell soup kitchen. He decided he would return to the Runagate Rampant meetings.

He had tried not to neglect Spiral Jacobs. The man was not easy to find. He disappeared for a long time, and Ori only found him after leaving messages with the shelters and the vagrants who were the old tramp’s family.

“Where did you go?” Ori said, and Spiral Jacobs was too vague to reply. The old man’s fog lifted when he spoke of his old life, of Jack Half-a-Prayer.

“How’d you come to know so much about Toro’s plans, Spiral?”

The old man laughed and bobbed his head.

Are you a friend of Toro? Ori thought. Do you meet and talk about the old times, talk about the Man’Tis?

“Whyn’t you just give them the money yourself?” Nothing.

“You don’t know them, do you?”

No one among the Toro-run recognised his description of Spiral. Ori asked Jacobs to tell him about Jack Half-a-Prayer. I think you like me, Ori thought. The mad old man looked at him with a familial care. I think you gave me the money to help them and me both. The weakness of Spiral’s mind came and went.

“Not seen much of you,” Petron had said in a louche cabaret pub of Howl Barrow. They ignored the gyring striptease and illicit dealings at the other tables.

“Doing things.”

“Running with a new crowd?” There was no accusation or venom in Petron’s tone—allegiances were fast among the bohemians. Ori shrugged.

“We’re doing good things, if you want to come back. The Flexibles are doing another show: ‘Rud and the Gutter and the Devil’s Embassy.’ Can’t use Rudgutter’s name, obviously, but it’s about the Midsummer Nightmares, years back: there’s rumours they tried to make some wicked deals to fix it.”

Ori listened and thought, You’ll do a show of me in years to come. “Ori and the Toro-Gored Mayor.” Things’ll be different then.

Two Chaindays running he went to The Grocer’s Sweetheart. No one was there the first night. The second, the trapdoor was raised to him and he was let back into the Runagate Rampant meeting. The Jacks were not all the same as they had been. The Remade man he had met months back was still there. There was a vodyanoi stevedore and a crippled cactus-man Ori did not remember, a few others looking through the literature.

A woman led the meeting. She was small and intense, older than he but still young. She spoke well. She eyed him, and when her face took on an uncertain expression he remembered her: she was the knit-machinist.

She spoke about the war. It was a tense meeting. Not only did the Runagate Rampant not support the war’s aims, stated or interpreted—that position was common to the tiny dissident groups—they said they fought for New Crobuzon to lose.

“You think Tesh is any better?” someone said, angry and incredulous.

The knit-worker said, “It ain’t that we think it’s better, it’s that our prime opponents are here, right here.”

Ori did not speak. He watched her and tensed only a second when it seemed one man’s anger at what he called her Tesh-love would make him violent, but she calmed him. Ori did not think she convinced everyone—he was not sure of his own feelings for the war, beyond that both sides were bastards, and that he did not care—but she did well. When the others had gone he waited and applauded her, and he was only half mocking.

“Where’s Jack?” Ori said. “The Jack who used to take these?”

“Curdin?” she said. “Gone. Militia. Snatched. No one knows.”

They were silent. She gathered her papers. Curdin was dead or jailed or who knew what.

“Sorry.”

She nodded.

“You did well.”

She nodded again. “He told me about you.” She did not look at him. “He told me a lot about you. He was disappointed you weren’t coming no more. Thought a lot of you. ‘Boy’s got the anger,’ he said. ‘Hope he knows what to do with it.’ So . . . so what’s it like on the wild side, Jack? How’s it with, with the Bonnot Gang, or Toro, or Poppy’s lot or whoever you’re with now? Think people don’t know? So, so what is it you’re doing now?”

“More than you.” But he hated his petulance and did not want to fight, so he said, “How’d you take over?” He meant You know so much, you argue well, you’ve risen to this. When last he saw her he would have been the experienced dissident, with insurrectionist philosophy: and now he had been present at deaths and was harder, and had been cut by a militia knife and knew how to talk to the danger-scum of the east city, but she knew more than him, and it had only been some weeks.

She shrugged.

“It’s the time,” she said. She tried to be dismissive, then met his eye. “Do you . . . How could you do this now? Now? What d’you think’s happening? Do you know what’s going on? Do you feel it? Five foundries went out last week, Jack. Five. The Rétif Platform of the dockers’ guild’s in talks with the vodyanoi for a cross-race union. That’s our chaverim pulling that, that’s Double-R. The next march we have we’ll make into a meeting, and we won’t have to moulder like this.” She waved at the close walls, brought her fists down on her thighs. She almost stamped. “And you’ve heard the stories. You know what’s returning? What’s coming back to us? And you choose now to go be an adventurer? To turn your back on the commonalty?”

The word made him breathe a sneer. The jargon of it, the commonalty, the commonalty that the Double-Rs spoke of so relentlessly.

“We’re doing things,” he said. Her tirade made him uneasy—or perhaps melancholic, nostalgic. He did not know of the actions and the changes that she spoke of, that he would once have been part of. But all his excitement, his pride came up in him and effaced anxiety, and he smiled. “Oh Jack,” he had said. “You don’t know what we’ll do.”

The door of the office opened and Old Shoulder and Marcus emerged, seen only by Ori. The cactus-man held Ori’s eyes and then was gone behind the curious crowd.

Carefully, not too sudden, Ori let Catlina know they were done, and they let their voices down like two people tired of arguing. Ori walked under the skyrails and the arches of the Dexter Line, the trains over his head lit up by gas, under skies awash in brown dusk, toward Badside where Toro was waiting. He walked back to his masked boss, whom he saw so rarely, whose face he never saw, leaving a dead man behind him.

Chapter Fifteen

Ori went to the docks of Kelltree. There was a congregation, made to look spontaneous, which the Caucus and its factions had spread word of for weeks. They could not have listed it in RR or The Forge so had relied on graffiti, handslang and rumour. The militia would close them down: the question was how long they had. A mass milled in the forefront of the Paradox Warehouse, dockworkers and a few clerks, human mostly, but all the races were there; even Remade, carefully at the edges of the crowd.

From canals that linked the docks to the river, vodyanoi watched the gathering. A few score yards away, hidden by roofs, was the Gross Tar, the meet of the Tar and the Canker, the wide river that bisected the east of the city. When tall ships passed, Ori could see their masts move behind the houses, their rigging over the chimneys.

Airships went over. Quick now, Ori thought. A wedge of men and women came through the crowd, coalescing out of randomness and moving with sudden purpose. They bundled around one man whom they pushed to the brick shed become a stage, where he vaulted up and was joined by someone Ori recognised, a Caucusist, from the Proscribed.

“Friends,” the man shouted. “We’ve someone wants to talk to you, a friend of mine, Jack,” and there were humourless smiles. “He wants to tell something of the war.”

They had so little time. Militia spies would be running to their contacts. In the thaumaturgic listening post in the Spike, the echelon of communicators and communicatrices would be blinking fast and trying to decipher from the city’s welter of cognition which illicit topics were being spoken. Quick now, Ori thought.

Looking behind him to gauge the size of the crowd, Ori was surprised to see Petron. The Nuevist was lacing his art activism with real dissidence, was risking more than late fighting in Salacus Fields. Ori was impressed.

There were Caucusists everywhere. Ori saw someone from the Excess, from the Suffragim; he saw an editor of Runagate Rampant. This speaker was not affiliated, and all the factions of the unstable, chaotic, infighting and comradely front had to share him. They were vying for the man.

“He has things to say,” the Proscribed man was shouting. “Jack here . . . Jack here is back from the war.”

There was an utter sudden hush. The man was a soldier. Ori was poised. What was this, this stupidity? Yes there was press-ganging and military Remaking, but whatever his history, this man was, formally at least, militia. And he had been invited here. He stepped forward.

“Don’t fret about me. I’m here, I’m here to tell you, of, of the real,” the man said. He was not a good speaker. But he shouted loud enough that all could hear him, and his own anxiety kept the crowd there.

He spoke fast. He had been warned he would not have long. “I ain’t spoken before to people like this,” he said and they could hear his voice trembling, this man who had carried guns and killed for New Crobuzon.

The war’s a lie (he said). I got my badge. (He drew it out by his fingertips as if it were dirty. City finds that he’s a dead man, thought Ori.) Months on them ships, we went through the Firewater Straits, on till landfall, and we thought we’d have to fight on the seas, we was trained to, sailor-soldiers, ‘acause them Tesh ships were out for us, we saw them and their weapons in flocks circling but they ain’t seen us, and it ain’t all city-loyal, the militia, not now, us from Dog Fenn on that ship were there because there ain’t no other jobs to do. Let loose and told to go liberate them Tesh villages.

They don’t want us. I seen things . . . What they done to us. What we done back. (There was a restive stirring somewhere in the streets and a brief incoming of Caucus scouts handslanging frantically to the Proscribed man and he whispered to the speaker. Ori got ready to run. The militia renegade gabbled in anger.) It ain’t no war for liberty, nor for the Teshi, they hate us and we, we fucking hated them I tell you, and it was a, it’s carnage there, just plain murder, they sending their children out stuffed full of hex to make us melt, I had my men melt on me, and I done things . . . You don’t know what it is, in Tesh. They ain’t like us. Jabber, I done things to people . . . (The Proscribed man hurried him, pulled him to the shed’s edge.)

So screw the militia and screw their war. I ain’t no friends to the damn Teshi after what they done but I don’t hate them half so much as I hate them. (He pointed at the basalt column-palace of Parliament, prodding the sky with tubes and tuskish jags, profane and arrogant.) Anyone needs dying it ain’t some damn Tesh peasant, it’s them, in there, who got us here. Who’ll take them out? (He cocked his thumb, shot his finger several times toward the Parliament—a Remaking offence.) Screw their war.

And at that someone from Runagate Rampant barked, “Yeah, so fight to lose, fight for defeat,” and there was angry calling from those who saw stupidity in this. They yelled at the Runagaters that they supported Tesh, that they were agents of the Crawling Liquid, but before there were fists between the factions, the whistles of the guards went, and the crowd began to scatter. Ori wrote fast on a tear of paper.

Militia were coming. People were prepared, and they ran. Ori ran too, but not for the doors or the broken fence. He went straight for the speaker.

Pushed past the bickering Caucus members who surrounded him. Some recognised Ori, stared at him with greeting or query stillborn as he went past them to the raging soldier-Jack. Ori put his name and his address into the speaker’s pocket, and whispered.

“Who’ll take them out?” he said. “We will. These lot won’t. Come find me.”

And then there was the burring of propellers and an airship protruded over them. Ropes spilled down and dribbled armoured militia. There were the sounds of dogs. The gates of the Paradox Warehouse were too full of people, and there was a panic. “Men-o’-war!” someone shouted, and yes there slowly rising to swell over the walls were the grotesque gland-bodies contoured with extrusions and organic holes, ridden by militia manipulating the exposed nerves of the giant filament-dangling things, flying them sedately toward the crews of Caucusists, the toxin in their tendrils dripping. Ori ran.

There would be other militia squads on the street: shunn-riders, plainclothes infiltrators. Ori had to take care. He itched at the sense that some sharpshooter might target him from the airship. But he knew the ways through these streets. Most of the audience had already disappeared in New Crobuzon’s brick tangles, careering past startled shop holders and corner-hanging vagrants to stop suddenly and walk like everyone else was walking, a few streets on. Later, a mile away on the other side of the river, Ori heard that no one had been captured or killed, and was savagely delighted.

The soldier’s name was Baron. He told Ori without any sense of the secrecy and care with which the dissidents did their business. He turned up two nights later. When Ori opened his door to him, Baron was holding Ori’s paper. “Tell me then,” Baron had said. “What is it you’ll do? Who the fuck are you, chaver?”

“How come they ain’t got you yet?” Ori asked. Baron said there were hundreds of militia gone AWOL. Most of those planning to go into hiding were keeping their heads down, readying for the black survivalist economy of New Crobuzon, staying out of sight of their erstwhile colleagues. With the chaos in the city, he said, it would be impossible for the militia to keep track of all their men. No day passed without a strike or riot: the numbers of the unemployed were growing, there were attacks on xenians by Quillers and on Quillers by xenians and dissidents. Some in Parliament were arguing for compromise, meeting the guilds.

“I ain’t hiding,” said Baron. “I don’t care.”

They approached The Terrible Magpie in Riverskin, near the cactus ghetto. Ori would not go to The Two Maggots, or any place so known as a dissidents’ hole that it would be watched. Here in Riverskin the roads were quiet gullies between damp wood houses. The worst trouble they were likely to find was from the gangs of drugged cactus youth who lounged and carved keloid tattoos into their green skins, sitting on the girders at the base of the Glasshouse as it loomed eighty yards high, a quarter of a mile across where it cut streets out of New Crobuzon like a stencil. The cactus punks watched Ori and Baron but did not accost them.

Something had happened to Baron. He said nothing explicit to make Ori wonder about his experiences, but it was in his pauses, in the ways he did not say things. A rage. Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war. Baron was thinking of something, of some one thing, a moment of—what? blood? death? transfiguration?—some atrocity that had made him this angry fighting man, eager to kill those who had once paid him. Ori thought of dead friends and of pain.

Each of the Caucus groups was courting Baron and the other renegade militia. With careful scorn Ori explained the agenda of the various factions. He told stories of Toro’s adventures, the crew’s works, and pulled Baron to his orbit.

Baron was a prize. The Toroans were delighted. Toro came the night Baron joined them, put a bony hand on the militiaman’s chest to welcome him.

That was the first time Ori saw how Toro travelled. When Old Shoulder and the gang were done talking, Toro lowered that carved and cast metal head and horns and pushed. The helmeted figure was leaning against nothing, against air, and then driving, straining forward, until those hexed horns caught at something, caught on it and the universe seemed to flex and stretch at two points, and Ori felt the air crack with thaumaturgy and Toro’s horns pierced the world and Toro stomped suddenly through. The split skin of reality closed again like lips, back into position, and Toro was gone.

“What does Toro do?” Ori asked Ulliam the Remade that night. “To make boss? I’m not complaining, you know that, right? I’m just saying. What does Toro do?”

Ulliam smiled.

“Hope you never find out,” he said. “Without Toro, we’re nothing.”

Baron brought a military savagery to the gang. When he was talking of the war he shook and barked rage; he became etched with veins. But when he went on jobs, on revenge-raids against informers, on punishment beatings against the drug gangs encroaching on Toro’s land, in the action itself he was utterly cold, mouth barely twitching as he worked without emotion on someone.

He frightened his new gang-comrades. His machinish drive, the ease with which he gave out punishment, the way his eyes switched off and the life in them sank very deep. We ain’t nothing, Ori thought. The Toroans had thought themselves hard desperados—and yes they had done violent, murderous things in the name of change—but their anarchist anger was a vague floundering next to the cool rageless expertise of the soldier. They were in awe of him.

Ori remembered the first execution he had seen, of a captain-informer. The roughhousing had been easy. They had found the proof, the blacklists of names, the executive orders. But even with all their hatred, even with the memory of fallen brothers and sisters, even with Ulliam’s memory of the punishment factories themselves, the execution was a difficult thing. Ori had closed his eyes so as not to see the shot. They had given Ulliam the gun saying it was for his Remaking, but Ori thought it was also because Ulliam could not look at his quarry. His backward-facing head focused on nothing. And even then, Ori bet he closed his eyes when he pulled the trigger.

By contrast Baron walked in anywhere he was bid and fought who he was told to fight and killed if told to implacably. He moved like the best constructs Ori remembered from his youth: like something oiled, metal, mindless.

When the Murkside Shrikes again, with pissy provocation, started to spread into Toro’s streets, Ori, Enoch and Baron were sent to finish the incursions. “One only,” Toro said. “The one with the harelip. He’s the planner.” Ori, always the best shot, had a flintlock, Enoch a double-crossbow, but neither had a chance to fire. Baron had checked and cleaned the barrels of his repeater with effortless expertise.

Young men and women, the hangers-on of the youthful Shrikes, lounged over the stairs to the Murkside attic drinking very-tea and smoking shazbah. Ori and Enoch followed Baron. Twice he was challenged by some junkie nominally on guard: twice he dismissed them with a look, a whispered threat. Ori was still turning the corner on the last mezzanine when he heard the quick-kicked splintering of wood, shouts.

Two shots had sounded already by the time he reached the door. Two boys about seventeen were fallen on ruined legs and screaming. While others ran and dropped their guns Baron kept moving. Someone shot Baron, and Ori saw blood flower on his left arm: Baron grunted and his face flashed a moment of pain and was impassive again. Two more quick shots disabled or terrified those firing, and then he was closing on the harelipped young man who gave the gang its ideas, and he shot him as Enoch and Ori stared.

He doesn’t care if he dies, Ori thought that night. Baron terrified him. He’ll kill if we tell him. He’ll kill if we let him.

That ain’t a man who learnt his fighting in the wilds. The quick and brute expertise with which he swept a room, the one-two-three taking in of all corners. Baron had done this many times before, this urban violence. Baron was no recent recruit, a jobless man found a job, a rushed soldier.

What can Toro do? Ori wondered. He had never seen his boss fight.

“What’s that helmet?” he said, and Ulliam told him that Toro had come out of the punishment factories or the jail, or the wilds, or the undertown, and gone on a long and arduous search to find a craftsman and the materials, had had the helmet made: the rasulbagra it was sometimes called, the head of the bull. Ulliam told him the unbelievable stories of its powers and the way it had been made, the long dangers of its forging, the years. “Years in jail, years hunting the pieces, years wearing it,” he said. “You’ll see what it can do.”

Each of the crew had their own tasks. Ori was sent to steal rockmilk and hexed liquors from laboratories. He knew a plan was coming. He could see its glimmers in his instructions.

Get a plan of the lower floors of Parliament. Get what? Ori did not know how to start. Make friends with a clerk at the magisters’ offices. Find the name of the Mayor’s undersecretary. Get day work in Parliament, wait for more instructions.

The air of strikes and insurrection was growing: Ori felt it, detached, excited.

Spiral Jacobs came back to the soup kitchen. Ori felt a strange unburdening at the sight of him. Jacobs was lucid, shrewd that night, staring at Ori with stoat eyes.

“Your money keeps helping us,” Ori said. “But I got instructions now I can’t do nothing with.” He told. “What’s that, then?”

They were at the river wall in Griss Fell, just down from the confluence, with Strack Island and the spires of Parliament sheer out of the Gross Tar. Its lights shone grey in the evening; their reflections in the water were drab. A cat was mewing from Little Strack, stranded somehow on the stub of land in the river. Spiral Jacobs spat at the waterpillars that had marked the limits of the Old Town. They were tremendously ancient stone carvings, a winding path of stylised figures ascending, depicting events from the early histories of New Crobuzon. Where they met the water they were defaced by delinquent vodyanoi.

“They trying for different things, ain’t they?” Jacobs took Ori’s cigarillo. “They ain’t got a strategy, have they? They’re trying for all different things. Lots of ways in.” He smoked and thought and shook his head. “Damn, but this ain’t how Jack would have done it.” He laughed.

“How would Jack have done it?”

Jacobs kept looking at the glow-end of his smoke.

“Mayor can’t stay in Parliament all the time.” He spoke with care. “Someone like the Mayor, though, can’t just go walking, or riding. Has to have protection, yes? Has to trust them. Wherever they go—Jack told me this, Jack watched for this—wherever they go, Mayor’s Clypean Guard take over. They’re the only ones trusted.” He looked up. His face was not impish or playful. “Imagine if one of them were turned. Imagine if one could be bought.”

“But they’re chosen just so’s they can’t be bought . . .”

“History . . .” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.”

He gave Ori a name. Ori stared while the old tramp walked away. He hobbled into view in each puddled streetlight until he reached the end of the alley and leaned, a tired old man with chalk on his fingers.

“Where do you go?” Ori said. His voice was flat by the river, did not echo between brick walls and windows but spread out and was quickly gone. “And dammit, Spiral, how d’you know these things? Come to Toro,” he said. He was excited and unnerved. “How do you do this? You’re better than any of us, come to the fucking Bull, come join us. Won’t you?”

The old man licked his lips and hovered. Would he speak? Ori saw him deciding.

“Not all Jack’s paths is dried up,” he said. “There’s ways of knowing. Ways of hearing things. I know.” Tapped his nose, comedically conspiratorial. “I know things, ain’t it? But I’m too old to be a player now, boy. Leave that to the young and angry.”

He repeated the name. He smiled again and walked away. And Ori knew he should go after him, should try again to bring him into the orbit of Toro. But there was a very strong and strange respect in him, something close to awe. Ori had taken to wearing marks on his clothes, coils mimicking the spirals Jacobs left on walls. Spiral Jacobs came and went in his strange ways, and Ori could not deny him his exits.

Chapter Sixteen

Old Shoulder was delighted with Ori’s information, the name, but cheerfully disbelieved his claims to its provenance.

“Drinking in the right pubs in Sheck my green arse, boy,” he said. “This is insider stuff. You ain’t telling. You’ve a contact you’re guarding. You hoarding him? Her? Some officer’s tart? You been doing some horizontal recruitment, Ori? Whatever. I don’t know what you’re doing but this is . . . this is gold. If it’s true. So I ain’t going to push it.

“I trust you, boy—wouldn’t have brought you in if I didn’t. So whatever you’re keeping this for, I’m thinking it’s for reasons that make sense. But I can’t say I like it. If you’re playing some game . . .” If you’re on another side he did not say. “Or even if you’re doing it for the right reasons but you’re just wrong, even if you just make a wrong call and mess us all up, you got to know I’d kill you.”

Ori was not even intimidated. Old Shoulder was suddenly vastly annoying to him.

He stood up carefully to the cactacae, met his eyes. “I’ll give my life for this,” he said, and it was true, he realised. “I’ll take the Mayor down, take off the fucking head of this snake-government. But you know, tell me, Shoulder. If I was playing you? If this information I got for us—that’s going to let us damn well do what we been wanting to do—if it was me setting you up, how’d you go about killing me after, Shoulder? Because you’re the one who’d be dead.”

It was a mistake. He saw Old Shoulder’s eyes. But Ori could not regret his provocation. He tried but he could not.

Baron frightened them all. They had seen that he could shoot and fight, but they were not sure if he could persuade. They briefed him with great anxiety, until he snapped at them to shut up and trust him. There was no choice.

“We need a man who knows how to speak militia to militia,” Toro said. The mechanisms or thaumaturgy of the helmet turned the words into lowing. Ori looked at the body so dwarfed by that helmet but somehow not ridiculous, dancer-tight and hard. The lamps of those featureless round eyes sprayed out light. “We’re crims,” Toro said. “Can’t talk to the militia—they’d see into us. Need someone who has no guilt. Who’s one of them. Knows barrack slang. We need a militiaman.”

There were militia quarters about the city. Some were hidden. All were protected with hex and firepower. But near each one were militia pubs, and all the dissidents knew which they were.

Bertold Sulion, the man whose name Spiral Jacobs had given Ori, and which Ori had given to his comrades, was, Jacobs said, a dissatisfied Clypean Guard, loyalty becoming nihilism or greed. He would be stationed in Parliament itself, by or in the Mayor’s quarter. And that meant the pubs below the skyrails and the militia tower at the wedge of Brock Marsh, where the rivers converged.

Brock Marsh, the magician’s arrondissement. Oldest part of an old city. In the north, with pebbled streets and yawing wooden lean-tos full of charmed equipment, karcists, bionumanists, physicists and all-trade thaumaturges lived. In the south of the borough, though, the elixirs did not so fill the drains; there was not such a pall of hex-stench in the air. The scientists and their parasite industries petered out below thrumming skyrails and pods. Strack Island and Parliament emerged from the river close-by. It was in this region that the Clypean Guards would drink.

It was a drab few streets of concrete blocks and girders, industrial, distressed by age and unkempt. In the pubs of the area—in The Defeated Enemy, in The Badger, in The Compass and Carrot—Baron went to be a frequenter, to find Sulion.

The headlines of The Quarrel and The Beacon told of slow triumphs in the Firewater Straits, the defeat of Teshi shunboats and the emancipation of the serf towns in Tesh’s demesne. There were unclear heliotypes of villagers and Crobuzoner militia exchanging smiles, the militia helping rebuild a food store, a militia surgeon tending a peasant child.

The Forge, a Caucus paper, found another officer like Baron, on the run. He told the war differently. “And even with all the things we’re doing that he’s talking about,” Baron said, “we ain’t winning. We ain’t going to win.” Ori was not certain that was not the main basis of his anger.

“Baron reminds me of things I seen,” said Ulliam. “And not in a good way.” It was night in Pelorus Fields, in the south of New Crobuzon. A quiet little haunt of the clerks, office men, with enclaves like prosperous villages, garden squares unflowered in the cold, cosy fountains, fat churches and devotionals to Jabber. Bucolic hideouts jutted off from the busyness of Wynion Street, with its shoe markets and tea dens.

Ulliam and Ori took a risk in being there. With the growth in strikes and unlaw, Pelorus Fields felt sieged. As Parliamentarians met with the guilds, whose demands became more organised, as the Caucus spoke out from its unsubtle front organs, Pelorus Fields was anxious. Its respectable citizens patrolled, nightly, in Committees for the Defence of Decency. Frightened copywriters and actuaries running down xenians and the shabby-dressed, Remade who did not show deference.

But there were places like Boland’s. “Show a bit of care, ladies, gents,” was all Boland would say to the Nuevist poets, the dissidents, who came for his coffees and to hide behind ivy-lush windows. Ori and Ulliam sat together. Ulliam’s chair faced away from Ori’s so his backward face was forward.

“I seen men take a room like that before,” Ulliam said. “It was men like that done this to me.

“It’s why Toro didn’t send me to Motley’s—I used to work for him. Long, long time ago.” He indicated his neck.

“What did they Remake you for? Why that way?” It showed trust to ask. Ulliam did not blench at the query, showed no shock. He laughed.

“Ori, you wouldn’t believe me, boy. You can’t have been more than a baby, if you was even born. I can’t tell you it all now; it’s done and gone. I was a herder, of sorts.” He laughed again. “I’ve seen things. Oh, the animals I guarded. Nothing scares me no more. Except, you know . . . when I saw Baron come into that room. I won’t say I was scared again but I remembered what it was, to feel that way.

“Do you think about what we’ll do, when we do this?” he asked later. “This job? The chair-of-the-board?” Ori shook his head.

“We’ll change things. Push it all the way.” Excitement rose in him as it always did, with speed. “When we cut off the head and watch it fall, we’ll wake people up. Nothing’ll stop us.” We’ll change everything. We’ll change history. We’ll wake the city up, and they’ll free themselves.

When they left and walked a few careful feet apart (whole and Remade could not fraternise in Pelorus Fields) they heard screaming from a few streets away, heard a woman running, her voice coming over the nightlit slates of Wynion Street. It just come, it just come, she shouted, and Ori and Ulliam looked at each other tense and wondered if they should go to her, but the sound became crying and then faded, and when they turned north they could not find her.

On Dockday the twelfth of Octuary, something came in front of the cold summer sun. Later Ori could not remember if he had seen the moment of its arrival or if he had only heard it so many times he had made it a memory.

He was in a train. On the Sink Line, passing over the shantytown of Spatters, toward the incline and grand houses of Vaudois Hill. Someone farther on in the carriage gave a shriek that he ignored, but others came then, too, and he looked up through the window.

They were raised, the train on arches, so they pushed through chimneys like little swells, minarets, towers with damp-splintered skins like swamp trees. They saw clearly across to the east and the morning sun spreading shadows and thick light, and at its centre something was swimming. A figure tiny in the core of the sun’s glare and made of the deepest silhouette, neither human nor ciliated plankton nor rapid startling bird but all of them and other things, in turn or at one instant. It moved with an impossible crawl, straight out, emerging from the sun with a swimming motion that used all of its contradicting limbs.

A spit of chymical fear hit Ori’s face from the khepri woman beside him, and he blinked till it dissipated. Later he learnt that wherever people stood in the city, from Flag Hill north, to Barrackham seven miles south, every compass point, they all saw the thing swim straight for them, growing in the heart of the sun.

It came closer, occluding the light so the city was drabbed. A dancing, swimming thing. The train was slowing—they would stop before Lich Sitting Station. The driver must have seen the sun and stopped in terror.

The sky over New Crobuzon shimmered like grease. Like plasma. The thing stuttered, palsied between sizes, was dwarfed by the sun around it and then for one dreadful instant was there above the heads of everyone in the city so looming, so massive it dwarfed New Crobuzon itself and all there was that moment was an eye with starred iris in baleful alien colours looking straight down between all the buildings, onto all the streets, into the eyes of everyone staring up at it so there was a tremendous, city-wide scream of fear, and then the thing was gone.

Ori heard his own shout. His eyes hurt, and it took him seconds to realise the sun was burning them, that he was staring where the thing had been, and now there was only the sun again. All that day he saw through the ghost of green colours, where his sight was burnt.

That evening there were riots in Smog Bend. The raged workforce of the factories ran for St. Jabber’s Mound, to assault the militia tower for something—failing to protect them from that dreadful haint vision. Others ran for Creekside, and the khepri ghetto, to punish the outlanders there, as if they had sent the apparition. The stone idiocy of this had the Caucusers in the crowd screaming, but they could not hold back the armed few who went to punish the xenians.

Word was quick, and across the city Ori knew of the attacks while they were still occurring. He knew, only minutes after it had happened, that a hard wall of militia faced the rioters from the base of their tower, and that they had been ready with men-o’-war, and that the jellyfish things had come at the crowd.

He feared for the khepri of the ghetto. “We need to get there,” Ori said, and while he and his comrades disguised their faces and pulled on guns he saw Baron look at him with cool incomprehension. Ori knew Baron was coming not because he cared about the khepri of Creekside, but only because this organisation to which he had allied himself had made a decision. “Toro’ll find us,” Ori said.

In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds were running to and from broken-open shopfronts and hauling away calico, jars of food, apothecaries’ remedies.

Over the roofs scant streets away was the Spike, the bleak splinter from where the militia ruled, tugged seven ways by skyrails. And beside it, its colossal paradox roofscape soaring, disappearing, soaring again into view, was Perdido Street Station.

They tore under the arches of the Sud and Sink Lines, listening to militia whistles. Stupid blind idiots, Ori thought, of the mass, the rioters out that night. Fighting the khepri, for Jabber’s sake. This is why you need us to wake you up. He checked his guns.

The first and worst flare of violence had ended when they arrived, but the ghetto was unquiet. They went through streets lit by rubbish fires. The century-old houses of Creekside had been made by and for humans, with poor materials and no care, and they sagged in toward each other like the sick. They were held by the wax and exuded byssus of the home-grubs, colossal maggoting larvae that the khepri used to reshape their dwellings. Ori and his comrades walked under houses half-seen through solid sputum that glowed fat-yellow in torchlight.

In a nameless square there was a last offensive. There were no militia, of course. Protecting the khepri was not their agenda.

Twenty or thirty men were attacking a khepri church. They had stamped to broken pieces the figure of Awesome Broodma that had stood by the entrance. It had been a poor, pathetic work, an oversized marble woman stolen or bought cheap from some human ruin, its head sawn off, supplanted with a carefully constructed headscarab in wire, thick with solder, bolted to the neck to mimic she-khepri shape. This chimera of poverty and faith lay scattered.

The men were battering at the door. Staring down from the first-floor windows were the congregation. Emotion was invisible in their insect eyes.

“Quillers,” Ori said. Most of the men wore the New Quill Party’s fighting outfits: dark business suits with trousers rolled, bowler hats that Ori knew were lined with steel. They carried razors and chains. Some had pistols. “Quillers.”

Baron moved in. His first shot pushed a hole through the hat of one New Quill attacker, flaring the armoured lining into a crocus of felt, blood and metal. The men stopped, stared at him. Gods, will we get out of this? Ori thought as he ran where he had been directed, to where masonry gave him some inadequate cover. He dropped a New Quill man and hunkered behind the stone as it pattered viciously with shots.

For a dreadful half minute the Toroans were pinned. Ori could see Baron’s implacable face, could see where Ruby and Ulliam crouched, Ulliam’s face in an anguish as he fired according to Ruby’s whispered commands. Some of their enemies had scattered, but the hardcore Quillers were focused, those with pistols covering those without as they crept closer.

And then as Ori prepared to shoot on an approaching corpulent and muscular New Quill man bulging from his inadequate suit, he heard an ugly tearing, and the air between him and the suddenly stupefied New Quillers was interrupted. As if a film of skin was stretched, the fabric of things bowed at two close points, distorting light and sound, and then the warp was a split and from out of the gash reality spat Toro.

The world resealed. Toro shouted. Crouched and pushed through the intervening feet with one shove of those horns and there was a stammering and Toro was close up to the fat Quill man whose billy club was shattering on the strange-refracting darkness that spilt from Toro’s horns. And then the horns were through the fat man, who gasped and gouted and dropped, sliding like meat off a hook.

Toro shouted and moved again that uncanny goring way, following the horns that bled the toughened dark, and was then by another man and gouged him, and the horns seemed in the night’s dim to soak up blood. Ori was astounded. A bullet from a New Quill gun pushed through the half-seen integument the horns shed and drew red, and Toro lowed, staggered back, righted and horned at the air and sent the gunman sprawling, feet away.

But though Toro took three men fast, the New Quillers still way outnumbered them, and were stoked with rage at these race-traitors. They danced in avoidance. Some lumbered, and some were consummate pugilists and gunmen. We ain’t going to get them khepri out, Ori thought.

There was the noise of fast footsteps and Ori despaired, thinking another corps of street-fighters was about to attack them. But the New Quillers were turning, and began to run when the newcomers arrived.

Cactus-women and -men; khepri with the two sputtering flails of the stingbox; raucous, frog-leaping vodyanoi. A llorgiss with three knives. Perhaps a dozen of mixed xenian races in startling solidarity. A broad cactacae woman shouted orders—“Scabeyes, Anna,” pointing at the running Quillers, “Chezh, Silur,” pointing at the church door—and the motley xenian army moved in.

Ori was stunned. The New Quillers fired but ran.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of the Toroans shouted.

“Get up, shut up,” Toro said. “Drop weapons, present yourselves.”

A vodyanoi and the llorgiss shouted to the khepri in the church, and held open the doors as the terrified captives ran out and home. Some embraced their rescuers. An unclotting drizzle of khepri males—mindless two-foot scarabs seeking the warmth and darkness—scuttled back from the door. Ori shivered. It was only now he could feel the cold. He heard the fires that gave Creekside a shifting skin of dark light. In their up-and-down illumination he saw children come out of the church with their mothers. Young she-khepri with their headscarabs flexing, their headlegs rippling in childish communication. Two khepri women carried neonates, their bodies like human newborns, their little babies’ necks shading into headgrubs that coiled fatly.

He dropped his gun hand, and a khepri, one of these militant newcomers, was running at him, the spiked flails of her stingbox leaving spirals of sparks in the air. “Wait!” Ori said.

“Aylsa.” The cactus-woman stopped her with her name. “He’s got a gun, Thumbs Ready,” said a vodyanoi, and the cactus-woman said: “I know he’s got a gun. There’s exceptions, though.”

“Exceptions?”

“They’re under protection.” Thumbs Ready pointed at Toro.

In the fight-anarchy, it was the first moment that many of the xenians had seen the armoured figure. They gasped in their different racial ways, stepped forward with camaraderie. “Bull,” they said, and made respectful greetings. “Bull.”

Toro and Thumbs Ready conferred too quiet for Ori to hear. Ori watched Baron’s face. It was immobile, taking in each xenian fighter by turn. Ori knew he was working out in what order he could take them, if he had to.

“Out, out, out,” Toro said suddenly. “You done so well, tonight. You saved people tonight.” There were no khepri left in the tumbledown church. “Now you got to go. I’ll see you back there. Go quickly.” Ori realised he was breathing hard, that he was bloodied from wounds, exhausted and shaking. “Go, get back, we’ll debrief. Tonight, Creekside’s protected by the Militant Sundry. Humans with weapons are legitimate targets.”

In the Badside hide. Dawn was pushing at the walls. They lay and fixed each other with unguent and bandages.

“Baron don’t care, you know,” Ori said. He spoke quietly to Old Shoulder while they made nepenthe-spiced tea. “I saw him. He didn’t care if them khepri women died. He didn’t care if them Quillers got them. He don’t care about anything. He scares me.”

“Scares me too, boy.”

“Why’s Toro keep him? Why’s he here?”

Old Shoulder looked at him over the pot, spooned resin in and honeyed it.

“He’s here, boy . . . because he hates the chair-of-the-board more than we do. He’ll do whatever he has to, to bring you-know-who down. It was you brought him, Jabber’s sake. You was right to. We can keep an eye on him.”

Ori said nothing.

“I know what I’m doing,” Old Shoulder said. “We can keep him watched.”

Ori said nothing.

Fires in Howl Barrow, in Echomire, in Murkside. Riots in Creekside and Dog Fenn. Race-hate in the ghetto, ineffectual powder grenades thrown from a Sud Line train at the Glasshouse, cracking two more of its frames. The Caucus put out posters deploring the attacks.

“What happened at the tower in Jabber’s Mound?”

“Three sallies: first time they got the militia running, made it into the base. Then got beat back. Same as always.”

Some weird thaumaturgy in Aspic Hole; self-defence committees of the terrified respectable in Barrackham, in Chnum, in Nigh Sump where they were attacked by what everyone said was a mob of Remade.

“What a damn night. Gods.” Things were breaking.

“And all because of that thing, that sun-thing.”

“Nah, not really.”

A critical mass of fear was what it had been, what it had released—a terror and a rage that found outlet. Protect us, people had shouted, tearing at the mechanisms that claimed to look after them. “It was just a catalyst,” Ori said.

“What in the name of Jabber and his godsdamn saints was that thing?”

“I know.” Whenever Baron spoke his comrades were quiet. “I know, or at least I know what I think it is, and I think so because it’s what the militia and the Mayor think too.

“What they call a witnessing. Remote viewer. Tesh camera. Come to see what we’re about. The state of us.”

They were aghast.

“I told you. We ain’t winning the war. It ain’t as powerful as that—it didn’t touch us, did it? The war ain’t over yet. But yes, they’re spying on us. And as well as all them normal spies they must have, they ain’t afraid to show us, now, they’re watching. They got strange gris-gris, the Tesh. Their science ain’t ours. They’ve eyeballed us. There’ll be more.”

At the other end of the world, around the corners of coastlines, where physics, thaumaturgy, geography were different, where rock was gas, where settlements were built on the bones of exploration, where traders and pioneers had died at the savage justice of the western Rohagi, where there were cities and states and monarchies without cognates in Crobuzoner philosophy, a war was being fought. The militia exerting New Crobuzon’s claims, fighting for territories and commodity chains, for theories, they said. Fighting for something unclear. And in response to bullets, the powderbombs, the thaumaturgy, burncurs and elementalists of New Crobuzon, Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, had sent this witnessing, to learn them.

“How?” Ori said. “New Crobuzon . . . It’s the strongest . . . ain’t it?”

“You going to swallow that?” Enoch jeered. He sounded tired. “New Crobuzon, greatest city-state in the world, and that? Horseshit . . .”

“No it ain’t,” said Baron, and they were quiet again. “He’s right. New Crobuzon is the strongest state in Bas-Lag. But sometimes it ain’t the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it’s stronger, that it ain’t got to try to fight.

“We’re getting outfought. And the government knows it. And they don’t like it, and they’re going to try to turn it into a victory, but here’s the thing: they know they have to end this. They’re going to sue for peace.”

The sun kept rising, and its light through the warehouse windows reached at sharper and sharper angles and took them one at a time, tangled in their hair and shone from Old Shoulder’s skin. Ori felt warm for the first time in hours.

“They’re going to surrender?”

Of course they would not. Not explicitly—not in the speeches they would give, not in their history books or in the loyal newspapers. It would be a historic compromise, a nuanced strategy of magnificent precision. But even many of those loyal to the Mayor’s Fat Sun Party and the partners in the Urban Unity Government would balk. They would know—everyone would know—what had been done. That New Crobuzon, however the Mayor put it, had been defeated.

“They’re trying to now,” Baron said, “but they don’t even know how to speak to the Teshi. We ain’t had contact with our mission there for years. And gods know there must be Teshi afuckingplenty in New Crobuzon now, but they ain’t got no clue who, where they are. The embassy’s always been empty. Teshi don’t do things that way. They’re trying thaumaturgy, message-boats, dirigibles . . . they’ll do whatever they bloody have to. They’ll try pigeon before long. They want a meeting. No one’s going to know what’s damn-well being done till they turn round and tell us ‘Good news, the Mayor’s brought peace.’ And in the meantime the poor bastards in the boats and on the ground’ll keep fighting and dying.”

Under alien skies. Ori felt vertigo.

“How do you know?” said Old Shoulder. He was standing, his legs locked, his arms folded. “How do you know what they think, Baron?”

Baron smiled. Ori looked down and hoped he would not see that smile again.

“ ’Cause of who I’m talking to, Shoulder. You know how I know. After all them bloody pints I sunk in Brock Marsh, I know because I been talking to my new best friend, Bertold Sulion.”

Part Five:

Retread

Chapter Seventeen

“Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”

Long before that the arc-flight of buzzards was disrupted. They scattered. The coy unfolding walk of a jaguar faltered and the cat erupted, was gone. Dust and black smoke sent animals away. Hundreds of years changed at the arrival of that crude loudness.

Through an opening-up of earth, like a bacillus, some little organic thread sullying blood, infecting landscape, came the Iron Council. A steaming and sniffing metal animal god. As once they did years before, figures before it laid down rails, and others cleared its tracks, and others recycled them, took the left-behind path and hauled it in the path of the sounding engine.

Wherever it went it was intruder. It was never part of the land. It was an incursion of history in stubby hillside woodland and the thicker tree-pelt of real forest, valleys between mountains, canyon-plains horned randomly with monadnocks. It intruded in uncanny places, dissident landscape, creeping hills, squalls of smokestone and fulgurite statues, frozen storms of lightning.

An apparition. A town of men and women hacked at the ground, rendered it just flat enough to lay tracks. They were invaders.

Like their ancestors the first Councillors, some of whom were their own younger selves, they were muscled, weathered, expert. Remade, whole, cactus, alien other, a consummate industry, the rail-carriers with their tongs, the dropping of sleepers, hammer-blows tight enough to dance to.

They wore skins; they wore smocks and trousers made from sacks resewn. They wore jewels made of railway metal, and sang mongrel songs, bastards of decades-old construction chanties, and new lays telling their own story.

West we came to find a place to
Rest to go without a trace and
Live our lives Remade and free to
Give ourselves our liberty

In the centre of the swarm, hundreds of figures attending to its complex fussy needs, protected by guards, lookouts at the hills and treetops and in the air, came the cause of it all, the train. Marked by time. It was altered. The train had gone feral.

The abattoirs, the bunks, the guntower, the library, the mess hall, the work-cabs, all the old carriages were there, but changed. They were crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots. Rope bridges joined new towers on different carriages and sagged and went tight at the slight curving of the Iron Council’s path. Siege engines were bolted to the roofs. New windows were cut into the carriages’ sides. Some were thickened with ivy and waxy vines, spilling from them as if they were old churches, winding the length of the guntower. Two of the flatbeds were filled with kitchen gardens full of herbs. Two others were also earth-filled, but only grass grew on them, between gravestones. A little pack of half-tame motion demons bit playfully at the Council’s wheels.

There were new carriages, one built all of water-smoothed driftwood, caulked with resin, tottering on spare, newly smelted or reclaimed wheels. Cars for alien Councillors, mobile pools for water-dwellers. The train was long, pushed and pulled by its engines. Two in the back, two at the front, their smokestacks all amended with metal flanges, painted and stained in crushed-earth colours to mimic flames. And at the very front of the train the largest, behind its flaring guard-skirt, was so amended and reshaped with crude art that it looked to have distended over the years, almost buckled with gigantism.

Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were tanned, drabbed by preservation, bones and teeth mazed with cracks and discoloured by smoke. The befaced engine wore dead like a raucous hunter god.

They cut their way on the echo of another path. Sometimes it was gone from view, or geography had twisted in the decades. They might spend hours splitting rocks by the side of hill-shadowed lakes to reach a fissure and, hacking through bramble and the outskirts of bosk, part crabgrass and uncover the ghost of a roadbed, the root-claimed ridge on which years ago they had come the other way. They found caches of rails, savaged by years, and sleepers, some still laid, covered in greased tarpaulin that had stained the earth. They placed their tracks to meet the ends waiting for them.

We left these, the oldsters who had been there at the laying said. I remember now. To make it easier. You never know, we said, when we might have to come back. The left-behind rails sped them. Gifts from their young selves, wrapped in oilcloth in rock-toothed country.

Judah Low taught Cutter to lay tracks.

They had come quietly, the draggled party, into the grasses, when first they had come. They had reached their destination stunned by their arrival. Pomeroy and Elsie quite silent. Drogon the whispersmith pulling his brimmed hat down. Qurabin invisible and felt, tired and diminished by the exertions of scouting, secret-finding. Cutter standing by Judah when he could. When he could, holding Judah’s hand.

Under uncoiling clouds in a grassland were miles of garden. Dense crops abutting each other, bounded by an iron ellipsis of tracks. Beyond the rails other fields were scattered, dissipating and merging with wild flora.

The guides led them there, the grass unsealing and sealing again. They watched all the figures working at their husbandry. A farmland, out here where there was nothing. Most of the party was mute. Judah smiled without ceasing, and muttered Long live. Men and women came along the paths, by sod huts that fringed the railroad, all the topography of normality, an everyday farmstead village, passed through by a train.

Judah watched the locals, and when they came close enough he would laugh and shout Long live, and they would nod in response.

“Hello, hello, hello,” Judah said as a very young child neared, its father half-watching from where he sharpened a scythe. Judah squatted. “Hello, hello, little comrade, little sister, little chaver,” he said. He made a benediction with his hand. “What’s it like, hey?”

And then he stepped back and simply sounded in happiness. The noise he made had been without syllables or shape, was nude delight, as he heard metal wincing and saw clouds of soot spoor, and as the train, the Iron Council, came through the grass. As the towering and shaking iron wood rope and found-sculpture wheeled town rolled out of the grasses and came at them.

They dropped what they carried. “Iron Council.” “Iron Council.” Each of them said it as the tusked train came.

It came, repeating its few-miles, as it had for so long, neither sedentary nor nomadic, describing its home. It was stopping.

“I’m Judah Low,” he shouted. He went toward it as if it were drawing in to a station. “I’m Judah Low.” Someone had stepped from the engine cab, and Cutter had heard a shout, a greeting whose words he could not pick apart but that had made Judah run and scream and scream a name. “Ann-Hari!”

Chapter Eighteen

There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.

Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.

Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah—he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.

Judah was a fairy tale. The children would come to watch him, and not only them but men and women who had not been born when the Iron Council crossed the world. He was kind. He would make golems for them, which delighted them. They had all heard of his golems. They sang to him once, around a fire, as vaguely animal trees tried to shy from the sound.

They sang Judah a story of Judah. They sang in chanty counterpoint about when he fixed the soldiers with a mud monster and saved the Iron Council, and then how he went into the desert and made an army, and then how he went to the under-hill court of the king of the trow and made a woman out of the princess’ bedsheet and how the sheet and trow had swapped places and how Judah Low had eloped with the troglodyte princess and gone across the sea.

At night Cutter pressed himself to Judah and the older man would sometimes respond, with his beneficent restraint. Cutter would push into Judah or open to him. On the nights they were not together, Judah was with Ann-Hari.

“I got your message,” Judah had said, the first night, when they arrived. “Your cylinder. Rahul’s voice. About Uzman. Long live.”

“Long live.”

Uzman died suddenly, she told him, a swift shutdown, of his organic or pipework tubes they never knew.

“You still have the voxiterator?”

“How many messages you got from us?”

“Four.”

“We sent nine. Give them to someone going to the coast to trade, to give to a ship, that says it’s going south, that might go through the straits, that might get past Tesh, that might get to Myrshock, and then to New Crobuzon. I wonder which ones you got.”

“I have them with me. You can tell me what I missed.”

They smiled at each other, a middle-aged man and a woman who looked much older, sunburnt and effort-lined, but whose energy was as great as his. Cutter was awed by her.

At the long first evening of introductions they met Thick Shanks. He was dethorned, and Judah hugged the brawny, greying cactus-man hard. There were others the golemist recognised and greeted with joy, but it was Shanks and Ann-Hari who filled him.

Others he knew lived quiet as farmers, had become nomads, trappers, hunters bushed with beards. There were newcomers at the head of the Council, with Ann-Hari.

Where she walked she was greeted. Thin and hard, lined, uglied perhaps by time but an astounding ugliness, vivid and passionate. As the train travelled it came to the factories, farmsteads, silos and halls that in the years had spread beyond the train. Ann-Hari would fetch down to walk wherever they stopped.

People gave her fruit, cakes of spiced game she shared among her entourage, a patrol of women, some seventy, some in their teens. Cutter saw the strange love in which she was held. She took Judah’s arm. They were a stately couple. The Iron Councillors would cheer and tell Judah how welcome he was, give the others food and drink, kiss their cheeks. They shouted in strange accents: New Crobuzon gone skewwhiff.

The perpetual train was town hall, church and temple. It was the keep. It whistled as it went, prowling the perimeter of its land of peasants, hunters, surgeons, teachers, drivers of the train. There were cactus-men and a very few cactus-women, and a handful of vodyanoi, the dowsers and diviners and their children. The sky was full of scudding wyrmen. The oldest of them had forgotten New Crobuzon; the youngest had never seen it.

Other races were there in little clutches: though New Crobuzon Ragamoll was the main tongue, there were those who cough-talked in arcane tonal systems. Immigrants to this track-layers’ land. The young were whole, of course, born without Remaking, but of those humans in their forties and above, most were Remade. They were the first Councillors. Those who had made the Council.

The spectre of the roadbed climbed slopes. Look, there. Veins through the stone. Ain’t this where we lost Marimon? On the crag yonder? It went up too fast and—They paused, respectful, where topography reminded them of the long-dead.

Most hill animals fled the Council, but there were those airborne and rock-running predators who picked off stray travellers—mouthed things the size of bears that stalked sheer walls on pads or adhesive pulvilli, skin-winged tentacular masses on goat legs. Cactacae, with no meat smell to goad carnivores, were the best guards.

Where they could they retraced the Council’s path. Sometimes they had to cut new paths. With powders synthesised in their made laboratories they broke through the matter of mountains. There were crag-ends and cliffs where the bridges they had made years before remained. Councillors would clamber out to test them, their footsteps echoed by crepitus as boards moved against each other. Many were fallen. Split wood lay weathered, mulched by insects, while above plank girders stubbed from hills.

They moved on quickly thrown-down tracks, on tracks already waiting scrubbed of rust. Where they reached cliff walls, they might see the scar of the old roadbed meander miles out of the way, while before them was a tunnel, crude but tall enough to take them. Over the years of the Council, battalions of tunnellers had come, in shifts, to cut passages, in case a quick return might one day be needed.

On the third day after their arrival, there was a trading. Striders raced in their stiff-legged, dimensionally disrespectful way through grass that did not move as it should at their approach. They laid before the Council’s traders their arcane wares: a coagulum of hairs, phlegm and gemstones, some earth-spat bezoar.

“All sorts of ju-ju in that,” a Councillor muttered to Cutter. Iron Council was privy to alien magics.

“If you can find us, you can trade with us.” Grain, information, meat and engineering know-how. Above all Iron Council traded its experts’ knowledge, selling them for a time, to dealers from The Brothers, from Vadaunk, from travelling tribes.

There were no cognates of this life. There was nothing like this. Cutter was agitated. He could not remember a time he had not known of the Council. As a child it was a strange story, as an older boy an adventure, as a man come to politics it had been some kind of possibility. And now he was here and though he could not have quite expressed his disappointment, he felt it.

He could not map the alterity he felt. He raged silently that he could see little in this life he had not seen before, and that yet each moment those he watched were farming, looking after animals, writing, arguing and helping children and performing a thousand actions he had seen all his life, they looked and felt like new things. He could not understand why this man stripping and repainting the train was doing something Cutter had seen before.

Except for some used for trading beyond the rails, there was no money. That angered him somehow. He had never seen why insurrectionists should want to mimic those old village fiefdoms in the badlands where landworkers never saw coin but took what the local big-man gave them. The cashless economy irritated him as an affectation. It made no difference whether it was for coin—painting was up-down with a brush, money or not.

It took him days to know that he was wrong. Something was very not the same. The painting was different, and the ploughing, knife-grinding, bookkeeping. These are new people, he thought. They ain’t the same as me. Cutter was terribly troubled.

For a horrible day he almost despised what he saw. He hated it for how it kept him out. For being not strange enough and being so strange. And then he knew that it was not the Council, it was—of course, of course—it was him.

I weren’t here when this was made. I didn’t make this like the old ones did; I weren’t born to it like the young. I didn’t make this place, so it didn’t make me.

“Was a long time coming here.” The travellers, Ann-Hari, and others of the guiding committee had spent an evening in the mess hall. A hammer-rhythm song telling the story of Iron Council’s journey west, recorded in snips on the antiquated voxiterator, was given to Judah: “Songs for the golem man.”

“I’ll tell you some real Council stories,” one man said when the eating was done. “Not that those was lies, but they left off some things. You should know everything.” It grew late and cold, and they picked at their flatbread as they listened. “Was a long time coming here,” he said and told them of the cacotopic stain, though he would give no details. “We got off light” was all he’d say. “Near a month by the edge of the madlands.”

He told them of more than two years sending out scouts across unknown unmapped land to be lost and many to die, squabbling over routes, learning techniques. The Council laying down tracks, blundering into wars. They had taken their train without intent between the ranks of feuding forest things that pattered them with darts and stones: animal-men accused them of invasion. The renegade train met representatives of half-heard-of countries: Vadaunk the mercenary kingdom; Gharcheltist, the aquapolis. The Iron Councillors learnt new languages, trade and politesse with brute and urgent efficiency. “Land went open after the cacotopos.”

Poor bewildered little New Crobuzoners. They felt, Cutter sensed, a kind of pity for their younger selves traipsing dogged across places they could not comprehend. They felt their pasts gauche. At the time they must merely have blinked and kept walking, kept hammering, apologising where they realised they trespassed. There had been sacrifices—severe, dreadful prices to pay when they passed unknowing into this or that little despotism, crossed some potentate or quasigodling thing. “We took the Council once into that forest and there was that magma-horse took all our coal. Remember? Remember when we lost them boys to that ghast thing that left glass footprints?”

A landscape that punished outsiders. They were picked off by animals, by cold and heat. They starved, were sent to shivering deaths by illness, died of thirst when their watercarts got lost. They made themselves learn, constructing their absconder railway.

And they had warred themselves, when they had to, against tribes who would not take offerings for the right to pass into their lands. There was a time, which the Councillors described briefly in shame—The Idiocy, they called it—when the train itself had been ripped by civil war, over strategy, over how to continue. The generals of the caboose and those of the foremost engine had lobbed grenades at each other over the long yards of train between, a week of guerrilla actions on the roofs of the cars, butchery in corridors.

“It was a bad winter. We was hungry. We was stupid.” No one could look up during that story.

But at last the grassland. They had mapped and made peace with the neighbours they found. “We got more maps than the New Crobuzon Library.” The train kept moving. At very last, way west, their scouts found the sea.

“The train’s our strength. We have to keep it strong.” They could never have the train stand still. It would have been a betrayal. They knew—they always knew—that when they found the place where they could rest, where the land would support them, even then they would never let the train fall still. They worshipped it, in a profane way. They reshaped it, made it monstrous, kept its engines primed, able to power on anything that would burn. They had built a life.

Years. Throwing up structures as they needed them. Their town had grown. And nomads and lost adventurers of all races came to join the renegopolis. The Iron Council.

The town and its government were one. Its delegates, its committee were voted on by catchments based on work and age and random factors. There were vicious arguments, methods of persuasion not always admirable, a hinterland of democracy, patronage and charisma. There were those who advocated moving; those who said the wheels should stop. There had been factions within factions in the early years, over methods of industry and agriculture. They had continued to build life, delegating, being delegates, arguing, voting, disagreeing and making things work.

“Before, I was an oiler,” the storyteller had said. “I oiled the wheels.”

“And you know why I’m here,” Judah had said. “Now it’s time for you to reach a new decision. It’s time for you to leave. To move again.”

Chapter Nineteen

Civilisations had been in the tablelands through which they passed, in this strange puna. The Iron Council, tracking back in head-on collision with its own history, passed through ruins.

Something that had perhaps once been a temple, a town of temples. In the shadow of a cratered ziggurat they laid their tracks, and the vent of their engines rose over the vines. They drove home spikes and split corroded marble gods in the rootmass. The Iron Council made the dead home shiver with hammer-blows. It sooted the bas-reliefs of battles in heaven. The Iron Council cut through the ivy-clotted city, towers gone to moulder.

“I know a man from a long time gone,” Judah had said to the committee. “We used to be partners. He was a government man for a time, works for some big concern now, but still has his ears open. He and me have history, and sometimes he needs golems for his work. And when he comes to me for that, we talk.”

Judah had told Cutter of these strange conversations, Pennyhaugh half-crowing at Judah, become his enemy, but them still drinking together. Not debates but performances. “I only see him because he gives me information, and I can give it to the Caucus,” Judah said. “And I don’t know . . . I don’t think he’s stupid enough just to sound off. It’s some kind of gift.”

The committee listened. There were the middle-aged, and Remades who remembered New Crobuzon, women who had once been the camp’s whores: but more than half the delegates were young, had been children or unborn when the Council was made. They watched Judah speak.

“There are always rumours. I asked him, like I know how to do, so he thinks he’s offering it to me. He told me what was happening. You know there’s war against Tesh.” They did not know the details, but so big a war as this made Bas-Lag shudder, and stories reached the Iron Council by bush-adventurers.

“There’s slaughter in the Firewater Straits: they call it the Sanguine Straits now. They broke the Witchocracy’s thalassomach hex, and the navy’s pushing ships through, all the way around the coast. Thousands of miles. But another expedition set off, weeks back. Below the warships. Ictineos. Maybe grindylow-led, I don’t know. But they’re coming. It’d take a long time, but they must be nearly here. Might have made landfall.

“They never forgot you in the city, you know. They never forgot Iron Council. Long live. People whisper the words. Your name’s on walls. Parliament never forgave you, never forgot what you done. And now they know where you are.”

He had waited for their alarm to subside.

“You couldn’t stay hid forever. You knew it. I don’t know how they know. Godspit, it’s been more’n twenty years, it could be anything. A wanderer tells another tells another tells another: it could have been one of your own, finding their way back to New Crobuzon, caught and interrogated. It could be a spy.” He spoke over the noise that spurred. “Far-seeing on a new scale. I don’t know. Point is they know where you are. They found you. I don’t even know how long they’ve known. But they’d never get a troop across the cacotopic stain, or through the Galaggi Veldt and forests and whatever—we had Qurabin.” But we didn’t at first, Judah, Cutter thought. What were you planning to do? “But with the war, that’s changed. Because the Firewater Straits are open.

“They’re coming all the way round, by sea. They’re trying to get past Tesh, up past Maru’ahm, and they’ll land on the edge of the grasslands. They’ll come at you not from the east but the west. They could never do that till now.

“Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You got away And sisters . . . now more than ever they need to finish it.”

It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. “There is something happening,” he said.

“They have to bring you back in pieces. So they can say to the citizens, See what we done. See what we do to them as tries to rise. See what’s been done to your Council.

“They’re coming to destroy you. It’s time to move, to relay the tracks. You have to go. You could go north—I don’t know. Take it up to the tundra. An ice-train with the bear-riders. Up to the Cold Claws. I don’t know. Hide again. But you have to go. Because they’ve found you, they’re coming for you, and they won’t stop till you’re gone.”

“Yeah, they could hide,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, sudden and insistent. “Or there’s another possibility. They could come back. Tell them they have to come back. Tell them.”

He did not whisper it as an instruction, but he spoke so urgently, with such sudden fervour, that Cutter obeyed him.

For days the Council was stunned enough that it could not plan. It had no sentimentality about its sedentary town. They had always insisted that the train was where they lived, that other buildings were only annexes, cabs without wheels. But the resources they had accrued over years, hard-won, would be missed.

“We should stay. We can take whatever comes,” the younger Councillors declared, and their parents, the Remade, strove to tell their children what New Crobuzon was.

“This ain’t a band of striders,” they said. “This ain’t horse-thieves. This is a different thing. Listen to Low.”

“Yeah, but we’ve techniques now, that, no disrespect to Mr. Low, he don’t know about. Moss-magic, cirriomancy—does he know about them?” Thaumaturgy learnt from arcane natives. Their parents shook their heads.

“This is New Crobuzon. Forget that. It ain’t like that.”

Judah unwrapped the braced mirror that Cutter had brought him. “There’s only one,” he said. “The other’s broken and without it this isn’t a weapon. But even if we had another, it wouldn’t be enough. You have to go.”

They had sent the cleverest of the wyrmen to watch the coast hundreds of miles off. A week passed. “Found nothing,” the first said when it came back, and Judah had grown angry. “They’re coming,” he said.

He refused to advise anything specific. Drogon, though, had become maniacal in his desire for the Council to return. He told the Councillors again and again that it was their duty to return. It was a strange fervour.

Cutter went to dances. The raucousness of them calmed him, the drunk young men and women kicking to peasant waltzes. He swapped partners and drank and ate their drugged fruit. He went with a tough young man he could grab and handfuck and even kiss so long as it was some kind of boys’ play, not sex but wrestling or somesuch. Afterward, wiping his hand, he found the man talkative about what Iron Council should do.

“Everyone knows we’ll leave,” he said. “What, we going to ignore Judah Low? And some say go up and some say down, and no one’s sure which way we’ll head, but me and more and more others, we’ve another plan. We been thinking. We say don’t go north or south, we say go east. Back along the tracks we left. We say it’s time to go home. Back to New Crobuzon.”

It was not Drogon’s doing, Cutter realised. It was a native desire.

“I think something is coming,” Qurabin said, a disembodied voice.

Drogon said, “They know it’s coming. And more and more of them want to head for New Crobuzon.”

“No,” Judah said. Cutter saw many things in him: a pride, a fear and anger, exasperation, confusion. “No, they’re insane. They’ll die. If they can’t face one New Crobuzon battalion, how’ll they face the city? It don’t make any sense to run from the militia to the militia. They can’t come back.”

“That ain’t what they’re banking on. You fired them up, didn’t you? With all your talk about what’s happening. They think they might tip the balance, Judah. And I think they might be right. They want to return to crowds, throwing petals at the rails. They want to come home to a new city.”

“No,” said Judah, but Cutter saw excitement in Pomeroy, in Elsie. He felt something of it through his own sardonics and reserve.

There was a clamour to go back. “It’s a matter of speed,” one old Remade woman said. “When we come here we laid down spare iron, so as if we needed to get away, they were waiting. Well, we’ve people coming for us now, and we’ve a lot of miles between us and safety, and we need speed. Them tracks is waiting. A mile here, two there. Be idiocy not to use them.” She pretended pragmatism.

Judah argued, but he was proud, Cutter saw, of his Council’s desire to return, to be something in this New Crobuzon moment. He wanted to dissuade them out of fear, but he wanted not to—Cutter saw this—for a sense of history.

“You don’t know,” he said, and he spoke gently. “You don’t know what it’ll be, what’ll be happening there. We need you to survive. It’s more important than anything. I’ve been your damn bard, and I need you to survive.”

“This ain’t—forgive me, Mr. Low, with all respect—this ain’t about what you need but what we need. We can’t take the bastards on their way, so if we’re to run, let’s make our running something. Let’s get word to New Crobuzon. Tell them we’re coming home.” That was a young man born five years after the Council, raised in the grasses.

Ann-Hari stood. She began to declaim.

I am not New Crobuzon born, she told them, and expounded her life in brute oratory. “I never knew I could have a country: Iron Council is my country, and what do I care about New Crobuzon? But Iron Council is an ungrateful child, and I ever loved ungrateful children. New Crobuzon deserves no gratitude—I been there and I know—and we are the child that freed ourselves. No other did. And all the other children are ungrateful now, and we can help them.”

To Cutter it was as if Judah’s party had liberated the Iron Council, had uncoupled it from some restraint, that it was taken by a tendency long immanent. Whatever reasons they gave, the Councillors arguing to go back seemed to voice something embedded, that they had wanted a long time. They were avid at the insurgency Judah described.

When he tried to think it in words, Cutter could not make it clear. They had come—he had come—so far, at such cost, to warn the Council that it should flee: how could it possibly face the city?

But though he could not express it, Cutter felt the logic of return. He felt it swell as Ann-Hari spoke, and he was not the only one.

The Councillors cheered her and shouted her name, and shouted “New Crobuzon.”

Elsie and Pomeroy exulted. They had never expected this. Qurabin made a sound of pleasure, no more supportive of New Crobuzon than of the Tesh who had betrayed the monastery, and impressed by the Councillors and their welcome. Qurabin was glad to be part of whatever exertion this would be. Drogon was delighted. Judah was silent, proud and frightened.

Cutter saw Judah’s fear. You need it to be a legend, don’t you? he thought. This troubles you, this it-coming-back. You love it for wanting to, but you need it safe, the thing you made. Something we can dream of. Judah would do anything for the Iron Council, anything at all. Cutter saw that. Judah’s love for it was complete.

They took the town down, broke their mud-and-wattle, their meeting houses, turned them to dust. They gathered what crops they could. There were plenty of those among the Councillors who were outraged.

The perpetual train, even with its new rolling stock in the strange materia of the wide lands, its rough wood and mineral cars, could not contain all the Councillors. There were hundreds who would be, again, camp followers, nomads in the train’s trail. A few would not come. Some went for the hills, or insisted they would stay as farmers in the settled land, surrounded by remnants of the torn-up iron road.

“You’ll die,” Judah told them, “when they come.” And they responded with bluff and bravado. It would come to nothing, Cutter thought, when the New Crobuzon Militia appeared, its most powerful and well-armed squads, to where they thought they would find their quarry and instead met fifty aging farmers. He watched them, knowing they were dead. May they kill you quick.

Cutter did not know if Ann-Hari and Judah were lovers, but they loved one another in a deep and simple way. He was jealous, yes, but no more than of the other people Judah loved. Cutter was used to this thing so unrequited.

Judah was with Ann-Hari the night before the Iron Council left its grassland sanctuary. Cutter was alone, holding himself and remembering the night he had tussled with the muscular young man.

The next day they gathered: there was Cutter in the outskirt land where wild grass was crushed by the train and by the farmers. And there brawny Pomeroy swinging his weapon playfully, like a scythe, and Elsie her arm around her man’s waist, and Drogon in his brimmed hat leading the mount he had persuaded the horse-husbanders of the Iron Council to give him, his lips moving and Cutter not sure to whom he spoke, and there the grass fluttered as Qurabin moved along secret ways revealed by his or her strange godling, and out ahead arm-in-arm walked Ann-Hari and Judah Low, investigated by the insects of the morning.

Behind them the Iron Council came. They would fall into line soon, would help lay tracks, help break the stone and wind through the sarsen blocks of the lowlands, but for now they walked ahead. The ellipse of iron was unwinding, the Councillors were track-layers again. And scouts and water dowsers, hunters and graders, but above all layers of track, who uncoiled the edge of their town and put it down again in a straight line, back along land that bore still the faint trace of their arrival.

Way to their west came predatory militia, soldiers wanting only to destroy them. The Iron Council shuddered, and went on, went east, headed for New Crobuzon, home.

That was how it had been. And then to this edge, this most literal badland.

“Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain.”

Part Six:

The Caucus Race

Chapter Twenty

The Monstrous Without—and Within. New Crobuzon’s Twin Enemies: The Watcher and the Treacherous. Night of Shame.

The newspapers declaimed. They brought out extra-large fonts for their condemnations of the EyeSky Riots. There were heliotypes of the dead barricaded in shops and smothered by smoke, crushed in falls from windows, shot.

In The Grocer’s Sweetheart on the Chainday after, Ori expected the Runagate Rampant meeting to be overflowing, but no one was there. He came back the next night and the next, looking for a face he remembered. At last on Dustday he saw the knit-worker, gathering money, whispering in the landlord’s ear.

“Jack,” said Ori. She turned, untrusting, and her face only opened a very little when she saw it was him.

“Jack,” she said.

“It’ll have to be fast,” she said. “I have to go. Wine, then, go on.

“Spiralling down, eh?” she said, pointing at the coil-marks on his clothes. “I see them all over now. They’ve gone from walls to clothes. Cactus punks are wearing them, Nuevists, radicals. What do they mean?”

“A link,” he said carefully. “To Half-a-Prayer. I know the man who started them.”

“I heard of him, I think . . .”

“He’s a friend of mine. I know him well.” There was silence. They drank. “Missed the meeting.”

“There ain’t no meetings now. You mad, Ori . . . Jack?” She was horrified. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she said, “really sorry. Curdin told me your name. And where you live. He shouldn’t have done, but he was keen I be able to get Double-R to you, if need be. I told no one.”

He contained his shock, shook his head.

“The meetings?” he said, and she forgot her contrition quickly.

“Why would we have meetings?” she said. “When it’s going on?” Ori shook his head, and she gave a sound almost a sob. “Jack, Jack . . . Jabber’s sake. What are you doing? Weren’t you there?”

“Godsdammit, of course I was. I was in Creekside. I was . . .” He lowered his voice. “Who are the Militant Sundry, any damn way? I was trying to stand up for the godsdamned khepri your bloody brainless commonalty were busy trying to butcher.”

“The Sundry? Well, if you was xenian and all you’d had in your corner were the comprador bastards in the Divers Tendency, wouldn’t you turn somewhere else? And don’t you dare. Don’t you dare scorn people. You know the Quillers take up the human dust. Even your friend Petron knows that—and don’t bloody look at me like that, Jack, everyone knows his name, he was in the Flexibles. And I ain’t sure of all the bloody lunacies the Nuevists do, faddling about dressed as animals, silly bloody games, but I’d trust him. I don’t know as I’d trust you, Jack, and that’s a sad thing, because it ain’t that I think you don’t want what I want. I know you do. But I don’t trust your judgement. I think you’re a fool, Jack.”

Ori was not even outraged. He was used to the arrogance of the Runagates. He looked at her with cool annoyance, and, yes, a residue of respect, a due she had inherited from Curdin.

“While you’re playing prophets, Jack,” he said, “keep your eyes open. When I move . . . you’ll know. We have plans.”

“They say Iron Council’s coming back.”

Her face had taken on such joy.

“It’s coming back.”

All the things Ori could think to say were obvious. He did not want to insult her, so he tried to think of something else to say, but could not.

“It’s a fairy tale,” he said.

“It ain’t.”

“A fable. There’s no Iron Council.”

“They want you to think that. If there’s no Iron Council, then we ain’t never took power. But if there is, and there is, we did it before, we can do it again.”

“Good Jabber, listen to yourself . . .”

“You telling me you never seen the helios? What do you think that was? You think they built the bloody train by marching alongside each other, women, whores, at the front? Children riding the damn cab hood?”

“Something happened, of course it did, but they were put down. It was a strike is all. They’re long dead—”

She was laughing. “You don’t know, you don’t know. They wanted them dead, and they want them dead again, but they’re coming back. Someone from the Caucus set out for them. We got a message. Why’d they be going, if not to tell them to return?

“Haven’t you seen the graffiti?” she said. “All over. Along with all them coils and spirals you’re wearing. IC You. Iron Council, You. It’s coming back, and even just knowing that’s a godsdamned inspiration.”

“People want them, they’ll find them, they’ll believe in them, Jack . . .”

“What you don’t know,” she said, and didn’t even look angry anymore, “is that we’re moving. If you could hear the Caucus.” She sipped her drink. She looked at him, some kind of challenge. She’s sitting on the damn Caucus. The cabal of insurrectionists, the truce of the factions and the unaligned.

“There are those in Parliament trying to cosy up, you know. They can’t admit it, but there are factories where we decide if people go to work or not. They want to negotiate. Parliament ain’t the only decider in New Crobuzon anymore. There’s two powers now.”

The knit-worker stretched her hand across the table.

“Madeleina,” she said deliberately. “Di Farja.”

He shook her hand, moved by her trust. “Ori,” he said, as if she didn’t know.

“I tell you something, Ori. We’re in a race. The Caucus is in a race to get things ready. It’ll be weeks or months yet. And we won’t just go round and round—we’re making it a race to something. We ain’t stupid, you know. We’re racing to build what we have to, chains of—” She looked around. “—chains of command, communication. Last night was the start. There’s a way to go, but it’s started. The war’s going sour, they say. The maimed’ll fill the streets. If Tesh could send over that—” She closed her eyes and held her breath, retrospectively aghast. “—that thing, that sky-born witness, what else might they do? Time . . . we ain’t got much time.

“And the Iron Council’s coming back,” she said. “When people hear that, it’ll go off.”

Maybe we’re all together, Ori thought with a plaintiveness that troubled him. Maybe the Caucus race is our race too . . .

“We’re all racing,” he said.

“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

He thought then of what it would be. Of that moment when the dispossessed, the toilers, the, yes if she wanted, yes, the commonalty heard that the Mayor, the head of the Fat Sun, the arbiter of New Crobuzon, was gone. What that would be.

“You want to talk inspiration?” he said. He was angry again, at her monomaniac prescription. “That I’ll give you,” he said. “You’ll thank me, Jack. What we’re doing, what we’re doing . . . we need to wake people up.”

“They’re already awake, Jack. That’s what you don’t see.”

He shook his head.

Bertold Sulion the Clypean Guard had lost his commitment to New Crobuzon, to the Mayor, to the law he was pledged to. Baron told them.

“It’s bled out of him,” he said. “You ain’t trusted to much when you’re a Clypean. The oath you take says it all: I see and hear only what the Mayor and my charges allow me to. Bertold don’t know so much. But he knows the war’s being lost. And he’s seen the deals they’ll do while them he trained with fight and die. It’s all gone rancid. His loyalty’s bled out of him and there ain’t nothing left.

“That’s the thing,” he said. He spoke with care. “It’s in you like your blood.” He patted his sternum. “And when it goes bad, when it goes septic, you might say, you bleed it out and then either something else fills it, or it leaves you empty. Sulion ain’t got nothing in him anymore. He wants to grass, and for form’s sake, he’s asking a lot of money for it, but it ain’t the money he wants. He wants to betray because he wants to betray. He wants us to help him go bad. Whether he knows it or not.”

They were not in Badside. Here are keys for you, the note had said, pinned by one of the two-horned cesti to the wall. We have a new meeting house. An address. Ori had read the note with Enoch, and they had stared at each other. Enoch was a stupid man, but this time Ori shared his confusion. “Flag Hill?”

At the edge of the city, at the end of the Head Line unrolling north from Perdido Street Station, Flag Hill was where the bankers and industrialists lived, the officials, the wealthiest artists. It was a landscape of wide-open ways and sumptuous houses sheer onto the streets, backing onto shared gardens. There were flowering trees and banyans spilling their knotting creepers and making them roots and trunks, emerging from between black paving.

There had been a slum in Flag Hill for years, like an abscess: an oddity of city planning. Mayor Tremulo the Reformer, two centuries past, had ordered some streets of modest housing built on the slopes of the rise that gave the area its name, so that the heroes of the Pirate Wars, he said, could live by those they had defended. The Flag Hill rich had not welcomed the newcomers, and Mayor Tremulo’s schemes for “social merging” had been made risible. Without money what had been modest became a slum. Slate and brick went sickly. The little community of Flag Hill poor came in and out by train, while their neighbours disdained the raised rails for private hansoms, and waited for squalor to reach a critical mass. It had done so fifteen years before.

The poor had been removed from their collapsing houses, settled in ten- and fifteen-floor blocks of concrete in Echomire and Aspic. And then their once-neighbours had moved curiously into the deserted, hollowed rookeries, and money had at last come. Some buildings had been made into houses for the new wealthy, shored up and two or three holed together: to live in reconfigured “base cottages” became a fashion. But several streets at the heart of Flag Hill’s nameless poverty district had been preserved, architecture as aspic, and made a slum museum.

It was through this that Ori and Enoch came. They had cleaned themselves, worn their better clothes. Ori had never been to this street-long memorial to poverty. There was no rot, of course, no smell, nor had there been for more than a decade. But the windows were still broken (their shard edges reinforced by subtle braces to prevent more cracking), the walls still bowed by damp and discoloured (thaumaturgy and joists holding them at the point of their collapse).

The houses were labelled. Brass plaques by their doors told the history of the slum, and talked of the conditions in which the inhabitants had lived. HERE, Ori read, CAN BE SEEN SCARS OF THE ARSON AND ACCIDENTAL CONFLAGRATIONS THAT PLAGUED THE STREETS, FORCING THE LOCALS TO ENDURE LIFE IN THE SPOILS OF FIRE. The house was smoked and char-dark. Its carbonised skin was sealed under a matte varnish.

There were front rooms and outhouses that could be entered. A FAMILY OF SIX OR EIGHT MIGHT CROWD INTO SUCH TERRIBLE SURROUNDINGS. The detritus of slum life was left in place, sterilised and dusted by attendants. IT SEEMS UNBELIEVABLE THAT IN MODERN TIMES SUCH SQUALOR COULD GO UNCHECKED.

The house to which they had been directed was a classic of Flag Hill architecture: big, beautiful, mosaiced in painted pebbles. Ori wondered if he had misread the address, but their keys worked. Enoch was frowning. “I been here before,” he said.

It was empty. It was a sham house. Its rooms were bone-colourless, as were its curtains. Enoch’s awe at the house and the gardens annoyed Ori.

There were people on the Flag Hill streets, men in tailored jackets, women in scarves. Mostly it was humans, but not only. There were canals here, and a community of wealthy vodyanoi who passed with their jump-crawl, dressed in light waterproof mumming of suits, chewing the cheroots that humans smoked and the vodyanoi would eat. There might pass a cactus now and then, some rare uptown achiever. There were constructs here, jolting steam-figures that gave Ori nostalgia for his childhood when they had been everywhere. The Flag Hillers were wealthy enough to afford the licences, to have their equipment pass the assiduous tests instituted in the aftermath of the Construct War. Mostly, though, even the rich had golems.

They walked with inhuman care, empty-eyed clay or stone or wood or wire men and women. They carried bags, they carried their owners, looking from side to side in mimicry of human motion, as if they could see through those pointless eyes, as if they did not sense mindlessly and abnaturally to follow their instructions.

When the other Toroans arrived, they all asked the question: “What are we doing here?”

When Baron came he was dressed as smartly as a local. He wore the lambswool, the fine sifted cotton and silk easily. They gaped.

“Oh yes,” he said. Shaven, cleaned, smoking a prerolled cigarillo. “You’re my staff, now. Best get used to it.” He sat with his back to the wall in their new, huge, empty room, and told them about Bertold Sulion.

Toro was with them. Ori realised it. He did not know how long that strange-silhouetted figure had been standing at the edge, with the oil-light drawing the edges of its horns. It was evening.

“Why are we here, Bull?” he said. “Where’s Ulliam?”

“Ulliam can’t come often. Remade would be a rarity on these streets. You’re here because I told you to be. Shut up and learn why. I’ll give you money. You get clothes. You’re servants now. Anyone sees you, you’re butlers, footmen, scullery maids. You keep yourselves clean. Got to fit in.”

“Was Badside compromised?” Ruby said. Toro did not sit, but seemed to lean, to be resting held up on nothing. Ori could feel the hex in those horns.

“You know what we aim to do. You know what we’ve wanted, what we build for.” Toro’s unnatural deep tones were a constant shock, a static charge. “The chair-of-the-board is in Parliament. On Strack Island. In the river. Vodyanoi militia in the water, cactus guards, officers in every chamber. Thaumaturges, the best in the city, putting up buffers and orneryblocks, charmtraps, all sorts. We ain’t getting into Parliament.

“And then there’s the Spike, and Perdido Street Station. You-know-who has to spend a lot of time in the Spike. Commanding the militia. Or in the station. In the embassy wing, in the high-tower.” It was more than the hub of New Crobuzon’s trains. It was a town, in three dimensions, encased in brick. The vastness of its mad-made architecture disobeyed not only rules of style but, it was said, of physics.

“When our quarry’s there, it ain’t as if it’s just the Perdidae we got to face.” Not that they would be easy to defeat. The dedicated submilitia given over to protect the station were well-armed and trained. “Wherever the chair-of-the-board goes, the Clypeans go. They’re our worry.

“What about in town? When did you last see any Fat Sun bigwig give a speech? They’re too scared, too busy trying to make secret peace with Tesh. So we need another strategy.” There was a long quiet.

“You-know-who is very close, intimate with one particular magister. Magister Legus. Weekly they meet. There’s all rumours, if you know who to ask. At Legus’ private house. Where he lives as a citizen, takes off his mask. They settle down in private. Sometimes they don’t part again until the morning.

“Happens every week, sometimes twice. In the magister’s house.

“The house next door.”

Tumult. How do you know? someone was shouting, and You can’t, and Whose is this place? How did you get this? and on.

Ori had a memory. Something in him flinched from an understanding, unsettling, that veered close and was gone again and then was back. Ori saw others remembering, not sure what it was they remembered, not threading things together.

“It was hard to find out the true name behind a nom de jure,” Toro was saying. “But I did it. Took me a long time. Tracked him down.” Ori heard through gauze.

“This is the house . . .” Ori said, and then said nothing more. No one heard him and he was glad of that. He did not know what he wanted to do. He did not know what he felt.

This is the house where the old couple lived. That I heard about, the job you did, months ago, soon after I gave you the money. That the papers railed at. You killed them, or Old Shoulder did or one of us, and it weren’t that they was militia at all. They was rich, but you wouldn’t do them for that. It weren’t because they was rich but because of where they lived. You needed them gone so you could buy this house. That’s what you did with Jacobs’ money.

Ori felt gutted. He swallowed many times.

He sat hard on his own instincts. Something welled in him. All the uncertainty, the desperate lack of knowledge, then the weight of knowledge but vacillation of ideas, the shameful hash of theory that had sent him to the Runagaters, to all the different sects and dissidents, looking for something to ground him, a political home, which he had found in the anger and anarchist passion of Toro. His uncertainty came back. He knew what he felt—that this was a dreadful thing, that he was aghast—but he remembered the exhortations to contextualise, always to have context, that the Runagaters above all had always stressed.

If one death’ll stop ten, ain’t it better? If two deaths’ll save a city?

He was still. He had a sense that he did not know best, that he had to learn, that he was a better man in this collective than out, that he must understand why this had happened before he judged. Toro watched him. Turned to Old Shoulder. Ori saw the cactus-man set his face. They can see I know.

“Ori. Listen to me.”

The others watched without comprehension.

“Yes,” Toro lowed. Ori felt like a schoolchild before a teacher, so disempowered, so ill-at-ease. He felt truly sick. Toro’s thaumaturged drone felt through his skin.

“Yes,” Old Shoulder said. “This is the house. They were old, rich, alone, no one to inherit, it’d be sold. But no, it ain’t good. Don’t presume, Ori, that there’s no guilt and pain.

“We get in that house beside us . . . we’re done. We win. We win.” Under the cactus’s words, Toro began to roar. It was a sound that went from beast-noise to the cry of elyctricity and iron under strain. It lasted a long time, and though it was not loud it took over the room and Ori’s head and stopped him thinking until it ebbed again and he was staring into Toro’s phosphorescent glass eyes.

“If we win, we take the city,” Old Shoulder said. “Take off the head. How many do we save then?” One by one, the other Toroans were understanding.

“You think other things weren’t tried? The magister’s house is closed. We can’t lie in wait there. The boss can’t push in, even with the horns. Some ward blocks us. Weapons won’t go through: not a bullet, a blast, a stone. It’s packed hard with charms. Because of who comes to visit. The sewers are stuffed with ghuls—no way in there there. It’s what we had to do. Think about it. You want out of this, now?”

How did I become the one to be asked? Don’t the others have to decide? But they were looking to him. Even Enoch had come to it now, and was open-mouthed thinking of what he had acted as lookout for, that night. Old Shoulder and Baron watched Ori. Tension drew the cactus-man up and stiff. Baron was relaxed. They would not let Ori walk, of course. He knew that. If he did not go along with this, he was dead. Even if he stayed, perhaps. If they thought they could not trust him.

Everything that was necessary was necessary. It was a tenet of the dissidents. And yes of course that necessary had to be fought over, debated and won. But they were so close. That they had found egress to a place their target would be alone, unwarded, vulnerable, where they could finally give their gift to New Crobuzon, was a towering thing. If it took two deaths to make it happen . . . could Ori stand in the way of history? Something in him blenched. It was necessary, he thought. He bowed his head.

On the top floor, the wall adjoining Magister Legus’ property had been precisely excavated. Inches of plaster and thin wood were swept away. The wall was dug out.

“Deeper’n that, hexes kick in,” Old Shoulder said. He touched the exposed surface with tremendous care. He was looking at Ori. Ori made his face unmoving. He listened. Toro had been preparing for weeks. Do you have other gangs? Ori thought, with an emotion he could not come close to identifying. Or are we your only ones? Whose name is this house in? It ain’t as if you bought it as yourself, is it?

Baron was talking, with his instrumental precision. I better listen, Ori realised. This is the plan.

“Sulion’s close to caving. We’re buying two things: information, of who’s where and what their tactics are, and a first move. Without him at the door, we’re dead.”

This is militia techniques, Ori thought, that’s what I’m learning. Once again, Ori wondered how many militia there were who had been to the war and had come back with such bitterness as this, so full of it. What they would do. He watched Baron and realised that everything in Baron led him to this, that he had no plans beyond this, that this would be his revenge.

An epidemic of murders. That’s what we’ll see. If those AWOL and back from the wars don’t have outlets. And the New Quill will recruit, too. They’ll recruit men like this. Jabber help us. And Ori’s eagerness to take off the head of the government came back strong. Soon, he thought. Soon.

He felt as if he might lose himself. He had to tell himself several times, until he was sure of it, that he was where he was meant to be.

Chapter Twenty-one

People could not walk New Crobuzon’s streets without looking up. Past the aerostats and the wyrmen, the hundreds of lives—alien, indigenous, created—that teemed the city’s skies, they looked at the cold white and the austere sun, and wondered if another of those searing organic shadows would come.

“They’re still trying to parley,” Baron told the crew. He had it from Bertold, who had inferred it from the Mayor’s forays to the embassy wing with diplomats and linguists.

Ori returned to the shelter. Ladia welcomed him, but she was wary. She looked so exhausted he was shocked. As ever there were men and women the colours of dirt lying where gravity huddled them, but now the hall itself was scarred. The walls were tattooed with splinters and ripped-up paint; the windows were boarded.

“Quillers,” she told him. “Three days ago. They heard we were . . . affiliated. We were slack, Ori, left papers around. With what’s going on in Dog Fenn, I suppose, we’ve been distracted: it’s been impossible to be so careful. We got cocky.”

He made her lie down, and though she bantered with him she cried when he laid her out on the old sofa, cried and held onto him for seconds, then sniffed and patted him, made a last joke and slept. He cleaned for her. Some of the homeless helped him. “We had a play yesterday,” one broken-toothed woman said to him as she wiped the tables. “Some Flexible troupe. Come to play for us. Very good it was, though not like nothing I’d seen before. I couldn’t really hear what they was saying. But it was nice, you know, good of them to come and do that for us.”

No one had seen Jacobs for days. “He’s been around, though. He’s been busy. You seen? His mark’s all over.”

The chalk spirals that Jacobs left wherever he went, that had given him his name, continued to disseminate, gone viral. They were in all quarters, in paint and thick wax colour, in tar; they were carved onto temples, scratched on glass and the girders of the towerblocks.

“You think he really started it? Maybe he’s just copying someone else. Maybe no one started it at all. You heard how it’s turning? People are using it as a slogan. It’s been adopted.”

Ori had heard and seen it. Spirals that tailed into obscenities levelled at the government. Shouts of Spiral away! when the militia appeared. Why that and not another of the symbols that had defaced walls for years?

The old man’s corner was grey with spirals. Ink and graphite, in different sizes, the angles and directions of the curves variant, and here were spirals off spirals in intricate series. It could be a language, Ori thought. Clockwise or widdershins, stopping after so many turns, in differing directions and numbers; derivatives budded from each corkscrew whorl.

For nine nights, Ori came. He volunteered the night shift. “I got to do this,” he told Old Shoulder. “I’ll do what you need in the day, but I got to do something.”

The Toroans granted him a kind of sabbatical, without trust. As he walked, Ori would stop, fasten his shoe buckle, lean against a wall and look behind him. If not Baron, someone would be following him, he was sure: he knew that the first time he spoke to someone that his unseen watcher, his fellow Bull-runner, did not trust, he was dead. Or perhaps there was no one. He did not know what he was to his comrades.

In The Two Maggots, Petron Carrickos gave Ori a book of his poems, self-published as Flexible Press.

“Been a long damn time, Ori,” he said. He had a shade of wariness—his mouth twitched to ask Where’ve you been? You disappeared—but he bought Ori grappa and spoke to him about his projects. Petron held Runagate Rampant—not quite openly, but with the new bolshiness of the times.

Ori read a stanza aloud.

“A season here/In your flower/Petals of wood and iron/Lockstock stonedead shock of a Dog Fenn frown.” He nodded.

Petron told Ori about the Flexibles: who was doing what, who had stayed part of something, who had disappeared. “Samuel’s buggered off. He’s selling stuff in some tarty gallery in Salacus Fields.” He snorted. “Nelson and Drowena are still in Howl Barrow. Of course everything’s changed now, you can imagine. We’re still trying to do the shows when we can. Community stuff, in churches and halls and such.”

“And just how does the Convulsive New go down with the commonalty?” It was a keystone concept from the second Nuevist Manifesto. Ori was sardonic.

“They like the Convulsive New just fine, Ori. Just fine.”

There was an illicit congress of all the underground guilds, the militant factory workers of Smog Bend and Gross Coil, spreading, Petron said, to other industries. Delegates from foundries, shipyards, dye plants, in a secret Dog Fenn location, discussing what demands to put to Parliament.

“Caucus is talking to them, too,” he said, and Ori nodded. He did not say, as he thought, More talking, talking again, that’s the problem, ain’t it?

At a crowded canalside market in Sangwine they reached, as part of the aimless walking that Petron theorised as a reconfiguration of the city, they came to sudden screams. “What in gods’, what in gods’,” someone was shouting, and there was a strange back-forward surge of crowd, people running to see what was happening and fleeing again past the stalls of books and trinket jewellery.

A woman lay in shudders by the lock and the watergates, her skirt puddled, her hair crawling like worms in static that made the air shake. People stared at her and tensed, made to run in and grab her and pull her away, but they blenched at the manifestation above her.

Vapour, a slick and sickly bruise-blue—a purpling as if the world itself, the air, was bleeding beneath its skin. The air souring and, like badness in milk, particles of matter coagulating from nothing, clots of rank aether aggregated into organising shape, and then there was a moving insectile thing made of scabbed nothing and sudden shade that twisted in the air as if suspended by thread and glimmered visible and invisible and then was unquestionably there, a hook-legged thing in the colours of rot, as large as a man. A wasp, its waist bone-thin below a thorax that refracted light like mottled glass, its sting like a curved finger beckoning from its abdomen, extending and adrip.

It cleaned its legs with its intricate mouth. It turned ugly compound eyes and looked at the aghast crowd. It unfolded its limbs one by one and shuddered and was moved, though not it seemed by the motion of those legs, but still as if it dangled and some giant hand holding its line had shifted. It came closer.

The woman was seizing. Her face had gone dark. She was not breathing. There was a gasp, a choking in the front of those watching. Two others fell. A man, another woman, fitting epileptically, flecking with spittle and vomit.

“Get out of the way!” The militia. From the entrance to the market. They came firing, and the sounds of the guns broke the cold that had held people, and they scattered screaming. Ori and Petron ducked but did not run, pushed away from the noisome apparition and watched the militia fire into its corpus.

Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.

An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.

But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

“It’s not the first of them,” Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. “You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense.”

Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. “One was a grub-thing,” Petron said, “in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard.”

“I heard of the dagger,” Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. “And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?”

“Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war.”

Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?

“Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?” Petron said. “Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale.”

The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went—driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?—they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.

When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.

“Gods almighty,” Ori said gently as he ladled food. “Gods almighty, Spiral, what’s happened to you?” The vagrant looked up at him with a wonderful and open smile. There was no recognition at all. “Where you been? All this time?”

Jacobs heard the question and pulled his brows together. He thought a long time and said carefully: “Perdido Street Station.”

It was the only thing he said that night that evidenced sanity. He murmured to himself in a foreign language or in children’s noises, he smiled, drew ink spirals on his skin. At night amid the grunts and the draughts, Ori came to where Jacobs sat chattering to himself. He was nothing but silhouette when Ori spoke.

“We’ve lost you, ain’t we, Jacobs?” he said. He was stricken. He could almost feel the rise of tears. “I don’t know if you’ll come back. Where you’ve gone. I wanted, I wanted to find you to tell you thank you, for everything you done.” You can’t hear me but I can. “I got to tell you this now, because I’m going places and doing things that might, might make it so I won’t get to see you no more, Spiral. And I want you to know . . . that we took your money, your gift, and we’re doing it right. We’re going to make you proud. We’re going to make Jack proud. I promise you.

“What you done for me. Gods.” Spiral Jacobs jabbered and drew swirls. “To know someone who knew Jack. To have your blessing. Whether you come back or not, Spiral, you’ll always be part of this. And when it’s over and it’s done, I’ll make sure the city knows your name. If I’m here. Got my word. Thank you.” He kissed the crumpled forehead, astonished at the fragility of the skin.

That night there was no moon, and the gaslamps of Griss Fell gave out. In the dark the New Quill Party attacked the kitchen again. Ori woke to chants of “scum” and the tattoo of missiles on the wooded windows. Through a slit between boards he could see them massed. Ranks of men, studies in shadow, the brims of their bowlers low, making their eyes belts of dark. A streetful of carefully suited malignance, rows of black-cottoned shoulders padded with fighters’ muscle, tipping their hats, straightening the dark ties noosed from their white shirts. They brushed imagined dust from themselves and swung weapons.

But the vagrants’ fear was brief. Was it Militant Sundry who came for them? Was it the mixed ranks of the Caucus? Ori could not see. He only heard shouting and shots, saw the Quillers start and turn like a pack of feral clerks, and run to fight.

Ladia and the residents scattered. Ori ran for Jacobs, but to his surprise the old man walked past him with purpose but no urgency. He did not look at Ori or anywhere but ahead. He walked quickly past the last milling homeless, while at the street’s end was the sound of battle and in the dark only a rapid and ugly mass of black figures. Jacobs turned the other way, toward Saltpetre Station and the raised arches that climbed north over the city.

Ori hesitated, thinking that there was perhaps nothing left to speak to in that shell, and then realising that he wanted to see where the man would go and what he would do. In the very dark of New Crobuzon without its lamps, Ori followed Spiral Jacobs.

He did not stalk him like a hunter but merely walked a few steps behind. He tried to place his shoes down soft enough that his step was only a ghost-echo of the mendicant’s shuffling. They were the only people in the street. They walked between a fence of wood and iron on one side, damp bricks on the other, rising scores of feet above their heads. Spiral Jacobs skipped, treaded forward singing a song in an alien key, wandered back some steps, ran his fingers, poking from the cutoff ends of his gloves, over the corrugated iron and rubbed at its rust, and Ori came behind him as respectful and observant as a disciple.

With a thumb of chalk, Spiral Jacobs drew the shape that had given him his name, whispering while he did, and it was of astonishing perfection, a mathematical symbol. And then there were curlicues, smaller coils coming from its outer skin, and Jacobs ran his hand over it, and walked on.

It began to rain as Ori reached the mark Jacobs had made. It did not smear.

Past the tumbledown brick arch of Saltpetre Station and on toward Flyside into a place where the gaslamps had not given out, where guttering dirt-light returned to tan the walls and doors into grotesques. The old man wrote his shapes. He wrote on window, once, the grease of whatever he was using gripping the shine. A rut of street closed up to Ori and funnelled him through a brick arch after his idiot guru, into a wider zone of pallid light where the gas was effaced by the elyctro-barometrics, cold lurid colours, red and gold made ice in knotted glass.

They were not alone now. They were in some dream-dark landscape. Ori wondered when his city was taken, made this.

A succession. The loud sound of fiddles. Wealthy men slumming it with downtown whores fell out of the doors of drinkhalls, walking oblivious past tsotsis who eyed them and fingered ill-concealed weapons. Up now toward a militia tower, the thrum of the skyrails as a lit pod passed over. Crowding under slowworms of lit glass spelling names and services, simple animations—a red-mouthed lady drawn with the light, replaced stutteringly with another who had raised her glass, and back again in autistic illuminant recursion. Narcotics on the corners sold in twists by macerated youths, militia in aggressive cabals, their mirrors sending the light back around the street. Anger, drunk and stupid fights, and serious fights, too.

North to Nabob Bridge, approaching Riverskin. At the edge of Flyside they passed a series of lots, open and strewn, and Ori saw the last blows of some gang-pummelling, and there was a crowd of Quillers approaching in their suits, natty and baleful, but they did not harass him, instead sneering at the students who ran by laughing, chasing motes of thaumaturgic light flying drunken as butterflies; and a catcall, and there was the lit brazier of a picket outside a chymical plant, the numbers of the strikers swollen by supporters carrying billy clubs and forks to protect them from the Quillers who eyed them but ran the numbers and walked on.

A scarred cactus-boy begging for coins even so late while his monkey danced, the boy’s head scratched with friendly condescension by the big cactus-man leading a gang of, that must be the Militant Sundry, not quite with weapons on display (militia were near enough to see) but making a presence in that late-night decadent street and nodding in some wary camaraderie-cum-challenge to a Caucus man, who shucked handslang at a passer and disappeared into an old cold alley when a panicked militia patrol ran past, and there was a fire in the back of the alley, and huddled junkie figures, and a wyrman called and came down to land and flew again.

Men and women passed. There was drink-smell and smoke, drug residue and the shrieks and calls like birds.

Spiral Jacobs walked through it all shielded by his madness. He stopped, drew his shapes, walked on, stopped, drew, walked, on to the spired old-century cragginess of Nabob Bridge, and over quickly through Kinken where the richer khepri moieties, older money and arriviste, preserved their dreamed-up culture in the Plaza of Statues, kitsch mythic shapes in khepri-spit. The air tasted, with the ghosts of khepri conversations in wafts of chymical.

Spiral Jacobs walked the tight streets of the Old Town, the firstborn part of New Crobuzon, a V in the mud between rivers, now spilt over into metropolis dimensions. He shuffled and crooned and drew his spirals on the dark brick walls, on through Sheck, a grocertown of shopkeepers and a stronghold of New Quill, where Ori walked carefully. He saw not the bowlered Quill foot soldiers but the nervous paunchy men of defence committees, in agonies of pride at their own bravery. Through the outer edge of Spit Hearth where the prostitutes worked, streetwalkers eyeing him. Spiral Jacobs drew his coil. On one side was the window of a brothel advertising outré relaxations: on the other a mouldered poster, some radical group trying to recruit women it coyly called “those of unorthodox service professions.”

The Crow, New Crobuzon’s commercial heart, was not full. There were only a few walking so late. Spiral Jacobs, with Ori behind him, passed the arcades, tunnels through buildings neither open nor closed. They were curlicued in spiralled iron that the old man fingered with appreciation, their windows full of trinkets for the burghers.

And then Ori stopped and let Spiral continue toward the shadow, light-dappled, of the core of New Crobuzon: a castle, a factory, a town of towers; a god, some said, made by a madman intent on theogenesis. It was not a building but a mountain in the materials of building, a mongrel of styles united with illicit intelligence. The city’s five railway lines emerged from its mouths, or perhaps they congregated there, perhaps their motion was inward and they coiled together like a rat-king’s tails and knotted and made the edifice that housed them, Perdido Street Station. A ganglion of railroad.

Spiral Jacobs headed under the arch that tethered it to the militia’s central Spike, was bunking down in the brick concrete wood iron temple great and charged enough to alter the weather above it, to alter the very night.

Ori watched the old man go. Perdido Street Station did not care that the city was surging. That nothing was the same as it had been. Ori turned and for the first time in hours his ears cleared, and he heard the calls of fighting, the swallowing of fires.

Chapter Twenty-two

All hands, the message said. It’s now. Pinned to Ori’s door.

Old Shoulder and Toro were the only ones not there. Baron explained the plan.

“Near a week,” he said. “That’s what we got. This information’s from Bertold. We have to be careful. This”—a square of chalk—“is the top room. This is where they’ll be.

“Remember. They ain’t expecting attacks, but the Clypeans are tough. Each of you’ll be told exactly what you have to do. Understood? Remember how you get in, and what you do, and how you get out. And—listen to me—don’t alter your plan no matter what you see. Understand me? You do what you’re told, let others do what they’re told.”

Are we a cell? Ori thought. Are there others we don’t know of? Ori’s companions shifted.

Baron drew more and more lines on the plan, repeating instructions until they had become mantra. His cadences did not alter; he was like a wax recording.

There was a cache of new weapons. Repeaters, blunderbusses, firespitters. Ori watched his comrades cleaning and oiling them. He saw whose hands shook. He saw that his own did not.

Baron taught them how to take point, secure areas, with the instrumental efficiency of the militia. They walked through their parts as if blocking a play. Step up, swing, step, step, raise, secure, two three, say two officers, two three, step, turn, nod. Ori recited his strategy to himself. How are we going to do this?

“We got surprise,” said Baron. “Get through that one moment, that chink. They got nothing to hold us back. Tell you something though, Ori.” He leaned in without even gallows humour. “Won’t all of us get out. Some of us’ll die there.” He did not look afraid. He did not care if he came out.

You can feel it, can’t you? Ori thought. His untethering. Ori was stretching out as if on a stem. It might snap. He still felt in that strange nightscape with Spiral Jacobs, his valedictory to the old man, when he had walked unmolested through a city turned into some psychotic, louche, broken thing. That was where he was.

There was no urgency in him. It was not a bleak feeling. Ori was only untethered. Things troubled him distantly. Uncertainties rose in him, distantly.

There were commotions. On the warming street, criers and journal-boys ran past, far from their usual grounds, called headlines. Convocation in Dog Fenn, they shouted. Demands to Parliament. Xenian Gangs, Seditionist Caucus. The Toroans sat in the house they had bought from the estate of those they had killed. They ignored the news-vendors, the anxiety on the streets. They began to spread mess, to live in a kind of aggressive squalor. They hung their cesti on their belts; they sharpened the horns.

Magisters, even the top-rank doges, were citizens, it was always stressed, citizens like anyone. They worked masked for justice’s sake, for the anonymity of justice. Any dwelling, in any part of town, could house a servant of law. The Flag Hill house next to the gang was elegant but nondescript.

Incongruously, at last, one early evening, with gunshots far off south—a noise New Crobuzon had grown used to, which no longer called the militia down from their dirigibles, was only part of the nightsound now—visitors began arriving. Cooks and maids and footmen left, given the night off. Not knowing their master’s job, not knowing who it was who came to him. Fops and uptown dandies arrived, dressed for a sedate party. A cactus-man in smart clothes.

Probably the staff think he’s an orgiast, Ori thought. They think their master’s up to shenanigans, peccadilloes or drugs. The guests were militia. Clypean. Preparing for the mayor’s arrival.

Ulliam put on a helmet. He strapped it tight and sighed. It jutted mirrors before his eyes. “Never, ever thought I’d put this on again,” he said.

“I’m not clear,” Enoch kept saying to Ori. “I’m not clear how it is I leave.”

“You heard him, ‘Noch, through the scullery window, over into the gardens, away.” You’ll never leave.

“Yeah, yeah, I, I know. It’s just . . . I’m sure that’s right.”

You’ll never leave.

“You’ll know when it’s time to go, Ori,” Baron had said, and Ori waited. He leaned against the cracked plaster, put his head on the thin ribs of board. Step step secure aim aim shoot.

“You understand what you’ve to do, Ori?” Baron had said. “What’s asked?”

Why this . . . this honour? Ori wondered. Why was he placed at the mission’s heart? He was—after Baron—the best shot; and he did not expect to live, yet had not run. Perhaps that had decided Toro. None of us will live, he thought. I’d still do this a thousand damn times. He felt himself anchor.

“You know where I’ve got to be, and you know where Shoulder’s got to be. We need someone at the top, Ori.”

Ori’s on point, he thought. Ori, take point.

He felt a weight of city below him, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him as he dangled. He closed his eyes. He imagined he felt things burrowing in the house walls, through his skin. He looked over what he had done, over years. A churchbell sounded. A wyrman shouted from the sky. In Dog Fenn his friends kept fighting.

He heard Old Shoulder come and go below. Ori did not take his head from the wall. He heard trunk-legs, the surprisingly gentle touchdown of the cactacae’s elephantine pads. Some time later reality pricked; there was a rending. He did not look round. “Evening boss,” he said. Toro had come.

Between two and three o’clock in the morning, with the sky squid-ink dark, clouds occluding the stars and half-moon, they began.

Toro tremored and said, “The house-hex flickered.”

Sulion, their treacherous contact, had left one key in one lock, turned one powerful ward charm upside down and rubbed it with hexed salt, cut one clutch of wires. It was all they needed.

With Toro’s murmured reportage, gleaned from the horns that antennaed in the ripples of thaumaturgy, Ori tracked progress.

The gang were inside. “There’s an empath,” Toro said. “They know we’re in.” Of course there’s a damn empath, Ori thought. There’s an empath and a shockjack and a cryomance, there’s everything. He stopped because he could feel the edge of hysteria.

There was the diversion. Ori could feel something. Steps on the stairs? Someone just beyond the wall running up and others running down. First sign of entrance, they’ll split: inner core’ll go to the Mayor, the outer squad’ll go to the incursion. They’ll move fast to get the Mayor out.

As the militia descended, Kit must be running the first set of stairs, sweeping whatever came at him with sticky flame, running fast past the fires he started. And as behind him came Ruby and Enoch with their own weapons, laying their traps, at the same time as that first wave—that diversion—came and the bodyguards rushed to its point of entry, Ulliam was funnelling gunpowder at the base of the door, leaving a tide-mark of explosive. And there, evidence of their breach. Ori heard shooting.

He imagined the guests moving with murderous militia grace. He hoped his comrades had surprised them enough to take some down. He even let himself hope they might get away.

Ulliam blew the door. Now the street would know. But in that fearful time, perhaps they would not intercede too quickly. Some of the Clypeans must be veering to deal with this new incursion. The ground floor would be thronging. And finally, Baron would be going in.

Ori pictured it. Such daring. He wished he could see. Swinging a line out from the first-floor window to that of the adjoining house, and Baron, in his new armour and helmet, brachiating across, letting the stepped rope drop for Old Shoulder to climb. Baron must be in the hall, attaching his charge to the banister and lighting that long fuse. And spraying oil on the stairs and lighting it so that the bulk of the militia were trapped beneath, Baron would let out a bellow, and now with Old Shoulder beside him, rivebow cocked, spitbolt ready, he must be treading up the stairs.

The inner guard would have to look, would send a scout-squad to the top of the stair, and oh Ori could just imagine the shock and the determination when they saw Baron. He would fire and back away, drawing them out. They would be so astonished to see him, his guns poised, bunching his shoulders, in his armour and his new helmet, cast so carefully in mimicry, his rivet-scarred bull’s head.

Toro! they would cry. Toro!

Were they shouting that now?

Even the Clypeans would be afraid to have so famous a bandit with them, the perpetrator of such inventive death and rebellion. They would have to attack. Ori put his ear to the plaster-dusted wood. There was scuttering beyond. “They’re going,” said Toro behind him.

“It’s time,” said Toro.

There was running—Ori could hear it. He drew his pepperpot revolver and saw that his hands were absolutely unshaking.

“It’s time, now,” said Toro. The Clypean Guards would be running past the charge Baron had laid, seeing only fires below and the retreating, shooting figure of Baron in his bull’s head disguise, slamming his horns from side to side so they rang against the walls. Ori had strapped on Baron’s headgear. Can you see? he had said, and Baron had answered, Enough to kill. And enough to die. Ori did not think Baron cared.

Old Shoulder must be firing his rivebow at any cactus militia before turning to the others; and with him, shooting with the expertise of the specialist, Baron the ersatz Bull. Drawing the militia out. Toro said again that it was time.

It was, it was almost time, it would be time in any moment. Ori strained. Step step two three quickly quickly step fire.

“Now,” Toro said, and this time it was true. There was a flowering of explosion. The sound of fire unfolding and the judder of masonry; dust pounced from the wall around Ori and in a chorus of downward raging housematter the stairs adjoining the topmost room to the melees below were blown by Baron’s bomb. The room beyond Ori’s wall was cut off.

“Now,” Toro said, and stepped up beside Ori, who moved his gun into place, stood beside his boss as Toro crouched and charged, with a distorted rage-noise, pushing horns ajut and piercing this time not the world with hermetic techniques but in the most base way the wall itself. It gave without restraint. And Toro was through, and Ori was through, and standing in the wall’s lime and laths detritus in a bedroom, with men and a woman staring at them.

Ori’s calm held. It slowed time. Motion was languid. He moved as if in water.

A warm room, tapestries and paintings, ornate furniture, a fire, a woman and man on a chaise, another man standing, no, two men, looking at the dusting hole and at Ori and Toro. There was music. Someone was moving: a man in evening dress, his coat-tails flapping as he came with cat-grace, levelling a cane that unfolded organically into a weapon like a metal claw. He was very close and Ori was curiously without fear raising his pistol and wondering if it would reach its apogee in time, if he could interrupt the oncomer.

Toro grunted. Toro was goring forward and spitted the man from a distance, two boreholes opening in the bodyguard’s chest so he was sodden in blood and his eyes closed and he died at Ori’s feet.

Ori moved his gun: step step, aim, one two, corner, corner. He heard shouting. The other standing man had his hands up, was shouting, “Sulion! Sulion!” Ori shot him.

The body of their contact lay bleeding from the clean headshot. The man and the woman sat quite still and stared at the corpse. Toro raised a snubbed pistol to them, and looked through those white-shining glass eyes at Ori.

Of course there was no expression to the cast head. No one had given Ori the order to kill Sulion. He looked at the body and did not feel vindication. Had it been a panic? Had he meant to do it? For what was this revenge? Ori did not know. He was still not shaking.

Toro nodded at the door: Secure the room. Ori stepped over Sulion’s wet corpse.

The corridor ended in a charred and guttering interruption. There was fighting below. He wondered which of his friends were still alive. Oily fire slathered the walls like ivy. They had only minutes before the house became conflagration or militia thaumaturgy breached the black hole they had punched in the house.

“We ain’t got long,” Ori said. He stood by Toro, before the last two people in the room, still sitting by the fire, watching them.

From a voxiterator a cello suite sounded, spitting momentarily with a crack of the wax. The man was in his sixties, broad and muscled under flesh, wearing a silk robe. He had a still, clever face. He kept his eyes on Ori and the Bull with such precision Ori knew he was trying to plan. He held the hand of the woman.

She must be close to his age—history evidenced that—but her face was almost without lines. Her hair was down-white. Ori recognised her from hundreds of heliotypes. She carried a long clay pipe as slender as a fingerbone. Its bowl still smoldered. It smelt of spice. She wore a shawl with nothing beneath. She did not cringe or glower or stare defiance. She watched with the same calm probing look as her lover.

“I can pay you,” she said. Her voice was absolutely steady.

“Hush,” Toro said. “Mayor Stem-Fulcher, hush now.”

Mayor Stem-Fulcher. Ori was curious. More even than angry, or disgusted, or murderous for revenge, he was curious. This woman had ordered the Paradox Massacre, had sent the rate of Remaking higher and higher. This woman did backdoor deals with the New Quill Party, let their pogroms against xenians go uninvestigated. This was the woman who had stuffed the official guilds with informers. Presiding over a rotting polity on which countereconomies of hunger and theft grew like fungus. This woman perpetrated the war. Mayor Eliza Stem-Fulcher, La Crobuzonia, the Fat Sun Mater.

“You know you won’t get out,” the Mayor said. Her voice was steady. She even raised her pipe, as if she would smoke. “I can give you passage.” She did not sound hopeful. She looked at her lover, and something went between them. A valediction, Ori thought, and for the first time felt a swell of something in him, a compound emotion he could not begin to parse. She knows.

“Hush, Mayor.”

The Mayor and her magister looked again at each other. Eliza Stem-Fulcher turned to Toro, and though she did not take her hand from the man’s she sat up some, as if formally, and she did take a draw from her pipe. She held it and closed her eyes a moment, breathed it out in a great flow from her nostrils, and she looked at Toro again and, gods, Ori thought awed, gods, she smiled.

“What do you think you’ll do?” she said. Indulgent as a kindly schoolma’am. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She turned square to Toro and gave another smile, drew again from the pipe, held her smoky breath, and she cocked her face quizzically and raised an eyebrow—Well?—and Toro shot her dead.

Her lover jumped as the bullet took her, and bit his lip hard but could not control his voice, could not stop himself letting out a mew, a cat-sound that became a moan. He sat and held her hand while she emptied out, her head back on blood. Smoke uncoiling from her open mouth. Gunsmoke joined her head and Toro’s hand in a moment’s sulphur umbilicum. The man breathed out sobs and held her hand. But he made himself be done, and made himself look up at Toro.

Ori was deep and dreamishly stunned, but he felt in him the tremors of the knowledge that they were done, and not dead. He raised the thought that gods, they might get out, they might yet. Let’s go then.

“Watch him,” Toro said and Ori raised his gun. Toro began to unbuckle the straps that held the huge metal head in place. Ori did not understand what he saw. Toro was removing the iron. “Watch him.” The voice came again, this time uncoupled from whatever mechanisms made it so orotund, and it seemed to falter and become human.

Something went out of the air as Toro pulled the helmet away and broke a thaumaturgic current. Toro lifted the metal off, like a diver removing the heavy brass helmet. Toro shook out her sweaty hair.

Ori looked at the woman and his gun did not waver from the magister’s chest. He had not felt capable of surprise for a long time.

Toro was Remade, of course. She turned her head. She was turned to wire by her middle years and by whatever traumas had made her Toro. Her face was set and animal hungry. She did not look at Ori. She sat, on a footstool, in front of the magister, laid her bull helmet to one side.

A child’s arms emerged from her. One from each side of her face. One over each brow. A baby’s arms that moved listlessly, tangling and untangling in her lank hair. They had been stretched out, one inside each horn, in the helmet. They waved next to her face like spiders’ pedipalps.

She sat and closed her eyes, stretched out her arms and the baby’s arms. She was quiet some moments.

“Legus,” she said. “I know you’re grieving now, but I need you to listen to me.” Without the distortion, Ori could hear her accent from the southwest of the city was strong. She pointed at the magister’s eyes and then at her own: Look at me. She held her gun gently at his belly.

“I’ll tell you my story. I want you to understand why I’m here.” A little sucking sound came out of the Mayor as gas or blood moved. She stared at the ceiling with the concentration of the dead. “I’ll tell you. Maybe you know already. But listen.

“It’s hard to find out your true name, like it’s supposed to be, but it can be done. There’s a black market in onomastics. But if it’s consolation, yours stayed hidden well. Magister Legus. I been trying to find out a long time.

“I came out of jail more than a decade ago. Graduated, we called it. The rumours, what we learn inside. We had something on every magister there is. You hear things. Drugs, boys, girls, blackmail. Nonsense, some of it. Legus, they said to me, Legus is a wily sod. You know he fucks the home secretary? As she was then.” She nodded at the cooling Stem-Fulcher. “That was information that never went away. Heard it often enough from those I trusted, inside and outside.

“Know how hard I been working on this, Legus?” She would not use his real name. “Getting myself ready. Had to fight to get my helmet made.” The child-arms patted her forehead. “I made myself; I been readying for years. To be exact, Legus,” she said, “you made me. Do you remember?”

“More than two decades gone. You remember those big old towers in Ketch Heath? Yes, you remember. That’s where I lived. I killed my darling. You remember, Magister? My girl Cecile.

“She cried and cried and cried and I was crying too and then I took her and I think maybe it was that I was shaking her to make her shush, I don’t remember, but she was gone when I remember again. And I took her down held close to keep her warm, to a sawbones worked gratis every other Blueday, but of course that didn’t work.

“And then there you were.” She leaned in. “You remember now?”

He did not. Of the thousands he had sentenced to Remaking, how could he remember one? Ori watched Legus. Toro reached up, tugged with a parent’s unthinking gentle playfulness at the child’s hand.

“You told me it was so I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget.” She leaned forward again and Cecile’s arms stretched out, toward Magister Legus holding the Mayor’s dead hand. There was noise. Their bomb-cavity was being breached. Toro pulled on her cestus. “It was her birthday just two weeks gone,” she said. “She’s older now than I was when I had her. My little girl.”

She stood and put her gun to Legus’ temple. Legus gripped Stem-Fulcher’s hand and opened his mouth but did not speak.

“From me,” she said. She did not sound angry. “From the men you made machines, the women you made monsters. Tanks, snailgirls, panto-horses, industry engines. And from all them you locked away in the toilets you call jails. And from all them on the run in case you find them. And from me, and from Cecile—and yes it was me, my hands done it, and that’s mine to feel. Cecile don’t grow, and she don’t rest. My girl. So this is from her too.”

She kept her pistol barrel to his head and punched him once then many times with her spiked cestus, and he grunted and gave out a blood retch and his face went ugly and he put up his hand not to ward her but in a reaching for something, not to interrupt the bihorned jabs—those he took, gripping his lover’s hand so hard her dead fingers splayed. He could not stop himself barking at the pain and spilling more blood down his front as Toro punched him in a miserable repetition, shoving horns into his gullet and heart, and her baby’s hands reached out above her onslaught and played with the dying magister’s hair.

Ori stood still while it was done and for a long time afterward. He waited for Toro to move—this small woman, with her south-city accent, her old grudge. After a minute or more when she did not, only sat with her head down while the magister put out his blood around her, he spoke.

“Come on,” Ori said. There was the sound of approach. “We have to go.”

She did turn to him, though he thought at first she would not. She looked with the effort of one waking and shook her head as if she did not understand his language. She did not speak, but she gave him to understand that she was going nowhere, that she was done.

“And, and . . .” Some pride or respect meant Ori would not have himself sound plaintive or aghast, and he spoke only when he knew his voice would level. “And this was the only way, then, eh? Us?” Ruby, he was saying, Ulliam, Kit, all of them down there, did they have to be part of this? Baron, godsdammit, and Old Shoulder. Gods know who’s died for you.

She gestured at the stiffening Mayor.

“We done what they wanted. We done what they come here to do.”

“Yes.” Yes but it isn’t the same. It was a sideshow, it wasn’t what you were here for, and that’s different, it makes it different.

Does it? Didn’t we win?

A middle-aged woman from the working-class estates of southwest New Crobuzon sat by two blood-glazed corpses. A young man from Dog Fenn held a gun uneasily and listened to his enemies getting closer. Everything was different.

“I want to go,” he said, shaking suddenly as all the anxiety he had dulled welled in him. He felt himself want again, for the first time in many days. And what it was he wanted, was to get out.

“So go.”

From the bitten-out hole through which they had come in he could hear hammering, sledgehammers taken to the doors of their empty house and echoing up its stairwells.

“You’ve killed me!”

“For Jabber’s sake, Ori, go.” She kicked her helmet at him. It jerked, rocked on its horns. He looked at it, at her, at it, picked it up. “Hexes are down. Go.” It was very heavy.

“I don’t know how to use this. What do I do?”

“Just push. Just push.”

There were shouts from the approaching militia.

“You’re giving me your helmet?”

She screamed at him. She said Go! but it stopped being a word, was quickly more animal than that, was only misery. He backed away and looked at the sticky emitting dead who kept her company, the way she sat, too tired even to tug her baby’s hands.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” he said. “You shouldn’t have used us like this. You used us hard. You had no right.” He lifted the mask, faltered under it. He hated how he sounded. “You killed them. Probably me too. It was . . . Was an honour to run with you.” He heard what must be grapples. Militia climbing. He heard them shout the Mayor’s name. “You shouldn’t have done this. I’m glad you . . . you got what you wanted. Shouldn’t have done it this way, but we got what we meant to, too.” He lowered the mask to his shoulders and tried to effect some militant salute, but Toro was not looking at him.

When the helmet settled it lightened. It felt like cloth. He had no talent for thaumaturgy, but even he could feel the metal thick with it. He looked through crystal that lightened the room, brought edges clear; he pulled the buckles tight under his shoulders, felt himself enhanced.

He gasped. Little needles spoked into his neck; his fingers gripped the metal. The sacrifice, the blood to power this iron head. How do I do this? he tried to shout. He felt extrusions of metal under his teeth and tried to bite or push them one way or another, feeling them still wet with the woman’s spit. His voice dinned in his own ears.

Push. Ori stood as he had seen her do and shoved with new-powerful thighs, jerked forward, staggered, balanced, tried again. He braced the tips of the horns against the wall and strained and only embedded them in the wood. People were running toward the door. Push, she had said. Where am I pushing to?

In his eagerness, his desperate sudden want to be alive, he reached for an urgency, envisioned his home, his little room. He thought of it and alchemised the want into a focus, and when he ploughed forward again he clenched his eyes and teeth and felt the hankering coalesce in two blistering nodes where the horns met his forehead, and he pushed again and felt something catch, a sensual rupture like splitting taut wax paper. He gasped, and the substance of the air began to part for him and like water tension it tried to draw him in.

Ori paused at the edge of the little ontic abomination, the hole, while the universe strained. Ahead of him was distressed darkness. He twisted, keeping the horns in the wound he had made, and tried to catch the eyes of the woman with the child’s arms playing pat-a-cake on her cheeks. She did not look at him. She did not look at the corpses she had made.

The militia were at the door. Ori pushed, let the momentum take him, into the rift he had made, out of that room where the most notorious thief and murderer of a generation quietly wept, where the ruler of New Crobuzon grew stiff, and

he was for a moment a long moment in a wrinkle, in an innard of time, of the world, his synapses gone sluggard so he felt his backwash of panic like slow clouding water as he thought what if he had the strength to break the surface of the universe and slip grubbish into the mortar between instants between cells of the real but what if he did not have the power to emerge again and was lost in the flesh of dimensions, a microbe in the protean, in spaceandtime?

What then?

But his push continued, and a long long time and an instant after the first split, he felt another; the membrane parted for him again, on the other side, and disgorged him like a splinter. He fell through and to the ground slippery, wet with reality’s blood, his inexpert passage having done trauma in its passing, blood that evanesced in iridescent skeins, a pavonine moment in the air that was gone, and left Ori disoriented and dry again, and in

an alley scattered with rubbish.

For a long time he lay bleating weakly, until the feeling like overwhelming motion sickness subsided, and strength seeped back to him.

He could not fathom where he was. He was giddy. In his Toro getup, aware that it made him a target. I’ll rest soon, he thought through fog. His forehead hurt, in points at the bases of the horns. He had come through, but nowhere near where he wanted to go.

Ori could feel a chill, but it did not trouble him. He stumbled and looked up as he came through entangled alleyways, and there was a line intersecting his path, nightblack arches that even Toro’s eyes could not see into, the brick and the dorsal crest of the elevated railroad. And beyond, tooth-yellow in the gaslamps that underlit them, the soffit of the Ribs. Ori was in Bonetown.

He lay for hours. The sky was grey-lit when he woke. When he removed the helmet he almost blacked out, and had to lean and breathe in a cavity below the railway. Silence unnerved him. He heard a few of the sounds that made the city whisper, but the bricks against which he leaned were still. They conducted no vibrations. The New Crobuzon trains should run all night, but there were none.

Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight. What’s happening? He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did not believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him. What has happened?

There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.

They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fenn. There, something was blocking his way.

Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.

“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.

It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.

“Stop, fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”

Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage. What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday? “No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”

“This is my home. Syriac. What’s happened? Godsdammit, how long was I between . . . This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak. I might’ve been days, he thought. What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods. “Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all happened . . . How long ago did she die?”

“Who?”

“The Mayor.” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting. She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store . . .

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.

“But what . . .”

“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.

“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”—and there were pantomime boos—“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fenn, in the future, which is now.

“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”

Part Seven:

Stain

Chapter Twenty-three

“I hate that we run from them.”

“You heard, though. You heard how it was. We have to play safe. They’re armed to take us out.”

“But if we have to run from them, why by gods are we heading back to the city? It’ll be way worse.”

“It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? That’s not the idea. We send out word. By coming back, we change things. By the time we get back, it won’t be them waiting for us. It’ll be a different city.”

Cutter and the man lounged against a wall after another dance, in a cab reconfigured. It was a punitive journey, and night after night the Iron Councillors kicked against the darkness to improvised rhythms.

There had been deaths, of course, to footholds lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland predators, animals that unfolded in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council’s forces, came back with the heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories. That one phases, so we trapped it when it went icy and I took it through the heart. That one sees with its teeth.

Cutter saw some of the new thaumaturgy the Iron Council had learned. It would not have saved them from the militia. The Council tried to make things hard for their pursuers, blowing up bridges behind them, filling trenches with rubble. Judah laid golem traps behind the Iron Council, set to be triggered only by a company of men. He laid as many as he could—each one ate at his energy. Cutter imagined the earth buckling and unbuckling become a rock figure, a figure made of fallen trees, the water of the stream, wherever Judah had laid the trap. Its one instruction indelible and simple in place of a brain: fight. The substance of the inlands themselves gone not feral but organized, interceding and pounding down the militia with its blows.

If the militia reached that far, which Cutter thought they would. Some of them would die, but most would likely not. When they made landfall, found the Council’s trail, even the power of Judah’s great golems could not stop them coming. The militia would close on the stragglers of the Iron Council, those left behind by the train. Iron Council relied on the cacotopic zone. That was what would hide them.

“Didn’t think I’d see this again,” Judah said. They were on a crag peering over the tracks, the long dotted-out spread of men and women, riding pack mules or walking hard and fast, surrounding and joining the graders.

What if the Council changes its policy on the way? Cutter thought. What if we get halfway across and enough people disagree and want to go back?

There. The sun moved behind them. Its vividness seemed to green slowly as it sank, as if it were verdigrising. In the ill-seeming light they looked north and east into the cacotopic stain. They had come hundreds of miles, in weeks, and here they were, at the edge.

Cutter went white to see it. “Qurabin,” he said, “tell us a secret. What is it? What’s happening there?” Something sounded in the air like scuttling.

The monk’s voice came: “Some secrets I don’t want to know.”

There, a Torque landscape. Mussed by that ineffable bad energy, the explosion of shaping, a terrible fecundity. Vistas. We ain’t seeing what this really is, Cutter thought. This is just one idea. One way of it being.

Even there in the outskirts of the cacotopos land was liminal, half-worldly geography, half some bad-dream set. It was merciless, stone horns and trees that looked like stone horns, forests of head-high mushrooms and ferns that dwarfed runt pines and, a way off, the flat of some delta where the sky seemed to push in between too-tall extrusions. Cutter could see nothing moving. That unplace extended to the horizon. It was many miles to pass through.

Cutter did not know if he was seeing hills or insects flying close to his eye: that could not be, he knew, but the impossibility of focus confounded him. Was that a forest so far off? That went for many miles? Or was it not a forest but a tar pit? Or now perhaps not a tar pit but a sea of bones or a grid, a wall of tessellated carbon or scabmatter the size of a city.

He could not make it out. He saw a mountain and the mountain was a new shape, and the snow on its top was a colour snow should not be and was not snow but something alive and tenebrotropic. The distant stuff extended cilia that must be the size of trees, toward oncoming darkness. Lights in the sky, stars, then birds, moons, two or three moons that were the bellies of acre-wide lightning bugs and then were gone.

“I can’t do the sense of it.” Qurabin’s voice was terrible. “There are some things the Moment of the Hidden and the Lost doesn’t know, or’s scared to say.”

The Torquescape was insinuatory, and fervent, and full of presences, animalized rock that hunted as granite must of course hunt and spliced impossibilities. They had all heard the stories: the cockroach tree, the chimerae of goat and ghost, reptilian insects, treeish things, trees themselves become holes in time. There was more than Cutter could bear. His eyes and mind kept trying, kept straining to contain, encompass. “How could they do this? Travel through this?”

“Not through,” Judah said. “They didn’t. Keep remembering that. They went just round the outside. Close enough to scare.”

“Close enough to die,” Cutter said, and Judah inclined his head.

“What things live here?” Cutter said.

“Impossible to list,” Judah said. “Each is its own thing. There are some I suppose—there are shunn, there are inchmen in the outskirts . . .”

“Where we’ll be.”

“Where we’ll be.”

They would be three weeks, perhaps, in the edges of the cacotopic zone. Three weeks pushing as close as they dared into the viral landscape. There must have been those who had passed through it before, in the half-millennium since it appeared in a spurt of pathological parturition. Cutter knew the stories of Cally the winged man; he had heard rumours of adventures in the stain.

“There must be another way,” he said. But no, they said there was not.

“It’s the only way to be safe from the militia,” Drogon whispered. “The only way to be sure they won’t follow us. They’ll be stranded outside. It’s basic orders: never go into the zone. And anyway—” His intonation changed, the breath of his words faster. “—this is how they found their way. The Council, I mean. A passage through the continent. You know how long people tried for that? A passage? Through the smokestone, the cordillera, the quaglands, the barrows? We can’t risk changing it. This might be the only way.”

A few miles in, Judah disappeared for hours in the train’s wake, returned exhausted. Cutter screamed at him not to go off alone, and Judah gave one of his saint’s smiles.

Camouflaged with brush were segments of the tracks. The scouts and graders joined them, section to section, and the train went through the outlands of the stain. Cutter clung to the perpetual train and let the wind refresh him. There were a few demons of motion left, all domesticated now, the children or grandchildren of the first wild pulse-eating dweomers who had chewed the wheels. The ethereal little fauna were cowed. Cutter watched them.

He watched the rocks and the trees, heard below the grind of the gears and flywheels the bleatings of unseen animals. There were fights as people tried to take their turn sleeping in the cabs. The camp of graders was a tight little tent-town, in circles for safety. Still, nothing could prevent some of the effects of the cacotopic stain reaching out.

Water was rationed, but still every day crews led by the council’s few vodyanoi dowsers would set out to find potable streams—they went south, always, away from the Torque and the danger. And still every few days one or other would return ragged and stammering, carrying the remnants of someone lost, or bundling someone who had changed. Torque touched at night with its fingers of alterity.

“She was fine till we headed home,” the hunters might shout, holding a Remade woman who shook so ceaselessly hard and fast that the blur of her limbs and head half-solidified and she was a faintly screaming mass of quasi-solid flesh. “Shadowphage,” they might say, indicating the terrified boy from whom light shone too brightly, the inside of his open mouth as clear and illuminated as the crown of his head. People came back who had become gnawed by the radula of impossibly fast vermiform predators. The Iron Council passed over footprints: the stiletto holes of an echinoid rex, the strange tracks of an inchman, pounded earth in clumps four or five yards apart.

Of the Torque- or animal-wounded they saved those they could, in the cattle-truck become a sanatorium. Others they buried. In their tradition, they laid them ahead of the tracks. Once, digging a grave, they disturbed the bones of one of their ancestors, one of the Council dead on the outward journey, and with tremendous respect they begged her pardon and laid the newly died down with her forever.

“This can’t be right,” Cutter raged. “How many will this take? How many have to die?”

“Cutter, Cutter,” Ann-Hari said. “Hush you. It’s a terrible thing. But if we stayed, faced militia, we all die. And Cutter . . . so many more were killed the first time. So many more. We’re getting better at this. The perpetual train sends out safety. It’s charmed.” Every day the heads of new predators were hung from the train. It became a grotesque museum of the hunt.

When Cutter saw Drogon, the whispersmith was in a state of constant amazement. He relished the hunt even in these badlands, and everywhere they went he watched so closely, tracking their passage through splits and rockways, watching the movement of the cacotopic zone. He was committing it to memory, trying to understand it. That was one way. Cutter preferred another: wanted this time to be done, wanted only to have it end.

He went with crews scavenging for wood and ground-coal, peat, anything for the boilers. He went with his companions, searching for water.

The diviner emerged from the water-tank car given over to the vodyanoi. His name was Shuechen. He was sour and taciturn as stereotype said vodyanoi always were. Cutter liked that. His own brusqueness, cynicism and temper predisposed him to atrabilious vodyanoi.

As they rode, Shuechen swinging in his water-filled saddlesac, the dowser told them about the debates, the factions among the Councillors, the argument over the Council’s new direction. Ex-Runagaters, cynics, the young, the fearful old. There was uncertainty growing as to whether this was the best strategy, he said.

Shuech would put his big palms flat and sniff the earth, slapping it and listening to its echoes. He led them three hours from the train. Clean water came out of the rocks and gathered in a basin surrounded by roots so minimally touched by Torque that Cutter could imagine he was back in Rudewood. When he did, loss broke him a long moment.

They filled their water-sacks but then it was night, fast as a rag thrown over the sun, and quickly they made camp. They did not light a fire. “Not near the zone,” Shuech said.

Gripped together against a punitive rocky cold, the two Remade made Cutter’s party tell them about New Crobuzon. “Rudgutter’s dead? Can’t say it’s a shock. That bastard was Mayor forever. And now it’s Stem-Fulcher? Gods help us.”

They were stunned by the changes. “The militia patrol openly? In uniform? What in hell happened?” Pomeroy gave a brief history of the Construct War, the attack on the dumps, the rumours of what was within. It did not sound real, even to Cutter, who remembered it.

For a long time they straight refused to believe what Cutter told them of the handlingers.

“We was chased by one,” he said. “I’m telling you. During one of the riot crises a few years back Stem-Fulcher announced that they’ve, whatever, made contact, and that they were all misunderstood.” The handlingers, figures of terror for centuries, the feral hands come from corpses (some said), who were devils escaped from hell (some said), who took over the minds of their hosts and made their bodies into something much more than they had been. If the condemned are to die anyway, Stem-Fulcher had said, and the city is in need of help the handlingers can give, it is foolish sentimentality not to draw an obvious conclusion. And of course they would be tightly controlled.

Even so the announcement had spurred new riots out of disgust, the abortive Handlinger Revolt. The crowd who would have taken boats across the Gross Tar to assault Parliament were defeated by those they were protesting, men and women suddenly rising from their masses and spitting fire, dextrier handlingers wearing the meat of the condemned.

Cutter talked late. He was very afraid of changing. “What if Torque gets out here?” he kept saying, and the Remade reassured him differently, one saying that if your number was up it was up, the other that they were far enough that they should be all right.

That night they were attacked.

Cutter woke to ripping and opened his eyes into grey moonlight and a face staring at his own. He thought it had come with him from his dreams. He heard shooting. He hauled himself away from the expression bearing down on him, a quizzical and monstrous look.

When adrenaline hit him he was already moving, was already out and running, thinking, Where are the others, what’s happening, what will I do? Emerging into the camp he saw more clearly what had come and what was happening and he stumbled and fought hard not to fall.

His party were around him, running, firing, and there was someone’s scream that made Cutter cry out himself. He saw the stirrings of the tent like a rag-beast as the thing that tore it flapped fragments like wings. He saw a looping, spastic move and there was the impact of something hurled to the ground, and then another. The percussions were around him everywhere.

“Inchmen!” he heard Elsie shout. “Inchmen!”

The creature threw the rippings of his tent apart and the wind spiraled them into the air and emerging from their centre as if by cheap stage effect was what had come for him with brute and hungry enquiry, what had smelt him through the cerecloth. In the swirl of rag-ends came his predator. Spangrub. Kohramit. Homo raptor geometridae. An inchman.

Cutter stared. The face of the figure leered at him and came forward very suddenly, snapping up and down in a motion Cutter did not for some moments understand.

Taller than he but all torso, its trunk seeming to extend from the ground, its head twice the size of his, long arms scrawn and bone, hands splayed or knuckle-dragging, clutching as it moved. Near-human, its mouth opened by teeth black and long, spike-sharp. He could not see its eyes. Two sinkholes, a mass of wrinkled skin and shadows: if it saw it did so out of darkness. It turned and sniffed, throwing back its bald head and opening and closing as best it could that toothed mouth. And then it shifted and Cutter saw its hindquarters.

Colossal and grossly tubate, a caterpillar body studded with tufts, ventricles opening and closing sphincters, dun and specked with warning colours. The man torso congealed into the front of that yards-long body, hip bones into larval flesh. The inchman moved.

It had a clutch of little pulsing legs at its front below its pale torso, and two, three stubby pairs of prolegs at its very rear. It pulled its rear up in a great arch, vised its prolegs into the hard earth, took the weight of its forebody, and with a flail lifted it, straightening the tube of bodiness, the humanish torso high at the end of outstretched grub physiognomy that batted uncertainly at the air, then onto the spongy caterpillar forelegs.

It sniffed again. It arched again, gripped and opened itself out, put its forebody down closer. Inchworm motion. A groping walk, a spanning toward him.

Cutter fired and ran. The inchman accelerated. The Iron Councillors tried to fight. There were several inchmen at the camp’s corners. There was the bray of a mule, and shouting.

In the moon’s glare Cutter saw another of the loopworm men champing, blood black in the half-light all over its front and mouth, a huge hand pressing down on the shuddering animal beneath it. It made an open-mouthed parody of chewing.

One inchman emitted an elyctric roar. The others joined in, spilling grots from their mouths.

The mules and runt camels were screaming. Shuech fired and the fist of buckshot sheared off skull and brain mass, but the inchman hit did not drop, too stupid or stubborn to die. It lurched in with its grotesque larval swaying, and with a leather-skinned hand grabbed a man and punctured him. The man screamed but stopped very fast as the inchman took him apart.

Shuech threw flaming cacodyl, and the caustic spread over one of the caterpillar figures, which batted without urgency at the fire. It sounded again, that throat noise, and as it reared on its hind prolegs it became a torch, illuminating them all.

The things blocked them. They were caught by a shelf above a canyon, which went to scree too loose to run. Cutter backed against rock and fired. Someone cried. Judah was murmuring.

The rearmost inchman chattered slab teeth. Its head burst. Matter spattered its fellows. Pomeroy refilled his smoking grenade shot.

In the wake of one Iron Council thaumaturge Cutter saw simple plantlife growing in footprint shapes, the spoor of moss-magic. The mossist growled and a mass of blots mottled an inchman’s skin, a bryophyte coating clogging its mouth and the holes of its eyes. It reared, retching, clawing the plant pelt and drawing its own thick blood.

The Iron Councillors fired chakris, fat flat-blade disks or scythe-bladed arrows. The inchmen bled in gouts, but did not stop coming. Judah stepped up with a near-holy fury in his face. He touched the ground. His crooked hand spasmed.

For a second nothing and then the inchmen were padding on moving earth that began to unfold in the shape of a vast man, a somatic intervention in the rock and regolith—and then something stammered in the aether and broke. Judah staggered and sat hard on the loose stones, and the ground settled. The human shape that had begun to disaggregate from it became random again.

Cutter cried Judah’s name. Judah was holding his head. An inchman was one step away from him.

But Pomeroy was there, his blade in his hand. With a psychotic doomed bravery while Elsie screamed he hacked into the human-form abdomen of the inchman.

He was a very strong man. The inchman even stopped a moment at the impact, and Pomeroy let go the sword and stepped back, standing in front of Judah, who gathered himself, looked up as the inchman snatched Pomeroy’s head. Its enormous palm pressed over the man’s face, swung him by his head with the absent savagery of a baby.

Cutter heard the shearing of Pomeroy’s neck, and Elsie’s scream. The inchman flailed Pomeroy’s body. Judah was crouched again, drawing up the golem from the earth. This time it came all the way. It stamped, shedding its earth-self, swung at the nearest inchman. The enormous strike sent the thing off the rock, into the air. Its inchworm arse flexed; it dropped and hit the ground with explosive wetness.

Elsie was weeping. The other inchmen were closing, and Judah crooked his fingers and the golem interceded. It stamped with a walk that was Judah’s walk, Cutter would swear, performed by earth. It stood before the Councillors and tore into another of the geometrid things.

After a moment of indecision while the exhausted Councillors fired, the inchmen retreated from the towering golem. Two descended head-first down the sheer uneven rock. The third was trapped in a last ugly blood-mud wrestle, and the collapsing golem rolled with its opponent to the edge and over.

Judah kneeled by Pomeroy, and the Iron Councillors ran to help their comrades. Cutter, shaking, stared over the edge. He saw the inchmen descending the vertical surface. On the rock floor were the bodies of the two who had fallen, and the red earth of the golem.

Cutter went to Pomeroy and gripped his dead friend. He gripped Elsie, who was wailing, who sobbed on him. Judah was stricken. Cutter tried to grab him too, pulled him close. They hung on together. The three of them held as Elsie cried, and Cutter felt Pomeroy go cold.

“What happened?” he whispered in Judah’s ear. “What happened? You . . . are you all right? You stumbled . . . and Pom—”

“Died for me.” Judah’s voice was perfectly flat. “Yes.”

“What happened?”

“Something . . . A remote. I weren’t expecting it. A golem trap was triggered. I’m saving chymicals and batteries—it took its energy mostly from me, and I didn’t have the focus. It shook me, made me fall.” He closed his eyes, lowered his head. He kissed Pomeroy’s face.

“It’s a golem trap I put in our path,” he said. “The militia triggered it. They’ve made landfall. They’re coming.”

Chapter Twenty-four

On the coast hundreds of miles away (Judah said) an ictineo, one of New Crobuzon’s experimental ichthyscaphoi, must have come to land. A behemoth fish come out of the ocean crawling on fins that became leg-stubs that stamped forward until the stumpy limbs shattered under their own weight and the enormous Remade fish-thing lay down and shuddered. This was what must have come.

A mongrel of whale-shark distended by biothaumaturgy to be cathedral-sized, varicellate shelled, metal pipework thicker than a man in ganglia protuberant like prolapsed veins, boat-sized fins swinging on oiled hinges, a dorsal row of chimneys smoking whitely. The fish-ship’s mouth (Judah said) must have opened with a grind of industry, anchored by chains, drawbridge-style, as the flange of lower jaw descended and the men of the New Crobuzon militia emerged, bringing their weapons, and coming for the Council.

“It weren’t so easy for us when first we came through. We found ourselves wandering, trying to get away from the stain, and then the path would coil and we’d be going straight into the Torque’s innards, sky like guts or like teeth. We lost so many to it then,” the man said.

He was, from long ago, a Dog Fenn Remade. His hands were gone, the left a mess of bird’s feet congealed in talon-mass, the right a snake’s thick tail. He was a scald, an Iron Council balladeer, and the apparent halting of his delivery was a game: he told in a complex, arresting syncopation mimicking novicehood. His story was a kind of lay for those dead by the inchmen.

“We lost so many. They went to glass and then was just gone, on a hill that was a bone and then a pile of bones and then a hill again. We learnt ways of passing through this in-between.” There was no scientist in the world of Bas-Lag who knew more about Torque, about the cacotopos, than the Iron Council.

“Now we come back, the land’s shucked and the Torque’s done what it’s done. Some of the rails we hid is gone, some’s corkscrewed, some are holes the shape of rails, some are lizards made of stone. But there are enough to get us out again. To come out on the other side, with only the plains between us and New Crobuzon. Hundreds of miles, weeks maybe months, but not the years it would once have taken.”

Many miles west, the New Crobuzon Militia tracked them.

Inchmen came again. This time they attacked the train itself, and were repelled but at cost. They drag-crawled and with their wavering spanworm walk stomped toward the train and even touched it and gnawed at it, marked it with stone-hard teeth and caustic spit. Councillors died pushing them away. There were other creatures: shadows shaped like dogs, simians with hyaena voices pelted with grass and leaves.

The ground defied the Council. It changed in sped-up corrasion, in the buckling of tectonics at some psychotic rate as if time was untethered from its rules. The ground crawled. There were patches of sudden and extreme cold where frost-heave buckled rails, and then temperate places where the rockwalls came closer and creeping hills stalked them.

They laid tracks on ground just smooth enough for their passage, on ties just strong enough, just close enough together. It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again. Hauled by the Remade and by young Councillors who had never seen their parents’ former home. Over a spread-out swamp, a quag that ate the tracks.

Cutter would look up, time to time, from his hammering or earth-laying, and see the glowering of the cacotopic stain in the near-distance: the snarl of sky and scene, a baby’s face, an explosion of leaves, an animal in the uncertainty in the air and the hills. We don’t even see it no more, he thought, amazed, and shook his head. The sky was clear, but a serein drizzled onto them. You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity, he thought.

With the knowledge that the militia followed them was a calm. “They’ll stop at the stain,” Judah said, but Cutter realized he was no longer sure. Cutter took heliotypes from the stationary train, of the unstable landscape and creatures that were not insects nor lizards, birds nor metal cogs but something Torque-random that seemed inspired by all these things.

Judah was quiet. He was in himself. He came to Cutter one night and let the younger man fuck him, which Cutter did with the urgency and love he could not ever control. Judah smiled at him and kissed him and stroked his cheek, gods, not as a lover but like some kind of priest.

Judah spent most of his hours in the laboratory car wedged full of witchy detritus. He wound his voxiterator. Listened over and again to the recordings of the stiltspear songs. Cutter saw his notebooks. They were filled: musical scores slashed through with colours, queries, interruptions. Judah muttered rhythms under his breath.

Once Cutter saw him, standing in half-light at day’s end, at the front of the perpetual train. He heard Judah mutter a song-rhythm and pat his own face with one hand, clicking a syncopation with the other. There were motes around Judah’s head, unmoving, a scattered hand of specks, flies and mountain midges that did not eddy with the wind: an unnatural and profound inertia. When the train shucked and rolled a few feet on, Judah left the gust of immobile insects behind.

Wyrmen Councillors flew. They looked for the end of the zone. Some of course did not return, vanished in a fold of air or suddenly forgetful of how to fly, or ossified, or become wyrmen cubs or tangles of rope. But most came back, and after many days in the outlands half-bred from the monstrous and quotidian, they told the Iron Councillors that they were near the end.

They built their last rails along a path their geoseers said was ambulatory, would wander and confuse pursuers. With the engine newly coated with predator heads, newly charnel, and the carriages scratched and marked by their passage, the Iron Council jackknifed up a slope. Cutter found it impossible to imagine land untouched by Torque.

They crested the rise, hammers laying down last tracks, behind them the crews hauling away the iron of their passage. Cutter stared at a windblown landscape of smokestone. It was a vivid and strange place, but without that pathology, that dreadful cancer fertility of the cacotopic stain.

“Oh my gods,” Cutter heard himself say. There was cheering, spontaneous, absolute with delight. “Oh my gods and Jabber and godsdamned fuck, we’re out, we’re out.”

They took a route on the very edge, the littoral ridge that divided the fringes of the Torque from the healthy land. They hammered the metal home on the smokestone flat and came back into natural land.

The perpetual train went through the smokelands. The winds had gusted great roils, rock cumulonimbus on the anvil-tops of which they laid tracks quickly, nervous that they might revert. “Somewhere down there’s where we came in,” Judah said. The split path they had made had long been effaced in scudding stone.

Judah, Cutter and Thick Shanks walked in the lee of the solid cloud, by the edge of the cacotopos.

“Some of us are afraid,” Thick Shanks said. “Things have run away from us. Feels like we ain’t got a choice of what we’re doing.” His voice was thin in the warm wind.

“Sometimes there are no choices,” Judah said. “Sometimes it’s history decides. Just have to hope history don’t get it wrong. Look, look, isn’t that it?”

They found what they were looking for: a vertical uncoil of rock drooled with ivy and on which shrubs were stubbled. There was something different about the ground, a remnant of gouging, long-ago explosive-ploughing. A path visible under two decades’ growth.

“This is where we came through,” Judah said, “the first time.”

He stood by the cloudlike wall and tugged at a rockplant, and Cutter saw it was not a rockplant but a bone come from the stone. A sere wristbone, time-bleached leather still ragging it.

Judah said: “Was too slow.”

A man encased. Caught by a tide of smokestone. Cutter looked with wide eyes. Around the wristbone was a circle of air, a thin burrow, where the arm-meat had been, and had rotted. And inside, it must hollow in a body’s contours, emptied by grubs and bacteria. A flaw, an ossuary the shape of a man. Silted with bones and bonemeal.

“Councillor or militia. Can’t remember now, can you, Shanks? There’s others. Dotted through. Bodies in the rock.” They clambered to the top of the range. The Iron Council moved, its hammers ringing, the wyrmen like windblown leaves above it through the gushing of its smoke. Cutter watched the train progress. He saw the strangeness of its contours, its brick and stone towers, the rope bridges that linked its carriages, its carriage-mounted gardens and the smoke of its chimneys, echoes of the smokestacks at its head and tail.

A way east, long-rusted barrels of militia ordnance protruded from the stone.

In the land beyond, the land that extended to New Crobuzon itself, it was a prairie autumn. The Councillors looked carefully at the water and the woods and hills and at their charts. They could not believe where they were.

The maps they inherited from when Iron Council was the TRT train became useful again. The perpetual train was still embedded in the loosest ink, the crosshatched beige that indicated uncertainty, but eastward the drawings grew more clear; stippling of brush, the watercolour wash of fen, contours of hills in precise line. This was not land on which tracks had been laid, but it was in the city’s ken. The Council could track its route through the ink.

They checked and rechecked. It was a burgeoning revelation. They were heady and astounded. “Around the long lake here. We’ve Cobsea to our south. We should avoid them, get northside of the lake as fast we can. We’ll bring Council justice to New Crobuzon.”

Even knowing the militia followed them could not cow them. “They’ve come after us. They followed us into the stain,” Judah told Cutter. “They’ve triggered a golem trap I put in the cacotopos.” No militia had ever gone so deep. This must be a dedicated squad, who realised the Council was heading back for New Crobuzon.

“We’ll go close to the hills.” Days ahead, a backbone of mountains rose and extended half a thousand miles to New Crobuzon. “We’ll skirt them; we’ll take the train through the foothills. To New Crobuzon.”

There were still months to go, but they went fast. Scouts went to see where bridges or fording were needed, where swampers had to fill wetland, where tunnellers and geothaumaturges would carve out passages. History felt quicker.

Drogon the whispersmith was alight with excitement, sounding in Cutter’s ears, telling him he could not believe that they had come through, that they had achieved this, that they were so close to being home. “Got to clock what we done,” he said. “Got to mark it. No one’s ever done this, and plenty’ve tried. There’s still a way to go, and it’s still land no one knows well, but we’ll do it.”

Judah sat on the traintop and watched this suddenly unalien landscape. “It ain’t safe,” he told Cutter. “Can’t say it’s safe at all.” He spent much time alone, listened to his voxiterator.

“Judah, Cutter,” Elsie said, “we should go back to the city.”

She was silent in these days, with Pomeroy’s death. She had found a calm that let her live in her loneliness. “We don’t know what’s happening there; we don’t know what state they’re in. We need to get them word that we’re coming. We could sway things. We could change it.”

It was a long way still, and there were many things that stood to stop them.

“She’s right.” Drogon spoke to each of them. “We need to know.”

“It ain’t no matter, I don’t think,” Judah said. “We’ll go, nearer the time. We’ll go and get a welcome ready, prepare for them.”

“But we don’t know what it’ll be there . . .”

“No. But it won’t make a difference.”

“What are you talking about, Judah?”

“It won’t make a difference.”

“Well if he ain’t going, no matter. I’ll go alone,” Drogon said. “I’m going back to the city, believe it.”

“They’ll find us, you know,” Elsie said. “Even if we veer north, Cobsea’ll likely hear of us.”

“As if the Council can’t deal with fucking Cobsea men,” Cutter said, but she interrupted.

“And if Cobsea finds us, it won’t be long before New Crobuzon does. And then we’ll have to face them again. Them as follows us, and those that’ll face us too.”

One of the carriages of the perpetual train was changing. They thought they had got through the fringe of Torque without being marked too hard, that all they had to show was the sanatorium full of the uncanny ill or dying. But some of the cacotopic miasma was slow to show effect.

There were three people in the boxcar when its Torque sarcoma began. The train was juddering through a high land of alpestrine plants and stoneforms jawing the air. One morning while snow as fine as dust eddied and the hammerers had to warm their fingers with each strike, the door of the carriage would not open. The Councillors within could only shout through cracks in the wood.

They took an axe to it but it rebounded without scuffing paint or wood, and the Councillors knew that this was the cacotopic stain’s last fingers. But by then the voices of those within had dulled with lassitude, a surrendering up.

Through the night they became more and more languid. By the next day the car was changing its shape, was bulbous and distending, the wood straining, and the people within made contented cetacean sounds. The walls grew translucent and shapes could be seen, eddying as if in water. The planks and nails and wood-fibre opalesced then went transparent as the boxcar sagged, fat over the wheels, and the councillors inside grew more placid, moved oozily within air become thick. The debris from the store-cupboards lost their shapes and spun as impurities.

The carriage became a vast membranous cell, three nuclei still vaguely shaped like men and women afloat in cytoplasm. They watched and waved stubby arm-flagella at their comrades. Some Councillors wanted to decouple the grotesquerie, let it roll away and thrive or denature according to its new biology, but others said they’re our sisters in there and would not let them. The long train continued with the corpulent amoebic thing rippling with the movement of passage, its innard inhabitants smiling.

“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.

“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”

A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.

They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”

The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.

They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.

Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!

The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.

They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.

Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.

It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west—trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.

“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more.”

If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?

Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.

“They’re there,” he said finally. “I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us.” What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife channelled through that bleak matrix?

The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.

Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told Ann-Hari and Judah and the Iron Councillors what had happened in New Crobuzon, what was still happening, the story of the Collective.

“Oh my good gods,” said Elsie. “We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods.” She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.

“It rose in Dog Fenn,” a refugee said. “Came up out of nowhere.”

“That ain’t the case,” another said. “We knew you was coming—the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said.”

They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.

“So there’s no wages: people are hungry. There’s the war, and ex-militia telling what it’s really like, and there are Tesh attacks. We feel like we ain’t safe at all and the city ain’t keeping us . . . And we hear that someone’s gone to find the Iron Council.” Judah’s face moved to hear it.

“There are Tesh attacks?” Cutter said. The man nodded.

“Yes. Manifestations. And you know, the government’s saying it’s going to sort out the Tesh, going to end the war, but it’s chaos, and no one knows if they’re doing what they say. There’s another demonstration to Parliament to demand protection, and there’s them in the crowd yelling for more than that, giving out their leaflets. Caucus people, I think. But out come the men-o’-war, and the shunn, and the militia come down on us.

“And someone starts saying there’s a handlinger at the front. And people started fighting.

“I wasn’t there—I heard about it, is all. There was dead all over the streets. And when people got the militia on the run . . . All over the city come up barricades. Time for us to do what we needed, on our own. We didn’t need the militia. Keep them out.

“It was after that we heard the Mayor was dead.”

Delegates from all the districts had gathered in a collective, called and recalled in excitement and panic as the downtowners realised there was no suffrage lottery, that each of them had direct power. After some days the anti-Parliament had curtailed that rude democracy; but only, they swore, because they were in a double war. Most in the Collective were eager to negotiate with Tesh, not caring who controlled what in the seas south.

“Why are you here?” the Councillors asked.

The New Crobuzoners looked down and up again and said that the fierceness of the fighting had driven them away, that there were many exiles. They had been walking for weeks, trying to find the Iron Council.

They were not Caucusers nor collectivists, Cutter thought, only people who had found they were part of a dissident town-within-a-town and under fire, who had run with their possessions in their barrows. They had sought the Council not with a theory or politics, but with the awe of religious petitioners. Cutter disdained them. But Judah was all joy.

“It’s happened, it’s happening,” Judah said. His voice was thick. “The rising, the second Contumancy, we’ve done it. Because of what we did. The Iron Council . . . it was an inspiration . . . When they heard we were coming . . .”

Ann-Hari was staring at him. He seemed to wear a halation in the last of the light. He spoke as if he were reading a poem. “We made this thing years ago and it laid its tracks through history, left its marks. And then we did this to New Crobuzon.”

He looked astounding, a very beautiful thing. He looked transformed. But Cutter knew he was wrong. We didn’t do this, Judah. They did. In New Crobuzon. With or without the Council.

“Now,” Judah said. “We ride into the city, we join them. We aren’t so far from the last of the rails. Jabber, gods, we’ll ride into a changed city, we’ll be part of change. We’re bringing a cargo. We’re bringing history.”

Yes, and no, Judah. Yes we are. But they’ve got their own history already.

Cutter had come not for the Iron Council, but for Judah. It was a guilt he could never forget. I’m not here for history, he thought. Low mountain pikes looked down on him. In a cold river, the Iron Council vodyanoi were swimming, while the train idled in its strath. I’m here for you.

“And there’ll be no militia now,” Judah said. “They know we’re coming, but with the city in revolt they won’t spare anything to face us down. When we come, there’ll be a new government. We’ll be a . . . a coda to the insurgency. A commonwealth of New Crobuzon.”

“It’s been hard,” said one of the refugees, uncertainly. “The Collective’s under fire. Parliament’s come back hard . . .”

“Oh oh oh.” No one saw who spoke. The sounds ebbed up suddenly. “Oh, now.

“What’s this?”

The voice was Qurabin’s. Cutter looked for the fold in air, saw a flit of gusting.

“What’s this?” The pilgrim-refugees were open-eyed in fear of this bodiless voice. “You said there were attacks, Tesh attacks. Manifestations? What kind? And what is this? This, this, this here?”

A buffeting, the stained leather of a newcomer’s bag belling with Qurabin’s tug. The woman moaned at what she thought some ghost, and Cutter snapped at her as Qurabin repeated, “What is that mark?” She looked in idiot fear at the complex gyral design on her bag.

“That? That’s a sign of freedom. Freedom spiral, that is. It’s all over the city.”

“Oh oh oh.”

“What is it, what is it, Qurabin?”

“What are the Tesh attacks?” The monk’s voice was calmer but still very fast. Cutter and Elsie stiffened; Ann-Hari’s concern grew; Judah slowly folded as he saw something was happening.

“No, no, this . . . I remember this. I need to, I have to, I’ll ask . . .” The monk’s voice wavered. There was an infolding sense, colours. Qurabin was asking something of the Moment of Secrets. There was silence. The refugees looked fearful.

“How is Tesh attacking?” Qurabin’s voice came back strong. “You said manifestations? Is it colour-sucked things, presences? Emptinesses in the shape of things in the world—animals, plants, hands, everything? And people gone, sickened by them and dead? They come out of nothing, unglow, is it? And they’re still coming. Yes?”

“What is it? Qurabin for Jabber’s sake . . .”

“Jabber?” There was a hysteria to the monk’s voice. Qurabin was moving, the locus of his sound bobbing among them. “Jabber can’t help, no, no. More to come, there’s more to come. And he has you thinking those are signs for freedom. The spiral. Oh.”

Cutter started—the voice was right up close to him. He felt a gust of breath.

“I’m Tesh, remember. I know. The things that are coming in your city, the haints—they aren’t attacks, they’re ripples. Of an event that hasn’t yet come. They’re spots in time and place. Something’s coming, dropped into time like water, and these have splashed back. And where they land, these little droplets come like maggoty things to suck at the world. Something’s coming soon, and these, these, these spirals, these curlicues are bringing it.

“Someone is loose in New Crobuzon. This is ambassadormagik. The little manifs are nothing. Tesh want more than that. They’re going to end your city. These spirals—they’re the marks of a hecatombist.”

Qurabin had to explain several times.

“Who left that mark is a purveyor of many thaumaturgies. Of which this is the last. This is the finishing of the law. This will take your city and, and will wipe your city clean. Understand that.”

“These are freedom spirals,” said a refugee, and Cutter all but cuffed him to be quiet.

“They say Tesh is talking? They say there are negotiations? No no no. If there are, they are ploy. This is the final thing they will do. Their last attack. Months of preparation, huge energy. This will end everything. No more wars for New Crobuzon. Not ever again.”

“What is it, what will it be?”

But Qurabin did not answer that.

“There will be no more wars and no more peace,” Qurabin said. “And more ripples will come, spattered, on the other side of the event. The last drops. Manifestations in the nothing left after your city’s gone. They’ll wipe it out.”

It was very cold, and the wind that ran down from the chines snatched smoke from their food-fires. Before and behind them, Councillors bunked in their ironside town. There were the noises of mountain animals. There was talking, and the settling metal of the sleeping train.

“What can we do?” Judah was in horror.

“If you want . . . if you want to fix it, you have to find him. The one who’s doing this, who’s calling things. We have to find him. We have to stop him.

“You—we—have to get back to New Crobuzon. We have to go now.”

Part Eight:

The Remaking

Chapter Twenty-five

The Battle of Cockscomb Bridge started early. A sun that looked watered-down lit amassing troops on either side of the river. Cockscomb, a thousand years old and built up with houses, joined Riverskin on the south of the Tar to Petty Coil north. The Collective fought very hard for Cockscomb Bridge. After the first astonishing days, when for a brief moment most of the south of New Crobuzon had been at least officially in Collective control, their zone had been eroded. Now, weeks later, Cockscomb Bridge was the westernmost point controlled by the Collective’s Dog Fenn chapter.

Lookouts from the Flyside Militia Tower, long occupied by the insurgents, verified the movements of militia units before dawn, and the insurrectionist tacticians mobilised forces from several boroughs. The militia came from The Crow, through Spit Hearth where those renegade hierophants who had not left or gone into hiding said prayers for one or other or both sides, and on to the déclassé collapse of Petty Coil. There in the decaying baroque of Misdirect Square, looked on by architecture once sumptuous now a little absurd with its blistered paint and falling-down facades, the militia fanned out. Light went in thousands of directions from their mirrors. They wheeled cannons and motorguns to point at the old stones of the Cockscomb, and waited.

Across the water the Collective’s troops came, battalions named for their areas. “Wynion Way, to me.” “Silverback Street, left flank.” Each corps identified by a scrap of coloured cloth, a sash, green for Wynion, grey for Silverback. Each officer wore a bandana in their colour, though their men and women would recognise them, having voted them in. They were mixed platoons, of all races. And Remade.

Rumours about militia tactics abounded. “There’ll be men-o’-war.” “There’ll be handlingers.” “There’ll be drakows.” “They’ve done a deal with Tesh—there’ll be haints on the bridge.” Heading each Collective unit were ex-militia, who had trained their new comrades as quick and thorough as they could. Where populist enthusiasm had resulted in someone utterly callow, untrained or useless voted in as officer, and where misplaced loyalty let them retain their position, some ex-soldier was quietly installed as advisor, to whisper tactics.

Dirigibles gathered like carrion fish at the edges of Parliament airspace, overlooking the Collective, beyond the reach of explosive harpoons, of grenades or squads of Collectivist wyrmen. The lookouts on the south watched carefully for signs that the aerostats would do a bombing run.

The standoff continued. There was anxiety among the Dog Fenn chapter that this was a decoy, that some other great attack was about to occur somewhere else. Runners went to Sheer Bridge and the barricades south of Bonetown and Mog Hill, the shanties east of Grand Calibre Bridge, but they found nothing. In the midmorning the hand-claps of explosions began—the day’s bombardments against each of the Collective’s three chapters.

“Howl Barrow’ll fall today.” The isolation of the three sections from each other had crippled them. After the first excitement-frenetic weeks, the militia had cut the street-corridors linking Flyside to Howl Barrow, had taken Kinken, separating Howl Barrow from Skulkford and the Smog Bend chapter. There had been some attempts at air-corridors, but the Collective’s dirigibles could not defeat or bypass those of Parliament. The three rebellious areas were separated, and messages passed between them by desperate and unreliable means.

“Howl Barrow’s gone.” It was the smallest of the chapters, one without industry, without factories or armouries. Howl Barrow was the revolt of the bohemians, and while their fervour was real, they had little beyond enthusiasm and some weakling thaumaturgy to resist the militia. At one time Dog Fenn would have sent troops through the sewers and buried roads of the undercity to join their comrades in Howl Barrow, but that would be a luxury now. They could only listen to bursts of masonry as the area was attacked. “Maybe Smoggers’ll go help them,” some said, but it was not a real hope. Smog Bend could send no one. The artists’ commune was doomed.

Before noon one of those who had refused to leave Cockscomb Bridge emerged from his cellar waving a white flag, and was shot by the militia. There were screams just audible from other houses. “We have to get them out,” Collectivists muttered. These citizens had been in their care.

Perhaps the militia were trying to draw the Collective onto the bridge. Perhaps those who had idiotically stayed behind had ceded their right to protection. Still, the officers tried to plan rescues.

A messenger came with orders from the tactics council. The leader of Wynion Way was a fierce young woman who, like other officers, carried a shield on which was nailed the torn-off streetsign for which her troop was named. She moved her men and women toward the bridge with their aging cannon, and opposite the militia began also to approach. From the south came the Glasshouse Gunners, a platoon of cactacae men.

So many debates over the pure-race squads! When the gangs of khepri guard sisters had come and said they would fight for the Collective, when the cactus squads had offered themselves as heavy infantry, some of the officers argued hard against it. “We’re Collectivists!” they had said. “Not cactus or human or Remade or vodyanoi or whatever! We stand and fight together.” And it was an impressive, even moving position, but it did not always make sense. “Would the chaver,” a vodyanoi delegate had, to laughter, asked one of the most strident human ultraequalitarian anarchs, “like to join me tonight as we trawl the riverbed for militia bombs?”

And if the vodyanoi had to be given the freedom to operate together (though each corps, the equalitarianists insisted, contained one symbolic and powerless officer from another race, as a comradely reminder), was it not absurd to deny that to others? Wouldn’t a crew of khepri trained in stingboxes be less likely to inadvertently hurt their own?

In the case of cactacae it became expedient: squads of the very strong were needed. Only the most augmented Remade could join them, with their agreement. The Glasshouse Gunners had agreed: with the tens of cactacae were two Remade, swollen with grafted muscle and oiled metal. “Rescue raid,” they were told, and under cover of Collective attack, lobbing powderbombs, pyrogenics and thaumaturgic compounds, the Glasshouse Gunners went onto the bridge. They swept the houses for inhabitants, and where they found them they funnelled them to safety through holes they blew in the walls between the terraced buildings.

There was little movement on the militia side. Though they fired, burst holes in the stone, shearing off faces of houses to display subsiding rooms, the militia were waiting for something. The Collective began to advance, emboldened, and laid down suppressing counterattack while their scouts (hotchi, wyrmen, acrobatic humans) went rooftop or airborne to watch what was coming. Then the militia ranks parted and there were three men adangle, clots of handflesh clamped to their throats. Handlingers.

There was no washing on Cockscomb Bridge, but there were still lines drooped over the street studded with pegs like wizened fruit, and they shuddered as the shelling continued. At the sight of the flying men the line of Collectivists almost broke.

Parliament’s handlingers were dressed in suits and bowlers, their trousers a shade too short. A strange scare tactic. Were these the bodies of condemned New Quillers? Could they be volunteers, about whom there were rumours? Men and women whose loyalty to New Crobuzon’s government was so absolute they sacrificed themselves to be vessels for the handlingers? A holy rightist suicide. Probably these were just the executed dressed in costumes to cause foreboding.

Seeing them loom, thaumaturgicked and fire-spitting, stronger than cactacae, they seemed supra-Quillers, nightmares of reaction. The costumes raised memories of the Night of the Kinken Shards, when the New Quill Party had overrun the khepri ghetto in a storm of murder, shattering spit-sculptures in the Plaza of Statues, stamping the mindless males and butchering the women until they trod a ground of glass needles, ichor, blood. After that attack, so frenzied that respectable uptown opinion was horrified, the militia had come in to protect those few khepri not fled or murdered. But the Quillers did not have to flee: they were allowed to leave in an orderly and triumphant way.

Now Quillers or what looked like them were bearing down from the sky. The Collectivists stepped quickly into the lees of the bomb-shaken houses. They coughed in the dust of millennium-old bricks.

From the south, running the length of the bridge unnaturally fast to join them, came a thin and naked man. Clamped not to his neck or his head but to his face, fingers spread over his eyes and nose, was a dark left hand. A sinistral.

Civil wars made for unlikely allies. There were those few handlingers that for whatever reasons opposed their brothersisters—whether odd altruism or a politic calculation, the Collective’s negotiators never knew. It may have sickened the negotiators to do deals with these symbols of corruption and parasite cunning, but they would turn nothing down now. Especially as several of the handlinger turncoats were sinistrals.

The three militia handlingers were dextriers, warriors, but for all their power they veered when they saw it was a sinistral on the man’s face. They tried to get out of range, but the Collectivist handlinger jumped up higher than a human should and snapped his fingers. One dark-suited man spasmed as the sinistral shut down the dextrier’s assimilation gland. It became nothing but a blind five-fingered beast clutching a brain-dead man who fell out of the sky, his bowler hat a coda behind him, into the slow and dirty river Tar.

A second snap from the sinistral’s fingers and the nude handlinger sent another of the flying men palsied and down, to spread out red on the cobbles. The Collectivists cheered. But the third loyalist handlinger had flown in fast under eaves unseen, and as the sinistral began to turn its host away from its burst victim, the dextrier opened its man’s mouth and spatseared.

Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat spitting, and the sinistral screamed in its host’s voice and psychically in its own, making receptives for a half mile wince. It dropped and burnt up, fire-ruined.

The militia motorguns opened and the air became a shredder. The Collectivists dropped behind stone as the dextrier flew unconcerned through the firing, its body jerking, protecting its hand-body with the contingent flesh it borrowed.

On the roofs at the north end of the bridge a thaumaturge rose, a Brock Marsh rebel come to defend the Collective. His body was aglow with corposant. It flared without sound in cobalt, and he barked and a gob of the colour sputtered, flew with butterfly flight to the frontmost militia gun, and it arced and took over the cannoneers who staggered and pulled their masks from faces gone bleached and blind.

The men and the gun brittled, cracks spread across them, and one by one gun and men shattered. The ground where they had been was dusted with shards of them, quite dry.

Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spinning as it did, heavy black boots flailing. It flew into a column of Collectivists with a kind of angry playfulness, smashing them and spitting fire in an incandescent spiral, leaving brutalised dead and dying and fire-stained walls.

“Fall back! Now!”

The Glasshouse Gunners emerged on the streeted bridge and started to retreat, firing rivebows into the militia, who were no longer waiting, were beginning to advance dragging carronade with them. Their motorguns started again. The handlinger and the Collectivist thaumaturge faced each other. The man raised his fists to send out a bolt; the handlinger sent him burning out of the air.

“Get the fuck back now!” The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gunners turned and in a sudden rage stormed them. The ranks of huge thorned fighters were tremendous. The militia faltered.

The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gunners’ random line was enfiladed and, even armoured in crude-cast metal, the motorgun bullets tore at them.

The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gunners was a Remade human. He wore a mottlesome thing on his foot. His cactus comrades turned to him, and he spat fire across their faces. They had killed the host but not the handlinger. It had crept onto him.

A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.

But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shunn-cavalry riding their bipeds into Creekside, a Mamluk regiment of loyal Remade fighting in Echomire while the Collectivists screamed and called them traitors).

It’s time. A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming: Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.

There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar, the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.

None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.

They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark water came enemy shapes. Betrayal, someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.

A rump escaped. Their information came through: We can’t explode the fucking bridge.

Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing—their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.

“It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got ways in.”

And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.

As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and anything went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.

They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).

In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fenn, the Collective’s heart, it had to be defended.

In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fenn Collectivists could not go, their sister chapters were in trouble. Something was being prepared in Tar and Canker Wedge, surely an attack on Smog Bend. Break it, with its machinofacture and its organised workers, and that chapter of the Collective was gone.

Howl Barrow was easy. “We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses,” one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.

The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gunners, and were camped on the south bank of the River Tar. They were poised to push east into the heartlands of the Dog Fenn chapter, the stronghold of the New Crobuzon Collective. There was a sense that no Collectivist would voice, that this was the start of the end.

It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.

Chapter Twenty-six

“Gods. Gods. How in the name of Jabber did you get here?”

Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.

There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.

Of course hundreds had entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fenn or Creekside, begging entry. And the Collective itself contained many who passively or actively wished it ill, and crept out uptown or stayed as spies.

So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fenn where the delegate council met. They addressed the representatives of the Caucus.

Cutter felt emptied out. So many months since he had been in New Crobuzon and now it was so new, so tremendously not as it had been. It made him think of everything, it made him think of Drey and Ihona and Fejh and Pomeroy, of the bones under the railroad tracks.

What city is this? he had thought as they entered.

The towers of Grand Calibre Bridge, ajut and centuries broken in the water of the Gross Tar, now crowned with guns puffing lazily to send shells uptown. Badside, always squalid, reshaped and broken now by more than poverty.

Everywhere. Over the girders of Barley Bridge, the streets concatenate with the everyday, the monstrous and the beautiful. They were not quite empty. There were bandaged soldiers who watched the party from broken buildings. Members of a quickly running, now ratlike populace bent under sacks of food, under furniture and nonsense they took from one place to another. They were cowed.

The trail-dust on Cutter and his comrades meant they took curious looks—everyone was dirty but their dirt was different—but no one seemed to find it strange that they travelled together: two Remade, with four whole humans (no one could see Qurabin) pulling their exhausted mounts.

The Remade were mounts themselves. The lizard-bodied man, Rahul, was one: Ann-Hari’s agent when the Iron Council was born, whose voice Cutter had heard telling of Uzman’s death. He was in late mid-age, but still ran on those backbent legs faster than any horse. Judah had ridden him across the wildlands to the city. The other was a woman, Maribet, whose arcane Remaking had put her head on the neck of a carthorse studded with avian claws. Elsie was her rider.

Many of the young freeborn Councillors had been desperate to see New Crobuzon, but Ann-Hari had insisted that the Council itself needed every hand. They would see the city soon enough. Iron Council had sent only these emissaries.

The two Remade stared like farmboys from the Mendican Foothills. As if the geography awed them utterly. They were walking in a broken dream of their own pasts.

There were children in the streets. Wild, they made playgrounds out of destroyed architecture. Bombs had taken large parts of the city away, recast others in a bleak fantastic of pointless still-standing walls, rubble wastes, girders and thick wires uncoiled arm-thick from the ground: gardens of ruin. And amid them new kinds of beauty.

Hexes had made sculptures of brick, stained breakdown, strange colours. In one place they had made an ivied wall only half there, a glasslike brick refraction. The cats and dogs of New Crobuzon ran over this reshaping. They were tense, prey animals now: the Collectivists were hungry.

A strange parade. A children’s play performed on a street-corner to an audience of parents and friends desperate and ostentatious with pride and enjoyment, as bomb sounds continued. Spirals on the walls. Complex, arcing and re-arcing. Qurabin, unseen, made a hiss, a yes sound.

Once there was a panic, someone as they walked past screaming and running from a patch of moving colour, crying “A haint! A haint!” But it was fresh graffiti, ink sliding down, that had shocked the woman. She laughed, embarrassed. A klaxon sounded and an aerostat had hauled piscine over the Collective and drizzled bombs with coughs of collapsing mortar; those on the streets started and looked wary but more resigned than afraid.

There were countless styles on the streets. A last flowering of impoverished dandyism.

What is this place? thought Cutter. I cannot believe I’m here. I cannot believe I’m back. We’re back.

He saw Judah. Judah was destroyed. His face was absolute with misery. Is this what we won? Cutter saw him wonder.

In the later days of their journey, close to the city, Iron Council’s emissaries had met scores of refugees, poor and not-poor, from downtown and uptown. Out in the open land, they were only the lost. “Too much terror,” one had told them, not knowing who they were, assuming them explorers. “It ain’t the same,” the Crobuzoners said.

“It was something in the first days,” a woman said. She held a baby. “I’d have stayed. It weren’t easy, but it was something. Emptying the prisons and the punishment factories, hearing Tarmuth had gone, getting messages from its Collective, till it fell. The food run out and next thing we’re eating rat. Time to go.”

A terrified shopkeeper from Sheck claimed the Collective had gathered all the rich from the south of Aspic when they had taken it, stolen their houses, shot the men, raped the women and shot them too, and were raising the children as slaves.

“I’m gone,” he said. “What if they win? What if they kill Mayor Triesti like they did Stem-Fulcher? I’m gone for Cobsea. They appreciate an industrious man.”

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

There were sixteen Caucusers in the delegate council. Five could be found. They stared. They hugged the newcomers. They wept.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it.”

They each gripped Judah for what he had done, finding Iron Council, and Cutter and Elsie for finding Judah and bringing him back. They greeted Drogon. Judah told them Qurabin was with them, described the monk as a renegade from Tesh, and they looked in unease and waved at the air.

And then the Remade. The Iron Councillors.

One by one, the Caucusers of New Crobuzon’s Collective gripped the hands or tail-like limb of the Councillors, awed, abject, let out murmurs of solidarity. “Decades,” one whispered, holding Rahul, who reciprocated with unexpected gentleness in his lower, reptile arms. “You came back. Chaver, where you been? Gods. We been waiting.”

There were too many things to ask. What has it been? Where have you been? How do you live? Do you miss us? These questions and others filled the room in ghost unspoken form. When at last someone spoke, it was to say, “Why have you come back?”

Cutter knew some of the delegates. An old cactus-woman called Swelled Eyelid, a Proscribed, he remembered; a man Terrimer, whose affiliation he did not know; and Curdin.

Curdin, a leader of the Runagates Rampant, had been Remade.

There were fashions in Remaking. Cutter had seen this shape before. Pantomime horses, people called them. Curdin had been made quadruped. Behind his own, another pair of legs shuffled uncertainly, bent at their waist, their human torso horizontal and submerging into the flesh above Curdin’s arse as if he were opaque water. Another man had been embedded in him.

“They broke me out,” he said to Cutter quietly. “When it started. When the Collective took over. They emptied the punishment factories. Too late for me.”

“Curdin,” Judah said. “Curdin, what is this? What’s happening? Is this the Collective?”

“It was,” Curdin said. “It was.”

“Why’s the Council coming back?”

“We’re being targeted,” Judah said. “New Crobuzon fought its way through the Firewater Straits for us. They found out where we are. They’ve wanted us for years. Curdin, they’re chasing us through the cacotopic stain. The Council’s a way off yet, but it’s coming. We came to tell you, and to see—”

“You sure you’re still being followed? Through the stain? How did you come through the damn stain?”

“We’ve not shaken them off. They may be depleted, but they’re still coming. Even if Parliament doesn’t believe that the Council’s returning, their assassins are after us.”

“But why are you here?”

“Because of you, of course. Godsdamn, Curdin. I knew something was happening when I left. I knew, and when the Council heard about it, they knew it was time to come home. To be part of this.”

But you wanted to stay away, Judah. Cutter looked at him, with a strange sense.

“We’re coming back. We’re going to join the Collective.”

Though there was joy in the faces of the Caucusers, Cutter swore he saw something ambivalent in all of them.

“There ain’t a Collective.”

“You shut your damn mouth,” said others instantly, rounding on Curdin, and, “The fuck you say.” Even the other Runagaters looked shocked, but Curdin raised himself up on four tiptoes and shouted.

“We know it. We’ve weeks, at the most. We’ve nothing left. They’ve cut us off, they’re killing Smog Bend, Howl Barrow’s probably gone. We’re less than a fifth of the committee—half the others don’t know what they want, or want to make peace, for gods’ sake, with the Mayor, as if Parliament wants that now. We’re over. We’re just living out days. And now you want to drag the godsdamned Iron Council into this? You want to bring it down?”

“Chaver.” It was a young woman who spoke, a Runagater. Her voice shook. “You won’t like what I’m going to say.”

“No this ain’t because of what’s done to me . . .”

“Yes, it is. You been Remade, chaver, and it’s a sick thing, and it’s made you despair, and I ain’t saying I’d do it any differently, and I ain’t saying we’ll win for sure, but I am damn well saying that you don’t decide now that we’re done. You better godsdamned fight with us, Curdin.”

“Wait.” Judah’s mouth moved with a panic of collapsing plans. “Listen listen. Whatever the, whatever it is, whatever’s happening, you have to know that ain’t the reason we’re here. We have a job to do. Listen.

“Listen.

“New Crobuzon will fall.

“We heard—listen, please—we heard about the manifestations, your haints. They haven’t stopped, have they?”

“No but they grow smaller . . .”

“Yeah. For the same reason there aren’t droplets just around a splash. Because something’s getting close. Tesh ain’t suing for peace. Whether they’re talking to you, or Parliament, or both or whatever . . . they ain’t making peace, they’re preparing for the end. The haints ain’t the weapon. Something else is. It’s in the spirals.”

When at last they understood, they thought him mad. But not in fact for long.

“You think this is a whim?” Cutter raged at them. “You got any idea what we went through to get here? Any idea at all? What we’re trying to do here? The spirals are calling down fucking fire on you. On Parliament, Collective, all.”

They believed him, but Curdin laughed when Judah asked for help.

“What do you want from us, Judah? We ain’t got troops. I mean we do, but who’s ‘we’? I can’t control the Collective’s fighters. If I try to tell them what we need, they’ll think—even godsdamned now—that it’s a sodding ploy from a Runagater, trying to take over the Collective. I ain’t a military commander; I couldn’t control them. Or do you want Runagaters? Specifically?” He looked at his factionists.

“There’s a few left. Kirriko Street Irregulars is ours, but who the fuck knows how to contact them? The others are at the front. They’re on the barricades, Judah. What would you have me do? You think we can call a godsdamned meeting of the delegates, explain the situation? We’re breaking down, Judah—it’s each district for itself. We have to hold off the militia.”

“Curdin, if we don’t stop this there won’t be a damn city, let alone the Collective.”

“I understand.” The Remade man’s eyes looked rubbed with sand. He was scabbed from fighting. He swayed. “What would you have me do?”

A standoff, as if they are enemies. A silence.

“The city needs this.”

“I understand, Judah. What would you have us do?”

“There must be someone, some thaumaturge, some of the kithless . . .”

“I know who makes the spirals,” someone said.

“Maybe there is, but you’ll have to find them, and don’t look at me like that Judah of course I’ll do what I can, but I don’t know where to go. It’s the end now: there ain’t no one giving orders.”

“I know who makes the spirals. I know who makes the spirals.”

Quiet, finally. It was the young woman Runagater who spoke.

“Who makes the spirals. Who’s calling something. The Tesh agent.”

“How?” Judah said. “Who?”

“I don’t know him, not really . . . but I know someone who does. He used to be a Runagater, or nearly. I know him from meetings, Curdin. You do too. Ori.”

“Ori? Who went to Toro?”

“Ori. He’s still with Toro, I think. It was Toro killed Stem-Fulcher, they reckon, for whatever bloody good it did. Toro disappeared after, but he’s been seen again. Maybe Ori’s with him. Maybe Ori can bring Toro to help.

“Ori knows who does the spirals. He told me.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

Toro was a dog now, a stupid and brutalised dog following a master it hated, unable to stop. Ori considered it that way.

We did it! he had thought. For a very short time. For less than one night. Even in the sadness and the shock of learning the first Bull’s motives and her manipulations, even uncoupled as he felt himself from the movement he had thought defined him, he had been proud that the killing of the Mayor had been this great catalyst.

He thought that for a few hours, against the evidence: the rebels who had no idea Stem-Fulcher was gone, who learnt it with a cruel excitement but no great renewal of purpose, no upsurge of fight spirit. They had enough of that in those early barricade days, irrespective of what the Toroans had done. A few hours with the Collective, and Ori had known that the operation against the Mayor had been irrelevant to its birth.

Ori, Toro, pushed against the world with his helmet and split through again and again. He could move easily. He went skulking from the Collective to Parliament’s city and back again, disdaining the traps and barriers between them. He followed his quarry, like a dog. He followed Spiral Jacobs.

Well then, he had thought, the execution of the Mayor will be part of the movement. It was of the moment. The world was changed. It would be part of the momentum. Ugly, yes, but a freeing, something that would drive things forward. The Collective would be inexorable. Uptown would fall. In the Collective, the seditionists would win the delegates, and the Collectivists would win against Parliament.

The militia imposed lockdown law across what of New Crobuzon they controlled. The populace convulsed in sympathy riots, fought in some places, to join the Collective, and failed. Ori had waited. With a tumour of anxiety, he found in himself a drab certainty that the killing of the Mayor had done nothing at all.

When he was Toro, Ori moved in the darkness between reality’s pores, to emerge in the quiet of uptown, in the evenings, on Mog Hill, unseen behind the rows of sightseers. Uptowners from Chnum and Mafaton whooped as if at fireworks at the oily blossomings of explosives, at the unlight glow of witch fire from Parliament’s thaumaturges, gave childish boos at the motes of glow from hedgehexers of the Collective.

I could kill so many of you, Ori thought, time and again, for my brothers and sisters, for my dead, and found himself doing nothing.

He went to the Kelltree warehouse many nights running. None of his comrades came back. He thought that Baron might have escaped, but he was sure the militiaman had not tried for that. No one came back to the rendezvous.

Ori gave his landlady promissory notes, which she accepted in kindness. Within the Collective’s bounds, everything was camaraderie. He sat with her at night and listened to the attacks. There were rumours that Parliament was using war constructs for the first time in twenty years.

He kept the armour under his bed. His bull helmet. He did not use it except to walk at night, and he did not know why. Once he horned his way through newly dangerous streets, past Collectivist guards who were drunk and others focused and sober, through the raucous night, to the soup kitchen. There was a debate among the derelicts.

Ori had been back again, in these most recent days. The roof was gone, replaced by the droppings of some masonry-riddling weaponworms Parliament had loosed. The kitchen was empty. The residues of seditionist literature, long unhidden, lay in wet scraps. Blankets were moulding.

Toro could have been a fighter for the Collective. Toro could have stood on the barricades, run boulevards between bomb-denuded trees and gored militia.

Ori did not. A lassitude took him. He was deadened by failure. In the first days, he tried to be in the Collective, to shore up its defences and learn from the public lectures, the art shows that initially proliferated: he could only lie and wonder what it was he had done. He had a literal sense of unknowing. What is it I did? What did I do?

He saw a haint in Syriac. A thick, unopened book in mottling uncolours, turning on spiderthreads of force. It sucked light and shade, killed two passersby before evanescing and leaving only a remnant of bookness that lingered another day. He was not afraid; he watched the apparition, its movements, its position, before the graffitied wall. Among the obscenities and slogans, the nonsense signs and little pictures, he saw familiar spirals.

I need to find Jacobs.

Toro could do it. Toro’s eyes could see which of the painted helicoid marks were new. There was thaumaturgy in them: they could not be effaced. When he was Toro, Ori traced backward by the marks’ ages, tracking Spiral Jacobs through a grand and ultracomplex spiral in the city itself.

Jacobs moved without difficulty between the Collective and Parliament’s city, just as Toro did. The spiral, through its recombinant coils, veered toward New Crobuzon’s core. Toro stalked at night, gathered in shadows the helmet snagged. A fortnight after the Collective was born, amid the noise of the popular committees for defence and allocation, Ori, unseen in his bull-head, came through Syriac Well and found Spiral Jacobs.

The old man was shuffling, his palette of graffiti tools in his hand. Toro followed him down an alley overshadowed by concrete. The tramp began to draw another of his coils.

Spiral Jacobs had not looked up. Had only murmured something like, “Boy, hello there, once a doubler eh, now kithless? You got out, did you then? Hello boy.” The thaumaturged iron of the helmet did not confuse him. He knew who he spoke to.

“It didn’t work like we thought,” Ori said. Plaintive, and disgusted with himself for that. “It didn’t turn out.”

“Turned out perfect.”

“What?”

“It turned, out, perfect.”

He thought the old man’s madness was asserting again, that the words were meaningless. He believed at first that that was what he thought. But anxiety rose in him. It swelled as he attended public meetings in Murkside, Echomire and Dog Fenn.

In Bull-guise, he found Jacobs again. It took him two days.

“What did you mean?” he had said. They were in Sheck, under the brick of Outer Crow Station, where he had tracked the convolutes of paint. “What did you mean it turned out perfect?”

The truth appalled him of course, but worse was that he was not surprised.

“Do you think you’re the only one, boy?” Spiral Jacobs said. “I made suggestions all over. You was the best. Well done, son.”

“What is it you wanted?” Ori said in Toro’s guttural voice, but he knew the answer, he realised. Jacobs wanted chaos. “Who are you? Why did you make the Collective?” Jacobs looked at him with something it took Ori seconds to recognise as contempt.

“Go away, boy,” the tramp said. “You don’t make something like this. It weren’t me done this. I been doing other things. And what you done—frippery. Just go.”

Ori was bewildered then debased. Everything the Toroans had done was a sideshow. Toro, Baron, his comrades . . . he did not understand what they had been used for, but he knew they had been used. His insides pitched. He could not breathe.

Without anger—with sudden calm—Ori knew he must kill Jacobs. For revenge, the protection of his city—he was not sure. He came close. He raised a crossbow pistol. The old man did not move. Ori aimed at his eye. The man did not move.

Ori fired and air rushed with the bolt, and Spiral Jacobs was unmoved, staring with two unbloodied eyes. The quarrel was embedded in the wall. Ori drew a pistol with clustered barrels. One by one the bullets he fired at Spiral Jacobs hit the ground or the wall. They would not touch the old man. Ori put his gun away and punched at Spiral Jacobs’ head, and though Jacobs had not moved Ori hit air.

Anger took him. He launched at the old man who had led him to Toro, had helped him, had had him kill. Ori kicked with all the power in him, all the strength given by the arcane helmet, gouged, and the old man did not move.

Ori could not touch Spiral Jacobs. He tried again. He could not touch him.

His anger had become despair, and even the Collectivists, even the militia a mile away who had grown inured to the noises of fighting stopped at his lowing. Ori could not touch the old man.

Spiral Jacobs was drunk. He was a real vagrant. He was just something else as well.

At last he walked away with slow near-rambling steps, and Toro, doglike, could only follow. Jacobs had walked to the centre of New Crobuzon, toward the vaults of Perdido Street Station, and Toro had followed. Ori was reduced to calling questions Spiral Jacobs would not answer.

“What were you doing?

“Why me?

“What about the others, what were they supposed to do? What’s the real plan?

“What are you doing?”

The Collective. It was a Remaking.

At first, in the upsurge of resentment, violence, surprise and contingencies, revenges, motives altruist and base, necessities, chaos and history, in the first moments of the New Crobuzon Collective, there had been those who refused to work with the Remade. Necessity had changed most of their minds.

It had been fast. Those who had agitated for the overthrowing of Parliament were stunned. The militia abandoned their places, the spikes, the pitons of the government left empty in Collective territory. Skyrails stopped. As looters ransacked militia towers, as AWOL soldiers brought out their weapons, an old word began to change. In a speech to the strikers of the Turgisadi Foundry, an agitator from the Caucus waved at the Remade workers to join the main mass and shouted, “We’re Remaking the damn city: who knows better about that than you?”

Ori knew his seditionist ex-friends, his erstwhile comrades, would be there as the commonalty rose. He could help them; as Toro he could be a weapon of the Collective.

He could not. Ori was broken. He could only find Spiral Jacobs and follow him, many nights. He felt he would remain unfinished until he had spoken to him, learnt what he had done.

“Where are the others?” he said. “What did you have us do? Why did we kill the Mayor?” Jacobs would say nothing, only walked away. Why does he want chaos?

Ori could always find him. The spirals glowed in Toro’s eyes. Ori was pathetic.

“I’m worried about you, love,” his landlady said. “You’re falling apart, anyone can see. You eating? You sleeping?”

He could not speak, could only lie for days, eating what she gave him, until his anxiety swelled and he would rise and, as Toro, find Spiral Jacobs again. That was how it was. Nights behind the strange old man.

At first he tracked him in his bull gear, moving in and out of the real. Following him in that terrible disempowered way, Ori saw weird in the old man’s own movements. He took off his helmet. Spiral Jacobs paid no mind.

Ori followed without Toro’s thaumaturgy, and still they passed somehow between Collective and Parliament’s city. In the gaslight, by vivid elyctro-barometric tubes, Spiral Jacobs walked his old-man walk on streets of night-stained brick, dark concrete, dark wood and iron, and Ori went after him, a desultory pilgrim.

Jacobs might start in Aspic, at the edge of the Collective, shambling past crowds of night-guards, turn under an arch of wattle. He might pass through a sooty alley between the backs of buildings, by shades of trees and the spires of saint-houses, and after a curve the passage might empty him and his follower into the streets of Pincod. Two minutes of walking but more than four miles from the starting point.

Ori followed Jacobs as the tramp kinked the city’s geography. He went easily between areas that were not coterminous. Later, alone, Ori tried to retrace the routes and of course could not.

From Flyside to Creekside, from Salacus Fields to St. Jabber’s Mound, Spiral Jacobs made the city convenient. He quietly put this area by that, had a terrace (always momentarily empty of passersby) wind impossibly through far-apart areas. He passed in and out of the Collective without seeing barricades or militia, and Ori followed, and begged him to answer questions, and sometimes in his rage fired or knifed at the old man, and always his weapon met nothing.

I’m in trouble. Ori knew it. I’m trapped. There was something in him: his mind was rutting, he was not well, he was despairing. In the middle of this upturn, this upheaval, the Remaking of the city, he who should live this moment was stricken, was crying, was lying in bed days at a time. Something’s wrong with me.

All he could do was track Jacobs through the byways he made: and sit alone, sometimes weep. He was crushed by a weight, while things changed, while the first days—of excitement, construction, arguments and street-meetings—became days of injury, of losses, became embattlement, became terror, became a sense of end.

The Collectivists’ resolution grew for a last stand, for something they knew was coming. Ori lay, and walked the violent streets and saw the initial spreading of the Collective halt, and reverse. Saw the militia encroach. Nightly another barricade was lost. The militia took the kilns on Pigsty Street, the stables of Helianthus Avenue, the arcades of Sunter. The Collective was shrinking. Ori, Toro, lay alone.

I should tell someone, he thought. Spiral Jacobs is trouble. He’s the cause of something. But he did nothing.

Was the city full of Jacobs’ castoffs? Men and women lost, their tasks unfinished, their work for Spiral Jacobs interrupted before they knew they did it, or what it was at all. Was it better or worse to have succeeded?

“Hush, hush,” Spiral Jacobs said to him as they walked at night. The old man’s wall-paintings became more arcane, more complexly spiralled. Ori was not quite crying but like a lost thing, following and asking questions in a tone near begging. “What did you have me do, what are you doing, what did you do?”

“Hush, hush.” Jacobs did not sound unkind. “It’s nearly done. We just needed something to keep things busy. Not long now.”

Ori returned home, and people were waiting for him: Madeleina di Farja; Curdin, whom he had not seen for months, Remade and broken; and a group of men and women he did not know.

“We need to talk to you,” Madeleina said. “We need your help. We have to find your friend Jacobs. We have to stop him.”

At that Ori cried, with the relief that someone else had come to this knowledge without him, that something would be done, that he did not have to do it alone. He was so tired. Seeing them, ranged and rugged by him, carrying their weapons with purpose, without the panic of those days, he felt something in him strain for them.

Chapter Twenty-eight

In the south, a salvage squad took a dangerous mission through the streets that separated Aspic from Sobek Croix Gardens. The park was a free-fire zone, inhabited by prison escapees and renegades from factions, not controlled by the Collective or by Parliament. The Collectivists needed fuel: they took axes and saws to the trees. But hauling through the streets under militia fire and returning weighed down by logs cost them. Men fell, shot on the corners of the park, lay on the cobbles, pinned and put down in the shade of walls.

Decisions were still made, but the overarching strategy that had made the Collective operate like a power, an alternative city-state, was breaking down. Some squads were commanded with strategic intelligence, but each action now was more or less its own end, part of nothing larger.

The Flyside Militia Tower had long been stripped of weapons, its thaumaturgic compounds deployed, its secret maps taken. Skyrails, thick and thrumming wires, extended south and north from its top, each stretched taut to its terminus. In the south the last militia tower in the city, in the suburbs of Barrackham; to the north the rail angled up, hundreds of feet above the tangle of slate and iron roofs, over the ghetto of the Glasshouse and the intricately twisted River Tar, up to the centre of New Crobuzon. It went to the Spike, stabbed into the sky by Perdido Street Station.

In these savage last days, the Collectivists of the Flyside tower filled two pods with explosives, chymical and blackpowder. A little before noon, they released one in each direction, throttles jammed. The little vehicles of brass tubing and glass and wood accelerated very fast, screamed over the city.

Wyrmen scattered in surprise as the wires bowed under the pods’ weight. They rose, shouted obscenities.

Perdido Street Station was the centre of the city, even more than Parliament, the atramentous keep now empty of functionaries (it was an irony of the time that the “Parliamentarian” government had suspended Parliament). The Mayor was making decisions from the Spike.

As the north-travelling pod careered over Riverskin the militia fired grenades. They landed short, with cruel billows, on Sheck or the riverside streets near Petty Coil. But the guards could not miss for long. The pod made the metal skyrail scream, and one two missiles sailed out, burst its windows and detonated.

The pod blew, its payload conflagrating in an apocalypse instant, and it plummetted in a smoke-described arc. It shattered across the shopkeepers’ houses and terraces of Sheck, crumbling into melting metal and fire.

To the south, though, the explosive-crammed pod rushed over spivvy streets, directly above a barricade at the borders of Aspic and Barrackham. Militia and Collectivist looked up from either side of the wedge of rubble and brick.

The pod overshot open scrubland, sinking as the skyrail angled down, as the estate towers rose toward it. It rushed into the Barrackham Tower.

A one-two-three of explosions as dirty fire blared from the top of the militia spire. Its concrete bulged and split; it was eaten from inside by an unfolding plume; it went up, blew out and began to fall, and the stories below it subsided. In burning slabs like pyroclastic flow the top of the tower slewed off, militia pods falling out and tumbling.

The skyrail went murderously slack, whiplashed down across two miles of city. It coiled through slates, gouging a threadline fault and killing as it came. It dangled from the Flyside Tower and curved toward Aspic, where its hot weight tore buildings.

A spectacular kind of triumph, but one the Collectivists knew would not change the tide.

Most of the workshops by Rust Bridge were quiet, their staff and owners keeping out of sight or protecting the Collective’s borders. But there were still some small factories doing what work they could, for what payment they could get, and it was to one of these that Cutter went on the day the militia tower fell.

The fires of the ancient street of glassworkers were cold, but with a scraped-together purse and political exhortations, he persuaded the seditionist workforce of the Ramuno Hotworks to restart their furnaces, bring out the potash, ferns, the limestone to scour and clear. Cutter gave them the housing with Judah’s circular mirror that he had broken. At last they said they would build him a crystal-glass speculum. He went to Ori’s rooms, to wait for him and Judah.

If Cutter had met Ori before, which was possible given the tight world of the pre-Collective seditionists, he did not remember it. Madeleina di Farja had described Ori, and Cutter had envisaged an angry, frantic, pugnacious boy eager to fight, excoriating his comrades for supposed quiescence. Ori had been something very else.

He was broken. In some way Cutter did not quite understand, but for which he felt empathy. Ori had shut down, and Cutter and Judah and Madeleina had to start him up again.

“It’s getting close,” Qurabin said. “It’s getting near, we have to hurry.”

The monk spoke more and more urgently: the mind behind the words seemed to degrade a little every day. There had been so many enquiries of that hidden Tesh Moment, more and more of Qurabin must have become hidden.

In her or his faintly decomposing way, Qurabin was anxious. The monk was troubled by each spiral they passed, felt the incoming of whatever the thing was, the purveyor of the coming hecatomb: the massacre spirit, the massenmordist, the unswarm, Qurabin called it. It was coming soon, he said, he felt it. The urgency infected Cutter, and the fear.

A ring of small haints beset the city. On the way to Ori’s home Cutter passed a commotion a street away, and Qurabin suddenly dragged him toward it, gripping him with hidden hands and keening. When they got there they saw the last moments of an emission like a dog, tumbling in complex patterns, disappearing and seeming to gather the world’s colour and light to it as it went. The small crowd of Collectivists around it were screaming and pointing, but none of them had died.

Qurabin moaned. “That’s it that’s it,” Qurabin said as the world blinked and the thing was gone. “It’s the endgame.”

Cutter did not know if he believed that Ori had killed Mayor Stem-Fulcher. It was still incredible to him. To think of that poised, white-haired woman he had known from heliotypes, from posters, from brief glimpses at public events, who had taken so much of his hatred for so long, now gone, was hard. He did not know what to do with it. He sat in Ori’s rooms, and waited.

Judah was with Ori, with Ori as Toro. He was clinging to him, pushed through the world’s skin to his old workshop in Brock Marsh.

“What you got to go for anyway?” Cutter had said. “I’m going to get a mirror—we’ll have that for the Council—so what is it you want? They’ll have closed your workshop.”

“Yes,” Judah said, “they will have. And yes, the mirror’s what’s needed, but there are things I want. Things I might need. I have a plan.”

The others were at the armouries. The Iron Council Remade were preparing to defend the Collective on the barricades. What must it be for them, this strange fight? Cutter thought.

He thought of the journey through the badlands and pampas, through the tumbledown rockscape, through hundreds of miles at a tremendous rate, directed by Drogon the horse-tramp who had explored these hinterlands before, until they had come to the city rising west of the estuary plain. They had come through ghost towns. Little empties, mean architecture desiccated by years of being left alone, inhabited only by squalls of dust.

“Yes,” Judah had whispered. This was his past, these outposts, the remnants of fences, the little bough-marked graves. Less than three decades before these had been the boomtowns.

The revolt of the Iron Council, the renegacy of the perpetual train, had been the last part of the crisis of corruption, incompetence and overproduction that had destroyed Wrightby’s Transcontinental Railroad Trust. The thrown-up towns and hamlets of the plains, and the herds of beef and crossbred meat-beasts, the gunfighters and mercenaries, the trappers, the populace of that mongrel of money and wild, had evaporated, in months. They left their houses like snakeskin casts behind. The waddies were gone, the horse-gangsters, the whores.

The Iron Council would be accelerating. It would eat the distance, even as each moment of track-laying seemed arduous and slow. Cutter had realised the Council must be in the open land. And the militia who tracked it, who had traced over the whole world to find it, must still be following, all the way back toward their home, gaining daily. The most absurdly roundabout trip, across the continent and back again, by a terrible route.

As the light began to glower and go out, the sense of the room buckled and ripped at two points, and from nothing, horns emerged. Toro shoved through adrip with the energies that were reality’s blood, carrying Judah, wrapped together like lovers.

Judah stumbled free and the colours dripped upward from him to sputter out of existence before they hit the ceiling. He was carrying a full sack.

“Got what you needed, then?” Cutter said. Judah looked at him and the last of the worldblood evanesced.

“Everything to finish this,” he said. “We’ll be ready.”

The fact that there were Iron Councillors in the Collective had leaked. Even through the terror and the unhappiness of those bleak days, it was huge news.

Excited mobs ran through the byways by the Dog Fenn post office, looking for their guests. When at last they found Maribet and Rahul, the barricade they had joined became a kind of fighting shrine.

There were queues of Collectivists waiting while militia bullets went overhead. They trooped past the Councillors and asked questions—an unspoken politeness limited each person to three. “When will the Council come?” “Have you come to save us?” “Will you take me away with you?” Solidarity and fear and millennial absurdity, in turn. The line became a street meeting, with old arguments between factions rehearsed again while bombs fell.

At the end of the street, on the other side of the barricades, lookouts saw through their periscopes the approach of war constructs. Soldier-machines in brass and iron, glass-eyed, weapons welded to them, came walking. More constructs in one place than had been seen for years.

They stamped and their caterpillar treads ground on the rubble and glass-strewn street toward the barrier. At their head a great earthmover, fronted by a cuneal plough that would push the matter of the barricade apart.

The Collectivists tried grenades, bombs, sent frantic word for a thaumaturge who might be able to halt this ugly monster thing, but it would not be fast enough. They knew they must withdraw. This barricade, this street, was lost.

Snipers and witch-snipers appeared on rooftops over the no-man’s-land, to lay down fire and hex on the constructs and the militia. At first they cut into the government forces, but a swivelling motorgun brought a score of them down in meat-wet and panicked the rest.

As the constructs sped, the Collectivists scrambled and their order broke down as they made for the backstreets. Rahul and Maribet did not know where to go. They headed toward secondary lines that did not take them out of the militia fire. Afterward, Cutter heard what happened: the two Remade had loped with their animal legs and skittered one way and another across the street, called by terrified Collectivists trying to help them. Maribet had turned her hooves on a bomb hole, and as she struggled to stand again and Rahul put out his human and lizard hands to help her, there was a grinding and the wedge-fronted construct began to push the barricade apart, and a militia-loyal cactus-man came over the rim of the tons of city-stuff, fired his rivebow into Maribet’s neck.

Rahul told them about it when he made it to Ori’s house. It was the first Iron Council death in New Crobuzon.

Posters had appeared throughout Collective territory, half-begging half-demanding that the populace stay. EVERY LOST MAN OR WOMAN OR CHILD IS A WEAKENING OF THE COLLECTIVE. TOGETHER WE CAN WIN. Of course they could not stem the refugees, who went out under the cordons, to the undercity or the collapsing suburbs beyond Grand Calibre Bridge.

Most ran to the Grain Spiral, the Mendican Foothills, the most adventurous into Rudewood to become forest bandits. But some, at risk, organised into guerrilla work-crews and made their way through the chaos of the city’s outer reaches, past neglected militia crews, by low boroughs become feral without food, too mean for Parliament to give them any notice. West of the city the escapees passed through the long-deserted hangars and goods yards where once the hub of the TRT had been. Rusting engines and flatcars were left deserted.

Offices were still inhabited and lit, where the remnant of Weather Wrightby’s company clung to existence, maintaining a last crew, a few tens of clerks and engineers. It survived off financial speculation, off railroad salvage, off the security work and bounty hunting of the TRT’s paramilitary guard-army, tiny and loyal to Wrightby’s corporatist vision, disdaining the race-thuggery of the Quillers. The men were stationed across the sprawling TRT property, and they and their dogs sometimes chased the escapees away.

The refugees took tools, made their way out of the once-terminus to the cut from where the Cobsea-Myrshock Railroad had set out.

“It moves, under, it is, they are, the Teshi, are,” said Qurabin. The monk’s voice scuttered around. They were all there—Drogon and Elsie, Qurabin, Cutter, Judah and Toro. Rahul kept watch. They had mourned Maribet. Qurabin was anxious.

“Something happens very soon,” the monk said.

In his strange and strangely broken voice Ori told them the history of his relations with the mysterious tramp: the money, the heliotype of Jack Half-a-Prayer. The help he had given Toro. “I don’t know where the plans come from,” Ori said. “Jacobs? No, no it was Toro’s plan, I know that, because it wasn’t the plan I thought it was. But it did the job. But Jacobs said, when I saw him . . . I don’t think it mattered much to him at all. He’s had other things on his mind. This was just . . . a distraction.”

They had promised they would wait for Curdin and for Madeleina, hoping for help. That morning, Judah had begged them to persuade the delegates to aid them, but what could they do? The militia were eating their territory house by broken-down house: there were rumours of punitive revenges against Collectivists in recaptured streets. “We have no one to give, Judah,” Curdin had said.

They returned late.

“Came as soon as we could. It was hard,” Curdin said. “Hello Jack,” he said to Ori.

“We lost Howl Barrow today,” said Madeleina.

She was hard; they both were hard. She was trying not to fall to her despair.

“It was something,” Curdin said. “They lasted two days longer than they should have done. The militia came down over Barrow Bridge, and there was all the barricadistes, and out of nowhere come the Pretty Brigade. And they was magnificent.” He shouted this suddenly and blinked. In the quiet after the word they heard bombs, at the battlefronts.

“A liability? They were lions. They came in formation, firing, in their dresses.” He laughed with a moment’s genuine pleasure. “They kept up the attack, they lobbed their grenades. Run forward skirts flapping, all lipstick and blackpowder, sending militia to hell. Hadn’t eaten anything but stale bread and rat meat for days, and they fought like gladiators in Shankell. It took the motorguns to cut them down. And they went shouting and kissing each other.” He blinked again many times.

“But they couldn’t hold it off. The Nuevists died. Petron and the others. The militia went in. There was street-fighting, but Howl Barrow’s gone. Got the last globe today.” Howl Barrow had released sealed glass floats to drift down the River Tar, past Strack Island, till the Collective’s bargers and mudlarks fished them and broke them to get the messages out.

“I tried, Judah, honestly, though your plan’s madness. But there’s no one spare. Everyone’s protecting the Collective. I don’t blame them, and I’m going to join them. We’ve a couple of weeks left, no more.”

Madeleina looked agonised but she did not say anything.

“I can’t help you, Judah,” Curdin continued. “But I’ll tell you something. When you left and there were rumours why, I thought you were . . . not mad, stupid. A stupid, stupid man. I never thought you could find the Iron Council. I would have bet it was long gone, nothing but a rotten train in the middle of a desert. Full of skeletons.

“I was wrong, Judah. And you, and all of you, done something I never thought could be done. I won’t say the Collective is because of you, because it ain’t. All I’ll say is that word that the Iron Council was coming . . . well, it changed things. Even when we thought it was just a rumour, even when I thought it was a myth, it still felt like something was . . . it was different. Maybe we heard you were coming a little bit too soon. Maybe that’s what happened. But it changed things.

“But I don’t quite trust you, Judah. Oh, gods, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying you’re a traitor. You always helped us, with golems, with money . . . but you watch from outside. Like you get to be pleased with us. It ain’t right, Judah.

“I wish you luck. If you’re right, and maybe you are, then you’d better win. But I ain’t coming to fight with you. I fight for the Collective. If you win and the Collective loses, I don’t want to live anyway.” Though it must be hyperbole, Cutter drew himself up at that, in respect.

“How you plan on finishing this, Judah?”

Judah pursed his lips. “I’ll have something,” he said.

“You’ll have what?”

“I’ll have something. And there’s someone here who knows what to do. Who knows Tesh magic.”

“I know, I know,” Qurabin said suddenly and loud. “The Moment I worship will tell me things. Will help me. It’s a Tesh thing. My Moment knows the gods this consul might call.”

“Consul?” Madeleina said, and when Judah told her that Spiral Jacobs was the ambassador of Tesh, Curdin laughed. Not a pleasant laugh.

“Yon Teshi’ll know what to do, is that it?” Curdin came close on his clumsy four legs. “You’re going to die, Judah,” he said. He spoke with true sadness. “If you’re right, you’re going to die. Good luck.”

Curdin shook each of their hands and left. Madeleina went with him.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Though winter it was suddenly warm. Unseasonal was not the word—it was uncanny, as if the city was in an exhalation. A warmth like that of innards took the streets. The party went with Toro.

Two nights they walked the streets, behind Ori, who stopped and stared at all the graffiti. Each night they did not find Spiral Jacobs, Qurabin’s distress became animal. Toro would trace a finger along Spiral’s marks, find signs, nod and lower his head, shove and be gone for long minutes, and then would return and shake his head: No, no sign.

Once he could not find him; once he found him but in the farthest north of the city, in the quiets of Flag Hill, scrawling his marks, unafraid of Ori as ever. There was no way for the others to get to him. Ori tracked Spiral Jacobs around the city, but until he came back to the Dog Fenn chapter, he could only be reached by Ori, who could do nothing alone.

Each day they had to live knowing the agent of the city’s destruction was walking free, that they could not touch him. They tried where they could to protect the streets of the Collective. From the river’s shores they saw a fight between two trains traveling alongside on the Dexter Line, a Collectivist and a militia, shooting into each other’s windows as they went.

There was a lightning raid by dirigibles scattering leaflets. PEOPLE OF THE SO-CALLED “COLLECTIVE,” they said. THE GOVERNMENT OF MAYOR TRIESTI WILL NOT TOLERATE THE MASS-MURDER AND CARNAGE YOU HAVE UNLEASHED ON NEW CROBUZON. AFTER THE OUTRAGE OF THE BARRACKHAM TOWER ALL CITIZENS NOT ACTIVELY SEEKING ESCAPE ARE DEEMED COMPLICIT IN THE DESPICABLE POLICIES OF YOUR COMMITTEES. APPROACH THE MILITIA WITH HANDS CLEAR AND UP, HALLOOING YOUR SURRENDER, and so on.

The third night. There they were, on the streets, with hundreds of Collectivists, a last wave of mobilizations, of every race. Little snips of magic, prestidigitation of light, chromathaumaturgy sending up pretences of birds made of radiance. The rebels made the night a carnival, as it had once been.

Everywhere people were running, according to news of a militia incursion, a moment’s panic, a rumour, a nothing at all. They drank, ate whatever repulsive food had been mustered or smuggled through the militia’s cordon. There was a millennial sense. Drinkers toasted Judah and Toro and Cutter and the others as they walked under half-lit gaslamps, raised mugs of poteen and beer and cheered the passersby in the name of the Collective.

Qurabin was moaning. Low but always audible.

“Something’s happening,” Cutter said to no one.

They passed Bohrum Junction where houses converged in a wedge of antique architecture, past dry fountains where war orphans played some catchpenny game and tied shell-casings to a dog too diseased to eat. Toro walked, making no effort to hide himself, and the children pointed and catcalled. Hey Bull, hey Bull, what you going to do? Who you going to kill? Cutter did not know if they thought Ori just a man in a strange uniform, or if they knew they had seen the bandit kithless himself that night. Perhaps in the exotica of the Collective, gods and the unique arcane were not worth awe.

Rahul came with saurian gait, knives in each human hand, his muscular reptile claws clenching. “Come come on,” said Qurabin.

Each wall of graffiti Ori would stop and stare at with light-emitting Bull-mask eyes. With an effortful grunt he straightened his legs, poked into nothing, and then there he was again in a new rent scant feet away, so fast Cutter could not be sure his feet had not still dangled from the first hole as his head emerged yards off.

“He’s here,” Ori said. “Trauka Station. Come.”

Not a mile off. They passed near the riverwall through long-emptied markets, where the integuments of the stalls were left, metal ribs slotted together, a herd of skeletons.

They were just one of the running groups that night. Into Trauka through narrow old streets in a mix of ugly architecture, under paint proclaiming Free Collective Territory and Fuck You Stem-Fulcher written then crossed out and Been done mate appended in another hand. Toro disappeared, reappeared a street from them, beckoning, splitting worldskin to keep sure of his quarry’s motion, coming back to the party to direct them. As if they were directed by a dozen identical bull-faced men throughout the city.

The smoke and miracle-colour blood that dripped from Toro’s helmet was thick; the horns were sparking as if with friction. So much violence against ontology was straining the thaumaturgic circuits. “Come,” Toro said again, and beckoned. “Just here, two turns from here, left left, he’s moving, come now.”

Judah stopped, quickly set down ceramic conductors and a funnel in the darkest part of a brick overhang. There was a snap of thaumaturgy. He sounded an invocatory whisper—no not an invocation—he had told Cutter that the difference was crucial—not an invocation but a creation, a constitution of matter or ideomatter. Cutter watched and Judah gathered. Cutter felt the creep of awe on his skin, watching the man for whom he felt and had always felt so animal an emotion, surely the most potent golemist in New Crobuzon, its autodidact magus.

Darkness gathered. Judah’s mechanism sucked the dark. It shifted, a tenebrous plasma; it was dragged in a slow resentful mass, the shadows become a cloud of unlight, and like water coiling down a plughole they wound into the cone, condensing, becoming darker as they went. The bricks it left were a catastrophe of physics, utterly abnatural. No light fell on them, but with their darkness gone they were clearly visible, as if harshly illuminated, but without colour, a perfect-edged grey. The cul-de-sac had become impossible: unglowing, unlit, uncoloured visibility in the absolute dark.

Shadows emerged from the funnel’s spigot to congeal in a shape between a body and a puddle of oil, a presence of dark, unsolid but profoundly there, a human shape of blackness. Gods, is that what you got from your study? Cutter thought. He had seen Judah animate hundreds of golems, but never one so uncorporeal. Judah raised his hands. The darkness golem stood. Eight feet of silhouette. It stepped into the night and became half-visible, a darkness on the dark that moved like a man.

Judah gathered his equipment and whispered, “Go!” He ran, and his companions, dumbed by what they had seen, let him pass before they found their energy again. Beside him with utterly silent steps was the golem, like a gorilla made of shade.

Left, left. Into alleys overlooked by the upreach of dark brown masonry, windows without doors, doorless brick-and-mortar cliffs that seemed a glimpse on something unfinished, the land behind the facades.

There was Toro ahead, one horn on fire and vibrating. He called to them, but his voice was drowned by the shuddering of the helmet, the unpeeling, the splitting of his horns. Screaming and with the metal itself spitting on fire, Ori scrabbled to undo the straps. He fought the helmet free and straightened, his face rivered with sweat. “There!” He pointed.

An old man at the far end of the street watched them, holding a paintbrush poised and dripping. He turned and shuffled with an incompetent run toward where the street curved away. Spiral Jacobs.

“Keep him in your sights!” Ori shouted, and ran, leaving his helmet to be eaten by blue fire. Cutter saw the thaumaturged glass eyes crack, the strange colours of fire and sparks as the heat ate arcana in the metal. It did not look like a statue’s head anymore but a skull, a bovine skull on fire.

They tried to catch Ori, who ran as if Toro’s strength were still in him. “Keep up, keep on him,” he shouted.

At the limits of their vision, where the leftward curve shut off the long alley from their view, Jacobs moved fast despite his age and gait. Judah and Cutter followed Ori, the golem loping dark beside them, and Drogon behind, and the others in changing order. The alleyway was full of echoes, of the sounds of all their feet. There were no other sounds, no gunfire of the war, no horns or noise of the Collective or the mayor’s city. Only footsteps on winter-damp brick.

“Where’s he going?” Ori shouted. Cutter turned and saw Rahul, two three seconds behind him, disappear momentarily around the corner and not emerge. Where was he? He had slipped beyond the influence of Jacobs’ reconfiguration, been tipped out into New Crobuzon; he would turn the corner into gods-knew-where.

Jacobs was still running, and was that, was he laughing? They ran faster, and from over the rooftops came light and sound again. Drogon was suddenly slow, and Jacobs was walking, his paint still dripping in his hand, and the alley was ended, and his footsteps were suddenly open as he emerged into a clearing. His pursuers ran out after him. They were in cold wind, in the city again, on the other end of that impossible alleyway.

Rahul was gone, and Drogon. They had stumbled and were lost somewhere in the errant geography. Cutter came forward. Judah walked and the darkness golem walked with him, step for step. Scores of yards away was Spiral Jacobs. He was not even looking at them.

Where were they? Cutter found the moon. He looked down between towers and walls. He was half enclosed. He struggled to make sense of it: this then that monolith spired, and here a minaret, and here one much fatter studded with lights, and above them the huge lines of airships. They were outside the Collective.

Above them an enormous column crowned with radial wires. The Spike. They were in an irregular courtyard. The walls were different stones, in different colours. A shaking came up at them through the concrete. They were high up. Cutter looked down over a spread-out skyline, over the city.

Perdido Street Station. Of course. They were in a huge and empty amphitheatre made by chance, floored with scrub, a little wilderness on the station’s roof. Undesigned, a forgot space in the vastness. The passage that had brought them looked now not like a street but a kink in concrete.

The wall, an edifice of huge bricks that made them feel shrunk to dolls, was broken by the remnants of wooden floors where once this open place had been interior. It was surfaced completely with spirals. A thicket rising, as high as a canopy. Some as intricate and complex as tangled briars, some the simplest snailshell patterns. Thousands. Months of industry. Cutter breathed out. From the very top of the wall descended one black line, through the forest of helix pictograms. A spiral, pinpointing this place.

Across the brickdust and savage weeds was Jacobs, the Tesh ambassador. He was drawing marks in the air, and he was singing.

“He’s hurried,” Qurabin said. His disembodied voice was close. “Has to move. He weren’t ready, but he’s moving now, early . . . He’ll try to force it, the thysiac, the murderspirit . . . feel! Quick,” and the voice was gone.

Ori ran. Across waste through dead thigh-high grass that cracked with cold, the plateau open and the lights of New Crobuzon splayed beneath him. The others followed, though no one knew what to do.

Spiral Jacobs tremored, and the air all around tremored with him. A hundred shapes began to solidify from nothing. Cutter saw a patch of milky air, a cataract, that took lumpy shape, peristalsed maggotlike and was a pale ghost stool, a three-legged kitchen thing hanging over his brow. Beside it was an insect, impossibly big, and a flower, a pot and a hand, a candle, a lamp, all the haints that had beset New Crobuzon. They looked undercooked, not quite fine, without colour, hanging and spinning. And as Cutter came closer the haints began to turn and move around each other in decaying orbits, an impossibly complex interpenetration of silent spiral paths. The things never collided, nor touched anyone. The apparitions moved fast, centring over Spiral Jacobs. A vortex of the everyday, the uncanny quotidian.

Ori batted at the things. They had not yet come full; they were not murderously sucking his colour. He reached Spiral Jacobs. The old man looked at him and said something: a greeting, Cutter thought.

He watched as Ori swung his fists, and kept missing Spiral Jacobs, kept always missing, each punch consistently mistimed, misjudged. Ori screamed and went onto his knees. Judah was just behind him, and the darkness golem stepped up.

The great thing swung its enormous shadow hands and unlight swept over Spiral Jacobs as it gripped him. It obscured him a long moment. Jacobs faltered, went obscure and dimmed, and all the ectoplasm shapes faltered with him, waning in time like dimming lamps. They came back again as he regained strength and light, and then he growled, showed anger for the first time.

He moved his hands, and the school of moving haints changed, came together, gusted suddenly through the golem, and where they passed they left a light in the core of the thing. It staggered like a wounded man and reached to throttle Jacobs once again, mimicking Judah’s motions. The light in the darkness golem’s core was growing.

It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its innards effaced it. Jacobs fought free of its shade hands. He bared dark-stained teeth. The haints swarmed. Jacobs was cobwebbed with darkness the golem had left; it was choking him. He retched up a gout of empty shadows. They spilled on the ground and crept away to their natural place below blockages of light. The darkness golem fell, and Judah fell with it, and while he lay flattened and unconscious for a second the golem disappeared.

Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spinning uncoloured shapes around her—a bowl, a bone, a scrap of cotton. Her face greyed instantly, choked off sudden, her eyes gone bloodshot but the blood without colour. She did not fall. With a care as if she were going to bed, she settled herself to the floor, lay down and died.

The haints were maelstroming so fast they lost visible integrity, seemed to melt to a kind of swirling oil. Spiral Jacobs drew another shape and everything convulsed. Ori was shuddering from the wall where he was embedded, making little sounds.

Judah woke. Spiral Jacobs moved his hands. There were no haints now; instead the air was a dilute milk of their residue tracked through with vapour trails. Jacobs was shaking with effort, hauling something out of nothing, vividly trembling. As if from behind a rock, from underwater, a presence began to insinuate.

It was very small, or very big and very far away, and then it was perhaps much bigger than Cutter had thought or much closer, and moving very slowly or tremendously fast over a huge distance. He could not make out its parameters. He could see nothing. He heard it. He could see nothing. The thing made sound. The thing Spiral Jacobs was bringing, the murderspirit, the citykiller, he heard it howl. It came round and round like a rising vine, growing or rising up as if uncoiling from a well. It made a metal howl.

Cutter saw the lights of the city change below them. As the unseen palpable thing approached, the buildings glowered. New Crobuzon’s architecture glared. The streetlamps and the lights of industry became the glints in eyes.

The beast was manifesting in New Crobuzon itself. It was pushing itself into New Crobuzon’s skin. Or was it waking what had been there always? Cutter could tell the thing was nearing them because the wall, the concrete beside them, did not change but looked to him suddenly like the flank of an animal tensed to attack. The Tesh thing was making the city itself a predator, rousing the hunt instincts of the metropolis.

How big, how big, when does it reach the top? Cutter thought. He felt a sleepiness, a bled-out emergent death.

“I know your gods,” Qurabin said. The thing kept coming. The buildings tensed. Spiral Jacobs looked suddenly afraid.

Qurabin was only a voice, moving through the empty space. The monk sounded hysterical, aggressive, eager to fight. Qurabin taunted Spiral Jacobs. Had she or he still known Tesh, Cutter was certain that was what he would have heard, that glottal and interruptive language. Ragamoll was all that was left to Qurabin.

“Jinxing . . . it’s easy to intimidate them as don’t know what it is, yes? But what if you face one as does, eh? Another Teshi? Who can find out Teshi secrets? Your secrets?”

Spiral Jacobs shouted something.

“I don’t understand you no more, mate,” Qurabin said, but Cutter was sure the ambassador had said traitor.

“Know who I am?” Qurabin said.

“Aye, I know who y’are,” shouted Jacobs, and he pushed out his hands sending a swirl of the buttery haint-stuff at where the voice came from, but the whirling air met no resistance. “You’re a Momentist blatherer.”

Judah was trying to stand, was burrowing his hands in dirt that shook with the incoming spirit-thing. He was trying to raise a golem, any golem, something.

“It’s coming,” Cutter shouted. It was coming out of its burrow into the real, it was unfolding into more and more impossible conjunctions. The dimensions of the bricks and the edges of the walls strained as it came close. Architecture stirred.

“Your godlings and demiurgii all live in the Moments, Teshman. And my Moment knows.” Qurabin’s voice was tremendous, louder than the oncoming of the murder-thing. Spiral Jacobs spat and his spit sent a cuffing wave through the milk-white disturbance. Qurabin roared, and began to shout.

“Tekke Vogu,” the monk said, “please tell me—” and the voice disappeared as Qurabin slipped into whatever place it was where the Moment lived and listened.

Nothing moved; the oncoming spirit seemed poised. And then Qurabin sounded again with a gasp, a terrible pain, because these were huge secrets to uncover. What it cost, Cutter could not imagine, but the monk learnt something. As the twitching filigree of the Phasma Urbomach unrolled into regular space, making the bricks, the spires and weathervanes and night-slates of New Crobuzon terrible teeth and claws, waking the surrounds so that Cutter gasped in terror, Qurabin let loose hidden knowledge and the thing was snatched back down toward the nothing it had come from. It strained to emerge.

Judah sent a grass-and-earth golem stumbling toward Jacobs, but it was shuddered to dust before it got close. He reached out, tried to make a golem in the air, but whiteness clogged him.

Spiral Jacobs cursed in Tesh, and Qurabin screamed and the spirit began to crawl back again, but with a last plea, a last hollering for knowledge, Qurabin made the dire and mass-murderous visitant begin to slide away. As Spiral Jacobs cursed the thinning air that very air disgorged a figure. Blood-faced and exhausted, Qurabin the monk smiled through wounds, without language, only barking a seal’s gasps, without eyes, Cutter saw. These were the cost of all the secrets that had saved them. Qurabin reached out and gripped Jacobs the ambassador and whispered what must be the last word left to the renegade Tesh, stepped back into a true secret, a hidden place, into the domain of Tekke Vogu. The air winked behind them, and they, and in a swallowing of space the Urbomach, were gone.

Only the opalescence in the air was left. It began to thicken, moving and congealing like eggwhite in hot water, into a stinking solidity. It inspissated, fell in clots, mucal rain, and the sky and air was empty.

A silence gathered, then ebbed, and Cutter heard the shoot-sounds of the war again. He rolled in the debris, saw Judah gather himself all groggy and sodden with the smell of haint-dissolution. Saw Ori, unmoving, tethered somehow to brick, bleeding. The body of Elsie, a greyed nothing. Saw nothing in the air. Cutter saw that Qurabin, Spiral Jacobs and his city-killing thing were gone.

Chapter Thirty

They called and whispered for Qurabin but the monk was definitely gone. “With the Moment now,” Judah said.

Elsie was colour-bled and dead. Ori was sutured to a wall, his skin become brick where it met the brick. Blood crusted the join. He was dead too.

Ori’s eyes were very open, would not close. Cutter felt huge sorrow for the young man. He tried to convince himself that there was peace in Ori’s expression, something settled. You rest, he thought. You rest.

They worked their slow way around their enclosure and found a hole in the stonework. There was no wall in New Crobuzon without its flaw. Through back tunnels, through metal-floored walkways and ladders, they entered Perdido Street Station. They had to leave their dead friends in the hidden garden. They could do nothing else.

In the enormous girdered cavern of Perdido Street Station, its vast central concourse, Judah and Cutter discarded their weapons and tried to clean their haint-fouled clothes, milled with late-night travellers and militia. They took a train.

They ricketed over the middling townscape of Ludmead with late-shift workers. When the cupolas of New Crobuzon University rose in the windows to the north, they got out at Sedim Junction Station. When at last the platforms were silent, Cutter led Judah onto the forking trainlines, toward the Kelltree and Dog Fenn branches. With the half-moon weak above the city’s lights, they crept onto the rails and set out south.

Some lines jutted into Collective territory—the Collective tried to run its own short services to match Triesti’s, from Syriac Rising to Saltpetre, Low Falling Mud to Rim. The conventional trains and those waving Collective flags would approach each other on the same lines, would halt above the many-angled roofs, a few yards apart, each on its side of barricades thrown across the lines themselves.

The Ribs curled hugely into the sky. Halfway up their length, scores of yards above the train lines, was the ragged jag where one of the Ribs had been broken by firing. The sharded edge of the break was a cleaner white, already yellowing. In the streets below Cutter saw the torn hole in the terrace where the broken end had fallen, crushing houses. It lay there still in the hole, among bomb damage, tons of bone ruin.

They walked an empty stretch of unclaimed railroad, chimneypots up from the street morass like periscopes peering curious, until they saw the piles of debris blocking the tracks. There were torches. Below in the alleyways was fighting, the incursion of the militia as the Collective’s barricadistes withdrew and fell back a few streets, firing from street kiosks, voxiterator booths, from behind iron pillars.

A war train was approaching from beyond the barricade—they could see its lights and the gush of it. It fired as it came, sending shells into the militia in the streets. It came up from the south, from Kelltree’s docks.

“Halt, you fuckers!” came from the barrier. Cutter was ready to beg entrance, but Judah spoke in a huge voice, coming out of stupor.

“Do you know who you’re talking to, chaver? Let me through, now. I’m Judah Low. I’m Judah Low.”

Ori’s landlady let them in. “I don’t know if he’ll be coming back,” Cutter said, and she looked away and thinned her green lips, nodded. “I’ll clean up later,” she said. “He’s a good boy. I like him. Your friends are here.”

Curdin and Madeleina were in Ori’s room. Madeleina wore tears. She sat by the bed and did not make a sound. Curdin lay soaking blood into the mattress. He sweated.

“Are we saved?” he said when Judah and Cutter came in. He did not wait. “Got pretty harsh out there.” They sat with him. Judah put his head in his hands. “We had some hostages, some priests, some members of Parliament, Fat Sunners, the old Mayor’s party. And the crowd was . . . It got ugly.” He shook his head.

“He’s dead, or dying,” Curdin said. He tapped his rear legs. “This one. The man inside me. That was the worst of it.” He backheeled his own ruined hindleg.

“Sometimes it seemed to want to go somewhere. There’s a knot in my belly. I wonder whether this was a dead man, or whether they left him alive in there. Whether his brain’s in there, in the dark. He’d be mad, wouldn’t he? I was either half-corpse, or half-madman. I might have been a prison.”

He coughed—there was blood. No one spoke a long time.

“I wish, you know I really wish you’d been here in the early days.” He looked at the ceiling. “We didn’t know what we were doing. People on the streets were moving much faster than the Caucus. Even some militia were coming over to us. We had to run to catch up.

“We put on lectures and hundreds came. The cactacae voted to show people inside the Glasshouse. I won’t tell you everything was all right because it weren’t. But we was trying.”

Silence again. Madeleina kept her eyes on his face.

“Chaos. Concessionists wanted to meet the Mayor, Suitors wanted peace whatever cost. The Victorians screaming that we had to crush Tesh: they thought the city’d gone pusillanimous. A core of Caucus. And provocateurs.” He smiled. “We had plans. We made mistakes. When we took over the banks, the Caucus didn’t argue hard enough, or we argued wrong, because we ended up borrowing little bits with by your leave. Never mind it should have been ours to start with.”

He was quiet so long Cutter thought he had died.

“Once, it was something else,” he said. “I wish you’d seen it. Where’s Rahul gone? I wanted to tell him.

“Well he or his’ll see something, I suppose. They’re still coming, ain’t they? Gods know what they’ll face.” He shook as if chuckling, emitting no sound. “The militia must know Iron Council’s coming. It’s good that they’re coming. I’m sorry it’s later than we’d have liked. We were thinking of them, when we did what we did. I hope we made them proud.”

By noon he was in a coma. Madeleina watched him.

She said: “It was him tried to stop the mob, when they took revenge against the hostages. He tried to step in.”

“Listen to me,” Judah said to Cutter. They were in the hallway. All Judah’s uncertainty was gone. He was hard as one of his own iron golems. “The Collective is dead. No, listen, be quiet. It’s dead and if Iron Council comes here it’ll be dead too. They’ve no chance. The militia’ll amass on the borders, where the trains come in. They’ll just wait. By the time the Council gets here—be, what, four weeks at least?—the Collective’ll be gone. And the militia’ll pour everything into killing Iron Council.

“Cutter. I won’t let them. I won’t. Listen to me. You have to tell them. You have to get back and tell them. They have to go. Send the train up north, find a way into the mountains. I don’t know. Maybe they have to desert the train, be fReemade. Whatever. But they can’t come into the city.

“Be quiet.” Cutter had been about to speak but he closed his mouth hard. He had never seen Judah like this: all the beatific calm was gone, and something stone-hard remained. “Be quiet and listen. You have to go now. Get out of the city however you damn well can, and find them. If Rahul or Drogon or anyone finds their way back I’ll send them after you. But Cutter, you have to stop the train from coming.”

“What about you?”

Judah’s face set. He seemed wistful.

“You might fail, Cutter. And if you do, I might, just, be able to do something.”

“You know how to use the mirrors, don’t you? You remember? Because those militia . . . they’ve come all the way through the cacotopic zone. They’ll reach the Council. And I ain’t sure, but I bet I know what they are, what they’d have to be to be hardcore enough to take us, but travel quick and light like they’ve done. If I’m right you’ll have to do what you can, Cutter. You’ll have to show the Council. Do right by me, Cutter.”

“And you? What are you going to do? While I’m off persuading the damn Council.”

“I said. I’ve an idea—something for safety’s sake. A last plan. Because by Jabber and by gods and by everything, Cutter, I will not let this happen. Stop them. But if you don’t, I’ll be here, with my plan. Do right by me, Cutter.”

Bastard, Cutter thought, tearing up, trying to speak. Bastard to say that to me. You know what you are to me. Bastard. He felt his chest hollow, felt as if he were falling inside, as if his very fucking innards were straining for Judah.

“Love you, Judah,” he said. He looked away. “Love you. Do what I can.” I love you so much Judah. I’d die for you. He wept without sob or sound, furious at it, trying to wipe it away.

Judah kissed him. Judah straightened, kind, implacable, held Cutter gently by the chin and tilted his head up. Cutter saw the damp on the wallpaper, saw the doorframe, looked at Judah’s stubble all grey, the man’s thin face. Judah kissed him and Cutter heard a sound from his own throat, and was enraged at himself and then also at Judah. You bastard, he thought or tried to think at the kiss, but he could not make himself. He would do what Judah asked. I love you Judah.

Part Nine:

Sound and Light

Chapter Thirty-one

A dirigible flew fast. It was pushed by wind and its engine over stone fragments. The dead towns it overflew, the remnants of railroad boom, were like discolourations on heliotypes. Cutter watched from the little cockpit.

The Collective had got them out. First two decoy balloons had set out, piloted by dummies, and while the militia pounded them, the escape dirigible flew. The pilot went so low towerblocks rose around them. The ship had cut between the smokestacks of the slum factories, evaded hunter warflots.

They travelled in fear of air-pirates, but beyond the idiot aggressions of githwings and a few outlander wyrmen nothing attacked them in the wilds outside the city. Cutter thought of Judah all the time. In him moved a complex of anger, and a kind of need he could not exorcise.

“Be careful, Cutter,” Judah said before he went, and held him. He would not say what he was doing, why he was staying. “You have to be quick. They’re through. The militia, through the cacotopos, and they’re hunting the Council down. Come back,” he said. “When they turn away, or scatter, come back, and I’ll be waiting. And if they refuse to turn away, come ahead of them, come to the city, and I’ll be here, I’ll wait.”

You never will, Cutter thought. Not in the way you know I want.

The pilot was Remade, his arm a python that he strapped to him. He hardly spoke. Over three days, all Cutter learnt was that he had once worked for a crime-boss, that he was pledged to the Collective.

“We have to go fast,” Cutter said. “Something’s coming out of the cacotopic zone.” He knew it must sound like some Torque-beast was hunting, and he did not correct the impression. “We have to find the Council.”

He checked the mirrors he carried. The glassworks had built a beautiful replacement. He had shown them to Madeleina di Farja, explaining what they were for.

“How many times have you done it?” she said, and he laughed.

“None times. But Judah Low told me how.”

Cutter stared down into the acres of air specked with birds and windblown scobs. They flew over raincloud like a smoke floor. At the limits of their vision, miles south, they saw people. A long spread-out column through the landscape, the vanguard of the rogue train, who went ahead even of the graders and the bridge-builders.

“Fly past, not too close,” Cutter said. “Let them know we don’t mean no harm.” His heart went fast. It took them an hour to trace the scattered miles of Council back, to the graders sweeping aside debris, patting down and hammering down the ground, and then to the track-layers moving with precision that made them seem automata, and then to the perpetual train.

“There.”

Cutter watched it. Its flatbeds, its carriages and its built-up towers, its bridges swaying, the mottled colours of its addenda, the skull and head adornments, smoke from all of its chimneys, those of the engines and those that specked its length. And all around it the hundreds of Councillors moving along it and on it, in the gap through which it travelled. A bolt of hexed gunpowder combusted below them.

“Dammit, they think we’re attacking. Swing round, give them a berth, let’s lower some flags.”

The train edged forward along the unrolling tracks, the line behind it dismantled as it went. In its wake was debris, a cut of altered ground.

“Gods they’re moving fast. They’ll be at the city within weeks,” Cutter said. Weeks. Too slow. Too late. Besides, he thought, what can it do? What can it do?

Cutter thought of the perpetual train deserted, growing old, made at last of age and weather as rain and wind turned its iron into red dust and the slates and thatch of its remade roofs slipped untended and mouldered, became mulch. In the shade of the flatcars weeds would pierce the hard floor of the train and its spokes and axles would be knotted with stems, honeysuckle, an empire of buddleia. Spiders and wilderness animals would run its nooks, and the boiler would grow cold. The last stores of coal would settle like the striae of ore they had once been. The smokestacks would clog with windblown loess. The train would be made of landscape. The rocks in which it sat would be stained with train.

The passage that the Iron Council had left would be a strange furrow of geography. And at last the descendants of the Councillors who had run as they had to, as he would persuade them they must, from the incoming militia and New Crobuzon’s revenge, the children of their many-times children would find the remnants. They would walk it and excavate the strange barrow, find their history.

Miles behind the very last of the Council’s stragglers, at the end of a wilder, wooded zone, was a line of fire, a crawl-motion that through the telescope Cutter saw was dark figures. Men were coming. Perhaps two days away.

“Oh Jabber they’re there,” Cutter said. “It’s them. It’s the militia.”

When they descended, the leaders were waiting for them. Ann-Hari and Thick Shanks embraced Cutter. They turned to the pilot, and Cutter saw that the Collectivist had tears in his eyes.

The urgency of Cutter’s mission filled him. The Councillors surrounded him, demanding to know what was happening in New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari was trying to control the situation, trying to bring Cutter to her, but he wanted very much not to be in her hands alone, did not want her controlling the message he brought. She was too powerful for him, her agenda too strong.

“Listen to me,” he shouted until he was heard. “The militia are coming. They’ve come through the cacotopic stain. They’re a day or two away. And you can’t go to the city. You have to run.”

When at last they understood him a gusty roar of no took them over, and Cutter climbed out of their arms and stamped on the train roof in frustration. He felt a wave of the bitterness, sadness and near-contempt with which Judah’s politicking and that of the Caucus had always filled him. He wanted to save these people from their own desperate want.

“You fools,” he shouted. He knew he should restrain himself but he could not. “Godsdammit, listen to me. There is a militia squad on your tail which has come through the cacotopic godsdamned stain, do you understand? They’ve crossed the world and back again just to kill you. And there are thousands more of them in New Crobuzon. You have to turn.” He shouted over their anger. “I’m your friend, I ain’t your enemy. Didn’t I cross the fucking desert? I’m trying to fucking save you. You cannot fight them, and you godsdamned well can’t fight their paymasters.”

A clutch of Council wyrmen flew to see. The Councillors debated. But it was a one-sided argument, to Cutter’s rage.

“We beat the militia before, years ago.”

“No you didn’t,” he said. “I know the damn story. You blocked them just enough that you could run away—that ain’t the same thing. This is the flatlands. You ain’t got nowhere to run. You face them now, they’ll kill you.”

“We’re stronger now, and we’ve got our own hexes.”

“I don’t know what the militia are carrying, but godsdammit, you think your fucking moss magic is going to stop a New Crobuzon murder squad? Go. Get out. Regroup. Hide. You cannot do this.”

“What about Judah’s mirrors?”

“I don’t know,” Cutter said. “I don’t even know if I can make them work.”

“Better try,” said Ann-Hari. “Better get ready. We haven’t come this far to run. If we can’t shake them off, we take them down.”

Cutter had lost.

“The Collective sends its solidarity, its love,” the pilot shouted. His voice was shaking. “We need you. We need you to join us, as fast as you can. Your fight’s ours. Come be part of our fight,” he said, and though Cutter was shouting, “Their fight is over,” he was not heard.

Ann-Hari came to him. He was almost weeping in frustration.

“We were meant to do this,” she said.

“There’s no plan to history,” he shouted. “You’ll die.”

“No. Some of us will, but we can’t turn away now. You knew we wouldn’t.” It was true. He had always known. The wyrmen returned as the light came down.

“Enough to fill a carriage,” one shouted. There were only a few score militia, it seemed, and at that the Councillors shouted derision. They had many times that number.

“Yes but gods it ain’t just about that,” Cutter shouted. “You think they won’t have something on their side?”

“So you better be ready,” Ann-Hari said. “You better practise with Judah’s mirrors.”

The Iron Councillors gathered everyone who could fight. The laggers, spread out behind them, were called to catch up, for safety. They sped up their track-laying, to reach a point where a few igneous pillars jutted out of the earth, where there were some dry hills, so they would have a little shelter. With the expertise they had accrued over years, they readied to fight.

“He got gone,” one wyrman said. He was talking about one of the others on the reconnoitre. “He got gone out the air. Something come pull him out the air, see?”

There were none of the chances Cutter had wanted, no opportunity to tell the stories of the Collective, to ask for the stories of the Council. It was rushed and ugly. He felt desperately angry as the Councillors prepared to die. He felt as well a sense of his own failure, that he was letting down Judah. You knew I couldn’t do it, you bastard. That’s why you’re still there. Getting ready some plan or other for when I fail. Still, even though Judah had expected it, Cutter hated that he had not succeeded.

No one slept that night. Councillors came to the train throughout the darkness hours.

With the first light Cutter and Thick Shanks withdrew into position, each on a stele twenty feet high, yards apart, both facing the sun, holding one of Judah’s mirrors. Before he went, Cutter found Ann-Hari, to try to tell her that she was having her sisters, the Councillors, commit suicide. She smiled until he had finished.

“Our hexers have what Judah gave them,” she said. “We have our own thaumaturgy. And we have what Judah taught us. There are those’ll be calling golems from the traps he gave us.”

“Each time you trigger one, he’ll feel it, you know. No matter how far he is.”

“Yes. And we’ll trigger all of them. One at a time. As the militia come. If we have to.”

“You’ll have to.”

Cutter and Thick Shanks braced themselves each on their rock shaft. It was a little after dawn. The moon was still visible, pale and high. As the sun rose its light struck their mirrors, and Cutter angled his down, directing his beam at the cross-mark he had made on the ground. Thick Shanks did the same, as Cutter had shown him, and the spots of intensified sunlight roamed like nervous animals over scrub and dust, to blend on the X.

Hundreds of Councillors prepared to fight, spread out in waves to trenches and earthworks, propped rifles. Cutter turned west, to where the militia would come.

It was not long. At first he saw only dust. Cutter looked through his telescope. They were still tiny, and they did seem to be very few.

A flock of wyrmen set out to harass them, carrying acid and drop-knives. Behind them the dirigible followed with the snake-armed pilot and two volunteers as strafe-gunners. The militia came closer, over minutes and then hours, and the wyrmen crossed the grey nothing-land, and the dirigible flew low. The engines of Judah’s golem traps were ready; the hexers sang incantations.

A frantic Councillor came out of the stony lands. He stumbled to them, could not speak for moments, silenced by exhaustion and fear.

“I got trapped,” he said at last. “They took my missus. There was eight of us. They made something come out of the earth, they made something come out of us.” He screamed. People looked at each other. I fucking told you, Cutter thought. He felt despair. I bastard told you that this weren’t simple like it looked.

Two miles off, the wyrmen came close to the militia on their horses. The riders carried no equipment anyone could see. Moved in formation. There was a strange instant, and the wyrmen were pulled one by one out of the air.

For a long few seconds there was no sound. Then—“What . . . ?” “Did . . . ?” “I think that, did you . . . ?” Not yet fear. Still incomprehension. Cutter did not know what had happened, but he knew that fear would come soon.

A last wyrman lurched in the air, wrestling, swaddled in a caul of dirty nothing. Cutter saw it by a smear of the particles it carried, a thrombus of feral air. Cutter knew what was happening.

“Where did they go?” someone shouted.

The wyrmen fought air that overwhelmed them, pulled them apart in marauding currents.

The dirigible was close to the militia, and a line of bullet-dust stretched out across the ground toward them. And then the bullets broke off, and with a sudden violent dancing the vessel tipped mightily up, pitching in the air as if a ship on an unstable sea. For seconds it paused, then began to fall, not as if with gravity but as if fighting, as if the turning motors and air-propellors were struggling. The airship was hauled out of the sky by some brutal hand, broke apart.

Shapes began to organise around the militia as they approached, out of the air or the earth or the fire of the torches they carried. Close enough now to see. All the officers were moving their hands in invocation. Cutter could see the ruins of their uniforms, the split and splintered helmets, scratches and Torque-stains where leather had become something else. The horses were dappled with blood and slather. Their passage through the cacotopic zone had marked them.

There were scores, despite what depredations must have culled them. Made mad by what they had suffered, ready to revenge against these renegades whose flight had dragged them into the cacotopos. No wonder they were so light-armed, no wonder so few. They did not need equipment or ordnance when they called up their weapons out of the surrounds and the matter of the world.

Cutter saw their arcane whips. He saw them shaping the air. He knew it was luftgeists that had brought down the wyrmen and the dirigible, air elementals of tremendous power. This was a corps of invocators, whose weapons were the presences they raised. Beast-handlers, of a preternatural kind. A cadre of elementarii.

Cutter was shouting at his chaverim. He saw some understood. Some were startled into fear.

There were no elementalists in the Iron Council. One man had a tiny captive yag that lived in a jar, a fire-spirit no larger than a match-flame. Those few vodyanoi with undines were bound to them by agreement; they could not control them. But there were some who understood what they were facing.

The elementarii were ranging out, each subgroup preparing its calling. It had to be, Cutter thought. People who could fight without hauling weapons. It had to be either elementalists or karcists, and dæmons are too unsure. Gods damn, a cadre of elementalists. That New Crobuzon would risk losing these men showed how profound was the government’s desire to end the Council.

“Come on, let’s do it,” he shouted to Thick Shanks, and wound the metaclockwork engine as well as he could. He focused the reflected light, levelled the beam, could not stop staring over his shoulder at the attack coming.

Which will it be? Cutter thought. Fulmen? Shudners? Undines? Lightning or stone or freshwater elementals, but of course it might be others: metal, sun, wood or fire. Or one whose elemental status was uncertain or disputed: elements made by history, born out of nothing and become real. Would it be a concrete elemental, a glass elemental? What would it be?

He could see already the coils of dust moving against any wind, extending air limbs. The luftgeists. The militia began to bring into being other things.

Sun? Darkness?

They threw all their torches to the ground, and the fire enlarged as if each individual flame loomed much larger than it should, so the ground was impossibly alight, and from the prodigious fire, with a tremendous cry of pleasure, came things like dogs or great apes made of the flames. A pack of yags, fire elementals that bounded in a motion between loping and burning. Cutter saw unridden horses corralled and chanted over and giving out equine screams. One by one they shuddered and let out dying wet noises and unfolded from inside: out of their shuddering carcasses came leaping creatures of their sinew and muscle and their organs all reconfigured into bloody skinless predators: proasmae, the flesh elementals.

Air, fire, flesh ran and turned in animal excitement. A line of militia drew whips occult-tempered, and cracked them, sending the elementals rearing in fear, delight and challenge. The whips snapped like heavy leather and elyctricity, like shadows. When they cracked the noise made dark light.

The elementarii cajoled their charges forward. Air and fire and flesh came. Councillors screamed. They fired and their shells burst among the elementals. Without strategy, pushed by panic, they triggered Judah’s golem traps.

With automaton motion golems unfolded out of the earth and the metal and wood debris of the railroad. There were not so many as there were elementals, and each of them drew on Judah’s powers. Wherever he was, he must have felt a burst of sudden draining. And soon he’ll feel more, Cutter thought, and tried to focus the mirror.

A bomb exploded in the path of the yags, and they disappeared amid its copse of high flames, and their cries were uncanny cries of pleasure. When the bomb settled, there were the fire elementals still running, bigger, through the smoke. A line of earth golems faced them.

Cutter felt the murmur of clockwork in the mirror, gears uncoiling in discombobulant dimensions. He felt the mirror moving as if it were a baby.

“Unlock your engine,” he shouted, and when Thick Shanks did Cutter felt another tugging. He held his mirror hard and saw Thick Shanks doing the same. The recombinant light their reflections made was waxing.

It was curling, growing around itself. It was something in itself, something real, with dimensions, something that moved. Cutter saw the fishlike swimming presence, a thing roaming out of nothing and made of the hard light, shining like a sun. He felt his strength haemorrhage from him. “We’ve got it,” he shouted. “Take it to them.”

Thick Shanks and he kept their mirrors angled at each other and moved them in time, and the presence of glutinous light followed, dragged over the ground as they turned to face the elementarii. Something terrible was happening. The militia whipmen had come forward, cajoling the elementals at the ends of their lashes, and though the outer lines of the Councillors were laying down fire with everything they had, the proasmae were coming.

Missiles tore into the creatures of slabbed-together muscle, burrowing into them so they refolded and spat out the nuggets of lead and the honed flint or iron blades. The proasmae, the flesh elementals, called up out of the stuff of the horses, reached the earthwork barrier.

They rolled up it, they were amoeboid, they were urchinlike, studded with bones they made limbs, they made themselves suddenly humanoid or like some unskinned and baying wildebeests, and they scrambled the height of the rise and paused at its top, then hurled down onto the screaming men, and Cutter saw what they did.

They dived into the men’s flesh. They dived and poured themselves through the Councillors’ skin, emptying into flesh-stuff, swimming in the innards while their victims, their new houses, looked suddenly stunned and grossly bloated, scrabbling for a brief second at their chests or necks or wherever the proasm had entered before exploding or infolding in a wet burp of blood and the flutter and flap of skin, and the proasm would run on again, its substance increased, built up with stolen flesh. They raced through the line, tugging the mens’ insides out of them and leaving gory skin rags, growing bigger and more bone-flecked as they came.

“Jabber preserve us,” Cutter said.

He pulled at the speculum, and felt resistance. He and Thick Shanks pulled their mirrors at different speeds and the thing between them began to pull apart, to split resentfully, strings of light-matter stretching out between its parts like mucus. Cutter shouted, “Back, back your end, pull it back together!” They struggled to reaggregate the light golem.

The strikes of the militia’s gnoscourges reached much longer than it seemed they should. Yards up the luftgeists screeched and were galvanised into aggression as the elementarii corrected them. They swept down, invisible. They forced the Councillors who shot and slashed pointlessly to breathe them, shoved into their lungs and burst them.

A salvo of attacks, bombs, a rush of weak thaumaturgy, and the militia regrouped. One was hit; one only was killed. The yags faced the first of the golems, a huge figure of stone and the stumps of iron rails. Yags wrestled it, hugged it, and their fire corpi re-formed and enveloped the golem and began to bend its hard black metal with the intensity of their heat. It spilled into a pool, trying still to fight as its matter collapsed. It ran in rivulets, streams of molten golem.

The Councillors fought, but the elementals were racing through them with effortless carnage, scampering like dogs, like children. It was a terrible dangerous strategy to call the elementals, these animals, substances made predatory and playful flesh: they could not be domesticated. But the elementarii needed only to control them for this one quick attack. The yags and luftgeists were heading on, leaving footprints of fire and trails of ruined air, toward the perpetual train. The golems tried to face them—interventions, the manifestations of sentient control against the animalisation of raw forces. The elementals were winning.

But though the air elementals might blow apart the substance of earth golems in a spew of particles, they had to work harder against air golems. It was a strange, near-invisible fight. Almost the very last line of Judah’s defences. Sudden gusts of unnatural wind came up and met the luftgeists, and there was a vague storm where they fought. The made and the wild, the intervention and the barely controlled, squabbled and tore each other apart.

Chunks of something dropped out of the sky and mussed the ground with impact. They were invisible, clots of air itself, Cutter realised, thrown down from the fight above, the torn-off meat of an air elemental discarded by an implacable air golem, the hands of a golem bitten through by a frantic luftgeist. The dead air-flesh lay and evanesced.

The yags were spitting flames. The proasmae were prowling, were sucking the last matter from corpses, grazing on the bodies of the dead. Cutter was very afraid.

From the sunken bed of a stream, way off on the militia’s flanks, emerged horse-riding men. With them, in a powerful loping run, came Rahul the Remade man: and on his back, a bolas spinning in his hands, his hat pulled low, was Drogon, the ranchero, the whispersmith.

Gods, thought Cutter, here come the uhlans, to save us. He felt delirious.

The riflemen on their horses, some on Remade horses, having come up unseen through the gorges of the waterways, having run all the way from New Crobuzon or gods knew where, emerged and began with great expertise to fire. There were many seconds when the militia were too surprised or could not pin down their new enemies.

Though they were not many, the horesemen took up positions like hunters and fired on the militia from protected places. Their weapons shot puissant bullets that roared like splits in the aether, that muttered as they flew. The gunmen took two, three, four, a handful of the elementarii fast, dropping them, and the Councillors who could see it cheered.

Then, oh, fast, some of the militia spun their whips, and the gnoscourges flailed much too long like serpentine presences momentarily alive and playing with space, flicked the rumps of the yags that squealed in voices like burning and came back at a terrible rate, headed for the newcomers. The Iron Council’s gunmen and bombardiers and thaumaturges attacked as they could, but the yags were coming fast.

“Control it. There, there,” Cutter yelled, nodding toward the wedge of militia, and with Thick Shanks he tugged the mirrors against the resistant light golem. Be, Cutter thought. Fucking be.

He pulled against the drag of the half-born golem and watched the yags bear on the newcomers. Who are they? he thought. Drogon’s friends? As they grew close, Drogon reared up on Rahul and put his hand to the side of his mouth, and must have whispered something. One of the elementarii flailed suddenly with his whip, sending the tip lashing across the gathering yags, and the scream they sent up was not playful but enraged.

Drogon whispered again and another militiaman did the same, scourged the oncoming elementals, and the yags reared and tumbled into each other, gobbed wads of burning sputum at their masters. Drogon whispered, whispered, sent commands to one and another elementarius, had them perform provocations, confusing the animals. The militia had to defend themselves with expert whip-play from the elementals’ revenge.

The light golem was born. It existed. Suddenly. Cutter’s mirror shook as the thing moved. It stood, out of the foetus of light it had been. It was a man, or a woman, a broad figure made of illumination that was impossible to look at yet did not shed light but seemed to suck in what light was there and gave a violent hard glow that impossibly did not spread beyond its own borders. It stood and stepped forward, and the mirrors were tugged with it. Cutter and Thick Shanks were half-following half-dictating its movements.

“There,” Cutter shouted, and they twisted their mirrors so the golem strode forward with a construct’s motion, past the outlying ranks of the Councillors who cried out, was this some seraph come to save them? They looked at each other with eyes momentarily occluded by its brightness, looked to its footsteps, which glowed with residue. The light golem strode into the yags. The golem stretched a little like some dough-thing, gripped the yags and began to shine.

Cutter felt weak. The golem wrestled them, and their fire did nothing against its solid light, and it grew brighter and brighter as it fought, became a humanoid star, shedding cold luminance that effaced the heat of the yags and grew much much too bright to see. And then the yags that had fought it were gone, washed out in its glow, and it was stronger. It moved with an unsound, a stillness.

Yags panicked. There were some that ran away in their animal motion across the landscape, and some who rallied and flew again at the light golem to be erased by its phosphorescence. There were elementarii whipping hard at the frightened fire elementals, but that enraged them and some in passing snapped petulant and pyrotic at their handlers and burnt them to death.

The militia were rallying. Little luftgeists like arrows hunted down the new gunmen, piercing them and drinking their blood. Drogon whispered his instructions, and the militia could not disobey him, and he made their whips flail destructively. They knew by then that he was their main enemy. They sent the proasmae toward him.

Cutter and Thick Shanks sent the golem for the militia, toward a group gathered around some kind of cannon. They were butchering animals. What are they doing?

They were siphoning something from the air, as their proasmae at last reached the newcomer gunmen and began to swim through them. The light golem came on. What were the militia calling?

A drizzle of luminance seemed to be pouring from the sky, very concentrate, a fine shaft just visible. It fell to the mechanism they surrounded. The light came out of the moon. The day-moon, just visible, very faint in sunlight. Out of its half-lustre came the moonlight into the machine, and at the end of the barrel a hole seemed to be opening.

In its deeps, something made of glow was moving. Cutter stared.

It took long moments to make sense of it—while he tried to march the light golem over the damage of still-exploding bombs, the wreckage left by the Councillors, who were advancing now that the yags had gone, now the proasmae were distracted by the newcomers, now the militia had lost control of their luftgeists that caused damage and death but only randomly as they gushed over the heavily protected train—but Cutter saw something in the opening. Its parameters changed, defied taxonomy. He tried to make sense of it.

Its shape altered with the seconds. A fish’s skeleton, the ribs passing ripples along the length of a body like a rope of vertebrae or like some rubberised cord. And then there was something of the bear to it, and something of the rat, and it had horns, and a great weight, and it shone as if its guts and skin, its bones were phosphorus. As if it were all cold and bright rock. A firefly, a death mask, a wooden skull.

A fegkarion. A moon elemental.

Cutter had heard of them, of course, but could not believe that this onrushing skeletal insectile animal thing he saw only half a second in three and that was a suggestion or a fold of space was the moonthing about which there were so many stories. Oh gods, oh Jabber.

“Shanks . . . get the golem to that thing, now.”

But the golem did not walk so fast. It went through the militia at a steady pace, laid out its hands as it came. It took time to touch each man it passed, to smother their heads with its hands and pour light into them, so each burst with light, beams exploding their helmets, shining hard and for yards from their ears, their anuses, their pricks, through their clothes, making them stars, before the golem let them fall.

The fegkarion was crawling out of the nothing. “Come on,” Cutter said.

The elementalists were withdrawing, gathering around the moon-callers to protect them. They slashed at the golem now and drew its substance with each whip-strike, sent gouts of light spraying. Each lash snapped back Cutter’s and Thick Shanks’ heads. They bled. They kept the thing moving.

The proasmae were neglected. The last of them roared through two more gunners then took its bone-and-innard body into the wilds, following its siblings, rolling away from Drogon and Rahul. Drogon kept whispering, but by some thaumaturgy the militia no longer obeyed him. They lashed at him; they lashed at the golem.

“Come on, come on.”

Now the golem’s light-stuff legs stamped through bodies of the men attacking it, and they burst with the shining. The moon elemental was close, was corkscrewing its chill and grey-glowing self through the hole that was opened, and it was vast, Cutter saw, it was monstrous, and he reached and the golem reached to block the lunic cannon, wedging itself into the hole, shoving through the stuff of the elemental itself and into the engine of the machine, and golem and elemental fought, and blistering light—cold, hot, grey and magnesium-white—came welling out of nothing like sweat.

The Councillors saw the proasmae were gone, sent in their heaviest squads, their cactacae and big Remade. “Take some alive!” someone was shouting, and the cactus hacked conscious and light-comaed militia, and there was a burst, a shattering, and the moon-engine combusted in harpoons of golem-light and moonlight.

The militia were broken. Stopped by Drogon and his men, and by the light golem. The ground was scattered with dead elementarii and countless more dead from the Iron Council, with the burst residue of flesh elementals and their victims, with gobs of glow that trickled luminous into the earth. Those few militia still able rode into the wilds of Rohagi, following the slick tracks of the proasmae, which had become a wild herd: wet red blubber things prowling the dustland.

Those militia left were immobilised by bullets, by chakris or golem-light. Lying, spitting and raging at the Councillors as they came.

“Fuck you fuck you,” one man said through the ruins of his reflective helmet. There was fear in his voice but mostly there was rage. “Fuck you, you send us through the fucking stain, you cowards, you think that’ll stop us? We lost half our force but we’re the fucking best, we can chase you wherever you go, and now we know the way through, we found our way, and maybe you got lucky with this bullshit, this bastard lightshow and fucking susurrator. We know the way.” They shot him.

They shot all the militia left alive. They buried their own dead where they could, except for one, a Remade woman famous for mediating during The Idiocy, long before. They voted her a burial on the train’s carried graveyard, in the flatcar cemetery of its greatest dead. They left the militia to rot, and some defiled the bodies.

When the sun rose again on the yag-scorched train, Cutter found Ann-Hari and the Council’s leaders. They were exhausted. Drogon, Rahul and Thick Shanks were with them. Cutter stumbled with his own tiredness. He gripped Drogon and the Remade who had carried him.

“Last time we escaped the militia,” Thick Shanks said. “This time we beat them. We took them down.” Something of his delight even entered Cutter himself, though he knew all the contingencies that had led to this victory.

“Yeah. You did.”

“We did. You . . . the light . . . all of us did it.”

“Yeah, we did, all right. We did.”

“We got out, is all,” said Rahul. Drogon whispered agreement. “We got lost. Came out of that tunnel, well, that alleyway, whatever, into the main part of the town. It took us a while to find where we were. But there was so much going on that night. We never saw nor heard a thing from you. Not from none of you. We didn’t know if you’d fixed that Teshman or not. We’d no idea. You did, didn’t you?

“It took us time to get back to the Collective, but honestly there were so many damn holes we could walk in. When we found out you’d gone—no, I don’t blame you at all, sister, you couldn’t have known we was coming—we had to get back.

“So we smuggled us out, and then old Drogon here goes off for two days and comes back with his brothers.”

“There ain’t so many of us horse-wanderers,” Drogon told Cutter. “You can get word out. I know where to find them. And they owe me.”

“Where are they now?”

“Most are gone. Some ride tomorrow. These men are nomads, Cutter. Give them your thanks, any coin you can share, that’s all they want.”

“We knew the militia was coming,” Rahul said. “We rode hard.”

“You came out of nowhere.”

“We came out of the trails. Drogon knows them. We came fast. I ain’t never known horses like these men’s. Where’s the monk? Talking of secret trails. Qurabin. Oh no . . . Gods. And Ori? Did he . . . Ori? Gods, gods. And . . .”

“Elsie.”

“Oh gods. No. Oh gods.”

“I didn’t think you could do it,” Cutter said to the Councillors. “I admit that. I was wrong. I’m happy. But it ain’t enough. I told you why Judah ain’t here . . . he’s working on something. In the Collective. But it’s too fucking late. It’s too late. He’s trying to do what he can.

“Listen to me.

“The Collective’s fallen. Shut your mouth, no, listen . . . The Collective was a . . . a dream, but it’s over. It failed. If it ain’t dead by now it’ll be dead in days. You understand? Days.

“By the time the Council comes close to the city . . . the Collective’ll be dead. New Crobuzon’ll be under martial rule. And what then? Killed Stem-Fulcher, it didn’t make a spit of difference: the system won’t be beat—don’t look at me like that, I don’t like it any more’n you. And when you come rolling up saying Hello, we’re the inspiration, on cue, you know what’ll happen. You know what’ll be waiting.

“Every militiaman and -woman in New Crobuzon. Every fucking war engine, every karcist, every thaumaturge, every construct, every spy and turncoat. They’ll kill you in view of the city, and then the hope that you are—you still are—dies when you die.

“Listen. I’ll give you Judah’s message again.

“You have to turn. The Iron Council has to turn. Or leave the train. You come on to New Crobuzon, it’s suicide. You’ll die. They’ll destroy you. And that can’t be. That ain’t acceptable. Iron Council has to turn.”

Chapter Thirty-two

“They’ll destroy you,” he said. “Do you want to die?” he said. “You owe yourself to the world, we need you.”

Of course they would not be persuaded. They continued, pushed through the buckled land leaving the scabs of fight behind them. Cutter showed horror that they would not do as he said, but he had expected nothing else. He made his case and the Iron Councillors answered him in various ways.

Some gave the kind of idiot triumphalism that enraged him. “We beat New Crobuzon before, we’ll do it again!” they might say. Cutter would stare uncomprehending because he saw that they knew what they said was untrue, that it would not be that way. They knew.

Others were more thought-through. They gave him pause.

“What would we be?” Thick Shanks said. The cactus-man etched a cicatrix into the skin of his inner arm, cutting a snake shape with an animal’s tooth. “What would you have us be, bandits? We lived free in a republic we made. You want me to give that up, be a bloody wilderness hobo? I’d rather die fighting, Cutter.”

“We have a responsibility,” Ann-Hari said. Cutter never felt eased in her presence. The fervour in her unnerved him—it made him tired and uncertain of himself, as though she might win him over against his own will. He knew he was jealous—no one had had such an effect on Judah Low as Ann-Hari.

“We’re a dream,” she said. “The dream of the commons. Everything came to this, everything came here. We got to here. This is what we are. History’s pushing us.”

What does that mean? he thought. What are you saying?

“It’s time for us to push through. Whatever happens. We have to come back now, you see?” That was all she would say.

The whispersmith’s friends, his fellow cavalry, disappeared on their horses Remade and whole, becoming dustclouds as they headed east, south. Drogon stayed. Cutter was not sure why.

“What do you want this lot to do? You been in the city . . . you know we’ll be killed if we go.”

“They’ll be killed maybe.” Drogon shrugged. “They know what’s happening. Who’m I to stop them? They can’t stop now. You set yourself on a rail and it comes to be what you do. They have to keep going.”

This ain’t about argument, Cutter thought. He was horrified by what seemed to him quiescence. If they tried to argue it, they’d lose . . . but even though they know that, they still go on . . . because in going against the facts, they change them. It was a methodology of decision utterly unlike his own, unlike how he could ever think. Was it rational? He could not tell.

The Iron Council progressed through a landscape made of mist. The scarps and hillocks, the layers of trees seemed momentary thickenings of water in the air, seemed to curdle out of the vapour as the perpetual train came, and dissipate again in its aftermath.

They moved through scenery that was abruptly familiar, that jogged old memories. This was New Crobuzon country. Siskins went between dripping haw-bushes. This was a New Crobuzon winter. They were a few weeks away.

“We had a man once, years and years ago,” Ann-Hari said to Cutter. “When the Weaver came to us, before we was Council, and told us secrets. The man went mad, so he could only talk about the spider. He was like a prophet. But then he was boring, and then not even boring, just nothing. We didn’t even hear him, you see? We heard nothing when he spoke.

“You’re like that. ‘Turn back, turn back.’ ” She smiled. “We don’t hear you no more, man.”

I’ve a mission, Cutter thought. I’ve failed. Knowing that his lover had expected it did nothing to stop his sadness.

He became a ghost. He was respected—one of the world-crossers, who had come to save Iron Council. His dissidence now, his insistence that the Council would die, was treated with polite uninterest. I’m a ghost.

Cutter could have left. He could have taken a horse from the township’s stables and ridden. He would have found the foothills, the deserted tracks, Rudewood, he would have come to New Crobuzon. He could not. I’m here now was all he could think. He would run only when he had to.

He had seen the maps. The Council would go on east leaving spike-holes and the debris of track-pressed shale, recycling the iron road, and would at last hit the remains of the railway scores of miles south of New Crobuzon. And there they would couple to what remained of the old tracks, and steam on, and within hours would approach the city.

Cutter would run when he had to. But not now.

“We are a hope,” Ann-Hari said.

Perhaps she’s right. The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall.

In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.

There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them—of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud—crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.

Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.

“Did you hear?” one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). “I heard of you. Did you hear?” She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. “You’ll be ploughing for me,” she said. “Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon.”

Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

“The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won.” We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it. “They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?”

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender. Something stopped Tesh’s plans? Cutter thought wryly. Fancy. And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

“The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out.”

Through the rained-on downs came a spread of runaways from the city. They came and lived in the small towns by which the Iron Council was passing; they repopulated the deserted cow-towns they found, the residues of the old railway rush. The Council might come out of the low hills in an industrious multitude and lay down tracks along the preflattened paths, along the reclaimed main roads. New inhabitants would emerge from what had been the saloon, a church, a bawdyhouse, and stare as over hours (their progress faster daily) the crews put down the sleepers and rails on old horsetracks and passed where stagecoaches and drifters had been.

“Did you hear?” They heard the same stories scores of times. There must have been escapees from the Parliamentarian quarters too, but no one said so: everyone was a Collectivist, on the run from the militia. Sure you’re not some two-bit spiv? Cutter thought cynically. Sure you’re really an organiser like you claim?

“Did you hear?” That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, and that when we beat the Tesh the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?

Yes, we heard. Though it was disputed.

They were entertained in these revenant towns, with sex and New Crobuzon cooking. “What have you come for? Did you not hear? Did you hear? There ain’t no Collective no more. Only dregs, some terrorists in Dog Fenn, a few streets here or there.” “That ain’t what I heard, I heard it was there and still fighting.” “You’re coming to help, to fight for the Collective? I wouldn’t go back. It’s a damn war there.” “I’d go back. Can I come? Can I come with you?”

Some of those who had left to be wanderers in the waste—some of the young—joined the perpetual train, to return to New Crobuzon, only weeks after their escape. “Tell us about the Iron Council!” they insisted, and their new compatriots told all their stories.

There were rumours of new kithless, unique powers. “Did you hear,” Cutter heard, “about the golem-man Low?”

“What?” he said, crossing to where the refugee spoke.

“Golem-man Low, he’s got an army of made men. He’s making them of clay in his cellar, ready to take over the city. He’s been seen, outside New Crobuzon, in the rail yards, on the sidings, by the tracks. He’s got plans.”

They came closer, and the escaped they met were more and more recent out of the city. “It’s done,” one said. “There ain’t no Collective anymore. Wish to gods there was.”

That night Cutter looked for Drogon and realised that the whispersmith had gone. He walked the length of the train, sent messages and queries, but there was nothing.

It was possible the susurrator was off riding, hunting, on a mission of his own, but Cutter was very suddenly certain that Drogon had gone. That they were close enough to New Crobuzon, that the horseman had had enough, and had ridden, his adventures with the Iron Council over.

Is that all? Such a slow deflation, such a lacklustre end. Was that all you wanted, Drogon? Not tempted to say good-bye?

Cutter prepared to leave. It could not be long. He felt a hollowness, a preemptive loss. He wondered how and where the militia would confront them and destroy the Council. The Remade and their families and comrades, the Councillors, all knew what was coming. Their track-laying songs became martial. They oiled their guns; the forges at trackside and in the carriages turned out weapons. The Iron Councillors carried made and stolen guns. The glass and brass foci of ordnance-shamanism. Racks of spears and west-coast weapons.

“We’ll gather people with us, we’ll be an army, we’ll sweep in. We’ll turn things around.” Cutter winced to hear the dreams. “We’re bringing history.”

There was a drip of people across the land, on their way anywhere, without plans but away from the carnage of New Crobuzon.

Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a suddenness and a strange anticlimax they were in domesticated country. They knew they were close.

The graders and scouts returned. “Yonder. Just beyond.” Over stone-flecked undulations. “The old rails. Down to Junctiontown, in the swamps. And up to New Crobuzon.”

Two days away. Every moment they continued, Cutter expected a deployment of New Crobuzon troops to emerge from the tunnels and flint hides of that damp region, but they did not come. How long would he stay? He had tried to dissuade them. Would he handle the mirror one more time?

“Low the golemer’s been seen, he’s in the hills, he’s watching over us. He’s by the old rails.”

Oh yes? Has he? Cutter was sour. He was very lonely. Where are you, Judah? He did not know what to do.

In small numbers, some Councillors—the older, mostly, the first generation, who remembered the punishment factories—left. Not many, but enough to be felt. They would go into the hills to scout for wood or food and would not come back. Their comrades, their sisters, shook their heads with scorn and care. Not everyone was unafraid, or willing or able to ignore their fear.

I’ll decide the plan when I see the old rails, Cutter told himself, but then he walked with the track-layers as they bent the iron road through gaps between sediment and basalt stanchions and through the V the graders had cut in soft displaced earth and there, there, there wetly ashine, black but glowing, were the rails. More than twenty years old. Curving away, drawn together by perspective, slipped through geography. The metal path. The crossties were bucked by neglect but held the rails down.

The Councillors gave a cheer that was reedy in the cold wet air but that continued a long time. The track-layers waved their tools. The Remade gesticulated their unshaped limbs. The road to New Crobuzon. That old road. Left to moulder when the collapse of money and the stockpiles in warehouses had made an end to the TRT boom. They had been left to the shifting ground—Cutter could see where the banks of the cut had bowed and buried the metal. They were running grounds for wild things.

In some places the iron had been stolen by salvagers. The Council would have to lay down some from its own stock. The Iron Council had come this way before, unborn, when it was just a train. The wet of the stones, the dark and glistening way. Cutter stared. And what was it? What was happening in his city? Where the Collective was fighting? How should he run?

Judah, you bastard, where are you?

The hammermen laid down the rails, and with careful measured sideswipes of their mallets, they put in curves. They made bends, gently, so that their tracks came out of the west and skewed gradually through the banks of the train-gash up and onto the roadbed of the old rails.

This is all a postlude, Cutter thought. This is all happening after the story.

The Collective was falling or fallen and all there was was this unfolding of violence. We’ll swing it, change it, Cutter thought with sad scorn, in the voice of a Councillor.

The greatest moment in the history of New Crobuzon. Laid low by war and by the end of war, which was gods help me my doing, our doing. But what could we do? Could we let the city fall? The Collective would have fallen anyway, he told himself, but he was not sure of that. He drew icons in the earth, making trains in outline, men and women running away or toward something. Maybe the Collective’s just hiding. Everyone in the city waiting. Maybe I should stay on the train. He knew he would not.

There were guards around the sprawling train-town now for fear of militia and of the bandits. Mostly the brigands that came, fReemade and whole, came to join the Council. They arrived daily, wondering if they had to audition, show their worth. The Councillors welcomed them, though some fretted about spies. There was too much chaos in those last days to worry. Cutter saw newcomers everywhere, with their tentative enthusiasm. Once with a start he thought he saw a man attached backward on a horse’s neck.

Walking back through the cold at night, through a startled gust of rock pigeons, Cutter heard a voice. Deep in his ear.

“Come up here. I’ve something to tell you. Quiet. Please. Quietly.”

“Drogon?” Nothing but the idiot fluting of the birds. “Drogon?” Only small stones skittering.

It was not a command but a request. The susurrator could have made him come, but had only asked.

Drogon was waiting in the dark hills overlooking the train.

“I thought you’d gone,” Cutter said. “Where’d you go?”

Drogon stood with an old white-haired man. He held a gun, though it was not aimed.

“This one?” the old man said, and Drogon nodded.

“Who’s this?” said Cutter. The old man held his arms behind his back. He wore an old-fashioned waistcoat. He was eighty or more, stood tall, looked at Cutter sternly, kindly.

“Who is this Drogon? Who the fuck are you?”

“Now, lad . . .”

“Quiet,” said Drogon peremptorily in Cutter’s ear. The old man was speaking.

“I’m here to tell you what’s happening. This is holy work and I would not have you not know. I’ll tell you the truth, son: I had and have no interest in you.” He spoke with a singing cadence. “I was here to see the train. I’ve been wanting to see the train a long time, and I come by darkness. But your friend”—he indicated Drogon—“insisted we speak. Said you might want to hear this.”

He inclined his head. Cutter looked at the gun in Drogon’s hand.

“So here is what it is. I am Wrightby.”

“Yes, I see you know me, you know who I am. I confess gratification, yes. I do.” Cutter breathed hard. Godsfuckingdamn. Could it possibly be true? He eyed Drogon’s gun.

“Stand still.” A whispered command. Cutter stood tall so fast his spine cracked. His limbs were rigid. “Hold,” Drogon said.

Jabber . . . Cutter had forgotten what it was to be so ordered. He shook, tried to curl his fingers.

“I am Weather Wrightby and I am here to tell you thank you. For this thing you’ve done. Do you know? Do you know what it is you’ve done? You crossed the world. You crossed the world, something that’s needed doing as long as I’ve lived, and that you did.

“More than once I tried, you know. With my men. We did what we could. Cut through the mountains, through creeping hills. Smokestone. All the landscapes. You know them. We tried, we died, we turned back. Eaten, killed. Taken by cold. Again and again, I tried. And then I was too old to try.

“All this”—he swept his arm up—“all this metal trail from New Crobuzon to the swamps, the split, to Cobsea, to Myrshock, it was something. But it wasn’t what I worked for. Not really. Not my dream. You know that.

“No: that other thought, of iron stretched from sea to sea, that was mine. The continent cut open. From New Crobuzon west. That was mine. That’s history. That’s what I been fighting for, wanting. You know it, don’t you, all of you? You know that.

“I won’t pretend you didn’t rile me. You did, of course you did, you riled me when you took my train. But then I saw what you were doing . . . Holy work. Much more than you’d been charged with. And while it weren’t the easiest for me to see, I’d not stand in the way of that.” Weather Wrightby shone; his eyes were passionate and wet. “I had to come see you. I had to tell you this. What you’ve done, what you did. I salute you.”

Cutter shook like an animal in a trap, debased by the susurrator’s techniques. He strived, moving and hearing again “Be still” deep in his ear. It seemed to resonate in the bone itself. Gods, fucking, damn. The air was utterly still. There was the snap of metal from below. It was cold.

“And then you were gone, off in the west and who knew where? It was over, but I knew I’d hear of you again and then, yes.” Weather Wrightby smiled. “Even fallen and failed, I’ve my networks, I’ve my plans. I’ve my friends in Parliament who want me to succeed. I hear things. So when they found you—when one of their scouts or merchanteers went up through that sea, and heard of the train-town and sent word and sent scouts and found you—when that happened, I heard it. And when they sent their men to bring your heads, under cover of the war, I heard that too.

“What could I do? What could I do but come to you? You know the route. You know the way through the continent. Do you know? What that is? That’s holy knowledge. I’d not let them bury that. You went as fast as you can, there’s places I’d deviate, go souther near the Torque, but however it’s finessed its your way. I needed to know.

“So I got word to your best defender in the city, one there when your Council was born. You think it isn’t known?” He shook his head with gentle amusement. “Who’s an idea where the Council might have gone? Of course we know. Known for a long time who their man is in the city. I’ve paid one of his friends, a long time, to keep a link to him. I got him word so he’d come find you. We knew he could. And we could come and help. To find the Council, to help it back. My whispersmith.”

Drogon was an employee. He was security, an agent, for the TRT. Cutter’s blood went from his stomach.

“He’s somewhere near, you know, they say. Your defender, Low. He’s been seen. He’s like a lost thing now the Collective’s near gone. He’s been seen around the lines. Waiting for your end. We’ve what we needed.

“We came to help, and learn the way. We learnt it all. Drogon, my man. A good man. We’d not have them interrupt you. We had to stop them. So close, so nearly home. I couldn’t let them interrupt you so near the city. We had to see you back again.”

That’s why Drogon came back. This mad bastard here, Wrightby’s fucking mission. And those other cavalry, TRT all? Good gods. He needed us to come through. He had to know we’d made it all the way. Had to see our route. He fought the city. He killed the damn militia so he could see us get back.

“And now, you’re here. Shhh, still now.”

“Still,” said Drogon, and Cutter’s slow struggling ended.

“Now you’re here. You’ll be on the rails tomorrow. And back to the city. You see, you’ve done what was needed. I’ve the route across the continent. By the cacotopic stain. The way you made out of your bodies and your need. We thank you for it.”

Drogon, without sneer or show, inclined his head.

“You can be sure we’ll use it. I’ll build the iron way. This continent will be made again, Remade, it’ll be made beautiful.” Cutter stared at the visionary of money and iron. He stared and could not speak, could not move, could not tell Weather Wrightby he was mad. Now Wrightby could cross the continent, after so long trying and failing. He would plough a train-thin strip and siphon money to the west and suck it back again. He would change the world and New Crobuzon.

Can he? It’s a long way. A damn long way.

But he knows the way now.

“Here’s how it will be. They’re waiting for you. The Collective’s dead. You know that, yes? And the militia knows you’re coming. They’re waiting. They know where you’ll arrive. To the sidings, the terminus we built. There’ll be plenty of them.”

There would be battalions. There would be whole brigades. Lined in rows, with their guns, with a patience of mass murder. They were waiting for their quarry to come, enter the fire and iron, the hotspit thaumaturgic carnage, at their own pace. No light golem, no moss-magic, no braveheart resistance of the fReemade and their kin, no cactus savagery, no shaman channelling, would defeat that massing.

“You’ll die. I’m here to tell you that.” He said it not like a warning, but as part of a conversation. He’ll not intercede again. This fucker helped for some religious craziness, some mercantile madness. Even against the government. But now we’re back he’s done with that. We’re home, we’ve done what’s needed, he has the way. He can do what he’s always wanted. It’s in Drogon’s head, the bastard, in the tracks we left.

“I want you to know you are magnificent. Such a brave thing, so strong. Like nothing I’d imagined. Well done, well done. You can end now.

“I tell you why I tell you this.

“It wouldn’t be seemly for you not to know. You should know what you’ve become. When you turn those last curves, and see the trainyard, and the militia.”

Cutter shook. Drogon watched him.

“Or you could go.”

Cutter’s heart beat faster as if it were only with the saying of it that Wrightby made it possible. As if he were giving him permission to escape. “You could go. Drogon wanted you to have that choice. That’s why I’m here.”

Drogon? Did you? Cutter had the strength, just, to move his eyes and look at his erstwhile companion. The ranch-hand hatted killer did not look up. Such attenuated camaraderie. What was this? Some last chance, granted to Cutter. I always had a chance, he thought, though he felt as if Drogon had given him a present.

“You’ve ridden history across the Rohagi steppes. You’ve made the TRT a truth though its name was always a lie before. It did—it crossed a continent. You can go now.

“Or. Or you could help us. You could help us cross back again. Once more. Leave the tracks behind us this time.” Wrightby looked at him and Drogon did not. “Drogon’s told me your facility, how you’ve learnt to travel, to grade, to scout. And you were always your own man. We know that. You could help us.”

Gods, Jabber, Jabber and shit, godspit, godshit, you ain’t saying that. You ain’t. The true of it. A revelation. So. Even through Drogon’s disabling hex, Cutter sneered.

That’s it? He tried to talk but could not. The expression he dragged across his face said it. You think what, you think what?

What do you think I am? Think I’m so cut off from them as I’ve fought and travelled and fucked with that I’d go, leave them for you? For your money crusade? All your religiose dung comes to this? This was a recruitment speech? You want me on your team? Because I know the way? Because I’ve done this? You want me on your team? What do you think I am?

He was melted with disgust, standing in his whisper-hexed stillness, his hands by his side.

“What do you say?” Wrightby said.

Deep in Cutter’s ear came Drogon’s voice: “Speak.”

“Fuck you,” said Cutter instantly. Wrightby nodded, waited.

“Get away from my fucking train. You bastards, you turncoat bastard, Drogon, you’ll never get away from us—” He breathed in to scream and Drogon silenced him again.

“We’ll not get past you?” Wrightby said. He looked quizzical. “I’m not sure. Really, I think we will. We’ll go now. I will be in the yard. When the train comes in. I’ll be there, waiting. Come if you want to, if you change your opinions.”

Drogon whispered again. Cutter was agonied by cramp. The whispersmith indicated a way through the hills, led Weather Wrightby away. He looked back and whispered to Cutter again.

“Just so you know,” he said. “I can’t see as it’ll make a spit of difference. But just in case. Because it has to finish now. Your mirrors are broken. Just to be sure.”

Weather Wrightby looked Cutter in the eyes. “You know where to find me.”

And they were gone, and Cutter was straining. Why didn’t you kill me, you fuckers?

His arm came up. It did not matter. He was no threat. What they had told him did not matter. The militia are waiting—he had said that for weeks. Everyone knew he thought that. However suddenly certain he was, it was what he had always said. Why would this change the Iron Council’s messianic plans?

There was another reason Drogon and Wrightby had left him alive. They still thought he might turn. They thought he might get out, leave the Council as it steamed toward its carnage and its end, and join them. And he hated them for that but also thought, What am I? What am I that they think that of me?

He cried some. He did not know if it was the effort of breaking the hex, or something else. He saw himself as Drogon must have seen him: his sneers and loneliness making him seem a traitor in waiting.

The mirrors had been taken out of their careful wrapping in the armoury car. The glass was veined, the tain made dust. Cutter wanted to tell someone what had happened, but he was afraid of the bitterness in him, the miserable certainty of an expectation fulfilled—he was afraid that for all the real loss of it he would seem to crow. He hated it in him. He knew Drogon had sensed it. It was why they had approached him.

He took the broken mirrors to Ann-Hari, and told her.

The old rails shone back moonlight. At the edge of their vision, in the east, was a darker dark: Rudewood, closing. The lights of the train and its cooking fires shed tiny auras.

“Well?” Ann-Hari said.

“Well?”

“Yes.”

“What will you do?”

“What would you do?”

“I’d turn away, for Jabber’s sake. I’d turn and go south on the rails, not north.”

“Into the swamp?”

“For a start. If that’s what it takes to get away. To live, good gods, Ann-Hari. To live. They’re waiting. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, they’re there.”

“Are they? So?”

Cutter shouted. Right into the night. “ ‘So?’ Are you insane? Haven’t you listened to me? And what do you mean ‘Are they?’?” Abruptly he stopped. They watched each other. “You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You think I’m lying.”

“Now now,” she said. “Come. You’re a good friend to the Council, Cutter, we know—”

“Oh my good gods, you think I’m lying. So what does that mean? You think, my gods, you think I broke the godsdamned mirrors?”

“Cutter, now.”

“You do.”

“Cutter. You didn’t break the mirrors. I know that.”

“So what, you think I’m lying about Drogon?”

“You never wanted us to come back, Cutter. You never wanted us here. And now you tell me the militia are waiting. How do you know Drogon or this man weren’t lying? They know what you think; they know what to tell you. Maybe they want us to fear and fail.”

Cutter stopped up short. Could Weather Wrightby be trying to frighten them away?

Perhaps the Collective had won. The refugees in the stony lands beyond the city were all wrong, and the Collective was establishing new democracy, had ended the suffrage lottery, had disarmed the militia and armed the populace. And there were statues to those fallen. Parliament was being rebuilt. And there were no militia pods, the clouds had no unmarked dirigibles in them, the air was full only of wyrmen, of balloons and bunting. Perhaps Weather Wrightby wanted them not to join that new New Crobuzon.

No. Cutter knew. He knew the truth. That was not how it was. He shook his head.

“You have to tell the Councillors,” he said.

“What do you want me to tell?” Ann-Hari said. “You want me to tell them how someone we never knew or trusted brought another man we don’t know here to tell us that the thing we always knew might be true is true, but gave no proof? You want that?”

Cutter felt a rise of something, some tremulous despair. “Oh my gods,” he said. “You don’t care.”

She met his stare.

Even if, she was saying, even if you are right—even if that was Drogon, and that was Weather Wrightby, even if there are ten thousand militia ranged ready—this is where we are, this is what we are. This is where we have to be. Was this her madness?

“We are the Iron Council,” she said. “We do not turn ever again.”

Cutter thought of running into the night and shouting the truth at these dissidents he had come to care for—his comrades, his chaverim, his sisters—and having them turn, begging them to turn, telling them what was waiting, what he knew, what Ann-Hari knew. He said nothing. He did not shout. He was not sure it was not a failure in him—he was not sure it was not a weakness—but he could not announce the truth. Because he knew that it would make no difference, that none of them would turn away.

Chapter Thirty-three

The train went slow on the old rails, the crews running ahead constantly to shore up a collapsing bank of stone, to sweep away detritus for a clear run. They welded split metal, rehammered spikes in bursts of rust. But it was not the ruin on the rails that kept them slow so much as disbelief, the theatre of where they were, what they were doing. At ten, fifteen miles an hour the perpetual train, Iron Council, went north, surrounded by cut, fangs of traprock, for New Crobuzon.

Every window was spiked with guns. The flatcars, the little grassed cemetery, the towers, the tent-towns on the rooftops were full of armed Councillors. They squatted, they sang war songs. “Tell us about New Crobuzon,” the young ones said, those born to whores while the Council was still a work-train, or to free women in Bas-Lag’s inner country, or to Iron Councillors.

Behind the train came the Councillors who could not fight. The children, the pregnant, those whose Remakings made them ill-suited. The old. They stretched a long way on the tracks, singing their own songs.

Wyrmen went overhead, went and came back screeching what they saw. Over the hours the roadbed rose, until the train was on a ridge ordering the granite-stubbled ground into this side and this side. Trees rose as they passed stumps of forest, and the things that lived in them shrieked in the canopies. Many miles west the miasma of trees became Rudewood.

The hours went fast with the mesmeric beat of train wheels that Cutter had forgotten, that the months had taken from his mind as the Iron Council crept too slowly to pick up any rhythm. The train moved just fast enough to make the noise come. The percussion of wheels, the beat of pistons. The uh uh, uh uh, like being tapped on the shoulder again and again, reminded of something, a nervous noise. Cutter rode the train’s anxiety.

I’ll know, in a moment I’ll know, he said inside himself. In a moment I’ll decide. And the perpetual train did not stop and it brought him miles and miles closer to New Crobuzon before, it seemed, he had a chance to think.

What will happen?

He had a weapon ready. He rode in the caboose with outsiders, refugees, who were excited and terribly afraid of what was ahead. It curved, it curved, as if trying to hide its terminus. Miles yet, Cutter thought, but the end of the line seemed to glow darkly just out of sight.

“I need to go home. They’re waiting for me,” someone said. Something is, Cutter thought. Something’s waiting for you.

I won’t stay. It was a certainty, suddenly. I’ll not go to that scum Drogon, but I’ll not give him my death either. What will you do? He gave the question a voice. I’ll run. Where will you go? Where I must. And Judah Low? If I can. If I can find him. Judah Low.

Oh Judah oh Judah. Judah, Judah.

When the night came down as if darkness thickened the air, they did not stop. Light went from their windows across the grey plain and made the train a millipede on gaslight legs.

They must be a few tens of miles off now. Quite suddenly the tracks were clean and clear. Perhaps there had been some passage, Cutter thought; perhaps the city had had trains run the pointless distance this far and back, ferrying ghost passengers to ghost stations. Then in the bone light of such early morning he saw figures on the trackside darkness waving adzes and thick twig brooms, shouting for the train to Go on, go on and telling it Welcome home.

Fugitives from New Crobuzon’s Collective. They were there in increasing numbers out of the black before the train, blinking pinned in its moony lights and waving. The day began to come. Deserters from the Collective’s war who had come through Rudewood or the dangers of the alleys west of Dog Fenn, where the militia hunted and gave out revenge. They had come to be an unskilled work party clearing the lines.

The Crobuzoners waved their hats and scarves. Run come home, one shouted. Some were crying. They threw dried petals on the tracks. But there were some stood and waved their arms No, shouted, No they’ll kill you, and others who wore a kind of sad pride.

They ran and leapt onto the Council. They threw winter flowers and food to the Councillors and their children, exchanged shouted words with them, dropped back. Those on the train had become stern and taciturn with history and mission, and it was their followers on foot who met the escapees and embraced them, merged.

People ran by the train, keeping pace with it, and shouted names. Bereft families.

“Nathaniel! Is he there? Nathaniel Besholm, Remade man, arms of wood. Went into the wilds with the lost train.”

“Split Nose! My father. Never came back. Where is he?”

Names and snips of histories breathed out by those for whom the return of Iron Council was not only a myth come to be real but was a family hope redivivus. Letters addressed to those long-disappeared in exile now suddenly perhaps come back were thrown into the windows. Most were for the dead or those who had simply deserted: these were read and became messages to everyone.

It was day now—the day that the Iron Council would reach the end of the line. It was slowing, the drivers wanting every moment of the journey.

“Low the Golem-man!” one woman shouted in her old voice as they went past. “He’s been prowling around, getting everything ready for you! Come faster!”

What? Cutter looked back. Up from inside him was a suspicion. What?

“Don’t fear,” someone shouted. “Listen, we’re only hiding, us Collectivists, we’re waiting, we’re behind the militia lines waiting for you,” but Cutter was looking for the woman who had spoken of Judah.

There isn’t far. They would be there by noon perhaps, at the end of the line, to the ranks of military in the sidings. Only a few miles left. “I’ve a plan,” Judah said. Gods. Gods. He’s here.

Overhead the Iron Council wyrmen flew in both directions. Their outflyers would soon be at the city.

Cutter was on horseback, the easy long gallop he had learnt over the months he’d become a wilderness man. He could almost keep up with Ann-Hari, who rode Rahul the Remade.

Rahul’s strides pounded, and he ran below the scree and pebble litter with the risen wall of the roadbed a windbreak beside him, dandelions and weeds in its slanted flank. Cutter rode where the wind was most resentful, throwing dust in his eyes. He ignored it. He pushed on under clouds that moved with sudden urgency and sowed rain nearby. He looked to the tracks, he looked ahead. He was beside the rail.

“Just come with me then if you want,” he had said to Ann-Hari. “Prove me wrong. You can always come back. But if I’m right, I’m telling you . . . I’m telling you Judah has something planned.” And though Ann-Hari had been exasperated there was in his urgency and the uncertain valence of his concern—was he excited, anxious, angry?—something that struck her and had her ride with him.

He had failed Judah, and he had to see him, unsure as he was what he sought to do—to persuade Judah to turn the Council if he could, to explain himself, to have him accept Cutter’s regret that he had failed. When the horse-guards blocked him he demanded they summon Ann-Hari. “You have to let me go,” he said. “Give me a fucking horse. Judah’s ahead! I have to see him!”

She affected impatience but he saw her start. She said she would come. “Whatever. Escort me if you don’t trust me, I don’t care, but there’s only a few hours left, and I have to fucking see him.”

What’s he doing?

Then. In the lands nearest New Crobuzon. Where rivers crossed under the raised road, and the stones that gave cover were gnawed by acid rain. Foothills stretched out their legs and rucked up the land in untidy grass, where the piceous thick of Rudewood like a black and black-green rash tided toward the train’s path and even in places stretched sparse little hands of forest to the edges of the track. Cutter, Rahul and Ann-Hari passed through trees and tree-shadow.

The perpetual train was quickly invisible behind them, the rails, newly renewed, meandering. Cutter rode as if he were alone, beside the metal raised like proud flesh, like slub in the land’s weft. There were some refugees still lining the iron who waved him on, but most had run to be with the train itself. He ignored the halloos—Where’s the Council? Come to save us? They’re ahead, boy, be careful. He kept his stare to the tracks, the trackside. The train was no more than an hour behind him.

He felt as if New Crobuzon sucked him in, as if its gravity—the denseness of brick, cement, wood, iron, the vista of roofs, stippling of smoke and chymical lights—as if its gravity took him. The stoned land rose like floodtide toward the line, and Cutter’s horse descended past a place where the roadbed and the country were level. Rahul was beside him. By a meadow of boulders Cutter saw a barge passing. They were near the farmlands. He watched the trackside. The occasional mechanism where a signal might have stood, some meter to read the speed or passage of trains. Here a clutch of stones and metal debris in the train’s path or by its side.

A flock of wyrmen tore back from New Crobuzon, scattered below the fast clouds and screeched at them. “They waiting! Thousands and thousands and thousands! Rows of ’em! No!”

Cutter and Rahul were racing on the eastern side of the tracks, eating the distance, so fast Cutter became hypnotised with it, until after a last turn of rocks the tracks converged at the end of suddenly bleak flatrock land, a stony pool and low marsh where there were wading birds as grey as the environs. At the end of the perfect perspective was a township of sidings, where the rails fanned. The smoke of workshops, the winter-dulled corrugate iron of train sheds, the sprawled terminus at the edge of New Crobuzon. Cutter sounded and heard Rahul sound too, become a single mass in the distance, one organism of pikes and cannon, clouded light reflected from thousands of masks, were the militia.

“Oh my gods.” Judah, where are you?

The troops waited.

“Where’s Judah?” Ann-Hari said. She was staring at the waiting men, miles off, and Cutter saw, good gods, he saw a challenge in her, a fight-light in her eye. A smile.

“We must have missed him. Come on, I swear he’s here . . .”

“You know nothing, don’t you, you don’t know nothing . . .”

“Godsdammit, Ann-Hari, we can find him.” Why are we looking? What will he do?

The train would come from the sheltering stone gulley out into that plateau with the New Crobuzon Militia waiting. Cutter saw the train. Come and come through, and the faces of all the Councillors pale when they saw what waited for them, but set with the knowledge that there was nothing else to be done. By the time they slowed the engine the militia would be on them. Nothing was possible except a last bravery, a tough pugnacious death. The knowledge would come over them, and the sweating and terrored faces of all the hundreds of Councillors on the train would toughen again, and the train would speed up. It would accelerate toward the enemy.

Come on, we taken the militia twice before, we can do it again, would come the shouts, lies that everyone would gratefully pretend to believe. Some would whisper to their gods or dead ancestors or lovers, kiss charms that would not protect them. They would shout, Iron Council! and For the Collective! and Remaking!

The Iron Council, the perpetual train, would howl, smoke streaming, the whistles of its cabin shrill, the sounds of its guns a tempest of bullets. The train would come into the zone of the New Crobuzon guns, and in bucking fire and the stretch and split of metal, in the agony shouts of burning dissidents, of fReemade, as hot death took them, Iron Council would end.

Gods, gods.

The Councillors rode back toward the train a few hundred yards. Cutter forced a slower pace. He watched the metal. Last chance. A mile, no more, into the cosseting of the stone surrounds. Again wyrmen overhead, but these ones speaking with different accents, these were city wyrmen come to greet the newcomers. “Come, come,” they shouted. “We’re waiting. Behind militia. For you.” They wheeled and went back toward some trackside machinery. Cutter rode.

“Ann-Hari.” A call from the edge of the gulch, twenty feet above. Cutter looked up and it was Judah.

Cutter let out a sound. He stopped his horse as Rahul stopped and he and Ann-Hari looked up. Judah Low was standing. He moved in agitation, craving their attention.

“Ann, Ann-Hari,” Judah shouted. “Cutter.” He beckoned hugely.

“Judah,” Cutter said.

“Come up, come up. What are you doing here? What are you doing? Gods, come up.”

Rahul’s great lizard weight could not take the incline, which slithered under him. He could only wait by the tracks as Cutter and Ann-Hari gripped handhold stubs of roots, ascended, stood, Cutter keeping his head down as long as he could so it was only at the very last that he raised his shale-grey face and looked at Judah Low.

Judah was looking at Ann-Hari with an opaque expression. He embraced her a long time, as Cutter watched. Cutter licked his lips. Cutter waited. Judah turned to him and with something at least half a smile gripped him too, and Cutter let Judah for a tiny moment take his weight. Cutter closed his eyes and rested his head, then made himself stand back again. They could see the tracks’ exit from the raised land.

They watched, the three of them, watched each other. Here he was, the tall thin grey-haired man Judah Low. What are you? Cutter thought. Around Judah were signs that he had been waiting. A water bottle. The obscure debris of his golem craft. A telescope.

In this place there was no one around them. The last cut before the city. Wyrmen went overhead again and circled, and shouted hysterical warnings as they went.

“What you been doing?” Cutter said. “What are you doing? They wouldn’t stop, Judah, they wouldn’t turn. I tried . . .”

“I know. I knew they wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter.”

“What happened? In the city?”

“Oh Cutter. Done, it’s done.” Judah was placid, cowish. He looked between Cutter and Ann-Hari’s heads at the curve of the track, in the direction from which the perpetual train would come. Looked back at them, back at the tracks. His attention switched ceaselessly.

“What’ll we do?” Cutter said.

“There’s nothing to be done, now,” Judah said. “It’s not the same now. The city . . . it’s changed again.”

“Why are you here, Judah?” Ann-Hari said. “What are you here for, Judah Low?” She was complicitous. They were smiling at each other, just. A little play in their voices. Even with the carnage to come, even having seen the militia, there was something still playful in her. She reached and touched him again and again, and he her. The thing between them was like an animal coiling from him to her and back. He looked over her shoulder and back at her.

“Judah!” Cutter shouted, and Judah turned to him.

“Yes, yes, Cutter,” he said. “Of course.” He was calming. “Why did you come here?”

“What have you done, Judah?” Cutter said. But there was a noise, and Judah gave a happy gasp just like a little boy and jumped on his toes, again like a boy. There were tears in his eyes. A smile and crying.

A wraith of smoke emerged a half mile off. The perpetual train. It wriggled up, the discharge, like a soot grub from a burrow, faster, slewing a tight turn through blasted barriers and coming closer. A wind came up before the train and pushed at their faces, Cutter and Ann-Hari turning to watch the lamps that rounded and shone weakly through the daylight, washed out the stone and the tracks, and the Iron Council came into the last of the cut.

No. Cutter did not know if he spoke aloud. He did not believe there were revolutionists hidden behind the militia. He watched and shouted aloud or in his head, as the Iron Council came through cleft stone and rolled at speed toward death. No.

The flared guard made into teeth, the engine a fetish head, carved with stories, hung with animal spoils, crowded with the toughest warriors, the biggest Remade, the cactacae with scramasaxes ready, roaring, feted by New Crobuzon refugees who ran alongside, who cheered desperately and threw confetti. The second engine, all its follow-ons, the whole tracktop town become militant, become its weapons, the Iron Council become a fighting city. Its wheels beat the iron, smoke gouting from its chimneys, everyone poised to fight, with no plan but the imbecile bravery of forward.

Uh uh, uh uh. Cutter heard it, the wheels, the clatter of tracks. He ran to the edge of the gap and shouted though he could not be heard. He saw that Judah was crying but still smiling, and Ann-Hari was smiling only. The train, faster than it had ever gone, went past Rahul, who waved his human and his lizard hands.

Cutter stumbled, and behind him he heard Judah muttering, heard Judah repeat the two-part rhythm, the repeating beat of the train. He was singing along with the train, and there was something expectant in him. Cutter leaned over, looked down on the train and the Councillors preparing for war, their last war, for their city again. He saw ahead of them a strange pattern of obstructions between the ties, nothing heavy enough to derail or damage the engine, but a precise set of interruptions, looking from above like the points of a pictogram, over a few yards of track.

“Uh uh uh uh,” Judah said, and below in time sounded uh uh, and the front of the Iron Council passed over a mechanism Cutter had seen, that he had thought a signal relict or something half-finished; and as the wheels touched it and it clattered, it beat into motion, and Judah gasped and dropped to his knees. His skin stretched; the very meat of him seemed bled away. Cutter saw the force of his cathexis, the yank of energy.

He heard the syncopation of the train and of something else now, a complex interfering, percussion in antiphase. Iron Council tripped the switch that Judah had laid for it and the circuit he had left went live, siphoning force from him, and only Cutter could see. Cutter watched Judah blink and gasp.

The little blockade between the tracks, which Judah’s first shout had stopped Cutter or Ann-Hari seeing, wedged in the shingle, propped on crossties—a blockage of pins, of metal rods, of blocks—was pushed over by the Iron Council. Each piece landed hard, onto the contacts Judah had laid, and their strange precise order, their materials, made each of them fall with its own sound. They combined into a careful and exact music of breaking, snaps and tolling iron that added to the flawless beat of the train; and for seconds, for a snatch of time, there was pulse-magic, a palimpsest tempo, and in that moment of complexity, each accented block of noise intervening in time, cutting time into shape so that as the huge hunter’s head of the Iron Council emerged from the rock folds and synclines into open land the moments themselves were hacked by the noise, axed into shape, an intervention through the mechanism that sucked energy from Judah Low, the great self-taught somaturge of New Crobuzon, and crude, vigorous, ineluctable, the precision of that parcelled-up time reshaped time, was an argument in time,

reshaped the time itself, and made it

a golem

time golem

which stood into its ablife, a golem of sound and time, stood and did what it was instructed to do, its instruction become it, its instruction its existence, its command just be, and so it was. This animate figure carved out of time itself, the rough hew-marks of its making the unshaped seconds and crushed moments at its edges, the split instances where its timelimbs joined its timebody. It was. The shape of a figure in dimensions insensible even to its maker, unseen by any there; its contours, seen another way, enveloping the train.

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was. It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it paid the outrage of ontology no mind.

His face bloodied, making some beached fish-flapping motion as he crawled and smeared his gore on the earth, as he shambled like a drunk man to stand, broken by the effort of thaumaturgy, Judah Low looked into the cut and smiled. Cutter watched him.

There was an ugly noise. The tearing and crush of a weighty impact. Ann-Hari was screaming. She ran down the scree with a wake of dust. She fell and rolled and gathered herself, tearing her clothes. Rahul stood in his own shock, looked up at the Iron Council, scant feet from him. The Councillors and runaway citizens were standing, were waiting, quite uncertain. Everyone was looking at the train.

The perpetual train. The Iron Council itself. The renegade, returned, or returning and now waiting. Absolutely still. Absolutely unmoving in the body of the time golem. The train, its moment indurate.

It could not always clearly be seen. The crude rips in the temporal from which the golem was made gave it edges like facets, an opalescence of injured time. From some angles the train was hard to see, or hard to think of, or difficult to remember, instant to instant. But it was unmoving.

For yards over its chimneys the exhaust was fast as smokestone, motionless until the set billows reached the limits of the split in time, the golem’s body, and above that random barrier gusted away in drifts, the last of the effluvia escaping into history. The Councillors were still poised, their weapons were still ready, the train was bursting into the plains beyond the city, and was without motion.

The last carriage, one of the two engines that pushed instead of pulling, had missed the protection of that cosseting unmoment, had stayed dynamic, and had been derailed and crushed against the sudden crisis of untimed matter. It had burst, scattering hot coal and debris and dying engineers. The last fringe of the car ahead of it was concertinaed and torn, and where it met the unending time golem, the edge of the wound was scored like a line.

Ann-Hari was screaming. The Council-followers were coming in more numbers out of the rock, telling each other what had happened, sending word back: Iron Council has . . . what?

No noise came from it. It was a huge silence shaped like women and men on a train. The Iron Council was made of quiet. Ann-Hari screamed and tried to grab it, to pull herself up onto it, and time slithered from her at the borders of the golem and sped her hand or deflected it or momentarily had the Council not there so she could not touch it, she could not touch it. She was in time. It was not, and it was beyond her. She could see it, and all the instant of her comrades, but she could not reach it. Others left behind in time were gathering around her. She was screaming.

At the head of the train, reaching with his brawny thorned arm, was Thick Shanks. He was staring at the massed militia in the distance. He was smiling, his mouth open. Beside him a laughing man whose string of spittle was stretched to the point of snapping. The train was occluded with suspended unmoving dust. Its headlights relucent, their shed light absolute and unwavering. Ann-Hari raged and tried and failed to rejoin Thick Shanks and the Iron Council.

Cutter looked on the impossibility. He jumped when Judah put his hands on him.

“Come,” said the somaturge. His voice was not Judah’s. A torn-up ruined thing that came up with blood and sputum, though he still smiled. “Come. I saved them. Come.”

“How long? Will it last?” Cutter heard his quaver.

“Don’t know. Perhaps till things are ready.”

“They died.” Cutter pointed at the train’s rear. Judah turned his head away.

“It’s what it is. I did all I could. Gods, I saved them. You saw.” He rose. He held his stomach. He let out a gasp. He swayed and left a spatter pattern around him. The daylight seemed to strengthen him. He reached, and Cutter gave him his hand, and they began to descend, Judah lolling as if he were stitched from old cloth, down into the rocks, hidden from the tracks. In the very far off, noise said that the militia were coming. That they saw something was not as it should be, and were coming.

Cutter and Judah climbed down, away.

Part Ten:

The Monument

Chapter Thirty-four

Scuffing and stumbling over little fox-trails, holding Judah while he dry-retched and pulling Judah’s hair back from his aging face, Cutter wanted the moments not to end. In a shallow brook he washed Judah’s blood away. Judah Low did not pay him any notice, but breathed and spread out his fingers. While this time lasted Cutter could dissemble, could make himself believe that he thought it would end well.

By a sideling creep they went very slowly toward New Crobuzon. Cutter took them a long way from the route of the militia, whom they could see and hear approaching the frozen train. Cutter thought of the hundreds of Councillors who must be running, looking for hides in the rocks, heading swampward. The city refugees among them. The warren of stone forms must be full of the frightened.

“Judah,” he said. He breathed the name. He did not know what emotion it was he spoke with. He thought of those killed by what Judah had done. “Judah.”

They were hardly subtle or secretive; they left what must, Cutter thought, be blatant trails of footfalls and blood and broken branches. He hunkered under Judah, took the tall man’s weight. Other Councillors must have climbed out of the cut and down into the outside land, but by some quirk of geography or timing Cutter and Judah seemed alone, hauling over gorse and through dry wintered brush. They were alone in the landscape. Spirits. When they came to open level land they would look and miles off see the advance of the militia. Once a vantage gave Cutter a look at the perpetual train. He saw it, slightly out of the world, as if reality bowed under its weight, as if it were at the bottom of a pit. He saw it quite unmoving.

With the slow move of the shadows, Cutter saw the winter day grow older. He knew that things must be changing, time creeping around the timeless. I am here, under Judah’s arm. I am taking him back to New Crobuzon. The knowing in him that it would not last was a thorn.

I’ll not ask you anything. I’ll not ask you why you did what you did. Ain’t got time. But even unbidden Judah began to speak.

“There was nothing that could be done, not really. Nothing to keep them from harm. History had gone on. It was the wrong time.” He was very calm. He spoke not to Cutter but to the world. Like one delirious. He was still utterly weak, but he spoke strongly. “History’d gone and that was . . . I never knew! I never knew I could do it. It was so hard, all the planning, trying to work it out, such learning, and it was . . . so—” He shook his hands at his head. “—so draining . . .”

“All right, Judah, all right.” Cutter patted him and did not take his hand away. Held Judah. He filled suddenly, closed his eyes, blinked it down. What a pair we are, he thought, and actually laughed, and Judah laughed too.

New Crobuzon’s that way. Cutter directed their walk.

“Where shall we go, Judah?”

“Take me home,” Judah said, and Cutter filled again.

“Yes,” he said carefully. “Let me take you home.”

Their little dissimulation, that they might make it. A long way around, up toward the rises behind the trainyard, where they might find a way north of the TRT sidings and eastward to New Crobuzon’s slum suburbs. To Chimer, say, or on up through the foothills to the River Tar and the barge nomads and low merchants with whom they might take a ride and be pulled in past Raven’s Gate, past Creekside and the remnants of the khepri ghetto, under the rails, to Smog Bend, into the innards of New Crobuzon. Cutter walked them north, as if that might be their plan.

What was that, Judah? What was that you did? Cutter remembered Judah’s talk of the noncorporeal golems, the stiltspear and their arcane golemetry. I didn’t know you could do that, Judah.

They saw people. “You’re going the wrong way, mate,” one caravanner said. Cutter and Judah pushed past them. The cart wheels scuffed and turned the earth and receded. Cutter looked up at birds. More. A little more. A little longer. He did not have any sense of to whom or to what he was pleading. Judah leant on him, and Cutter held him up.

“Look at you,” he said. “Look at you.” He wiped dirt off Judah’s face, onto his own clothes. “Look at you.”

A second tiny wave of runaways approached. This time all variegated. Humans with handcarts, a vodyanoi panting out of water. A fat she-cactus carrying a prodigious club. She hefted it at Cutter and Judah but set it down again when she saw them more closely. There were two khepri, their skinny women’s bodies swaddled in shawls so they moved with tiny steps, conversing with their headscarabs, the iridescent beetles on their thin necks moving headlegs and mandibles in sign, emitting gusts of chymical meaning. Behind them, a kind of punctuation mark to this random Collective, was a construct.

Cutter stared at it. Even Judah looked, through the fug of his exhaustion. It waddled toward and past them on the ruts.

Limbs, a trunk and head in rough human configuration, its body an iron tube, its head featured in pewter and glass. One arm was its own original, the other some later repair in a scrubbed, lighter steel. From a vent like a cluster of cigars it jetted breaths of smoke. It raised its cylinder legs and placed them down with inhuman precision. Wedged over what would be its shoulder it carried a bundle dangling on the end of a staff.

One of the city’s rare legal constructs, the servant or plaything of someone rich? An underground machine, an illegal, hidden for years? What are you? Did it follow its owner into exile, was its meticulous stomping progress simple obedience to a mathematised rule in its analytical engine? Cutter watched it with the superstition of someone grown up after the Construct War.

It turned its head with a whinge of metal. It took them in with eyes that were milky and melancholy, and though it was absurd to think that some self-organised viral mind moved in the flywheels behind that glass, Cutter had a moment where he felt that, in the fall of the Collective, New Crobuzon had gone so grim that even the machines were running. The construct continued, and Cutter led Judah away.

They had some miles to go still. There was sound. The militia must, Cutter thought, have been by the paused Iron Council for hours. The sound came closer. Cutter tightened his eyes shut. The time was ending, as he had known it would.

In a little stone-cluttered clearance he and Judah came to face Rahul and, on his animal back, Ann-Hari. Her teeth were bared. She held a repeater pistol.

“Judah,” she said. She dismounted. “Judah.”

Cutter patted himself until he found his gun, tried unsteadily to raise it. Rahul crossed to him with spurt-quick lizard steps and held him in his saurian arms. He leant forward at the waist and took Cutter’s weapon away. He tapped Cutter’s face with brusque kindness. He moved, dragging Cutter as if he were his parent. Cutter protested, but so weakly it was as if he said nothing. He was almost sure his gun would not have fired. That it would have been clogged, or unloaded.

Judah swayed and watched Ann-Hari. He smiled at her with his vatic calm. Ann-Hari trembled. Cutter tried to say something, to stop this, but no one paid notice.

“Why?” Ann-Hari said, and came forward. She stood close to Judah Low. She was teary.

“They’d be dead,” said Judah.

“You don’t know. You don’t know.”

“Yes. You saw. You saw. You know what would have happened.”

“You don’t know, Judah, gods damn you . . .”

Cutter had never seen Ann-Hari so raging, so uncontrolled. He wanted to speak but he could not because this was not his instant.

Judah looked at Ann-Hari and hid any fear, looked at her with an utterness of attention that snagged Cutter’s insides. Don’t end now, like this. Rahul’s arms around him were protective.

“Ann-Hari,” Judah said, his voice gentle though he must know. “Would you have had them die? Would you have died? I tried to turn you, we tried to . . .” You knew they wouldn’t, thought Cutter. “They’re safe now. They’re safe now. The Iron Council remains.”

“You’ve pickled us, you bastard . . .”

“You’d all have died . . .”

“End it.”

“I don’t know how. I wouldn’t, besides—you know that.”

“End it.”

“No. You’d all have died.”

“You’ve no fucking right, Judah . . .”

“You’d have died.”

“Maybe.” She spit the word. A long quiet followed. “Maybe we’d have died. But you don’t know. You don’t know there weren’t Collectivists waiting behind them militia ready to take them, now all scared off because of what you done. You don’t know that they weren’t there, you don’t know who wouldn’t have been inspired when we come, too late or not. See? Too late or not, they might have been. See, Judah? You see? Whether we died or not.”

“I had . . . it’s the Council. I had to make them, you, safe . . .”

“It’s not yours to choose, Judah. Not yours.”

He moved his arms slightly out from his sides, stood square to her, looked down at her. The connection between them remained, a line of force. They seemed to draw in energy from the surrounds. Judah stared at her with patience, a readiness.

“It was not yours, Judah Low. You never understood that. You never knew.” She raised her pistol and Cutter made a sound and moved in Rahul’s grip. She pressed it against Judah’s chest. He did not flinch. “The thing in you . . . You did not create the Iron Council, Judah Low. It was never yours.” She stepped back and raised the pistol till he stared into its mouth. “And maybe you’ll die not understanding, Judah. Judah Low. Iron Council was never yours. You don’t get to choose. You don’t decide when is the right time, when it fits your story. This was the time we were here. We knew. We decided. And you don’t know, and now we don’t either, we’ll never know what would have happened. You stole all those people from themselves.”

“I did it,” Judah whispered, “for you, for the Iron Council. To save it.”

“That I know,” she said. She spoke quietly, but her voice still shook. “But we were never yours, Judah. We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made our decision, and it was not yours. Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history. You were never our augur Judah. Never our saviour.

“And you won’t hear this, you can’t, but this now isn’t because you’re a sacrifice to anything. This isn’t how it needed to be. This is because you had no right.”

Cutter heard the end in her voice and saw Ann-Hari’s hand move. Now, he thought. Now Judah, stop her.

In the tiny splintered instant that she tightened her hand he thought: Now.

Call an earth golem. Judah could focus and drag from the hard earth before him a grey earth golem that would rise, levering itself out of the stuff of its own substance with weeds and weed-debris hanging still to it, the hillside itself become moving, and it could intervene. It could stand between Judah and Ann-Hari and take her bullet, stop it with the density of its matter, then reach and cuff the gun away and grip her close so that she could not fight and Judah would be safe from her, and could have the golem walk her away or keep her motionless while he turned with Cutter and they went on around the roots where trees had been torn up and past the powdering rocks to New Crobuzon.

An air golem. One hard gust of ab-live wind to close Ann-Hari’s eyes and make her aim falter. An obedient figure made of air to stand before the Iron Councillor and throw her clothes into her face, to channel very hard and fast into the barrels of her pistol, to ruin any shots. And as the air around displaced by the dance of the new presence made whorls of dust rise and the gusting of dry leaf-matter where it still scabbed bushes, Judah and Cutter could leave.

Make her gun a golem. Turn the very pistol itself into a small and quick golem and have it close its mouth, have it eat the bullet before it spat it away, and then Judah might have the thing twist in Ann-Hari’s hand and turn with what limited motion its shape allowed it, and point up into her face, a threat, and give Judah the time, while Ann-Hari was paralysed with that surprise and the menace of her own weapon, give him the time to get away, with Cutter, over the rise and the pathway.

Make the bullet a golem. And it could fall. Make her clothes golems. They might trip her. Make a golem of those scattered little dead trees. Make a golem of clouds. Of the shadows, of her own shadow. Make another sound golem. Make a golem of sound and time to keep her unmoving. It was very cold. Sing your rhythms again fast to make a golem of still time and stop her up and we’ll go.

But Judah did nothing and Ann-Hari pulled her trigger.

Chapter Thirty-five

It was by the Tar that Cutter regained the city. A night entry. Slowly and under new laws, the New Crobuzon authorities were reopening riverine trade. The barge-rangers were waiting to establish new runs. Cutter came back into New Crobuzon disguised in a coal-smeared overall, piloting a fat low-slung boat.

Around him the houses spread out from the wind of the river, tens then hundreds, and he heard their sounds and remembered them, the settling of architecture, and knew he was coming home. The bargeman he had bribed to crew him was eager for Cutter to leave. With the repeating cough of the engine they came past the tarry houses of Raven’s Gate, the khepri warren of Creekside, the houses disguised by mucal addenda, and under the old brick bridges of New Crobuzon, while the boat left a rainbow discharge on the water.

Airships went. They stalked on searchlight legs. A fat glare pinioned the boat then blinked off, twice.

He walked through the warehouses of Smog Bend, the bleached brick, the stained concrete. Past creosote, past bitumen and mouldered posters, past the dumps of building matter, powdered glass and stone, into streets once held by the Collective. Cutter walked past the lots where there had been meetings of residents voting noisily on everything. Now they were as they had been, little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses for the insects. There were spirals on the walls. Rain was washing them away.

Days later and Cutter knew the new rules, knew how to avoid the militia who patrolled the streets and locked down Creekside and Murkside and above all Dog Fenn. They said there were still pockets of Collectivist treachery, and they were ruthless in their hunt.

Cutter said nothing when he saw the squads emerge from broken buildings with men and women screaming their innocence or occasionally rebellion. He kept his eyes down. Numb as he was, he negotiated the checkpoints, offering his forgeries without fear, because he did not care if he was challenged, and when he was not he would walk on without triumph.

Uptown had its beauty. BilSantum Plaza, Perdido Street Station. It was as if there had been no war. The spirals were smears. Perdido Street Station loomed like a god over the city. Cutter looked up at its roofscape, at where he had been.

In the last days of the Collective there had been a desperate copy of the skyrail attack. A train heavy with explosives had set out from Saltpetre Station, accelerating toward Perdido Street Station with a dream of immolating the vast edifice. It would never have happened. The Collectivist who drove it on his suicide mission, brave with drink and the assuredness of death, had rammed the blockade at Sly Station and powered on toward Spit Bazaar, but the militia had detonated the train as it approached, tearing a hole in the stitching of arches that went the length of New Crobuzon. The Sud Line was severed and was being slowly rebuilt.

The posters on the kiosks, the newspapers, the wax proclamations that were free in the voxiterator booths told of the government’s triumphs: Tesh’s tribute payments, their war apologies, the rebirth of community. Hard, hopeful times, they said. There was word of new projects, expeditions across the continent. The promise of a new economy, of expansion. Cutter wandered. Creekside was a ruin. The khepri bodies left after the Quiller Massacre had been cleared, but there were stains still on some walls. In places the phlegm integuments exuded by home-grubs had been cracked and burnt, revealing the brick underneath.

Cutter wandered and watched the reconstruction. Throughout the centre of New Crobuzon were the holes torn by armaments, the thickets of concrete, mortar and broken marble, new raggedy passages linking alleys, paved with rubble. In Barrackham the militia tower’s tip was swathed in scaffolding like cuckoo-spit. The drooping severed skyrail was gone. It would be restrung when the Barrackham Tower stood again.

In Mog Hill, near enough the Collective’s old ground but just outside the militarised zone so not subject to martial law or curfew, Cutter found lodging. He gave his new name. Paid with the proceeds from his day-work, in areas he had not frequented in his life before.

New Crobuzon was wrecked. Its statues broken, districts stained and blistered by fire, whole streets become facades, the buildings eviscerated. Houses, churches, factories, foundries as hollow and brittle as old skulls. Wrecks floated in the rivers.

He knew how to become part of the whispering networks again, even broken as they were. Even now when no one spoke to anyone with trust, when citizens strove not to see each other’s eyes as they passed, he knew how. Even now when a quickly clenched fist risked being interpreted as handslang and the militia might be called or there might be a quick vigilante killing to save the area from renegade insurgents and the death squads they would bring. Cutter was careful and patient. Two weeks after his return he found Madeleina.

“It’s better now,” she said. “But in the first weeks, gods.

“Bodies by walls, every one of them ‘resisting,’ they said, while they were taken away. Resisting by tripping, or asking a moment’s rest, or spitting, resisting by not coming fast enough when they were told.

“Up by the Arrowhead Pits, in the foothills,” she said, “Camp Sutory. It’s where they keep the Collectivists. Thousands. No one knows how many. There’s an annex: go in, you don’t come out, so they say. When they’re done asking questions.

“Some of us escaped.”

She listed those she had known, and what had happened to them. Cutter recognised some of the names. He could not tell if Madeleina trusted him, or was past care.

“We need to tell what happened,” she said. “It’s what we have to do. But if we tell the truth, those that weren’t here will think we’re lying. Exaggerating. So . . . do we make it less bad than it was, to be believed? Does that make sense?” She was very tired. He made her tell him all the story, everything about the fall of the Collective.

When he found out how long ago it had been it would have been easy for him to say to himself, There was no one to fight for the Council, but he did not. He did not because they could not know what might have happened, because it had not been allowed to. They could not know what Judah’s intervention had done.

There were ten thousand rumours in New Crobuzon about the Iron Council.

Cutter went often to the slow-sculpture garden in Ludmead, to sit alone amid the art dedicated to the godling of patience. The gardens were ruined. The sculpted lawns and thickets were interrupted by huge sedimentary stones, each of them veined with layers and cracks, each carefully prepared: shafts drilled precisely, caustic agents dripped in, for a slight and so-slow dissolution of rock in exact planes, so that over years of weathering, slabs would fall in layers, coming off with the rain, and at very last taking their long-planned shapes. Slow-sculptors never disclosed what they had prepared, and their art revealed itself only long after their deaths.

He had always hated the sedateness of these gardens, but now that they were ruined he found them a comfort. Some Collectivist or sympathiser punks had climbed the wall weeks ago, before Dog Fenn had fallen, and taken chisels to several of the larger stones. With cheerful imprecision and disrespect they had made crude and quick and vulgar figures, lively and ugly, ground filthy and dissident slogans into their skins. They had ruined the meticulous boring and acid-work of the artists, preempting the erosion-sculptures with pornographic clowns. Cutter sat and leaned against a new stone figure stroking an oversized cock, carved out of what might have been intended as a swan or a boat or a flower or anything at all.

He did not remember much of that time in the hills. The grip of Rahul. Holding him while—did he flail? Did he cry? He suspected that yes he had cried and flailed. He had been held till exhaustion dropped him.

He remembered Ann-Hari walking, disappearing, not looking at him. He remembered her mounting Rahul and having him return to the rocks. “Back,” she had said. “The Council,” and what that meant he had not known. He had not even heard her at the time. Only later when he was done mourning.

Was she at large? Had she looked for and found death? He had seen them disappear, Ann-Hari and Remade Rahul, toward the stones where the Iron Council waited. It was the last time he saw them.

When he had been able to, Cutter had strained to move Judah. He had wanted to bury him. He had tried not to look Judah in his broken face. Finally he pulled him off the animal-track. Without looking, by touch, Cutter had closed Judah’s eyes. He had held Judah’s colding hand and had not been able to bring himself to touch the leather lips with his own though he so wanted to, so had kissed his own fingers instead and brought them a long time to Judah’s breathless mouth. As if, if he waited long enough, Judah would have to move.

He had made a cairn over him. He could only think it in small moments.

The Council did not move. Cutter had not yet been to see it, though he knew he would, but everyone in New Crobuzon knew its state. Judah’s death had not released it from its synchronic jail. The newspapers had outlandish theories for what had happened. Torque-residue was the most common suggestion, after its plunge through the cacotopic zone. Cutter was sure there were those in the government who knew the truth.

He would go to see it, when he could. He thought of Ann-Hari, walking the stone, riding Rahul.

Cutter tells Madeleina about Judah Low, and she listens with wordless sympathy for which he is broken with gratitude. One night she takes him with her to an abattoir in Ketch Heath. They go carefully, roundabout routes. There is a cat-howl as they come close. The animals are coming back, now they are not meat. Once there in the dark slaughterhouse, Cutter steps with di Farja over gutters of cloying blood, and in the hollow churchlike echoes, the ring of the now-empty meathooks against each other, in the smoulder from the fireboxes of the grinders, she shows him the hidden doors and the little printing press beyond.

They work together that night, turning the handles, making sure the ink does not clot. They turn out many hundreds of copies in the dark.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT.
LUNUARY 1806.

“Order reigns in New Crobuzon!” You stupid lackeys. Your order is built on sand. Tomorrow the Iron Council will move on again, and to your horror it will proclaim with its whistle blaring: We say: We were, we are, we will be.

Now through pathways in the strewn wires and razored wires that litter this open zone this flat land outside the city split by a seam of rail we come in numbers. Under the moon in grey or without it gathered in the dog drab of unlit night we will come.

There. There we will come to Iron Council. There we will come to the perpetual train, truly perpetual now perhaps poised always poised forever just about its wheels just about to finish turning. It waits. By its iron axles are devils of motion, waiting an eternal second.

Past guards patrolling a border. Where there are runnels beneath the wires we slip through, where there are none we cut or climb very careful, cushioned with rag. Through the selvage of history toward that moment become a place, that history instant a splinter in now, under now’s skin.

We are incessant despite the penalties. Old women, young, men, human cactus khepri hotchi vodyanoi and Remade, even Remade. Here in the environs of the train those Remade who make the dangerous pilgrimage are given something, are for these yards around this moment equals. And scores of children. Rude little roughnecks, orphans living animal in New Crobuzon’s streets self-organised in troupes to come to this strange playground. Through runoff and flyblown trains made of rust, the aggregate of industry in the TRT sidings, reaccreting power as its new projects begin, through beetle-tracked wasteland, through miles of greyed nothing and stones like the ghosts of stones the alley children come to the Iron Council.

There is a circuit. There are routes to be followed.

Climb the scree slopes to look down on the flash-frozen smoking from the chimneys. Stand on the very tongue of tracks between the iron to look into the face of the train. Slow circle widdershins the whole Council, a some-minutes’ walk. No one can touch it. Everyone tries. Time slips around it. They are coming. Everyone can see it. The Iron Council is not stopped it is onrushing it is immanent and we see it only in this one moment. Circle it.

The engine smokestack towered and flared, a belch of black, keeping its shape, swept back fast by the wind embedded in that moment. We come in close scant hairs from the protuberance of animal-head horns and the blades of the warriors who wait, stand close up, stare at the Councillors preparing with shouts set on them.

That one is Thick Shanks. That big, age-discoloured cactus-man, him at the engine’s window. He helped make Iron Council all the time ago. Here he is to bring it home.

There is a route from Councillor to Councillor, given names. Here is Spitter whose excited shout has left saliva spray in a parabolic fringe around his mouth; here is Leapfrog who has jumped from one carriage top toward another and hangs over the gap midway in her arc; here is the Gunner from whose rifle has emerged a bullet, ajut six inches from the barrel. The tradition is to stop, wave your hand between unmoving missile and gun.

Some of us knew these Councillors once. There is a woman who comes many times to speak to the same man, her father, come back to her, unmoving in history. She is not the only one who visits family.

The ivy-tower skirted with rust dust and smoke the cattletrucks made bunks and bedlam, panelled laboratory cars messhalls arsenals and church, here open-topped flatcars full of earth, gardens and a graveyard with its cenotaph, a cab whittled from driftwood and the bulbous triple-nucleated plasmic sac left where Torque warped those inside, the final engine with its snarl of metal teeth where the moment ended. These paused Council cars wait to salvage us.

We play around them; we come to them. Some come to pray. The ground around the Iron Council is a litter of written pleas.

The militia and their scientists and their thaumaturges try to send through violence, but the time golem only is, and is unhurt by their crude attacks. We come back again, again, again.

Years might pass and we will tell the story of the Iron Council and how it was made, how it made itself and went, and how it came back, and is coming, is still coming. Women and men cut a line across the dirtland and dragged history out and back across the world. They are still with shouts setting their mouths and we usher them in. They are coming out of the trenches of rock toward the brick shadows. They are always coming.

CHINA MIÉVILLE (Norwich, England, 1972) lives and works in London. He has written four novels for adults, twice winning the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award, with Perdido Street Station and Iron Council. He is also twice winner of the British Fantasy Award, for Perdido Street Station and The Scar. China’s first novel for younger readers is Un Lun Dun.

China Miéville lives and works in London. He has had short fiction published in the Neonlit and Britpulp! anthologies. King Rat was his first novel.

‘China Miéville is a bona-fide wizard, a powerful hybrid strain of magician, scientist, and poet … It doesn’t come any better than this’
Tricia Sullivan

‘Energetic, thuggish, constantly inventive, China Miéville continues his project of rebuilding fantasy from the sub-cellar up. New Crobuzon, city of clock-work engine and subterranean punishment factory, has the architectonics of a living thing. It is a site of elation, dispute, danger and change: a city raucous with dreams’
M. John Harrison

‘A phantasmagoric masterpiece whose grotesquerie is unmatched by any other work of contemporary imaginative fiction. Its surreal imagery recalls the work of Hieronymus Bosch, and only a writer of the very highest quality could bind such a hectic torrent of exotica into a plot as taut and compelling as this one’
Brian Stableford

Also by China Miéville

The Scar

Perdido Street Station

Iron Council

Looking for Jake and Other Stories

CHINA MIÉVILLE

KING RAT

PAN BOOKS

First published 1998 by Macmillan

First published in paperback 1999 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
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ISBN 978-0-330-46618-9 PDF
ISBN 978-0-330-46617-2 EPUB

Copyright © China Miéville 1998

The right of China Miéville to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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TO MAX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to everyone who read this in the early stages. All my love and gratitude go to my mother, Claudia, for all her support, always: and to my sister, Jemima, for her advice and feedback.

Deep love and thanks to Emma, of course, for everything.

My heartfelt thanks to Max Schaefer, who gave me invaluable criticisms, hours of word-processing help, and great friendship during a generally rubbish year.

I can never thank Mic Cheetham enough. I am incredibly lucky to have her on my side. And thanks to all at Macmillan, particularly my editor Peter Lavery.

I owe too many writers and artists to mention, but respect is especially due to Two Fingers and James T. Kirk for their novel Junglist. They blazed a trail. Many thanks also to Iain Sinclair for generously letting me keep the metaphor I accidently stole from him. Jake Pilikian introduced me to Drum and Bass music and changed my life. Big up to all the DJs and Crews who provided a soundtrack. Awe and gratitude especially to A Guy Called Gerald for the sublime Gloc: old, now, but still the most terrifying slab of guerrilla bass ever committed to vinyl. Rewind.

A London Sometin’…
Tek 9

KING RAT

I can squeeze between buildings through spaces you can’t even see. I can walk behind you so close my breath raises gooseflesh on your neck and you won’t hear me. I can hear the muscles in your eyes contract when your pupils dilate. I can feed off your filth and live in your house and sleep under your bed and you will never know unless I want you to.

I climb above the streets. All the dimensions of the city are open to me. Your walls are my walls and my ceilings and my floors.

The wind whips my overcoat with a sound like washing on a line. A thousand scratches on my arms tingle like electricity as I scale roofs and move through squat copses of chimneys. I have business tonight.

I spill like mercury over the lip of a building and slither down drainpipes to the alley fifty feet below. I slide silently through piles of rubbish in the sepia lamplight and crack the seal on the sewers, pulling the metal cover out of the street without a sound.

Now I am in darkness but I can still see. I can hear the growling of water through the tunnels. I am up to my waist in your shit, I can feel it tugging at me, I can smell it. I know my way through these passages.

I am heading north, submerged in the current, wading, clinging to walls and ceiling. Live things scuttle and slither to get out of my way. I weave without hesitation through the dank corridors. The rain has been fitful and hesitant but all the water in London seems eager to reach its destination tonight. The brick rivers of the underground are swollen. I dive under the surface and swim in the cloying dark until the time has come to emerge and I rise from the deeps, dripping. I pass noiselessly again through the pavement.

Towering above me is the red brick of my destination. A great dark mass broken with squares of irrelevant light. One glimmering in the shadow of the eaves holds my attention. I straddle the corner of the building and ease my way up. I am slower now. The sound of television and the smell of food seep out of the window, which I am reaching towards now, which I am rattling now with my long nails, scratching, a sound like a pigeon or a twig, an intriguing sound, bait.

PART ONE

GLASS

CHAPTER ONE

The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs. They pass between towers jutting into the sky like long-necked sea beasts and the great gas-cylinders wallowing in dirty scrub like whales. In the depths below are lines of small shops and obscure franchises, cafés with peeling paint and businesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. The colours and curves of graffiti mark every wall. Top-floor windows pass by so close that passengers can peer inside, into small bare offices and store cupboards. They can make out the contours of trade calendars and pin-ups on the walls.

The rhythms of London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zone between suburbs and centre.

Gradually the streets widen and the names of the shops and cafés become more familiar; the main roads are more salubrious; the traffic is denser; and the city rises to meet the tracks.

At the end of a day in October a train made this journey towards King’s Cross. Flanked by air, it progressed over the outlands of North London, the city building up below it as it neared the Holloway Road. The people beneath ignored its passage. Only children looked up as it clattered overhead, and some of the very young pointed. As the train drew closer to the station, it slipped below the level of the roofs.

There were few people in the carriage to watch the bricks rise around them. The sky disappeared above the windows. A cloud of pigeons rose from a hiding place beside the tracks and wheeled off to the east.

The flurry of wings and bodies distracted a thickset young man at the rear of the compartment. He had been trying not to stare openly at the woman sitting opposite him. Thick with relaxer, her hair had been teased from its tight curls and was coiled like snakes on her head. The man broke off his furtive scrutiny as the birds passed by, and he ran his hands through his own cropped hair.

The train was now below the houses. It wound through a deep groove in the city, as if the years of passage had worn down the concrete under the tracks. Saul Garamond glanced again at the woman sitting in front of him, and turned his attention to the windows. The light in the carriage had made them mirrors, and he stared at himself, his heavy face. Beyond his face was a layer of brick, dimly visible, and beyond that the cellars of the houses that rose like cliffs on either side.

It was days since Saul had been in the city.

Every rattle of the tracks took him closer to his home. He closed his eyes.

Outside, the gash through which the tracks passed had widened as the station approached. The walls on either side were punctuated by dark alcoves, small caves full of rubbish a few feet from the track. The silhouettes of cranes arched over the skyline. The walls around the train parted. Tracks fanned away on either side as the train slowed and edged its way into King’s Cross.

The passengers rose. Saul swung his bag over his shoulder and shuffled out of the carriage. Freezing air stretched up to the great vaulted ceilings. The cold shocked him. Saul hurried through the buildings, through the crowds, threading his way between knots of people. He still had a way to go. He headed underground.

He could feel the presence of the population around him. After days in a tent on the Suffolk coast, the weight of ten million people so close to him seemed to make the air vibrate. The tube was full of garish colours and bare flesh, as people headed to clubs and parties.

His father would probably be waiting for him. He knew Saul was coming back, and he would surely make an effort to be welcoming, forfeiting his usual evening in the pub to greet his son. Saul already resented him for that. He felt gauche and uncharitable, but he despised his father’s faltering attempts to communicate. He was happier when the two of them avoided each other. Being surly was easy, and felt more honest.

By the time his tube train burst out of the tunnels of the Jubilee Line it was dark. Saul knew the route. The darkness transformed the rubble behind Finchley Road into a dimly glimpsed no-man’s-land, but he was able to fill in the details he could not see, even down to the tags and the graffiti. Burner. Nax. Coma. He knew the names of the intrepid little rebels clutching their magic markers, and he knew where they had been.

The grandiose tower of the Gaumont State cinema jutted into the sky on his left, a bizarre totalitarian monument among the budget groceries and hoardings of Kilburn High Road. Saul could feel the cold through the windows and he wrapped his coat around him as the train neared Willesden station. The passengers had thinned. Saul left only a very few behind him as he got out of the carriage.

Outside the station he huddled against the chill. The air smelt faintly of smoke from some local bonfire, someone clearing his allotment. Saul set off down the hill towards the library.

He stopped at a takeaway and ate as he walked, moving slowly to avoid spilling soy sauce and vegetables down himself. Saul was sorry the sun had gone down. Willesden lent itself to spectacular sunsets. On a day like today, when there were few clouds, its low skyline let the light flood the streets, pouring into the strangest crevices; the windows that faced each other bounced the rays endlessly back and forth between themselves and sent it hurtling in unpredictable directions; the rows and rows of brick glowed as if lit from within.

Saul turned into the backstreets. He wound through the cold until his father’s house rose before him. Terragon Mansions was an ugly Victorian block, squat and mean-looking for all its size. It was fronted by the garden: a strip of dirty vegetation frequented only by dogs. His father lived on the top floor. Saul looked up and saw that the lights were on. He climbed the steps and let himself in, glancing into the darkness of the bushes and scrub on either side.

He ignored the huge lift with its steel-mesh door, not wanting its groans to announce him. Instead he crept up the flights of stairs and gently unlocked his father’s door.

The flat was freezing.

Saul stood in the hall and listened. He could hear the sound of the television from behind the sitting-room door. He waited, but his father was silent. Saul shivered and looked around him.

He knew he should go in, should rouse his father from slumber, and he even got as far as reaching for the door. But he stopped and looked at his own room. He sneered at himself in disgust, but he crept towards it anyway.

He could apologize in the morning. I thought you were asleep, Dad. I heard you snoring. I came in drunk and fell into bed. I was so knackered I wouldn’t have been any kind of company anyway. He cocked an ear, heard only the voices of one of the late-night discussion programmes his father so loved, muffled and pompous. Saul turned away and slipped into his room.

Sleep came easily. Saul dreamed of being cold, and woke once in the night to pull his duvet closer. He dreamed of slamming, a heavy beating noise, so loud it pulled him out of sleep and he realized it was real, it was there. Adrenaline surged through him, making him tremble. His heart quivered and lurched as he swung out of bed.

It was icy in the flat.

Someone was pounding on the front door.

The noise would not stop, it was frightening him. He was shaking, disorientated. It was not yet light. Saul glanced at his clock. It was a little after six. He stumbled into the hall. The horrible bang bang bang was incessant, and now he could hear shouting as well, distorted and unintelligible.

He fought into a shirt and shouted: ‘Who is it?’

The slamming did not stop. He called out again, and this time a voice was raised above the din.

‘Police!’

Saul struggled to clear his head. With a sudden panic he thought of the small stash of dope in his drawer, but that was absurd. He was no drugs kingpin, no one would waste a dawn raid on him. He was reaching out to open the door, his heart still tearing, when he suddenly remembered to check that they were who they claimed, but it was too late now, the door flew back and knocked him down as a torrent of bodies streamed into the flat.

Blue trousers and big shoes all around him. Saul was yanked to his feet. He started to flail at the intruders. Anger waxed with his fear. He tried to yell but someone smacked him in the stomach and he doubled up. Voices were reverberating everywhere around him, making no sense.

‘ … cold like a bastard …’

‘ … cocky little cunt …’

‘ … fucking glass, watch yourself …’

‘ … his son, or what? High as a fucking kite, must be …’

And above all these voices he could hear a weather forecast, the cheery tones of a breakfast television presenter. Saul struggled to turn and face the men who were holding him so tight.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he gasped. Without speaking, the men propelled him into the sitting-room.

The room was full of police, but Saul saw straight through them. He saw the television first: the woman in the bright suit was warning him it would be chilly again today. On the sofa was a plate of congealed pasta, and a half-drunk glass of beer sat on the floor. Cold gusts of air caught at him and he looked up at the window, out over houses. The curtains were billowing dramatically. He saw that jags of glass littered the floor. There was almost no glass left in the window-frame, only a few shards around the edges.

Saul sagged with terror and tried to pull himself to the window.

A thin man in civilian clothes turned and saw him.

‘Down the station now,’ he shouted at Saul’s captors.

Saul was spun on his heels. The room turned around him like a funfair ride, the rows of books and his father’s small pictures rushing past him. He struggled to turn back.

‘Dad!’ he shouted. ‘Dad!’

He was pulled effortlessly out of the flat. The dark of the corridor was pierced by slivers of light spilling out of doors. Saul saw uncomprehending faces and hands clutching at dressing-gowns, as he was hauled towards the lift. Neighbours in pyjamas were staring at him. He bellowed at them as he passed.

He still could not see the men holding him. He shouted at them, begging to know what was going on, pleading, threatening and railing.

‘Where’s my dad? What’s going on?’

‘Shut up.’

‘What’s going on?’

Something slammed into his kidneys, not hard but with the threat of greater force. ‘Shut up.’ The lift door closed behind them.

‘What’s happened to my fucking dad?’

As soon as he had seen the broken window a voice inside Saul had spoken quietly. He had not been able to hear it clearly until now. Inside the flat the brutal crunch of boots and the swearing had drowned it out. But here where he had been dragged, in the relative silence of the lift, he could hear it whispering.

Dead, it said. Dad’s dead.

Saul’s knees buckled. The men behind him held him upright, but he was utterly weak in their arms. He moaned.

‘Where’s my dad?’ he pleaded.

The light outside was the colour of the clouds. Blue strobes swirled on a mass of police cars, staining the drab buildings. The frozen air cleared Saul’s head. He tugged desperately at the arms holding him as he struggled to see over the hedges that ringed Terragon Mansions. He saw faces staring down from the hole that was his father’s window. He saw the glint of a million splinters of glass covering the dying grass. He saw a mass of uniformed police frozen in a threatening diorama. All their faces were turned to him. One held a roll of tape covered in crime scene warnings, a tape he was stretching around stakes in the ground, circumscribing a piece of the earth. Inside the chosen area he saw one man kneeling before a dark shape on the lawn. The man was staring at him like all the others. His body obscured the untidy thing. Saul was swept past before he could see any more.

He was pushed into one of the cars, light-headed now, hardly able to feel a thing. His breath came very fast. Somewhere along the line handcuffs had been snapped onto his wrists. He shouted again at the men in front, but they ignored him.

The streets rolled by.

They put him in a cell, gave him a cup of tea and warmer clothes: a grey cardigan and corduroy trousers that stank of alcohol. Saul sat huddled in a stranger’s clothes. He waited for a long time.

He lay on the bed, draped the thin blanket around him.

Sometimes he heard the voice inside him. Suicide, it said. Dad’s committed suicide.

Sometimes he would argue with it. It was a ridiculous idea, something his father could never do. Then it would convince him and he might start to hyperventilate, to panic. He closed his ears to it. He kept it quiet. He would not listen to rumours, even if they came from inside himself.

No one had told him why he was there. Whenever footsteps went by outside he would shout, sometimes swearing, demanding to know what was happening. Sometimes the footsteps would stop and the grille would be lifted on the door. ‘We’re sorry for the delay,’ a voice would say. ‘We’ll be with you as soon as we can,’ or ‘Shut the fuck up.’

‘You can’t keep me here,’ he yelled at one point. ‘What’s going on?’ His voice echoed around empty corridors.

Saul sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

A fine network of cracks spread out from one corner. Saul followed them with his eyes, allowing himself to be mesmerized.

Why are you here? the voice inside whispered to him nervously. Why do they want you? Why won’t they speak to you?

Saul sat and stared at the cracks and ignored the voice.

After a long time he heard the key in the lock. Two uniformed policemen entered, followed by the thin man Saul had seen in his father’s flat. The man was dressed in the same brown suit and ugly tan raincoat. He stared at Saul, who returned his gaze from beneath the dirty blanket, forlorn and pathetic and aggressive. When the thin man spoke his voice was much softer than Saul would have imagined.

‘Mr Garamond,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.’

Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.

‘What’s going on?’ he croaked.

‘I was hoping you might be able to tell us that, Saul,’ said the thin man. His voice remained quite impassive. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Crowley, Saul. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions …’

‘What happened to Dad?’ Saul interrupted. There was a pause.

‘He fell from the window, Saul,’ Crowley said. ‘It’s a long way up. I don’t think he suffered any’ There was a pause. ‘Did you not realize what had happened to your dad, Saul?’

‘I thought maybe something… I saw in the garden … Why am I here?’ Saul was shaking.

Crowley pursed his lips and moved a little closer. ‘Well, Saul, first let me apologize for how long you’ve been waiting. It’s been very hectic out here. I had hoped someone might come and take care of you, but it seems no one has. I’m sorry about that. I’ll be having a few words.

‘As to why you’re here, well, it was all a bit confused back there. We get a call from a neighbour saying there’s someone lying out front of the building, we go in, there you are, we don’t know who you are … you can see how it all gets out of hand. Anyway, you’re here, long and short of it, in the hope that you can tell us your side of the story.’

Saul stared at Crowley. ‘My side?’ he shouted. ‘My side of what? I’ve got home and my dad’s …’

Crowley shushed him, his hands up, placating, nodding.

‘I know, I know, Saul. We’ve just got to understand what happened. I want you to come with me.’ He gave a sad little smile as he said this. He looked down at Saul sitting on the bed; dirty, smelly, in strange clothes, confused, pugnacious, tear-stained and orphaned. Crowley’s face creased with what looked like concern.

‘I want to ask you some questions.’

CHAPTER TWO

Once, when he was three, Saul was sitting on his father’s shoulders, coming home from the park. They had passed a group of workmen repairing a road, and Saul had tangled his hands in his father’s hair and leaned over and gazed at the bubbling pot of tar his father pointed out: the pot heating on the van, and the big metal stick they used to stir it. His nose was filled with the thick smell of tar, and as Saul gazed into the simmering glop he remembered the witch’s cauldron in Hansel and Gretel and he was seized with the sudden terror that he would fall into the tar and be cooked alive. And Saul had squirmed backwards and his father had stopped and asked him what was the matter. When he understood he had taken Saul off his shoulders and walked with him over to the workmen, who had leaned on their shovels and grinned quizzically at the anxious child. Saul’s father had leaned down and whispered encouragement into his ear, and Saul had asked the men what the tar was. The men had told him about how they would spread it thin and put it on the road, and they had stirred it for him as his father held him. He did not fall in. And he was still afraid, but not as much as he had been, and he knew why his father had made him find out about the tar, and he had been brave.

A mug of milky tea coagulated slowly in front of him. A bored-looking constable stood by the door of the bare room. A rhythmic metallic wheeze issued from the tape-recorder on the table. Crowley sat opposite him, his arms folded, his face impassive. ‘Tell me about your father.’

Saul’s father had been racked with a desperate embarrassment whenever his son came home with girls. It was very important to him that he should not seem distant or old-fashioned, and in a ghastly miscalculation he had tried to put Saul’s guests at their ease. He was terrified that he would say the wrong thing. The struggle not to bolt for his own room stiffened him. He would stand uneasily in the doorway, a grim smile clamped to his face, his voice firm and serious as he asked the terrified fifteen-year-olds what they were doing at school and whether they enjoyed it. Saul would gaze at his father and will him to leave. He would stare furiously at the floor as his father stolidly discussed the weather and GCSE English.

‘I’ve heard that sometimes you argued. Is that true, Saul? Tell me about that.’

When Saul was ten, the time he liked most was in the mornings. Saul’s father left for work on the railways early, and Saul had half an hour to himself in the flat. He would wander around and stare at the titles of the books his father left lying on all the surfaces: books about money and politics and history. His father would always pay close attention to what Saul was doing in history at school, asking what the teachers had said. He would lean over his chair, urging Saul not to believe everything his history teacher told him. He would thrust books at his son, stare at them, become distracted, take them back, flick through the pages, murmur that Saul was perhaps too young. He would ask his son what he thought about the issues they discussed. He took Saul’s opinions very seriously. Sometimes these discussions bored Saul. More often they made him feel uneasy at the sudden welter of ideas, but inspired.

*

‘Did your father ever make you feel guilty, Saul?’

Something had been poisoned between the two of them when Saul was about sixteen. He had been sure this was an awkwardness that would pass, but once it had taken root the bitterness would not go. Saul’s father forgot how to talk to him. He had nothing more to teach and nothing more to say. Saul was angry with his father’s disappointment. His father was disappointed at his laziness and his lack of political fervour. Saul could not make his father feel at ease, and his father was disappointed at that. Saul had stopped going on the marches and the demonstrations, and his father had stopped asking him. Every once in a while there would be an argument. Doors would slam. More usually there was nothing.

Saul’s father was bad at accepting presents. He never took women to the flat when his son was there. Once when the twelve-year-old Saul was being bullied, his father came into the school unannounced and harangued the teachers, to Saul’s profound embarrassment.

‘Do you miss your mother, Saul? Are you sorry you never knew her?’

*

Saul’s father was a short man with powerful shoulders and a body like a thick pillar. He had thinning grey hair and grey eyes.

The previous Christmas he had given Saul a book by Lenin. Saul’s friends had laughed at how little the ageing man knew his son, but Saul had not felt any scorn – only loss. He understood what his father was trying to offer him.

His father was trying to resolve a paradox. He was trying to make sense of his bright, educated son letting life come to him rather than wresting what he wanted from it. He understood only that his son was dissatisfied. That much was true. In Saul’s teenage years he had been a living cliché, sulky and adrift in ennui. To his father this could only mean that Saul was paralysed in the face of a terrifying and vast future, the whole of his life, the whole of the world. Saul had emerged, passed twenty unscathed, but his father and he would never really be able to talk together again.

That Christmas, Saul had sat on his bed and turned the little book over and over in his hands. It was a leather-bound edition illustrated with stark woodcuts of toiling workers, a beautiful little commodity. What Is To Be Done? demanded the title. What is to be done with you, Saul?

He read the book. He read Lenin’s exhortations that the future must be grasped, struggled for, moulded, and he knew that his father was trying to explain the world to him, trying to help him. His father wanted to be his vanguard. What paralyses is fear, his father believed, and what makes fear is ignorance. When we learn, we no longer fear. This is tar, and this is what it does, and this is the world, and this is what it does, and this is what we can do to it.

There was a long time of gentle questions and monosyllabic answers. Almost imperceptibly, the pace of the interrogation built up. I was out of London, Saul tried to explain, I was camping. I got in late, about eleven, I went straight to bed, I didn’t see Dad.

Crowley was insistent. He ignored Saul’s plaintive evasions. He grew gradually more aggressive. He asked Saul about the previous night.

Crowley relentlessly reconstructed Saul’s route home. Saul felt as if he had been slapped. He was curt, struggling to control the adrenaline which rushed through him. Crowley piled meat on the skeletal answers Saul offered him, threading through Willesden with such detail that Saul once more stalked its dark streets.

‘What did you do when you saw your father?’ Crowley asked.

I did not see my father, Saul wanted to say, he died without me seeing him, but instead he heard himself whine something inaudible like a petulant child.

‘Did he make you angry when you found him waiting for you?’ Crowley said, and Saul felt fear spread through him from the groin outwards. He shook his head.

‘Did he make you angry, Saul? Did you argue?’

‘I didn’t see him!’

‘Did you fight, Saul?’ A shaken head, no. ‘Did you fight?’ No. ‘Did you?’

Crowley waited a long time for an answer. Eventually he pursed his lips and scribbled something in a notebook. He looked up and met Saul’s eyes, dared him to speak.

‘I didn’t see him! I don’t know what you want … I wasn’t there!’ Saul was afraid. When, he begged to know, would they let him go? But Crowley would not say.

Crowley and the constable led him back to the cell. There would be further interviews, they warned him. They offered him food which, in a fit of righteous petulance, he refused. He did not know if he was hungry. He felt as if he had forgotten how to tell.

‘I want to make a phone call!’ Saul called as the men’s footsteps died away, but they did not return and he did not shout again.

Saul lay on the bench and covered his eyes.

He was acutely aware of every sound. He could hear the tattoo of feet in the corridor long before they passed his door. Muffled conversations of men and women welled up and died as they walked by; laughter sounded suddenly from another part of the building; cars were moving some way off, their mutterings filtered by trees and walls.

For a long time Saul lay listening. Was he allowed a phone call? he wondered. Who would he call? Was he under arrest? But these thoughts seemed to take up very little of his mind. For the most part he just lay and listened.

A long time passed.

Saul opened his eyes with a start. For a moment he was uncertain what had happened.

The sounds were changing.

The depth seemed to be bleeding out of all the noises in the world.

Saul could still make out everything he had heard before, but it was ebbing away into two dimensions. The change was swift and inexorable. Like the curious echoes of shrieks which fill swimming pools, the sounds were clear and audible, but empty.

Saul sat up. A loud scratching startled him: the noise of his chest against the rough blanket. He could hear the thump of his heart. The sounds of his body were as full as ever, unaffected by the strange sonic vampirism. They seemed unnaturally clear. Saul felt like a cut-out pasted ineptly onto the world. He moved his head slowly from side to side, touched his ears.

A faint patter of boots sounded in the corridor, wan and ineffectual. A policeman walked past the cell, his steps unconvincing. Saul stood tentatively and looked up at the ceiling. The network of cracks and lines in the paint seemed to shift uneasily, the shadows moving imperceptibly, as if a faint light were being moved about the room.

Saul’s breath came fast and shallow. The air felt stretched out taut and tasted of dust.

Saul moved, reeled, made dizzy by the cacophony of his own body.

Above the stripped-down murmurings, slow footsteps became audible. Like the sounds Saul made, these steps cut through the surrounding whispers effortlessly, deliberately. Other steps passed them hurriedly in both directions, but the pace of these feet did not change. They moved steadily towards his door. Saul could feel vibrations in the desiccated air.

Without thought, he backed into a corner of the room and stared at the door. The feet stopped. Saul heard no key in his lock, but the handle turned and the door swung open.

The motion seemed to take a long long time, the door fighting its way through air suddenly glutinous. The complaints of the hinges, emaciated with malaise, stretched out long after the door had stopped moving.

The light in the corridor was bright. Saul could not make out the figure who stepped into his cell and gently closed the door.

The figure stood motionless, regarding Saul.

The light in the cell performed only a rudimentary job on the man.

Like moonlight it sketched out nothing but an edge. Two eyes full of dark, a sharp nose and pinched mouth.

Shadows were draped over the face like cobwebs. He was tall but not very tall; his shoulders were bunched up tight as if against the wind, a defensive posture. The vague face was thin and lined; the long dark hair was lank and uncombed, falling over those tight shoulders in untidy clots. A shapeless coat of indiscriminate grey was draped over dark clothes. The man plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was turned slightly down. He was looking at Saul from beneath his brows.

A smell of rubbish and wet animals filled the room. The man stood motionless, watching Saul from across the floor.

‘You’re safe.’

Saul started. He had only dimly seen the man’s mouth move, but the harsh whisper echoed in his head as if those lips were an inch from his ear. It took a moment for him to understand what had been said.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Who are you?’

‘You’re safe now. No one can get to you now.’ A strong London accent, an aggressive, secretive snarl whispered right in Saul’s ear. ‘I want you to know why you’re here.’

Saul felt dizzy, swallowed spit made thick with phlegm by the atmosphere. He did not, he did not understand what was happening.

‘Who are you?’ Saul hissed. ‘Are you police? Where’s Crowley?’

The man jerked his head in what might have been dismissal, shock, or a laugh.

‘How did you get in?’ demanded Saul.

‘I crept past all the little boys in blue on tippy-toe. I slid hugger-mugger under the counter and I sneaked my way to your little queer ken. Do you know why you’re here?’

Saul nodded dumbly.

‘They think …’

‘The constables think you killed your daddy, but you didn’t, I know that. Granted, you’ll have a fine time getting them to Adam and Eve that… but I do.’

Saul was shaking. He sank onto the bunk. The stench which had entered with the man was overpowering. The voice continued, relentless. ‘I’ve been watching you carefully, you know. Keeping tabs. We’ve a lot to talk about, you know. I can … do you a favour.’

Saul was utterly bewildered. Was this some casualty off the streets? Someone ill in his head, too full of alcohol or voices to make any sense? The air was still taut like a bowstring. What did this man know about his father?

‘I don’t know who the fuck you are,’ he started slowly. ‘And I don’t know how you got in …’

‘You don’t understand.’ The whisper became a little harsher. ‘Listen, matey. We’re out of that world now. No more people and no more people things, get it? Look at you,’ the voice harsh with disgust. ‘Sitting there in your borrowed duds like a fool, waiting patiently to get took before the Barnaby. Think they’ll take kindly to your whids? They’ll bang you up till you rot, foolish boy.’ There was a long pause. ‘And then I appear, like a bloody angel of mercy. I spring your jigger, no problem. This is where I live, get it? This is the city where I live. It shares all the points of yours and theirs, but none of its properties. I go where I want. And I’m here to tell you how it is with you. Welcome to my home.’

The voice filled the small room, it would not give Saul space or time to think.

The shadowy face bore down on Saul. The man was coming nearer. He moved in little spurts, his chest and shoulders still tight, he approached from the side, zigzagged a little, came a little closer from another direction, his demeanour at once furtive and aggressive.

Saul swallowed. His head was light, his mouth dry. He fought for spit. The air was arid and so full of tension he could almost hear it, a faint keening as if the sound of the door hinge had never died away. He could not think, he could only listen.

The stinking apparition before him moved a little out of the shadows. The filthy trenchcoat was open, and Saul caught sudden sight of a lighter grey shirt underneath, decorated with rows of black arrows pointing up, convict chic.

The angle of the man’s head was proud, the shoulders skulking.

‘There’s nothing I don’t know about Rome-vill, you see. Nor Gay Paree, nor Cairo, nor Berlin, nor no city, but London’s special to me, has been for a long time. Stop looking at me and wondering, boy. You’re not going to get it. I’ve crept through these bricks when they were barns, then mills, then factories and banks. You’re not looking at people, boy. You should count yourself lucky I’m interested in you. Because I’m doing you a big favour.’ The man’s snarling monologue paused theatrically.

This was madness, Saul knew. His head spun. None of this meant anything; it was meaningless words, ludicrous, he should laugh, but something in the curdled air held his tongue. He could not speak, he could not mock. He realized he was crying, or perhaps his eyes were just watering in the stagnant atmosphere of the room.

His tears seemed to annoy the intruder.

‘Stop moaning on about your fat dad,’ he spat. ‘That’s all over, and you’ve more important things to worry about.’

He paused again.

‘Shall we go?’

Saul looked up sharply. He reached his voice at last.

‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’ He was whispering.

‘Shall we go? I said. It’s time to scarper, it’s time to split, to quit, to take our leave.’ The man looked about him conspiratorially, and hid his mouth behind the back of his hand in a melodramatic stage whisper. ‘I’m breaking you out.’ He straightened up a little and nodded his head, that indistinct face bobbing enthusiastically. ‘Let’s just say your path and mine cross at this point. It’s darkmans outside already, I can smell it, and it looks like they’ve forgot about you. No Tommy Tucker for you, it seems, so let’s bow out gracefully. You and I’ve got business together, and this is no place to conduct it. And if we wait much longer they’ll have banged you up as a member of the parenticide club and eaten the key. There’s no justice there, I know. So let me ask you one more time … shall we go?’

He could do it, Saul realized. With a terrified amazement he realized he was going to go with this creature, was going to follow this man whose face he could not see into the police station, and the two of them would escape.

‘Who … what … are you?’

‘I’ll tell you that.’

The voice filled Saul up and made him faint. The thin face was inches from his, silhouetted by the bare bulb. He tried to see through the obfuscating darkness and discern clear features, but the shadows were stubborn and subtle. The words mesmerized him like a spell, as hypnotic as dance music.

‘You’re in the presence of royalty, mate. I go where my subjects go, and my subjects are everywhere. And here in the cities there’re a million crevices for my kingdom. I fill all the spaces in-between.

‘Let me tell you about me.

‘I can hear the things left unsaid.

‘I know the secret life of houses and the social life of things. I can read the writing on the wall.

‘I live in old London town.

‘Let me tell you who I am.

‘I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief, I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my piss. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king.’

In one sudden movement he turned to face the door and sloughed the coat from his shoulders, unveiling the name stencilled crudely in black on the back of his shirt, between the rows of arrows.

‘I’m King Rat.’

CHAPTER THREE

A long way off to the south, somewhere in the heart of the city, a siren sounded mournfully. The smell of smoke still clung faintly to the air. It mingled with exhaust fumes and the whiff of rubbish, all made chill and even refreshing by the night.

Above the black bags and deserted streets rose the walls of North London; above the walls the slate roofs; and, above the slates, two figures: one standing astride the apex of the police station roof like a mountain climber, the other crouching in the shadow of the aerials.

Saul wrapped his arms tightly around himself. The unlikely figure of his saviour loomed above him. He was sore. His borrowed clothes had rubbed against concrete many times during his escape, till his skin was scraped raw and bleeding, imprinted with a bas-relief of cotton weave.

Somewhere in the guts of the building under his feet was the cell he had recently vacated. He supposed that the police had discovered him missing by now. He imagined them scurrying about frantically, searching for him, looking out of windows and filling the area with cars.

Back in that cell, the grotesque figure calling itself King Rat had impaled Saul with his grandiloquent and preposterous declamations, taking his breath away and rendering him dumb. Then he had paused again, and hunched those bony shoulders defensively. And again that invitation, as casual as from a bored lover at a party.

‘Shall we go?’

Saul had hovered, his heart shaking his body, eager to follow instructions. King Rat had sidled up to the door and gently tugged it open, silent this time. In a sudden movement he had poked his head into the tight crack between door and frame, and twisted his head exaggeratedly in both directions, then reached a hand behind him without looking back and beckoned to Saul. Something magic had come to take him away, and Saul had crept forward with guilt and hope and excitement.

King Rat had briefly turned as he approached and, without warning, swept him up over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Saul had let out a bark of surprise before King Rat crushed his body against him, driving the air from him and hissing: ‘Shut it.’

Saul lay still as King Rat stalked forward with ease. He jounced up and down as the stinking figure paced out of the room. Saul listened.

His head was flat against the other’s back. The smell of dirt and animal suffused him. He heard a very faint whine as the door was pushed further open. He closed his eyes. The light of the police-station corridor shone red through his eyelids.

King Rat’s thin shoulder dug into Saul’s stomach.

Through the flesh of his belly he felt King Rat pause, then pad forward without the slightest sound. Saul kept his eyes shut tight. His breath came in starts. He could hear the low hubbub of people nearby. He felt the wall press into him. King Rat was hugging the shadows.

From somewhere in front of them came footsteps, brisk and inexorable. The wall scraped along Saul’s side as King Rat swiftly sank into a crouch and froze. Saul held his breath. The footsteps came closer and closer. Saul wanted to shriek his guilt, his presence, anything to break the unbearable tension.

With a tiny breeze and a moment of warmth, the footsteps passed by.

The grey shape moved on, one arm coiled tight around Saul’s legs. King Rat was weighed down under Saul’s motionless body like a grave-robber.

King Rat and his cargo passed silently through the halls. Again and again footsteps approached, voices, laughing. Each time Saul held his breath, King Rat was still, as people passed by impossibly close, near enough to touch, without seeing him or his burden.

Saul kept his eyes closed. Through his lids he could see changes in darkness and light. Unbidden, his mind drew a map of the station, rendering it a land of these stark and sudden oppositions. Here be monsters, he thought, and felt ridiculously close to giggling. He became acutely aware of sounds. The echoes he heard aided his helpless cartography, waxing and waning as the rooms and corridors through which he was carried grew and shrank. Another door creaked open, and Saul was held still.

The echoes hollowed out, changed direction. The bobbing of his body increased. He felt himself borne upwards.

Saul opened his eyes. They were on a narrow flight of grey stairs, musty and sterile and badly lit. Muffled sounds came from above and below. His rescuer carried him up several flights, past floor after floor of filthy windows and doors, eventually coming to rest and ducking his body for Saul to dismount. Saul struggled off the bony shoulder and looked about him.

They had reached the top of the building. On his left was a white door through which the tapping of a keyboard could be heard. There was nowhere else to go. On all other sides was dirty wall.

Saul turned to his companion. ‘What now?’ he whispered.

King Rat turned back to face the stairs. Directly in front of him was a big greasy window, high above the little entresol where the stairs had changed direction. As Saul stared, the grey figure cocked his head, sniffed the expanse of air between himself and the window ten feet away. In a burst of feverish motion he locked his hands onto the banister and sprang astride it, right foot planted below the left, perfectly still and poised on the sloping plastic. He seemed to bunch up his shoulders, contracting muscles and sinews relentlessly one by one. He paused for a moment, the sharp, obscure face contorted in a grin or a grimace, then he burst forward in a silent flurry of limbs, for a moment filling the gap between mezzanine and ceiling. He flew through the air, grasped the handles of the window and set his feet on the edge of the tiny sill. And as suddenly as he had moved he was quite still, a bizarre shape spreadeagled on the glass. His trenchcoat was the only thing in motion, swinging gently.

Saul gasped, clapped his hand over his mouth, glanced fearfully over his shoulder at the nearby door.

King Rat was sinuously unwinding. His long limbs disentangled and his left hand scrabbled quietly at the window lock. With a click and a gust of cold, the window opened. His right hand still poised on the sill, the weird apparition twisted his body, pulling it bit by bit out of the narrow opening. He made himself impossibly thin as he squeezed through the vertical strip of darkness that was all the window was built to admit. His passage was as enchanted as that of a genie from a lamp, clinging as tight to the outside frame as he had within, poised on a few centimetres of wood five stories above the earth, until those unclear eyes were staring at Saul from beyond the filthy glass.

Only King Rat’s right hand remained inside the police station. It beckoned to Saul. Outside the dark figure breathed mist onto the pane, then wrote with the index finger of his left hand. He wrote in looking-glass script so the words appeared the right way round to Saul.

NOW YOU he wrote, and waited.

Saul tried to clamber onto the banister. He scrabbled ineffectually as his legs slid towards the floor. He clung desperately and started to haul himself up again, but the weight of his body tugged at him. He was beginning to pant.

He stared up at the thin figure in the window. That bony hand still stretched out towards him. Saul descended to the mezzanine. Flattening his body as low as it would go on the window-ledge, the other swung his hand down, following Saul, reaching towards the floor. Saul looked up at the tiny opening under the window-frame: it was no more than nine inches wide. He looked down at himself. He was broad, a little fleshy. He spread his hands about his girth, looked up at the window again, looked at the thing waiting for him outside, shook his head.

The hand stretched towards him clawed the air impatiently, clutched fitfully at nothing. It would not take no for an answer. Somewhere below them in the building, a door slammed and two voices entered the stairwell. Saul stared over the banister, saw feet and the tops of heads two floors below. He jumped back out of sight. The men were rising towards him. The hand still clutched at him; outside, that shady face was twisted.

Saul positioned himself underneath the hand, stretched his arms up and leapt.

Strong fingers caught him around his left wrist, locked tight, dug into his flesh. He opened his mouth to cry out, caught himself, hissed. He was hauled silently through the air, all thirteen stone of blood and flesh and clothes. Another hand slid around his body, a booted foot locked efficiently underneath him. How was his sinewy benefactor holding on? Saul twisted through the air, saw the window approach him. He turned his head to one side, felt his shoulders and chest lock in the tight space. Hands slid over his body, finding purchase, easing his passage into the outside world. He was slipping through the window now, his stomach pressing painfully against the lock fixed on the frame, but moving much too smoothly through that narrow gash and out into the shock of cold air.

Impossibly, he was delivered.

Wind buffeted him. Warm breath tickled his neck.

‘Cling on,’ came the hissed order, as Saul was pulled into the air. Saul clung. He wrapped his legs around King Rat’s thin waist and threw his arms over those bony shoulders.

King Rat stood on the tiny ledge, his boots clinging precariously to the paint. Saul, who was much the bigger, perched on his back, frosty with terror. King Rat’s right hand held the window-frame; his left hand was locked into an absurdly tiny crack above his head. Over them rose an expanse of sheer brickwork four or five feet high crowned with a strip of plastic guttering. Above that the roof, its slates too steep to be seen.

Saul turned his head. His stomach pitched like an anchor. Five floors below him was the rubbish-strewn concrete of a freezing alley. The shock of vertigo made Saul feel sick. His mind shrieked at him to put his feet on ground. He can’t possibly hold on! he thought. He can’t possibly hold on! He felt the lithe body shift under him and he nearly screamed.

Dimly Saul heard the voices from the stairwell approach the window, but they suddenly receded as he felt himself moving again.

King Rat lifted his right hand from the window-frame, and reached up to wrap his fingers around a nail rusted into the wall, its purpose long forgotten. His left hand moved now, creeping swiftly along invisible paths in the brick and mortar to stop suddenly and grip at a seemingly arbitrary spot in the surface. Those fingers were acute to unseen clues and potentials in the architecture.

The booted feet stepped free of the ledge. Saul was twisted to one side as King Rat swung his right foot up above his shoulder, suspending himself and his burden from only clenched white knuckles. His feet scraped at the wall, investigating like octopus tentacles, till they found purchase and locked on some minor aberration, some imperfection of the brick.

King Rat reached up with his right hand, grasping; then his left, then his right, this time gripping the rim of the black plastic gutter that marked the border between brick and slate. It creaked dolefully but, unperturbed, he tugged at it with both hands. He pulled his knees up into his stomach, his feet planted firmly against the brick, hung poised for a moment, then pushed out with his thighs like a swimmer.

Saul and King Rat somersaulted through the air. Saul heard himself wail as the wall, the alley below, the lights of buildings, streetlamps and stars spun around his head. The guttering cracked as King Rat clung to it, his hands the centre of the circle his body described. He released his grip, his feet met the sloping roof slates, he bent low to muffle the sound and, twisting his body, flung himself flat on the roof itself. Hardly pausing, he scrambled on up the tiles like a spider, with Saul holding so tight to him it felt as if he would never come loose.

King Rat scampered on all fours up the slate incline, his heavy boots making no sound. Like a tightrope-walker the surreal figure then crept swiftly along the apex of the roof towards the chimneys, and a looming tower block beyond. Terror had cemented Saul to his body, his fingers twisted into the fabric of the stinking trenchcoat with the tenacity of rigor mortis. But King

Rat prised him loose with ease and swung him off his shoulders, depositing him shivering in the shadow of the chimney.

And there Saul lay.

He shivered there for several minutes, with the unclear shape of the thin man who did impossible things standing above him, ignoring him. Saul could feel a part of himself going into shock, shaking with a terrible cold out of all proportion to the night wind.

But the spasm passed, the threat receded.

Something in the insanity of the night calmed him. What was the point of being afraid? he wondered. He had suspended all common sense half an hour before and, with that gone, he was free simply to immerse himself in the charged night.

Gradually Saul stopped gasping. He unfolded. He looked up at King Rat, who stood staring at the vast tower block above them.

Saul braced himself with his hands, then, holding his breath, he rose to his feet, one planted each side of the building’s vertex, wobbling with gusts of vertigo. He steadied himself with his left hand against the chimney stack and relaxed a little. King Rat twitched his eyes over him momentarily, then sauntered a few feet further away, balancing on the apex of the roof.

Saul looked out over the London skyline. A swell of euphoria gathered in him and crescendoed, he swayed and yelped with incredulous laughter.

‘It’s unbelievable! What the fuck am I doing up here?’ He swivelled his head to stare at King Rat, who again stood regarding him with those imprecise eyes. King Rat gestured briefly over the chimney’s bulk, and Saul turned, realizing that those eyes had not been fixed on him at all. The side of the tower block beyond was studded with lights.

‘Look at them,’ King Rat said. ‘In the windows.’

Saul looked and saw, here and there, minuscule figures bustling past, each reduced to a snatch of colour and motion. In the centre of the building one patch of shade remained still: someone leaning out of their flat window, looking over the hillocks and knolls of slate on which Saul and King Rat stood, brazen in their night-time camouflage.

‘Say goodbye to that now,’ King Rat said.

Saul turned his head to face him, quizzical.

‘That geezer there, stopping and staring, that’s as close as you ever got to this before now. The place he’s looking at now – no, he’s not looking at it, he’s caught a glimpse, a hint, it’s teasing him out of the corner of his eye – that’s your gaff now, me old son.’ Emotion was disguised in King Rat’s bass snarl, but he seemed satisfied, as if with a job well done. ‘The rest of it, that’s just in-between for you now. All the main streets, the front rooms and the rest of it, that’s just filler, that’s just chaff, that ain’t the real city. You get to that by the back door. I seen you in the windows, at night, at the close of the lightmans. Staring out, playing look-but-don’t-touch. Well, you’ve touched it now. All the vacant lots and all – that’s your stomping ground now, your pad, your burrow, Saul. That’s London.

‘You can’t go back now, can you? You stick with me, boy. I’ll see you’re alright.’

‘Why me?’ said Saul slowly. ‘What do you want from me?’ he stopped, remembering, for what seemed the first time in hours, why he had been in the police station. ‘What do you know about my father?’

King Rat turned and stared at Saul, those features, already so obscured, now invisible in the moonlight. Without taking his eyes from Saul, he slowly sank until he sat straddling the roof ridge like a horseman.

‘Slide over here, cove, and I’ll tell you the story. You aren’t going to like it.’

Saul lowered himself carefully, facing King Rat, and pulled himself forward until he was only a couple of feet away from him. If anyone could see them, Saul realized, they must look like two schoolboys, ungainly figures from a comic strip, sitting with their legs swinging. Saul’s exhilaration had dissipated with as little warning as it had arrived. He was swallowing with anxiety. He was remembering his father. This was the key to everything, he thought; this was the catalyst, the legend that would make sense of the sur-reality which had caught him up in its gusts.

King Rat spoke, and just as it had in the police cell, his voice took on a rhythm, a dislocating monotony like a bagpipe drone. The sense and meaning of what he said crept into Saul’s head as much by insinuation as by conscious understanding.

‘This here Rome-vill, London, that’s my manor, but I been around wherever my little courtiers found grain and rubbish to Tea Leaf. And they did my bidding, because I’m their king. But I was never alone, Saul; that’s never how it was. Rats believe in their Godfers, chuck out broods, the more mouths to filch, the better.

‘What do you know about your mother, Saul?’

The question took him by surprise. ‘I … her name was Eloise … She was, uh, a health visitor … She died when I was born, something went wrong …’

‘Seen any Beechams?’

Saul shook his head in confusion.

‘Beechams: pictures, photos …’

‘Of course … she’s short and dark, pretty … What’s this about? Where are you going?’

‘Sometimes, me old China, sometimes there are black sheep, ne’er-do-wells, if you clock me. I’d lay good money you and your dad were snarling at each other’s throats sometimes, am I right? Didn’t get on like you might have hoped? Well, do you really think rats aren’t the same?

‘She was always the gentry mort, your ma. Took to your daddy a whole lot, and he to her. What a beauty she was, luscious, who’d have passed that up?’ King Rat finished his sentence with a flourish, twisted his head and looked at Saul from around the corner of his face.

‘Your ma made a choice, Saul. Health visitor! That was a cheeky little joke. Set a thief to catch a thief, they say, isn’t it, and so, likewise, with her. Walk into a place, one sniff of the I Suppose, and your ma knew exactly how many rats was in there, and where. Recidivist, traitor, they called her, but I suppose that’s the power of love …’

Saul was incredulous, staring and staring at King Rat.

‘She wasn’t built for the likes of you. You bumped her off on arrival. You’re a big strong lad, sonny, stronger than you probably think. There’s a lot you can do you don’t know about. I bet you gawped out of all those night-time windows longer and harder than any of your mates. I think you’ve been scrabbling to get into this city for real for a long time.

‘You want to know who did the deed on your old man, I know. That’s what you call petulance, that is, that bod smashed out front, in the garden.

‘The one who did that … he was after you. Your old dad just got in the way.

‘You’re a special boy, Saul, got special blood in your veins, and there’s one in the city who’d like to see it spilled. Your mum was my sister, Saul.

‘Your mum was a rat.’

CHAPTER FOUR

With that insane allegation hanging in the air, King Rat rocked back onto the flesh of his arse and fell silent.

Saul shook his head and struggled between incredulity and excitement and disgust.

‘She was … what?’

‘A … fucking … rat.’ King Rat spoke slowly. ‘She crept out of the sewers because she fell for your dad. More tragic than Romeo and Juliet. And her of royal blood, too, but still she went. Couldn’t get shot of me, though. I used to come see her on the nows and thens; she’d tell me to sling my hook. Wanted all that behind her, but with her new nose she stank to herself. Couldn’t shake birthright, you know. Blood’s thicker than water, and rat blood’s the thickest of all.’

Somewhere in the tar-black below, a patrol car lurched out of the pound spewing blue light.

‘And since your mum got put in the ground, I’ve been keeping a little eye out for you: trying to keep you out of trouble. What’s family for, Saul? But it looks like things have caught up. Can’t outrun your blood, Saul. Looks like you’ve been rumbled, and your dad had to take a fall.’

Saul sat still and gazed over King Rat’s shoulder. The words, the deadly understatement delivered with something like a flourish, unlocked a door inside him. He could see his father in a hundred images. And, like a backdrop to all the frozen moments he recalled, Saul could see a powerful fat body pitching in slow motion through the night air, the mouth a distended yawn of shock and terror, eyes rolling in frantic search for safety, thinning hair flickering like candlelight, jowls trembling with gravity’s sudden shift, paddling ineffectually with those thick limbs, jagged scintillas of glass whirling around him as he flew towards the dark lawn, its soil frost-hardened like tundra.

Saul’s throat caught, and he let out a tiny sound of grief. His tears amazed him with their speed, flooding his vision instantly.

‘Oh Dad …’ he sobbed.

King Rat was incensed.

‘Leave it out now, leave it out, will you give it a fucking rest?’

His hand snapped out and he slapped Saul lightly across the face.

‘Hey. Hey. Fucking enough.’

‘Fuck off!’ Saul found a voice between sniffing, weeping and wiping his nose on the sleeve of the police-issue jumper. ‘Just stop for a minute. Just leave me alone …’

Saul relapsed into tears for his father. He beat himself on the head in his loneliness, screwed up his eyes as if he were being tortured, moaned rhythmically as he pummelled his forehead.

‘I’m sorry Dad I’m sorry I’m sorry …’ he crooned between his quiet cries. His words were garbled and confused in isolation and terrible inchoate anger. He wrapped his arms around his head, desperate and alone up on the roof.

Through the gap between his arms, he saw that King Rat was no longer sitting before him, that he had risen without a sound and had somehow reached the other end of the roof, where he stood looking out over London, facing away from Saul whose sadness angered him so much. Saul’s body moved with sobs, as he stared from behind his hands at the strange figure perched between two outcroppings of brick, King Rat. His uncle.

Saul wriggled backwards, still weeping, until he felt the damp pressure of the chimney on his back. He looked over his shoulder and saw a place where two chimney stacks met near the roof edge, leaving a space between them, a rooftop cubby-hole into which he crept with a quick contortion. He curled up in this little space, insulated from the sky and the sickening drop on all sides, out of the sight of King Rat. He was so tired, exhaustion had soaked into his bones. He lay on his side in the cramped, sloping chamber he had found and covered his head with his hands. He cried some more until his tears became mechanical, like a child who has forgotten what he is weeping for. Saul lay there on the slate slope under the chimneys, without food inside him, in someone else’s ruined clothes, lonely and utterly confused, until, amazingly, he slept.

When he woke, the sky was still dark, with only a faint fringe of dun in the east. There was no time for a luxurious morning state for Saul, no slow stretches or confusion, no slow remembrance of where he was and why. He opened his eyes onto red brick, and realized with a shudder of claustrophobia that he was surrounded, that curled up around him was King Rat. He started, pulled himself upright out of that passionless, utilitarian embrace. King Rat’s eyes were open.

‘Morning, boy. Bit parky in the small hours. Thought we’d share a bit of warmth to help you kip.’

King Rat uncoiled and rose, stretching each limb individually. He grabbed the top of the high chimney and hauled himself up with his arms, his legs dangling. He looked slowly from one side to the other, surveying the dim urban sprawl, before hawking noisily and spitting a gob of phlegm down the chimney. Only then did he relax his arms and lower himself to the roof again. Saul struggled to his feet, slipping on the slope. He wiped rheum and rubbish from his face.

King Rat turned to him. ‘We never finished our little chat. We was … interrupted last night. You’ve an awful lot to learn, matey, and you’re looking at teacher, like it or not. But first off, let’s make ourselves scarce.’ He laughed: a filthy, throaty bark that tickled Saul’s ear. ‘They were going hell for leather for you last night. No sirens, mind – didn’t want to warn you off, I reckon, but they were frantic: cars and constables running around like the blue-arsed proverbials, in a right old state, and all the time there I am playing at peek-a-boo over their gables.’ He laughed again, the noise of it, like all he issued, sounding as if it were just inches from Saul’s ear. ‘Oh yes, I am a most accomplished thief.’ He said this final line with stilted gusto, as if delivering lines in a play.

He scampered to the edge of the roof, impossibly sure-footed on its steep angle. Clinging on to the guttering, he scouted some distance round the edge, until he found what he was looking for. He turned and gestured for Saul to follow him. Saul edged along the roof ridge on all fours, afraid to expose himself to the wicked-looking grey slate. He reached the spot directly above King Rat, and there he waited.

King Rat bared his teeth at him. ‘Slide down,’ he whispered.

With both hands, Saul gripped the little concrete ridge he was straddling, and slowly swung his leg over until his whole body was spreadeagled on the slope above King Rat. At this point his arms rebelled and would not release him. He swiftly changed his mind about his actions, and attempted to haul himself back across the roof ridge, but his muscles were stiff with terror. Trapped on the slippery surface, he panicked. His brittle fingers lost their grip.

For a long, sick-making moment he was sliding towards his death, until he met King Rat’s strong hand. He was halted sharply, plucked from the roof and swung up and over in a terrifying hauling motion before being dropped hard onto a steel fire escape below.

The noise of his landing was muffled and insubstantial. Above him grinned King Rat. He still hung on to the edge of the roof with his left hand, his right extended over the stairs where he had deposited Saul. As Saul watched, he released himself, and fell the short distance to the iron mesh of the platform, his big rough boots landing without a sound.

Saul’s heart was still racing with fear, but his recent undignified precipitation galled him.

‘I … I’m not a fucking sack of potatoes,’ he hissed with spurious bravado.

King Rat grinned. ‘You don’t even know which way’s up, you little terror. And until you’ve a bit of learning in your Loaf, that’s exactly what you are.’

The two crept down the steps, past door after door, descending to the alley.

Dawn came fast. King Rat and Saul made their way through the crepuscular streets. Afraid and excited, Saul half expected his companion to repeat his escapades of last night, and he glanced from side to side at drainpipes and garage roofs, the entrances to rooftop passageways. But this time they remained earthbound. King Rat led Saul through deserted building sites and car parks, down narrow passages masquerading as culs-de-sac. Their route was chosen with an instinct Saul did not understand, and they did not pass any early morning walkers.

The dark dwindled. Daylight, wan and anaemic, had done what it could by seven o’clock.

Saul leaned against the wall of an alley. King Rat stood framed by its entrance, his right arm outstretched, just touching the bricks, the daylight beyond silhouetting him like the lead in a film noir.

‘I’m starving,’ said Saul.

‘Me too, sonny, me too. I’ve been starving for a long time.’ King Rat leaned out of the alley. He was peering at a nondescript terraced row of red brick. Each roof was topped with a dragon rampant: little flurries of clay enthusiasm now broken and crumbled. Their features were washed out by acid rain.

That morning the city seemed made up of back-streets.

‘Alright then,’ murmured King Rat. ‘Time for tucker.’

King Rat, a figure skulking like a Victorian villain, stepped carefully from his point of concealment. He lifted his face to the air. As Saul watched, he sniffed loudly twice, twitched his nose, turned his face a little to one side. Gesturing for Saul to follow him, King Rat scampered down the deserted street and ducked into a gash between two houses. At the far end was a wall of black rubbish bags.

‘Always follow your I Suppose.’ King Rat grinned briefly. He was crouched at the end of the narrow alleyway, a hunched shape at the bottom of a brickwork chasm. The surrounding walls were inscrutable, unbroken by windows.

Saul approached.

King Rat was tearing at a plastic sack. The rich smell of rot was released. King Rat plunged his arm into the hole, and fumbled inside in an unsettling parody of surgery. He pulled a polystyrene box from the wound. It dripped with tea-leaves and egg yolk, but the hamburger logo was still evident. King Rat placed it on the ground, reached inside the bag again, and pulled out a damp crust of bread.

He thrust the sack aside and reached for another, ripped it open. This time his reward was half a fruitcake, flattened and embedded with sawdust. Chicken bones and crushed chocolate, the remnants of sweet-corn and rice, fish-heads and stale crisps, the bags yielded them all, disgorged them into a stinking pile on the concrete.

Saul watched the mound of ruined food grow. He put his hand over his mouth.

‘You have got to be joking,’ he said, and swallowed.

King Rat looked up at him.

‘Thought you was peckish.’

Saul shook his head in horror, his hand still clamped firmly over his mouth.

‘When was the last time you puked?’

Saul furrowed his brow at the question. King Rat wiped his wet hand on his trenchcoat, adding to the camouflage-pattern of stains hidden in its dark grey. He poked at the food.

‘You can’t recall,’ he said, without looking at Saul. ‘You can’t recall because you’ve never done it. Never spewed nothing. You’ve been ill, I’ll bet, but not like other Godfers. No colds or sneezing; only some queer sickness making you shiver for days, once or twice. But even then, not a sign of puke.’ He finally met Saul’s eye, and his voice dropped. He hissed at him, something like victory in his voice. ‘Got the notion? Your belly won’t rebel. No sicking up Pig’s, no matter how plastered, no sweet sticky chocolate bile on your pillow the night after Easter, no hurling seafood across the tiles, no matter how dodgy the take-away. You’ve got rat blood in your veins. There’s nothing you can’t stomach.’

There was a long moment of silence as the two stared at each other.

King Rat continued.

‘And there’s more. There’s no grub you don’t want. Said you were starving. I should coco; it’s been a while. Well here we go. Sitting comfortably? I’m going to teach you what it is to be rat. Look at all this scran your uncle sorted you out with. Said you were starving. Here’s breakfast.’

King Rat picked up the fruitcake without taking his eyes from Saul. He raised it slowly to his mouth. Moist chunks dropped from his hand, sultanas made juicy from their long marinating in black plastic. He bit into it, crumbs bursting out of his mouth as he exhaled in satisfaction.

He was right. Saul could not remember a time when he had thrown up. He had always eaten a lot, even for his frame, and had never been able to sympathize with people put off their food. Stories about maggots told over risotto left him unmoved. He had never suffered after too much sugar or fat or alcohol. This had never occurred to him before; he sympathized with others when they complained that something made them feel sick, never stopping to ask what it meant or if it was true.

Now he was sloughing off those layers of habit. He stood watching King Rat eat. The wiry figure would not take his eyes from him.

It had been hours and hours since Saul had last had food. He investigated his own hunger.

King Rat continued chewing. The stench of slowly collapsing food was overwhelming. Saul gazed at the leftovers and remnants heaped in front of the bags, the flecks of mould, the bite marks, and the dirt.

He began to salivate.

King Rat kept eating.

When he opened his mouth wet chunks of cake were visible. ‘You can eat pigeon-meat scraped off a car-wheel,’ he said. ‘This here’s good scran.’

Saul’s stomach growled. He squatted before the pile of food. Gingerly, he picked out the unfinished burger. He sniffed it. It was long cold. He could see where teeth had torn through the bun. He brushed at it, cleared it of grime as best he could.

It was damp and clammy, still shiny with spit where it had been bitten.

Saul put it near his mouth. He let his mind play over the filth of the dustbin, waited for his stomach to turn. But it did not.

His mind still rang with admonishments heard long ago – don’t touch, it’s dirty, take it out of your mouth – but his stomach, his stomach remained firm. The smell of the meat was enticing.

He willed himself to feel ill. He strove for nausea.

He took a bite. He wriggled his tongue into the meat, pushed apart the fibres. He probed, tasting the dirt and decay. Lumps of gristle and fat split open in his mouth, mixed with his saliva.

The burger was delicious.

Saul swallowed and did not feel ill. His hunger, piqued, demanded more. He took another bite, and another, eating faster and faster all the time.

He felt something slipping away from him. He drew his strength from the old cold meat, food that had surrendered to people and decay, and now to him. His world changed.

King Rat nodded and ate on, grabbed handfuls and shoved them into his mouth without looking at them.

Saul reached for a slimy chicken wing.

In the street, only twenty feet away, children were appearing in outsized school uniforms. The bricks and the bags kept Saul and King Rat hidden. They looked up as the children passed, paused briefly in their breakfast.

They were silent while they ate. When they had finished, Saul licked his lips. The taste of filth and carrion was very strong in his mouth, and he investigated it, still wondering that it did not turn his stomach.

King Rat nestled into the bags and pulled his coat about him. ‘Feeling better now?’ he asked.

Saul nodded. For the first time since his sudden release, he felt calm. He could feel the acids of his stomach getting to work inside him, breaking down the old food he had eaten. He felt molecules scurrying out of his gut, carrying strange energy from the ruins of other people’s suppers and breakfasts. He was changing from the inside out.

My mother was like this creature, he said to himself, this skulking thing. My mother was like this thin-faced vagrant with magical powers. My mother was a spirit, it seems, a dirty spirit. My mother was a rat.

‘You can’t go back, you know.’ King Rat looked at Saul from under his eyelids. Saul had long given up trying to make sense of his features. The light would not fall full on King Rat’s face, no matter where he stood or lay. Saul glanced at him again, but his eyes found no purchase.

‘I know it,’ he said.

‘They think you did your pa, and they’ll do you for that. And now you’ve slung your hook from their old Bucket, they’ll have your guts for garters.’

The city had been made unsafe. Saul felt it yawn before him, infinitely vaster than he had imagined, unknowable and furtive.

‘So, so …’ said Saul slowly. So what is London? he thought. If you can be what you are, what’s London? What’s the world? I’ve had it all wrong. Do werewolves and trolls lurk under bridges in the parks? What are the boundaries of the world?

‘So … what do I do now?’

‘Well, you aren’t going back, so you got to bing a waste forward. I’ve to teach you how to be rat. You got a lot going for you, sonny. Hold your breath and squeeze in tight, freeze like a statue … you’re invisible. Move just right, dainty on your toes, you’ll make nary a sound. You can be like me. As far as you’re concerned, up’s no longer out of bounds, and down’s nothing to fear.’

It didn’t matter any more that he didn’t understand. Unbelievably, King Rat’s words took away Saul’s trepidation. He felt himself grow strong. He stretched out his arms. He felt like laughing.

‘I feel like I can do anything,’ he said. He was overwhelmed.

‘You can, my old son. You’re a ratling boy. Just got to learn the tricks. We’ll cut your teeth. You and me together, dynamite. We’ve a kingdom to win back.’

Saul had risen to his feet, was staring out into the street beyond. At King Rat’s words he turned slowly and looked down at the thin figure cocooned in black plastic.

‘Back?’ he said levelly. ‘Back from who?’

King Rat nodded. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘for a word in your shell-like. Much as I hate to piss on your chips, you’re forgetting something. You’re in another country now because your old man did the six-storey swan-dive’ – King Rat blithely ignored Saul’s aghast stare – ‘and he did that, the old codger, in lieu of you. There’s something out there wants your head, chal, and you’d be wise not to forget it.’

Saul wobbled to his knees. ‘Who?’ he whispered.

‘Well now, that’s the biggy, isn’t it? That’s the question. And therein lies a story, a twisting rat-tale.’

PART TWO

THE NEW CITY

CHAPTER FIVE

Fabian was trying to call Natasha but he could not reach her. She had taken her phone off the hook. The news about Saul’s father was spreading among his friends like a virus, but Natasha had immunized herself for a little while longer.

It was just after midday. The sun was bright but as cold as snow. The sounds of Ladbroke Grove filtered along the backstreets to the first floor of a flat on Bassett Road. They slid through the windows and filled the front room, a susurrus of dogs and paper-sellers and cars. The sounds were faint; they were what passed for silence in the city.

In the flat a woman stood motionless in front of a keyboard. She was short and her face was severe, with dark eyebrows that met above a scimitar nose. Her long hair was dark, her skin sallow. Her name was Natasha Karadjian.

Natasha stood with her eyes closed and listened to the streets outside. She reached out and pressed the power button on her sampler. There was a static thud as her speakers clicked into life.

She ran her hands over the keys and the cursor. She had stood motionless for a minute or two now. Even alone she felt self-conscious. Natasha rarely let people watch when she created her music. She was afraid they would think her precious, with her silent preparations and her closed eyes.

She tapped out a message on a clutch of small buttons, twisted her cursor, displayed her musical spoils on the LCD display. She scrolled through the selection and plucked a favourite bassline from her digital killing jar. She had snatched it from a forgotten Reggae track, sampled it, preserved it, and now she pulled it out and looped it and gave it another life. The zombie sound travelled the innards of the machine and out through wires, through the vast black stereo against her wall, and burst out of those great speakers.

The sound filled her room.

The bass was trapped. The sample ended just as the bass-player had been about to reach a crescendo, and expectation was audible in the thudding strings as they reached out for something, for a flourish … then a break, and the cycle started again.

This bassline was in purgatory. It burst into existence with a recurring surge of excitement, waiting for a release that never came.

Natasha nodded her head slowly. This was the breakbeat, the rhythm of tortured music. She loved it.

Again her hands moved. A pounding beat joined the bass, cymbals clattering like insects. And the sound looped.

Natasha moved her shoulders to the rhythm. Her eyes were wide as she scanned her kills, her pickled sounds, and she found what she wanted: a snatch of trumpet from Linton Kwesi Johnson, a wail from Tony Rebel, a cry of invitation from Al Green. She dropped them into her tune. They segued smoothly into the rolling bass, the slamming drums.

This was Jungle.

The child of House, the child of Raggamuffin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Bass soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.

The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the bassline you followed with your feet, the bassline that gave Jungle its soul.

And above the bassline was the high end of Jungle: the treble. Stolen chords and shouts that rode the waves of bass like surfers. They were fleeting and teasing, snatches of sound winking into existence and sliding over the beat, tracing it, then winking away.

Natasha nodded her satisfaction.

She could feel the bass. She knew it intimately. She searched instead for the sounds at the top, she wanted something perfect, a leitmotif to weave in and out of the drums.

She knew the people who ran the clubs, and they would always play her music. People liked her tracks a lot, gave her respect and bookings. But she felt a vague dissatisfaction with everything she wrote, even when the sensation was shot through with pride. When she finished a track she did not feel any purgation of relief, only a slight unease. Natasha would cast around, ransacking her friends’ record collections in an attempt to find the sounds she wanted to steal, or would make her own on her keyboard, but they never touched her like the bass. The bass never evaded her; she needed only to reach out for it, and it would drop out of her speakers complete and perfect.

The track was nearing a crescendo now: Gwan, exhorted a sampled voice, Gwan gyal. Natasha broke the beat, teasing the rhythm out, paring it down. She stripped flesh from the tune’s bones and the samples echoed in the cavernous ribcage, in the belly of the beat. Come now … we rollin’ this way, rudebwoy … She pulled her sounds out one by one, until only the bass was left. It had ushered the song in; it ushered it out again.

The room was silent.

Natasha waited a while until the city silence of children and cars crept into her ears again. She looked around at her room. Her flat contained a tiny kitchen, a tiny bathroom and the beautiful big bedroom she was in now. She had put her meagre collection of prints and posters in the other rooms and the hall; the walls here were quite bare. The room itself was empty except for a mattress on the floor, the hulking black stand which housed her stereo, and her keyboard. The wooden floor was criss-crossed with black leads.

She reached down and put the receiver back on the phone. She was about to wander into the kitchen, when the doorbell sounded. Natasha crossed the room to the open window and leaned out.

A man was standing in front of her door, looking straight up at her eyes. She had a brief impression of a thin face, bright eyes and long blond hair, before she ducked back into the room and headed down the stairs. He had not looked like a Jehovah’s witness or a troublemaker.

She walked through the dingy communal hall. Through the rippled glass of the front door she could see that the man was very tall. She pulled the door open, admitting voices from the next house and the daylight that was flooding the street.

Natasha looked up into his narrow face. The man was about six feet four, dwarfing her by nearly a foot, but he was so slim he looked as if he might snap in half at the waist any moment. He was probably in his early thirties, but he was so pale it was difficult to tell. His hair was a sickly yellow. The pallor of his face was exaggerated by his black leather jacket. He would have looked quite ill were it not for his bright blue eyes and his air of fidgety animation. He started to grin even before the door was fully open.

Natasha and her visitor stared at each other, he smiling, she with a guarded, quizzical expression.

‘Brilliant,’ he said suddenly.

Natasha stared at him.

‘Your music,’ he said. ‘Brilliant.’

The man’s voice was deeper and richer than she would have thought possible from such a slender frame. It was slightly breathless, as if he were rushing to get his words out. She stared up at him and her eyes narrowed. This was much too weird a way of starting a conversation. She was not having it.

‘What do you mean?’ she said levelly.

He smiled apologetically. His words slowed down a little.

‘I’ve been listening to your music,’ he said. ‘I came past here last week and I heard you playing up there. I tell you, I was just standing there with my mouth open.’

Natasha was embarrassed and amazed. She opened her mouth to interrupt but he continued.

‘I came back and I heard it again. It made me want to start dancing in the street!’ He laughed. ‘The next time I heard you stop halfway through, and I realized someone was actually playing while I listened. I’d thought it was a record. It was such an exciting thought that you were actually up there making it.’

Natasha finally spoke.

‘This is really … flattering. But did you knock on my door just to tell me that?’ This man unnerved her with his excited grin and breathy voice. It was only curiosity that stopped her shutting the door. ‘I’ve not got a fan club yet.’

He stared at her and the nature of his smile changed. Until that moment it had been sincere, almost childish in its excitement. Slowly his lips closed a fraction and hid his teeth. He straightened his long back and his eyelids slid halfway down over his eyes. He leaned his head slightly to one side, without taking his eyes off her.

Natasha felt a wave of adrenaline. She looked back at him in shock. The change which had come over him was extraordinary. He stared at her now with a look so sexual, so casually knowing, that she felt vertiginous.

She was furious with him. She shook her head a little and prepared to slam the door. He held it open. Before she could say anything, his arrogance had gone and the old look was back.

‘Please,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself. I’m flustered because I’ve … been plucking up courage to talk to you.

‘You see,’ he continued, ‘what you’re playing is beautiful, but sometimes it feels a little bit – don’t get angry – a bit unfinished. I sort of feel like the treble isn’t quite … working. And I wouldn’t say that to you except I play a little bit myself and I thought maybe we could help each other out.’

Natasha stepped backwards. She felt intrigued and threatened. She always stonewalled about her music, refusing to discuss her feelings about it with any except her very closest friends. The intense but inchoate frustrations she felt were rarely verbalized, as if to do so would give them form. She chose to keep them at bay with obfuscation, from herself as much as from others, and now this man seemed to be unwrapping them with an unnerving casualness.

‘Do you have a suggestion?’ she said as acidly as she could. He reached behind him and picked up a black case. He shook it in front of her.

‘This might sound a bit cocky,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want you to think I reckon I can do better than you. But, when I heard your playing, I just knew I could complement it.’ He undid the clasp of the case and opened it in front of her. She saw a disassembled flute.

‘I know you might think I’m crazy,’ he pre-empted hurriedly. ‘You think what you play is totally different to what I play. But … I’ve been looking for bass like yours for longer than you could believe.’

He spoke earnestly now, his eyebrows furrowed as he held her gaze. She stubbornly stared back, refusing to be overawed by this apparition on her doorstep.

‘I want to play with you,’ he said.

This was stupid, Natasha told herself: even if this man was not arrogant beyond belief, you could not play the flute to Jungle. It was so long since she had stared at a traditional instrument she felt a gust of déjà vu: images of her nine-year-old self banging the xylophone in the school orchestra. Flutes meant enthusiastic cacophonies at the hands of children or the alien landscape of classical music, an intimidating world of great beauty but vicious social exclusivity, to which she had never known the passwords.

But to her amazement, this lanky stranger had impressed her. She wanted to let him in and hear him play his flute in her room. She wanted to hear him play over some of her basslines. Discordant indie bands had done it, she knew: My Bloody Valentine had used flutes. And while the result had left her as dead cold as the rest of that genre, surely the alliance itself was no more unlikely than this one. She realized that she was intrigued.

But she was not simply going to stand aside. She had a reputation for being intimidating. She was not used to feeling so disarmed, and her defences flared.

‘Listen,’ she said slowly. ‘I don’t know what you think qualifies you to speak about my tracks. Why should I play with you?’

‘Try it once,’ he said, and again that sudden change flooded his features, the same curled smile on the edge of the lips, the same heavy-lidded nonchalance about the eyes.

And Natasha was suddenly furious with this pretentious little art-school wanker, livid where a moment ago she had been captivated, and she leaned forward and up on tiptoes, until her face was as close to his as it would go, and she raised one eyebrow, and she said: ‘I don’t think so.’

She closed the door in his face.

Natasha stalked back up her stairs. The window was open. She stood next to it, close to the wall, looking down at the street without putting herself in view. She could see no sign of the man. She walked slowly to her keyboard. She smiled.

OK, you cocky fucker, she thought. Let’s see how good you are.

She turned the volume down slightly, and pulled another rhythm out of her collection. This time the drums came crashing out of nowhere. The bass came chasing after, filling out the snare and framing the sound with a funky backdrop. She threw in a few minimal shouts and snatches of brass, looped a moment of trumpet, but the treble was subdued; this was an offering to the man outside, and it was all about rhythm.

The beats looped once, twice. Then, sailing up from the street came a thin snatch of music, a trill of flute that mimicked the looping repetition of her own music, but elaborated on itself, changed a little with every cycle. He was standing below her window, his hastily assembled instrument to his lips.

Natasha smiled. He had made good on his arrogance. She would have been disappointed if he had not.

She stripped the beat down and left it to loop. She stood back and listened.

The flute skittered over the drums, teasing the beat, touching just enough to stay anchored, then transporting itself. It suddenly became a series of staccato flutterings. It lilted between drum and bass, now wailing like a siren, now stuttering like Morse code.

Natasha was … not transfixed, perhaps, but impressed.

She closed her eyes. The flute soared and dived; it fleshed out her skeletal tune in a way she could never achieve. The life in the live music was exuberant and neurotic and it sparked off the revivified bass, the very alive dancing with the dead. There was a promise to this tension.

Natasha nodded. She was eager to hear more, to feed that flute into her music. She smiled sardonically. She would admit defeat. So long as he behaved, so long as there were not too many of those knowing looks, she would admit that she wanted to hear more.

Natasha paced silently back down the stairs. She opened the door. He was standing a few feet back, his flute to his lips, staring up at her window. He stopped as he saw her, and lowered his hands. No trace of a smile now. He looked anxious for approval.

She inclined her head and gave him a sideways look. He hovered.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy it.’ He finally smiled. ‘It’s Natasha.’ She jerked her thumb at herself.

‘Pete,’ the tall man said.

Natasha stood aside, and Pete passed into her house.

CHAPTER SIX

Again Fabian tried Natasha’s number, and again she was engaged. He swore and slammed his receiver down. He turned on his heel, paced pointlessly. He had spoken to everyone who knew Saul except for Natasha, and she was the one who mattered most.

Fabian was not gossiping. As soon as he had heard about Saul’s father he had got on the phone, almost before he was aware of what he was doing, and begun to spread the news. At some point he had rushed out to buy a paper, before starting again on the phone. But this was not gossip. He felt a powerful sense of duty. This, he believed, was what was needed of him.

He pulled on his jacket, tugged his thin dreadlocks into a ponytail. Enough, he decided. He would go to Natasha, tell her in person. It was a fair journey from Brixton to Ladbroke Grove, but the thought of the cold air in his face and lungs was beguiling. His house felt oppressive. He had spent hours on the phone that morning, the same phrases again and again – Six floors straight down … The filth won’t let me talk to him – and the walls had soaked up the news. They were saturated with the old man’s death. Fabian wanted space. He wanted to clean out his head.

He shoved a page of newspaper into his pocket. He could recite the relevant story by heart: News in brief. A man died in Willesden, North London, yesterday, after falling through a sixth-floor window. Police will not say if they are treating the death as suspicious. The man’s son is helping them with their enquiries. The screaming accusation of the last sentence stung him.

He left his room for the filthy hall of the shared house. Someone was shouting upstairs. The dirty, ill-fitting carpets irritated him always; now they made him feel violent. As he struggled with his bike, he glanced at the unwashed walls, the broken banisters. The presence of the house weighed down on him. He burst out of the front door with a sigh of relief.

Fabian treated his bike carelessly, letting it fall when he dismounted, chucking it against walls. He was rough with it. He yanked himself onto it now with unthinking brutality, and swung out into the road.

The streets were full. It was a Saturday and people were thronging the streets, coming to and from Brixton market, determined on their outward journey and slow on the way back, laden down with cheap, colourful clothes and big fruit. Trains rumbled, competed with the sounds of Soca, Reggae, Rave, Rap, Jungle, House, and the shouting: all the cut-up market rhythm. Rudeboys in outlandish trousers clustered around corners and music shops, touched fists. Shaven-headed men in tight tops and AIDS ribbons made for Brockwell Park or The Brixtonian café. Food wrappers and lost television supplements tugged at ankles. The capricious traffic lights were a bad joke: pedestrians hovered like suicides at the edge of the pavement, launched themselves across at the slightest sign of a gap. The cars made angry noises and sped away, anxious to escape. Impassive, the people watched them pass by.

Fabian twisted his wheels through the bodies. The railway bridge passed above him; some way ahead the clocktower told him it was mid-morning. He rode and walked intermittently past the tube station, wheeled his bike across Brixton Road, and again over Acre Lane. There were no crowds here, and no Reggae. Acre Lane stretched out wide. The buildings that contained it were separate, sparse and low. The sky was always very big over Acre Lane.

Fabian jumped back onto his bike and took off up the slight incline towards Clapham. From there he would twist across into Clapham Manor Street, wind a little through backstreets to join Silverthorne Road, a steep sine-wave of minor industrial estates and peculiarly suburban houses tucked between Battersea and Clapham, a conduit feeding directly into Queenstown Road, across Chelsea Bridge.

For the first time that day Fabian felt his head clear.

Early that morning a suspicious policeman had answered Saul’s phone, had demanded Fabian’s name. Outraged, Fabian had hung up. He had rung up Willesden police station, again refusing to give his name, but demanding to know why policemen were answering his friend’s phone. Only when he acquiesced and told them who he was would they tell him that Saul’s father had died, and that Saul was with them – again that disingenuous phrase – helping with enquiries.

First he felt nothing but shock; then quickly a sense of a monstrous error.

And a great fear. Because Fabian understood immediately that it would be easy for them to believe that Saul had killed his father. And, as immediately, he knew without any equivocation or doubt that Saul had not. But he was terribly afraid, because only he knew that, because he knew Saul. And there was nothing he could tell others to help them understand.

He wanted to see Saul; he did not understand why the officer’s voice changed when he demanded this. He was told it would be some time before he could speak to Saul, Saul was deep in conversation, his attention wholly grabbed, and Fabian would just have to wait. There was something the man was not telling him, Fabian knew, and he was scared. He left his phone number, was reassured that he would be contacted as soon as Saul was free to speak.

Fabian sped along Acre Lane. On his left he passed an extraordinary white building, a mass of grubby turrets and shabby Art Deco windows. It looked long deserted. On the step sat two boys, dwarfed by jackets declaring allegiance to American Football teams neither had ever seen play. They were oblivious to the faded grandeur of their bench. One had his eyes closed, was leaning back against the door like Mexican cannon-fodder in a spaghetti Western. His friend spoke animatedly into his hand, his tiny mobile phone hidden within the voluminous folds of his sleeve. Fabian felt the thrill of materialist envy, but battened it down. This was one impulse he resisted.

Not me, he thought, as he always did. I’ll hold out a bit longer. I won’t be another black man with a mobile, another troublemaker with ‘Drug Dealer’ written on his forehead in script only the police can read.

He stood up out of his seat, kicked down and sped off towards Clapham.

Fabian knew Saul hated his father’s disappointment. Fabian knew Saul and his father could not speak together. Fabian had been the only one of Saul’s friends who had seen him turn that volume by Lenin over and over in his hands, open it and close it, read the inscription again and again. His father’s writing was tight and controlled, as if trying not to break the pen. Saul had put the book in Fabian’s lap, had waited while his friend read.

To Saul, This always made sense to me. Love from the Old Leftie.

Fabian remembered looking up into Saul’s face. His mouth was sealed, his eyes looked tired. He took the book off Fabian’s lap and closed it, stroked the cover, put it on his shelf. Fabian knew Saul had not killed his father.

He crossed Clapham High Street, a concourse of restaurants and charity shops, and slid into the back-streets, wiggling through the parked cars to emerge on Silverthorne Road. He started down the long incline towards the river.

He knew that Natasha would be working. He knew he would turn into Bassett Road and hear the faint boom of Drum and Bass. She would be hunched over her keyboard, twiddling dials and pressing keys with the concentration of an alchemist, juggling long sequences of zeros and ones and transforming them into music. Listening and creating. That was what Natasha spent all her time doing. When she was not concentrating on source material behind the till of friends’ record shops, serving customers in an efficient autopilot mode, she was reconstituting it into the tracks she christened with spiky one-word titles: Arrival; Rebellion; Maelstrom.

Fabian believed it was Natasha’s concentration which made her so asexual to him. She was attractive in a fierce way, and was never short of offers, especially at clubs, especially when word got around that the music playing was hers; but Fabian had never known her seem very interested, even when she took someone home. He felt blasphemous even thinking of her in a sexual context. Fabian was alone in his opinion, he was assured by his friend Kay, a cheerful dope-raddled clown who drooled lasciviously after Natasha whenever he saw her. The music was the thing, Kay said, and the intensity was the thing, and the carelessness was the thing. Just like a nun, it was the promise of what was under the habit.

But Fabian could only grin sheepishly at Kay, absurdly embarrassed. Amateur psychologists around London, Saul included, had wasted no time deciding he was in love with Natasha; but Fabian did not think that was the case. She infuriated him with her style-fascism and her solipsism, but he supposed he loved her. Just not in the way Saul meant it.

He twisted under the filthy railway bridge on Queenstown Road now, fast approaching Battersea Park. He was riding an incline, racing towards Chelsea Bridge. He took the roundabout with casual arrogance, put his head down and climbed towards the river. On Fabian’s right, the four chimneys of Battersea Power Station loomed into view. Its roof was long gone, it looked like a bombed-out relic, a blitz survivor. It was a great upturned plug straining to suck voltage out of the clouds, a monument to energy.

Fabian burst free of South London. He slowed and looked into the Thames, past the towers and railings of steel that surrounded him, keeping him snug on Chelsea Bridge. The river sent shards of cold sunlight in all directions.

He scudded over the face of the water like a pond-skater, dwarfed by the girders and bolts ostentatiously holding the bridge together. He hung poised for a moment between the South Bank and the North Bank, his head high to see over the sides into the water, to see the black barges that never moved, waiting to ferry cargo long forgotten, his legs still, freewheeling his way towards Ladbroke Grove.

The route to Natasha’s house took Fabian past the Albert Hall and through Kensington, which he hated. It was a soulless place, a purgatory filled only with rich transients drifting pointlessly through Nicole Farhi and Red or Dead. He sped up Kensington Church Street towards Notting Hill and on through to Portobello Road.

It was a market day, the second in the week, designed to wrest money from tourists. Merchandise that had cost five pounds on Friday was now offered for ten. The air was thick with garish cagoules and backpacks and French and Italian. Fabian cussed quietly and inched through the throng. He ducked left down Elgin Crescent and then right, bearing down on the Bassett Road flat.

A gust of wind stained the air brown with leaves. Fabian swung into the street. The leaves boiled around him, stuck to his jacket. Pared-down trees lined the tarmac. Fabian dismounted while still in motion, walked towards Natasha’s flat.

He could hear her working. The faint thumping of Drum and Bass was audible from the end of the street. As he walked, wheeling his bike beside him, Fabian heard the sound of wings. Natasha’s house teemed with pigeons. Every protuberance and ledge was grey with plump, stirring bodies. A few were in the air, hovering nervously around the windows and gables, settling, dislodging their peers. They shifted and shat a little as Fabian stopped at the door directly below them.

Natasha’s rhythm was loud now, and Fabian could hear something unusual, a clear sound like pipes, a recorder or a flute, bursting with energy and exuberance, shadowing the bass. He stood still and listened. The quality of this sound was different from that of samples, and it was not trapped in any loops. Fabian suspected it was being played live. And by something of a virtuoso.

He rang the bell. The electronic boom of the bass stopped cold. The flute faltered on for a second or two. As silence fell, the company of pigeons rose en masse into the air with the abruptness of panic, circled once like a school of fish and disappeared into the north. Fabian heard footsteps on the stairs.

Natasha opened the door to him and smiled.

‘Alright, Fabe,’ she said, reaching up to touch her clenched right fist to his. He did so, at the same time bending down to put an arm around her and kiss her cheek. She responded, though her surprise was evident.

‘Tash,’ he whispered, in greeting and in warning. She heard it in his voice, pulled back holding his shoulders in her hands. Her face sharpened in concern.

‘What? What’s happened?’

‘Tash, it’s Saul.’ He’d told the story so often today he’d become an automaton, just mouthing the words, but this time it was difficult all over again. He licked his lips.

Natasha started. ‘What is it, Fabe?’ Her voice cracked.

‘No no,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Saul’s fine. Well, I guess … He’s in with the pigs.’

She shook her head in confusion.

‘Listen, Tash … Saul’s dad … he died.’ He rushed on before she could misunderstand. ‘He was killed. He was lobbed out of a window two nights back. I think … I think the police reckon Saul did it.’ He reached into his pocket and brought out the scrunched-up news story. Natasha read it.

‘No,’ she said.

‘I know, I know. But I suppose they heard about him and the old man having arguments and that, and … I dunno.’

‘No,’ said Natasha again. The two of them stood quite still, staring at each other. Eventually Natasha moved. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘come in. We’d better talk. There’s this bloke here …’

‘The one playing the flute?’

She smiled slightly. ‘Yeah. He’s good, isn’t he? I’ll get rid of him.’

Fabian closed the door behind him and followed her up the stairs. She was some way ahead of him and, as he approached her inner door, he heard voices.

‘What’s happening?’ It was a man’s voice, muffled and anxious.

‘A friend’s in a bit of bother,’ Natasha was saying. Fabian entered the sparse bedroom, nodded in greeting at the tall blond man he saw over Natasha’s shoulder. The man had his mouth slightly open, was fingering his ponytail nervously. In his right hand was a silver flute. He looked up and down at the two in the doorway.

‘Pete, Fabian.’ Natasha waved her hand vaguely between the two in a cursory introduction. ‘Sorry, Pete, but you’re going to have to split. I have to talk to Fabe. Something’s come up.’

The blond man nodded and hurriedly gathered his things together. As he did so, he spoke rapidly.

‘Natasha, do you want to do this again? I felt like we were … really getting into it.’

Fabian raised his eyebrows.

The tall man squeezed past Fabian without taking his eyes off Natasha. She was clearly distracted, but she smiled and nodded.

‘Yeah. For sure. Do you want to leave me your number or something?’

‘No, I’ll come by again.’

‘Do you want my number, then?’

‘No. I’ll just come by, and if you’re not in, I’ll come by again.’ Pete stopped in front of the stairs and turned back. ‘Hope I see you again, Fabian,’ he said.

Fabian nodded abstractedly, then looked into Pete’s eyes. The tall man was gazing at him with a peculiar intensity, demanding a response. The two were locked for a moment, until Fabian acquiesced and nodded more pointedly. Only then did Pete seem satisfied. He descended the stairs, followed by Natasha.

The two were speaking, but Fabian could not make out any words. He frowned. The front door slammed shut and Natasha returned to the room.

‘He’s a bit of a weirdo, isn’t he?’ Fabian asked.

Natasha nodded vehemently. ‘’Strue, man, do you know what I mean? I threw him out at first, he was kind of getting leery’

‘Trying it on?’

‘Kind of. But he was going on and on about wanting to play with me, and I was intrigued, and he started playing outside. He was good so I let him back in.’

‘Suitably humbled, yeah?’ Fabian grinned briefly.

‘Damn right. But he plays … he plays like a fucking angel, Fabe.’ She was excited. ‘He’s the original nutter, you’re right, I know, but there’s something very right about his playing.’

There was a short silence. Natasha tugged at Fabian’s jacket and pulled him into the kitchen. ‘I need a coffee, man. You need a coffee. And I need to know about Saul.’

In the street stood the tall man. He stared up at the window, the flute limp in his hand. His clothes twisted in the wind. He was even paler in the cold, in front of the dark trees. He was quite motionless. He watched the tiny variations of light as bodies moved in and out of the sitting-room. He cocked his ear slightly, pulled his fringe out of his eyes, twisted a lock of hair in his fingers. His eyes were the colour of the clouds. He raised the flute slowly to his lips, played a brief refrain. A little group of sparrows wheeled out from the branches of a tree, circled him. The man lowered his flute and watched as the birds disappeared.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Two eyes stained yellow by death gaped stupidly. All the imperfections of the human body were magnified by utter stillness. Crowley ran his eyes over the face, took note of the wide pores, the pockmarks, the hairs sprouting from nostrils, the patch of stubble under the Adam’s apple that the razor had missed.

The skin folded up under the chin and became a tightly wound coil, a skein of flesh wrung out to dry. The body was chest-down, limbs uncomfortable, and the head was facing the ceiling, twisted round nearly 180 degrees. Crowley stood and pushed his hands into his pockets to disguise their trembling. He turned and faced his entourage, two burly officers whose faces were identical portraits of disbelieving revulsion, scarcely more mobile than their fallen comrade’s.

Crowley paced through the small hall to the bedroom. The flat was full of busy people, photographers, pathologists. Fingerprint dust sat in the air in flat layers, like geological strata.

He peered round the frame of the bedroom door. A suited man crouched on the floor before a figure sitting with splayed legs, leaning against a wall. Crowley looked at the seated man and made a small disgusted noise, as if at rotten food. He stared into the ruinous mess of the other’s face. Blood was smeared across the wall. The dead man’s uniform was saturated with it, stiff like an oilskin coat.

The suited doctor removed his tentative fingers from the bloody mess, and glanced behind him at Crowley.

‘You are …?’

‘DI Crowley. Doctor, what happened here?’

The doctor gestured at the slumped figure. His voice was utterly detached, exhibiting the defensive professionalism Crowley had seen before at unpleasant deaths.

‘Ah, this chap, Constable Barker, yes? Well … he’s been hit in the face, basically, very fast and very hard.’ He stood, ran his hands through his hair. ‘I think he’s come here to the front of the room, opened the door and been walloped with a … a bloody piledriver which sent him into the wall and onto the floor, at which point our assailant has borne down on him and cracked him a few more times. Once or twice with his fists, I think, then with a stick or a club or something, lots of long thin bruises across the shoulders and neck. And the line of damage here …’ He indicated a particular trough in the bone-flecked pulp of the face.

‘And the other?’

The doctor shook his head, and blinked several times. ‘Never seen that before, to be honest. He’s had his neck broken, which sounds straightforward enough, but … well, my God, you’ve seen him, yes?’ Crowley nodded. ‘I don’t know … do you have any idea how strong the human neck is, Inspector? It’s not so very difficult to break a neck but someone has turned his the wrong way round … And they’ve had to dislocate all the vertebrae completely, so that tension in the flesh doesn’t send the head back round to the front. So they didn’t just turn his head round, they pulled upwards while they were doing it. You’re dealing with someone very, very strong, and, I shouldn’t wonder, with some sort of karate or judo or something.’

Crowley pursed his lips. ‘There’s no real sign of struggle, so they were fast. Page opens the door and has his neck done in half a second, makes a little noise. Barker moves to the door of the bedroom, and …’

The doctor looked at Crowley in silence. Crowley nodded his thanks and rejoined his companions. Herrin and Bailey were still staring at the implausible figure of Constable Page.

Herrin looked up as Crowley approached. ‘Jesus fucking Christ, sir, it’s like that film …’

‘The Exorcist. I know, Constable.’

‘But like all the way round, sir …’

‘I know, Detective, now give it a rest. We’re leaving.’

The three ducked under the twists of tape which sealed the flat, and made their way down through the bowels of the building. Outside, a large patch of grass was still surrounded with the same tape that closed off the flat above. Vicious droplets of glass still littered the earth.

‘It doesn’t seem possible, sir,’ said Bailey, as they approached the car.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I saw Garamond when he came in. Quite a big bloke but no Schwarzenegger. And Jesus, he didn’t look capable of …’ Bailey spoke quickly, still deeply shocked.

Crowley nodded as he swung the car round. ‘I know you’re never supposed to let yourself make judgements about who’s “the type” and who’s not, but I’ve got to admit, Garamond’s shocked me. I thought, “Fine, no problem. Argues with the dad, struggle, shoves him out the window, in shock, goes to bed.” Bit odd that, I admit, but when you’re drunk and freaked out, you do odd things.

‘But I certainly didn’t have him down for the little Houdini he turned out to be. And as for this …’

Herrin was nodding vehemently.

‘How did he do that? Door open, cell empty, no one sees him, no one hears a thing.’

‘But all this,’ continued Crowley, ‘this is a real … surprise.’ He gobbed the word out with disgust. He spoke slowly, his quiet voice halting momentarily between each word. ‘What I interviewed last night was a scared, confused, fucked-up little man. Whatever escaped from the station was some sort of master criminal, and whatever killed Page and Barker was … an animal.’

He thinned his eyes and gently thumped the steering-wheel. ‘But everything about this is weird. Why did none of the neighbours hear anything going on between him and the dad? His camping story checks out?’ Herrin nodded. ‘We can put him in Willesden at about ten, Mr Garamond hit the ground at about ten-thirty, eleven. Someone should’ve heard it. How’s it going with the rest of the family?’

‘Series of blanks,’ said Bailey. ‘Mum’s long dead, you know, and she was an orphan. His dad’s parents are dead, there’s no uncles, an aunt in America no one’s seen for years … I’m moving on to his mates. Some of them have already been calling in. We’ll go chase them up.’

Crowley grunted assent as they pulled in at the station. Colleagues slowed as he walked past, gazed at him unhappily, wanting to say something about Page and Barker. He pre-empted them by nodding sadly, then moved on. He had no desire to share his shock.

He returned to his desk, sipping the crap from the coffee machine. Crowley was losing his grasp on what was going on. It was disquieting him. The previous evening, when he had discovered that Saul had walked out of his cell, he had been filthy angry, livid – but he had made the right noises, done the right things. There’d been some major fuck-up obviously, and he would have serious words with a few people, just as the governor had had words with him. He had sent men out delving into Willesden’s darkness; Saul could not have got far. As a precaution, he had sent Barker to join Page in the boring task of watching over the crime scene, just in case Saul should be so stupid as to return home.

Which it seemed he had done. But not the Saul he had interviewed, he would not believe that. He accepted that he made mistakes, could misjudge people, but not like that, he could not believe it. Something had demented Saul, given him the strength of the unhinged, and changed him from the person Crowley had interviewed into the devastating assassin who had brought such carnage to the small flat.

Why had he not run? Crowley could not understand. He shoved his fingers into his eyes, kneaded them till they ached. Saul had returned, he pictured it, disorientated and stumbling, to the flat; to atone, perhaps, to try to remember, perhaps; and when he opened the door on the men in uniform he should have run, or fallen to the floor crying, denied all knowledge, snivelled.

Instead he had reached out towards Constable Page, taken his head in his hands and torn it around in less than a second. Crowley winced. His eyes were closed but that was no respite from the brutal image. Saul had quietly closed the door behind him, had turned to Constable Barker who was surely gazing at him in momentary confusion, had punched him back five feet, following the suddenly limp body, and beaten his face systematically into a broken, bloody, shattered thing.

Constable Page was a stupid stocky man, quite new to the force. He was talkative, forever telling idiot jokes. They were often racist, although his girlfriend, Crowley knew, was of mixed race. Barker was a perpetual footsoldier, had been a constable for too long, but would not get the message and change his career. Crowley had not known either of the men well.

There was an unpleasant sombreness about the station: not so much shock as a tentative uncertainty about how to react. People were unused to death.

Crowley put his head in his hands. He did not know where Saul was, he did not know what to do.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Greasy-looking clouds slid above the alley in which King Rat and Saul sat digesting. Everything seemed dirty to Saul. His clothes and face and hair were smeared with a day and a half’s muck, and now dirt was inside him. As he drew sustenance from it, it coloured what he could see, but he looked around at his newly tarnished world as if it were a cynosure. It held no horror for him.

Purity is a negative state and contrary to nature, Saul had once read. That made sense to him now. He could see the world clearly in all its natural and supernatural impurity, for the first time in his life.

He was conscious of his own smell: the old acridity of alcohol splashed on these clothes long ago, the muck from the gutter of the roof, rotting food; but something new underneath it all. A taste of animal in his sweat, something of that scent which had entered his cell with King Rat two nights ago. Maybe it was in his mind. Maybe there was nothing beyond the faint remnants of deodorant, but Saul believed he could smell the rat in him coming out.

King Rat leaned back against the rubbish sacks, staring at the sky.

‘It occurs,’ he said presently, ‘that thee and me should scarper. Full?’

Saul nodded. ‘You’ve got a story to tell me,’ he said.

‘I know it,’ said King Rat. ‘But I can’t exercise myself on that particular just yet. I’ve to teach you to be rat. Your eyes aren’t even open yet; you’re still such a mewling little furless thing. So …’ He got to his feet. ‘What say we retire? Grab a bit of tucker for the underground.’ He pushed handfuls of leftover fruitcake into his pockets.

King Rat turned to face the wall behind the rubbish sacks. He moved to the right-angle of brick where the wall met one side of the narrow alley, wedged himself within it in his impossible way, and began to scale the wall. He teetered at the top, twenty feet up, his feet daintily picking between rusting coils of barbed wire as though they were flowers. He squatted between them and beckoned to Saul.

Saul approached the wall. He set his teeth and jutted out his lower jaw, confrontational. He pushed himself into the corner space, as hard as he could, feeling his flesh mould itself into the space. He reached up with his arms. Like a rat, he thought, squeeze and move and pull like a rat. His fingers gripped the spaces between bricks and he hauled himself up with a prodigious strength. His face ballooned with effort, his feet scrabbled, but he was progressing up the wall in his own undignified fashion. He let out a growl, and heard an admonitory hissing from above him. He pushed his right arm up again, the dank smell of rat-sweat more evident than ever beneath his arms. His legs failed him, he quivered and fell, was caught and pulled into the thicket of crumbling wire.

‘Not so bad, ratling boy. Isn’t it a marvel what you can do with a scrap of decent grub in your belly? You were right up near the top.’

And Saul felt pride at his climbing.

Below them was a little courtyard hemmed in on all sides by dirty walls and windows. To Saul’s new eyes the robust dirt of the enclosure was almost too vibrant to look at. Every corner teemed with the spreading stains of decay; this weak spot of the city had been convincingly annexed by the forces of filth. A disconcerting line of dolls gently mouldered where they had been placed, their backs to the wall, eyes on the pewter-coloured plug in the corner of the courtyard. A manhole.

King Rat exhaled through his nose triumphantly.

‘Home,’ he hissed. ‘Into the palace.’

He leapt from the top of the wall, landing in a crouch over the manhole, surrounding it. He made no sound as he came to rest on the concrete. His coat drifted down around him, surrounding him like an oily puddle. He looked up and waited.

Saul looked down and felt the old fears. He steeled himself, swallowed. He willed himself to jump, but his legs had locked into a fearful squat, and he grew exasperated as he readied himself to land beside his uncle. He breathed in, once, twice, very deeply, then stood, swung his arms and launched himself at the shape waiting for him.

He saw greys and reds of bricks and concrete lurch around him in slow motion, he moved his body, prepared his landing, as he saw King Rat’s grin approach him at speed; then the world jolted hard, his eyes and teeth juddered in his face, and he was down. His knees pushed all the air out of his stomach, but he smiled with exhilaration as he overcame his spasming belly and sucked air into his lungs. He had flown, had landed ready. He was shedding his humanity like an old snakeskin, scratching it off in great swathes. It was so fast, this assumption of a new form inside.

‘You’re a good boy,’ said King Rat, and busied himself with the metal in the ground.

Saul looked up. He saw figures move behind the windows above, wondered if anyone could see them.

King Rat’s London snarl had assumed a didactic tone. ‘Pay attention, ratling. This here is the entrance to your ceremonial abode. The all of Rome-vill is yours by rights, you’re royalty. But there’s a special palace, the rat’s own hidey-hole, and you bing a waste there through these portholes.’ He indicated the metal cover. ‘Observe.’

King Rat’s fingers scuttled over the iron disc like a virtuoso typist’s, investigating its surface. He turned his head from side to side, cocked it briefly, then suddenly tensed his body and slipped his fingers into infinitesimal gaps between the seal and its shaft. It was like sleight of hand: Saul could not see what had happened, or how the fingers had fit, yet they were there, pulling, in the gaps.

The manhole cover twisted with a yelp of rust. There was a rush of dirty wind as King Rat pulled it free.

Saul stared into the pit. The swirling winds of the courtyard yanked at the rich-smelling wisps of vapour emerging from the hole. The sewer was gorged with darkness; it seemed to overflow, seeping out of the open concrete and obscuring the ground. The organic scent of compost billowed out. Just visible, a ladder driven into the subterranean brick plunged out of sight. Where it was riveted to the wall, metal had oxidized and leached out profusely, making the sewer bleed rust. The sound of a thin flow of water was amplified by the yawning tunnels, making for a bizarre booming trickle.

King Rat looked at Saul. He clenched his hand into a fist, extended a pointing index finger, and his hand described an elaborate twisting path through the air, playfully circling, till it spiralled down and came to rest pointing into the sewer. King Rat stood at the edge of the thin circle. He stepped out over the hole and dropped through the pavement. There was a tiny echoing damp sound.

King Rat’s voice emerged from underground.

‘Down you come.’

Saul squeezed his hips through the hole.

‘Put a lid on it,’ said King Rat from below, and laughed briefly. Saul fumbled with the metal cover. He was half in, half out of the sewer. He sank under the weight of the metal. He held it above his head and descended. The light disappeared.

Saul shivered in the cold of the sewer. His feet clapped on the metal. He stumbled as his feet hit wetness. He backed away from the ladder and rubbed himself in the darkness. Air gusted and hissed; freezing water flooded his shoes.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered.

‘Watching,’ came King Rat’s voice. It moved around him. ‘Wait. You’ll see. You’ve never tried this, laddie, so hold your horses. The darkmans is nothing to you.’

Saul stood still. His hands were invisible before him.

Shapes moved in front of him. He thought they were real until the corridors themselves began to emerge from the darkness and he realized that those other fleeting, indistinct forms were born in his mind. They were dispelled as Saul began to see.

He saw the muck of the drains. He saw the energy it contained spilling out, a grey light that showed no colours but illuminated the damp tunnels. Before him a study in perspective, the shit- and algae-encrusted walls of the shaft meeting in the distance. Behind him and to his right more tunnels, and everywhere the smell, rot and faeces, and the pungent smell of piss, rat piss. He wrinkled his nose, his hackles rising.

‘No worries,’ said King Rat, a figure saturated in shadows, drenched in them, a mass of darkness. ‘Some cove’s staked a claim and made a mark, but we’re royalty. His territory doesn’t mean fuck to us.’

Saul looked about him. A thin rivulet of dirty water seeped by at his feet. His every movement seemed to set off an explosion of echoes. He stood in a twisting brick cylinder seven feet in diameter. From everywhere came the noises of streaming water and falling stones, and organic sounds of squeaks and scratches, peaking, dying out and being replaced, sounds far away being written over by those nearby, a palimpsest of noise.

‘I want to see you leg it, staying mum as you like,’ said King Rat. He startled Saul. His voice wandered through the tunnels, exploring every corner. ‘I want to see you shift your arse, climb sharpish. I want to see you swim. School is in.’

King Rat turned to face the same direction as Saul. He pointed into the charcoal grey.

‘We’re off thataway. And we’re off sharpish. So pull your finger out and keep up. Ready, my old lad?’

Saul shivered with excitement, the cold irrelevant now, and crouched in a starter’s position.

‘Come on, then,’ he said.

King Rat turned and bolted.

Saul did not feel his legs moving as he followed. The rapid, faint beat of footsteps he heard was his own; King Rat was soundless. Saul could feel his nose twitching and he felt like laughing.

He panted with exhilaration. King Rat was an ill-defined blur before him, his coat flapping vaguely in the noisome wind. Tunnels passed by on either side, water spattered him. King Rat disappeared suddenly, cutting sharply left down a smaller tunnel where the water pressure was greater, swirling insistently around Saul’s legs. He pulled his legs up out of the stream.

King Rat turned his head for a second, a flash of pale flesh. He crouched as he ran and pulled to a sudden halt. He waited briefly while Saul caught him up, then ducked into a claustrophobic shaft barely three feet high. Saul did not hesitate, but dove in after him.

Saul’s breath and the sound of his flesh on the brick came bouncing back at him, as loud and intimate as if they existed only in his head. He stumbled, mud smearing his legs, careering along the tube in a messy, effective fashion.

His nose hit wet cloth. King Rat had stopped suddenly.

Saul peered over King Rat’s shoulder.

‘What is it?’ he hissed.

King Rat jerked his head. He raised his hand, pointing perfunctorily.

Something moved in the flat, leaden light. Two small creatures edged backwards and forwards uneasily in the brick warren. They crept a few ineffectual inches in one direction, then in another, without once taking their eyes from the figures before them.

Rats.

King Rat was quite still. Saul hovered, bewildered.

One rat stood on either side of the dirty water. They moved in concert, forward together, backwards together, a tentative dance, staring at King Rat.

‘What’s happening?’ whispered Saul.

King Rat did not answer.

One of the rats scuttled forward and sat up on its hind legs, six feet in front of King Rat. It paddled its front legs aggressively, squeaked, bared its teeth. It returned to all fours and crept a little further forward, baring its teeth, clearly afraid but apparently angry, contemptuous.

The rat appeared to spit.

King Rat suddenly barked in outrage and lurched forward, his arm outstretched, but the two rats had bolted.

King Rat picked himself silently out of the muck and continued along the tunnel.

‘Hey, hey, hold on,’ said Saul in amazement. King Rat kept moving. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’

King Rat kept moving.

‘What’s going on?’ shouted Saul.

‘Stow it!’ screamed King Rat without turning. He crept on. ‘Not now,’ he said more quietly. ‘That’s the seat of my sorrow. Not now. Just you wait till I get you home.’

He disappeared round a corner.

Saul became lulled by the sewers. He kept King Rat in his sights, losing himself in the damp brick convolutions. More rats passed them, but no more taunted them as the first two had seemed to do. They stopped when they saw King Rat, and then quickly ran.

King Rat ignored them, winding through the complex at a constant quick trudge.

Saul felt like a tourist. He investigated the walls in passing, reading the mildew on the bricks. He was hypnotized by his own footsteps. Time passed as a succession of brick tributaries. He was ignorant of the cold and intoxicated by the smell. Occasional growls of traffic filtered through the earth and tar above, to yawn through the cavernous sewers.

Presently King Rat stopped in a tunnel through which the two explorers had to crawl. He turned to face Saul, a trick which looked impossible in the tiny space. The air was thick with the smell of piss, a particular piss, a strong, familiar smell, the smell which permeated King Rat’s clothes.

‘Righto,’ murmured King Rat. ‘So have you clocked your whereabouts?’ Saul shook his head. ‘We’re at the crossroads of Rome-vill, the centre, my very own conjunction, under King’s Cross. Hold your tongue and prick up your ears: hear the trains growling? Got the map in your bonce? Learn the way. This is where you’ve to get to. Just follow your I Suppose. I’ve marked out my manor nice and strong, you can sniff it out from anywhere underground.’ And Saul felt suddenly sure that he could find his way there, as easy as breathing.

But he looked around him, and could see only the same bricks, the same dirty water as everywhere else.

‘What,’ he ventured slowly, ‘is here?’

King Rat pushed his finger against his nose and winked.

‘I set myself down anywhere I bloody fancy, but a king wants a palace.’ As he spoke, King Rat was busying himself with the bricks below him, running a long fingernail between them, creating a rising worm of dirt. He traced a jagged square of brick whose uneven sides were a little less than two feet long. He dug his fingernails under the corners and pulled what looked like a tray of bricks out of the floor.

Saul whistled with amazement at the hole he had uncovered. The wind played over the newly opened hole like a flute. He looked at the bricks King Rat held. They were an artifice, a single concrete plug with angled edges under the thin veneer of brick, so that it sat snug and invisible in the tunnel floor.

Saul peered into the opening. A chute curved away steeply out of sight. He looked up. King Rat was hugging the lid, waiting for Saul.

Saul swung his legs over the lip of the chute, and breathed its stale air. He pushed himself forward with his bum and slid under the tight curve, greased with living slime.

A breakneck careering ride and Saul was deposited breathless into a pool of freezing water. He spluttered and gobbed, emptying his mouth of the taste of dirt and squeezing his eyes clear. When he opened them, he stopped quite still, water dripping from his open mouth.

The walls stretched out away from each other so suddenly and violently it was as though they were afraid of one another. Saul sat in the cold pool at one end of the chamber. It swept out, a three-dimensional ellipse, like a raindrop on its side, ninety feet long, with him dumbstruck at the thin end. Reinforced brick ribs striped the walls of the chamber and arched overhead: cathedral architecture, thirty feet high, like the fossilized belly of a whale long entombed under the city.

Saul stumbled from the pool, took a few short steps forward. To either side the room dipped a little, creating a thin moat drawing its water from the pool into which the chute had deposited Saul. Every few feet, just above the moat, were the circular ends of pipes disappearing, Saul supposed, into the main sewer above.

Before him there was a raised walkway, which climbed an incline until at the opposite end of the chamber it was eight feet from the floor, and there was the throne.

It faced Saul. It was rough, a utilitarian design sculpted with bricks, like everything under the ground. The throne-room was quite empty.

Behind Saul something hit the water. The report leisurely explored the room. King Rat came to stand behind Saul.

‘Ta very much, Mr Bazalgette.’

Saul turned his head, shook it to show that he did not understand. King Rat scampered up the walkway and curled into the chair. He sat facing Saul, one leg thrown over a brickwork arm. His voice came as clear as ever to Saul’s ears, although he did not raise it.

‘He was the man with the plan, built the whole maze in the time of the last queen. People owe him their flush crappers, and me … I can thank him for my underworld.’

‘But all this …’ breathed Saul. ‘This room … why did he build this room?’

‘Mr Bazalgette was a canny gent.’ King Rat snickered unpleasantly. ‘I had a few whids, burnt his lugholes, told him a few tales, sights I’d seen. We had a conflab about him and his habits, not all of which were unknown to me.’ King Rat winked exaggeratedly. ‘He was of the opinion that these tales should remain undisclosed. We came to an arrangement. You’ll not find this here burrow, my cubby-hole, on any plans.’

Saul approached King Rat’s throne. He squatted on all fours in front of the seat.

‘What are we doing here? What do we do now?’ Saul was suddenly weary of following like a disciple, unable to intervene or shape events. ‘I want to know what you want.’

King Rat stared at him without speaking.

Saul continued. ‘Is this about those rats?’ he said. There was no answer.

‘Is this about the rats? What was that about? You’re the king, right? You’re King Rat. So command them. I didn’t see them showing any tribute or respect. They looked pretty pissed off to me. What’s this about? Call on the rats, make them come to you.’

There was no sound in the hall. King Rat continued to stare.

Eventually he spoke. ‘Not … yet.’

Saul waited.

‘I won’t … yet. They’re still … narked … with me. They’ll not do what I tell them just yet.’

‘How long have they been … narked?’

‘Seven hundred years.’

King Rat looked a pathetic figure. He skulked with his characteristic combination of defensiveness and arrogance. He looked lonely.

‘You’re … not the king at all, are you?’

‘I am the king!’ King Rat was on his feet, spitting at the figure below him. ‘Don’t dare talk to me like that! I’m the King, I’m the one, the cutpurse, the thief, the deserter chief!’

‘So what’s going on?’ yelled Saul.

‘Something … went … wrong … Once upon a time. Rats’ve long memories, see?’ King Rat thumped his head. ‘They don’t forget stuff. They keep it all in the noggin. That’s all. And you’re involved, sunshine. This is all tied up with the one that wants you dead, the cove that bumped off your fucking dad.’

Fucking dad, said the echoes for a long time afterwards.

‘What … who … is it?’ said Saul.

King Rat looked balefully at him with those shadow-encrusted eyes.

‘The Ratcatcher.’

PART THREE

LESSONS IN
RHYTHM
AND HISTORY

CHAPTER NINE

Almost as soon as Fabian had left, Pete had appeared. His alacrity was suspicious. In another mood it would have pissed Natasha off, but she felt like forgetting about Saul, just for a short time.

She and Fabian had sat up late in her small kitchen. Fabian always commented on Natasha’s rather self-consciously minimalist approach to decor, complaining that it made him feel uneasy, but that night they had other things on their mind. The faint strains of Drum and Bass filtered through from the stereo next door.

The next morning Natasha rose at eight, regretting the cigarettes she had shared with Fabian. He rolled out of the sleeping-bag she had lent him, when he heard her stir. They had no more words to say about Saul. They were numb and tired. Fabian left quickly.

Natasha wandered out of the kitchen dripping night-clothes, pulling a shapeless sweater over her shoulders. She turned on the stereo, slipped the needle onto the vinyl on the turntable. It was the best of last year’s compilations, now some months old, rendering it an ancient classic in the fast-mutating world of Drum and Bass.

She ran her hands through her hair, pulling brutally at the tangles.

Pete rang the bell. She guessed it was him.

She was tired but she let him in. As he drank her coffee, she leaned against the counter and peered at him. She considered him ugly, his pale skin and thin limbs. He was hardly a style guru, either. The world of Jungle could be elitist. She smiled slightly at the thought of the rudeboys and hard-steppers in the club AWOL being presented with this under-sunned apparition, complete with flute.

‘How much do you know about Drum and Bass?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘Not much, really …’

‘I can tell. When you played yesterday it was impressive, but I’ve got to tell you it’s a weird idea playing flutes or shit like that to Jungle. If it’s going to work, we’re going to have to figure it out carefully’

He nodded, his face comical with concentration. Natasha almost wished for a repeat of his extraordinary performance of the previous day, his sudden knowing smile. The alternative was so cringing, so desperate to please, that it all but nauseated her. If this day didn’t go well, she decided, she wasn’t having any more of it.

She sighed. ‘I’m not cutting anything with you without you knowing something about the music. Just because General fucking Levy gets a single in the top ten, and some art-school wankers start writing about Jungle, and the next thing you know anything with a backbeat’s “Jungle”. Even Everything But The fucking Girl!’ She folded her arms. ‘Everything But The Girl aren’t Jungle, alright?’

He nodded. It was clear he had never heard of Everything But The Girl.

She closed her eyes and bit back a grin.

‘Right. There’s a lot going on in Jungle: there’s intelligent Jungle, there’s Hardstep, Techstepping, Jazz Jungle … I like ’em all, but I can’t cut Hardstep tracks. All the darkness edges. You want Hardstep, go to Ed Rush or Skyscraper or something, OK? I cut tunes more like Bukem, DJ Rap, stuff like that.’ Natasha was enjoying herself enormously, lecturing him, watching his eyes dart frantically around. He had no idea what she was talking about.

‘DJs have started bringing musicians to gigs; Goldie brings in a drummer, and stuff like that. Some people don’t like it, they reckon Jungle should be digital or nothing. I’m not down with that, but I got no immediate plans to be dragging you on stage either. What I’m interested in is maybe playing with you for a while and sampling some of your flute for the top end. Loop it and cut it and stuff.’

Pete nodded. He was fumbling with his case, assembling his flute.

Saul woke in the throne-room under the city. He sat curled up in the cold, below the unmoving shape of King Rat, stiff on his throne. As soon as Saul’s eyes opened, King Rat stood up. He had been waiting for Saul to awake.

They ate and left the chamber by the brick ladder which crept up behind the throne, emerging by means of another hidden door into the main sewer. Saul followed King Rat through the tunnels, and this time he paid attention to his location, his movements, he created a map in his head, he tracked himself.

The water rushed around them as drizzle hit the urban sprawl above and poured into their recesses. It slid around the bricks, transporting a sudden deluge of oil. The walls here were coated with fat, thick with translucent white residue.

‘Restaurants,’ hissed King Rat as he plunged on, and Saul picked up his feet to avoid the slippery muck. He could smell it as he ran past, the stench of old frying and stale butter. It made him hungry. He ran a finger along the wall as he moved, sucked the glutinous mess he had picked up, and laughed, still amazed and excited by his hunger for old food.

Saul could hear things frantically escaping their path. The corridors were thick with rats, nibbling at the walls and the abundant edible detritus, fleeing as they approached. King Rat hissed and the path ahead of them cleared.

The two of them quit the underground, emerging into a Piccadilly backstreet, behind a great stinking pile of food waste, gastronomic effluent spewed out by London’s finest.

They ate. Saul devoured a crushed concoction of old cold fish in some rich sauce, King Rat wolfing broken tiramisu and polenta cake.

And then up onto the roofs, King Rat ascending by a stairway of iron piping and broken brick. As soon as he had used it, its purpose became clear. Saul saw through vulgar reality, discerned possibilities. Alternative architecture and topography were asserting themselves. He followed without hesitation, slipping behind slate screens and running unseen over the skyline.

They barely spoke. Periodically, King Rat would stop and stare at Saul, investigate his motions, nod or indicate to him a more effective way to climb or hide or jump. They picked their way over banks and behind publishing houses, sly and invisible.

King Rat whispered obscure descriptions under his breath. He waved at the buildings they passed and murmured at Saul, hinted at the dark truth concerning the scratchmarks on the walls, the hollows that broke up lines of chimneys, the destination of the cats that scattered at their approach.

They wove in and out of central London, climbing, creeping, moving behind houses and between them, over offices and under the streets. Magic had entered Saul’s life. It didn’t matter any more that he didn’t understand.

This was a million miles from the tawdry world of conjuring tricks. His life was in thrall to another hex, a power which had crept into his police cell and claimed him, a dirty, raw magic, a spell that stank of piss. This was urban voodoo, fuelled by the sacrifices of road deaths, of cats and people dying on the tarmac, an I Ching of spilled and stolen groceries, a Cabbala of road signs. Saul could feel King Rat watching him. He felt giddy with rude, secular energy.

They ate. They raced north beyond King’s Cross and Islington, the light already hinting that it would soon leave. They passed Hampstead, Saul still not tired, gorging himself from time to time from backstreet rubbish bins. They skirted briefly into Hampstead Heath, out of the intricate paved world. They doubled back and found their way through small parks and along ignored bus routes to the borders of the financial world, the City.

Saul and King Rat stood behind a café on the corner of High Holborn and Kingsway. Away in the east was the forest of skyscrapers where so much money was made. A huge squat building stood before them, a financial Gormenghast, a hulk of steel and concrete which seemed to exude like a growth from the buildings around it. It was impossible to define where it began and ended.

Away in Ladbroke Grove, Pete peered over Natasha’s shoulder. She indicated the tiny grey screen on her keyboard as the beats cascaded out of the speakers. She was tweaking the treble, playing with sounds. Pete’s pale eyes flitted from screen to speaker to flute.

Fabian emerged from Willesden police station, cursing with disbelief. He slipped into patois, into American slang, into profanities.

‘Bambaclaht motherfucker shithead blahdclaht whitebread pig chickenshit piss-artist fuckers.’

He wrestled with his jacket and stormed towards the tube station. The police had arrived to pick him up without warning, had not let him take his bike.

He still muttered obscenities in his rage. He flounced up the hill to the underground.

Kay stood under Natasha’s window, wondering what she had done to her music, where she’d got the flute sound from.

‘I don’t think he knows anything, sir,’ said Herrin. Crowley nodded in vague agreement. He was not listening. Where are you, Saul? he thought.

Who’s the Ratcatcher? Saul wondered. What wants to kill me? But King Rat had mooched into melancholia after he had mentioned the name, and would say nothing more. Time enough for that, he had said. I don’t want to scare you.

King Rat and Saul saw the sun turn red over the Thames. Saul found himself scrambling without fear up the vast wires of the Charing Cross railway bridge, looking out over the river. He hugged the metal. Trains wriggled below like illuminated worms.

South, and they careered secretly through Brixton, bore west for Wimbledon.

King Rat told more and more stories about the city as they passed. His assertions were wild and poetic, unreal, senseless. His tone was as casual as a cabby’s.

The tour seemed to end quite suddenly, and they wound back towards Battersea. Saul was exhilarated. His body throbbed with exhaustion and power. The city’s mine, he thought. He felt headstrong and intoxicated.

They came to a manhole in a deserted car park and King Rat stood aside. Saul wiped the dust from the metal disc. He fumbled with it, pushed his fingers around it. He felt strong. His muscles were taut from the continual effort of the day, and he rubbed them in a motion that would have been narcissistic were it not for his obvious amazement. He twisted at the metal, felt his pores open with sweat and dirt then clog them, invigorating him.

The cover squealed momentarily and burst from its housing.

Saul barked in triumph and ducked into the darkness.

The music coming from Natasha’s window was by Hydro, Fabian realized. He had calmed somewhat in the time it had taken for him to reach Ladbroke Grove. The sky boiled in time to the beats.

He hammered on the door. Natasha came to him, opening the door, her small grin frozen by his scowl.

‘Tash, man, you ain’t going to fucking believe it. Just keeps getting weirder.’

She stood aside for him. As he came up the stairs he heard Kay’s laconic assertions.

‘ … go down there once or twice a month, you know, and all Goldie and shit and them come there sometimes … Hey, Fabian, whassup man?’

Kay sat on the edge of the bed and peered up at him. Pete sat somewhat stiffly in a chair brought in from the kitchen.

Kay’s amiable face was devoid of concern, blind to Fabian’s mood. He sat with the same vague, open smile while Natasha caught up and entered the room. Pete was clearly uncomfortable, but he sat with his eyes unblinking on Fabian until Natasha arrived.

Fabian paused before speaking.

‘I just spent the afternoon with the fucking pigs dem. They been giving me serious shit for nuff time, all fucking day, “What can you tell us about Saul?” I told the motherfuckers time and fucking again, I don’t know shit.’

Natasha sat cross-legged on the mattress.

‘They still think Saul did in his dad?’

Fabian laughed theatrically.

‘Oh, Tash, man, no no no, not any more, that’s nothing, that’s the least of anyone’s worries.’ He sucked his teeth and pulled a battered newspaper out of his bag, waved it in front of them. The story was thumbed, the ink smeared. ‘You won’t get much from that,’ he said as they tracked it with their eyes. ‘Only the bare bones. Lemme give you the real deal.

‘Saul’s gone. He escaped.’

Fabian laughed unpleasantly at Kay’s and Natasha’s dumbfounded expressions. He pre-empted their exclamations.

‘Not yet, man, there’s more. Two police got killed at Saul’s dad’s flat, smashed up bad. And it looks … they reckon Saul did it. They’re fucking bananas to find him. They’ll come for you all, your turn soon. With all the fucking questions.’

No one spoke.

The strains of Hydro were alone in filling the room.

CHAPTER TEN

King Rat was gone.

Saul brooded. He felt gorged on the supernatural and surreal.

He was crouched behind King Rat’s throne. He had lain down there after the epic journey around London, sated and exhausted. That night he had oozed in and out of sleep and when he awoke, King Rat had gone.

Saul had risen and meandered around the room. He listened to the sound of dripping and distant howls.

King Rat had pinned a grubby piece of paper to the throne.

BACK SOON , it said. STAY PUT.

Alone, Saul felt unreal.

It was difficult to believe that he existed independently of King Rat, that King Rat was not a figment of his imagination, or Saul of his. Saul felt the stirrings of panic.

Alone, he was suddenly sick of King Rat’s evasion. What was the Ratcatcher? he wanted to know. King Rat would not say. Their run across the city had been largely silent. With King Rat by his side, Saul had acquiesced, was complicit in the cover-up; he had been busy listening to the rat in him wake up.

But alone, he realized that it had been a long time since he had thought of his father’s death. That he had been remiss in his mourning. His father’s death was the fulcrum. Understand that and he would know what wanted to kill him, he would know why the rats would not obey their king.

With King Rat by his side, Saul had seen a new city. The map of London had been ripped up and redrawn according to King Rat’s criteria. Alone, Saul was suddenly afraid that the city no longer existed.

Stay put? he thought. Fuck that.

Saul climbed out of the room and into the sewer.

Wind swept through the tunnels. Saul stood perfectly still and listened. He could not hear King Rat anywhere. He replaced the door to the hidden exit and moved gingerly away.

As he left the side tunnel which concealed the ways in and out of the throne-room, the strong smell of King Rat’s piss dissipated. Three rats hovered outside the tunnel, moving nervously, regarding him. He was unafraid but uncertain. He stopped and watched.

One of the three scampered forward a little and shook its head in a shockingly human motion.

Saul took off through the sewers, trembling with trepidation. Alone, the sewer was a different world from the one that King Rat had shown him, but Saul was not afraid. He walked through an olfactory patchwork, and the smells of piss told him stories. The rat who pissed here was aggressive and quick to anger; the one who pissed here was a follower; the one here ate too much, and his favourite food was chicken.

Saul could feel the city above him. He felt lines and directions pull at him. He followed the geomantic tugging.

From behind him, Saul heard a pattering. He turned, and in the grey non-light he saw three rats following him. He stopped still and watched them. They halted six feet from him and shifted, without taking their eyes from him. As he watched two more rats jumped from a pipe that jutted into the tunnel, and joined their fellows.

Saul backed up a little and the rats followed, keeping their distance. One of them squeaked loudly and the others joined in, a discordant cacophony which was taken up throughout the tunnels nearby. Small feet scampered from all directions towards him. The squealing reverberated around Saul’s head.

More rats began to froth around him, out of the side tunnels and the surrounding dark. They came in twos and threes and tens, and although he did not fear them the sheer number was overwhelming. There was no light to glint off the hundreds of eyes which ringed him; they remained only little points of blackness in the general gloom, foci in the simmering mass of bodies which had filled the tunnel around him.

The squealing continued. It filled his head.

Suddenly, through his trepidation Saul felt a burst of excitement. He was confused by the sensation, it felt alien and out of place. And he realized that it was not his excitement at all, but that of the rats, that he understood their shrill communication, that he could feel what they felt.

He was awash with vicarious emotions.

Saul trembled and turned. There was nothing to distinguish what was before him from what was behind, everywhere was filled with the tiny eyes and bodies of the rats. The rats’ voices were tremulous, cosseting, pleading.

Saul fled the pressure of the sound, flooded by panic. He turned and leapt over the mass of bodies, which parted under him, little islands of clear sewer appearing under his feet as he landed, tails being whisked out of the way. The voices were suddenly plaintive. They followed him.

Saul ran through the tunnels and the rats scampered after him. Ahead of him he saw a wall-mounted ladder. He leapt up, caught it. The rats jumped, scratching at the bottom rail. Saul felt a surge of relief as he looked down into their inscrutable faces.

He climbed and forced open the metal cover, peeping out through the crack. The exit was fringed with high grass. Saul climbed out of the depths and emerged in a hollow between shadowy bushes. He was in a deserted park. Above the distant hum of traffic there were closer sounds of birds. Saul saw water before him, a twisted lake with islands.

Trees framed his field of vision. He saw a shape over the arboreal boundary: a huge gilded dome surmounted with a shaving of crescent moon. London’s central mosque, burnished by the streetlamps. To the south he saw the thin stiletto of Telecom Tower. He was in Regent’s Park.

Saul circled the boating lake and slipped silently through the hedgerows and trees and railings.

Saul clambered out into the dark city.

He walked south to Baker Street. Lights waved wildly over the faces of the buildings as cars swung by. Headlights pinned him in their glare as a battered van swept towards him and past. Saul’s heart raced for a long time after it had gone.

He turned onto Marylebone Road.

People bore down on him from all directions. It took him a moment to realize that they also moved away on past him, that they were simply walking along the street. Saul’s breath shook a little as he exhaled. He pushed his hands into his pockets and set off west.

The first man to pass him was dressed in a blazer and jeans, his rugby shirt tucked in, cuddling his distended belly. He glanced momentarily at Saul before his eyes flickered back ahead of him.

Look at me! Saul shouted in his head. I’m a rat! Can you tell? Can you smell? The man must have detected the stench which hung around Saul’s clothes, but was it so much worse than that which coloured the passing of a drunk? The man did not turn to investigate Saul, who stopped and stared after him. He turned and gazed at the next person approaching him, a young Asian woman in a short tight dress. She smoked as she passed him. She did not spare him a glance.

Saul laughed, giddy. He was passed from behind by a short black man, from in front by a group of singing teenagers, and then a very tall man with glasses, from behind by a man in a suit who walked, then jogged, then walked to his destination.

No one minded Saul.

Ahead of him the broken stream of night traffic rose, cut across Edgware Road. It returned briefly to earth then rebounded, flying again. This was the Westway, the vast raised road which swept above London. A thousand tons of impossibly suspended asphalt, it soared off over Paddington and Westbourne Grove, with the city spattered out forever on all sides. In the west, over Latimer Road, it twisted into an intricate mess of raised ramps and exits. It extricated itself from this tangle and continued, finally returning to earth outside Wormwood Scrubs prison.

Saul stared at the Westway. It passed Ladbroke Grove station, where Natasha lived. The rules of the city no longer concerned him. The prohibition against pedestrians on the Westway did not apply to rats.

He ducked between the sparse cars and scampered onto the central reservation, racing up the incline, skirting the barrier with vehicles buzzing past him on both sides.

Below him he heard faint shouts from the mustard-coloured estates. Dirty winking lights swept away from him. The drivers could not see him. He was a dark figure, utterly inured to the cold, his back bent, his arms grasping the barriers, pulling himself along. He moved like a cartoon villain on speed, a fast, exaggerated skulking.

Four great squat blocks reached up like stubby fingers around the Westway: brown tower blocks overlooking him with uneven points of light. The sound of traffic was a rhythmic, constant crescendo, flows without ebbs, never dying away.

Isolated in the centre of this wide road, Saul could not see the streets below him. He could not gaze into windows or over the edge of the Westway at late-night walkers. He was alone with the anonymous cars and the horizon. The whole city had become horizon punctuated by fat towers.

To his left, the raised tracks of the Hammersmith and City tube line shadowed the Westway, only a few feet away. A train rattled past. With a rush of adrenaline, Saul pictured himself racing across the road and leaping out, catching it as it went by and straddling it like a rodeo rider, but he felt a sudden, certain intimation that he could not make that jump, not yet, and he stood still as the train headed on to Ladbroke Grove.

He followed its passage on the Westway until he could see Ladbroke Grove station hovering in the air to his left. It was so close that he could probably leap across onto the platform itself. Saul peered into the headlights to his right, and bundled himself across the road, passing like a discarded coat in wind before the windscreens of startled drivers. He flattened himself against the barrier and leaned over.

Just beyond the station, Ladbroke Grove still throbbed with the beats of ghetto-blasters. A group of youth leaned, studiously cool, outside the closed Quasar building. They did their best to intimidate the passers-by. Late-night grocers leaned out of their doors and chatted to each other, to customers, to the mini-cab drivers. The streets did not throng, but they were hardly empty. From his precarious hide, Saul watched.

Unnoticed he clambered over the barrier and held it behind his back, leaning out over the streets. He enjoyed his own insouciance.

It was an easy jump to the drainpipe opposite, barely four feet, and he accomplished it without a sound. He descended to the wedge of low roofing between the station and the raised road, and slid into the Westway’s looming shadow. He clambered over mildewed eaves. Three days ago, he thought as he jumped to the ground, I was heavy and human. And now, he thought as he moved out of the graffitied darkness towards Ladbroke Grove itself, I’m rat and I can travel how I like. I woke up so fast.

He made no effort to hide himself, even swaggering a little, and the groups of young men who clotted the pavement eyed him but let him pass, their noses wrinkling in his wake. He walked through conversations in accented English, in Arabic and in Portuguese.

He turned into Bassett Road and trotted up to Natasha’s house. Her lights were off. He cursed and turned on his heel, pacing away to a tree opposite her window. He leaned against it and folded his arms, debating whether or not to wake her.

Saul had no illusions. He could never go back, he had become a rat. There was no way into that world again. But he had lived there once and he missed his friends.

As he stood trying to make up his mind, a slouching figure made its way down the street. With a sudden thrill, Saul recognized the stumbling gait. As the man approached Natasha’s house and slowed, Saul cupped his hands over his mouth and hissed, ‘Kay.’

Kay jumped and looked all around him in confusion. Saul hissed again. Kay stared straight at him for a moment and panned his eyes around, comically nervous.

Saul stepped out of the cover of the tree.

‘Jesus, Saul man, you gave me a heart attack!’ said Kay as he slumped with relief. ‘You were fucking invisible under that tree, and your voice has gone all weird …’ He stopped short suddenly, shook his head and put his hands to his face.

‘Shit, man!’ he hissed, looking wildly around him. ‘What’s gone on? How the fuck are you? I just heard about all your shit! Jesus! What’s happened?’

Saul had reached him, and he slapped his shoulder and gripped his hand.

‘Seriously, Kay, you wouldn’t fucking believe it. I’m not fobbing you off, man, it’s just… I don’t even understand it myself.’

Kay’s face had screwed up.

‘What is that stink, man? Is that you? I mean no offence, man, but…’

‘I’m … hiding out.’

‘Where? The fucking sewers?’ Saul said nothing and Kay’s eyes widened. ‘Fuck me! You aren’t? I wasn’t serious …’ Saul cut him off.

‘Yeah, well, you heard about me getting out of the cell? I got to hide, man, the police think I killed my dad.’

Kay stared at him for a moment.

Saul was aghast. ‘No I fucking didn’t. Jesus, do you have to ask me that?’

All the talk of chase and crime and capture was making him nervous, and he backed into the darkness under the tree, pulling Kay with him.

‘So what are you doing?’ said Kay.

‘Oh …’ Saul was vague. ‘I’ve got to find something to prove I didn’t do it.’ He could not explain that he could never go back.

‘What about the two cops?’ Saul stared at Kay blankly. ‘The ones who bought it in your flat.’

Saul stared at him in mounting horror.

‘Didn’t you know?’

‘So what fucking happened?’ Saul shook his lapels. Kay backed away, wrinkling his nose.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Fabian came up to Tash’s waving a newspaper around. The police have been interviewing him all day, said the two watching your flat got beat up and died. They’ve got you pegged for it, man.’

Kay had no malice. He could see that Saul knew nothing of the crime, and felt only concern, no more suspicion.

‘Do you … know … do you know who …’ he continued.

‘No, but I think I know someone who does. Shit!’ Saul ran his hands through his hair. ‘Shit, they’ll be going ballistic for me now! Shit!’

He’s going to tell me, he thought, overcome with rage. No more petulant silences. When I find King Rat he’s got to tell me who’s doing this and why, and fuck all this fobbing me off.

He turned back to Kay.

‘What’s going on, man? Why you here?’

Kay pointed up the road.

‘I was in the pub with Tash and Fabe and this geezer Tash has started cutting some tracks with. It’s a lock-in … we’re all talking about you, man.’ He grinned weakly. ‘I realized I left my bag at Tash’s, and she give me her keys. I’m going back in a minute. You want to come?’ Saul hesitated and Kay began to urge him. ‘Come on, man, everyone’s worried fucking sick over you, man. Fabe’s terrible.’

Saul thought of Fabian and felt a wave of nostalgia. His friendships felt shockingly distant. He wanted to come to the pub, but he was suddenly terrified. He had nothing in common with these people any more, though he wanted them desperately; he missed them. What could he say to them, tell them? And the police … they were already questioning them. After this latest killing, could he risk incriminating them?

‘I … can’t, Kay. I’m wanted, man, and I can’t be hanging around in pubs and stuff. I got to keep moving. But … will you tell them that I’m missing them and I promise I’ll try to see them. And Kay … tell them if they don’t hear from me for a bit they can’t worry … I’m sorting things out. OK? Will you tell them that?’

‘Are you sure you won’t come back?’

Saul shook his head.

Kay acquiesced with a sideways nod. ‘So … at least tell me what’s going on. How the fuck d’you get out of prison?’

Saul even laughed a little.

‘It was only a cell, and … I really can’t explain now. I’m really sorry.’

‘How are you looking after yourself?’

‘Kay … I can’t, alright? Please stop, man. I can’t explain it.’

‘But are you OK?’ Kay was concerned. ‘You don’t sound all that good. Like I say, your voice is all … weird, and you smell … like …’

‘I know, but I can’t talk about it. I promise I’m looking after myself. I have to go, man. I’m sorry. Give them all my big love.’ He touched him briefly on the shoulder and walked into the dark, turning to wave.

Kay stood under the tree, waving back. His eyes peered intently as Saul left the circle of shadow and found other darkness beside the front walls of houses.

‘Take care, man,’ Kay said, too loud, from behind him.

Saul was lost to his sight.

Kay stood for a moment under the tree before walking slowly to Natasha’s front door and letting himself in. He was deeply confused. Something was obviously very wrong with Saul, but he could not tell what. The man had turned into some kind of Ninja, for one thing; walk five feet away from him and he turned invisible. And his voice … husky and somehow … close up.

It had unnerved Kay, made him a little afraid. It was clear that Saul did not know anything about the dead policemen, but Kay found himself wondering whether he was somehow involved without knowing it. There was certainly a touch of the psychopath about him tonight: his eyes all dark, his voice and manner intense, and that smell …! The man must be living in pigshit. Could he really be dossing in the sewers? How would you even get into them?

He was afraid for his friend.

He found his bag in the unlit sitting-room and left the flat, locking the door behind him. He was eager to tell the others of his meeting. At least Saul was … well, alive, if not OK.

He stepped out into the street and turned left, still shaking his head in confusion. Something emerged from a patch of darkness behind him and moved in fast. Kay heard nothing. Metal twirled briefly and something long and hard cracked him on the back of his head. Kay emitted a gasp of air as he fell forward, was caught, dead-weight, hanging like a corpse, before he hit the pavement.

Blood welled up and dribbled onto his bag, trickling inside, staining the covers of records by Ray Keith and the Omni Trio.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Saul saw the fat pillars of the Westway loom out at him again.

He turned right, skirting the great dark thoroughfare, wandering slowly west. He did not know where to turn. He turned his eyes to the ground, seeking a manhole. Perhaps he should hide himself from view, seek out King Rat again. He did not know if he could find his way back through the sewers to the throne-room. He did not want to see the rats. They had unnerved him with their pleading. They wanted something of him.

A few late walkers passed him by. Saul wanted to stop, to sit and think for a while, to eat. He was not tired. He thought suddenly of the policemen who had died in his flat, and he winced.

He was gravitating towards the tangled concrete of the Westway’s mid-air junction, a confusion of sweeping curves which hung above the earth like an imminent threat. Below the skeins of steel and tarmac the council had provided enclosures for basketball and football, a climbing wall and chin-up bars. During the day the area was full of the shouts of young players oblivious to the concrete above and around them, swooping in all directions with functional grandeur, a found stadium occluding direct light, obscuring the sky.

Saul wandered into the darkness between the pitches. He looked up at the underside of the Westway itself. The traffic above sounded very far away.

He meandered into the passageways between chain-link fences and football fields. The wind was stilled under the roadway. He stood and listened to it buffet the edges of the secluded ground.

There was another sound.

A faint, quick scampering echoed quietly between the pillars.

Saul turned and moved his head sharply as something circled him. He backed away. Panic bubbled up inside him. The Ratcatcher! he thought, and ran for the faint glow of the streetlamps.

He spun around on his heel, desperately looking for a way out of the darkness. Something flitted across his vision, a black body that swung down from the shadows above him, from the crevices in the underside of the Westway. It swung around him, too quick for his eye to follow, free of gravity’s constraints, moving in all directions through the air. Saul’s breath came fast as he turned and ran.

Something sailed out of the air above him and flew overhead in a perfect parabola, with a grace and speed that eclipsed any gymnast or circus performer alive. The dark mass curved over the Earth and came to rest, landing lightly twenty feet in front of him. The crouching form sprang upright, splaying legs and arms suddenly like a jack-in-the-box.

A tall, fat man swayed before Saul, his arms and legs spread wide as if anticipating an embrace.

Saul braked and backed away, turning suddenly and running back into the darkness from which he had come. He tried to remember to hide, to become a rat, but terror had frozen his cunning.

As he ducked behind a tennis court, the fleeting shape passed, flying over the net, and the man was there before him again, arms outstretched. A thin cord suspended from somewhere above recoiled from the swing, and brushed against Saul as it returned along its flight path.

Saul changed direction and disappeared behind a climbing frame. He heard something hissing behind him. Saul gasped as he ran, his rat-strength pushing him faster than he had ever moved before. His skin crawled with fear. Ahead of him he glimpsed threadbare trees. There was a thin gap between two of the wire fences, beyond which was the garden to a housing estate.

He raced for the slit and careered along it, making very little sound, when something caught his ankle and he swung like a felled tree towards the concrete.

He was yanked away from the ground before he hit and he hung for a moment in the air. Thin ropes were stretched across his path, tied to the chain links on either side. One had swept away his foot, and another had caught him across the chest. He cursed frantically and struggled to stand, tugging at the rope which had somehow entangled itself around his ankle. He ploughed forward and saw spindly shapes before him: more ropes, a thicket of them across his path. How had he not seen them before?

He struggled to climb over them, but they confused him; some tied so loosely they came away in his hand and wrapped themselves around him, others so tight they vibrated like a bass string as they repulsed him. He fell again, caught in this cat’s cradle. He could not move. He hung suspended at a forty-five-degree angle, head downwards, four feet from the ground.

Saul heard a footstep behind him. He jerked his head, disentangling himself frantically, swivelled in the midst of his mesh to face the way he had come, his back to the morose shrubs he had sought.

The man stood at the entrance to the little passageway.

Light from the far-off lamps struggled to illuminate him, glinting faintly on his skin. He wore nothing but a pair of black cut-off shorts on his lanky legs. He seemed unaffected by the cold. The man had very dark skin and a massive belly jutting over his belt, but arms and legs that were ridiculously long and thin, every muscle standing firm with every movement. His stomach was distended, globular but taut as a bubble. It hardly rippled as he moved slowly towards Saul. Saul saw a thick coil of filthy white rope wound around his left shoulder.

‘Don’t give me no more trouble, pickney, or me gwan mash you up.’

The voice was scratchy and sharp, vibrant with Caribbean intonation. It sounded close in his ear, as King Rat’s did.

The man moved in little bursts. He paced quickly forward a few feet, then stopped to investigate Saul, moved forward again. As he approached, he unwound the rope from his shoulder.

Saul shook violently to free himself from the tangles of rope, seemed only to pull them tighter around him. He began to screech.

The man was upon him, fetched him a vicious slap across the cheek that stopped Saul’s cry instantly. His head rocked. He was dizzy and his face throbbed.

‘Me tell you fe shut your mouth, bwoy!’ The man kissed his teeth.

Saul’s head wobbled forward and he blinked hard. The man was bending over him. Saul was deeply afraid. He put up his hands, tried to push them through the ropes to ward off the attack he was sure was coming. He thrashed in his bonds and opened his mouth to scream again.

The man reached down as fast as a snake and pushed his fingers into Saul’s mouth. Saul tried to bite down, but the man spread his fingers and with inhuman strength forced Saul’s mouth open. Saul’s captor tugged at the rope draped over his shoulder with his free hand. He wound it around Saul’s head once, twice, stuffed it into his mouth like a gag.

He muttered to himself in patois.

As he spoke, the man yanked the rope tight and wound it expertly around Saul’s head again, obscuring the lower half of his face. Saul mewed frantically from behind this mask as his eyes darted from side to side.

The man pulled at Saul’s arms, twisting the rope around them and pulling tight, securing them behind Saul’s back. He tugged Saul free of the little alley. Saul stumbled and ran forward till his feet were jerked out from under him and he fell. He had reached the end of the rope which bound him. He slid back across the concrete. The man was reeling him in.

Saul was pulled to his feet and turned to face his captor. With his mouth blocked, Saul breathed frantically through his nose, sputtering flecks of snot onto his bindings. Black eyes stared into his own, which were wet with fear.

‘You come with me fe see ratty. There some bad obeah loose now.’

He twirled the rope suddenly over Saul’s head like a film cowboy. The coils slid down through the air and wound around Saul’s body. The man spun him on the spot, tightening the bonds, letting out slack to constrict him like a top. He bent and ran the rope on down Saul’s legs, until his whole body was obscured in a shroud of grubby white cord.

Only Saul’s eyes could move. He could feel a hammering in his arms and legs as his heart struggled to push blood past the obstructions cutting into his flesh.

The man bit through the rope and tied the end at Saul’s feet. He stood before Saul and looked down at him, nodded.

‘No more nonsense and hollering now, innit?’

Saul began to pitch forward but the man caught him and, to Saul’s sudden horror, rolled him through the air and onto his back. He pulled Saul into position as effortlessly as King Rat had done. Saul felt like fluff. The man took more rope from his shoulder and wrapped it around his captive several times, attaching him more firmly. Saul was helpless on those broad flat muscles, his eyes facing backwards. His legs were twisted up into a tight bend. He was suspended from the man’s shoulders and waist, the rope cutting into his captor’s skin, seemingly painlessly. Saul bobbed in a terrifying and undignified fashion as his abductor raced suddenly through the darkness.

He rushed through the underworld below the Westway at a rate of knots, his route violent and oscillating. The hidden byways receded before Saul’s eyes. The man beneath him lurched suddenly and Saul saw the dark horizon drop around him. They were airborne. Saul’s eyes widened and he gave a muffled yell, spit slithering down his chin behind the ropes.

They flew through the air, paused and swung backwards, then around, a pendulum ten feet from the ground. They were suspended, clinging to a rope, Saul realized. The man began to climb.

He moved easily, the curve of his back suggesting that he was using both feet and hands. The pace was utterly smooth. The sports grounds disappeared below them and, as they swung from side to side, vistas of West London peeked in and out of Saul’s vision. The occasional roar of traffic was closer now.

They reached the top of the rope. Saul was facing away from the highway, out over badly lit sidestreets. The man clung to the barrier and scampered along the side of the Westway. Saul’s stomach drummed with fear. There was nothing below his feet. He saw the streets below curve a little closer to him, and he saw the dim light catch on a filament, a thread passing up from the chimney of a house fast approaching.

They were opposite the house now, and he caught another glimpse of the thin line of light. It was close by, twisting towards him.

Suddenly he was falling.

But the ground stopped rushing towards him, and he bobbed in the air. He was facing directly down, the Westway growling a few feet above and behind him. The filament he had seen was another rope, tied at one end to the roof and another to the railings of the great road above. The man was descending the rope now, headfirst, hand over hand, bouncing unnervingly as he slid fast towards the intricate darkness of the roofscape.

Saul prayed that the rope was strong.

And then they were down, and Saul was swung around. He heard a loud snap, and when the man turned again Saul saw that he had broken the rope behind them, obscured their passing.

They were off over the tops of houses, another raised race across London. The man swung himself around obstacles, scampering over the slates even faster than King Rat.

Blocks fleeted away below them. Behind them Saul saw the monolithic Westway shrinking.

The man leapt forward and bounced perilously over a road that blocked his path. Saul realized with terror that they were on another rope tied horizontally between buildings, but this time moving on top of it, tightrope-walking faster than Saul could run.

The air was buffeted out of him by the quick motion of his captor and the constricting ropes on his chest. Below them Saul saw a solitary walker moving nervously through the backstreets, oblivious to the mad funambulism above him.

With a jump the dark man left the rope, landed on the opposite roof, snapped the trail behind them.

They moved like this at a crazy speed over the streets, traversing a network of ropes already laid. They passed through grassland and into an estate, leaping along flat roofs and scampering insanely fast down sheer bricks. Saul was convulsed with terror, unable to see what his captor was doing.

They raced down a bank of scrub onto a railway line, and rushed along the wooden sleepers. Saul watched the tracks curve away behind them.

Again their passage was interrupted as the dark man climbed the side of a bridge that passed over the railway and the canal that skirted it. They swept through an industrial estate, a collection of low, shabby buildings and motionless forklift trucks. Saul was hypnotized by the breakneck progress over the houses. He had been caught, he did not know by whom, and he did not know what was to happen to him.

The noise of the city became oddly distant. They had entered a yard full of ruined cars crushed flat, piles of them like geological features: strata of old Volvos and Fords and Saabs. The cars teetered around them, leaving only narrow alleys through which to pass.

They wound through these walkways.

Suddenly the man stopped and Saul heard another’s voice: a strange, vain, musical voice coloured with a European accent he could not specify.

‘You did find him, then.’

‘Yeah, man. Caught the lickle bleeder down south from here, not far you know.’

There was no more speaking. Saul suddenly felt the ties that bound him slipping, and he fell in a heap to the dust. He was still wrapped tight in his own rope swaddling. The fat man picked him up and carried him in his arms like a bride.

Saul caught a glimpse of the newcomer: thin and very pale, with red hair, a sharp hawkish nose and wide eyes. Saul was borne towards his destination, a huge steel container like a vast skip ten feet high, over which loomed a yellow structure something like a crane.

His eyes flitted about as he was carried, he saw the cars all flattened around him, and he realized that this was a car-crusher, that the lid of the dark container would bear down on whatever was inside, and squeeze it, press it like a flower into two dimensions. And as he was borne inexorably towards it Saul’s eyes widened in horror and he began to struggle, to shout through his gag.

He flopped pathetically in the man’s arms, tried to roll out of his grip, but the man held him firm and kissed his teeth in disgust, did not break his stride, no matter how Saul emitted frantic humming protests and jack-knifed. The man hauled Saul over his shoulder, Saul staring for a moment into the insane-looking eyes of the redhead behind them. Saul was held, bending and unbending at the waist pathetically, till the tall man heaved him upwards and he sailed over the edge of the ominous grey container … hung silent and still for a moment … fell, passing into the shadow of its metal walls, feeling the air cool and still, slamming into the pitted floor.

He landed hard on the shards of metal and glass which littered the dark.

Only because he was a rat was he not unconscious or dead, he decided, as he lay moaning. He struggled to sit upright, trickles of blood discolouring the cords which held him. Something approached him, footsteps clanging on the metal floor, and he tried to turn, and fell again, banging his head, only to feel himself grabbed around the shoulders and pulled upright. He opened his eyes and stared into a face glaring balefully at his, a dark face, darker than the shadows in the deadly car-crusher, a face boiling with anger, teeth gritted hard, scoring lines around the mouth, and the familiar stink of old wet animals and rubbish made acrid with anger.

King Rat looked at him and spat in his face.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The spittle slid down around Saul’s nose. His gaze was bouncing off the walls of the crusher, vibrating back and forth, trapped. King Rat stared at him unflinching and angry. Why was he angry, Saul wondered frantically, the thoughts crowding around each other in his head. What was happening? They’d both been caught by the Ratcatcher, that was why they were here, about to be crushed, so why was King Rat still? He wasn’t trapped like Saul. Why did he not leap out of the container and save them, or flee?

With his breath fast and ugly in his ears, Saul saw the suspended weight of the lid hovering above them, hideous with potential energy, full of pent-up momentum. King Rat was trying to hold Saul’s eyes, was muttering something, but in his panic Saul stared briefly at his uncle, then up at the lid, back down and up again, waiting for it to descend.

King Rat shook him and growled, a quiet bellow of rage.

‘What by damn do you reckon you’re playing at? Off I go for my constitutional, on the lookout for some victuals, leave you akip like a babe, and what happens? You up and piss off.’

Saul shook his head frantically and King Rat impatiently yanked at the rope around his face, tearing it free. Saul spluttered, breathed deeply, spraying mucus and spit and a little blood at King Rat.

King Rat did not move, did not wipe himself clean.

Instead he slapped Saul in the face.

Saul felt so abused, so sore and bloodied, the sting of it was nothing to him, but his anger and confusion overflowed. He exhaled, and the breath turned into a long shout, a yell of incoherent frustration. He wriggled and felt his muscles bunch up against his bonds.

‘What are you doing?’ he yelled.

King Rat pushed his hand over Saul’s mouth.

‘Stow your parley, you little fucker. Don’t come the misunderstood. Don’t ever be fucking off on your tod, got it?’ He was motionless, staring at Saul, pushing him hard with his hand, driving his point home. ‘Care to share the whys and wherefores of your little exhibition, eh?’

Saul’s voice emerged muffled from behind King Rat’s hand.

‘I wanted to look about, that was all; wasn’t looking for trouble. I’ve been learning, haven’t I? No one saw me, and I climbed like … you would’ve been proud.’

‘Enough of your crap!’ King Rat bellowed. ‘Trouble’s got its eyes peeled for you, sonny. There’s a roughneck out there wants you dead! Like I told you, you’re wanted, you’re prey, someone’s out for your hide … and mine.’

‘So fucking tell me what’s going on,’ spat Saul, suddenly jutting his chin into King Rat’s face. There was a long silence. ‘You go on and on, talking in riddles like you think you stepped out of a fucking fable, and I don’t have time to wait for you to tell me what the moral of it is! Something’s after me? Fine. What? Tell me, explain to me what the fuck is going on, or shut up.’

The silence returned, stretched out.

‘He’s right, rattymon. He have to know wha’appen. You can’t keep him in the dark. He can’t protect himself.’

The voice of the man who had carried him from the Westway dropped from above, and Saul glanced up to see him crouched like a monkey on the corner of the car-crusher. As he watched, the redhead appeared, arriving suddenly next to the black man, with his legs dangling into the container, as if he had jumped up from below and landed perfectly on his bum.

‘And who are they?’ said Saul, jerking his head at the watchers. ‘I thought the Ratcatcher had caught me. I’m walking along and suddenly that geezer’s got me trussed up, tripped up. I thought he was going to crush me in this thing.’

King Rat did not look up at the men sitting on the rim above, even as one of them spoke.

‘Not just Ratcatcher, you know, bwoy. The one want you, him the Ratcatcher and the Birdcatcher and the Spidercatcher and the Batcatcher and the Humancatcher and all tings catcher.’

King Rat slowly nodded.

‘So tell me,’ said Saul. ‘Listen to your mate. I need to fucking know. And get me out of these!’

King Rat reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a flick-knife. It emerged from its case with a snikt, and he shoved it under Saul’s bonds and pulled. The ropes fell away. King Rat turned his head and paced to the far end of the container. Saul opened his mouth to speak, but King Rat’s voice emerged from the darkness, pre-empting him.

‘I want nary word fucking one to emerge from your gob, boy. I’ll give you the whole spiel then, my old son, if that’ll quell your hankering.’

Saul could dimly see that he had turned to face him. The three men now faced him in a row: the two above – one squatting, one swinging his legs like a child – and the one below glowering in the corner.

Saul pushed the ropes away from him and backed into the opposite corner, pulled up his knees like protection for his brutalized body, listened.

‘Meet my mates,’ said King Rat. Saul looked up. The man who had caught him was still motionless on his haunches.

‘Me name Anansi, pickney.’

‘Me old China Anansi,’ interjected King Rat. ‘The gent who most likely saved your skin from the ruffian out there on the hunt for you.’

Saul knew the name Anansi. He remembered sitting in a hushed circle, surrounded by other tiny bodies all sucking lukewarm milk out of tiny bottles, listening to his Trinidadian teacher tell the class about Anansi the spider. He could not remember any more.

The redhead was standing now, balancing without effort on the thin metal edge. He gave an exaggerated bow, sweeping one arm out behind him. He wore suit trousers in burgundy, tightly pressed and perfect, a stiff white shirt and dark braces, a floral tie. His clothes were immaculate and stylish. Again he spoke in that peculiar accent, a composite of all the European intonations Saul could think of.

‘Loplop presents Loplop,’ he said.

‘Loplop, aka Hornebom, Bird Superior,’ said King Rat. ‘We go back a long way, not all of it friendly. When I saw you’d slung your hook, I called on this pair of coves. You put us to a lot of strife, sonny. And you want the story of the Ratcatcher.’

‘Spidercatcher,’ said Anansi softly.

‘Birdcatcher,’ spat Loplop.

King Rat’s voice held Saul still. King Rat settled back.

‘We’ve all had our admirers, you know, your uncles ’Nans and Loplop and I. Loplop chased a painter for a while, and I was always partial to a snatch or two of verse. If you know some poesy you might know this story already, acos I told it once before to another, and he wrote it down for the Godfers – a child’s story he called it. I didn’t mind. He can call it what he wants. He knew it was for honest.

‘I haven’t always lived in the Smoke, you know. I’ve lived all over. I was here when London was born, but it was measly pickings for a long time, so I took my flock and jumped ship long time gone. Your ma was entertaining herself elsewhere while I bing a waste to Europa for a shufti with the faithful, going hell for leather over land in packs with me at the head, my coat sleek. One twitch of my tail and the massed ranks of Rattus went west, east, wherever I gave the word. We run through the dews-a-vill, through the fields of France, the high-pads of Belge, through the flatlands near Arnhem, and on through to Germany – not that those were the names they used.

‘Next thing you know we’re looking around, bellies on the growl. We’ve found a place where John Barleycorn’s been most generous … The crops are high and golden, ripe and ready and fit to burst. We took a Butcher’s. “Yes,” I says, “this’ll do,” and on we trog, slower now, on the skedge for a place to set us down.

‘Through a forest, tight-clumped together under me the boss-man, afeared of nowt, on the hoof through lightmans and darkmans. By a river we found us a town, not too gentry a gaff, mind, but with silos that fair creaked at the seams, and knockabout houses with a hundred holes, nesting nooks, eaves and cellars, a hundred little corners for a knackered rat to rest a Crust.

‘I gave the word. In we marched. The populace dropped their bags, gobsmacked and agog. Next thing they’ve lost their marbles, running around hither and thither, and letting loose with such a damned caterwauling … ! We were an impressive phalanx: we spewed in and didn’t stop till the whole town was chock with me and my boys and girls. We herded the squealing civvies into the square, and they stood clutching their pathetic duds and children. We were bushed, been on the go a long time, but we pulled ourselves up proud in the sun and our teeth were magnificent.

‘They tried to give us the heave-ho, flailing around with torches ablaze and paltry little shovels. So we bared our teeth, sank them in deep, and they ran screaming like yellow-bellied ponces, disappearing as quick as you like. We had the square to ourselves. I called the troops to order. “Right,” I says, “quick march. This town is ours. This is Year One: this is the Year of the Rat. Spread out, make your mark, set the stage, find your places, eat your fill, anyone gives you any gyp, send them to me.”

‘An explosion of little lithe bodies, and the square’s empty.

‘Rats in the rub-a-dubs, the houses, the kazis, the dews-a-vill, the orchards. We gave them what for. I did walkabouts, with nary a word said, but all and sundry knew who ran things. Any burgher raised a hand against one of my own, I took them down. People soon clocked the rules.

‘And that was how the rats came to Hamelin.’

‘Saul, Saul, you should’ve seen us. Good times, chal, the best. The town was ours. I grew fat and sleek. We fought the dogs and killed the cats. The loudest sound in that town was rats talking, chattering and making plans. The grain was mine, the gaffs were mine; the tucker they cooked, we took our cut first. It was all mine, my Kingdom, my finest hour. I was the Kingpin, I made the rules, I was Copper and jury and Barnaby and, when occasion demanded, I was Finisher of the Law.

‘It turned famous, our little town, and rats flocked to us, to join the little Shangri-La we put together, where we ruled the roost. I was the boss-man.

‘Until that Ruffian, that bastard, that peripatetic fucking minstrel, that stupid tasteless shit with his ridiculous duds, the prancing nancy, until he strolled into town.

‘First I knew of it, one of my girls tells me there’s a queer cove with the mayor, furtive at the gates, dressed in a two-tone coat. “Hallo,” says I, “they’re about to have a go. They think they’ve a trick up the sleeve.” I settled back to piss on their parade, and it all went a little sorry.

‘There was a note.

‘Music, something in the air. Another note, and I prick up my ears to hear what’s going on. Little sleek brown heads appear from holes all over town.

‘Then the third note sounds, and apocalypse begins.

‘Suddenly I could hear something: a body scraping tripe from a bowl, a huge bowl. I could see it! I heard apples tumbling into a press, and my Plates start moving forward. I could hear someone leaving cupboards ajar, and I knew the jigger had been sprung on the Devil’s own pantry … the door was wide open, and I could fair sniff the scran inside, and I had to find it, and I had to eat it all.

‘I started forward and I could hear a rumble, a shaking, a scamper of a hundred million little feet and I saw the air around me heaving with my little minions, all shouting for joy. They could hear the food too.

‘I do a leap from the gables into the Frog. Splashdown in a stream of rats, all my little boys and girls, my lovers and my soldiers, big and fat and small and brown and black and quick and old and slow and frisky and all of them, all of us after that food.

‘And as I troop ravenous onwards, I suddenly feel queer horror in my gut. I was using my nous, and I saw there wasn’t no food where we were going.

‘ “Stop,” I shrieks, and no one listens. They just bump my bum from behind to get past. “Don’t,” I yell, and that starving stream just parts around me, rejoins.

‘I felt that hunger waxing, and I scamper over and sink me Hampsteads fast into the wood of a door, hard as you like, holding myself back with my good strong gob. My pegs are dancing, they want that music, that food, but my mouth’s holding strong. I feel my mind go slack and I gnaw some more, locking my jaw … but disaster strikes.

‘I take a bite from the door. My mouth snaps free and, before you can say knife, I’m in the stream of my subjects, my brainbox weaving in and out of hunger and joy for the tucker I can all but taste – and the despair, I’m King Rat, I know what’s happening to me and my kind, and no one will listen. Something dire’s in the offing.

‘On we march, willy-nilly, and from the corner of my eye I can see the people leaning out the windows, and the bastards are clapping, cheering, giving it all that. We’re trotting in time, all four legs stately and sharpish to that… abominable piping, tails swaying like metronomes.

‘I can see where we’re headed, a little journey to the suburbs I’ve taken more times nor I can think, on a beeline for the grain silos beyond the walls. And there behind the silos, bloated after the showers, hollering like the sea, roaring and pelting down through the dews-a-vill, wide and rocky, filthy with swirling muck and mud and rain, is the river.

‘There by the bridge I catch sight of the swine playing his flute in his fatuous duds. His Loaf bobs up and down, and I clock a revolting grin all over his North while he plays. The first ranks of rats are at the bridge now, and I can see them troop calmly to the edge, nary a hint of disquiet, eyes still narrowed on that lovely mountain of scran they’re headed for. I can see them getting ready and I’m screaming at them to stop, but I’m pissing in the wind, it’s a done deal.

‘They step off the stone walls of the bridge into the water.’

‘The most almighty cacophony of squeals starts up from below the bridge, but none of the sisters and brothers can hear it. They’re still listening to the dance of the sugarplums and bacon rind.

‘The next in line jump on their comrades, and more and more – the Fisherman’s is seething. I can’t bear it, I can hear the screams, every one a blade in my gut, my boys and girls giving up the ghost in the water, fighting to keep their Crusts over the waves, good swimmers all but not built for this. I can hear wails and keens as bodies are swept downriver, and still my goddamn fucking legs keep moving. I pull back through the ranks, trying to turn round, going a little slower than the others, feeling them pass me, and the squire on the bridge looks at me, that infernal flute still clamped to his gob, and he sees who I am. I can see him see I’m King Rat.

‘And he smiles a little more, and bows to me as I march on past onto the bridge and into the river.’

Loplop hissed and Anansi breathed something to himself. The three were locked into themselves, all staring ahead, all remembering.

‘The Fisherman’s was icy, and the touch of it cleared the bonce of nonsense. Every splash was quick-echoed by a screech, a wail as my poor little minions fight to keep their I Supposes in the air, thinking What the fuck am I doing here? and busy dying.

‘More and more bodies jumping in to join them, more and more fur becoming waterlogged, feeling the tug of the river, slipping below the caps, raking their claws every which way in panic, tearing each other’s bellies and eyes, and dragging brothers and sisters into the freezing cold under the air.

‘I kicked my pegs to get away. There was a frantic mass of us kicking up froth, an isle of rat bodies, fighting and killing to climb atop, the foundations dying and disappearing below.

‘Water plugged my lugs. All I can hear is the in-out of my breath, panicked and disjointed, gulping and retching and breathing in bile. The waves are smashing me around, tossing me against rocks, and on all sides rats are dying in thousands and thousands. I can just make out the noise of the flute. It’s stripped of magic here in the Fisherman’s, just a whining noise. I can hear the splashes of more rats leaping in the water to die; it’s endless and merciless. Screams and choking are everywhere; stiff little bodies bob past me like buoys in hell’s harbour. This is the end of the world, I think, and the stinking water fills my lungs, and I sink.

‘Everywhere are corpses.

‘They move with the swell, and through my half-closed eyes I can just clock them, all around me, suspended under the water, above me as I sink and below me too, blobs of brown approaching. And there in the murk, as the last bubbles of air spew out of me, I can see the charnel house under the river, the killing fields, those sharp black rocks an abattoir for ratkind, pile upon pile of cadavers, little skinless babies and old grey males, fat matron rats and pugnacious youth, the fit, the ill, an endless mass of death shifting with the torrent above.

‘And I alone stared this holocaust in the face.’

Drowned rats seemed to hover before Saul as he listened. His ears pounded as if his lungs fought for air.

King Rat’s voice came back, and the dead tone which had crept into his descriptions had gone.

‘And I opened my eyes and said, “No.”

‘I kicked suddenly, and left that cataclysm behind. I didn’t have no air, don’t forget, so my lungs were screaming murder, whipping me one stroke for every heartbeat, and I climbed out of the quiet into the light, and I could hear the cries through the river above me, and I moved out and away, and finally pushed my face into the air.

‘I sucked it in like an addict. I was eager.

‘I turned my Crust and it was still going on, the deaths still continuing, but the spume was a sight lower by now and there was no more ratkind falling out of the sky. I saw the man with his flute walk away.

‘He didn’t see me watch him.

‘And I decided, as I watched, that he had to die.

‘I dragged myself out of the river, and laid myself down under a stone. The cries of the dying continued for a while, and then they went out, and the river swept all the evidence away behind it. And I lay and breathed and swore revenge for my Rat Nation.

‘The poet called me a Caesar, who lived to swim across. But that wasn’t my Rubicon. That was my Styx. I should’ve gone. I should be a drowned rat. Maybe I am. I’ve thought of that. Maybe I never made it, and maybe it’s just hate that seeped into my bones that keeps me up and scrapping.

‘I got some small satisfaction, the first part only, from the bastard sons and daughters of Hamelin. The stupid, stupid fuckers tried to put one over on the Piper and I had the pleasure of watching the gurning cunts, who’d clapped as we took our leave, screaming in the alleys, stuck like glue while their Kinder pranced away to the tune of the flute. And I had the small joy of smiling when the queer cove made the mountain split open for those little Godfers, and they skipped on in. Because those little Dustbins went to hell, and they hadn’t even died, and they hadn’t even done any wrong, and their bastard parents knew that.

‘That was some pleasure, like I say.

‘But it was that damnable minstrel himself I wanted. He was the real culprit. He’s the one who has a certain reckoning due.’

Saul shivered at the viciousness of King Rat’s tone, but he stopped himself from remonstrating about the innocence of the children.

‘He sucked all the birds out of the sky and taunted me, till I grew mad in my impotence.’ Loplop was speaking in the same dreaming tone as King Rat. ‘I fled to Bedlam, forgetting myself, thinking myself nothing but a madman who thought himself King of Birds. For a long time I rotted in the cage, till I remembered and burst away again.’

‘Him clear all the scorpion and my lickle pickneys from the palace in Baghdad. Him call me in with him piccolo, and my mind was gone, and him rough me, mash me up, hurt me bad. And all the lickle spiders them saw.’ Anansi spoke softly.

The three were emasculated, casually stripped of power by the Piper. Saul remembered the contempt, the spitting of the rats in the sewer.

‘That’s why the rats don’t obey you,’ he murmured, looking at King Rat.

‘When Anansi and Loplop were caught, some lived to see them suffer, saw Loplop lose his mind, saw Anansi tortured. They bore witness to the martyrdom of the monarchs. It was plain for every Jack with eyes to see.

‘My rats, my troops, they saw nothing. Every one was taken. And drowning leaves no marks, no scars or stripes to illustrate engagement. Word spread to the towns and dews-a-vill around that King Rat had run, left his people to the swollen river. And they dethroned me. Stupid shits! They’ve not got the nous to live without me. It’s anarchy, no control. We should run the Smoke, and instead it’s chaos. And I’ve been without my crown more nor half a thousand years.’

When he heard this, Saul thought of the entreating, pleading rats who circled him below the pavements. He said nothing.

‘Anansi and Loplop, they still rule, bloodied maybe, bowed and cowed, but they’ve got their kingdom. I want mine.’

‘And if,’ said Saul slowly, ‘you can defeat the Piper, you think the rats will come back to you.’

King Rat was silent.

‘He roams around the world,’ said Loplop flatly. ‘He has not been here for a hundred years, since he cast me into the birdcage. I knew he had returned when I called all my birds to me a night not long ago, and they did not come. There is only one thing can make them deaf to my command: the damnable pipe.’

‘Sometimes the spiders rush away from me like them do another’s bidding. The Badman back in town, fe true, and him want the rattymon bad this time.’

‘None’s ever escaped, you see, sonny, except me,’ said King Rat. ‘He let Loplop and Anansi go, after shaming them, letting them clock who’s the bossman, he reckons. But me, he wanted my hide. I’m the one that got away. And for seven hundred years he’s been trying to make good his mistake. And when he found I had a nephew, he came looking for you. He’s on the skedge for you now. Anything to square accounts.’

Anansi and Loplop looked at each other, looked down at Saul.

‘What is he?’ breathed Saul.

‘Him greed,’ said Anansi.

‘Covetousness,’ said Loplop.

‘He exists to own,’ said King Rat. ‘He has to suck things in to him, always, which is why he’s so narked at me for having pulled a disappearing trick. He’s the spirit of narcissism. He’s to prove his worth by guzzling all and sundry in.’

‘Him can charm anything,’ said Anansi.

‘He’s congealed hunger,’ said Loplop. ‘He’s insatiable.’

‘He can choose, see?’ said King Rat. ‘Will I call the rats? The birds? The spiders? Dogs? Cats? Fish? Reynards? Minks? Kinder? He can ring anyone’s bell, charm anything he fancies. Just choose and he plays the right tune. Owt he chooses, Saul, except nor one thing.

‘He can’t charm you, Saul.

‘You’re rat and human, more and less than each. Call the rats and the person in you is deaf to it. Call to the man and the rat’ll twitch its tail and run. He can’t charm you, Saul. You’re double trouble. You’re my deuce, Saul, my trump card. An ace in the hole. You’re his worst nightmare. He can’t play two tunes at once, Saul. He can’t charm you.

‘No, you he just wants to kill.’

No one spoke. Three pairs of unclear eyes transfixed Saul.

‘But no need to panic, sonny. Things are going to change around here,’ King Rat suddenly spat. ‘See, my mates and me are pissed off. We’ve had enough. Loplop owes the Piper for his brain-box that was Tea-Leafed off him. Anansi here got tortured, still feels it sore in all his pegs – and in front of his own people. And me … I owe the fucker because he stole my nation and I want it back.’

‘Revenge,’ said Loplop.

‘Revenge,’ said Anansi.

‘Revenge is right,’ said King Rat. ‘Piper-man fucker better steel himself for some animal magic.’

‘The three of you …’ said Saul. ‘Is that how many there are? To take him.’

‘There are others,’ said Loplop, ‘but not here, not to do the job. Tibault, King of the Cats, he’s trapped in a nightmare, a story told by a man called Yoll. Kataris, Queen Bitch, who runs with the dogs, she’s disappeared, no one knows where.’

‘Mr Bub, Lord of the Flies, him a shifty murderer and me can’t work with him,’ said Anansi.

‘There are others but we’re the ones, the hard core, the sufferers, who’ve scores to settle,’ said King Rat. ‘We’re bringing the war back to him. And you can help us, sonny.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

What woke Kay was the drumbeat of blood in his head. Each stroke that landed on the back of his skull sent vibrations of pain through the bone.

His eyes cracked a seal of rheum. He opened them and saw nothing but black. He blinked, tried to focus on the vague geometry he could glimpse in the shadows. He felt that something stretched away in front of him.

Kay was freezing. He groaned and raised his head, a motion accompanied by a crescendo of aches, rolled his neck and tried to move. His arms hurt and he realized they were stretched out above him, held fast, and stripped of clothing. He opened his eyes more and saw coils of thick dirty rope around his wrists, disappearing into the gloom above him. He was suspended, his weight dragging him hard, pulling the skin of his armpits taut.

He tried to twist his body, to investigate his position, but he was suddenly constrained, his feet refusing to obey. He shook his groggy head and looked down. He saw that he was naked, his cock shrivelled and tiny in the cold. He saw the same rope around his ankles, spreading his legs. He was caught tight in a petrified star-jump, he was an X hovering in the dark, the pain in his wrists and ankles and arms beginning to register. Gusts of wind pulled at him, raised goosebumps.

Kay winced, blinked hard, tried to work out where he was, lowered his eyes again to his feet. As the cold air began to cut through the muck of pain in his head he became aware of the dim diffuse light around him. Shapes clarified in the shadow below his dangling toes: sharp lines, concrete, bolts, wood. Railway tracks.

Kay’s head wobbled up. He tried to throw it behind him, to see over his shoulder.

He gave a yell of shock which bounced back and forward in its enclosed environs.

Behind him, illuminated by half-hearted little bulbs dribbling beige light, stretched an underground platform covered in dust and small pieces of rubbish. The darkness before him stopped sharp above Kay’s head, where the bricks of the tunnel began. Those bricks arced down on both sides of him. To his right was a wall, to his left the platform edge. The ropes which bound him stretched out to that arch, wound around huge nails driven roughly into the old brickwork.

He hung cruciform at the entrance to the tunnel, from where the trains emerged.

Kay’s scream echoed around and around him.

He shook ineffectually, tried to wriggle from his bonds. His fear was complete. He was utterly vulnerable, suspended nude in the path of the locomotives.

He screamed and screamed, but no one came.

He twisted his head around as far as he could. Kay’s eyes frantically skipped from surface to surface, searching for some clue to tell him where he was. The trimmings of the station were black; the line above the poster spaces – all empty – was black. This was the Northern Line. At the edge of his limited field of vision he saw the curved edge of an underground sign, the tell-tale red circle bisected by a blue line containing the name of the station. He pulled his head over, ignoring the pain in his neck and skull, trying to push his shoulder out of the way with his chin, desperate to see where he was. As he vibrated to and fro the sign moved in and out of his view. He caught glimpses of the two words it contained, one above the other.

gton ent… ington scent… rnington rescent…

Mornington Crescent. The ghost station, the strange zone between Euston and Camden Town on the decrepit Northern Line: the odd, poky little tube stop which had been closed for repairs sometime in the late Eighties and had never opened again. Trains would slow down as they passed through, so as not to create a vacuum in the empty space, and passengers would glimpse the platform. Sometimes posters would apologize and promise a swift resumption of service, and sometimes obscure pieces of equipment to cure ailing underground stations lay scattered on the abandoned concrete. Often there was nothing, just the signs proclaiming the name of the station in the faint light. It lived a half-life, never being finally laid to rest, haunted by the unlikely promise that it would one day open for business again.

Behind him Kay heard footsteps.

‘Who’s there?’ he yelled. ‘Who’s that? Help me!’

Whoever it was had been standing on the platform, out of his sight when he had tried to turn round. Kay’s head was twisted as violently over his left shoulder as he could manage. The steps approached him. A tall figure strolled into view, reading something.

‘Alright, Kay?’ said Pete without looking up. He chuckled as he read. ‘My God, they’re not averse to a bit of pretension, this bunch, are they?’ He held up what he was reading and Kay saw it was Drum ’n’ Bass Massive 3!, a CD Kay had just bought. Kay fought to speak but his mouth was suddenly dry in terror. ‘ “Rudeness MC sends shouts to: the Rough an’ Ready Posse, Shy FX,” blah blah blah, “an’ Boys from da North, da South, da East, da West, remember … It’s a London Someting! Urban-style ghetto bass!” ’ Pete looked up, grinning. ‘This is drivel, Kay.’

‘Pete …’ Kay finally croaked. ‘What’s going on? Get me down, man! How did I get here?’

‘Well, I needed to ask you some questions about something. I’m concerned about something.’ Pete moved off, still reading. In his other hand he held Kay’s bag. He replaced the CD and brought out another. ‘ “Jungle versus the Hardsteppers.” Cor! I’ve got a lot of lingo to learn if I’m going to get in with Natasha, haven’t I?’

Kay licked his lips. He was sweating even as he shivered. His skin felt slick with terror.

‘How did you get me here, man?’ he moaned. ‘What do you want?’

Pete turned to him, replaced the CD, squatted down on the platform to his left. His flute, Kay saw, was thrust through his belt like a sabre.

‘It’s early yet, Kay, probably not yet five o’clock. The Northern Line doesn’t start for a while. Just thought I’d let you know. And, yes, what I wanted … well. When I came out of the pub I headed for Natasha’s flat as well, a little after you, wanted to have a word or something. See what you got up to. I’ve been very interested in all these stories I keep hearing about your mate who’s in trouble, and I wanted to maybe get you on your own – see what you could tell me about him.

‘Then, as I come towards you, downwind, I smell a very particular scent, one that someone wore once who I’m trying to track down. And it occurs to me that maybe your mate knows the bloke I’m after!’ He smiled reasonably and put his head on one side.

‘So. You did bump into your mate last night, didn’t you?’

Kay swallowed. ‘Yeah … but Pete … let me down … please. I’ll tell you all about it if you’ll just … please, man … this is really freaking me out.’

Kay’s mind was racing. He could not think for the pain in his head. Pete was mad. He swallowed again. He had to make him take him down, he had to do it now. Kay could not formulate his thoughts clearly, so overwhelming was the adrenaline rush brought on by fear. He was trembling violently.

Pete nodded.

‘I’m not surprised it’s freaking you out, Kay. Where’s your mate?’

‘You mean Saul? I don’t know, man, I don’t know. Please …’

‘Where’s Saul?’

‘Just get me fucking down!’

Kay’s control broke and he began to cry.

Pete shook his head thoughtfully.

‘No. You see, you haven’t told me where Saul is yet.’

‘I don’t know, I swear I don’t know! He, he, he said he was …’ Kay thought desperately for something to tell Pete, something that might save him. ‘Please let me go!’

‘Where’s Saul?’

‘The sewers! He said something … he stank. I asked where’d he been, and he was on about the sewers …’ Kay’s waist twisted, legs yanking violently at the strong cord.

‘Now that’s interesting,’ said Pete, leaning forward. ‘Did he say anything about where in the sewers? Because I’ve often suspected that… this guy I’m after uses them.’

Kay was sobbing.

‘Nah, man, he didn’t say nothing else … please … please … he was weird, his voice was weird, he stank … he wouldn’t tell me anything… Please let me down!’

‘No, Kay, I won’t let you down,’ Pete’s voice was suddenly shockingly vicious. He rose and stalked towards him. ‘Not yet. You see, I want to know everything you know about your friend Saul, because it’s important to me. I want to know everything, Kay, capeesh?’

Kay gabbled, tried to think of what he knew. He screamed about sewers, repeated that Saul had stunk, that he was hiding in the sewers. He ran out of anything to say. He whimpered and twisted where he hung.

Pete had been taking notes, nodding with interest now and then, writing carefully in a little notebook.

‘Tell me about Saul’s life,’ he said without looking up.

Kay talked about Saul’s father, the fat socialist they had all laughed at; about Saul’s brief, disastrous attempt to move in with a girlfriend; his return home, temporary he said, always temporary for the next two years. Kay kept talking, about Saul’s friends, about his social life, Jungle, the clubs, and as Kay spoke tears rolled down his cheeks. He was pathetically eager to please. He whimpered with each breath. He had no more to say and he was afraid, because Pete seemed pleased with him when he told him about Saul, and all Kay could think of was that he must keep Pete happy. But he truly had no more to say.

Pete sighed and put the pad in his pocket. He glanced at his watch.

‘Thanks, Kay,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re wondering what this all means, what I’m up to. I’m afraid I won’t tell you that. But you’ve helped me a lot. The sewers, huh? I thought as much, but you don’t really want to go wading around in shit unless you’re quite sure you have to, do you? It’s not really my turf, know what I mean? I’ll have to get him out.’ He grimaced light-heartedly.

‘Maybe … maybe … you … can … let … me … go …’ Kay forced the words out past chattering teeth. His body was shaking with little sobs, and every word of Pete’s chilled him.

Pete looked at him and smiled.

‘No,’ he said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I don’t think so.’

Kay’s screams began again, went shooting off down the tunnel he faced, bounced around him. He threatened, cajoled, pleaded, and Pete ignored him, and continued speaking in his conversational tone.

‘You don’t know me, Kay. I can do a trick.’ He pulled the flute from his belt. ‘See this?’ Kay continued begging. ‘I can play this, make anything I want come to me. Play the right notes and I can get you the cockroaches around us, the mice, anything close enough to hear. And it feels so good to make them come to me.’ He crooned the last sentence, and at the sound of that cloying wetness, that fucked-up sugary tone, Kay retched.

‘And I was looking at these tunnels and thinking how much they looked like wormholes,’ Pete continued. ‘If I played this, what do you think I might call?’

Pete put the flute to his lips and began to play, a strange, droning tune, a hypnotic dirge that wailed flatly over Kay’s garbled exhortations.

Kay gazed into the mouth of the tunnel.

Behind him the melody continued, and Kay could hear the slap of feet as Pete danced to his own tune.

The wind jerked around Kay, pushed into his face from somewhere far off.

Deep in the darkness before him something growled.

Kay hung like an obscene toy, nude and chubby in the yawning darkness of the underground.

The wind pushed on with more resolve, and the growl sounded again. Kay shrieked in despair, felt himself relax in terror, sag in his bonds, felt piss run down his legs. The tune continued.

There was a sound like steel whiplashing as the tracks buckled and moved under the oncoming weight. The wind began to hit Kay now, began to push his hair out of his face. Scraps of paper and dirt came whirling out of the blackness, surrounding him, sticking to him; grit filled his eyes and mouth and he fought and spat to clear himself of debris, consumed by a ghastly desperation to see.

The growling ebbed and flowed, became a clattering, began to drown out the disinterested flute. A great presence rushed towards him.

Lights had appeared in the distance, two dirty white lights that seemed to crawl towards him, seemed determined never to arrive. It was only the wind and noise that moved at speed, he reasoned desperately, but even as he decided that, he saw how much closer those lights suddenly were, and Kay wriggled and fought and screamed prayers to God and Jesus.

He was in a tornado now as the lights suddenly rushed towards him. The howl and rumble echoed around the tube with a strange raging melancholy, an empty roar. The track was visible as glistening threads illuminated by those lights. The filthy off-white of the first Northern Line train of the day became evident before him, the driver’s glass front still a black slit. He must see me, thought Kay. He’ll stop! But the great flat surface moved ineluctably forward at a horrible speed, pushing the air out, clogging the wind with dirt. The speed was intolerable, thought Kay, just stop, but the lights kept coming, there was no let-up, the howl of the tunnel had become a charnel roar, the lights were dazzling, they blinded him, he looked up as he screamed, still hearing the flute, always the flute behind him, he looked up at the reflections varnished onto the windscreen, caught a glimpse of his ridiculous little body spreadeagled like a medical specimen, then saw through that, through the wide-open mouth of his reflection, into the incredulous gaze of the driver who bore down on him, disbelief and horror smeared across his face, those eyes aghast, Kay could see the whites of the other man’s eyes …

The glass front of the train burst open like a vast blood-blister. The first Northern Line train of the day arrived at Mornington Crescent station and ploughed to an unscheduled halt, dripping.

PART FOUR

BLOOD

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Days came and went in the city. In the sewers, on the rooftops, under the canal bridges, in all the cramped spaces of London, King Rat and his comrades held councils of war.

Saul would sit and listen as the three unlikely figures murmured together.

Much of what they said made no sense to him: references to people and places and occurrences that he could not fathom. But he understood enough of the growled discussion to know that, despite their grandiose declarations of hostilities, neither King Rat nor Loplop nor Anansi had any idea how to proceed.

The prosaic truth was that they were afraid. Sometimes the arguments became heated, and accusations of cowardice would flurry between the three. These accusations were true. The circular discussions, the half-plans, the protestations of anger and pugnacity, all were stymied by the fact that the three knew that in any confrontation one of them would be doomed.

As soon as the Piper got his flute to his lips, or even pursed his lips to whistle, or perhaps even hummed, one of them would be commandeered, one of them would be taken over to the other side. His eyes would glaze and he would start to fight against his allies, his ears stuffed with the enticing sounds of food and sex and freedom.

Anansi would hear sluggish fat flies blundering near his mouth, and the skittering of lovelorn feet approaching him over towering webs to mate. That was what he had heard in Baghdad, as the Piper had thrashed him mercilessly.

Loplop knew that he would hear the snapping of threadlike filaments as the roots of grass were pushed aside and juicy worms groped blindly into the light, towards his bill. He would hear the rush of air as he felt himself swoop above the city, the come-hither calls of the most beautiful birds of paradise.

And King Rat would once again hear the doors of the pantries in hell swinging open.

None of the three wanted to die. It was a mission which involved certain destruction for one. The sheer force of animal self-preservation seemed to preclude their willingness even to risk the odds of one in three. There was to be no sentimental self-sacrifice in this fight.

Saul was vaguely aware that he was a vital component in this argument, that ultimately he was the weapon which would have to be deployed. It did not yet frighten him, as he could not begin to take it seriously.

Some days, Loplop and Anansi would disappear. Saul remained with King Rat.

Every time he walked or climbed or ate, he felt stronger. He would look down over London as he scaled the side of a gas tower and think How did I get up here? with exhilaration. Their journeys across London became rarer, more sporadic. Saul was frustrated. He was moving faster and more quietly. He wanted to roam, to make his mark – literally, sometimes, as he had discovered the pleasure of pissing his strong-smelling piss against walls and knowing that that corner was now his. His piss was changing, just like his voice.

King Rat was always there when Saul woke. After the initial exhilaration of a new existence at right-angles to the world of people he had left behind, Saul was disheartened by the speed with which his days blurred. Life as a rat was dull.

The individual moments still thrilled him with adrenaline, but those moments no longer coalesced.

He knew King Rat was waiting. His ferocious whispered arguments with his comrades became the focal point of Saul’s life. In gravelly hisses and fluting tones the three bickered furiously over whether Anansi’s webs would hold the Piper, and how best to wrest his flute away from him, and whether spiders or birds would constitute better cover. King Rat grew furious. He was alone; he could contribute no troops to any battle. The rats had snubbed him and ignored his commands.

Saul became quieter, learning more about the three creatures who constituted his circle.

He was alone on a roof, one night, sitting with his back to an air-conditioning vent, while King Rat scoured the alley below for food, when Anansi crept over the side of the building before him. Saul was still in his shadows and Anansi looked straight at him for a moment, then cast his eyes around the roof.

I’m getting better at this, thought Saul, with idle pride. Even he can’t see me now.

Anansi sneaked forward under dark red clouds which rolled around each other, belching themselves into and out of existence. They threatened rain. Anansi squatted on the roof, stripped to the waist, as always, despite the cold. He reached into his pocket and drew out a glittering handful, a shifting mass of little buzzing bodies. He smeared the insects into his mouth.

Saul’s eyes widened in fascination, even as he grimaced. He was not surprised by what he saw. He thought he could hear the humming of mother-of-pearl wings obscured by Anansi’s cheeks, till those cheeks tensed and he saw Anansi suck hard, not chewing, but pursing his lips and working his mouth as if he sucked the juice from a big gobstopper.

There was the faintest of crunching sounds.

Anansi opened his mouth and poked out a tongue rolled into a tight U. He exhaled sharply, as if through a blowpipe, and a cascade of chitin shot out across the roof, scattering near Saul’s feet; the desiccated body parts of flies and woodlice and ants.

Saul rose to his feet and Anansi started a little, his eyes widening momentarily.

‘Wha’appen, pickney,’ he said evenly, gazing at Saul. ‘Me never see you there. You a quiet lickle bwoy.’

Loplop was harder to surprise. He would appear suddenly from behind chimney stacks and rubbish bins, ruffling his foppish coat behind him. His passage was always invisible. Occasionally he would look up and yell ‘Oy!’ into the firmament, and a pigeon, or a flock of starlings, or a thrush, would wheel suddenly out of the clouds, obeying his call, and perch nervously on his wrist.

He would peer at the bird, then briefly up at Saul or whoever observed him, and smile in satisfaction. He would glance back at the bird, imperious suddenly, and bark a command at it, upon which it would seem to cringe and give obeisance, bobbing its head and bowing. And then Loplop would become a good and just king all of a sudden, with no time for such puerile displays of power, and he would murmur reassuringly to his subject, and jettison it, watching it disappear with a look of noble benediction.

Saul believed that Loplop was still a little mad.

And King Rat, King Rat was the same: cantankerous and cockney and irritable and otherworldly.

Kay did not reappear with Natasha’s keys, and she was forced to wake her downstairs neighbour, with whom she left a spare set.

It was just like Kay to meander off and forget that he had them, and she waited for him to call with his cheerful apology. He did not call. After a couple of days she tried his number, and his flatmates said they had not seen him for ages. Natasha was heartily pissed off. After another couple of days she had a new set cut and resolved to charge him when he re-emerged.

The police did seek her out. She was taken to the station and interviewed by a quiet man named Crowley, who asked her several times in several different ways if she had seen Saul since his disappearance. He asked her if she thought Saul capable of murder. He asked her what she had thought of Saul’s father, whom she had never met, and what Saul thought of him. He asked her what Saul thought of the police. He asked what she thought of the police.

When they let her go she returned home seething, to discover a note on her door from Fabian, who was waiting for her in the pub. She fetched him back to her house where they smoked a joint and, to the sound of Fabian’s abrupt giggles, composed a Jungle track on her sequencer using loads of samples from The Bill. They christened the song Fuck You Mister Policeman Sir!.

Pete was coming around more and more. Natasha was waiting for him to make a move on her, something which seemed to happen with the majority of blokes she hung out with for any length of time. He did not, which was a relief to her, as she was completely uninterested and did not want to have to deal with his embarrassment.

He was listening to more and more Drum and Bass, was making comments that were more and more astute. She sampled his flute and wove it into her tunes. She liked the sound it made; there was a breath of the organic about it. Normally, for the main sounds at the top end she would simply create something with her digital powers, but the soullessness those noises possessed, a quality she often revelled in, was beginning to alienate her. She enjoyed the sounds of his flute, the tiny pauses for breath, the hint of vibration when she slowed it down, the infinitesimal imperfections that were the hallmark of the human animal. She sent the bass to follow the flute track.

She was still experimenting, still laying plenty of tracks without him. After a time she focused her flute experimentation on one track. Sometimes they would play together, she snapping down a drum track, a bass line, some interjections, and he would improvise over the top. She recorded these sessions for ideas, and a notion formed in her mind of how they could play together: a session of Jazz Jungle, the newest and most controversial twist to the Drum and Bass canon.

But for now she concentrated on the track she had christened Wind City. She returned to it day on day, tweaking it, adding layers to the low end, tickling the flute, looping it back on itself.

She had a clear idea of the feeling she sought, the neurotic beats of Public Enemy, especially on Fear Of A Black Planet, the sense of a treble constantly looking over its own shoulder. She took the harmony of the flute and stretched it. Repetition makes listeners wary of a statement, and Natasha made the flute protest too much, coming back in and back in and back in on its purest note, till that purity became a testimony of paranoia, no sweet sound of innocence.

Pete loved what she was doing.

She would not let him hear the track until it was finished, but occasionally she would give in to his pesterings and play him a snippet, a fifteen-second phrase. The truth was that although she feigned exasperation, she enjoyed his rapturous reception.

‘Oh, Natasha,’ he said as he listened, ‘you really understand me. More than I think you think you do.’

Crowley was still haunted by the scene of the Mornington Crescent murder.

There had been something of a news blackout, a halfway house of secrecy whereby the unknown victim’s death had been reported but the intricacies withheld. There was a vain and desperate hope that by mulling over the unbelievable facts in private, by containing them, they could be understood.

Crowley did not believe it would work.

The crime was not connected to his own investigation, but Crowley had come to examine the scene. The unearthly circumstances surrounding the murder reminded him of the peculiarities of Saul’s disappearance and the murder of the two police officers.

Crowley had stood on the platform, the train still waiting there some hours after a hysterical driver had reported something which made no sense. A brief examination of the scene told the police that the driver’s ‘floating man’ had been suspended by rope to the tunnel entrance. Frayed cord dangled from the brick. The few passengers had been cleared out and the driver was with a counsellor elsewhere in the station.

The front of the train was encrusted with blood. There was very little of the body left to identify. Dental records had been rendered useless by the crushing, inexorable onrush of metal and glass onto the victim’s face.

There was no escaping this crime, it lay all around him, on the platform, spattering the walls, carbonized on the live rail, smeared by gravity the length of the first carriage. No cameras had recorded the passing of criminal or victim. They had come and gone invisibly. It was as if the metal stakes and bloodied stubs of rope, the ruined flesh, had been conjured up spontaneously out of the dark tunnels.

Crowley exchanged words with the investigating detective, a man whose hands still shook since his first arrival at the scene an hour or more previously. Crowley had only tenuous reasons to connect the crime to his own investigations. Even the savagery was wrong. The murder of the policemen had seemed an act of huge rage, but a spontaneous act, brutally efficient. This was an imaginative piece of sadism, ritualistic, like a sacrifice to some dangerous god. It was designed to strip the victim of dignity and any vestige of power. And as he thought that, Crowley wondered if the man – they had found flesh that told them it was a man – had been awake and conscious as the train had arrived, and he screwed up his face, felt briefly sick with horror.

And yet, and yet, despite the differences, Crowley felt himself linking the crimes in his mind.

There was something in the infernal ease with which life had been taken, a sense of power which seemed to permeate the murder sites, the sure and absolute knowledge that none of these victims, for so much as one second, had the slightest chance of escape.

He asked the shaking Camden detective to contact him were there any developments at all, hinting at the connections he might be able to make.

Now, days later, Crowley still visited Mornington Crescent when he slept, its walls chaotically re-sprayed, abattoir chic, the red carpet laid down, ghastly organic decor.

He was convinced that the three (four?) murders he investigated contained secrets. There was more to the story, there was much more than they knew. The facts were damning, but still he wanted to believe that Saul had not committed the crimes. He sought refuge in a firm if nebulous belief that something big was going on, something as yet unexplained, and that whatever Saul was doing, he was not somehow responsible. Whether being absolved by the sudden onset of madness, or another’s control, or whatever, Crowley did not know.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

For a long time Pete had been asking Natasha to take him to a Jungle club. She found his pesterings irritating, and asked why he could not just go by himself, but he made noises about being a newcomer, being intimidated (which was, in all fairness, entirely reasonable given the atmosphere at many clubs). His hectoring stayed just on the right side of whining.

He made one or two good excuses. He did not know where to go, and if he were to follow Time Out’s appalling recommendations, he would end up a lonely figure at a hardcore Techno evening or some such fate. Natasha, by contrast, knew the scene, and could walk into any of the choicest evenings in London without paying. Just cashing in favours, calling in accounts set up in the early days of the music, by knowing the names and the faces, talking the talk.

Something was rumbling in the Elephant and Castle. The AWOL posse were getting together with Style FM in a warehouse near the railway line. Everyone was going to be there, she started to hear. A DJ she knew called Three Fingers phoned her and asked her to come along, bring a tune or two; he’d play them. She could spin a few if she wanted.

She wasn’t going to take him up on that, but maybe just turning up wasn’t such a bad idea. It was a month since she’d last been out on a serious night, and Pete’s clamouring made for a decent excuse to move. Three Fingers put her ‘plus whoever’ on his guest list.

Fabian immediately said he would come. He seemed pathetically grateful for the idea. Kay remained incommunicado and, for the first time since he had disappeared a week or more previously, Natasha and Fabian felt the beginnings of trepidation. But for the moment that was forgotten as they made preparations for the foray into South London.

Pete was ecstatic.

‘Yes yes yes! Fantastic! I’ve been waiting for this for ages!’

Natasha’s spirit sank as she saw herself being shoe-horned into the role of Junglist Nanny.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to disappoint you or anything, Pete, but so long as you know I’m not looking after you there or anything. Alright? We get there, I listen, you dance, you leave when you want, I’m leaving when I want. I’m not there to show you around, d’you know what I’m saying?’

He looked at her strangely.

‘Of course.’ His brow furrowed. ‘You’ve got some odd ideas about me, Natasha. I don’t want to cadge off you all evening, and I’m not going to … to leach any of your cool, OK?’

Natasha shook her head, irritated and embarrassed. She was concerned that having a pencil-necked, white-bread geek padding after her was going to do her credentials as an up-and-coming Drum and Bass figure no good at all. She had only been vaguely conscious of the thought, and having it pointed out with frank good humour made her defensive and snappy.

Pete was grinning at her.

‘Natasha, I’m going because I’ve found a new kind of music I never knew existed, and it’s one which – for all I don’t look the part – I think I can use, and I think I can probably make. And I presume so do you, because you haven’t stopped recording me yet.

‘So don’t worry about me making you look less than funky in front of your mates. I’m just going to hear the music and see the scene.’

After the last bout of arguing, Anansi had disappeared. Loplop had remained in the area for another day or two, but had ultimately followed the spider into obscurity.

King Rat had slumped into a foul mood.

Saul hauled himself into the sewers, careful not to spill the bag of food he carried. He picked his way through the tunnels. It was raining in the streets above, a steady dribble of filthy, acid-saturated water which raced into the tunnels, swirled around Saul’s legs, tried to pull him down, a stream nearly two feet high, fast-moving and dilute, the usual warm compost smell mostly dissipated.

King Rat had done nothing about finding food, and Saul, impatient with his self-pity, had left the throne-room and gone scavenging. King Rat’s leash on him was loosening. The neurotic hold he had kept for so long was almost gone. As his mood grew worse, his determination to keep Saul in his sights weakened.

Saul knew what this meant. His worth for King Rat was not measured by blood. He had not been rescued because he was a nephew, but because he was useful; because his peculiar birthright meant he was a threat to the power of the Piper. As the campaign against the Piper dissolved in petty fights and squabbles, cowardice and fear, Saul’s existence meant less and less to King Rat. Without a plan of attack, how could he deploy his chosen weapon?

As Saul picked his way through the saturated tunnels he heard a sound. In a crevice in the concrete stood a waterlogged rat, her babies blind and squealing in the darkness behind her.

She stood uncertainly on the grey lip, overlooking the rush of water. She was only six inches or so above the rising stream, and the comfortable hollow in which she lived was on the verge of becoming a water-sealed tomb. She looked up across the tunnel. On the far side from where she stood was another hole, an accidental passageway slanting up away from the depths.

The rat raised herself on her hind legs when she smelt Saul, and she let forth a peculiar cry.

She bobbed up and down in the darkness, avoiding looking him in the face, yet clearly aware of his presence. Again the she-rat made a sound, a lengthy screech, purged of the sneer which usually coloured rats’ voices.

He stopped just before her and hoisted his plastic bag over his shoulder.

The rat was pleading with him.

She was begging him for help.

The tone of the squeal was beseeching, and Saul was reminded of the profusion of rats who had followed him a fortnight previously, rats which had seemed animated by hunger and desperation, and which had been eager to show him respect.

Not here, was the sentiment pouring out of the bedraggled rat as she cringed below him. Not here, not here!

Saul reached out to her and she hopped onto his hand. A cacophony of infantile rat squeaks poured out of the holes in the concrete, and Saul plunged his hand further into the depths of the rotting stone. Little bodies were pushed onto his hand, where they lay squirming. He closed his fingers gently into a protective cage and drew out his hand, on which the little family lay shivering as the water level rose.

He crossed the tunnel and placed them on the ledge where the mother could pull the babies out of danger. She backed away from him bobbing her head, the pitch of her sounds changed, her fear gone.

Boss, she said to him, Boss, before turning and pulling her family out of sight into the darkness.

Saul leaned against the soaking wall.

He knew what was happening. He knew what the rats wanted. He did not think King Rat would like it.

By the time he arrived at the entrance to the throne-room, the water was moving faster and the level kept on rising. He fumbled under the surface for the brick plug hiding the chute, pulled it open with a sudden explosive burp of air, and slipped through the cascade of water into the dark room below, pulling the door closed behind him.

He landed in the pool, splashed briefly onto his arse, before standing and walking onto the dry bricks. Behind him water dribbled into the room and down the wall from the imperfectly fitting brick entrance, but the chamber was so large and the hidden sluices so efficient that the moat around the room’s central island of raised brickwork became only a little fatter. It would take days of ceaseless rain truly to threaten the air in the throne-room.

King Rat sat brooding on his grandiose brick seat.

Saul glared at him. He delved into the plastic bags.

‘Here,’ he said, and threw a paper package across the room. King Rat caught it in one hand, without looking up. ‘Bit of falafel,’ said Saul, ‘bit of cake, bit of bread, bit of fruit. Fit for a king,’ he added provocatively, but King Rat ignored him.

Saul sat cross-legged at the base of the throne. His own package contained much the same as King Rat’s, with the emphasis skewed towards the sugary components of the meal. Saul’s sweet tooth had survived his passage to rat-hood. The extra richness which rot lent to fruit was a pleasure he was still indulging in as often as possible.

He dug into the bag and pulled out a peach whose surface was one seamless bruise. He ate, gazing all the time at the morose King Rat.

‘I’m fucking sick of this,’ he finally snapped. ‘What is up with you?’

King Rat turned to stare at him.

‘Shut your trap. You don’t know buggery about it.’

‘You stink of self-pity, you know that?’ Saul gave a sudden laugh. ‘You don’t see me acting up like this, and if anyone’s got reason to be … moody … it’s me. First off, you rip me out of my life and turn it into some kind of fucking … bad dream … So fuck it, alright, I’ll do that, and I did a decent enough job didn’t I? And now, just when I’ve got to grips with the rules of my life as Saul, Prince Rat, you get all morose and change the channel. What the fuck is going on? You … galvanize me, get me ready, for fuck knows what, and then you just slump. What am I supposed to do?’

King Rat was staring at him contemptuously, ill at ease.

‘You’ve no clue what you’re spouting, you little gobshit …’

‘Don’t tell me that! Jesus! What the fuck do you want me to do? Is my role here to fucking get you spurred again? Am I supposed to shake you up? Get you going again? Well fuck off! If you want to sit there on your rat arse and mope, then fine. And spider-features and Loplop can join you, you’re as bad as each other. But I’m fucking off!’

‘Got any suggestions, you mouthy little cunt?’ hissed King Rat.

‘Yeah, I have. You fuckers have got to be less chicken. That’s what this is about. You’re all scared, and you’re scared because you all want a plan which makes sure your own arse isn’t on the line. Well, it’s not going to happen! You all reckon the Piper is such a bad fucker that you’ve got to take him, that this is the Final Battle – so long as none of you does the actual fighting. And while we’re on that subject, I get the distinct fucking impression that it was me who was supposed to do the fighting for you, but you’re all still chickenshit because you can’t quite work out how to deploy me without any danger of recoil or whatever. Well count me the fuck out!’ Saul had worked his way into a righteous anger.

‘The Piper wants you dead too!’ hissed King Rat.

‘Yeah, so you say. Well, unlike you, maybe I’m going to do something about it!’ There was a long silence. Saul waited a moment, then spoke again.

‘The rats want me to take over.’

There was a long silence as King Rat slowly swung his head to look at him.

‘What?’

‘The rats. In the sewers. Sometimes in the streets, or wherever. Whenever you’re not around. They come to me, hover, kow-tow, and they squeak, and I’m beginning to make sense of what they’re on about. They want me to take over. They want me to be the boss.’

King Rat was rising, standing on the throne.

‘You little ingrate. You little Tea-Leaf… you little shit, you bastard, I’ll tan your hide, it’s mine, mine, you understand, mine

‘So take a stand, you fucking has-been!’ Saul was standing, glaring at him, his face just below King Rat’s, their spittle forming a crossfire. ‘They don’t want you back. And they’re not going to have you back until you … redeem yourself. That seems to be the morality of this fucking terrain.’

Saul turned and stormed to the exit. ‘I’m going out. I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I don’t expect you to care, because you don’t think you can use me at the moment. While I’m gone I recommend you think carefully about doing something. Use Loplop, use Anansi, get hold of them and track the motherfucker down. When you’re willing to get off your arse, maybe we can talk.’ He turned to face King Rat. ‘Oh, and don’t worry about your Magic Kingdom. I don’t want to be Rat King, not now, not ever, so I wouldn’t stress it. I’m going to find my mates or something. I’m bored of you.’

Saul turned and swung out of the room, was briefly coated in filthy water, and passed into the sewers.

While Saul stalked through the subterranean realms above him, King Rat stood quivering with rage, his hands tugging fitfully at his overcoat. Eventually his motions ceased and he seated himself.

He brooded.

He jumped up again, purposeful for the first time in days.

‘OK, sonny, point taken. So let’s talk about bait,’ he murmured to himself.

He rushed out of the room, suddenly moving as he had when Saul first saw him, sinuous and mysterious, fast and chaotic.

He passed quickly, silently through the layers of the earth, while Saul still struggled to find his bearings. King Rat emerged into a dark street. On the other side, figures passed in and out of the puddle of

CHINAMIÉVILLE lacklustre lamplight, keeping their eyes fixed in front of them.

He stood quite still, his hidden eyes twitching imperceptibly He looked around him. His eyes crawled up the wall before him. He stalked forward, one foot rising in a slow arch, curving back down to earth in an exaggerated parabola, his upper body bobbing slightly. He looked up, spread his arms wide, gripped the brick wall like a lover. Silently, he scaled the side of the building, his boots finding impossible purchase, his hands gripping invisible imperfections. He drew his hands back, contracting the muscles of his arms, fixing his attention on the dark below the eaves.

His arms uncoiled, shot out. Something fluttered desperately and a family of dirty pigeons burst from the shadow, disturbed from their sleep. They disappeared into the air behind him. He withdrew his hand and brought with it one of the birds, caught and held tight, its wings trying to stretch open, unable to escape him.

King Rat lowered his face towards his captive. It stopped struggling as he brought his face closer. He held it very tight to him, stared deep into its eye.

‘You don’t have Jack to fear from me, little cove,’ he hissed. The bird was still, waiting. ‘I want you to do me a favour. Go find your boss-man, spread the word. King Rat wants Loplop. Have him track me down.’

King Rat released his scout. It lurched into the air, wheeled and swept off over London. King Rat watched it go. When he couldn’t see it any more, he turned his back and disappeared into the dark city.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was the first time since his solo stroll along the Westway that Saul had been alone for so long. His ire was dwindling, threatening to snuff out, and he fed it carefully, maintained it. It gave him a righteous rush.

He wanted out of the claustrophobic sewers, wanted a taste of cold air. Judging by the ebb of water around his legs, the rain outside had let up. He wanted to emerge before it had fully dissipated.

Saul trusted to instinct in his rambles through the brick underworld. The rules of the sewers were different, the distinctions and boundaries between areas blurred. Above ground he knew where he was, and decided where he was going. Under the pavement he felt only a vague tugging to move from one part of the tunnel network to another, a buzzing of the troglodytic radar apparently lodged in his skull, and he would follow his nose. He did not know if he had visited any particular patch of sewer before; it was irrelevant. He knew it all. It was only the environs of the throne-room which were particular, and all roads in the underworld seemed to lead there eventually.

He ducked under low bricks, pushed his way through tight tunnels.

Saul heard the patter of feet around him, isolated squeals of excited rats. He saw a hundred little brown heads peeking from chinks in the bricks.

‘Hi, rats,’ he hissed as he moved.

Ahead of him he saw the ruined metal of a ladder, old and corroded, dribbling its constituent parts into the stream of rainwater. He grasped it, felt it crumble beneath him, scrambled up it before it disintegrated entirely. He pushed at the cover, to poke his head into Edgware Road.

It was the end of twilight. The street was busy with Lebanese patisseries, mini-cab firms and cut-price electrical repair shops, dirty video stores and clothing warehouses with hand-drawn signs advertising their wares. Saul looked over the top of a building site across the road. Away in the west the fringe of the sky was still a beautiful bright blue, shading to black. At the base of the skyline the edges of the buildings looked unnaturally sharp.

Saul slid gently through the hole in the pavement, nonchalant in the knowledge that he could move without being seen or heard, so long as he kept in the shadows, obeyed the rules. Subtly he oozed through the opening, waiting for a gap in the flow of pedestrians, arching his eyebrows, rolling out of the hole in the ground with the smell.

He reached back to replace the manhole cover, and heard a mass of hisses. Peering over the edge, Saul looked into the eyes of dozens of rats, perched precariously on the rotting ladder.

He regarded them. They gazed at him.

He grunted and pulled the cover over the opening, but not fully, leaving a slit of darkness, to which he put his mouth and whispered, ‘Meet me over by the bins.’

In a quick, odd motion Saul bobbed to his feet. He stuck his hands in his pockets, sauntered along the street past the clumps of people. They noticed him suddenly, moved aside and apart for him, frowning at his smell. Behind him a brown bolt shot out of the sewers, followed by another, then a sudden mass. One of the proprietors noticed and shrieked, and all attention focused on the manhole. By then the flow had almost finished and the rats had melted into the interstices of the city, made themselves invisible.

Saul continued walking at the same pace as the street erupted into pandemonium behind him. People snatched themselves away from the hole in the ground.

‘Who the fuck left that open?’ came one yell, along with a mass of Arabic.

Saul slid into the darkness at the edge of the street. The rats had disappeared now and public-spirited citizens were gingerly shoving the metal cover back into position. Saul turned slowly and leaned against a wall, ostentatious, if only for his own benefit. He inspected his nails.

A few feet away to his right was a mass of bins, some tumbling into each other and spilling bags, the whole smelling faintly of baklava, sullied of course by filth. There was a rustling from the bags. A honey-stained head poked up from the black plastic mass. More heads appeared around it.

‘Got yourself some food, then?’ hissed Saul out of the corner of his mouth. ‘That’s good.’

There was a faint screeching from the bins in reply.

A few feet away, in the world of the patisseries, those who had collaborated on resealing the sewers were laughing, unsettled. They were sharing cigarettes and looking around nervously, in case the rats came back.

Saul moved over to the dustbins.

‘Alright, squad,’ he said quietly. ‘Show me what you can do. First alley on the left, quick march, quiet as … mice? Fuck it, I suppose so. Rank yourselves nice for me.’

There was a sudden explosive burst and a hundred brown torpedoes bolted from cover. Saul watched as they disappeared up drains, behind walls, into the darkness which dribbled down from the eaves of the buildings, into the holes between bricks. The bins were suddenly vacant and still.

Saul turned slowly on one heel in a deliberate motion. He dragged his feet, picking them up, dropping them, walking ponderously along the street. He looked down at his chest as he moved. Saul was thinking.

He felt as if he had lost all capacity for urgency.

Saul wondered what he was trying to achieve. Was this revenge? Boredom? A dare?

He was becoming King Rat. Was he? Was that what he was doing? He was not sure at all. He had not asked the rats to follow him, but he wanted to see what he could do with them.

He was aware that he should fear the Piper, that he should think, form a plan, but he could not, not now. He felt untrustworthy, confused, full of betrayal. He would show King Rat. King Rat who had not chased him, not tried to stop him, not urged him to come back.

He did not know what he was about to do, he did not know where he would go, when he would return. But then the very emptiness he felt was a liberation. For a long time he had felt full of guilt about his father, full of his father’s disappointment. Then he had been full of King Rat, full of trepidation and amazement.

Now he was empty, all of a sudden. He felt very alone. He felt light, as if he might evade gravity with every step. As if he had pissed after a day holding it in, or had put down a massive burden he had forgotten he carried. He felt he could blow away in the wind, and he had to keep moving. And each movement, for the first time he could remember, the first time ever, was entirely his own.

There was a screaming from the alley just ahead of him, and he swore and rushed to the corner. He swung around the edge of brick and stared into the shadows. A few feet from the Edgware Road a young woman was lying in the delivery entrance of a shop. She had a dirty face and dirty brown hair. She sat huddled in a greasy blue sleeping-bag, pulling it up tight around her. Her face was shot through with horror, her mouth stretched as if it would split her cheeks. Her voice had run dry. She did not see Saul. She could not take her eyes from the wall before her.

A cascade of rats spewed and bubbled over the edge. The stream was almost soundless, marked only by a low white noise of scratching.

The sleeping-bag slipped slowly from the woman’s hands, and they stayed as they were, frozen, framing her face. Rats simmered around her, looked up at Saul, made sounds of supplication, sought approval. They parted as he strode towards the terror-stricken woman.

She did not look at him, still unable to look anywhere except at the deluge of scuttling bodies. There were more rats there than Saul had seen in the sewers. They had been joined by compatriots from the houses around them. Saul glanced up at them, then turned to the woman.

‘Hey, hey,’ he said gently, and kneeled before her. ‘Don’t panic, shhhhh …’

The woman’s eyes flickered briefly to him and she found her voice.

‘Oh my God do you see them they’re coming for me Jesus Christ …’

She spoke in a strangled screech. It sounded as if there were no air in her lungs, as if it were only fear that was giving her a voice.

Saul grabbed her face in both hands and forced her to look at him. Her eyes were green and open very wide.

‘Listen to me. You won’t understand this, but don’t worry. Shhh, shhh, these rats are mine. They won’t hurt you, do you understand?’

‘But the rats are here to get me and they’re going to get me and …’

‘Shut up!’ There was silence, for a second. ‘Now watch.’ Saul held her head still and slowly moved his aside, until the woman could see the rats which waited in the shadows and, as her eyes widened again and the muscles around her mouth went taut, Saul threw his head back briefly and hissed, ‘Disappear!’

There was a flurry of feet and tails. The rats vanished.

The alley was silent.

Bewilderment crept into the creases on the woman’s face. She looked from side to side as Saul moved away from her. She craned her neck and peered nervously around her. Saul sank to his haunches next to her, sat back against the door. He looked to his right and saw the lights of Edgware Road, only ten feet away. Again he thought: these things take place so close to the real city, and no one can see them. They take place ten feet away, somewhere in another world.

Next to him the woman turned. Her voice quivered.

‘How did you do that?’ She spoke too loudly still.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘They’re my rats. They’ll do what I tell them.’

‘Is it like a trick? Like trained rats? Don’t they scare you?’

As she spoke her eyes wavered from side to side. Her voice was unnaturally loud and abrupt. Her panic was over too quickly. She spoke to him as though she were a child. Saul suddenly understood that this woman was probably mentally ill.

Don’t treat her like a child, he thought warily. Don’t patronize her.

‘The rats don’t scare me, no,’ he said carefully. ‘I understand them.’

‘They frightened the shit out of me. I thought they were out to get me!’

‘Yeah, well I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know anyone was here when I sent them into the alley’

‘It’s amazing that you can do that, I mean make rats do what you want!’ She grinned quickly.

There was silence. Saul looked around him but the rats remained hidden. He turned back to his companion. Her eyes were darting around like flies.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Deborah.’

‘I’m Saul.’ They smiled at each other. ‘Now that you know the rats are mine,’ he said slowly, ‘would you still be scared of them?’

She looked at him questioningly Saul sighed for a long time. He did not know what would happen next. He did not really know what he was doing. He was enjoying his words, rolling every one around his mouth. It was the first time since meeting Kay that he had spoken to a human being. He revelled in every sentence. He did not want the conversation to end.

‘I mean, I could bring them out again.’

‘I don’t know, I mean, aren’t they dirty and stuff?’

‘Not my lot. And if I tell them not to, they won’t touch you.’

Deborah twisted her face up. She was grinning, a sickly frightened grin.

‘Oh you know I don’t know I mean I don’t know …’

‘Don’t be scared, now. Look. I’ll call them out, and show you they do what I want.’ He turned his head slightly. He could smell the rats. They waited just out of sight, quivering. ‘Heads up,’ he said firmly, ‘heads only.’

There was a stirring in the debris and a hundred little heads poked up, like seals in the waves, sleek skulls under greased-back fur.

Deborah shrieked and put her hand over her mouth. Her head shook, and Saul saw that she was laughing.

‘It’s amazing …’ she said through her fingers.

‘Down,’ said Saul, and the heads disappeared.

Deborah laughed delightedly.

‘How do you do it?’

‘They have to do what I say,’ said Saul. ‘I’m the boss, as far as they’re concerned. I’m their prince.’ She looked at him in consternation. Saul felt irresponsible. He wondered if he was damaging her further. What she needs is reality, he thought, but the realization came firmly to him that this was reality, whether anyone liked it or not. And he wanted to keep talking to her.

‘Are you hungry, Deborah?’ She nodded. ‘Well, why don’t I get you some food?’ He jumped up and crept into Edgware Road, returned some seconds later with two pastries, intricate things encrusted with pistachios and icing sugar, which he put in Deborah’s lap.

She bit into one, licked her lips. She was obviously hungry.

‘I was asleep,’ she said, honey muffling her voice. ‘I heard the rats in my sleep and they woke me up. Oh, it’s OK. I’m glad I’m awake. I wasn’t sleeping very well, actually, I was dreaming horrible things.’

‘Wasn’t waking to a plague of rats a horrible thing?’

She laughed jerkily.

‘Only at first,’ she said. ‘Now I know they do what you tell them I don’t mind so much. It’s very cold.’ She had finished the pastries. She had eaten very fast.

There was a faint scratching. The rats were becoming impatient. Saul barked a brief order to be quiet and the sound ceased. It feels so easy, he thought, so simple to take control like this. It didn’t even excite him.

‘Do you want to go to sleep, Deborah?’

‘What do you mean?’ Her voice was suddenly suspicious, even afraid. She almost whined in her trepidation, and bundled herself up into her sleeping-bag. Saul reached out to reassure her and she shrank away from him in horror and he realized with a sinking feeling that she had heard such a line before, but spoken with different intent.

Saul knew that the streets were brutal.

He wondered how often she had been raped.

He moved his hands away, held them up in surrender.

‘I’m sorry, Deborah, I didn’t mean anything. I’m just not tired. I’m lonely, and I thought we could go for a wander.’ She still looked at him with terrified eyes. ‘I won’t … I’ll go, if you want.’ He did not want to leave. ‘I want to show you around. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.’

‘I don’t know I don’t know what you want to do …’ she moaned.

‘Don’t you want to do something?’ he said desperately. ‘Aren’t you bored? I swear I won’t touch you, won’t do anything, I just want some company …’

He looked at her and saw her wavering. He put on a silly expression, a clownish sad face, sniffed theatrically, nauseating himself.

Deborah laughed nervously.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

‘Oh … OK …’ She looked pleased, even though nervous.

He grinned at her reassuringly.

He felt ill at ease, shockingly clumsy. Even the simplest mannerism cost him huge effort. He was relieved that he had not frightened her away.

‘I’ll take you up to the roofs, if you want, Deborah, and I’ll show you the quick way of getting around London on foot. Can I …’ He paused. ‘Can I bring the rats?’

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Bring them, bring the rats, she said, after a little persuasion. It was obvious that, despite her fear, she was fascinated. Saul gave a long whistle and the rats appeared again, eager to show willing.

He did not know how it was he commanded them. It seemed to make no difference what words he used, or if he whistled, or gave a brief shout. He could not think an order for it to be obeyed, he had to make a sound, but the rats seemed to understand him through an empathy, not through language. He invested the sound he made with the spirit of an order for it to be obeyed.

He made the rats line up in rows, to Deborah’s delight. He made them move forward and backwards. When he had shown off and made the rats ridiculous, taking away Deborah’s fear, she would even touch one. She stroked it nervously as Saul murmured deep in his throat, held the rat in thrall so it would not panic, bite or run.

‘No offence or anything, Saul, but you smell, you know,’ she said.

‘It’s where I live. Smell it again; it’s not as bad as you think at first.’

She leaned over and sniffed him, wrinkled up her nose and shook her head apologetically.

‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said.

When she had lost her fear he suggested that they move. She looked nervous again, but nodded.

‘Which way?’ she said.

‘Do you trust me?’ Saul said.

‘I think so …’

‘Then hold on to me. We’re going up, straight up the walls.’

She did not understand at first, and when she did she was terrified, refused to believe that Saul could carry her. He reached out to her gently, slowly so as not to intimidate her, and when he was sure she did not mind being touched, he lifted her easily, held her with his arms outstretched, feeling his muscles snap hard with rat-strength. She laughed delightedly.

He felt like a superhero.

Ratman, he thought as he held her. Doing good with his bizarre rat-powers. Helping the mentally ill. Carrying them around London faster than shit through a sewer. He sneered at himself.

‘See. I told you I could carry you. Let me put you on my back.’

‘Mnnnn …’ Deborah swung her face from side to side like a flattered child, smiling a little. ‘MnnnnOK.’

‘Great. Let’s go.’ The rats scampered a little closer, hearing the dynamism in Saul’s voice.

Deborah still looked at them nervously every time they moved, but she had forgotten most of her fear.

Saul bent down and offered her his back. She stepped out of the sleeping-bag.

‘Shall I take this?’ she said, and Saul shook his head.

‘Just hide it. I’ll bring you back here.’

Deborah gingerly clambered onto Saul’s back, and he was struck once again by the fact that it was only her tenuous grip on reality that meant she would do as he suggested. Approach most people with the offer to piggyback them across the roofs and he would not have met with such a willing response.

The irony, of course, being that she was right to trust him.

He rose to his feet and she shrieked as if she was on a fairground ride.

‘Gentle, gentle!’ she yelled, and he hissed at her to keep her voice down.

He strode into the passage, and all around him he heard the pattering of hundreds of rat feet. This is how I changed worlds, he thought, carried to my new city on the back of a rat. What goes around comes around.

He stopped below a window, its sill nine feet above the pavement.

‘See you up top,’ he hissed at the rats, who disappeared in a flurry, as before. He heard the scrape of claws on brick.

Saul jumped up and grasped the window, and Deborah shouted, a yell which did not die away but ballooned in terror as her fingers fought for purchase on his back. His feet swung above the ground, the toes of his prison-issue shoes scraping the wall.

He called for her to shut up, but she would not, and words began to form in her protest.

‘Stopstopstop,’ she wailed and Saul, mindful of discovery, hauled himself at speed up into the space by the window, flattened himself against the glass, reached up again, determined to pull Deborah out of earshot before she could order him down.

He scrambled up the building. Not yet as fast as King Rat, but so smooth, he thought to himself as he climbed. Terror had stopped Deborah’s voice. I know that feeling, thought Saul, and smiled. He would bring this to a close as fast as he could.

Her weight on his back was only a minor irritation. This was not a hard wall to climb. It was festooned with windows and cracks and protuberances and drainpipes. But Saul knew that to Deborah it was just so much unbreachable brick. This building had a flat roof contained by rails, one of which he grasped now and tugged at, raising himself and his cargo up onto the skyline.

He deposited Deborah on the concrete. She clawed at it, her breath ragged.

‘Oh now, Deborah, I’m sorry to scare you,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me if I told you what I was going to do, but I swear to you, you were safe, always. I wouldn’t put you in danger.’

She mumbled incoherently. He dropped to her side and gently put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched and turned to him. He was surprised at her face. She was quivering, but she did not look horrified.

‘How can you do that?’ she breathed. All around them on the roof the concrete began to swarm with rats, struggling to prove their eager devotion. Saul picked Deborah off her side and put her on her feet. He tugged at her sleeve. She did not take her eyes from him but allowed herself to be pulled over to the railing around the roof. The light was entirely leached from the sky by now.

They were not so very high; all around them hotels and apartment blocks looked down on them, and they looked down on as many again. They stood at the midpoint of the undulations in the skyline. Black tangles of branches poked into their field of vision, over in Regent’s Park. The graffiti were thinner up here, but not dissipated. Here and there extravagant tags marked the sides of buildings, badges pinned in the most inaccessible places. I’m not the first to be here, thought Saul, and the others weren’t rats. He admired them hugely, their idiot territorial bravery. To scale that wall and spray BOOMBOY!!! just there, where the bricks ran out, that was a courageous act. It’s not brave of me, he thought. I know I can do it, I’m a rat.

Deborah was looking at him. From time to time her eyes flitted away towards the view, but it was him she was conscious of. She looked at him with amazement. He looked back at her. He was awash with gratitude. It was so good, so nice to talk to someone who was not a rat, or a bird, or a spider.

‘It must be amazing to be able to do what all the rats do,’ she said, studying their massed ranks. They stood a little way behind, quiet and attentive, fidgeting a little when unobserved but hushing when Saul turned to gaze at them.

Saul laughed at what she said.

‘Amazing? I don’t fucking think so.’ He could not resist bitching, even though she would not understand. ‘Let me tell you about rats,’ he said. ‘Rats do nothing. All day. They eat any old crap they can find, run around pissing against walls, they shag occasionally – or so I’m led to believe – and they fight over who gets to sleep in which patch of sewer. Sure, they think they’re the reason the world was invented. But they’re nothing.’

‘Sounds like people!’ said Deborah and laughed delightedly as if she had said something clever. She repeated it.

‘They’re nothing like people,’ Saul said quietly. ‘That’s a tired old myth.’ He asked her about herself and she was vague about her situation. She would not explain her homelessness, muttering darkly about not being able to handle something. Saul felt guilty but he was not that interested. Not that he did not care: he did, he was appalled at her state and, even alienated from her city as he was, he felt the old fury against the government so assiduously trained into him by his father. He cared deeply. But at that moment he wanted to talk to her not for herself particularly but because she was a person. Any person. As long as she kept talking and listening, he was not concerned about what she might say. And he asked her about herself because he was hungry for her company.

He heard a sudden sound of flapping, something like heavy cloth. He felt a brief gust of wind in his face. He looked up, but there was nothing.

‘I tell you what,’ he said. ‘Never mind rats being amazing. Do you want to come back to my house?’

She wrinkled her nose again.

‘The one that smells like that?’

‘No. I was thinking of going back to my real place for a bit.’ He sounded calm, but his breath came short and fast at the thought of returning. Something in her remarks about rats had reminded him of where he came from. Cut off from King Rat, he wanted to return, touch base.

He missed his dad.

Deborah was happy to visit his house. Saul put her on his back again and set off, with the rats in tow, across the face of London, across a terrain that had quickly become familiar to him.

Sometimes Deborah buried her face in his shoulder, sometimes she leaned back alarmingly and laughed. Saul shifted with her to maintain his balance.

His progress was not as rapid as King Rat’s or Anansi’s, but he moved fast. He stayed high, loath to touch the ground, a vague rule he remembered from a children’s game. Sometimes the platform of roofs stopped short and he had no option but to plunge down the brick, by fire escape or drain or broken wall, and scurry across a short space of pavement before scrambling up above the streets again.

Everywhere around him he heard the sound of the rats. They kept up with him, moving by their own routes, disappearing and reappearing, boiling in and out of his field of vision, anticipating him and following him. There was something else, a presence he was vaguely aware of: the source of that flapping sound. Time and again he sensed it, a faint flurry of wind or wings brushing his face. His momentum was up and he did not stop, but he nursed the vague sense that something kept up with him.

Periodically he would pause for breath and look around him. His passage was quick. He followed a map of lights, keeping parallel to Edgware Road, shadowing it as it became Maida Vale. He followed the route of the 98 bus, passed landmarks he knew well, like the tower with an integument of red girders which jutted out above its roof, making a cage.

The buildings around them began to level out; the spaces between towers grew larger. Saul knew where they were: in the stretch of deceptively suburban housing just before Kilburn High Road. Terra cognita, thought Saul. Home ground.

He crossed to the other side of the road so fast that Deborah was hardly aware of it. Saul took off into the dark between main roads, bridging the gap between Kilburn and Willesden, eager to return home.

They stood before Terragon Mansions. Saul was afraid.

He felt fraught, short of breath. He listened to the stillness, realized that the escort of rats had evaporated soundlessly. He was alone with Deborah.

His eyes crawled up the dull brick, weaving between windows, many now dark, a few lit behind net curtains. There at the top, the hole through which his father had plummeted. Still not fixed, pending more police investigation, he supposed, though now the absence was disguised by transparent plastic sheets. The tiny fringe of ragged glass was still just visible in the window-frame.

‘I had to leave here in a hurry,’ he whispered to Deborah. ‘My dad fell out of that window and they reckon I pushed him.’

She gazed at him in horror.

‘Did you?’ she squeaked, but his face silenced her.

He walked quietly to the front door. She stood behind him, hugging herself against the chill, looking nervously about. He caressed the door, effortlessly and silently slipping the lock. Saul wandered onto the stairs. His feet made no sound. He moved as if dazed. Behind him came Deborah, in fits and starts, her ebullience gone with his. She dragged her feet as if she were whining, but she made no sound.

The door to his apartment was criss-crossed with blue tape. Saul stared at it and considered how it made him feel. Not violated or outraged, as he would have supposed. He felt oddly reassured, as if this tape secured his house from outsiders, sealing it like a time capsule.

He tugged gently at it. It came away in his hand, airy and ineffectual, as if it had been waiting for him, eager to give itself up. He pushed the door open and stepped into the darkness where his father had died.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It was cold, as cold as the night when the police had arrived. He did not turn on the lights. What filtered up from the streets was enough for him. He did not waste time, pushed open the door of the sitting-room and entered.

The room was bare, had been stripped of possessions, but he noticed that only in passing. He stared at the jagged window full on. He dared it to unsettle him, to sap his strength. It was just a hole, he thought, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it just a hole? The plastic billowed back and forth with a noise like whips cracking.

‘Saul, I’m scared …’

He realized belatedly that Deborah could hardly see. She stood at the threshold to the room, hesitant. He knew what she could see, his obscure form against the dark orange of the distant streetlamps. Saul shook himself in anger. He had been using her with such ease he had forgotten that she was real. He strode across the room and hugged her.

He wrapped himself around her with an affection she poured back into him. It was not sexual, though he sensed that she expected it to be, and might not have minded. But he would have felt manipulative and foul and he liked her and pitied her and was so, so grateful to her. They held each other and he realized that he was trembling as much as she. Not all rat yet, then, he thought ruefully. She’s afraid of the dark, he thought. What’s my excuse?

There was a book in the middle of the floor.

He saw it suddenly over her shoulder. She felt him stiffen and nearly shrieked in terror, twisting to see whatever had shocked him. He hurriedly hushed her, apologized. She could not see the book in the dark.

It was the only thing in the room. There was no furniture, no pictures, no telephone, no other books, only that.

It was not coincidence, Saul thought. They had not missed that when they cleared out the flat. Saul recognized it. An ancient, very fat red-bound A4 notebook, with snatches of paper bursting from its pages; it was his father’s scrapbook.

It had appeared regularly throughout Saul’s life. Every so often his father would drag it out from wherever he hid it and carefully cut some article from the paper, murmuring. He would glue it into the book, and as often as not write in red biro in the margin. At other times there was no article at all; he would just write. Often Saul knew these bouts were brought on by some political occurrence, something his father wanted to record his pontifications on, but at other times there was no spur that Saul could fathom.

When he was little the book had fascinated him, and he had wanted to read it. His father would let him see some things, articles on wars and strikes, and the neat red notes surrounding them. But it was a private book, he explained, and he would not let Saul examine it all. Some of it’s personal, he explained patiently. Some of it’s private. Some of it’s just for me.

Saul removed himself from Deborah and picked it up. He opened it from the back. Amazingly, there were still a very few pages not yet full. He flicked backwards slowly, coming to the last page that his father had filled. A light-hearted story from the local paper about a Conservative Party fundraising event which had suffered a catalogue of disaster: failing electricity, a double booking and food poisoning. Next to it, in his father’s carefully printed letters, Saul read, ‘There is a God after all!!!’

Before that, a story about the long-running strike at the Liverpool docks, and in his father’s hand: ‘A morsel of information breaches the carefully maintained Wall of Silence! Why the TUC so ineffectual?!’

Saul turned the page backwards, grinned delightedly as he realized that his father had been pondering his Desert Island Discs selection. At the top of the page was a list of old Jazz tunes, all with careful question-marks, and below was the tentative list. ‘One: Ella Fitzgerald. Which one??? Two: “Strange

Fruit”. Three: “All The Time In The World”, Satchmo. Four: Sarah Vaughan, “Lullaby of Birdland”. Five: Thelonius? Basie? Six: Bessie Smith. Seven: Armstrong again, “Mack the Knife”. Eight: “Internationale”. Why Not? Books: Shakespeare, don’t want the Bloody Bible! Capital? Com. Manifesto? Luxury: Telescope? Microscope?’

Deborah knelt beside Saul.

‘This was my dad’s notebook,’ he explained. ‘Look, it’s really sweet …’

‘How come it’s here?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said after a pause. He kept turning the pages as he spoke, past more cuttings, mostly political, but here and there simply something which had caught his father’s eye.

He saw small tales about Egyptian tomb-robbers, giant trees in New Zealand, the growth of the Internet.

Saul began to pull back clumps of pages now, going back years at a time. There was more writing in the earlier years.

7/7/88: Trade Unions. Must read old arguments! Had a long argument with David at work about Union today. He going on and on about ineffectual and etc. etc. and I rather letting myself down, just seemed to sit there saying Yes but solidarity vital! He wasn’t having any of it. Must reread Engels on Trade Unions. Have vague memories of being rather impressed but could be fooling myself. Saul still very sulky. Don’t know what’s going on there at all. Remember seeing book about Teenagers and Problems, though can’t remember where. Must track it down.

Saul felt awash with the same hopeless love he had felt when he had shown Fabian the book his father had bought him. He was going about it all wrong, the old man, but all he wanted to do was understand. Maybe there was no right way to do it. I was wrong too, he thought.

Back, back, he moved through the years. Deborah cuddled into him for warmth.

He read about the time his father had had an argument with one of his history teachers over the best way to present Cromwell.

No, fair enough, maybe can’t be talking about Bourgeoisie to group of ten-year-olds but shouldn’t be glossing over him! Terrible man, yes (Ireland, and etc. etc.) but must make clear nature of Revolution!

He read a reference to one of his father’s girlfriends – ‘M.’ He could not remember her at all. He knew his father had kept such affairs out of the house. He did not think his father had had any romantic involvement at all in the last six or seven years of his life.

He read about his own fifth birthday party. He remembered it: he had been given two Indian headdresses, and in retrospect a thrill of worry had passed around the adults, concerned at his reaction, but he had been elated. To have not one but two of the beautiful feathered things … He remembered the joy. Saul was seeking the first reference to himself, maybe a mention of his dead mother, who had been carefully excised from his father’s ruminations. A date caught his eye: 8/2/72, the only entry from the year of his birth, the birth itself apparently not recorded. There was no cutting attached to the entry. Saul’s brow furrowed as he read the first few words.

We are a few weeks on now from the attack, which I don’t really want to talk about. E. is very strong, Thank God. Many fears, of course, alleys and etc. etc., but overall she is getting better daily. Kept asking her was she sure, I thought we should go to the Police. Don’t you want him caught? I asked her and she said No I just don’t want to see him again. Can’t help thinking this is a mistake but it must be her decision of course. Am trying to be what she needs but God Knows it is hard. Worst at night, of course. Don’t know whether better to comfort/cuddle or not touch and she doesn’t seem to know either. Definitely the worst times, tears etc. Am beating about the bush. Fact is, E. had test and is pregnant. Can’t be sure of course but have looked at timing carefully and looks very likely that it is his. Discussed abortion but E. can’t face it. So after long hard talks have decided to go ahead. No record, so no one need know. Hope everything turns out alright. I’ll admit, I’m afraid for child. Haven’t yet worked out my own reaction. Must be strong for E.’s sake.

Saul’s chest had gone quite hollow.

Somewhere Deborah was saying something to him.

Oh, he felt stupid.

He saw what he had lost.

Stupid, stupid boy, he thought, and at the same time he was thinking: You needn’t have worried, Dad. You were strong as fuck.

Tears came cold to his eyes and he heard Deborah again.

Look at what you lost, he thought. She died! he thought suddenly. She died, and still he did right by me. How could he? I killed her, I killed his wife! Every time he looked at me, wasn’t he looking at the rape? Wasn’t he looking at the thing that killed his wife?

Stupid boy, he thought. Uncle Rat? When were you going to think that one through? he thought.

But more than anything he could not stop wondering at the man who had raised him, had tried to understand him, and had given him books to help him understand the world. Because when he had looked at Saul, somehow he did not see murder, or his lost wife, or the brutality in the alley (and Saul knew just how that attacker had appeared, as if from nowhere, out of the bricks, as he himself moved). Somehow, when he looked at Saul he looked at his son, and even when the air between them had poisoned and Saul had exercised all his studied teenage insouciance not to care, the fat man had still looked at him and seen his son, and had tried to understand what was wrong between them. He had had no truck with the awful, bloody vulgarity of genes. He had built fatherhood with his actions.

Saul did not sob, but his cheeks were wet. Wasn’t it odd and sad, he thought a little hysterically, that it was only on learning that his father was not his father, that he realized how completely his father he had been?

There’s a dialectic for you, Dad, he thought, and grinned fleetingly.

It was only in losing him that he regained him, finally, after so many dry years.

He remembered being carried on those broad shoulders to see his mother’s stone. He had killed her, he had killed his father’s wife, and his father had set him down gently and given him flowers to put on her grave. He wept for his father, who had been given his wife’s murderer, the child of her rapist, and who had decided to love him dearly, and had set out to do it, and had succeeded.

And somewhere he kept telling himself how stupid a boy he was. A new thought was occurring to him. If King Rat lied about this, he reflected, and the thought trailed off like a sequence of dots …

If he lied about this, the thought said, what else did he lie about?

Who killed Dad?

He remembered something King Rat had said, a long time ago, at the end of Saul’s first life. ‘I’m the intruder,’ he had said. ‘I killed the usurper.’

In the succession of words the sense had been drowned, had been another surreal boast, a crowing, bullish aggrandizement without meaning. But Saul could see differently now. A cold stone of fury settled in his gut and he realized how much he hated King Rat.

His father, King Rat.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The door to the flat opened.

Saul and Deborah had been huddled together on the floor, she murmuring nervous words of support. They looked up at the same moment, at the gentle creak of hinges.

Saul scrambled silently to his feet. He was still clutching the book. Deborah rocked herself, tried to rise. A face peered around the rim of the door.

Deborah clung to Saul and gave a tiny whimper of fear. Saul was primed like an explosive, but as his eyes made light of the darkness his tension ebbed a little, and he stood confused.

The face in the doorway was beaming delightedly, long blond hair falling in untidy clumps around a mouth stretched wide in childish joy. The man stepped forward into the room. He looked like a buffoon.

‘I thought I heard someone, I thought so!’ he exclaimed. Saul straightened a little more, his brow furrowed. ‘I’ve been waiting here night after night, saying no, go home, it’s ridiculous, he won’t come here, of all places, and now here you are!’ He glanced at the book in Saul’s hand. ‘You found my reading material, then. I wanted to know all about you. I thought that might tell me a bit.’

He looked a little closer at Saul’s red eyes and his own face widened.

‘You didn’t know, did you?’ His smile of pleasure was broader than ever. ‘Well. That does explain a few things. I thought you were rather quick to join your so-called father’s murderer.’ Saul’s eyes flickered. Of course, he thought, giddy with grief, of course. The man was eyeing him. ‘I thought blood must have been thicker than water but, of course, why on Earth should he have told you?’ He rocked back on his heels, stuck his hands in his pockets.

‘I’ve needed to talk to you for a long time. The rumours have been flying about you, you know! You’ve been famous for years! So many places, so many leads, so many possibilities … I’ve been all over, chasing impossible crime … You know, any time I heard about some weird break-in, some murder, something that doesn’t fit the bill, something people couldn’t have done, I’d run to investigate. The police can be very helpful with information.’ He grinned. ‘So many dead ends! And then I came here …’ The man grinned again. ‘I could just smell him, and I knew I’d found you, Saul.’

‘Who are you?’ Saul finally breathed.

The man smiled pleasantly at him but did not answer. He seemed to see Deborah for the first time.

‘Hi! My God, what a night you must be having!’ He strolled forward as he laughed. Deborah clung still to Saul. She gazed at the man with guarded eyes. ‘Anyway,’ he continued easily, reaching out his hand towards her, ‘I’m afraid I’m not interested in you.’

He snatched her wrist and wrenched her out of Saul’s grasp. Too late, Saul realized that the urbane man had taken her, his head moved slowly down to look where she had been even as his mind screamed at him to look up, to move.

He dragged his head up through the thick air.

He saw the man close his left hand in Deborah’s hair, Saul reached out in horror, determined to intervene, but the man who was still smiling broadly glanced down at her briefly and sent his other fist slamming into the underside of her chin just as she opened her mouth to scream, and the impact split the skin and bone of her jaw and snapped her mouth closed so fast that blood spurted out from between her lips where she bit deep into her tongue. The scream died before it appeared, mutating into a wet exhalation. Even as Saul’s slow, slow feet took him towards her the man swivelled on his toes and pulled her body around from the nape of the neck where he held her, built up momentum, spun fast and buried her face in the side of the door-frame.

He released her and turned back to Saul.

Saul shrieked in anguish and disbelief, stared past the man at Deborah’s carcass, which slid down the door-frame and tumbled back into the room. It was twitching as nerve endings died. Her flattened and distorted face stared blindly up at Saul as she danced in a posthumous fit, her heels pattering on the floor like a monsoon, blood and air bubbling out of her exploded mouth.

Saul bellowed and flung himself at the man with all his rat-strength.

‘I’ll eat your fucking heart!’ he screamed.

The tall man sidestepped the flurry of blows easily, still grinning broadly. He pulled his fist back leisurely and sent it into Saul’s face.

Saul saw the blow coming and moved away from it, but he was not fast enough and it snapped into the side of his skull, sending him reeling. He spun round, hit the floor hard. A shrill sound hurt his head. He turned to look at the man, who stood with his lips pursed, whistling a jaunty, repetitive air. He glared at Saul and his eyes flickered dangerously. Without pause, the tune he was whistling changed, became less organized, more insidious. Saul ignored him, tried to crawl away. The whistling stopped short.

‘So it’s true,’ the Piper hissed, and his urbane voice had metamorphosed into something unstable. He looked as if he was about to be sick, and he looked enraged. ‘Dammit, neither man nor rat, can’t shift you. How dare you how dare you …’ His eyes were wild and sick-looking.

‘I can’t believe how stupid you are coming here, rat-boy,’ said the Piper as he approached him. He shook with effort and his voice righted itself. ‘Now I’m going to kill you and string your body up in the sewers for your father to find, and then I’m going to play for him and make him dance and dance, and eventually when he’s really tired I’m going to kill him.’

Saul pulled himself up, stumbled out of his way, sent a lumbering kick at the Piper’s balls. The Piper grabbed his foot, pulled up very fast, sending him thumping onto his back and pushing the wind out of him. All the while he kept talking, amiable and animated.

‘I’m the Lord of the Dance, I’m the Voice, and when I say jump, people jump. Except you. And I have you here about to die. You’re a fucking abortion. If you don’t dance to my tune, you don’t belong in this world. Twenty-five years in the planning, and here’s the rat’s secret weapon, the supergun, the half-and-half.’ He shook his head and wrinkled his nose sympathetically. He kneeled next to Saul who struggled for breath, tried to hold his head up.

‘I’m going to kill you now.’

A high-pitched screech made them both look up. Something burst the plastic sheet shrouding the window with an improbable pop, shot through the tattered window of the flat, a figure, careering through the air towards the Piper, shoving into his body with an impact that took him flying away from Saul’s supine body. Saul struggled up, saw an immaculately suited man trying to strangle the Piper, who convulsed, sending his adversary flying back across the room.

It was Loplop, with terror in his eyes, screaming at Saul to come on, grabbing him and running for the window, until a short clear sound stopped him cold. Saul turned and saw the Piper’s puckered lips as he rose, whistling. A liquid tune, repetitive and simple. Loplop was stiff. Saul saw a look of wonder cross his face as he turned to face the Piper, his eyes alive and ecstatic.

Saul backed away, felt the wall behind him. He could see Deborah’s corpse behind Loplop, see the stain of blood oozing liberally onto the floor. To his left was the Piper, moving forward now, still whistling. Before him was Loplop, stepping towards him, his eyes not seeing, his arms outstretched, his feet moving in rhythm to the Piper’s bird song.

Saul tried to get past Loplop, could not, felt his throat underneath those fingers. The Bird Superior fell on him and began to squeeze the air out of him, all the while holding his own entranced face up to catch the music. He was not heavy but his body was as stiff as metal. Saul beat at him, twisted, tugged at his fingers. Loplop was impervious, unaware. As blackness began to creep in at the edges of his vision, Saul saw the Piper in the corner of the room, rubbing his throat, and the rage pushed blood back into Saul’s face, even past Loplop’s cruel talons, and he spread his arms wide, cupped his hands exactly as his father had warned him not to in the swimming pool, even if you’re just playing, Saul, and he slammed his hands down, clapping with all his strength, around Loplop’s ears.

Loplop shrieked and snapped up, arcing his back, his hands quivering. Saul’s rat-strength had driven air deep into those aural cavities, shattering the delicate membranes and sending bubbles rushing in like acid through the ruptured flesh. Loplop shook in agony.

Saul rolled out from under him. The Piper was upon him again, and he wielded the flute like a club. Saul could only roll a little out of his way and feel it crush his shoulder rather than his face. He dodged again and this time his chest was struck, and the pain took his breath away.

Behind him Loplop stumbled away from the wall, fumbled blindly, as if his other senses had gone with his hearing.

The Piper gripped the flute in both hands, straddled Saul and pinned his arms to the floor with his knees, raised the flute like a ceremonial dagger, ready to drive the stubby object into Saul’s chest. Saul screamed in terror.

Loplop still shrieked, and his voice mixed with Saul’s. The dissonance made the air shake and something in the vibrations made Loplop turn and kick the flute from the Piper’s clenched hands. The Piper bellowed in rage and reached for it. Loplop pulled Saul from under the tall man’s legs, and hauled him to the window. Still Loplop shrieked, and the sound did not stop as he leapt onto the sill of the ruined window. He was still shrieking as he grabbed Saul with his right hand and stepped out into darkness.

Saul could not hear his own despairing yell through Loplop’s incessant keening. He closed his eyes and felt air swirl around him, waited for the ground, which did not come. He opened his eyes a little and saw a confusion of lights, moving very fast. He was falling still … the only sound was Loplop’s wail.

He opened his eyes fully and he saw that the constriction around his chest was not terror but Loplop’s legs, and that the ground was shooting not towards him but parallel to him, and that he was not falling but flying.

His head faced backwards, so he could not see Loplop as they flew. The Bird Superior’s legs, elegant in Savile Row tailory, wrapped around him below his armpits. Terragon Mansions receded behind them. Saul saw a thin figure standing in the punctured plastic shadow of his father’s flat, somehow heard a faint whistling over Loplop’s cries.

In Willesden’s dirty darkness the trees were obscure, a tangle of fractal silhouettes from which there now burst pigeons and sparrows and starlings, startled out of their sleep by the compulsion of the Piper’s spell. They swirled like rubbish for a moment, and then their movements became as precise and sudden as a mathematical simulation.

They converged on the Piper, imploding from all sectors of the sky towards his hunched shoulders, and then en masse they rose again, suddenly clumsy, trying to fly in concert, dragging the Piper’s body through the air with them.

‘The fucker’s following us!’ Saul screeched in fright. He realized as he spoke that Loplop could not hear him, that all that stopped Loplop from joining his subjects in transporting the Piper was the fact that Saul had deafened him.

Saul rocked alarmingly in Loplop’s tight embrace. The streets lurched below them. They oscillated uncertainly between the skies and the freezing earth. Loplop’s wails were now turning to moans; he crooned to comfort himself. Behind them a writhing clot of birds dragged the Piper through the air after them. As birds fell away, exhausted or crushed, others rushed to their place, dug their claws into the Piper’s clothes and flesh, pulling against each other, bearing him on in a butterfly’s drunken rush.

The Piper was gaining on them.

The moon glinted briefly on water and railway tracks far below. Loplop began to spiral out of the sky.

Saul shook the legs that held him, shouted at him to continue, but Loplop was close to fainting, and the screaming in his head was all he could hear. Saul caught glimpses of a vast roadway and an undulating red plain below them, but they were snatched from his field of vision as Loplop’s body spun. The Piper was closing in, shedding his entourage like a ragged man shedding clothes.

They fell. Saul caught glimpses of a network of railtracks spreading out like a fan, and then that red field again, the tight-packed roofs of a hundred red buses. They were spiralling towards Westbourne Park station, where bus routes and railways converged on a hill, under the yawning gloom of the Westway.

They swept into that shade and crashed to the ground. Saul was thrown from Loplop’s grasp. He rolled over and over, came to a stop, covered in dust and dirt. Loplop lay some feet away, hunched up in a strange position, his arms wrapped around his head, his arse thrust into the air, his knees on the ground.

They were beside the dark entrance to the bus terminus. A little way off was the yard, full of the buses Saul had seen from the air. In the cavernous building before him were hundreds more. They were packed tight, an intricate puzzle set up and solved day after day; there was a strict order in which they could leave the garage. Each was surrounded by its fellows, no more than two feet away on any side, a maze of the ridiculous-looking vehicles.

Loplop’s suit was muddy and ruined.

Moving unsteadily through the sky came the Piper. Saul stumbled across the threshold into the vaulted chamber, dragging Loplop behind him. He ducked out of sight behind the nearest bus, which constituted one of the red labyrinth’s external walls. He shook Loplop’s leg, pulled him towards him. Loplop flopped a little and lay still. He breathed heavily. Saul looked around frantically. He could hear the storm of wings which heralded the Piper’s arrival, and above it the thin whistle of the Lord of the Dance himself. There was a gust of air as the Piper was swept down into the cold hall, spewing feathers in his wake.

The whistling stopped. Instantly the birds dispersed in panic, and Saul heard a thud as the Piper landed on the roof of a nearby vehicle. For a minute, there was no sound apart from the escaping birds, then footsteps approached across the buses’ roofs.

Saul let go of Loplop’s legs and flattened himself against the bus beside him. He crawled sidewise, striving for quietness. He felt feral instincts awaken in him. He was dead silent.

The bus was an old Routemaster, with an open platform at the back. Saul made his way silently into this opening, as the footsteps above him grew nearer. They moved slowly, up and down over the roofs, punctuated by little leaps as the Piper crossed the ravine between two vehicles.

Saul backed slowly up the stairs without a sound as the footsteps approached. Then again there was a jump, and the landing made him shudder with the vibration as the Piper leapt onto Saul’s bus and strode across its roof.

The bus was in darkness. Saul moved backwards continually, his hands reaching out to touch the rows of seats on either side. He grasped the steel poles as if the bus was moving, steadying himself. His mouth hung open stupidly. He gazed at the ceiling, his eyes following the steps above. They crossed in a long diagonal, towards where he and Loplop had landed. Then they reached the edge and Saul’s heart lurched into his mouth as the Piper’s body flew past a window on his left. He froze, but nothing happened. The Piper had not seen him. Saul crouched silently, crept forward, came up from underneath the window-frame, pushed just enough of his head into the open to see, his hands framing his face, his eyes big, like a Chad graffitied on a wall.

Below him, the Piper was leaning over Loplop. He was touching him with one hand, his stance like a concerned bystander who finds someone sitting in the street and crying. The Piper’s clothes were shredded from all the tiny bird claws, and they ran red.

Saul waited. But the Piper did not attack Loplop, just left him in his misery and bloody silence. He stood and slowly turned. Saul ducked down and held himself quite still. His mind suddenly began to replay the grotesque two-step he had seen the Piper perform with Deborah and he felt weak and enraged, and disgusted with himself, and scared. He breathed fast and urgent, with his face down on his knees, hunched on the top floor of the bus, in the dark.

And then he heard a whistling, and it came from the passenger entrance below. He felt the enormous welling of energy in his arms and legs that fear gave him.

The Piper’s voice called up to him, as amiable and relaxed as ever.

‘Don’t forget I can smell you, little ratling.’ Feet began to mount the stairs and Saul scuttled backwards towards the front of the bus. ‘What, do you think you can live and sleep and eat in a sewer and I wouldn’t smell you? Honestly, Saul …’

A dark figure appeared at the top of the stairs.

Saul rose to his feet.

‘I’m the Lord of the Dance, Saul. You still don’t get it, do you? You really think you’re going to get away from me? You’re dead, Saul, because you just will not dance to my tune.’

There was fury in his voice as he said that. The Piper stepped forward, and the weak light of the garage hit him. It was enough for Saul’s rat eyes.

The Piper’s face was a ghastly white, ruthlessly stripped of colour. His hair had been tugged from its neat ponytail by a thousand frantic little claws, and it swept around his face and under his chin and around his throat as if it would strangle him. His clothes were pulled and stripped and tugged and unravelled and stretched in all directions, a collectivity of tiny injuries, and everywhere blood spattered him, streaked his milky face. His expression belied his ruined skin. He stared at Saul with the same relaxed, amiable gaze he had first levelled, the same banal cheerfulness with which he had greeted Saul, dispatched Deborah, the calm which had only disappeared for one moment when he could not make Saul dance.

‘Saul,’ he said, in greeting, and held out his hands.

He walked forward.

‘I’m not a sadist, Saul,’ he said, smiling. He held out his hand as he walked, and when it touched one of the steel poles that rose between seat and ceiling, he gripped it, then grasped it with his other hand. He began to twist it, his body straining and shaking violently with the effort, and the steel slowly bent and tried to stretch, snapped loudly. He did not take his eyes from Saul, nor did his expression change, even as he strained. He yanked at the broken end and the pole broke again, came away in his hand, a twisted cudgel of shining metal.

‘I’m not eager to hurt you,’ he continued, resuming his pace. ‘But you are going to die, because you won’t dance when I tell you to. So you’re going to die now.’ The slender club swung down with a flash like an electric arc, and Saul hissed as he saw it move, jerked under the shining thing with a rodent’s nervous grace. The club tore great gouts of stuffing into the air as it eviscerated a seat with its ragged tip.

The Piper’s strength was awesome and unstoppable, dwarfing the tight rat muscles that reclaimed food had awoken in Saul, his new power that he was so proud of. He rolled away from the club and scuttled backwards to the front end of the bus. He thought of Deborah and rage choked him. His rat-side and his humanity oscillated violently, buffeted by the great storm of his anger. He wanted to bite out the Piper’s throat and then he wanted to beat him, to smash his head, pummel him methodically with his fists and then he wanted to claw at his stomach, he wanted to gut him with his sharp claws. And he could do none of these things, because he was not strong enough, and the Piper would kill him.

The Piper straightened a little, paused and grinned at Saul. ‘Enough,’ he said and lunged straight forward, his weapon held like a spear. Saul screeched in fear and rage and frustration as his bestial reflexes carried him to the side of the brutal thrust.

There was no way past the Piper, that was clear as he jumped, and he pulled his legs up tight under him and brought them down on the seat beside him, and he drove them up again like pistons, kicking hard away from the seat, out to the side, punching at the glass next to him, stretching his body out like a diver, feeling the window fall around him in a million pieces, taking bits of his skin with it as it fell.

He flew through the air between the bus and its neighbour, another of the same route, that had preceded it into the maze. Saul’s body passed fifteen feet above the ground, and then another wall of glass disintegrated under his ferocious rat fists and his arms and shoulders disappeared into the next bus before his feet had even left the last one, and the explosive collapse of the first window, still loud in his ears, segued into the next, and he was through, rolling off the seat, glass shards showering him like confetti.

He could still hear a spattering sound from outside, as little nuggets of glass hit the ground. He stood, shaking, ignored his ripped skin and deep bruises. He ran for the stairs at the back of the bus. From behind him he heard a strange sound, a roar of irritation, exasperation raised to the point of rage. There was a further loud crashing, and in the curved mirror at the top of the stairs he saw another window shatter, saw the Piper burst the glass feet-first and land sitting on a seat, his head craned to watch Saul. He swung up immediately, no more talk, and raced after Saul.

Saul careened down the stairs and out of the rear of the bus, running through the dark alleys between the sides of the great red vehicles, losing himself in the maze. He stopped, crouching, and held his breath.

From a way away he heard feet running, and a voice shouting, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Oh Christ, thought Saul. The fucking guard. Saul’s heart was beating like a Jungle bassline.

He could hear the guard’s leaden steps somewhere close by, and he could clearly hear the man’s wheezing and panting. Saul stood quite still, tried to listen beyond the sounds of the guard, to hear any movement the Piper might make.

There was nothing.

An overweight, middle-aged man in a grey uniform emerged suddenly into the gap between buses in which Saul stood. The two men stood still for a moment, gazing stupidly at each other. They moved simultaneously. The guard approached with a truncheon raised, opened his mouth to shout, but Saul was on him, underneath the sluggish truncheon, pushing it out of his opponent’s hand. He pinned the man’s arm behind him, held his mouth closed and hissed in his ear.

‘There is a very bad man in here. He will kill you. Leave right now.’

The guard’s eyes were blinking violently.

‘Do you understand?’ hissed Saul.

The guard nodded vehemently. He was looking around frantically for his truncheon, deeply scared by the ease with which he had been disarmed.

Saul released him and the man bolted. But as he reached the end of the little bus-street, the sound of the flute pierced the air around them and he froze. Instantly Saul ran to him, slapped his face hard twice, pushed him, but the man’s eyes were now ecstatic, fixed with a quizzical, overjoyed look over Saul’s shoulder.

He moved suddenly, pushing Saul aside with a strength he should not possess, and skipped like an excited child deep into the red maze.

‘Oh fuck, no!’ breathed Saul, and overtook him, shoved him back, but the man kept moving, simply pushing past Saul without once looking at him. The flute was closer now, and Saul grabbed him in a bear hug, held him, tried to block his ears, but the man, impossibly strong, elbowed him in the groin and punched him expertly in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of Saul and doubling him over in a crippling reflex prison. He could only stare desperately, willing himself to breathe, as the man disappeared.

Saul pulled himself up and hobbled after him.

In the heart of the bus maze was an empty space. It was a strange little room of red metal and glass, a monk’s hole barely six feet square. Saul found his way towards the centre, rounded a corner and was there, at the outskirts of the square.

Before him stood the Piper, flute to his lips, staring at Saul over the shoulder of the guard, who pranced ridiculously to the shrillness of the flute.

Saul grabbed the man’s shoulders from behind, and hauled him away from the Piper. But the guard spun around and Saul saw that a shard of glass was embedded deep in one of his eyes and thick blood had welled all over his face. Saul shrieked and the Piper’s playing stopped dead. The guard’s expression took on a puzzled cast; he shook his head, raised his hand experimentally towards his face. Before he could touch his eye, silver flashed behind him and he dropped like a stone. A pool as dark and thick as tar began to spread very quickly from his broken head.

Saul was quite still.

The Piper stood before him, wiping his flute clean.

‘I had to let you know, Saul, what I can do.’ He spoke quietly and did not look up, like a teacher who is very disappointed but is trying not to shout. ‘You see, I feel that you don’t really believe what I can do. I feel that you think because you won’t listen to me, no one else will. I wanted to show you quite how hard they listen, see? I wanted you to know. Before you die.’

Saul leapt straight up.

Even the Piper stared, momentarily stupid with amazement, as Saul grabbed one of the surrounding buses’ big wing-mirrors, pivoted in his flight, and swung his feet through the top front window. Then the Piper was there behind him, his flute thrust aggressively into his belt. No attempt to hide this time, Saul just hurled himself through windows again, leaping the gap to the next bus, bursting into its top deck. He picked himself up and leapt again, refusing to hear his screaming limbs and skin. Again and again, always followed, always hearing the Piper behind him, the two of them pushing through layer after layer of glass, littering the ground below, a fantastically fast and violent passage through the air, Saul desperate to reach the edge of the maze, eager to take this into open ground.

And then there it was. As he girded himself to leap through another window, he realized that what he could see through it was not just a bus two feet beyond, that he was looking out at a window in the garage wall itself, and through that at a house, a long way off. He smashed free of the last bus and leapt onto the window-ledge, halfway up the bricks. Between him and that house a gash was cut through London soil, a wide chasm filled with railway lines. And between Saul and those railway lines was nothing but a high fence of steel slats and a long drop.

Saul could hear the Piper still following him, great heavy crashes and vibrations rocking the massed ranks of buses. Saul kicked out the final window. He braced himself, jumped out and clutched at the dull metal barrier below. He landed across it, his weight shaking it violently. He clung to it tight, let his balance adjust. Scuttled a little forward, looked back at the ripped-out window. The Piper appeared, looked out. He had stopped grinning. Saul fled down the sheer metal, his descent something between an exercise in rat agility, a controlled slide, and a fall.

He looked up momentarily and saw the Piper trying to follow. But it was too far for him: he could not grasp that fence, he could not crawl like a rat can crawl.

‘Fuck it!’ he screamed, and snatched his flute to his lips. And as he played, all the birds began to return. They flocked once again to his shoulders.

The railway lines curved out of sight in both directions. Above him Saul could see buildings which seemed to jut out over the valley, seemed to loom over him. He ran, following the tracks to the east. He snatched a glimpse behind him, and saw the birds settling on the dark figure who stood in the window-frame. Saul lurched hopelessly on, and nearly sobbed with delight when he heard a tight metallic snap, a restrained rattling, and he knew that a train was approaching. He looked behind him and saw its lights.

He moved sideways a little, making room, running alongside the tracks. Come on! he willed it, as the two lights he could not help but think of as eyes slowly drew nearer. Above them he saw the scarecrow figure of the Piper approaching him.

But now the train was nearby and Saul was smiling as he ran, as his sores and his ripped skin pulled against each other. Even as the Piper swung close enough for Saul to see his face, the tube train hurtled past Saul and he accelerated as it slowed for a bend, and as it passed him he threw himself at the back of the final carriage, grappling with it like a judo wrestler, jostling for position, thrusting his fingers deep into crevices and under extrusions of metal.

He pulled himself to the top and spread his arms wide, clinging tight to the edges of the roof as the train began to increase its speed. Saul swivelled on his stomach until he faced backwards, stretched his neck and looked up into the Piper’s enraged face, bobbing up and down in the air, contorted even as he continued to play, borne aloft by a canopy of dying birds in this slit through the city, this roofless tunnel – but there was nothing the Piper could do to catch Saul now.

And as the train pulled away even faster, Saul saw him become a flying ragdoll, and then a speck, and then he couldn’t see him any more, and he looked instead at the buildings around him.

He saw light and motion inside them, and he realized that people were alive that night, making tea and writing reports and having sex and reading books and watching TV and fighting and expiring quietly in bed, and that the city had not cared that he had been about to die, that he had discovered the secret of his ancestry, that a murderous force armed with a flute was preparing to kill the King of the Rats.

The buildings above him were beautiful and impassive. Saul realized that he was very tired and bleeding and in shock, and that he had seen two people die that night, killed by a power that didn’t care if they lived or died. And he felt a disturbance in the air behind him, and he put his head down and let his breath out in a great sob as the approaching tunnel swept up rubbish and sucked it in behind the train, as a sudden warm wind hit him like a boxer’s glove, and all the diffuse city light went out and he disappeared into the earth.

PART FIVE

SPIRITS

CHAPTER TWENTY

Fabian shook his head, scrunched up his dreadlocks into vicious little bunches. His head ached terribly. He lay on his bed and pulled faces at the mirror just visible on his desk.

Lying some way off was his ‘work in progress’, as his tutor insisted on calling it. The left two-thirds of the huge canvas were a garish panoply of metallic spray-paints and bright, flat acrylic; the right third was covered in ghost letters, faint pencil lines and charcoal. He had lost motivation for the project, though he still felt a certain pride in it as he stared at it again.

It was an illuminated manuscript for the 1990s, the letters a careful synthesis of mediaeval calligraphy and graffiti lettering. The whole screen, six feet by eight, consisted of just three lines: Sometimes I want to lose myself in faith/and Jungle is the only thing I can turn to,/because in Drum an’ Bass I know my place …

He had thought of a phrase which started with an ‘S’ because it was such a pleasing letter to illuminate. It was very large, contained in a box, and surrounded by ganja leaves and sound-system speakers and modern serfs, rudebwoys and gyals, an intricate parody, the expressionless zombies of monastic art executed by Keith Haring or one of the New York Subway Artists. The rest of the writing was mostly dark, but not matt-black, shot through with neon strips and encased in gaudy integuments. In the corner below the writing lurked the police, like devils: The Man. But these days the sloganeering had to be ironic. Fabian knew the rules and couldn’t be bothered to disobey them, so the devils coming up from the pit were ridiculous, the worst nightmares of St Anthony and Sweet Sweetback combined.

And up in the top right, though not yet drawn, would be the dancers, the worshippers who’ve found their way out of the slough of urban despond, a drab maze of greys in the centre of the piece, to Drum and Bass heaven. The dancing was fierce, but he had been careful to make these faces more than ever like those in the old pictures he was mimicking: placid, stupid, expressionless. Because individualism, he remembered explaining earnestly to his lecturer, had no more place in a Jungle club than in a thirteenth-century church. That was why he loved it and why it frustrated him and sometimes frightened him. That was why the ambiguous text as well.

He was always on at Natasha to cut a really political track, and she demurred, claiming not to be interested, which irritated him. So until someone would do it, he would keep on with his loving chiding. Hence the Middle Ages, he had explained. The necessary displays of opulence and style at the clubs were as grandiose and vapid as any display of courtly etiquette, and the awe in which DJs were held was positively feudal.

At first, his tutor had hummed and hawed, and sounded unconvinced at the project, until Fabian had hinted that he did not appreciate the importance of Jungle in modern pop culture, and that had given it the seal of approval. All the lecturers at his art college would rather have died than admit that there were any gaps in their knowledge of youth.

But he was unable to concentrate on ‘Jungle Liturgy’, even though he was quite proud of it.

He was unable to concentrate on anything except his disappearing friends. First Saul, in a blur of shocking violence and mystery, then Kay in circumstances far less dramatic but no less mysterious. Fabian could still not bring himself really to worry about Kay, although it had been at least a couple of weeks now since he had seen him, maybe more. He was concerned, but Kay was so vague, so aimless and genial, that any notion that he was in trouble was impossible to take seriously. It was, nonetheless, frustrating and perplexing. No one seemed to know where he had gone, including his flatmates, who were beginning to get agitated about his share of the rent.

And now it seemed as if he might be losing Natasha. Fabian scowled at the thought and turned over on his bed, sulking. He was angry with Natasha. She was obsessive about her music at the best of times, but when she was on a roll it was compounded. She was excited about the music she was making with Pete, a man Fabian considered too weird to be liked. Natasha was working on tracks to take to Junglist Terror, the event coming up fast in the Elephant and Castle. She had not called Fabian for several days.

It was Saul’s departure, he thought, which had precipitated all this. Saul was hardly the leader of a social phalanx but, since his extraordinary escape from custody, something that held Fabian’s friendships together had dissipated. Fabian was lonely.

He missed Saul deeply, and he was angry with him. He was angry with all his friends. He was angry with Natasha for failing to realize that he needed her, for not putting away her fucking sequencer and talking to him about Saul. He was quite sure she must be missing Saul, but she was such a control freak she was unlikely to discuss the matter. She would only allude to it obliquely and suddenly, and then refuse to say more about it. She would listen to him, though, patiently. She always broke that social contract, the exchange of insecurities and neuroses with one another. With Natasha the offering was always one-way. She either did not know, or did not care, how that disempowered him.

And Saul – Fabian was angry with Saul. He found it amazing his friend had not contacted him. He understood that something unbelievable must be going on in Saul’s life, that it would take a lot to cut Fabian off so completely, but it still hurt him. And he was desperate to know what was happening! He was sometimes afraid now that Saul was dead, that the police had killed him and had concocted a bizarre story to allay suspicion, or that he was caught up in something huge – vague images of Triads flashed through Fabian’s mind, and the London chapter of the Mafia, and God-knew-what – and that he had been routinely eliminated.

Often that seemed the likeliest explanation, the only thing that could explain the deaths of the police and Saul’s escape, but Fabian could not believe he would have known nothing about his friend’s involvement. It seemed unbelievable. And then he was forced to consider the possibility that Saul had killed those men – and his father, which he did not believe, definitely – but then … what was happening?

Fabian stared around him at his room, a tip of paint and record covers and clothes and CDs and posters and cups and wrappers and dirt and paper and books and pads and pens and canvas and bits of glass for sculptures and plates and postcards and peeling wallpaper. He was lonely and pissed off.

*

The view was so familiar Natasha did not see it. It was a tabula rasa to her, a white space on which she could impose her tunes. She had gazed out at it for so many hours and days, especially since Saul disappeared and Pete appeared, that she had achieved a Zen-like transcendence of it. She transcribed its features into her mind as nothingness.

First the net curtains, a tawdry throwback to the previous occupant that she had never bothered to get rid of. They moved slightly, a constant whiteness with flickering edges. Through this veil the trees, just at the level where the boughs thrust outward from the body. Stripped by winter, black branches clutching. So a film of curtain, then the twisted knots of wood, dark and intricate, a random lattice of twigs and thick limbs. Beyond that a streetlamp.

After dark when it had rained, she would sit at her window and poke her head out from under the net curtains and stare at that lamp through the tree outside. Its rays would pass through the thicket, lighting up the inside of each branch, surrounding the streetlight with thin circles of illuminated wood, composites of a thousand tiny wet sections reflecting the light. As Natasha moved her head, the streetlight’s halo moved with it behind the tree. The lamp sat like a fat spider in the centre of a wooden web.

Now it was day and the lamp was nothing, just another washed-out shape beyond the curtain, a shape Natasha was not seeing as she stared at it. Beyond it the houses on the other side of the street. The child’s bedroom, the little study. The kitchen. The roofs, the slate anaemic, its rough red invisible inside the room. Behind the roofs the jutting landmarks, the estates that stretched up over West London, squat and huge and awe-inspiring. Behind them a sky that was all cloud, a shifting scudding mass whose details twisted and turned and decayed leaving the totality unchanged.

Natasha knew every part of this diorama. Had anything been missing or different, she would have seen it immediately. Instead she saw that it was as it should be, and therefore she did not see it at all. In her careful itemization of its qualities, it became invisible.

She felt as if she would float into the clouds, sometimes.

She did not feel tethered at all.

She thought about Saul but she thought about basslines as well, and she wondered where he was, and she heard a stunning track suggest itself in her mind. She wondered where Pete was. She wanted to hear his flute. It was time to put some layers down on to Wind City. She realized that she could not really think straight. She had not felt secure and engaged for some days now. But she was eager to lay down some more flute.

Pared down as it was, Natasha wanted to strip the room of all its extraneous objects, the bed, the telephone, the cups she saw by her pillow. She wanted to close the door and ignore the rest of her flat and just stare at that window, at that view, through the dilute milk interference of the curtain. She wanted no sounds except the tiny murmurings of the street and her own sequencer, weaving her tune, making Wind City what she wanted.

A couple of weeks ago she had mentioned the track to Fabian when he had called her, and he had made a joke about the title: about eating too many beans, or something cretinous like that. She had brought the call to an abrupt close, and when she had put the receiver down she had cursed him, sworn at him, told him how fucking stupid and crass he was. A part of her had tried to evaluate his comment dispassionately, tried to see it as he saw it, but even as she understood she saw how wrong he was. Her opinion of Fabian was shaken. Maybe he had to hear the track, she concluded charitably.

He could not hear the word Wind without remembering his little idiot jokes in playgrounds, the puerile scatology she could not empathize with. It was a boy thing. How could she make him see what she saw when she named that track, when she played it and tweaked it and made it work so well it made her chest hollow?

To start, a tiny piano run from some histrionic Swingbeat rubbish. She had stripped it down so severely that she had dehumanized it. This was something different from her usual approach. The piano, the instrument that so often ruined Jungle, making her think of Happy House and idiotic Ibiza clubs, here turned into an instrument that signalled the destruction of anything human in this world. Deeply plaintive and melancholy, but ghostly. The piano tried to remember melancholia, and presented it as if for approval. Is this it? Is this sadness? it asked. I can’t recall. And under the piano she faded in, for a fraction of a second, subliminal, she laid down a sample of radio static.

She had sought it for a long time, recording great swathes of sound from all the bands on her radio, rejecting them all, until she found and seized and created exactly what she wanted. And here she hinted at it.

The beat kicked in after the piano went around and came around several times, each time separated by a severe gap, a rupture in the music. And the beat was all snares at first, fast and dreamy, and a sound like a choir welled up and then resolved itself into electronic orchestration, fabricated emotion, a failed search for feeling.

And then the bassline.

A minimal program, a single thud, pause, another thud, pause, another, longer pause … double thud and back to the beginning. And underneath it all she began to make those snatches of radio static a little longer, and longer still, and looping them more and more randomly, until it was a constant, shifting refrain under the beat. A chunk of interference that sounded like someone trying to break out of white noise. She was proud of that static, had created it by finding a station on shortwave and then just missing it, so that the peaks and troughs of the crackling could have been voices, eager to make contact, and failing … or they could have just been static.

The radio existed to communicate. But here it was failing, it had gone rogue, it had forgotten its purpose like the piano, and the people could not reclaim the city.

Because it was a city Natasha saw as she listened. She sped through the air at huge speed between vast crumbling buildings, everything grey, towering and enormous and flattened, variegated and empty, unclaimed. And Natasha painted this picture carefully, took a long time creating it, dropping a hundred hints of humanity into the track, hints that could not deliver, dead ends, disappointments.

And when she had sucked her listener in to the city, all alone, Natasha brought on the Wind.

A sudden burst of flute mimicking the almost-speaking of the static, a trick she had pilfered from a Steve Reich album – God knew where she had heard that – where he made violins mimic human voices. The static rolled on and the beat rolled on and the soulless piano rolled on and as the static rose and fell the flute would shudder into existence behind it for a moment, a shrill echo, and then it would disappear. Gusts of Wind sweeping rubbish off the streets. Then again. More and more often, until two gusts of flute would appear, overlaying each other. Another and another would join in, a cacophony of simultaneous forces of nature, half-musical, half-feral, artificial, commentary, an intruder in the city that shaped it contemptuously, sculpted it. A long low wail of flute piped up from behind, gusting through everything, the only constant, dwarfing the effect of the other sounds, intimidating, humbling. The peaks and troughs in the static go, they are blown flat by the flute. The piano goes, each trill of notes reducing by one until it is just a single note like a slow metronome passing time. Then that, too, disappears. The intricacies of flute are superseded and only the great single wind remains. Flute, white noise, snares and bassline, stretching off for a long time, an unbroken architecture of deserted beats.

This was Wind City, a huge metropolis, deserted and broken, alone, entropic, until a tsunami of air breaks over it, a tornado of flute clears its streets, mocks the pathetic remnants of humanity in its path and blows them away like tumbleweed, and the city stands alone and cleared of all its rubbish. Even the ghost of the radio proclaims the passing of the people, a flat expanse of empty sound. The boulevards and parks and suburbs and centre of the city were taken, expropriated, possessed by the Wind. The property of the Wind.

This was Wind City, the title that made Fabian laugh.

She could not talk to him after he had made his joke.

Pete really understood. In fact, when he heard pieces of the track, he told her that it was she who understood, that she really understood him.

Pete loved the track with an extraordinary passion. She supposed it appealed to him, the notion of the whole world possessed by the Wind.

The little flat in Willesden had become the setting for Crowley’s dreams. He was no longer fooled by its nondescript architecture. This flat was a dynamo. It had been turned into a generator of horrors.

He was on his haunches, looking down at another ruined face.

The little flat was becoming steeped in violence. It contained some vast attractive force luring people in to violent and bloody mayhem. Crowley felt trapped in some ghastly time-slip. Here we are again, he thought, gazing at the destroyed and bloody mask beneath him.

There had been the first time, when he had seen Saul’s father shattered on the lawn. Not systematically pulped like this, it was true. Maybe he had been running from the flat. Maybe that was why his injuries were less severe; he had tasted it in the air, he had known that had he stayed he would not just die but be crushed. He had not wanted to die like an insect, so he had hurled himself instead from the window, eager for a human death.

Crowley shook his head. His edge was blunting, he could not help it. Here we are again.

Then Barker, another one whose face was destroyed, and Page, looking over his own shoulder, impossible.

And now another had been broken on this sacrificial altar. The girl lay on her back, the floor around her was vile with blood. Her face was bent inwards as if on a hinge. Crowley glanced up at the door-frame. That patch of wood there, with radial explosions of blood and saliva and mucus bursting out from it on all sides, that section of the frame there, that was where her face had been thrust.

Crowley vaguely remembered the sense of duty which pushed him into the dark corridors at night, as he lay sleeping. He would stand in the sitting-room, where he was now, looking behind him, again, again, like a dog chasing its tail, unable to stand still because he knew that if he did something would come and smash his face …

He never saw Saul, in his dreams.

*

Bailey entered, pushing through the perplexed knot of uniforms.

‘No sign of anything anywhere else, sir. Just this, just here.’

‘Has Herrin got anything?’ he said.

‘He’s still talking to the uniform who got called to the bus station this morning. A load of the buses are smashed up; and the guard, they reckon it wasn’t the glass in his eye that killed him. He was hit over the head with a long, thin stick.’

‘Our unusual club, again,’ mused Crowley ‘Too thin for most people’s taste; they like something that packs a wallop. Of course, if you’re as strong as our murderer seems to be, the thinner the better. Less surface area, more pressure.’

‘Our murderer, sir?’

Crowley looked at him. Bailey seemed confused, and even accusatory. Crowley could tell that he thought his superior was losing it. The extraordinary nature of the crimes had affected Bailey in the opposite way from Crowley. He had been thrust towards an aggressive, dogmatic common sense, determined to bring Saul to heel, refusing to be overawed or surprised by the carnage he saw.

‘What?’ demanded Crowley.

‘You sound unsure, sir. Have you got some reason for thinking it’s not Garamond?’

Crowley shook his head as if at a mosquito, irritated, brushing the air. Bailey withdrew.

Yes, I have ample reason, thought Crowley, because I interviewed him and saw him. I mean Jesus look at him, he did not do this. And if he did, then something happened to change him in that night after I interviewed him, and he changed so much he is no longer what I saw, in which case I am still right, Saul Garamond did not do this, and I don’t give a shit what you and Herrin think, you lumbering great pricks.

Nothing added up. The dead guard at Westbourne Grove was clearly the victim of the same man as had killed the two policemen, and this girl here lying ruined in blood and bone. But the police had been called to the bus station minutes after the inhabitants of Terragon Mansions had reported violent shouts and bumps from upstairs. And Westbourne Park was simply too far from Willesden to be reached in that time. So whoever was shattering all that glass in those buses and pushing it in that poor man’s eye could not be the same one who had destroyed this woman.

Of course, Herrin and Bailey saw no problem with this. Someone had been confused about the time. The people in Willesden must be half an hour or so out. Or the people in Westbourne Grove were, or both were fifteen minutes out, or something. And the fact that so many were out by the same amount, well, what did you think happened then, sir? If not that?

And of course Crowley had no answer.

He was intrigued by reports of music coming from the garage at the time Saul – or whoever – was destroying it. The reports were vague, but seemed to indicate a high-pitched sound like a recorder or a flute or pipes, or something. Saul was no musician, Crowley knew that, though he was apparently something of an aficionado of Dance music, the kind that his taciturn friend Natasha played. So what of the pipes?

Crowley could see the scenario being created for Saul. Saul had become a serial killer. And Saul therefore needed rituals, such as the return to this, the site of his first murder, that had unhinged him. And the playing of music at the site of a murder, such as the one at the bus station, what was this but ritualized? Perhaps he had played music also at the death of the as yet unidentified man in the underground, a crime Crowley was still sure was part of the same rampage. The public-transport connection only strengthened his conviction.

So, why was Saul no longer into Dance music? Why had he started playing what most of those who had heard it described as Folk music? None of this was airtight, of course, of course …

But Crowley could not help thinking it might be another who had played the music in the bus station. Why not? Why must it be Saul? What if it was another who mocked him with this music so utterly different to Saul’s own taste?

Crowley straightened up suddenly. A long, thin, light club. Made of metal: the impact was clear about that. Something the murderer hung on to, used more than once. Took from crime to crime. Where he played music, it seemed.

‘Bailey!’ Crowley yelled.

The big man appeared, still impatient, still exasperated with his boss.

He all but rolled his eyes at Crowley’s new question.

‘Bailey, do any of Saul’s mates play the flute?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Deep underneath London, King Rat skulked and ferreted in the darkness.

He clutched a stash of food, carried it slung over one shoulder like a swag bag. His strides were long and left no sign. He stalked silently through the water of the sewers.

The rats ran as he approached. The braver souls stayed a little to spit at him and provoke him. His smell was deeply ingrained in their nervous system, and they had been taught to despise it. King Rat ignored them. Walked on. His eyes were dark.

He passed like a thief in the night. Unclear. Minimal. Dirty. Subaltern. His motives were opaque.

He reached under the dirty stream to dislodge the plug to his throne-room, slid through the murk into the great teardrop chamber. He shook the water from him, and stamped into the room.

Saul came from behind him. He clutched a broken chair leg which he swung at an incredible speed and cracked against the back of King Rat’s skull.

King Rat flew forward and flung his arms out with a sudden shrill bark of pain. He sprawled, rolled, clutching his head, regained his footing.

Food spread across the sodden floor.

Saul was upon him, quivering, his jaw set hard and tight. He swung the chair leg again and again.

King Rat was as pliable as quicksilver. He slid impossibly out of Saul’s flurry of blows and scampered away, hissing, clutching his bleeding head.

He spun to face Saul.

Saul’s face was a mosaic of bruises and blood and puffy flesh. King Rat was quite still. He eyed Saul with his hidden eyes. His teeth were bared and glinted with dirty yellow light. His breath came hard. His hands were crooked into eager claws.

But Saul hit him again, before those claws could move. Saul’s hands and club came at him hard, but King Rat ripped up with his clawed hands and drew lines on Saul’s stomach, below his ruined shirt.

Saul spoke, muttering in time to the blows he attempted to land.

‘So what the fuck was Loplop doing there, unh?’ Slam.

King Rat slipped outside the club’s arc. It hit the floor loudly.

‘Tell him to follow me, unh?’ Slam. ‘What was he going to do – report back?’ Slam. This time the wood connected and King Rat yelled in rage.

King Rat growled and slashed at Saul with those claws, and Saul bellowed and swung the club with renewed venom. The two of them skittered around the dark room, slipping on mould and food, moving now on two limbs, now on four. Saul and King Rat moved like liminal figures, hovering between evolutionary strata, bestial and knowing.

‘So was Loplop going to send a message, unh? A bird? Little bird going to let slip where I was, then?’

Again the attacks came, again King Rat moved, refusing to engage in battle, content to draw blood and slip away, his teeth still visible and wicked.

‘What if Loplop had accidentally told someone else where I was, unh? Was I fucking bait?’ King Rat caught the club with his right hand and bit at it suddenly and savagely, and it dissolved in a burst of splinters. Saul did not pause, but grasped King Rat’s filthy lapels and carried him down into the muck, straddling him.

‘Well you needn’t have bothered, you fucking shit, because the Piper was there and look what he did to me, you shit. You just weren’t ready, you and ’Nansi, so poor old Loplop had to take him on his own.’ Saul pinioned King Rat’s arms to the brick floor and began systematically to punch his face. But even trapped like that King Rat writhed and slipped under him, and many of the heavy blows did not land.

Saul thrust his face right up to King Rat, and stared through the shadows on his eyes.

‘I know you wouldn’t give a fuck if I’d died, as long as I took Piper-man with me,’ he hissed. ‘And I know you killed my dad, you fucking shithead rapist, you piece of crud – not the fucking Piper …’

‘No.’ King Rat shouted the word out and convulsed, throwing Saul from him and sliding in a single movement until he stood in characteristic pose by the throne, skulking and aggrandizing, but this time with his claws bared and his teeth dangerous, coated in slaver like a wild animal. Saul moved backwards in the dirt, fought to right himself.

King Rat spoke again. ‘I never bumped off your dad, stupid. I killed the Usurper.’

The word stayed in the air after he had spoken it.

King Rat spoke again.

‘I’m your dad …’

‘No you fucking aren’t, you weird old fucked-up spiritual degenerate,’ replied Saul instantly. ‘I might have your blood in my veins, you fucking rapist bastard, but you aren’t shit to me.’

Saul smacked himself on the forehead, laughing bitterly.

‘I mean, hello? “Your mother was a rat, and I’m your uncle.” Jesus, nice one – playing me like a fucking idiot! And …’ Saul paused and jerked his finger viciously at King Rat, ‘and, that goddamn fucking lunatic Piper who wants me dead only knows about me because of you.’

Saul sat down hard and held his head in his hands. King Rat watched him.

‘I mean, I keep saying I’ve sorted it out, right?’ Saul murmured. ‘And I just can’t stop thinking about it. You killed my father, you rapist shit, and when you did that you let some fucking spirit of darkness out after me, you gave him my fucking address, and, what, I’m supposed to go “Daddy!”?’ Saul shook his head in disgust. He felt his gut twist with contempt and hatred. ‘You can fuck off. It doesn’t work like that.’

‘So what’re you after, an apology?’

King Rat was scornful. He moved towards Saul.

‘What do you want? We’re blood. It was half an age since I left, since you were a little Godfer in the fat man’s arms. I could clock you getting flabby. It was time to join your old dad, the cutpurse king. We’re blood.’

Saul stared up at him.

‘No, fucker, I don’t want shit from you.’ Saul stood. ‘What I want is out.’ He moved off behind the throne, turned to face King Rat. ‘You can deal with the Piper on your own. He only wants me because of you, you know? You’ve been bragging about me, you stupid shit. You don’t give a fuck about family. You raped my mum so you could have your weapon. The Piper knows it; he called me the secret weapon. I know what I mean to you. I know I’m a good way of getting at him, because he can’t control me.

‘But he only wants me dead because of you. So, tell you what.’

Saul moved backwards as he spoke, towards the room’s peculiar exit.

‘Tell you what. You deal with the Piper as best you can, and I’ll look after myself. Agreed?’

And Saul looked King Rat in the eye, those eyes he could still not see, and he left the room.

Up above the sewers: in the sky, over the slate. Out in the air. Saul fingered the skin over his bruises and felt it stretched out taut and split. He gazed at London, spread out before him, unfolding, the underworld threatening to burst through, to rupture its surface tension. It was dark; his life was always dark now. He was becoming a night creature.

His body hurt. His head ached, his arms were scratched and stretched, his muscles burned with deep bruises. But he could not stay still. He felt a desperate eagerness to work through it, to burn the pain out of his body. He swung meaninglessly around girders and antennae, loose-limbed and elegant like a gibbon. He was suddenly very hungry, but he remained on the roofs for a while, running and jumping over low walls and skylights. He straddled the intricacies of St Pancras station, and sped along the spine of roofs which jutted out behind it like a dinosaur’s tail.

This was the realm of the arches. Weird little businesses waged a battle against empty space, cramming into the unlikely hollows below the railway lines. They proclaimed themselves with crude signs.

OFFICE EQUIPMENT CHEAP.

WE DELIVER.

Saul descended to street level. He was fighting to channel the force of elation which had flooded through him at his renunciation of King Rat. He was fragile, ready to burst into tears or hysterics. He was captivated by London.

Someone approached him from around a corner: a woman in heels, he could hear, a brave soul walking this area alone at night. He did not want to scare her, so he slumped against a wall and slid down to the floor, just a comatose drunk.

The associations of homelessness struck him and, as the heels clicked by him unseen, he thought of Deborah and he felt his throat catch. And then it was easy to think of his father.

But Saul did not have time for this, he decided. He leapt up and followed his nose to the dustbins of this odd realm, a world where the streets were empty of houses, where the only things that surrounded him were the peculiar businesses, Victorian throwbacks.

The bins were not rich in pickings. Without domestic rubbish there was little to them. Saul crept back towards King’s Cross. He found his way to the dumping grounds of the all-night eateries, and amassed a huge pile of food. He played games with himself, refusing to allow himself to eat a mouthful until he had collected everything he wanted.

He sat in the shade of a skip in a cul-de-sac by a Chinese take-away and fondled the food he had collected, chunks of greasy meat and noodles.

Saul gorged himself. He ate as he had not for days. He ate to fill all the cavities inside him, to drive out anything that had been left behind.

King Rat had used him as bait, but the plan had gone wrong. The Piper had pre-empted his plan.

As Saul stuffed himself, he felt an echo of that surge of strength that had coursed through him the first time he ate reclaimed food, found food, rat food.

The Piper still wanted him dead, of course, now more than ever. He did not think he would have to wait too long before the Piper came for him.

It was a new chapter, he reflected. Away from King Rat. Out of the sewer. He ate until his belly felt dangerously taut, and then resumed his position in the skyline.

Saul felt as if he would burst, not from food but from something that had been released inside him. I should be mad, he thought suddenly, and I’m not. I haven’t gone mad.

He could hear sounds from all over London, a murmuring. And as he listened, it resolved itself into its components, cars and arguments and music. He felt as if the music was everywhere, all around him, a hundred different rhythms in counterpoint, a tapestry being woven underneath him. The towers of the city were needles, and they caught at the threads of music and wound them together, tightened them around Saul. He was a still point, a peg, a hook on which to wind the music. It grew louder and louder, Rap and Classical and Soul and House and Techno and Opera and Folk and Jazz and Jungle, always Jungle, all the music built on drum and bass, ultimately.

He had not listened to music for weeks, not since King Rat had come for him, and he had forgotten it. Saul stretched as if waking from a sleep. He heard the music with new ears.

He realized that he had defeated the city. He crouched on the roof (of what building he did not know) and looked out over London at an angle from which the city was never meant to be seen. He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements. These monolithic products of human hands had turned on their creators, and defeated them with common sense, quietly installed themselves as rulers. They were as insubordinate as Frankenstein’s monster, but they had waged a more subtle campaign, a war of position more effective by far.

Saul kicked carelessly off and stalked across the roofs and walls of London.

He could not put off thinking for ever.

Tentatively, he considered his position.

King Rat was no longer with him. Anansi was his own man, would do whatever made him and his kingdom safest. Loplop was mad and deaf and maybe dead.

The Piper wanted to kill them all.

Saul was on his own. He realized that he had no plan, and felt a curious peace. There was nothing he could do. He was waiting for the Piper to come to him. Until then he could go underground, could investigate London, could find his friends …

He was afraid of them now. When he let himself think of them, he missed them so much it made him ache, but he was not made of the same stuff as them any more, and he was afraid that he did not know how to be their friend. What could he say to them, now that he lived in a different world?

But perhaps he didn’t live in a different world. He lived where he wanted, he thought suddenly, furiously. Wasn’t that what King Rat had told him, all that time ago? He lived wherever he wanted, and even if he didn’t live in the same world as them any more, he could visit, couldn’t he?

Saul realized how much he wanted to see Fabian.

And he remembered as well that the Piper wanted to kill him precisely because he could move between the worlds. He felt a fleeting sense of loneliness as he thought about the Piper, and then he realized that the smell of rat was all around him, was always all around him. He stood slowly.

He realized that the smell of London was the smell of rat.

He began to hiss for attention, and lithe heads poked out of piles of rubbish. He barked a quick order and the ranks began to approach him, tentatively at first and then with eagerness. He shouted for reinforcements and seething waves of filthy brown bodies boiled over the lip of the roof, and from chimneys and fire escapes and hidden corners, like a film of spilt liquid running backwards, they congealed around him, tightly wound, an explosion frozen at the flashpoint, hovering with suppressed violence, hanging on his words.

He would not face the Piper alone, he realized. He would have all the rats in London on his side.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sometimes, between putting food in her mouth and sleeping and then Jungle, seeing Pete, Natasha remembered other things.

She remembered something; she had a sense of being needed for something. She could not be sure what it was until somebody called her. She fumbled with the phone, confused.

‘Yo yo Tasha!’

The voice was bizarre, muted and enthusiastic. She did not recognize it at all.

‘Tash man, you there? It’s Fingers. I got your message about Terror and, yeah, that’s no problem. We’re going to stick you on the poster, make out like you’re famous. No one’s gonna admit they haven’t heard of you.’ The man on the telephone yelled with laughter.

Natasha muttered that she did not understand.

There was a long pause.

‘Look, Tash, you faxed me, man – told me you wanted to spin some at Junglist Terror … you know, couple of weeks’ time? Well, that’s fine. I wanted to know what name you’re under, because we’re chucking out some last-minute posters. Going to do a blitz down Camden, down your way too.’

What name? Natasha gathered herself, played the phone call by ear, pretended she understood what was happening.

‘Put me in as Rudegirl K.’

That was a name she used. Was that what he wanted, the man? Gradually she began to remember and to understand. Junglist Terror, near the Elephant and Castle. It came back. She smiled delightedly. Had she asked for an opportunity to play? She could not remember that, but she could play Wind City, she didn’t mind …

Fingers rang off. He seemed perturbed, but Natasha only promised to come on the date he told her, and agreed that she would spread the word. She held the receiver against her ear for a little bit too long after he had rung off. The buzz confused her again, until gentle hands reached around her head and disentangled her from the machine.

Pete was there, she realized with a jolt of pleasure. He put the receiver down, turned her to look at him. She wondered how long he had been with her. She looked up at him, smiled beatifically.

‘I forgot to tell you that, Natasha,’ he said. ‘I thought we should take the opportunity to show the world what we’ve been doing. So we’re going to play Wind City. OK?’

Natasha nodded and smiled.

Pete smiled back. His face; Natasha saw his face. It seemed hurt, she saw long thin scabs adorning it, but she did not really notice them somehow, he grinned so happily. His face was very pale, but he smiled at her with the same wide-eyed pleasure she always associated with him. Such a sweetie, she thought, so green. She smiled.

Pete backed away from her, holding her hand until he was out of reach.

‘Let’s play some music, Natasha,’ he suggested.

‘Oh yes,’ she breathed. That would be excellent. A little Drum and Bass. She could lose herself in that, take the tunes apart in her mind, see how they fitted together. Maybe they could play Wind City.

All of Saul’s friends were accounted for, apart from the man Kay. As he considered the piece of paper he held, the queasy foreboding in Crowley’s stomach grew. He was afraid he knew exactly where Kay was.

He felt ridiculous, like a cop from some American TV show, operating on hunches, responding to preposterous gut feelings. He had sought to cross-refer the data that had been gathered on the ruined body in the tube with the information they had on Saul’s friend Kay, who had been missing now for a couple of weeks.

For a while, Crowley had played with the idea that Kay could be behind all this. It would be so much easier to attribute the carnage he had seen to the other missing man. He kept his conjectures to himself. His unwillingness to see Saul as the killer made no sense to those around him, and he could understand why. There was just something, there was just something … the thoughts went around and around in his head … it did not work; he had seen Saul; there was something else happening.

He jeopardized control of the investigation with his disquiet. He was reduced to scribbled notes to himself, exchanging favours with laboratory technicians, the usual channels too risky for his ideas. He could not sit with his men and women and brainstorm, bouncing possibilities back and forth, because they knew full well who they were looking for. His name was Saul Garamond, he was an escaped prisoner and a dangerous man.

So Crowley was cut off from discussion, the medium in which his best work was done. He was afraid that without it his notions were stunted, half-truths, soiled with the muck of his own mind that no one could brush off for him. But he had no choice; he was atomized.

Kay as killer. That was one of the ideas that he must dispense with. Kay was peripheral, not close to any of the main protagonists in this drama. He had even less motive than Saul for any of these actions. He was even less physically impressive than Saul.

And besides, his blood group matched that which had covered the walls of Mornington Crescent station.

The fragments of jaw that could be analysed seemed to match Kay’s.

Nothing was certain, not with a body as destroyed as that had been. But Crowley believed he knew who they had found.

And he still, he still, could not believe that it was Saul they wanted.

But he could talk to no one about this.

Nor could he share the pity he felt, a pity which was welling up inside him more with every day, a pity which was threatening to dwarf his horror, his anger, his disgust, his fear, his confusion. A growing pity for Saul. Because if he was right, if Saul was not the one responsible for all the things Crowley had seen, then Saul was right in the middle of something horrendous, a kaleidoscope of bizarre and bloody murder. And Crowley might feel isolated, might feel cut off from those around him, but if he was right, then Saul … Saul was truly alone.

Fabian returned to his room and immediately felt bad again. The only time now that he did not feel oppressed by isolation was when he got on his bike and rode around London. He was spending more and more of his time on the road these days, burning up the junk calories he got from the crap he was eating. He was a wiry man, and his hours and hours on the road were stripping the final ounces of excess flesh from him. He was being pared down to skin and muscle.

He had ridden for miles in the cold and his skin blushed with the change of temperature. He sweated unpleasantly from his exertions, his perspiration cold on him.

Straight south he had ridden, down Brixton Hill, past the prison, through Streatham, down towards Mitcham. Real suburbia, houses flattening down, shopping districts becoming more and more flat and soulless. He had ridden up and down and around roundabouts and along sidestreets: he needed to cross traffic, to wait his turn on the road, to look behind him and indicate brief thanks to someone letting him in, he needed to cut in front of that Porsche and ignore the fact that he had pissed them off …

This was Fabian’s social life now. He interacted on the fucking tarmac, communicated with people passing him in their cars. This was as close as he came to relationships now. He did not know what was happening.

So he rode around and around, stopped to buy crisps and chocolate, orange-juice maybe, ate on the saddle, standing outside the poky little groceries and newsagents he now frequented, balancing his bike next to the faded boards advertising ice-cream and cheap photocopying.

And then back out onto the road, back into the cursory conversations of the roadways, his dangerous flirtations with cars and lorries. There was no such thing as society, not any more, not for him. He had been stripped of it, reduced to begging for social scraps like signalling and brake lights, the rudenesses and courtesies of transport. These were the only times now that anyone took notice of him, modified their behaviour because of him.

Fabian was so lonely it made him ache.

His answering machine blinked at him. He pressed play and the policeman Crowley’s voice jerked into life. He sounded forlorn, and Fabian did not think it was just the medium which was having that effect. Fabian listened with the contempt and exasperation he always felt when he dealt with the police.

‘ … pector Crowley here, Mr Morris. Ummm … I was wondering if you might be able to help me again with a couple of questions. I wanted to talk to you about your friend Kay and … well … perhaps you could call me.’

There was a pause.

‘You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris? Would you or Saul have known anyone who does?’

Fabian froze. He did not hear what else Crowley said. The voice continued for a minute and stopped.

A wave of gooseflesh engulfed him briefly and was gone. He fumbled, stabbed at the rewind button.

‘ … ould call me. You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris?’

Rewind.

‘You don’t play the flute, do you, Mr Morris?’

With an agony of numb fingers Fabian fast-forwarded, found the number Crowley gave. He punched it into the phone. Why does he want to know that? why that? his mind kept begging.

The number was busy, and a pleasant female voice told him he was in a queue.

‘Motherfucker!’ Fabian yelled and threw the receiver at the cradle. It bounced and hung from its cord, the dial tone just audible.

Fabian was trembling violently. He tugged at his bike, wrestled it through the constricted entrance hall and hurled it ready for him into the street. He slammed the door behind him. Adrenaline and terror made him feel sick. He lurched into the road and sped towards Natasha’s house.

No sociability now. He wove in and out of cars, leaving a cacophony of horns and curses in his wake. He twisted around corners at sharp, sharp angles, leaving pedestrians leaping out of his way.

Jesus Christ Jesus Christ, he thought, why does he want to know that? What has he found out? What has a man who plays the flute done?

He was over the river now, Jesus God knew how, he realized he was risking his life at every second. He seemed to be in and out of fugues, he had no recollection at all of passing through the intervening streets before the bridge.

Blood poured through Fabian’s veins. He felt giddy. The cold air woke him, slapped him in the face.

He saw a clump of phone boxes speeding into view before him. He was struck with a sudden realization of his isolation, again. He tugged at his brakes and pulled his bike up short, letting it fall to the ground and breaking into a run before it had stopped moving. The nearest box was empty, and he ransacked his pockets for money, pulled out a fifty-pence piece. He dialled Crowley’s number.

Dial 999 you stupid fucker! he suddenly admonished himself, but this time Crowley’s phone was ringing.

‘Crowley.’

‘Crowley, it’s Fabian.’ He could hardly speak; the words swallowed each other up in their eagerness. ‘Crowley, go to Natasha’s house now. I’ll see you there.’

‘Now, hold on, Fabian. What’s this all about?’

‘Just be there, motherfucker! The flute, the fucking flute!’ He hung up.

What’s he doing to her? Fabian thought as he ran to his bike. Its pedals still spun slightly where it lay. That weird fucker who just appeared, Jesus! He had thought she was having an affair with him, that this explained her weird behaviour, and the obscure challenge Fabian always sensed from Pete. But what if … what if that was not the whole story? What did Crowley know?

He was nearly there now, speeding towards Natasha’s house. London light surrounded him. He could not hear the traffic at all, he relied only on his eyes to stay alive.

Another sharp turn and there was Ladbroke Grove. He realized briefly that he was drenched in sweat. The day was overcast and cold, and his wet skin was frozen. Fabian felt like crying. He felt utterly out of control, as if he could have no effect on the world.

He turned, and was in Natasha’s street. It was as deserted as usual. The ringing in his ears dispersed and there was the Drum and Bass, the soundtrack to Natasha’s house. Dreamy and washed out, a very bleak song. He could feel it creeping into him behind his eyes.

He stepped free of his bike, letting it fall beside her door.

Fabian rang the bell. He put his finger on the button and did not release it until he saw a form approach behind the smoked-glass door.

Natasha opened the door to him.

Fabian wondered for a moment if she was stoned: she looked so vague, her eyes so clouded. But he saw how white she looked, how thin, and he knew that this was more than dope.

She smiled when she saw him, and looked up at him with unfocused eyes.

‘Hey, Fabe, man, how’s it going?’ She sounded tired, but she raised her hand to touch fists.

Fabian took her hand. She looked at him in mild surprise. He put his lips close to her ear.

His voice, when he spoke, was unsteady.

‘Tash, man, is Pete here?’

She looked up at him, creased her face quizzically, nodded.

‘Yeah. We’re practising. For Junglist Terror.’

Fabian began to tug at her.

‘Tash, we have to go. I want you to come with me. I promise I’ll explain, but come with me now …’

‘Oh, no.’ She did not sound angry or perturbed. But she pulled away from him gently and began to close the door. ‘I’ve got to play some tracks with him.’

Fabian pushed the door open and grabbed her. He held her mouth closed with his right hand. She struggled, her eyes suddenly wide, but he dragged her towards the door.

His eyes were prickling, and he whispered to her. ‘Tash please you don’t understand he’s something to do with it all we have to get away …’

‘Hi, Fabian! How’s it going?’

Pete had appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked down at them both, his body poised in mid-stride. He grinned amiably.

Fabian froze, as did Natasha, in his arms.

Fabian stared at Pete’s face. It was white, crisscrossed with vicious, half-healed scratches, bloody and intricate. He affected his usual cheerful expression but his eyes were giving him away now, open a little too wide, staring a little too hard.

Fabian realized that he was very frightened of Pete. Fabian wondered how long before Crowley would be there.

‘Hey, Pete, man …’ he muttered. ‘Uh … I was wanting … me and Tash might split for a bit … uh …’

Pete shook his head, looking amused and rueful.

‘Oh, Fabian, you mustn’t go. Come hear what we’ve been playing.’

Fabian shook his head and stumbled backwards a little more.

‘Natasha?’ said Pete, and turned to her. He whistled something very quickly. Instantly Natasha spun in Fabian’s arms and twisted her leg, taking his feet from under him and kicking the door closed behind him in one motion. She stood to one side as he fell against the door. He stared at her, and her eyes clicked back into the focus that had momentarily deserted her.

Fabian fumbled behind him for the latch, his mouth open, his legs wobbling as he stood.

‘Look, Fabe,’ said Pete reasonably, descending towards him. ‘It’s simple.’ Natasha stood still and gazed at him as he approached. ‘I don’t know quite what you’ve worked out or how, and I’m impressed, really I am, but now what? What to do with you? I could kill you, like I did Kay, but I think I’ve got a better idea.’

An angry, frightened little noise issued from Fabian’s throat. Kay … what had happened to him?

‘So anyway, the first thing I think is that you should come upstairs.’ Pete motioned to the room above them, and the faint strains of Jungle that had been filtering down the stairs seemed to swell, the plaintive song that he had caught from outside was suddenly filling Fabian’s head. And it was such a beautiful song, it completely took him away …

It made him think of so many things …

He was on the stairs, he realized, and then he was in the bedroom, but he wasn’t really bothered about that, because what was important was that he should hear this song. There was something about it …

It stopped and he caught his breath, stumbled, felt as if he was choking.

The room was silent. Pete had one hand by the on/ off switch on the sequencer. Natasha stood next to him, her arms by her side, the same free-floating look in her eyes. With his left hand Pete held a kitchen knife to her throat. She obligingly held her head up.

Fabian opened his mouth in horror and gesticulated towards the two of them, frozen like a waxwork scene of the moment of murder. He emitted inchoate sounds.

‘Yes yes yes, Fabian. Answer or I slit her throat.’ Pete’s voice was still measured, urbane. ‘Is anyone else coming?’

Fabian’s eyes flitted around the room as he tried to gauge the situation. He shrieked as Pete pressed the knife to her throat, and blood welled up around it.

‘Yes! Yes! The police are coming!’ Fabian screamed. ‘And they’re going to fucking take you, you motherfucker …’

‘Nope,’ said Pete. ‘Nope, they won’t.’

He released Natasha and she touched her neck experimentally, screwing up her face, perturbed and confused by the blood. She picked up her pillow and pressed it to the side of her neck, watched it stain red.

Pete kept his eyes on Fabian. He fumbled on the top of the keyboard and gathered up some DATs which sat there.

‘Tash?’ he said. ‘Grab your record bag and a few twelve-inches. We’re going to go to mine until Junglist Terror.’ He smiled at Fabian.

Fabian bolted for the door. He heard a faint whispering and his left calf burst into agony. He screamed as he fell. The kitchen knife was embedded deep in the muscle of his lower leg. He fumbled at it with bloody fingers and screamed when he had the breath.

‘See,’ said Pete, sounding amused. ‘I can make you dance to my tune, but fuck it, sometimes other methods do the job.’ He stood over Fabian.

Fabian closed his eyes and laid his head on the floor. He was fainting.

‘You will come to Junglist Terror, won’t you, Fabe?’ said Pete. Behind him Natasha quietly gathered some things. ‘You may not feel like dancing now, but I promise you will. And you can do me a favour.’

The faint percussive thump of the Drum and Bass beat which wafted into Bassett Street was washed out, rendered nothing by the sirens. Two police cars slid to a stop outside the house. Uniformed men and women leapt out and raced to the door. Crowley stood beside one of the cars. Behind him, the residents peered out of their doors and windows.

‘Have you come about all that screaming? That was quick,’ said an old man approvingly to Crowley.

Crowley looked away as his stomach yawned. He felt sick with foreboding.

Next to the door a bicycle lay on the pavement. Crowley stared at it as the battering ram took care of the door. The police swept up the stairs in a confused mass. Crowley saw the guns at the ready.

There was a sound of heavy feet in the house, audible in the street outside. The faint Jungle beat jerked to an abrupt halt. Crowley strode after the advance party into the hallway. He jogged up the steps and waited by the front door to the flat.

A short woman in a flak jacket approached him.

‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nothing?’

‘They’re gone, sir. Not a sign. I think you should see this.’

She led him into the flat. It was thick with heavy bodies. The air was full of authoritative voices, the sounds of searching.

Crowley looked around him at the bare walls of the sitting-room. By the entrance to the room was a pool of blood, still slick and sticky. One of the white pillows on the futon was stained deep red.

The keyboard, the stereo, a handbag … everything was untouched. Crowley strode over to the turntable. A twelve-inch single rested on it. The needle had skipped, pushed off course by the vibration of the heavy police boots. Crowley swore.

When he raised his voice it dripped bile.

‘I don’t suppose anyone saw how far through the record we were? No?’

Everyone stared at him in incomprehension.

‘Because that way we could have told how long ago they left.’

They looked away, surly. Next time you try rushing a fucking lunatic and stopping to take notes, sir, they said with every look and gesture.

To hell with them, thought Crowley, furious. To fucking hell with them. He looked at the blood on the floor and the pillow. He looked out of the window. The constables held back the growing crowds. The bicycle lay alone, ignored.

Fabian, Fabian … thought Crowley. I’ve lost you, I’ve lost you. You were my lead, Fabian, and now you’ve gone.

He leant down and rested his head on his arms, there on the window-sill.

Fabian, Natasha, where have you gone? he thought. And with whom?

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Scrawled notes were appearing on walls.

In a hand at once gothic and subliterate, they entreated Saul to a peace. They were etched into the brick, scribbled in pencil, sprayed with aerosol.

The first, Saul found on the side of a chimney stack he had decided to sleep in.

LISTEN SONNY, it read. WERE BLOOD AND BLOOD STICKS SO LETS US LET BYGONES BE. TWOS BETTER NOR ONE YOU KNOW AND IN FACT TWO CAN BE THE DEVIL.

Saul had run his fingers over the thin scratches and looked around the roof. The stench of King Rat was on the air, he could smell it clearly. The rats with him had bristled, and been ready to bite or run. He was never alone now, always surrounded by a group whose number was unchanging even as the individuals who formed it came and went.

Saul and his entourage had crouched on the roof and sniffed the air. He had not slept in the chimneys that morning.

*

The next evening he had woken in the corner of the sewer he had found, and painted above his head was another message. This was in white paint, paint that had dripped and slid down the walls into the dirty water, leaving the words only just legible.

LOOK YOU AINT DOING NOONE ANY FAVOURS CEPT THE PIPER. 

It had been written while he slept. King Rat was stalking him, afraid to speak but desperate for reconciliation.

Saul was angry. The ease with which King Rat was still able to sneak past him rankled. He realized that he was just a baby, a little ratling.

He could not think about whether or not King Rat was right. It was irrelevant to him. He had had enough of compromise. King Rat the rapist and murderer, destroyer of his family, had no right to his collaboration. King Rat had released the Piper, King Rat had made Saul what he was. He had released him, but only into his new prison.

So fuck King Rat, thought Saul. He had had it with being bait. He knew that King Rat could not be trusted.

So instead he thought about what he could do for himself.

For all that he felt liberated, for all that he felt powerful, Saul did not know what to do. He did not know where the Piper lived. He did not know when the Piper would attack. He knew nothing at all except that he himself was not safe.

Saul began to think more and more about his friends. He spent a lot of time speaking to the rats, but they were only cunning, not clever, and their stupidity alienated him. He remembered his thoughts on the night he had left King Rat, the realization that it was his decision whether or not his world would cross those of Fabian and others.

He wanted to see Fabian more than anything.

So one evening he bade the rats leave him alone. They obeyed immediately, disappearing in a sudden flurry. Saul began to cross the city, alone again.

He wondered if King Rat was with him, was watching him. As long as the fucker kept his distance, Saul decided, he did not care.

Saul crossed the river under Tower Bridge. He swung like an ape along the girders which festooned its underside, convoluted thickets of vast wires and pipes. In the middle, just at the point where the bridge could split and open for tall ships, he stopped and hung by his hands, swaying slightly.

The sky was taken from him; the great mass of the bridge above him was all he could see at eye-level and above. At the very edge of his sight, buildings appeared again over the river. But for the most part the city was inverted and refracted in the Thames, a sinuous shattered mirror. Lights glinted on the water, dark shapes punctuated with hundreds of points of light, the towers of the city, the far-off lights of the South Bank Centre, far more real for him then than their counterparts in the air above.

He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part … but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin veneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold.

Saul held on to that. He resisted the poetics of the city.

Saul walked fast, making the passers-by ignore him, being nothing to them. He strode the streets like a cipher, invisible. Sometimes he stopped quite still and listened, to see if he was being followed. He could see no one, but he was not so naive as to think that was conclusive.

He approached Brixton from the backstreets, not wanting to run the gamut of its light and crowds. His pulse was up. He was nervous. He had not spoken to Fabian for so long, he was afraid they would no longer understand each other. How would he sound to Fabian now? Would he sound strange, would he sound ratty?

He reached Fabian’s street. An old woman walked past him, bent into herself, and he was alone.

Something was wrong. The air tasted charged. People moved behind the white curtains of Fabian’s room. Saul stood quite still. He stared at the window, saw the vague movements of men and women within. They milled uncertainly, investigating. With a growing horror, Saul pictured those within opening drawers, examining books, looking at Fabian’s artwork. He knew who moved like that.

Saul’s demeanour changed. One moment his shoulders were hunched, he was tightened into a drab stance, something to see but not notice, his disguise for the streets. Now he uncurled and sank towards the pavement. He bent in a sudden snap of motion, sidling simultaneously against the low wall. He crept through the thin strip of garden, the desultory tiny patios.

He was truly invisible now. He could sense it in himself.

He sidled along the wall, sudden bursts of motion interspersed with unearthly stillness. His nose twitched. He smelt the air.

Saul stood before Fabian’s house. Soundlessly he vaulted the low wall and landed in a crouch below the window. He placed his ear to the wall.

Architecture betrayed those within. Bluff voices seeped out through cracks and rivulets between bricks.

‘ … don’t like that bloody picture, though …’

‘ … know that the DI’s totally losing it over this. I mean he’s fucking well lost it …’

‘ … geezer Morris, why have a go at him? … thought he was a mate …’

The police talked in an endless stream of banalities, clichés and pointless verbiage. Their speech served no purpose, thought Saul in despair, no fucking purpose at all. He ached for conversation, for communication, and to hear words wasted like this … he felt like crying.

He had lost Fabian. He put his head in his hands.

‘Him gone, bwoy. Him with the Badman now.’

Anansi’s voice was soft and very near.

Saul rubbed his eyes without opening them. He breathed deeply. Finally he looked up.

Anansi’s face hovered just in front of his, suspended before him upside-down. His strange eyes were very close, staring right into Saul’s.

Saul looked at him calmly, held his gaze. Then he let his eyes slide casually up, investigating Anansi’s position.

Anansi was hanging from one of his ropes, suspended from the roof. He grasped it with both hands, effortlessly suspended his weight, his naked feet intertwined with the thin white rope. As Saul watched, Anansi’s legs uncoupled from the fibres and swivelled slowly and soundlessly through the air. His eyes held Saul’s, even as his face turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

His feet touched the concrete with a tiny pat.

‘You damn good now, you know, pickney. Not easy keep track of you, these days.’

‘Why did you bother? Daddy send you?’ Saul’s voice was withering.

Anansi laughed without sound. He smiled lazily, predatory – the big spider-man.

‘Come now. Me want fe talk.’ Anansi pointed with a long finger, straight up. Then hand over hand he seemed to fall up the rope, which was tugged peremptorily from view.

Saul slid silently to the corner of the building and gripped it on both sides. He hauled himself away from the earth.

Anansi was waiting. He sat cross-legged on the flat roof. His mouth worked as if he were preparing to say something unpleasant. He nodded a greeting to Saul and indicated with a nod that he should sit opposite him.

Instead, Saul interlaced his fingers behind his head and turned away. He looked out over Brixton.

There were noises all around them from the streets.

‘Mr Rattymon going crazy waiting for you now.’ Anansi spoke quietly.

‘Motherfucker shouldn’t have usedmeas bait, then,’ said Saul evenly. ‘Rapist motherfucker shouldn’t have killed my dad.’

‘Rattymon you dad.’

Saul did not answer. He waited.

Anansi spoke again.

‘Loplop come back and him crazy mad at you. Him want you dead fe true.’

Saul turned, incredulous.

‘What the fuck has he got to be angry with me for?’

‘You make him deaf, you know, and you done also make him mad again, mad in him head.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ spat Saul. ‘We were both about to be killed. He was about to kill me and get fucking taken apart himself. I think the fucking Piper’s done playing with us, you know? I think he just wants us all dead now, all the kings. Loplop would’ve fucking died, I saved his life …’

‘Yeah, man, but him save you. Could’ve watch while the Piperman done kill you, but him try to save you, and you fuck up him ear …’

‘That’s a load of crap, Anansi. Loplop tried to save me because you all … you all … know the Piper can’t hold me, and you all know I’m the only thing that can stop him.’

There was a long silence.

‘Well, Loplop him mad, anyway. Don’t be getting too close to him now.’

‘Fine,’ said Saul.

Again, a long pause.

‘What do you want, Anansi? And what do you know about Fabian?’

Anansi sucked his teeth in disgust.

‘You still green, bwoy, fe true. You sure got all the rats dem upon you side, but you don’t know what fe do with them. Rats everywhere, bwoy. Spiders everywhere. Them you eyes, the rats. My lickle spiders tell me what the Badman do with you friends. You ain’t never ask. You not care till now.’

‘Friends?’

Anansi screwed up his face and looked at Saul disdainfully.

‘Him have kill the fat bwoy.’ Saul’s hands fluttered about his face. His mouth stayed shut, but it quivered. ‘Him have take the black bwoy and the lickle DJ woman.’

‘Natasha,’ breathed Saul. ‘What does he want with her …? How does he know who they are …? How is he getting inside me?’ Saul grabbed his head with both hands, began to thump himself in despair. Kay, he thought, Natasha, he hit himself more, what was happening?

Anansi was on him. Strong hands gripped his wrists.

‘Stop now!’ Anansi was horrified.

Animals do not hurt themselves, Saul realized. There was still human inside him, then. He shook himself and stopped.

‘We have to get them back. We have to find them …’

‘How, bwoy? Be real.’

Saul’s head spun.

‘What did he do to Kay?’

Anansi pursed his lips.

‘Him took the bwoy apart.’

They ran for a while, then there was a short scurrying climb, and they stood on Brixton Rec, the sports centre. They could hear the faint thump of MTV from the weights room below. Saul stood at the very edge of the roof, a little way forward from Anansi. He pushed his hands in his pockets.

‘You could have told me, you know …’ he said. He heard himself, and hated his plaintive tone. He half-turned, glanced at Anansi, who stood quite still, his arms folded over his bare chest.

Anansi sucked his teeth in contempt.

‘Cha, bwoy, you still full to the brim with rubbish. You talk about how the Rattymon him you father? What for me want tell you that?’

Saul looked at him. Anansi was insistent.

‘What for me want tell you? Hmmm? Listen, bwoy, pickney, hear me now. Me one bigass spider, understand? The Rattymon, him a rat. Loplop him the bird, the Bird Superior. Now you, you some strange half-ting, fe true, but what for we gwan tell you ting like that? Me tell you just what me want you fe know. Always, there you have a promise. No more hypocrisy now, you see, bwoy? No need. Animal like me no need for such ting. You leave that behind. You can trust me to be just so trustworthy, never no more, but never no less. Y’understand?’

Saul said nothing. He watched a train arrive at Brixton station and trundle away again.

‘Was Loplop going to tell the Piper where I was? Were you all going to come for him when he tried to take me?’ he asked finally.

Anansi shrugged, almost imperceptibly.

They sidled along the side of the railway, the British Rail line which rose above the market and the streets. They slid along without speaking, heading for Camberwell. Saul appreciated the company, he realized, though it was hardly what he had hoped for when setting out this evening.

‘How could he find my friends?’ said Saul. They sat on the climbing frame in a nondescript schoolyard.

‘Him search all you books an tings. Him find some address tings fe sure.’

Of course, thought Saul. My fault.

He was numbed. If he was still human, he realized, he would be in shock. But he was not, not any more; he was half rat, and he felt inured.

Anansi was very silent. He made no attempt to persuade Saul to return to King Rat, or to do anything, for that matter.

Saul looked at him curiously.

‘Does King Rat know you’re here?’ he asked.

Anansi nodded.

‘Has he asked you to say anything? Get me back?’

Anansi shrugged. ‘Him want you back, sure. You useful, y’know? But him know you can’t be told nothing you don’t want. You know what him want. If you want come back, you will come.’

‘Do you … do you understand why I won’t come back to him?’

Anansi looked at his eyes. Gently, he shook his head.

‘No, bwoy, not at all. You can survive better with him, with us, fe true. And you are rat. You should go back. But I know you don’t think like that. I don’t know what you are, bwoy. You can’t be rat, you can’t be man. I don’t understand you at all, but that’s alright, because I know now that I will never understand you, nor will you me. We are not the same.’

In the small hours, after they had eaten, they stood together at an entrance to the sewers. Anansi looked behind him, planning his route up the side of the warehouse beside them. He looked back at Saul.

Saul stuck out his hand. Anansi grasped it.

‘You are the only hope, bwoy. Come back to us.’

Saul shook his head, twisted, uncomfortable before the sudden intensity.

Anansi nodded and dropped his hand.

‘See you around.’

He turned and slung one of his ropes over an overhang, disappeared at speed over the vertical bricks.

Saul watched him go. He turned and examined where he was. The grille in a yard littered with hulking pieces of machinery. They loomed solemnly in the dark, looking vaguely pathetic. There were no roads visible from here, and Saul enjoyed the moment of solitude. Then he reached down without looking and pulled the grille from the earth.

He hesitated.

He knew there was little point searching for Natasha and Fabian. The city was so large, the Piper’s powers so prodigious, it would not be hard for him to hide two humans. But he knew also that he could not bear to leave them in his power. He knew he had to search, if only to prove that he was still half human. Because he was disquieted by his passivity, his acceptance, the speed with which he had conceptualized their absence as inevitable, as done, as a done thing. He was becoming dulled. Kay’s death was utterly unreal to him, but that was a human reaction. More disturbing to him was his reaction to the Piper’s abduction of his two closest friends.

The acceptance of the unacceptable was a kind of reactionary stoicism, a dynamic that dulled his feelings for these others. He could feel it within him, a growing cunning, a hyper-real focus on the here and now. It frightened him. He could not battle it head on, he could not decide what to feel and what not to feel, but he could challenge it with his actions. He could change it by refusing to behave as if it were how he felt. He abhorred his own reaction, his own feeling.

It was an animal trait.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Saul could tell something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the sewers.

The sounds, the sounds he had become accustomed to walking into, were absent. As his feet hit the trickling water, he dropped into a crouch, suddenly full of feral energy. His ears twitched. He knew what was missing. He should walk into the sewers into a barely audible network of scratching and skittering, the noises of his people. He should hear them at the very edge of his rat-hearing, and subsume them within him, make them part of him, use them to define his time in the darkness.

The sounds were missing. There were no rats around him.

He lowered himself effortlessly, sliding into the organic muck. He was utterly silent, his ears twitching. He was trembling.

He could hear the constant soft drip of the tunnels, the thick trickle of viscous water, the mournful soughing of warm subterranean winds, but his people were gone.

Saul closed his eyes, stilled himself from his toes up. His joints ceased to work over each other; he banished the sound of his blood, slowed his heart, dispensed with all the tiny noises of his body. He became part of the sewer floor, and he listened.

The quiet of the tunnels appalled him.

He rested one ear gently against the floor. He could feel vibrations from all around the city.

A long way off, something sounded.

A high-pitched sound.

Saul snapped to his feet. He was sweating and trembling violently.

The Piper had come here? Was he in the sewers?

Saul raced through the tunnels. He did not know where he was running. He ran to kill the shuddering of his legs, the terror he felt.

What was he doing here?

He sped past a ladder. Maybe he should leave, maybe it was time he left the sewers and ran for it through the streets above, he thought, but damn it, this was his space, his safe haven … he could not have it taken from him.

He stopped still suddenly and cocked his head, listening again.

The sound of the flute was a little closer now, and he could hear a scratching around it, the sound of claws on brick.

The flute slid violently up and down the scale, a cacophony of quavers chasing each other in mad directions. The flute and the claws were strangely static. They did not grow nearer or further away.

There was something strange, Saul realized, about the sound. He listened. Unconsciously he braced himself against the tunnel walls, spread his arms, one above him, one to his side, his legs slightly parted, each climbing the gentle incline of the cylindrical tunnel. He was framed by the passageway.

The flute trilled on, and now Saul could hear something else, a voice raised in anguish.

Loplop. Squawking, emitting meaningless, despairing cries.

Saul moved forward, tracking the sounds through the labyrinth. They remained where they were. He wound his way through the dark towards them. Loplop still shrieked intermittently, but his cries were not pained, not tortured, but miserable. Loplop’s voice rose above the scrabbling – an orderly scrabbling, Saul realized, an unearthly timed scratching.

The sounds were separated from him now only by thin walls, and he knew he was there, around the corner from the congregation. The tremors had returned to Saul’s body. He fought to control himself. Terror held him hard. He remembered the numbing speed with which the Piper moved, the power of his blows. The pain in his body, the pain he had managed to forget, to ignore, reawakened and coursed through him.

Saul did not want to die.

But there was something not right about this sound.

Saul pressed himself hard against the wall and swallowed several times. He edged forward, to the junction with the tunnel which contained the sounds. He was very afraid. The mad piping, Loplop’s random cries, and above all the constant, orderly scrabbling against brick – everything continued as it had for minutes. It was loud, and so close it appalled him.

He looked around. He did not know where he was. Deep somewhere, buried in the vastness of the sewer system.

He steeled himself, drew his head slowly, silently around the edge of the brick.

At first, all he could discern were the rats.

A field of rats, millions of rats; a mass that started a few feet from the entrance to the tunnel and multiplied, bodies piling upon bodies, rat upon rat, a sharp gradient of hot little bellies and chests and legs. A moving mountain, replacing those that fell with new blood, defeating the urge of gravity to level its impossibly steep sides. The rats boiled over each other.

They moved in time, they moved together.

All together they pushed down with their right forefoot, then all together with their left. Then the back legs, again in time. They clawed each other, ripped each other’s skin, trampled on the young and dying – but they were one unit. They moved together, in time to the hideous music.

The Piper was nowhere. On the other side of the rat mountain Saul could see King Rat. Saul could not see his face. But his body moved on the same beat as those of his rebellious people, and he danced with the same disinterested intensity, his body stiff and spasming in perfect time.

Loplop cried again and again, and Saul glimpsed him, a desperate figure before King Rat, his fists flailing against King Rat’s chest. He pushed King Rat, tried to move him back, but King Rat continued with his stiff zombie dance.

And behind them all, something hanging from the ceiling … something emerging, Saul saw, from a shaft to the pavements above. A black box, dangling at a ridiculous angle, its handle tied to a dirty rope …

A ghetto-blaster.

Saul’s eyes widened in astonishment.

The fucker doesn’t even have to be here, he thought.

He stumbled into the tunnel and approached the seething mass. The flute was ghastly, loud and fast and insane like an Irish jig played in Hell. Saul edged forward. He began to pass straggling rats. The ghetto-blaster swayed slightly. Saul waded into the mass of rats. So many already, all around him, and he had at least six feet to walk. It seemed as if every rat in the sewer had found its way here; monstrous foot-long beasts and mewling babies, dark and brown, crushing each other, killing each other in their eagerness to reach the music. Saul pushed forward, feeling the bodies squirm around him. A thousand claws ripped at him, never in antagonism, only in the ecstasy of the dance. Under the rats he could see were layers that moved sluggishly, tired and dying; and below them were rats who did not move at all. Saul walked knee-deep in the dead.

King Rat did not turn, stayed where he was, dancing at the head of his people once again. Loplop saw Saul. He shrieked and pushed past King Rat, launched himself through the living wall towards Saul.

He was ruined. His suit was filthy, and in tatters. His face contorted, rage and confusion fleeting across it.

He waded forward two, three steps, then stumbled under the weight of enthralled bodies. He went under, drowning in the seething mass. Saul ignored him, contemptuous of him, disgusted.

But he too found it difficult to move; he pushed through the rats, killing, he was sure, with each step, unwillingly but inevitably. He swayed, regained his balance. The cacophonous flute was utterly deafening. Saul went down suddenly on one knee and the rats used him as a springboard, leapt from him, tried to fly to the dangling stereo.

Saul swore, struggled to regain his feet, went under again. He became enraged, surged to his feet, spilling rats as he rose. A few feet away he could see the pitiful sight of Loplop’s body bobbing below the surface of the rats, trying and failing to stand.

Saul shook himself and brown bodies spun through the air. He could not reach the boombox. He tugged hard with his feet, which seemed stuck as firmly as in quicksand. He roared, suddenly livid, pulled inexorably through the mass of rats, stumbled again, yanked and forced his way through, past King Rat, to the point where the rats thinned out and the stereo hung six feet from the floor.

He reached up to it, and saw King Rat. He stopped moving, shocked.

King Rat stood in thrall, his face slack, his limbs swinging vaguely, stripped of dignity, a string of drool stretching and snapping from his lower jaw. Saul stared, fascinated and horrified.

He hated King Rat, hated what he had done, but something in him was appalled at seeing him so shorn of power.

Saul turned and grasped the swinging box, pulled hard, snapping the rope.

He smashed it hard against the wall.

The music stopped at the instant of impact. Metal and plastic spattered out of the broken casing. He slammed it twice more against the brick. Its speakers burst out of their housing. A tape flew from the ruined cassette deck.

Saul turned and looked at the assembled multitude.

They stood still, confused.

Understanding and recollection seemed to well over them all simultaneously. In a panic, a terrified flurry, the rats emitted a communal hiss and disappeared, scampering over each other, made clumsy by the fallen.

The mountain crumbled and disappeared. Lame and ruined rats tried to follow their fellows. The first wave was gone; then the second wave, limping after them; and the third wave, the dying, hauled themselves away, sliding on blood.

The ground was covered with bodies. Corpses lay two, three thick. Loplop crawled into a corner.

King Rat stared at Saul. Saul looked back at him for a moment, then returned his attention to the ruined stereo. He fumbled in the mud until he found the tape.

He wiped it, examined the label.

Flute 1, it said. It was handwritten. It was Natasha’s writing.

‘Oh fuck,’ Saul shouted and pushed his head into the crook of his arm. ‘Oh fuck, oh leave them alone, you fucker,’ he breathed.

He heard King Rat move forward. Saul looked up sharply. King Rat looked uneasy. He moved with a deferential cast to his limbs, resentment curling his mouth. He was intimidated, Saul realized.

Saul nodded.

‘It’s just noise to me,’ he whispered. He nodded again, saw King Rat’s eyes widen. ‘Just noise.’

With a shriek Loplop saw Saul, ran towards him flapping his rags and his arms, stumbled as he ran.

King Rat started. Saul stepped smartly out of Loplop’s way and watched as the Bird Superior slipped in mud, went over in a half-controlled fall and banged his head against the wall.

Saul gesticulated at King Rat, danced back a few steps.

‘Keep that motherfucker under control!’ he shouted.

Loplop still shouted, still yelled his incoherent cries as he tried to stand. King Rat strode to where Loplop slithered in mud, and gripped his collar. He tugged him, pulled him along the slippery sewer bottom. Loplop struggled and whimpered. At the entrance to the tunnel King Rat crouched before him, held his finger before Loplop’s face. Saul could not tell if he was speaking to Loplop, or merely holding him still with those eyes. Some kind of communication passed between them.

Loplop stared past King Rat at Saul. He looked afraid and enraged. King Rat regained his gaze and seemed to say something, gesticulated. Loplop’s eyes returned to Saul, and the same rage filled him as before, but he backed away, moved away through the tunnels, disappeared.

King Rat turned back to Saul.

As he walked back through the bodies of the rats, Saul saw that King Rat had regained his furtive swagger. He had composed himself.

‘Back, then?’ King Rat asked casually.

Saul ignored him. He looked up into the shaft from which he had pulled the stereo. Several feet above, a grille was visible, and above it the drab orange-shot black of the city night. Something was affixed to the inside of the narrow shaft.

‘So what you here for, then, chal?’ asked King Rat, his insouciance wearing and affected.

‘Fuck you,’ replied Saul quietly. He stood on tiptoe, reached up into the vertical tunnel. He could feel a corner of paper flapping in wind. He gripped it, pulled gently, but succeeded only in tearing the corner away.

He looked down briefly. King Rat stood near him, his hands held uncertainly to his chest.

Saul looked around him at the corpses.

‘Another fine display of leadership skills, then, Dad.’

‘Fuck you, you pissing little half-breed, I’ll kill you …’

‘Oh give it a rest, old man,’ said Saul, disgusted. ‘You need me, you know it, I know it, so shut up with your stupid threats.’ He returned his attention to the tunnel. He jumped up and grabbed the top of the paper, pulled it down with him when he fell.

It came away in his hands. He spread it out.

It was a poster.

It was designed by someone with Adobe Illustrator, a sixth-form aesthetic and too much time. Garish and jumbled, a confusion of fonts and point sizes, information crowding itself out and details fighting for space.

A line drawing took up most of the sheet: a grotesquely muscled man in sunglasses standing impassive behind a twin-deck turntable. He stood with his arms folded, as the chaotic writing exploded around him.

JUNGLIST TERROR!!! it exclaimed.

One night of Extreme Drum an’ Bass Badness!

£10 entry, it exclaimed, and gave the address of a club in the Elephant and Castle, in the badlands of South London; and a date, a Saturday night in early December.

Featuring da Cream of da Crop, Three Fingers, Manta, Ray Wired, Rudegirl K, Natty Funkah …

Rudegirl K. That was Natasha.

Saul let out a little cry. He bent slightly, his breath pushed from him.

‘He’s telling us,’ he hissed to King Rat. ‘He’s inviting us.’

Something was scrawled on the bottom of the poster, an addendum in a strange ornate hand. Also featuring a special guest! it proclaimed. Fabe M!

Jesus he was pathetic! Saul thought. He sank slowly back against the wall as he grasped the paper. Fabe M! Look, he’s trying to play games, thought Saul, but this isn’t his environment, he doesn’t know what to do, he can’t play with these words …

It made him feel obscurely comforted. Even in the misery of knowing that his friends were in the hands of this creature, this monster, this avaricious spirit, he felt a triumph in the ineptitude with which his foe stumbled on jargon. He was trying for nonchalance, scribbling an addition in Drum and Bass style, but the language was unfamiliar and he had stumbled. Fabe M! It sounded stupid and contrived. He wanted Saul to know that he had Fabian, that Fabian would be at the club, but he was not on his home ground, and his clumsy affectation showed that.

Saul found himself chuckling, almost ruefully.

‘Bastard can’t play no more.’ He crushed the paper and threw it at King Rat, who had been hovering nervously, resentfully. King Rat snatched it out of the air. ‘Fucker’s telling us to come and get them,’ said Saul, as King Rat opened out the sheet.

Saul pushed past King Rat, kicked his way through the bodies of the rat dead.

‘He’s operating like a fucking Bond villain,’ he said. ‘He wants me. Knows I’ll come for him if he dangles my friends in front of me.’

‘So what’s a rat to do?’ said King Rat.

Saul turned and stared at him. He knew, quite suddenly, that his eyes were as hidden to King Rat as King Rat’s were to him.

‘What am I going to do?’ Saul said slowly. ‘A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge. I’m going to go, of course. I’m going to Junglist Terror. To rescue my friends.’ He could feel that sentiment within him which had disturbed him before, a part of him saying fuck it, don’t go, it’s not your problem any more.

That was King Rat’s blood. Saul would not listen to it. I am what I do, he thought, furiously.

There was a long silence between the two of them.

‘You know what?’ said Saul finally. ‘I think you should come too. I think you will.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Squadrons of rats spread out across London. Saul harangued them in foetid alleys, behind great plastic bins. He raged to them about the Piper, told them that their day had come.

The massed ranks of the rats stood quivering, inspired. Their noses twitched; they could smell victory. Saul’s words broke over them like tides, swept them up. He communicated with them by his tone; they knew they were being commanded, and after centuries of furtive skulking they became brave, puffed up with millennial fervour.

Saul ordered them to prepare. He ordered them to search out the Piper, to bring Saul information, to find his friends. He described them, the black man and the short woman being kept hostage by the Piper. The rats did not care about the people being held. They represented nothing except a task set by Saul.

‘You are rats,’ Saul told them, sticking out his lower lip and jerking his head back like Mussolini. They gazed at him, a shifting mass of followers, peering out from all the nooks and crannies of the building site in which they had congregated. ‘You’re the sneakers, the creepers, the rat-burglars. Don’t come to me afraid of being seen, don’t come to me with fears of the Piper’s revenge. Why will he see you? You’re rats … if he sees you you’re a failure to your species. Stay hidden, creep in the spaces in between, and find him, and tell me where he is.’

The rats were inspired. They longed to follow him. He dismissed them with a wave and they scattered in short-lived bravado.

Saul knew that beyond the range of his voice, the rats’ fear would quickly return. He knew that they would hesitate. He knew they would slow down as they scaled walls, look around anxiously for him to shout them on, and that they would fail. He knew they would slink back to the sewers and hide until he found them and urged them out again.

But maybe one would be brave or lucky. Maybe one of his rats would scale the walls that divided the Piper’s sanctuary from the outside, and pick a way through the barbed wire, scamper along the pipes and the cables, cross the wasteland, and find him.

Somewhere, squeezed into the air-conditioning housing on the top of a financial building in the heart of the City, or in a bitumen-sealed hole under a suburban railway bridge, or in a room with no windows in an empty hospital beyond Neasden, or in the high-tech vaults of a bank to the west of Hammersmith, or in the attic above a bingo hall in Tooting, the Piper was holding Natasha and Fabian, waiting out the week before Junglist Terror.

Saul suspected that the Piper would avoid the gaze of rats and spiders and birds. He was not afraid of his adversaries, but there was no point advertising his presence. He had issued his challenge, had told them the night that they would die. The Piper had issued them with invitations to their own executions.

It might be that he was only concerned with Saul, with the half-and-half, the rat-man he could not control, but he must suspect that Anansi would be there, too, and King Rat, and Loplop. They were not brave or proud. They were not ashamed to turn down challenges. But they knew that Saul was the only thing that the Piper could not control, that Saul was the only chance they had, and they knew they must be there to help him. If he did not survive, they could not.

The rats spread throughout London.

Saul was alone amidst the rubble and the scaffolding.

He stood in the centre of a wide ruined landscape, a blitzed corner of London that hid behind hoardings, in easy earshot of Edgware Road. A forty-foot by forty-foot square, carpeted in crushed brick and old stone and surrounded by the backs of buildings. On one edge of the square a rough wooden fence hid the street that flanked the site, and above the fence towered the old brick walls of ancient shops and houses. Saul looked up at them. On that side the windows were surrounded by large wooden frames, rotting but ornate, designed to be seen.

On all other sides the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’ underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. Out of sight of their façades, he was ringed by great flat expanses of brick, windows that spilt at random down featureless walls. Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed.

This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out. Even as he saw it clearly for the product it was, Saul felt it square up against him. The city and he faced each other. He saw London from an angle against which it had no front, at a time when its guard was down.

He had felt this before, when he had left King Rat, when he had known that he had slipped the city’s bonds; and he had known then that he had made of it an enemy. The windows which loomed over him reminded him of that.

In the corner of the square lurked obscure building machines, piles of materials and pickaxes, bags of cement covered with blue plastic sheeting. They looked defensive and overwhelmed. Just in front of them stood the remnants of the building that had been pulled down. All that remained was a section of its front, a veneer one brick deep, with gaping, glassless holes where windows had been. It seemed miraculous that it could stand. Saul walked over the broken ground towards it.

There were lights on in a few of the rooms that overlooked him and, as he walked silently, Saul even caught sight of movement here and there. He was not afraid. He did not believe that anyone would see him; he had rat blood in his veins. And if they did, they might be surprised to see a man striding by lamplight in the forbidden space of a nascent building, but who would they tell? And if someone were, unbelievably, to call the police, Saul could simply climb and be gone. He had rat blood in his veins. Tell the police to call Rentokil, he thought. They might have a better chance.

He stood under the free-standing façade. He stretched his arms up, prepared to scramble over the city himself, to join his emissaries in their search. He did not believe that he would find Fabian or Natasha or the Piper, but he could not fail to look for them. To acquiesce in the Piper’s plans would be to abrogate his own power, to become collaborator. If he were to meet the Piper on the ground the Piper had specified, he would be dragged there, he would be unwilling. He would be angry.

He heard a noise above him. A figure swung into view in one of the empty window-frames. Saul was still. It was King Rat.

Saul was not surprised. King Rat followed him often, waited until the rats had left, then poured scorn on his efforts, ridiculed him in agonized contumely, incoherent with rage at the behaviour of the rats who had once obeyed him.

King Rat grasped his small perch with his right hand. He crouched, his left arm dangling down between his legs, his head lowered towards his knees. Seeing him, Saul thought of a comic-book hero: Batman or Daredevil. Silhouetted in the ruined window, King Rat looked like a scene-setting frame at the start of an epic graphic novel.

‘What do you want?’ Saul said finally.

In a sinewy sliding movement King Rat emerged from the window and landed at Saul’s feet. He bent his knees on landing, then rose slowly just before him.

His face twisted.

‘So what silly buggers are you playing now, cove?’

‘Fuck off,’ said Saul and turned away.

King Rat grabbed him and swung him back to face him. Saul slapped the other’s hands down, his eyes wide and outraged. There was a horrible uneasy moment as Saul and King Rat stared at each other, their shoulders wide, their fists ready to strike. Slowly and deliberately, Saul reached up and pushed King Rat on the chest, shoved him slightly back.

His anger boiled up in him and he shoved King Rat again, growled and tried to make him fall. He punched him suddenly, hard, and images of his father raced through his mind. He felt a desperate desire to kill King Rat. It shocked him how fast the hatred could overtake him.

King Rat was stumbling slightly on the uneven ground, and Saul reached down to snatch up a half-brick. He bore down on King Rat, flailing brutally with his weapon.

He swung it at King Rat’s head, connecting and sending his opponent sprawling, but King Rat hissed with rage as he fell. He rolled painfully across the shattered ground and swung his legs up at Saul, taking him down. The fight became a violent blur, a flurry of arms and legs, nails and fists. Saul did not aim, did not plan; he flailed in rage, feeling blows and scratches bruise him and rip his skin.

Blood exploded from a vicious strike below his eye and his head rocked. He slammed his brick down again but King Rat was not there, and the brick struck stone and burst into dust.

The two rolled and grappled. King Rat slid from Saul’s grip and hovered like a gadfly, ripping him open with a hundred cruel scratches and dancing out of the range of retaliation.

Saul’s frustration overwhelmed him. He suddenly broke off his frenzied attack with a shouted curse. He stalked away across the rubble.

Another vicious half-fight. He could not kill him.

King Rat was too fast, too strong, and he would not engage Saul properly, he would not risk killing Saul. King Rat wanted Saul alive, for all that he was growing to hate him for his following among the rats, for his refusal to obey him.

King Rat shouted scornfully after him. Saul could not even hear what he said.

He felt blood well from the deep scratches on his face and he wiped himself as he began to run, surefooted despite the terrain. He threw himself at one of the walls which overlooked him, scrambled up its tender surface, slipping by those unadorned windows, leaving a long smear of blood and dirt on his way up the bricks.

He stared briefly behind him. King Rat sat forlornly on the hulking piles of cement. Saul turned away from him and set out over the top of London. He looked around him as he moved, and sometimes he stopped and was still.

On the top of a school, somewhere behind Paddington, he saw harsh security lights catching on a billowing cobweb suspended below the railings that topped the building. The fragile thing was empty and long deserted, but he lowered himself to the ground and stared around him. There were other, smaller webs below it, still inhabited, less visible without the accumulated dust of days.

He lowered his lips to these webs and spoke in a voice he knew sounded removed and intimate, like King Rat’s. The spiders were quite still.

‘I need you to do what I say, now,’ he whispered. ‘I need you to find Anansi, find your boss. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Tell him I need to see him.’

The little creatures were still for a long time. They seemed to hesitate. Saul lowered himself again.

‘Go on,’ he said, ‘spread the word.’

There was another moment’s hesitation, then the spiders, six or seven of them, tiny and fierce, took off at the same moment. They left their webs together, on long threads, little abseiling special forces, disappearing down the side of the building.

Fabian drifted on waves.

He was stuck very deep in his own head. His body made itself felt occasionally, with a fart or a pain or an itch, but for the most part he could forget it was even there. He was conscious of almost nothing except perpetual motion, a tireless pitch and yaw. He was not sure if it was his body or only his mind which was lulled by the liquid movement.

There was a Drum and Bass backdrop to the hypnagogic rolling. The soundtrack never stopped, the same bleak, washed-out track that he had heard from Natasha’s stairs.

Sometimes he saw her face. She would lean over him, nodding gently in time to the beat, her eyes unfocused. Sometimes it was Pete’s face. He felt soup trickle down his throat and around his mouth, and he swallowed obligingly.

Most of the time he lay back and surrendered to the rocking motion in his skull. He could see almost anything when he just lay back and listened to the Jungle filtering from somewhere close by, twisting around him in a tiny dark room, oppressive, stinking of rot.

He spent a lot of time looking at his artwork in progress. He was not always sure it was there, but when he thought of it and relaxed into the beat, it invariably appeared, and then he would make plans, scribble charcoal additions in each corner. Changing this canvas was so easy. He could never quite remember the moment when he drew, but the changes appeared, bright and perfect.

He became more and more ambitious in his changes, going over old ground, rewriting the text at the centre of his piece. In no time at all it was changed beyond recognition, as smooth and perfect as computer graphics, and he stared at the legend he could not quite remember choosing. Wind City, it said.

Fabian swallowed the food he found in his mouth and listened to the music.

*

Natasha spent most of her time with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to open them at all. Her fingers knew every inch of her keyboard, and she spent her time playing Wind City, tweaking it, changing it in slight and subtle ways, to fit the exigencies of her mood.

Occasionally she would open her eyes and see with surprise that she stood in unfamiliar environs, that she was in the centre of a dim, stinking space, that Fabian danced horizontally, lying down nearby, food drying on his face, and that her keyboard was not in front of her after all. But when she tweaked Wind City, it changed anyway, it did what she wanted, so she closed hereyesand continued,herfingersflying over thekeys.

Sometimes Pete would come and feed her, and she would play him what she had done, still with her eyes closed.

The rats had given up in fear and confusion. The great cadres that had set out earlier in the night had dried up, had slunk home to the sewers, but here and there the braver souls continued the search, as Saul had hoped they would.

In the streets of Camberwell they searched the catacombs of old churches. On the Isle of Dogs they ran past Blackwall Basin and scoured the decrepit business park. The rats worked their way along the great slit of the Jubilee Line extension, past vast hulking machines that tunnelled through the earth.

Their numbers dwindled. As the night wound on, more and more gave in to hunger and fear and forgetfulness. They could not work out why they were running so hard. They could no longer remember what their quarries looked like. One by one they slipped back into the sewers. Some fell prey to dogs and cars.

Soon there were only a very few rats left searching.

‘Lickle bird tell me you want talk to me, bwoy.’

Saul looked up.

Anansi descended from the bough of a tree above him. He moved elegantly, belying his size and weight, slipping smoothly down one of his ropes, utterly controlled.

Saul leaned back. He felt the cold weight of the gravestone behind him.

He was sitting quietly in a small cemetery in Acton. It was a tiny space that straddled the overland train line, tucked behind a small industrial estate. It was overlooked on all sides by ugly functionality, a set of grotesque flattened factories and suburban warehouses, uncomfortable in this residential zone.

Saul had wandered West London for a time and entered the graveyard to eat and rest, here amid the crammed urban dead.

The stones were nondescript, apologetic.

Anansi came to the ground silently a few feet from him, stalked past the low grey markers and crouched beside him.

Saul glanced at him, nodded in greeting. He did not offer Anansi any of the old fruit he had scavenged. He knew he would not take it.

Saul sat and ate. ‘Now was it really a little bird, ’Nansi?’ he asked mildly. ‘How is Loplop?’

Anansi jerked his head.

‘Him still screaming angry, bwoy. Him mad, too. Them can’t understand him, the birds dem. Him have lost a kingdom again, think you take it from him.’ Anansi shrugged. ‘So we no have no birds. Just my lickle spiders and the rats, and you and me.’

Saul bit into his bruised apple.

‘And Loplop?’ he asked, and paused. ‘And King Rat? They going to be there with us? They going to be there when we take him?’

Anansi shrugged again. ‘Loplop is nothing, whether him there or not. King Rat? You tell me, bwoy. He’s your daddy …’

‘He’ll be there,’ said Saul quietly.

The two sat for a while. Anansi rose presently and walked to the railing in front of them, looked over at the train-line below.

‘I’ve sent the rats to find the Piper,’ said Saul, ‘but they’ll fail. They’re probably all sitting stuffing their bellies right now. They’ve probably forgotten what it is I wanted them to do …’ He smiled humourlessly. ‘We’re going to face him on his terms.’

Anansi said nothing. Saul knew what he was thinking.

Anansi had to come to the Junglist Terror, because Saul would be there. Saul was the only chance he had to defeat the Piper, but he knew it was a tiny chance; he knew that he was walking into a trap, that by being there he was doing exactly what the Piper wanted. But he had no choice. Because if he were not there, Saul’s chances of defeating the Piper were even smaller, and if Saul failed, the Piper would have them all, the Piper would hunt Anansi down and kill him.

It was paradoxical. Anansi, King Rat, they were animals. Preserve yourself, that was the whole of their law. And that law would compel them to go to Junglist Terror. To their almost certain death. Because Saul had to go, because of his human friends, because Saul was refusing to act as an animal.

Saul was going to kill Anansi.

They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father’s son.

Anansi looked back at Saul and shook his head slightly.

Saul returned his gaze.

‘Let’s talk about what we’re going to do, ’Nansi,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a few plans … let’s not let everything go this fucker’s way.’

They had spiders, they had rats … they had Saul. The Piper would have to make a choice. One of the armies would be defeated as soon as they all entered the fray, but the Piper had to make a choice. Anansi and his troops had half a chance of remaining free from the Piper’s thrall. And so did the rats.

A handful of rats still scoured London for … something …

They could not remember exactly what.

These were the pride of the nation. These were the bravest, the fattest and strongest and sleekest, the leaders of the pack.

As smooth as seals through the water they roamed.

One raced like a chubby bullet along the Albert Embankment.

It had come up from the kitchens of St Thomas’s Hospital, next to Waterloo, there on the South Bank of the river. It had snatched food to fortify itself, had searched the attic spaces and cellars. It had run like a ghost through the hospital, leaving its footprints in thick dust, dirtying obscure and forgotten diagnostic machinery.

It had passed through others’ territories, but it was a great big animal, and it was on royal business. They did not challenge it.

It had found nothing. It made its way out of the building.

In the open space it scampered along the bank of the river towards the medical school.

The Thames glinted balefully beside it, oozing fatly through the city. On the opposite bank stood Westminster Palace, London’s absurdly crenellated seat of power. Its many lights flickered on the river’s skin.

The rat stopped.

Lambeth Bridge loomed up over the water before it, darkening the muck of the Thames.

An indistinct shape bobbed sullenly in the water beside it. An ancient barge, one of the various hulks that littered the river, untended and ignored. It heaved gently to and fro in the current, little waves slapping its greasy boards like petulant children. The corpse of a boat, its black wood leprous and decaying, a vast tarpaulin slung across it like a shroud.

The rat moved forward nervously, stopped, uncertain.

It strained its ears. It could hear something, faint and sinister. Sounds emanating from under the heavy waterproof cloth.

The barge rocked back and forth. The water was digesting it. But in the meantime, before the wood splintered and dissolved into the Thames, someone was on the vessel, desecrating it, interrupting its long death.

Two old ropes still tethered it to the bank. One dipped in an elegant curve below the surface of the water, but the other was nearly taut. Tentative, the rat stepped onto the mooring. Like a tightrope walker it scurried over the water.

It slowed as it approached the boat. Foreboding flooded its tiny brain, and it would have turned to run if it could, but the rope was too narrow. The rat was stuck with its choice, its impetuous courage.

The rope was strung like a necklace, with huge lumpy beads designed to impede a rat’s progress. But unable to turn back, and dreading the water, the rat was tenacious. It hauled itself over the impediments until only a few feet of rope remained.

Stealthy now, silent, the rat continued. The sound from the barge was clearer now, a low repeated thump, a thin, plaintive wailing, the creaking of wood under moving bodies.

With the lightest of touches the rat set foot on the barge.

It crept around to the side, seeking a gap in the tarpaulin. It could feel vibrations in the wood that were nothing to do with the water.

Slinking below the boat’s lip, the rat found a place where the material was rucked up, where it could creep through tunnels left between folds in the heavy canvas.

It made its way through this maze until it could hear soft murmurings. It could feel the tarpaulin opening up around it.

With a nose twitching maniacally, the rat crept forward, peered furtively up into the barge.

There was an incredible stink. A mixture of decay, food, bodies and old, old tar. The tarpaulin was stretched out on a frame to make the barge a floating tent. The rat could see by the weak light of a torch suspended from the frame. It pointed directly down and its ambient light was poor, so everything in the room was glimpsed, half-seen, noticed briefly as the motion of the boat swung the torch one way, then lost as its oscillations took it away again.

A low, very quiet bass thump pervaded the tiny space.

In one corner a man lay on the floor. He looked feverish, moved his arms and legs as if he were dancing, his face thrashing uneasily from side to side.

A woman stood nearby, facing away from him. Her eyes were closed. She nodded her head and moved her hands in abstract, exact patterns in front of her, her fingers flying, tracing intricate motions.

Their clothes were dirty. Their faces were thin.

The rat stared at them briefly. Saul’s descriptions were muddled in its mind, but it knew that these two were important, it knew that it had to tell Saul what it had found. It turned to run.

A foot slammed down on its escape route, closing off the way through the cloth.

The rat bolted in terror.

It ran around and around the room, everything a dark blur, between the legs of the standing woman, under the arms of the lying man, scratching madly at the cloth all around in a frenzy of fear.

Then suddenly it heard a quick whistling, a jaunty marching tune, and it stopped running, filled with wonder and amazement. The whistling segued gently into the sounds of sex, and the slopping of rich, fatty food falling to the ground, and the rat turned and marched in the direction of the sound, eager to find all these good things.

Then the whistling stopped.

The rat was staring into a man’s eyes. Its body was held fast. Frantic, it bit down, drew blood, savaged the fingers which gripped it, but they did not relax.

The eyes gazed at it with a lunatic intensity. The rat began to scream in terror.

There was a brief and sudden motion.

The Piper slammed the rat’s head against the wooden floor again and again, until it had lost its definition, become just a flaccid, indistinct appendage.

He held the little corpse up to his face, pursed his lips.

He reached down for the small ghetto-blaster on the floor, and lowered the volume still further. Wind City could still be heard, but now it was almost subliminal.

Fabian and Natasha turned simultaneously, looked at him in confusion and surprise.

‘I know, I know,’ he said, mollifying. ‘You’ll have to listen really hard. I have to turn it down a bit. We’re attracting attention. We don’t want to do that yet, right?’ He smiled. ‘Save that for the club. Right?’

He moved the ghetto-blaster closer with his foot. Spent batteries lay all around it, moving uneasily with the current.

Natasha and Fabian subsided into their previous poses.

Fabian sank back and began to paint.

Natasha continued to play Wind City. They both strained their ears a little, and heard what they were looking for.

Warily, the Piper lifted a corner of the cloth. His pale eyes scanned the darkness around the boat.

No one was passing by on Albert Embankment; Pete saw by the lights of the Houses of Parliament.

He reached out and dropped the rat’s body into the Thames.

It circled, one speck of dirty darkness among many in the water. The current pulled it slowly, tugging it beyond Westminster, carrying the little cadaver way out to the east.

PART SIX

JUNGLIST TERROR

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Jungle night.

It was in the air. The sharp-dressed youth who congregated on the Elephant and Castle could taste it.

The clouds were low and moving very fast, ruddy with streetlamp light, billowing up from behind the skyline. London looked like a city on fire.

Police cars swirled ephemeral through the streets, streaking past those other cars that prowled towards Lambeth, stereos pumping. The strains of Dancehall and Rap, blunted and languorous, and everywhere Drum and Bass, febrile and poised, savage and impenetrable.

The drivers leaned their arms out of open windows, nodded lazily in time to the music. These cars were full, bursting with designer clothes and basslines. For the cruisers, the evening kicked in at the zebra crossings and red lights, when they could stop, engine idling, beats pounding, visible in all their finery. They drove from junction to junction, searching for places to be still.

A hundred slogans boomed out of a hundred car windows, the samples and shouted declarations of the classic tracks being played, a hundred preludes to the evening.

Mr Loverman, came the shouts, and Check yo’self. Gangsta. Jump. Fight the Power. There is a Darkside.

I could just kill a man.

Six million ways to die.

They only had eyes for each other that night. They drove and walked the streets like conquistadors in Karl Kani, Calvin Klein and Kangols. In wafts of cologne the homeboys and rudegirls, the posses and massives claimed the streets south of Waterloo, striding past the intimidated natives as though they were shades.

Touching fists and kissing their teeth, the massed ranks moved in on the venue. Irish boys and Caribbean girls, smooth Pakistani kids, gangstas in huge coats muttering into mobile phones, DJs with record bags, precocious kids aping the studied nonchalance of the elders …

They made their way into the Jungle.

Here and there the police lurked in corners. Sometimes they were judged worthy of a contemptuous glance, a sneer, before the lights changed and the drivers moved on. The police watched them, whispered to their radios in garbled code. The air teemed with their electronic hisses, warnings and prophecies, unheard by the gathering, swamped by urban breakbeats.

The night was fraught, full of looks held too long.

In the dark streets the warehouse shone. Light spilled from its crevices as if it were a church.

Lines stretched out before the entrance. The bouncers, vast men in bomber jackets, stood with arms folded like grotesque gargoyles. Feudal hierarchies asserted themselves: the serfs in line, clamouring at the gates, staring enviously at the DJs and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers of the Drum and Bass scene, who sauntered casually past them and murmured to the guards. For the noblest of them, even checking the guest list was unnecessary.

Roy Kray and DJ Boom, Nuttah and Deep Cover, familiar from a hundred CD covers and posters, were waved in without demur. Even the preposterously proportioned bouncers showed their obeisance, as their impassivity became momentarily more studied. Droit de seigneur was alive and kicking in the Elephant and Castle that night.

If any of the assembled had looked up they might have caught a glimpse of something lurching across the sky, seemingly out of control. A bundle of rags as big as a man, buffeted through the air. It was not at the mercy of the wind: no wind changed direction as violently or as fast as the shapeless mass, no wind could carry such bulk.

Loplop, the Bird Superior, arced and wheeled above the streets, staring down at the dirty map below him, staring up into the night stained orange by diffuse light, falling, rising, his ears filled with ringing.

He could not hear the city. He could not hear the predatory grunting of the cars. He could not hear the thud thud thud emanating from the warehouse. The intricate hairs and bones in his ears had burst, and the canals were blocked with dry blood.

Loplop had only his eyes, and he searched as best he could, weaving silently between buildings, perching on weathervanes and springing into the sky.

The air was slowly thickening with birds. The few that had been awake as Loplop sped by had cried out, pledged their fealty, but he had not heard them. Confused, they had risen from the eaves and the branches of trees, had followed him, screaming out to him, frightened by his wild flight and his ignoring of them. Huge ponderous crows circled him. Loplop saw them and shouted wordlessly, clutching at the authority he had lost.

The birds wove elegantly around each other, their numbers growing. Their eyes darted from side to side in confusion. In the midst of their slow wheeling, Loplop rose and sped and zigzagged and fell – a wild card.

The birds could not obey their general.

Elsewhere in London, other armies were also massing.

The walls and corners of houses were emptying out. From crevices and holes all over the city, the spiders streamed. They scuttled in their millions, little smudges racing across dirty floors and through gardens, descending on threads from building tops. They crawled over each other, a sudden, nervous mass of blacks and browns.

Here and there their squadrons were seen. In children’s bedrooms and backstreets, the night was punctuated by sudden screams.

Many died. Crushed, eaten, lost. Ruined chitin and smeared bodies marked their passing.

Something sparked deep in the spiders’ tiny brains. A sensation that was not the hunger or fear or nothingness that were previously their lot. Trepidation? Excitement? Vindication?

The city lights glinted minutely on the spiders’ multiple eyes. Close set and impenetrable, as cold and disinterested as a shark’s … except tonight …

The spiders trembled.

In the wilds of South London, Anansi watched from rooftops. He could feel the air shifting. He could taste the presence of his troops.

The sewers boiled with rats, incited to a frenzy.

Their Crown Prince had passed among them. Saul had spread the word. He had commanded them, controlled them, sent them forth.

The rats surged through the tunnels like a flash flood. Smaller tributaries streamed into the main branch, bodies on bodies, fat and fast.

They poured under the streets and over the skyline. Up in the canopy of the city, in the thin air, rats bounded over walls and between partitions, scrabbled along slates and behind chimneys.

The river was no obstacle: they found their way across almost without pause.

Different dirt, different packs, a hundred different smells … all the tribes in London running for the south, gnawing on forgotten filth and shaking with adrenaline, ready for battle. An enormous sense of wrong had been encoded in their genes for years, eating them alive like a cancer, and for the first time they could smell a cure.

Rats spewed out of a hundred thousand holes and converged on the wastelands of South London, a scratching, biting mass, hungry and scared, trying to be brave.

Insidiously, furtively, the rats gathered round the warehouse, and waited.

The warehouse was a spark plug. It crackled with energy. It was surrounded by invisible circles, waves and cadres of rats and spiders, crowned with confused, wheeling birds, penetrated by people.

It was a magnet.

Loplop still watched from above.

Anansi scanned the rooftops.

‘Where the fuck is she at?’

Three Fingers, wiry and cantankerous, addressed his question to one of the bouncers. The huge man shook his head. Fingers danced from side to side in frustration. The wet thumping of basslines and beats welled up behind him. He felt as if he could lean backwards on the sound without falling, cushioned, held in the air.

He stood at the entrance to the warehouse, gazing out at the crowd assembled in the forecourt. He had been on the top step for some minutes, waiting for Natasha. All the other DJs had arrived. Fingers had already had to rearrange his running order a little, in case Natasha did not appear. He trotted down the stairs into the courtyard, strode out to the split in the wire-mesh fence and looked up and down the street.

Swaggering dancers were still appearing from all over, converging on the warehouse. Looking absurdly drab in their midst, a few locals passed by, staring at Fingers and glancing uneasily at the warehouse lit up and pounding, monstrous in the dull light.

A tall figure rounded the corner and bore down on him. Close behind him appeared two figures, a slim black man and a short woman. Fingers started, looked hard. It was Natasha.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ shouted Fingers, smiling tightly, amiable but pissed off. He strode off down the street towards Natasha and her escorts.

She looked amazing. Her hair was pulled up into a high, coiling ponytail. Her body was sheathed in a tiny bra-top, reflective red, and her trousers were so tight they looked painted onto her legs. She wore no jacket, nothing on her thin arms or midriff. She must be freezing, Fingers thought. He shrugged: no surrender to comfort in the style war. But he was surprised. Whenever he had seen her DJ before, Natasha had resolutely dressed down, in clothes that were baggy and comfortable and nondescript. But not tonight. Gold glinted in her ears and around her neck.

Fingers stopped short, waited for her to come to him.

She was approaching with an odd gait, he realized, a peculiar hybrid, at once arrogant sashay and aimless wander. He noticed that she was wearing a walkman, as was the guy next to her, Fabian. Fingers had met him once before. He was as dressed up as Natasha, and walking in the same half-lost manner. It suddenly occurred to Fingers that the two of them might be high, and he gritted his teeth. If she was fucked up and couldn’t perform …

The tall man reached him first and proffered a hand, which Fingers stared at, then shook perfunctorily. Fuck knew where Natasha had picked this one up, he thought. An embarrassing grin, his blond hair enticed into a ponytail it clearly resented, and clothes that proclaimed his indifference to fashion. Incongruously, his face was covered in thin, half-healed scratches. If he hadn’t been with Natasha, he would never have got past the bouncers.

‘You must be Fingers,’ he said. ‘I’m Pete.’

Fingers nodded briefly and turned to Natasha. He was about to harass her about her late arrival but, as he opened his mouth, her face passed from shadow into the dim glow of a streetlamp and his complaints died unsaid.

Her make-up was immaculate and excessive, vampish, but it could not disguise how thin and pale she looked. She looked up at him with eyes that did not properly focus, smiled abstractedly. Drugs for sure, he thought again.

‘Tash, man,’ he said uneasily, ‘are you OK?’

Behind him the thumping beats of the warehouse were audible, a backdrop to his conversation.

She cocked her head, pulled the headphone from one ear. He repeated his question.

‘For sure, man,’ she said, and he was a little reassured. Her voice sounded firm and controlled. ‘We’re ready to go.’

Fingers realized that Fabian was nodding his head slightly, in time to the beat passing through his headphones, his eyes unfocused.

Natasha followed Fingers’ gaze. ‘You’ll be hearing that later,’ she said softly. ‘You can join in. I swear you’ll love it. Have you got a DAT player in there? Pete brought mine, in case.’ She paused and gave another wan smile. ‘You have to hear what I’ve been doing. It’s special, Fingers.’

There was a silence Fingers did not know how to fill. Eventually he inclined his head for them to follow him, turned and walked back towards the warehouse.

It felt like a long way.

As he walked, he heard a brief sound, a snatch of billowing and snapping like a sheet being shaken out. He turned, but saw nothing. Pete was looking into the sky, smiling.

Giddy with excitement and terror, Loplop spun in circles in the air, passing through narrow passages between buildings, searching for Anansi. He caught a glimpse of his nude torso tucked under the eaves of a building. Loplop hovered before him like a humming-bird, screeching incoherently. Anansi understood. He glowered and mouthed something.

He’s here. The Piper’s here.

Loplop nodded, shrieked, disappeared.

Anansi whispered into his hand, released the tiny spider held therein. It scuttled away from him down the side of the building, to the bottom of the drainpipe, where another five comrades awaited it. They caressed the newcomer with their long, powerful legs, leaned in close and gazed into one another’s eyes. Then all six turned and disappeared, their paths forming an expanding asterisk, until each spider met others of its kind, waiting, and there was another brief conference, and more messengers joined the throng, exponentially, faster and faster, and word spread among the spiders like contagion.

Directly opposite the warehouse rose a high red wall, the boundary of a long-gone factory. Behind it was a small area of urban scrub, and beyond that a thickset tower block, fabricated from grey slabs, that overlooked the warehouse and its courtyard.

On the top of the block’s flat roof, something moved under a pile of old cardboard. Stealthy hands with filthy nails crept gingerly out from underneath and gently cleared a small space. Two indistinct eyes peered out as Natasha, Fabian and Pete followed Fingers up the stairs of the warehouse, past the bouncers and into the building.

The cardboard rose, then fell away as Saul stood.

He was still for a moment, breathing deeply, calming himself, slowing his heart.

His old clothes, stolen from the prison, fluttered around him.

He closed his eyes briefly, rocked on his heels, then snapped to attention, scanned the air for any signs of Loplop coming for him.

It was partly in case of such an attack that he had concealed himself, but there was more and less to it than that. He could not speak, could not talk to Anansi, could not make any more plans. He gave an empty smile. As if they had come up with any plans.

This was the night when it would all happen. This was the night when he would free himself, or the night he would die. And he wanted to be alone in London, using the city as his climbing frame, asserting himself alone, before the night came for him.

And as he had known it would, the night had come.

It was time to move.

Saul leant forward, grasped the gutter with both hands, shook it vigorously, testing its strength.

His legs bent a little for leverage, he paused, then vaulted over the edge of the building.

Saul swung round in mid-air, his hands leapfrogging over each other as he renewed his grip, tugged himself out of his acrobatic arc and into a sharp sideways movement, curtailing his curving passage and slithering along the gutter to the drainpipe.

He slipped down it as if it were a firefighter’s pole, his hands and feet moving imperceptibly fast to avoid the bolts that tethered it to the wall.

He touched down on the desiccated earth and moved through the desultory patches of dandelions and grass into the shadow of the wall.

Saul clicked his fingers imperiously. Immediately a dozen little brown heads poked up from hiding places behind old bricks, from holes in the earth, cavities in the wall. The rats watched him, twitching in excitement and fear.

‘It’s time,’ he said. ‘Tell everyone to get ready. I’ll see you in there.’ He paused, and spoke his final words with a flat excitement, a fatalistic thrill. ‘In you go.’

The rats bolted.

Saul ran with them. He overtook them, ran through them like a symbol of victory. He slunk along the top of the wall, invisible. He crossed the road unseen, now in the shade of a car, now flattened against a building, now as a passer-by; into the gutter and out, over the wall and along the side of the warehouse, past the waiting crowds without giving them a second glance. The air was thick with the taste of alcohol and scent, but Saul held his nose through that.

He kept his nose clean to smell his troops.

Up a low garage and across its collapsed skylight, a ramp onto the crumbling brick walls of the venue, clinging to forgotten nails and the undersides of heavy old windows. He gripped the edge of the gently sloping roof and bent his legs against the wall. He could feel the bricks vibrate with bass. Then, just as King Rat had done so long ago, on Saul’s first night among the beasts, before he had eaten their food, when he was still human, Saul pushed out with his legs and swung around in a perfect circle, landing solidly on the warehouse roof.

He slithered quickly up the slates towards the massive skylights. They were cracked all over, a few seconds’ work to pry open and push aside, opening the way to an attic space, a dusty wooden floor that jumped with the bass from below, as if the building itself was eager to dance to the music in its bowels.

Saul paused. He could taste a mass movement in the air. He could sense the migration of the compact little bodies, was aware of the exodus of his troops from the streets and sewers and scrub, towards the glowing building. He could feel the scratch of claws on concrete, the feverish searching for causeways and flaws in brick.

The rats and Saul left the relative safety of London’s nightlands and entered the warehouse, the frenzied jaws of Drum and Bass, the domain of smoke and strobe lights and Hardcore, the Piper’s lair, the heart of Darkness, deep in the Jungle.

The wooden boards drummed under Saul’s feet: the dust motes would not settle but hovered instead in an indistinct mist around his ankles. He crept the length of the long attic. In the corner of the great dark space there was a trapdoor.

Saul flattened himself against the floor and tugged at it very gently, raising it slowly away from the surrounding boards. Music and coloured light and the smell of dancers spilled through the slit to which he put his eye.

The lights below spun and changed colours, illuminating and obscuring, bouncing off suspended globes and dissipating throughout the hall. They cut through the darkness, confusing as much as they elucidated.

A long way below him was the dancefloor. It was a hallucinogenic vision, shimmering and metamorphosing like a fractal pattern, feverish bodies moving in a thousand different ways. In the corners lurked the bad boys, nodding their heads, no more than that, no reaction to the overwhelming music. On the floor the hard-steppers, swinging their arms, loose-limbed and syncopated; and those on speed and coke, ludicrously trying to keep up with the BPM, shifting their feet like lunatics; the rudegirls, arms spread wide, winding their hips slowly to the bassline, a barrage of colours and clothes and undress. The dancefloor was tight-packed, thronging with bodies, decadent and vibrant, thrilling, communal and brutal.

As he watched, a strobe light kicked in, transforming the room momentarily into a series of frozen tableaux. Saul could investigate individuals almost at his leisure. He was struck by the multiplicity of expressions on the faces below.

The Drum and Bass felt as if it would lift the hatch out of the floor, off into the sky. It was unforgiving, a punishing assault of original Hardcore beats.

A little below him an iron walkway described the edge of the hall. It was deserted. There was a ladder in one corner, tucked up under the walkway and secured with chains. It was designed to swing down to another, similar ledge further down. This lower level was crowded with bodies, people looking down on the dancers ten feet below.

Saul cast his eyes around the hall. There was a tiny movement in the corner opposite him.

Red and green lights swirled around a black shape suspended from the ceiling. Anansi swung gently from one of his ropes. His arms and legs were tucked up impossibly tight. His knuckles were just visible, motionless, and stretched taut from grasping.

He swayed from side to side, buffeted by sonic vibrations. Saul knew that Anansi’s army was with him, around them both, invisible and ready.

Directly below Anansi, Saul saw the stage raised above the dancefloor. His breath quickened a little: there, framed by two colossal speakers, were the decks.

Behind the stage a huge graffito was hung: the same grotesque DJ who had adorned the poster, and the legend Junglist Terror!!! was writ very large. Dwarfed by the unlikely figure on the canvas, the DJ labouring behind the decks paced quickly to and from his record box, a bulky pair of earphones tucked against one ear. He moved with a controlled, feverish energy. Saul did not recognize him. As he watched, the man deftly segued between two tracks. He was good.

Behind him, Saul felt the tentative lick of a rat-tongue on his hand. He was no longer alone.

‘Alright,’ he whispered, and stroked the little head without looking backwards. ‘Alright.’

Saul opened the trapdoor. He poked his head upside-down into the hall, breaking the surface tension of the music and immersing himself in it. He lowered himself gently to the iron grille below. The beats were overwhelming. They crept into every crevice of the room. He felt as if he was moving underwater. He was almost afraid to breathe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Anansi notice him, and he raised his hand.

It was sweltering in the hall, as humid and heavy as a rainforest. The condensed heat of the dancers enveloped him. He pulled off his shirt. Oily dirt coated him. He realized that it was weeks since he had seen his own body. The shirt had become his fur.

He remembered the touch of the rat above, and he reached up to wedge one sleeve of his shirt under the open trapdoor’s hinge. He pulled at the other sleeve until it was stretched taut, tied it to the railing which enclosed the walkway. Almost immediately, two rats scurried along this greasy canvas bridge and leapt onto the iron.

Others would be joining them, thought Saul as he watched them race away along the rampart, finding their way down.

Sweat trickled down his body, cutting channels in the grime which covered him. He felt no shame. His standards had changed.

Saul flattened himself against the wall and crept forward towards the decks, keeping his eyes fixed on the stage below him. He lowered himself as he advanced. By the time he had covered half the length of the wall, he was slithering along the cold iron like a snake. He pushed his face to the gaps in the grille, his eyes darting urgently from side to side. He crawled slowly forward.

Even through the pervasive clouds of cologne and sweat and drugs and sex, Saul could taste rat. The troops were arriving in force, waiting for his signal.

He glanced up. Anansi flickered in and out of existence in the quickfiring lights.

A door opened at the back of the stage.

Saul stiffened.

Natasha emerged from the depths of the building, into the sound and fury.

Saul caught his breath. He gripped the grille on which he crawled until his fingers hurt. She looked breathtaking. But she was thin, much too thin, and she moved as if she was in a dream.

Where was the Piper? Was she here of her free will? Saul stared at her in consternation. He saw headphones on her ears and was momentarily confused – how could she listen to a walkman in the middle of a club? – before he understood. He caught his breath, watching her bob her head, moving to a different rhythm from the rest of the dancers. He knew what she was listening to, he knew whose music it was.

In one hand she held a case full of records, in the other a squat box, some piece of electronics, trailing wires. He could not see what it was. Natasha tapped the DJ on the shoulder. He turned and touched fists with her, shouting animatedly into her ears. As he spoke she busied herself plugging the box into the sound system, nodding occasionally, whether in answer or in response to the music in her ears Saul could not tell.

The DJ removed his huge earphones and placed them over Natasha’s ears, hesitating for her to remove her small walkman earpieces. When she did not, he shrugged and placed the larger ones over the top of them and laughed. He disappeared into the door from which Natasha had emerged.

Natasha rifled through the records she had brought, pulled something out, twirled it elegantly and blew dust from it. She placed it on the turntable and hunched over, spinning it, smoothing it back with her fingers, listening through the tune on her walkman, mixing the beats, until she stood straight, with her fingers poised, and let a burst of piano spill over from the twelve-inch she had selected into the tune now coming to an end.

It was impossible to tell where one started and the other ended, the mixing was seamless. She pulled the record back, let it forward again a little, pulled it back, scratching playfully like an old school rapper, finally releasing her hand and switching off the first tune in a smooth movement, unleashing the new bassline.

She stood back without a trace of a smile on her lips.

Saul knew that he had to get down to her, had to take the phones from her head and make her understand the danger she was in. But this must be exactly what the Piper had in mind for him. The cheese in his trap.

The door opened again and two more figures appeared. The first was Fabian. Saul was appalled, nearly leapt to his feet. Fabian was even more emaciated and exhausted-looking than Natasha. His finery could not disguise that. He was limping. Like Natasha, he wore walkman headphones. It was that beat, the tune that only he could hear, that propelled Fabian forward.

Behind him was the Piper.

As he entered the room he stopped, breathed in deeply, gave a huge smile. He spread his arms wide as if he would embrace all the dancers below him.

Fabian stayed very close to him.

Saul looked up at Anansi. He was oscillating on his rope, his sudden tension communicated violently through his body.

Rush him?

Should we rush him? thought Saul frantically.

What is to be done?

Anansi and Saul were paralysed, caught in the gaze of a snake. And the Piper could not even see them.

Natasha turned and saw her two companions. She held out her hand and the Piper pulled something out of his pocket, tossed it across the stage to her. As it curved through the air it was transfixed for a moment in a beam of white light. It seemed to freeze, letting Saul examine it at his leisure. It glinted, a small plastic case, like a cassette but smaller, squarer …

A DAT.

A Digital Audio Tape. Natasha used them to record her tracks.

He screamed and leapt to his feet as Natasha’s hand closed around the tape.

The cavernous space was full of sound, there was no room for his paltry screech. He could not even hear it himself in the cacophony of beats and basslines. The dancers danced on, unperturbed, Natasha turned towards the decks, Fabian continued his shambling little rotations … but the Piper turned his head sharply at the imperceptible sound, stared up, through the cat’s cradle of light beams, past the too-cool bodies on the lower walkway, up into the shadow of the roof, gazing directly into Saul’s eyes.

The Piper gave a jaunty wave, and grinned. He was burning with triumphalism.

Saul propelled himself along the gantry while the Piper laughed on the stage. The dancers were oblivious. The beats seemed to slow down, everything was slow, Saul could see the mass of bodies below him sink and rise ponderously.

He pounded along the iron towards the corner where Anansi hung, paralysed. He stared through the floor at Natasha walking slowly towards the DAT player she had plugged in, reaching out with the hand holding the tape. Saul looked up as he drew near Anansi, who swung from side to side, around and around, a useless pendulum.

Saul had not stopped shouting. He was ululating appallingly as he ran. Anansi looked up at him. As Natasha slipped the tape into the deck and crooked one of the headphones against her shoulder, Saul grabbed the rail with his left hand and vaulted up high, moving so slowly he could stare at the faces below him, all the individuals that made up the bouncing mass. He brought his feet down together on the railing, bent down and leapt out, sending himself through the air, flying above the dancers like a superhero.

Anansi’s eyes widened as Saul surged towards him, his arms flailing, legs tucked up in front of him like a long-jumper. Saul spread his arms and legs wide, and crashed into Anansi forty feet above the stage.

He clutched at Anansi, hugged himself to him. He felt himself lurching crazily back and forth through the air, heard Anansi yelling something at him. The rope holding the two bodies was vibrating, dangerously taut. Saul was screaming into Anansi’s ears.

‘Down!’ he screamed. ‘Go down now!’

Saul felt himself drop and his stomach lurched. His descent smoothened out as Anansi manipulated the fibres in his hand. Smoother than any abseiler, the spider-man and his cargo sank swiftly towards the stage.

As they plummeted, Saul and Anansi spun around their centre of gravity, and the room whirled around them. Saul caught glimpse after glimpse of the dancers, frozen, gazing at the men dropping out of the air. Some looked aghast or confused, but most were laughing, enrapt at this new entertainment.

‘Run! Get the fuck out!’ screamed Saul, but the Jungle was remorseless, and no one heard him except Anansi.

Saul looked down, eight feet from the stage, relaxed his grip and dropped from Anansi like a bomb.

He was rigid, his quarry dead in his line of flight. Even over the Drum and Bass beats, Saul thought he heard a collective gasp. His face set as he fell, his legs straightened, but the Piper had been watching and he danced nimbly to one side, away from Saul’s punishing boots, leaving Saul to slam into the wooden stage.

He staggered but remained on his feet. The decks were so well supported that the record playing did not even skip at his arrival. Saul looked on in horror as Natasha’s hand tightened on the DAT player’s volume control, her face furrowed over the headphones as she prepared to mix from the record to the tape, waiting for the right moment in the beat.

Saul leapt towards her, prepared to throw her away from the decks, to hurt her if need be, rage and fear filling him, but as he neared her something slammed into him from behind and he went sprawling, flying off to the side of the stage. Natasha did not even look round.

Saul rolled on the floor, twisted, and pulled himself back up.

Fabian was bearing down on him.

His friend was not looking at him, was focusing over Saul’s shoulder, just as Loplop had done that night in the flat. He moved towards Saul without pausing, his arms outstretched like a cinematic zombie.

Behind Fabian, Saul saw Anansi touch the stage, only for the Piper immediately to smack him hard in the mouth, sending him sprawling. But Saul’s attention was taken by the tiniest of motions: Natasha’s hand turning the volume slowly up.

Saul barrelled into Fabian, trying to run through him, overpower him, and his friend held him fast, twisted as Saul tried to run past him. The two came crashing down, Saul’s hand outstretched, an inch from Natasha’s shoe.

She nodded in satisfaction and turned up the DAT.

Everything froze.

There was a sublime moment. Everyone was utterly still: the dancers, the men who had jumped on stage to break up the fights they saw there, Saul, rigid with despair.

The beats that slid insidiously from the speakers were all at the high end, cymbals, no bassline. A tiny snatch of piano cried out plaintively.

But it was the flute which held the attention.

A sudden burst had heralded the song, a trill that had erupted into the room’s collective consciousness and cleared the minds of the listeners. As Saul watched, Natasha removed her headphones and her walkman. No need for them now. This was the song she had been listening to. Behind him Fabian rose and followed suit.

The snatch of flute had shocked the dancers into submission, and now it faded, leaving only echoes and the sounds of radio static, the ghosts of dead stations rolling over the beat and the soulless piano. Still there was no bassline. Saul could not get up. He saw the dancers begin to shake their heads and extricate themselves from the snares of the flute, and then another burst exploded into the room and with comically precise timing, the assembled throng all snapped back upright, their eyes rapt.

And then again. Again.

The Piper stared at Saul, the amiable cast of his face belied by his ghastly wide eyes, ferocious with pleasure.

‘You lose,’ he mouthed to Saul.

Saul glared balefully at the Piper. He raised his arm theatrically, and caught Anansi’s eye as he struggled to his feet. Shaking, Anansi imitated him.

Together, they brought their arms down.

‘Now!’ Saul shrieked.

Floorboards and pipes boiled over with rats. Saul’s crack troops exploded into the room, racing voraciously through the frozen legs of the dancers towards the stage. The walls erupted as spiders burst from the pores of the building and spilled like liquid towards the Piper.

At that moment, the bassline of Wind City burst into the room, pared down and simple. And riding it, sailing over the troughs and peaks of beat and bass, was the flute.

The dancers moved as one.

They moved in time, dancing again, an incredible piece of choreography, every right foot raised together, coming down, then every left, a strange languorous hardstep, arms swinging, legs rigid, up and down in time to the beat, obeying the Piper’s flute. And every step aimed at a rat.

This was war.

The rats were fighting now, leaping onto bodies and backs. The dancers’ unearthly unity slowly dissolved as they fought their small, vicious enemies without that dislocated look ever leaving their eyes.

The spiders had reached the stage now, with the vanguard of the rats, and both armies swarmed towards the Piper. Anansi rose behind him and lurched forward, slamming his arms into the Piper’s back, but his power was diminished by the men who leapt forward to hold him. They did not look at him. They held their heads to the side to hear the music, and they did what the music told them. With a strength that was not theirs they hurled Anansi backwards into the wall. He shouted at his troops, gesticulated.

Saul slithered across the floor towards the decks, the DAT player, the source of the music. Instantly Natasha turned and stamped on his hand with her long heel. He screeched in pain, slithered away again, tried to get past her, but she stamped again and again, faster and faster, until it seemed impossible that she remain standing.

Someone behind Saul grabbed him and pulled him up and with a sudden surge of righteous anger he elbowed them in the face. The head snapped back and lolled, the body staggering but somehow kept standing by the music. Saul turned, his hands claws, and his rage dissipated in horror. His assailant was about seventeen, a chubby Asian boy dressed in his Jungling best, now spattered with blood. His nose was a mess in the middle of his face and still he tried to keep time to the beat.

Saul pushed him away hard, out of the fight.

He realized that the dancers were slowly approaching the stage, fighting and scratching, hurling rats and spiders against the walls, ripping at them with their teeth, all the while cocking their heads thoughtfully to hear the notes of Wind City. The fucking flute!

It was multilayered, alienating, frightening, a cacophonous backdrop.

More and more dancers leapt onto the stage, their clothes clogged with blood, rat and human, with fragments of fur, their faces shredded by tiny claws. Saul could taste the rat blood on the air. It flooded him with adrenaline.

Spiders and rats covered the stage, swarmed up the legs of Fabian and the dancers. Fabian tugged at the fat bodies of rats and slammed them underfoot where their legs and spines and skulls cracked and they crawled off to die. He slapped at himself and danced from leg to leg, smearing spiders into the wood.

Saul could hear Anansi bellowing.

Saul turned and made for the decks again. Fabian kicked him in the crotch from behind and Natasha stamped at his shoulder. He moved, avoided being impaled, but hands grasped his legs and tugged him violently across a floor slippery with rat blood and crushed spiders, slid him away from Natasha and the DAT player, slammed him into a wall. Bodies fell across him, inhumanly strong knees crushed his back, he was pinioned by a score of arms and legs.

Saul could hear Anansi shrieking.

He looked up, saw the Piper bent over Anansi, the spider-man held down by several dancers. With his head low against the boards, all Saul could see of the dancefloor was the bobbing heads of the dancers.

It was a vision of hell, rats and spiders and blood swarming over the damned.

Fabian stumbled into his view, and Saul looked up at him and back at Natasha. They were invisible beneath a second skin of spiders, a thick skittering mass. The tide of spiders spilled towards the Piper. Anansi kept shrieking.

The Piper looked up, caught Saul’s eye, and looked briefly at the spiders approaching him.

‘Shall I show you my new party trick?’ he said. His voice sounded close and intimate in Saul’s ear, whispered through the Jungle and the flute.

The Piper flickered his eyes briefly at the decks.

Something changed in the flute.

The samples were looped and laid one on top of the other, and as he listened Saul realized that one of the layers was soaring, changing, becoming staccato and breathless. Anansi was suddenly silent.

As it reached the Piper’s feet, the tide of spiders stopped dead.

He’s changing the music! He’s changing his choice! thought Saul. He’s going for the spiders instead!

But the dancers kept dancing, even as the spiders began to move together, incredibly, undulating with the beat. The circle of spiders around the Piper’s feet expanded, gave him space.

Still the dancers did not stop dancing. The spiders coating the bodies of the dancers dripped off them and scuttled onto the stage. Natasha and Fabian were uncovered, their skin covered in tiny welts and sores, dead spiders dropping from their clothes and mouths. They resumed their war against the rats.

The Piper began to leap, higher and higher, from one foot to the other, without taking his eyes from Saul’s. Saul looked down at the Piper’s feet. As he jumped, a little group of spiders would dance out, in time to the music, and stand below him, arranging themselves into the shape of the underside of each shoe. They would wait patiently as he plunged through the air and destroyed them exactly, the carnage of each step pre-empted by the spiders themselves, queuing up to die.

‘You see, Saul?’ whispered the Piper across the slick, stained stage. ‘That’s the joy of Jungle. All those layers … I can play my flute as many times as I want, allat once

The dancers kept dancing, and the spiders still waited to die.

Anansi sat up, his eyes glazed with delight at the spider music in Wind City. An idiot’s grin spread across his face. His left arm was missing at the shoulder, his side awash with blood, his shoulder a mass of ruined flesh and bone.

The Piper watched Saul’s face.

‘Yes, cruel, I know, to pull the legs off spiders, but this one had caused me no end of trouble.’

He pushed Anansi’s head back to the stage.

Saul’s shout was drowned in the Drum and Bass and flute. He struggled violently, but was held fast by the dancers. He could feel them move slightly with the beat as they leant on him.

The Piper leapt up, pulled his legs up hard and stamped down with all his strength.

Bones crunched and split in Anansi’s head.

Saul collapsed with a howl.

The wood of the stage heaved and buckled. Something burst through the boards in front of the Piper. Saul caught a momentary glimpse of a back, of wiry arms snapping out like whipcord and grasping the Piper’s ankles, then tugging sharply and disappearing back under the stage.

The Piper was gone. The music still blared, Saul was still pinioned, the rats still fought and bit and scratched, the dancers still fought back and massacred rats and danced, but the Piper was gone.

Saul could feel the vibrations of some huge battle being waged under him. He tugged at the arms holding him. They were obscenely strong but quite still. They held him tight but did not punish him for his pointless struggles.

The wood under his stomach lurched as something was thrust against it. A little to one side of him he heard a systematic pounding, something slammed again and again into the wood. Splinters of wood that fringed the hole in the stage spilled gently into the darkness below.

Spiders poured into the hole, and Saul saw the back of a nearby dancer lowering himself into the dark.

Saul pounded suddenly at the wood under his body, thrust his fingers into the tiny gap between two planks, ignoring the skin he left behind. He had no leverage, this was the wrong angle, but adrenaline gave him strength, and he tugged and ripped at the boards beneath him. His fingers shoved into the small cavity and scrabbled for purchase. He was straining, shoving upwards, feeling the board resist, then relax as old nails sprang from their moorings and the board went flying away.

He stuck his head into the darkness.

There, rolling in the dirt, his eyes frenzied and livid, his veins bulging with fury, was the Piper. And clinging to him like a limpet, the heel of his right hand shoved hard into the Piper’s mouth, his teeth bared and snapping at any of the Piper’s limbs in reach, his claws scratching, his old coat wrapping around the two bodies like a living thing, was King Rat.

His hand streamed with blood from where the Piper gnawed at him, but he would not release the Piper’s mouth. He swarmed with spiders. Behind him the dim shape of a dancer, bent double under the stage, flailed at him with his arms. King Rat rolled from side to side to avoid him, desperate to stay out of reach.

King Rat stared up at Saul. His eyes begged for help.

Saul saw the dancer’s arms wind around King Rat’s neck, begin to bend inexorably backwards.

He tugged desperately at the hands holding him, straining against them with all his strength, arching his back. They pushed him down so he suddenly acquiesced, rolling slightly and squeezing himself through the thin slit in the wood, being shoved through to freedom by those trying to constrain him, until he dropped suddenly and landed across the Piper’s feet.

He yelled with triumph, and turned.

‘Help me,’ hissed King Rat between clenched teeth. His head was pulled back at a grotesque angle, his arms were losing their grip on the Piper, his hand having to strain harder and harder to block the Piper’s mouth. The man behind him was slowly defeating him, made preternaturally strong by the music which surrounded them.

Saul stormed through swathes of dancing spiders and punched hard at the face of the man holding King Rat.

He saw that it was Fabian just as his fist connected.

Saul had hit him hard, with all his rat-strength, and Fabian’s head rolled on his shoulders dangerously fast, teeth splintered in his mouth, but he retained his grip on King Rat, and continued to pull.

The Piper was pulling free, his teeth ripping at King Rat’s hand, a growl of triumph bubbling bloodily out from behind it.

‘Help me,’ repeated King Rat. Desperately Saul grabbed at Fabian, shoved him this way and that, with all his strength, but the flute had entered Fabian’s soul and nothing would move him. If that punch did not do the job, Saul knew he would have to kill Fabian to get him off.

‘Help me,’ said King Rat once more.

But Saul had hesitated too long and Fabian pulled King Rat free of the Piper.

‘Yes!’ The Piper was standing before Saul, filthy, scratched and quivering, spilling spiders in all directions. He grabbed Saul’s collar, heaved him with those insanely strong arms, sent him flying through the hole in the stage back out into the heat and noise and blood of the club.

Saul landed awkwardly, skidded across the splintered wood.

The Piper rose behind him, dragging King Rat by the hair.

Wind City was looping, again and again. Saul was sure it covered the whole DAT, perhaps an hour long.

‘You lose!’ the Piper shouted to Saul. ‘You and your daddy and uncle spider and the birdman, you lose, because I can play my flute as often as I want now. Your friend showed me how, Saul …’ He waved his hands at the walls where the spiders were dancing in little circles. He gesticulated at the dancefloor where the dancers jumped up and down to Wind City, drenched in blood, stamping on dying rats.

He released King Rat into the arms of the dancers on the stage. King Rat sagged with weakness and defeat.

Saul was exhausted. He felt more hands grab him. The Piper sauntered towards him and crouched in front of him, just out of reach.

‘See, Saul,’ he whispered, ‘I’m not just going to kill you. Before you die, Saul, I’m going to make you dance for me. You think you’re so special, don’t you? Well, I’m the Lord of the Dance, Saul, and before you die you’re going to dance for me. Why do you think I let your pathetic little army fight to the last gasp?’ He indicated the dancefloor, where lacklustre little battles were still continuing, where the routed rats were being systematically destroyed as the dance continued.

‘You see, I wanted to explain to you, Saul. You see how I can make the people dance and the spiders? See how I did that? Well, I can make the rats dance, too, Saul. And you’re the famous half and half, aren’t you? Eh? The rat-boy? Eh? Well, I’m already playing for the people, Saul, so half of you is dancing, even if you can’t feel it. So when I start playing for the rats, Saul, then I’m playing for both your sides. See? See, you little fucker? I didn’t know what I’d found when I checked your address book, tried to find you. Just turned up at the one with stuff scrawled next to it … and see what I found. Your friend Natasha, who showed me how to make my flute multiply …’

The Piper grinned and patted Saul’s face gently, then backed away towards the decks. Behind him stood Natasha, her clothes ruined, her face coated in blood as thick as oil.

The dancefloor still surged, but an odd calm had settled on the stage.

‘I’m going to play for both your halves, Saul,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make you dance.’

He looked up, raised his finger like a conductor and the music changed again.

The beat was sustained, the bassline unchanged, the static and the hesitant piano continued … but the flute soared.

Across the top of the mellifluous and pointillist flute lines that seduced the dancers and the spiders, a third level of sound sprang into being. An unsettling, crawling democracy of semitones and minor chords, pauses punctuated by surreal bursts of noise, music to make the skin crawl. Rat-music.

All across the dancefloor, the rats that had not fled or died were suddenly still.

Out of the corner of his eye Saul saw King Rat stiffen, his eyes glaze and focus on something just out of sight. And as he saw that, Saul felt himself jerk upright, listened to the music, heard it with a wave of amazement, stared wide-eyed at the bursts of light around him, saw through the speakers and the walls, felt his mind open up.

A long long way away he heard a high-pitched laugh, saw the Piper lying back, being borne around the room on the raised arms of the dancers, but that didn’t bother him now. The hands that held him were gone. Saul stood and paced to the centre of the stage. All he could concentrate on was the music.

There was something just out of his reach …

Just out of his reach … there was beautiful food …

He could smell it … he could taste it on the air, and sex, he felt his cock stiffen, his mouth was watering, his feet propelled him, he did not need to think of where to walk, the responsibility had been taken from him, he obeyed the music, two tunes at once, the rat and the man, the mellow and the frenzied, spilling around each other, filling his mind.

Beside him, he was dimly aware of King Rat, pacing from side to side, his feet ponderous but enthusiastic.

‘Dance!’ The command came from across the floor, where the Piper rode the arms of the crowd like a sportsman, a hero, a dictator.

Obedience came easily to Saul. He danced.

Hardstepping.

With the fighting stopped, everyone in the hall could dance, the people and the spiders and rats that were still alive, all moving in time, getting down as one, as the Piper laughed delightedly. Saul was vaguely aware of being pleased, moving in a tight circle, eager for the food and the sex and the music, proud to be part of this hall, this great gestalt.

The Piper had ridden the tops of the dancers all around the hall in his triumph, a lap of honour, and through a blissful haze Saul saw the tall figure step smoothly back onto the stage.

Saul danced for joy, opened his arms wide. This was his epiphany, he was filled with music, two strains of music, his mind relaxed and floating, his feet revelling in the dance, gazing up and around at the bobbing bodies on all sides of him, the faces of the worshippers … Saul was ecstatic.

The Piper smiled, and Saul smiled back.

He was vaguely aware of words being spoken, felt his feet propel him forward, across the big stage, towards the Piper, who waited for him, something long and glinting in his hand.

‘ … to me …’ Saul heard between beats. ‘ … dance for me … come …’

He stepped forward, shifting in time to the two tunes he could hear, eager to dance.

But something was wrong.

There was a disturbed moment. Saul hesitated.

The two flutelines were dissonant.

Saul put his foot on the stage and tried to dance, but a shadow had crossed his mind.

The flutes jarred with each other.

He was suddenly aware of their raucous discord. His hunger and desire burned as strong as ever, but he could not see, he was blind, pulled in different directions, shaken by the aesthetic antiphase of the two flutes.

And as he listened, standing suddenly outside the music, looking in, desperate to get back, he sensed the great cavity between the flutes.

And pushing its way through the gap, vibrating in his gut, ever-present, the foundation of the music, the beginning and the end-point of Jungle, there came the bass.

Saul stood poised, immobile, centre stage.

The flute and the bass surged inside him.

The flutelines swirled around him, inveigling their way past his defences, seducing him, urging him to dance, teasing his rat-mind and his humanity in turn.

But something inside him had hardened. Saul was straining for something else. He was listening for the bass.

The words of a hundred slogans raced through his mind, the endlessly sampled Hip Hop and Jungle paeans to the low end.

DJ! Where’s the bass?

Bass! How low can you go?

R-r-r-roll the bass …

Da bass too dark …

Here’s the bass.

Here’s how low the bass can go.

I … I’ll roll with the bass.

Because the bass too dark …

Because the bass is too dark for this, thought Saul suddenly, with shocking clarity, the bass is too dark to suffer this, the insubordinate treble, fuck the treble, fuck the ephemera, fuck the high end, fuck the flute, and as he thought this the flutelines faded in his mind, became nothing more than thin, clashing cacophonies, fuck the treble, he thought, because when you dance to Jungle what you follow is the bass …

Saul rediscovered himself. He knew who he was. He danced again.

This was different. He was fierce, swinging his arms and legs like weapons. He danced with the bassline, rolled over the beats … ignored the flutes.

It was the bass that set the agenda. It was the bass that made the song. It was the bass that united the Junglists, that cemented their community, that built a room full of dancers, something far stronger than this hive mind.

The Piper was still waiting for him. Saul saw a renewed smile spread across his face. He had seen Saul falter. You wanted me to dance, didn’t you? thought Saul. Had to have me dance my way over to you, waltz to my death … and now I’m dancing, you think your treble won, don’t you?

Saul danced closer and closer to the Piper. The Piper held his flute close, flush with his body like a Samurai sword. The Piper’s arms were tense.

Two flutes aren’t enough, thought Saul, giddy with power. He danced on, approaching his enemy. The Piper smiled and raised his right hand, the hand holding the flute, held it high, quivering, ready to strike.

Saul came close enough to touch.

‘Now dance on the spot, ratling,’ said the Piper softly.

He swung the flute.

The strike was cocky, cavalier and ill-timed, the Piper waiting for his prey to walk into the path of the wicked silver club.

Instead, Saul stepped inside the killing blow.

He moved in a blur of rat-speed, channelling all his frenetic panic and power, burning calories from old food. He turned as he stepped forward and reached up with his right hand, grabbing the flute and twisting, spinning round in a full circle, tugging at the cold metal, ripping it out of the Piper’s too-confident fingers and bringing his left arm up and around, looking over his left shoulder as he spun, and slamming his elbow into the Piper’s throat.

The Piper staggered backwards. His eyes bulged and stared at Saul in disbelief. He retched, clutched at his throat, sucked at the air. Saul stalked towards him, holding the flute. The Drum and Bass was pounding in his ears. It wasn’t the Piper’s song any more; it was the drums he heard, the drums and the bass.

‘One plus one equals one, motherfucker,’ he said, and brought the flute up hard under the Piper’s jaw. The Piper staggered back but did not fall. ‘I’m not rat plus man, get it? I’m bigger than either one and I’m bigger than the two. I’m a new thing. You can’t make me dance.’ He slammed the flute against the Piper’s temple, sending the tall figure spinning across the stage in a spray of blood, towards where King Rat still danced.

The Piper twirled an ugly pirouette but still did not fall.

Saul advanced on him, hitting him again and again with the flute, brutal and unforgiving. He punctuated his assault with proclamations.

‘Should’ve just killed me. You’re too strong for me, but you had to get cocky. Well, I’m the new blood, motherfucker. I’m more than the sum of my parts.

You can’t play my fucking tune, and your flute means nothing to me.’

With the last strike, the Piper went down in the shadow of King Rat. His legs folded and he sat down hard on the floor, his back to the brick wall. He stared up at Saul, horrified and broken. His face was crushed and spoilt. Blood slid over the silver of the flute. The Piper’s eyes were glazed with agony and with affront, with outrage at this man who would not dance to his tune.

His breath rattled grotesquely in his throat. He fought to speak, failed.

Saul looked up. The dancing figures that filled the room were slowing down. The flute was mutating, folding in on itself. It could not sustain itself without the Piper’s will. People’s faces were confused, their heads lolling as if in uneasy sleep. The rats and spiders were twitching pathologically as the flutelines that held them imploded.

King Rat fell to the floor and twisted in agony, pulling himself out of the spell.

Always the strongest, thought Saul.

He looked back at the Piper, collapsed on the floor. With puffy lips and bloody teeth, the Piper smiled.

Saul held the flute like a dagger, raised it over his head.

There was a Stygian rumble deep in the walls. The stage shook. Saul staggered.

‘What the fuck …?’ he said.

The floor lurched, shook violently. Saul fell backwards.

Above the Piper’s head a split appeared in the wall, thin and unnaturally straight as if scored with a vast razor. The stage shook until all the dancers had fallen. It was only because it was on DAT, safe from the caprice of styluses and shocks, that Wind City did not falter.

The split widened and spread downwards, opening the bricks behind the Piper’s back. The rent in the wall opened onto a sheer darkness.

The Piper fixed Saul with his little smile.

The darkness widened and sucked at the air in the room. As if a window on an aeroplane had burst, papers and clothes and fragments of spider corpses whirled through the air into the black.

He opened a mountain once before, thought Saul urgently, he can open up a wall. He’s heading for home.

The Piper was quite still as the split pulled itself open behind him, the eye in a tornado of detritus that filled the room. Saul planted his feet wide and got to his knees, adamant that the Piper would not escape out of the world.

Then, as he steadied himself and gripped the flute once more, ready to strike, he heard a thin, desperate keening from the pit that was opening.

A child’s voice.

Saul froze, aghast. The Piper was still. He did not release Saul’s gaze. He did not stop smiling. The split behind his back was a foot wide now, and he began to wriggle his way into it, holding Saul’s eyes all the time. The pathetic wail stopped abruptly.

And just as abruptly a chorus of terror welled out of the darkness, hundreds of tiny voices screaming, stripped raw, mad with fear.

The lost children of Hamelin could see the light.

Saul fell back in a paralysis of horror.

His mouth was stretched wide but only tiny noises burst out. He reached out to the split in the wall, powerless, useless.

The Piper saw him crumple, and winked.

Later, he mouthed, and put his hands to each side of the split, gave a little wave.

A growling thing shoved into Saul at a fierce speed and tore the flute from his hands.

King Rat gripped the flute with both hands and leapt at an impossible angle from Saul’s lap to the Piper’s side. His teeth were clenched, his feral roar barely contained. His overcoat whipped in the vortex of wind. The Piper looked up at him, stupid and confused.

King Rat’s growl burst, became a frenzied bark, he drew back his arms, holding the flute like a spear.

He punched it into the Piper’s body with an animal strength.

The Piper gave a shout of amazement, ludicrously bathetic with the music and the wails of the children behind him.

The flute punctured him like a balloon, shoved deep into his belly. His face went white under the blood, and he gripped King Rat’s arms, clinging to them with all his might, holding the hands that held the flute close to him, staring into King Rat’s eyes.

Everything was poised, for a moment. Everything hung in the balance.

The Piper fell backwards into the dark.

King Rat fell with him.

All Saul could see was the curve of King Rat’s back, which lurched forwards and stopped abruptly. The slit was suddenly closing around him; the voices of the children were more and more plaintive and distant.

King Rat’s back wriggled and his arms emerged above his head, holding the great rent open for half a second more as he braced himself and shoved back from the brink, falling across Saul.

The two sides of the rip met and resealed with a faint crunch.

The Piper had gone. The cries of the children had gone.

Only the Drum and Bass could be heard.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Saul lay still, exhausted, listening to King Rat breathe.

He rolled away, crawled across the stage. He surveyed the room.

The disco lights still spun and stuttered pointlessly. The wreckage of the hall did not seem real. It was a carnage of blood and sweat, dead rats, crushed spiders, collapsed dancers. The walls were foul with a thousand different stains. The floor was slippery and vile. The dancers shuffled like revivified corpses from side to side, ruined, their eyes closed, shifting their weight from foot to foot, as the beat of Wind City droned on, and the flute continued to degrade. All over the hall dancers were falling.

Saul stumbled across to the decks and ripped the lead from the DAT player. The speakers went dead. Instantly, all around the room, the dancers dropped, fainting where they stood, as still as the dead. It looked like the aftermath of a massacre.

The spiders and rats still dancing when the music stopped were still for a moment, then bolted. They quit the hall and disappeared into the London night.

Saul looked around the hall, searching for his friends.

There, under the heavy body of a huge dancer, lay Natasha. He tugged her free, crooning.

‘Tash, Tash,’ he whispered, wiping the blood from her face. She was scratched and ripped, her skin welted with the poison of a million tiny spiders, covered with bruises and rat-bites, but she was breathing. He hugged her very hard as she lay there, and squeezed his eyes tight closed.

It had been so long since he had held one of his friends.

He put her gently down, searched for Fabian.

Saul found him lolling out of the hole King Rat had pushed through the stage. He almost wept to see him. He was badly damaged, his face crushed and broken, his skin as ruined as Natasha’s.

‘He’ll live.’

Saul looked up sharply at King Rat’s harsh voice.

King Rat stood over him, taking his weight on his left leg, regarding Saul’s ministrations to Fabian.

Saul looked back down at his friend.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘His heart’s beating. He’s breathing.’

It was difficult to talk. His throat was constricted with emotion. He looked up at King Rat, gesticulated at the wall.

‘The children …’ he couldn’t say any more.

King Rat nodded sharply. ‘The little fuckers whose parents clapped us out of town,’ he spat.

Saul’s face twisted. He could not speak, could not look at King Rat. He shook with anger and disgust, clenched his fists. He could still hear the pathetic cries echoing up from the dark.

‘Fabian,’ he whispered. ‘Can you hear me, man?’

Fabian moved gently but did not respond. It’s better, thought Saul suddenly. I can’t talk to him now, here, I can’t explain all this. He needs to be out of this. He mustn’t see this. Saul could not bear the loneliness. He wanted his friend so much, but he knew that he must wait.

Time enough soon, he thought and tried to be brave.

He stood, limped his way to King Rat. The two looked warily at each other, then fell forward, catching each other’s forearms, gripping each other. It was a long way from an embrace or a reconciliation, but it was a moment of connection. Like exhausted boxers leaning on each other, still enemies, but each granting the other a moment’s respite, and each grateful.

Saul breathed deep, stepped back.

‘Did you kill him?’ he said.

King Rat was silent. He turned away.

‘Did you?’

‘I don’t know …’ The words lingered in the silence of the hall. ‘I think so … the flute was deep inside him, his throat was crushed … I don’t know …’

Saul ran his hands through his hair, looked down at his heavy torso, smeared with the muck of combat. He felt winded by anticlimax and uncertainty. But, then, he thought suddenly, it doesn’t matter to me. He can’t touch me. He’s dead, or dying, or fucked and wounded, and if he ever comes back, I’ll be whatever I am now, only infinitely more so. He can’t touch me.

‘He can’t touch you,’ said King Rat and licked his lips.

Anansi’s body had gone. King Rat was unsurprised. He looked from side to side at the carpet of crushed spiders on the stage and the dancefloor.

‘You’ll never find him,’ he mused.

Saul looked at him and stared around the room. He was trembling violently. The stench of rat-blood was heavy in the air, and with every step Saul walked on the bodies of Anansi’s dead. Some of the dancers were beginning to stir.

Blood decorated the walls like abstract art.

‘I have to get out of here,’ Saul whispered.

Without words Saul and King Rat climbed to the attic. King Rat went before him. Saul untied his prison shirt and draped it across his back before jumping and grasping the edges of the hatchway, hauling himself up and out.

He looked back once, stuck his head into the huge, silent room.

Red and green and blue lights spun on intricate axes, flashing at random now that the beats had gone. The floor was littered with bodies, a few twitching gently. Saul looked at the stage where he had arranged Fabian and Natasha. They looked as if they were sleeping peacefully side by side. Natasha moved her arm dreamily and it fell across Fabian’s chest.

Saul’s breath caught. He could not look on any more.

He followed King Rat, emerged blinking from the skylight, sucked at the cold fresh air. It seemed days ago that he had entered by this route, but the sky was still dark and the streets as deserted as they ever were.

It was the small hours, the small hours of the same night. London slept, fat and dangerous and blithely unaware of what had happened in the Elephant and Castle. The crisp ignorance of the city refreshed him. It carried on whatever, he thought. There was a great comfort in that.

King Rat and he were eager to leave these bricks behind. They moved as fast as they could, hauling themselves across the roofs, trailing their bruised limbs and wincing with pain, but high and exhilarated. When they had put some houses between them and the warehouse, Saul stopped.

He was going to call for help for those left behind in the club. God knew how many broken bones and punctured lungs and so on were lying in that hall, and he was very afraid of what they might contract from his troops. He could not contemplate that any would die. Not after that night. To live through that, crazed, possessed and dancing, only to die of ratbite in bed … he could not bear to think of that.

He stood a little way off from King Rat, on the flat roof of a bookie’s shop. Nondescript low-rise housing surrounded them. Saul revelled in the banality of the view, the slate grey, the lacklustre billboard ads, peeling and out of date, the obscure graffiti. He could hear a train pass by somewhere not far away.

King Rat faced him.

‘You off, then?’ he said.

Saul burst out laughing at the absurd understatement of the parting.

‘Yeah.’ He nodded.

King Rat nodded back. He seemed very distracted.

‘I killed him, you know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I took him out. Not you, you froze up. You’d have let him do a bunk, but not me! I sprung up with my sharp Hampsteads and took the ruffian out!’ Saul said nothing. King Rat stared at him, his excitement ebbing. ‘But nary a rat was there to get a shufti,’ he said slowly. ‘None of my boys and girls. They saw nowt, all dancing, out of it, dead and dying.’

There was a long silence.

King Rat pointed briefly at Saul.

‘They’ll think you done it.’

Saul nodded.

King Rat began to quiver. He fought to control himself, shoved his hands into his mouth, beat his sides, but he could not contain the anguish and excitement.

He grabbed Saul’s arms, his hands shaking.

‘Tell them,’ he begged. ‘They’ll believe you. Tell them what I did.’

Saul stared at that dark, dirty figure. From where he stood, nothing of London was visible behind King Rat. That wiry, ill-defined face was all he could see, surrounded by nothing but the sky, the faint stars and oily clouds. King Rat was an island in his field of vision, operating under his own rules. The dark spaces in which those eyes hid were fervent, would not release him. The clouds behind King Rat’s head were tinged with red, stained by the city.

King Rat begged for absolution. He wanted his kingdom back.

Saul did not want it. He did not want to be Crown Prince of rats. He was not a rat any more than he was a man.

But as he stared at King Rat’s face he saw a sordid brutality in an alley. He saw a fat old man who loved him falling out of the sky in a deadly rain of glass.

Saul closed his eyes and remembered his father. He wanted him. He wanted to talk to him so much.

He would never ever speak to him again.

He spoke very slowly, without opening his eyes.

‘I’m going to tell my troops,’ he said, ‘about how you cowered and begged the Piper for your life, and promised him all the rats he could kill, and how it would have worked if I hadn’t fought past you bravely and shoved him into hell impaled on his flute.

‘I’ll tell them all what a craven lying coward Judas you were.’

He opened his eyes as King Rat began to screech.

‘Give me my Kingdom,’ he shrieked, and clawed at Saul’s face. ‘You little cunt I’ll kill you …’

Saul stumbled back from the flailing claws, and pushed King Rat in the chest.

‘So what are you going to do?’ he hissed. ‘You going to kill me? Because you know what? I’m not sure you killed the Piper! And if he ever comes back he’ll kill you dead like fucking vermin, and he’ll make you dance and beg for it before you die, but he can’t kill me …’

King Rat slowed down, his frantic flailings subsided. He backed away from Saul, his shoulders slumped, broken.

‘See? He can’t touch me …’ Saul hissed. He jabbed a finger at King Rat’s chest. ‘You dragged me into this world, murderer, rapist, Dad, you killed my father, unleashed the Piper on me … I can’t kill you, but you can sing for your fucking Kingdom. It’s mine, and you need me in case he ever comes back. You can’t kill me, just in case.’ Saul laughed unpleasantly. ‘I know how you work, you fucking animal. Self iiber allés. Kill me and you might be killing yourself. So what do you want to do? Eh?’

Saul stepped back and spread his arms wide. He closed his eyes.

‘Kill me. Take your best shot.’

He waited, listening to King Rat breathe.

Eventually he opened his eyes and saw King Rat skulking, moving back and forth, towards him and away again, clenching and unclenching his fists.

‘You little bastard!’ he hissed despairingly.

Saul laughed again, bitter and tired. He turned his back on King Rat and walked to the edge of the roof. As he began his descent, King Rat whispered to him again.

‘Watch your back, you shit,’ he hissed. ‘Watch your back.’

Saul climbed down a curving line of old bricks and disappeared into the labyrinth behind a skip, wound his way along a tiny alley and emerged into South London.

He scoured the streets until he found a darkened arcade of kebab vendors and newsagents and shoe-shops, and there at the end a mercifully unvandalized phone box. He dialled 999 and sent the police and ambulances to the warehouse. God knew, he thought, what they would make of the scene awaiting them.

When he had made that call, Saul held the receiver to his chin for a long time, trying to decide whether to act on his instinct. He wanted to make one more call.

He called directory enquiries and got the number for the Willesden police station. He called the operator and told her that his pound coin had stuck in the phone box and he had to make an urgent call. The operator acquiesced with a bored voice designed to let Saul know that she knew he was lying.

The phone was answered by a crotchety sergeant on the graveyard shift.

Saul didn’t suppose that DI Crowley was available. At this time? Was Saul mad? Anything urgent the sergeant could help with?

Saul asked to be put through to Crowley’s answering machine. He stiffened with déjà vu at the sound of Crowley’s measured tones. He had not heard them since his rebirth, the night after his father’s murder.

He cleared his throat.

‘Crowley, this is Saul Garamond. By now you’ll know about the fucking carnage in the Elephant and Castle. This is just to let you know that I was there, and to tell you not to bother asking anyone there what happened, because none of them know. I don’t know how you’ll end up writing it up … Fuck it, say it was a performance art piece that went horribly wrong. I don’t know. Anyway, I was calling to tell you that I did not kill my father. I didn’t kill your policemen. I didn’t kill the bus guard, I didn’t kill Deborah, and I didn’t kill my friend Kay.

‘I wanted to tell you that the main culprit is gone.

‘I don’t think we’ll see him again.

‘There’s one more culprit for part of this, Crowley, and I can’t get rid of him, not yet. But I’ll be keeping my eye on him. I promise you that.

‘I want to come back, Crowley, but I know I can’t. Leave Fabian and Natasha alone. They don’t know anything, and they haven’t seen me. I did everyone a favour tonight, Crowley. You’ll never know the half of it.

‘If we’re both lucky that’s the last we’ll hear of each other.

‘Good luck, Crowley.’

He hung up.

Tell me about your father, Crowley had suggested, all those weeks ago. Ah, Crowley, thought Saul, that’s just what I can’t do.

You wouldn’t understand.

He walked into the dark streets, heading for home.

EPILOGUE

Deep under London, in a rough chamber off a tube line abandoned for fifty years, accessible from the sewers and the pipes of a hundred buildings, Saul told the rats the story of the Great Battle.

They were spellbound. They ringed him in concentric circles, rats from all over London, here a survivor of that night, licking her scars ostentatiously, another boasting of his exploits, others chattering in agreement. It was dry and not too cold. There were piles of food for everyone. Saul lay in the centre and told his story, showing off his healing wounds.

Saul told the assembled company about King Rat’s Betrayal, when he had abased himself in the dirt and offered the life of every rat in London if only the Piper would spare him. Saul told the story of how he himself had heard the cries of the dying and had broken the Piper’s spell, shoved him into a void with his infernal pipe embedded in him, and he told them how he had stamped on King Rat in contempt as he did so.

The rats listened and bobbed their little heads.

Saul warned the rats to be vigilant, to keep a watch for the Piper, and to avoid the lies and seductions of the Great Betrayer, King Rat.

‘He’s still in the sewers,’ warned Saul. ‘He’s on the roofs, he’s all around us, and he’ll try to win you over, he’ll tell you lies and beg you to follow him.’

The rats listened intently. They would not fail.

When Saul had finished the story, he sat up on his haunches and looked into the ring of faces. Row upon row of anxious eyes, gazing at him, demanding that he command them. They oppressed him.

There was so much that Saul wanted to do. He had a letter to Fabian in his pocket. Fabian would be leaving hospital soon and he would find it waiting for him, some tentative overtures, hints at explanation and a promise to contact him when things had calmed down.

Saul wanted to find a permanent base. There was an empty tower in Haringey he wanted to investigate.

There was shopping that needed doing. He had his eye on a very flash Apple Mac portable computer. Leaving the human world behind certainly made things easier as far as money was concerned.

But he could not operate like that as long as the rats hung on his every word, followed him everywhere, desperate to do his bidding. His revenge on King Rat had trapped him with endless ranks of adoring followers from whom he was eager to escape. And there was always the chance that the rats might start lis- tening to King Rat. He was out there, skulking, plotting, destroying. Saul had to ensure that his revenge would last.

He had to change the rules.

‘You should all be proud of yourselves,’ he said. ‘The nation scored a great triumph.’

The gathering basked.

‘It’s a new dawn for the rats,’ he said. ‘It’s time the rats realized their strength.’

Excitement swept the assembly. What announcement was this?

‘And it’s for that reason that I abdicate.’

Panic! The rats ran from side to side, beseeched him. Lead us, they said to him with eyes and screeches and claws, take us.

‘Listen to me! Why don’t I quibble with King Rat’s right to that name? Listen to me! I abdicate because the rats deserve better than a King. The dogs have their Queen, the cats their King, the spiders will throw up another sovereign, all the nations fawn before leaders, but let me tell you all … I couldn’t have defeated the Piper without you. You don’t need champions. It’s time for a revolution.’

Saul thought of his father, his fervent arguments, his books, his commitment. This one’s for you, Dad, he thought wryly.

‘It’s time for a revolution. You were led by a monarch for years, and he brought you to disaster. Then years of anarchy, fear, searching for a new ruler, the fear isolating you all so you didn’t have faith in your nation.’ A frisson passed momentarily up and down Saul’s back. He was suddenly alarmed. Jesus, he thought, I wonder what I’m unleashing. But it was too late to stop and he plunged on. He felt like an agent of history.

‘So now you know what you can do, the rats will never kow-tow to the whims of kings again. I do not abdicate in favour of another.’ Saul paused theatrically.

‘I declare this Year One of the Rat Republic.’

Pandemonium. Rats tearing around the room, terrified, excited, liberated, aghast. And above the hubbub and confusion, Saul’s voice continued, his speech nearly at an end.

‘All equal, all working together, respect going to those who deserve it, not just those who claim it … Liberty, Equality … and let’s put the “rat” back into “Fraternity”,’ he concluded with a grin. This way, he thought, maybe I can get a bit of peace.

He raised his voice over the clamour.

‘I’m not Prince Rat, I’m not King Rat…. Let the Betrayer cling to his outmoded title if he wants, pathetically hankering for the past. From now on there are no kings,’ said Saul.

‘I’m just one of you,’ he said.

‘I’m Citizen Rat.’

Alone again.

I’ve done this before.

You can’t keep me down.

Watch your back, Sonny.

I’m the one that’s always there. I’m the one that sticks. I’m the dispossessed, I’ll be back again. I’m why you can’t sleep easy in your bed. I’m the one that taught you everything you know, I’ve got more tricks up my sleeve. I’m the tenacious one, the one that locks my teeth, that won’t give up, that can’t ever let go.

I’m the survivor.

I’m King Rat.

ALSO BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

King Rat

Perdido Street Station

The Scar

Iron Council

Looking for Jake: Stories

Un Lun Dun

The City & The City

To Mark Bould
Comrade-in-tentacles

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For all their help with this book I’m extremely grateful to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Melisande Echanique, Penelope Haynes, Chloe Healy, Kaitlin Heller, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Jemima Miéville, David Moensch, Sandy Rankin, Max Schaefer, Jesse Soodalter, and to my editors Chris Schluep and Jeremy Trevathan. My sincere thanks to all at Del Rey and Macmillan.

The Natural History Museum and Darwin Centre are, of course, real places—the latter containing a real Architeuthis—but the questionable versions depicted here are entirely my responsibility. For their extraordinary hospitality and behind-the-scenes access, I am enormously grateful to those who work in the real institutions, particularly Patrick Campbell, Oliver Crimmen, Mandy Holloway, Karen James, and John Lambshead.

The poem in chapter 19, “The Kraken Wakes,” is copyright Hugh Cook, and I am very grateful to his family for permission to reproduce it. Among the countless writers, musicians, artists, and researchers to whom I’m indebted, those I’m particularly aware of and grateful to with regard to this book include Hugh Cook, Burial, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, William Hope Hodgson, Pop Will Eat Itself, Tsunemi Kubodera and Kyoichi Mori, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Japetus Steenstrup.

Contents

Other Books by this Author

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Part One - Specimens

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two - Universal Sleeper

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Part Three - Londonmancy

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Part Four - London-Upon-Sea

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Part Five - Rise Toward Descent

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Part Six - Inklings

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Chapter Eighty

Chapter Eighty-One

Part Seven - Hero = Bottle

Chapter Eighty-Two

About the Author

Copyright

“The green waves break from my sides
As I roll up, forced by my season”

—HUGH COOK, “The Kraken Wakes”

The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you’re a big boy.

The sea’s full of saints and it’s been full of saints for years. Since longer than anything. Saints were there before there were even gods. They were waiting for them, and they’re still there now.

Saints eat fish and shellfish. Some of them catch jelly fish and some of them eat rubbish. Some saints eat anything they can find. They hide under rocks; they turn themselves inside out; they spit up spirals. There’s nothing saints don’t do.

Make this shape with your hands. Like that. Move your fingers. There, you made a saint. Look out, here comes another one! Now they’re fighting! Yours won.

There aren’t any big corkscrew saints anymore, but there are still ones like sacks and ones like coils, and ones like robes with flapping sleeves. What’s your favourite saint? I’ll tell you mine. But wait a minute, first, do you know what it is makes them all saints? They’re all a holy family, they’re all cousins. Of each other, and of … you know what else they’re cousins of?

That’s right. Of gods.

Alright now. Who was it made you? You know what to say.

Who made you?

PART ONE
SPECIMENS

Chapter One

AN EVERYDAY DOOMSAYER IN SANDWICH-BOARD ABRUPTLY walked away from what over the last several days had been his pitch, by the gates of a museum. The sign on his front was an old-school prophecy of the end: the one bobbing on his back read FORGET IT.

INSIDE, A MAN WALKED THROUGH THE BIG HALL, PAST A DOUBLE stair and a giant skeleton, his steps loud on the marble. Stone animals watched him. “Right then,” he kept saying.

His name was Billy Harrow. He glanced at the great fabricated bones and nodded. It looked as if he was saying hello. It was a little after eleven on a morning in October. The room was filling up. A group waited for him by the entrance desk, eyeing each other with polite shyness.

There were two men in their twenties with geek-chic haircuts. A woman and man barely out of teens teased each other. She was obviously indulging him with this visit. There was an older couple, and a father in his thirties holding his young son. “Look, that’s a monkey,” he said. He pointed at animals carved in vines on the museum pillars. “And you see that lizard?”

The boy peeped. He looked at the bone apatosaurus that Billy had seemed to greet. Or maybe, Billy thought, he was looking at the glyptodon beyond it. All the children had a favourite inhabitant of the Natural History Museum’s first hall, and the glyptodon, that half-globe armadillo giant, had been Billy’s.

Billy smiled at the woman who dispensed tickets, and the guard behind her. “This them?” he said. “Right then, everyone. Shall we do this thing?”

HE CLEANED HIS GLASSES AND BLINKED WHILE HE WAS DOING IT, replicating a look and motion an ex had once told him was adorable. He was a little shy of thirty and looked younger: he had freckles, and not enough stubble to justify “Bill.” As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, DiCaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

Billy’s black hair was tousled in halfheartedly fashionable style. He wore a not-too-hopeless top, cheap jeans. When he had first started at the centre, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore.

“So you’re all here for the tour of the Darwin Centre,” he said. He was acting as if he thought they were present to investigate a whole research site, to look at the laboratories and offices, the filing, the cabinets of paperwork. Rather than to see one and only the one thing within the building.

“I’m Billy,” he said. “I’m a curator. What that means is I do a lot of the cataloguing and preserving, stuff like that. I’ve been here awhile. When I first came here I wanted to specialise in marine molluscs—know what a mollusc is?” he asked the boy, who nodded and hid. “Snails, that’s right.” Mollusca had been the subject of his master’s thesis.

“Alright, folks.” He put his glasses on. “Follow me. This is a working environment, so please keep the noise down, and I beg you not to touch anything. We’ve got caustics, toxins, all manner of horrible stuff all over the place.”

One of the young men started to say, “When do we see—?” Billy raised his hand.

“Can I just …?” he said. “Let me explain about what’ll happen when we’re in there.” Billy had evolved his own pointless idio-superstitions, according to one of which it was bad luck for anyone to speak the name of what they were all there for, before they reached it.

“I’m going to show you a bunch of the places we work,” he said lamely. “Any questions, you can ask me at the end: we’re a little bit time constrained. Let’s get the tour done first.”

No curator or researcher was obliged to perform this guide-work. But many did. Billy no longer grumbled when it was his turn.

They went out and through the garden, approaching the Darwin with a building site on one side and the brick filigrees of the Natural History Museum on the other.

“No photos please,” Billy said. He did not care if they obeyed: his obligation was to repeat the rule. “This building here opened in 2002,” he said. “And you can see we’re expanding. We’ll have a new building in 2008. We’ve got seven floors of wet specimens in the Darwin Centre. That means stuff in Formalin.”

Everyday hallways led to a stench. “Jesus,” someone muttered.

“Indeed,” said Billy. “This is called the dermestarium.” Through interior windows there were steel containers like little coffins. “This is where we clean up skeletons. Get rid of all the gunk on them. Dermestes maculatus.”

A computer screen by the boxes was showing some disgusting salty-looking fish being eaten by insect swarms. “Eeurgh,” someone said.

“There’s a camera in the box,” said Billy. “Hide beetles is their English name. They go through everything, just leave bones behind.”

The boy grinned and tugged his father’s hand. The rest of the group smiled, embarrassed. Flesh-eating bugs: sometimes life really was a B-movie.

Billy noticed one of the young men. He wore a past-it suit, a shabby-genteel outfit odd for someone young. He wore a pin on his lapel, a design like a long-armed asterisk, two of the spokes ending in curls. The man was taking notes. He was filling the pad he carried at a great rate.

A taxonomiser by inclination as well as profession, Billy had decided there were not so many kinds of people who took this tour. There were children: mostly young boys, shy and beside themselves with excitement, and vastly knowledgeable about what they saw. There were their parents. There were sheepish people in their twenties, as geeky-eager as the kids. There were their girlfriends and boyfriends, performing patience. A few tourists on an unusual byway.

And there were the obsessives.

They were the only people who knew more than the young children. Sometimes they did not speak: sometimes they would interrupt Billy’s explanations with too-loud questions, or correct him on scientific detail with exhausting fussy anxiety. He had noticed more of such visitors than usual in the last several weeks.

“It’s like late summer brings out the weirdos,” Billy had said to his friend Leon, a few nights back, as they drank at a Thames pub. “Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.”

“Fascist,” Leon had said. “Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?”

“Please,” Billy said. “That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, but you pass. You’re like, you’re in deep cover,” Leon said. “You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.”

“Mmm, tasteful.”

“Alright,” Billy said as colleagues passed him. “Kath,” he said to an ichthyologist; “Brendan,” to another curator, who answered him, “Alright Tubular?”

“Onward please,” said Billy. “And don’t worry, we’re getting to the good stuff.”

Tubular? Billy could see one or two of his escortees wondering if they had misheard.

The nickname resulted from a drinking session in Liverpool with colleagues, back in his first year at the centre. It was the annual conference of the professional curatorial society. After a day of talks on methodologies and histories of preservation, on museum schemes and the politics of display, the evening’s wind-down had started with polite how-did-you-get-into-this?, turned into everyone at the bar one by one talking about their childhoods, these meanderings, in boozy turn, becoming a session of what someone had christened Biography Bluff. Everyone had to cite some supposedly extravagant fact about themselves—they once ate a slug, they’d been part of a foursome, they tried to burn their school down, and so on—the truth of which the others would then brayingly debate.

Billy had straight-faced claimed that he had been the result of the world’s first-ever successful in vitro fertilisation, but that he had been disavowed by the laboratory because of internal politics and a question mark over issues of consent, which was why the official laurel had gone to someone else a few months after his birth. Interrogated about details, he had with drunken effortlessness named doctors, the location, a minor complication of the procedure. But before bets were made and his reveal made, the conversation had taken a sudden turn and the game had been abandoned. It was two days later, back in London, before a lab-mate asked him if it was true.

“Absolutely,” Billy had said, in an expressionless teasing way that meant either “of course,” or “of course not.” He had stuck by that response since. Though he doubted anyone believed him, the nickname “Test-tube” and variants were still used.

THEY PASSED ANOTHER GUARD: A BIG, TRUCULENT MAN, ALL SHAVED head and muscular fatness. He was some years older than Billy, named Dane Something, from what Billy had overheard. Billy nodded and tried to meet his eye, as he always did. Dane Whatever, as he always did, ignored the little greeting, to Billy’s disproportionate resentment.

As the door swung shut, though, Billy saw Dane acknowledge someone else. The guard nodded momentarily at the intense young man with the lapel pin, the obsessive whose eyes flickered in the briefest response. Billy saw that, in surprise—and just before the door closed between them—Dane looking at him.

DANE’S ACQUAINTANCE DID NOT MEET HIS EYES. “YOU FEEL IT GET cool?” Billy said, shaking his head. He sped them through time-release doors. “To stop evaporation. We have to be careful about fire. Because, you know, there’s a fair old bit of alcohol in here, so …” With his hands he made a soft explosion.

The visitors stopped still. They were in a specimen maze. Ranked intricacies. Kilometres of shelves and jars. In each was a motionless floating animal. Even sound sounded bottled suddenly, as if something had put a lid on it all.

The specimens mindlessly concentrated, some posing with their own colourless guts. Flatfish in browning tanks. Jars of huddled mice gone sepia, grotesque mouthfuls like pickled onions. There were sports with excess limbs, foetuses in arcane shapes. They were as carefully shelved as books. “See?” Billy said.

One more door and they would be with what they were there to see. Billy knew from repeated experience how this would go.

When they entered the tank room, the chamber at the heart of the Darwin Centre, he would give the visitors a moment without prattle. The big room was walled with more shelves. There were hundreds more bottles, from those chest-high down to those the size of a glass of water. All of them contained lugubrious animal faces. It was a Linnaean décor; species clined into each other. There were steel bins, pulleys that hung like vines. No one would notice. Everyone would be staring at the great tank in the centre of the room.

This was what they came for, that pinkly enormous thing. For all its immobility; the wounds of its slow-motion decay, the scabbing that clouded its solution; despite its eyes being shrivelled and lost; its sick colour; despite the twist in its skein of limbs, as if it were being wrung out. For all that, it was what they were there for.

It would hang, an absurdly massive tentacled sepia event. Architeuthis dux. The giant squid.

“IT’S EIGHT POINT SIXTY TWO METRES LONG,” BILLY WOULD SAY AT LAST. “NOT THE largest we’ve ever seen, but no tiddler either.” The visitors would circle the glass. “They found it in 2004, off the Falkland Islands.

“It’s in a saline-Formalin mix. That tank was made by the same people that do the ones for Damien Hirst. You know, the one he put the shark in?” Any children would be leaning in to the squid, as close as they could get.

“Its eyes would have been twenty-three or twenty-four centimetres across,” Billy would say. People would measure with their fingers, and children opened their own eyes mimicry-wide. “Yeah, like plates. Like dinner plates.” He said it every time, every time thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s dog. “But it’s very hard to keep eyes fresh, so they’re gone. We injected it with the same stuff that’s in the tank to stop it rotting from the inside.

“It was alive when it was caught.”

That would mean gasps all over again. Visions of an army of coils, twenty thousand leagues, an axe-fight against a blasphemy from the deep below. A predatory meat cylinder, rope limbs unrolling, finding a ship’s rail with ghastly prehensility.

It had been nothing like that. A giant squid at the surface was a weak, disoriented, moribund thing. Horrified by air, crushed by its own self, it had probably just wheezed through its siphon and palsied, a gel mass of dying. That did not matter. Its breach was hardly reducible to however it had actually been.

The squid would stare with its handspan empty sockets and Billy would answer familiar questions—“It’s name is Archie.” “Because of Architeuthis. Get it?” “Yes, even though we think it’s a girl.”

When it had come, wrapped in ice and preservative cloth, Billy had helped unswaddle it. It was he who had massaged its dead flesh, kneading the tissue to feel where preservatives had spread. He had been so busy on it it was as if he had not noticed it, quite, somehow. It was only when they were done and finished, and it was tanked, that it had hit him, had really got him. He had watched refraction make it shift as he approached or moved away, a magic motionless motion.

It wasn’t a type-specimen, one of those bottled Platonic essences that define everything like them. Still, the squid was complete, and it would never be cut.

Other specimens in the room would eventually snare a bit of visitor attention. A ribbon-folded oarfish, an echidna, bottles of monkeys. And there at the end of the room was a glass-fronted cabinet containing thirteen small jars.

“Anyone know what these are?” Billy would say. “Let me show you.”

They were distinguished by the browning ink and antique angularity of the hand that had labelled them. “These were collected by someone quite special,” Billy would say to any children. “Can you read that word? Anyone know what that means? ‘The Beagle’?”

Some people got it. If they did they would gape at the subcollection that sat there unbelievably on an everyday shelf. Little animals collected, euthanized, preserved and catalogued on a journey to the South American seas, two centuries before, by the young naturalist Charles Darwin.

“That’s his writing,” Billy would say. “He was young, he hadn’t sorted out his really big notions when he found these. These are part of what gave him the whole idea. They’re not finches, but these are what got the whole thing started. It’s the anniversary of his trip soon.”

Very rarely, someone would try to argue with him over Darwin’s insight. Billy would not have that debate.

Even those thirteen glass eggs of evolutionary theory, and all the centuries’-worth of tea-coloured crocodiles and deep-sea absurdities, evinced only a little interest next to the squid. Billy knew the importance of that Darwin stuff, whether visitors did or not. No matter. Enter that room and you breached a Schwarzschild radius of something not canny, and that cephalopod corpse was the singularity.

That, Billy knew, was how it would go. But this time when he opened the door he stopped, and stared for several seconds. The visitors came in behind him, stumbling past his immobility. They waited, unsure of what they were being shown.

The centre of the room was empty. All the jars looked over the scene of a crime. The nine-metre tank, the thousands of gallons of brine-Formalin, the dead giant squid itself were gone.

Chapter Two

AS SOON AS BILLY STARTED CLAMOURING HE WAS SURROUNDED by colleagues, all gaping and demanding to know what was going on and what the hell, where was, where was the goddamn squid?

They hurried the visitors out of the building. Afterward, all Billy recalled of that rushed dismissal was the little boy sobbing, desolate that he had not been shown what he had come to see. Biologists, guards, curators came and stared with stupid faces at the enormous lack in the tank room. “What …?” they said, just like Billy had, and “Where did …?”

Word spread. People ran from place to place as if they were looking for something, as if they had misplaced something, and might find it under a cupboard.

“It can’t have, it can’t have,” a biophysicist called Josie said, and yes, no, it couldn’t have, not disappeared, so many metres of abyss meat could not have gone. There were no suspicious cranes. There were no giant tank-nor squid-shaped holes cartoon-style in the wall. It could not have gone, but there it was, not.

There was no protocol for this. What to do in the event of a chemical spill—that was planned. If a specimen jar broke, if results did not tally, even if a tour member became violent, you run a particular algorithm. This though, Billy thought. What the hell?

•   •   •

THE POLICE ARRIVED AT LAST, COMING IN A STAMPY GANG. THE staff stood waiting, huddled exactly as if cold, as if drenched in benthic water. Officers tried to take statements.

“I don’t understand, I’m afraid …” one might say.

“It’s gone.”

The crime scene was off-limits, but since Billy was the discoverer he was allowed to stay. He gave his statement, standing by the lack. When he was done and his questioner distracted, he stepped aside. He watched the police work. Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.

They measured the room as if maybe the dimensions were hiding things. Billy had no better ideas. The room looked huge. All the other tanks looked forlorn and far away, the specimens apologetic.

Billy stared at the stands on which the Architeuthis tank should be. He was still adrenalized. He listened to the officers.

“Search me for a fucking clue, mate …”

“Shit, you know what this means, don’t you?”

“Don’t even get me started. Hand me that tape measure.”

“Seriously, I’m telling you, this is a handover, no question …”

“What are you waiting for, mate? Mate?” That was to Billy, at last. An officer was telling him just-courteously to fuck off. He joined the rest of the staff outside. They milled and muttered, congregating roughly by jobs. Billy saw a debate among directors.

“What’s that about?” he said.

“Whether or not to close the museum,” Josie said. She was biting her nails.

“What?” Billy said. He took off his glasses and blinked at them aggressively. “What’s the sodding debate? How big does something have to be before its nickage closes us down?”

“Ladies and Gents.” A senior policeman clapped his hands for attention. His officers surrounded him. They were muttering to and listening to their shoulders. “I’m Chief Inspector Mulholland. Thanks for your patience. I’m sorry to’ve kept you all waiting.” The staff huffed, shifted, bit their nails.

“I’m going to ask you to please not talk about this, ladies and gents,” Mulholland said. A young female officer slipped into the room. Her uniform was unkempt. She was speaking on some phone hands-free, muttering at nothing visible. Billy watched her. “Please don’t talk about this,” Mulholland said again. The whispering in the room mostly ceased.

“Now,” Mulholland said, after a pause. “Who was it found it gone?” Billy put up his hand. “You, then, would be Mr. Harrow,” Mulholland said. “Can I ask the rest of you to wait, even if you’ve already told us what you know? My officers’ll speak to you all.”

“Mr. Harrow.” Mulholland approached him as the staff obeyed. “I’ve read your statement. I’d be grateful if you’d show me around. Could you take me on exactly the route you did with your tour?” Billy saw that the young female officer had gone.

“What is it you’re looking for?” he said. “You think you’re going to find it…?”

Mulholland looked at him kindly, as if Billy were slow. “Evidence.”

Evidence. Billy ran his hand through his hair. He imagined marks on the floor where some huge perfidious pulley system might have been. Drying puddles of preserver in a trail as telltale as crumbs. Right.

Mulholland summoned colleagues, and had Billy walk them through the centre. Billy pointed out what they passed in a terse parody of his usual performance. The officers poked at bits and pieces and asked what they were. “An enzyme solution,” Billy said, or, “That’s a time sheet.”

Mulholland said: “Are you alright, Mr. Harrow?”

“It’s kind of a big thing, you know?”

That wasn’t the only reason Billy glanced repeatedly behind him. He thought he heard a noise. A very faint clattering, a clanking like a dropped and rolling beaker. It was not the first time he had heard that. He had been catching little snips of such misplaced sound at random moments since a year after he had started at the centre. More than once he had, trying to find the cause, opened a door onto an empty room, or heard a faint grind of glass in a hallway no one could have entered.

He had concluded a long time ago that it was his mind inventing these just-heard noises. They correlated with moments of anxiety. He had mentioned the phenomenon to people, and though some had reacted with alarm, many told some anecdote about horripilation or twitches when they were under pressure, and Billy remained fairly sanguine.

In the tank room the forensic team was still dusting, photographing, measuring tabletops. Billy folded his arms and shook his head.

“It’s those Californian sods.” When he returned to where most of the staff were waiting he joked quietly about rival institutes to a workmate outside the tank room. About disputes over preservation methodology that had taken a dramatic turn. “It’s the Kiwis,” Billy said. “O’Shea finally gave in to temptation.”

HE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO HIS FLAT. HE HAD A long-standing arrangement to meet a friend.

Billy had known Leon since they had been undergraduates at the same institute, though in different departments. Leon was enrolled in a PhD course in a literature department in London, though he never talked about it. He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, “I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics.”

“If you didn’t swim in your sump of ignorance you’d know that title’s designed to fuck with the French. Neither word’s translatable into their ridiculous language.”

Leon lived in a just-plausible rim of Hoxton. He camped up his role as Virgil to Billy’s Dante, taking Billy to art happenings or telling him about those he could not attend, exaggerating and lying about what they entailed. Their game was that Billy was in permanent anecdote overdraft, always owed Leon stories. Leon, skinny and shaven-headed and in a foolish jacket, sat in the cold outside the pizzeria with his long legs stretched out.

“Where’ve you been all my life, Richmal?” he shouted. He had long ago decided that blue-eyed Billy was named for another naughty boy, the William of Just William, and had illogically rechristened him for the book’s author.

“Chipping Norton,” said Billy, patting Leon’s head. “Theydon Bois. How’s the life of the mind?”

Marge, Leon’s partner, inclined her face for a kiss. The crucifix she always wore glinted.

He had only met her a few times. “She a god-botherer?” Billy had asked Leon after he first met her.

“Hardly. Convent girl. Hence tiny Jesus-shaped guilt trip between her tits.”

She was, as Leon’s girlfriends were more often than not, attractive and a little heavy, somewhat older than Leon, too old for the dilute emo-goth look she maintained. “Say Rubenesque or zaftig at your peril,” Leon had said.

“What’s zaftig?” Billy said.

“And fuck you ‘too old,’ Pauley Perrette’s way older.”

“Who’s that?”

Marge worked part-time at Southwark Housing Department and made video art. She had met Leon at a gig, some drone band playing in a gallery. Leon had deflected Billy’s Simpsons joke and told him that she was one of those people who had renamed herself, that Marge was short for Marginalia.

“Oh what? What’s her real name?”

“Billy,” Leon had said. “Don’t be such a wet blanket.”

“We’ve been watching a weird bunch of pigeons outside a bank is what we’ve been up to,” Leon said as Billy sat.

“We’ve been arguing about books,” said Marge.

“Best sort of argument,” said Billy. “What was the substance?”

“Don’t sidetrack him,” said Leon, but Marge was already answering: “Virginia Woolf versus Edward Lear.”

“Christ Alive,” said Billy. “Are those my only choices?”

“I went for Lear,” said Leon. “Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense.”

“You obviously haven’t read the glossary to Three Guineas,” said Marge. “You want nonsense? She calls ‘soldiers’ ‘gutsgruzzlers,’ ‘heroism’ equals ‘botulism,’ ‘hero’ equals ‘bottle.’”

“Lear?” Billy said. “Really? In the Land of the Fiddly-Faddly, the BinkerlyBonkerly roams.” He took off his glasses and pinched the top of his nose. “Alright, let me tell you something. Here’s the thing,” he said at last and then whatever, it stalled. Leon and Marge stared at him.

Billy tried again. He shook his head. He clucked as if something were stuck in his mouth. He had at last almost to shove the information past his own teeth. “One of … Our giant squid is missing.” Saying it felt like puncturing a lid.

“What?” Leon said.

“I don’t …” Marge said.

“No, it doesn’t make any more sense to me.” He told them, step by impossible step.

“Gone? What do you mean ‘gone’? Why haven’t I heard anything about it?” Leon said at last.

“I don’t know. I’d have thought it would have … I mean, the police asked us to keep it secret—oops, look what I did—but I didn’t expect that to actually work. I’d thought it would be all over the Standard by now.”

“Maybe it’s a what-d’you-call-it, a D-Notice?” Leon said. “You know, one of those things where they stop journalists talking about stuff?”

Billy shrugged. “They’re not going to be able to … Half that tour group have probably blogged the shit out of it by now.”

“Someone’s probably registered bigsquidgone dot com,” Marge said.

Billy shrugged. “Maybe. You know, when I was on my way, I was thinking about maybe I shouldn’t … I almost didn’t tell you myself. Obviously put the fear of God in me. But the big issue for me’s not that the cops didn’t want us to tell: it’s the whole ‘totally impossible’ thing.”

THERE WAS A STORM THAT NIGHT AS HE HEADED HOME, A HORRIBLE one that filled the air with bad electricity. Clouds turned the sky dark brown. The roofs streamed like urinals.

As he entered his Haringay flat, precisely at the second he crossed the threshold, Billy’s phone rang. He stared through the window at the sodden trees and roofs. Across the street, a twirl of rubbishy wind was gusting around some klaggy-looking squirrel on a rooftop. The squirrel shook its head and watched him.

“Hello?” he said. “Yeah, this is Billy Harrow.”

“… somethingsomething, ’bout damn time you got back. So you’re coming in, yeah?” a woman on the line said.

“Wait, what?” The squirrel was still staring at him. Billy gave it the finger and mouthed Sod off. He turned from the window and tried to pay attention. “Who is this, sorry?” he said.

“Will you bloody listen? Better at shooting your mouth than listening, ain’t you? Police, mate. Tomorrow. Got it?”

“Police?” he said. “You want me back to the museum? You want—”

“No. The station. Fuck’s sake clean your ears.” Silence. “You there?”

“… Look, I don’t appreciate the way you’re—”

“Yeah, I don’t appreciate you gabbing away when you was told not to.” She gave him an address. He frowned as he scribbled it on some takeout menu.

“Where? That’s Cricklewood. That’s nowhere near the museum. What’s …? Why did they send someone from up there down to the museum …?”

“We’re done, mate. Just get there. Tomorrow.” She rang off and left him staring at the mouthpiece in his chilly room. The windows made sounds in the wind, as if they were bowing. Billy stared at the phone. He was annoyed that he felt obliged to acquiesce to that last order.

Chapter Three

BILLY HAD BAD DREAMS. HE WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE. THERE WAS no way yet he could know that night sweats were citywide. Hundreds of people who did not know each other, who did not compare their symptoms, slept harried. It was not the weather.

It meant a trek, that meeting to which he had been ordered, that he pretended to himself to consider ignoring. He considered, or, again, pretended to consider, calling his father. Of course he did not. He started to dial Leon’s number but again did not. There was nothing to add to what he had said. He wanted to tell someone else about the disappearance, that strange theft. He auditioned recipients of that phone call in his mind, but his energy to do so, to say anything, kept spilling out, left him repeatedly.

That squirrel was still there. He was sure it was the same animal that watched him from behind the gutter, like a dug-in soldier. Billy did not go in to work. Was not even sure if anyone was in that day and did not call to check. He called no one.

At last—late, as the sky became grey and flat, later than his rude interlocutor had desired, in some feeble faux disobedience—he set out from his block by a commercial yard near Manor House for a 253 bus. He walked through scuffing food wrappers, through newspapers, through flyers urging repentance being peeled one by one by the wind from a discarded pile. In the bus he looked down on the low flat roofs of bus shelters, plinths for leaves.

In Camden he took a Tube, came up again a few steps on for another bus. He checked his mobile repeatedly, but all he received was one text from Leon—LOST NE MORE TREASURES?? On that last leg Billy looked into areas of London he did not know but that felt tuggingly familiar, with their middling businesses and cheap eateries, the lampposts where unlit Christmas street ornaments put up early in readiness or left unplucked a whole year dangled like strange washing. He wore headphones, listened to a soundclash between MIA and an up-and-coming rapper. Billy wondered why he had not thought to insist the police just pick him up, if they were going to have their HQ in this ridiculously out-of-the-way patch.

Walking, even through his headphones Billy was startled by noises. For the first time ever outside the corridors of the Darwin Centre, he heard or imagined that glass noise. The light in that early evening was wrong. Everything’s screwed up, he thought. As if the fat spindle of the Architeuthis’s body had been slotted in and holding something in place. Billy felt like a lid unsecured and banging in the wind.

The station was just off the high street, much larger than he expected. It was one of those very ugly London buildings in mustard bricks that, instead of weathering grandly like their red Victorian ancestors, never age, but just get dirtier and dirtier.

He waited a long time in the waiting area. Twice he got up and asked to see Mulholland. “We’ll be with you shortly, sir,” said the first officer he asked. “And who the fuck’s he?” said the second. Billy grew more and more irritated, turning the pages of old magazines.

“Mr. Harrow? Billy Harrow?”

The man coming toward him was not Mulholland. He was small and skinny and trimly kempt. In his fifties, in plain clothes, a dated brown suit. He had his hands behind his back. As he waited, he leaned forward and up on his toes more than once, a dancey little tic.

“Mr. Harrow?” he said in a voice thin like his moustache. He shook Billy’s hand. “I’m Chief Inspector Baron. You met my colleague, Mulholland?”

“Yeah, where is he?”

“Yes, no. He’s not here. I’m taking over this investigation, Mr. Harrow. Sort of.” He tilted his head. “Apologies for keeping you waiting, and thank you very much for coming in.”

“What do you mean you’re taking over?” Billy said. “Whoever it was spoke to me last night didn’t … She was bloody rude, to be honest.”

“Though I suppose with us lot taking over your labs,” Baron said, “where else were you going to go, eh? I suppose there’ll be no pickling for you till we’re done, I’m afraid. Maybe you can think of it as a holiday.”

“Seriously, what’s the score?” Baron led Billy down striplit corridors. In the white light Billy realised how dirty his glasses were. “Why’ve you taken over? And you’re way out here … I mean, no offense …”

“Anyway,” said Baron. “I promise we won’t keep you any longer than we have to.”

“I’m not sure what it is I can do for you,” Billy said. “I already told you lot everything I know. I mean, that was Mulholland. Did he mess up then? Are you a cleaner-upper?”

Baron stopped and faced Billy. “It’s like a film, this, isn’t it?” he said. He smiled. “You say, ‘But I’ve told your officers everything,’ and I say, ‘Well now you can tell me,’ and you don’t trust me and we dance a little bit and then eventually after a few more questions you get to look horrified and say, ‘What, you think I had something to do with this?’ And we go round and round.”

Billy was speechless. Baron did not stop smiling.

“Rest assured, Mr. Harrow,” he said. “That is not what’s going on here. My absolute honour.” He held his hand up in a scout pledge.

“I never thought …” Billy managed to say.

“So having made that clear,” Baron said, “do you reckon we can dispense with the rest of the script and you can give me a hand? That’s a blinder, Mr. Harrow.” His little voice fluted. “That’s peachy. Now let’s get this done.”

It was Billy’s first time in an interview room. It was just like on telly. Small, beige, windowless. On the far side of a table were a woman and another man. The man was in his forties, tall and powerful. He wore a nondescript dark suit. His hair was receding, his haircut severe. He clasped his heavy hands and regarded Billy levelly.

The first thing Billy noticed about the woman was her youth. She was out of her teens maybe, but not by much. She was, he realized, the policewoman who’d done a brief cameo at the museum. She had on a blue Metropolitan Police uniform, but it was worn more informally than he would have expected her to get away with. It was not buttoned up, was a bit thrown-on. Clean, but rucked, hitched, and tweaked. She had on more makeup than he would have thought permissible, too, and her blonde hair was messily fancily styled. She looked like a pupil obeying the letter but straining against the spirit of school uniform rules. She did not even glance at him, and he could not see her face more clearly.

“Right then,” said Baron. The other man nodded. The young WPC leaned against the wall and fiddled with a mobile phone.

“Tea?” said Baron, gesturing Billy to a chair. “Coffee? Absinthe? I’m joking of course. I would say ‘Cigarette?’ but these days, you know.”

“No, I’m fine.” Billy said. “I’d like to just—”

“Of course, of course. Alright then.” Baron sat and pulled bits of paper from his pockets and searched through them. The scattiness was not convincing. “Tell me about yourself, Mr. Harrow. You’re a curator, I think?”

“Yeah.”

“Which means what?”

“Preserving, cataloguing, that sort of stuff.” Billy fiddled with his glasses so he did not have to meet anyone’s eye. He tried to see which way the woman was looking. “Consulting on displays, keeping stuff in good nick.”

“Always done it?”

“Pretty much.”

“And …” Baron squinted at a note. “It was you who prepared the squid, I’m told.”

“No. It was all of us. I was … it was a group effort.” The other man sat by Baron, saying nothing and looking at his own hands. The young woman sighed and prodded her phone. She appeared to be playing a game on it. She clicked her tongue.

“You were at the museum, weren’t you?” Billy said to her. She glanced at him. “Was it you who called me? Last night?” Her Wine-housey hair was distinctive. She said nothing.

“You …” Baron was pointing at Billy with a pen, still sorting through the papers, “are too modest. You are the squid man.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Billy shifted. “Something like that comes in, you know … We were all working on it. All hands on deck. I mean …” He indicated hugeness with his hands.

“Come come,” said Baron. “You’ve got a way with them, haven’t you?” Baron met his eye. “Everyone says so.”

“I don’t know.” Billy shrugged. “I like molluscs.”

“You are an endearingly modest young man,” Baron said. “And you are fooling no one.”

Curators worked across taxonomies. But it was a standing claim in the centre that Billy’s molluscs in particular were special. The stress could be on either word—it was Billy’s molluscs, and Billy’s molluscs, that kept pristine for ages in their solutions, that fell into particularly dramatic enjarred poses and held them well. It made no sense: one could hardly be any better at preserving a cuttlefish than a gecko or a house mouse. But the joke did not die, because there was a tiny something to it. Though in truth Billy had been pretty cack-handed when he had started. He had shattered his way through a fair few beakers, tubes, and flasks; had splayed more than one dead animal sodden on the lab floor before rather abruptly coming into his skills.

“What’s this got to do with anything?” Billy said.

“It has the following to do with what for,” Baron said. “See we’ve got you down here, or up here, depending which way you hold your map, for two reasons, Mr. Harrow. One, you’re the person who found the giant squid missing. And two, something a bit more specific. Something you mentioned.

“You know, I have to tell you,” Baron said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean I’ve heard of stealing horses before. Plenty of dogs, of course. A cat or two. But …” He chuckled and shook his head. “Your guards’ve got a lot to answer for, haven’t they? I gather there’s a fair old degree of mea culpa-ing going on right now, as it goes.”

“Dane and that lot?” Billy said. “I guess so, I don’t know.”

“I didn’t mean Dane, actually. Interesting you bring him up. I was referring as they say to the other guards. But certainly Dane Parnell and his colleagues, too, must be feeling a bit daft. And of them more later. Recognise this?”

Baron slipped the page of a notepad across the table. On it was a vaguely asterisk design. Maybe it was a burst of radial sunbeams from a sun. Two of the several arms coiled at their ends, longer than the others.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “I drew that. It was what that bloke on the tour was wearing. I drew it for the guy interviewing me yesterday.”

“Do you know what this is, Mr. Harrow?” said Baron. “Can I call you Billy? Do you know?”

“How should I know? But the bloke who had this on, he was with me all the time. He never had any time to go off and do anything, you know, dodgy. I would’ve seen …”

“Have you seen this before?” The other man spoke, for the first time. He gripped his hands as if holding them back from something. His accent was classless and without any regional pitch—neutral enough that it had to have been cultivated. “Does it jog your memory?”

Billy hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Can I just … Who are you?”

Baron shook his head. The large man’s face did not change but for a slow blink. The woman glanced up from her phone, at last, and made some little tooth-kissing noise.

“This is Patrick Vardy, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. Vardy clenched his fingers. “Vardy’s helping with our investigation.”

No rank, Billy thought. All the police he had met had been Constable So-and-so, DC This, Inspector That. But not Vardy. Vardy stood and walked to the edge of the room, out of the immediate light, made himself an illegitimate topic.

“So have you seen this before?” said Baron, tapping the paper. “Little squiggle ring any bells?”

“I don’t know,” said Billy. “Don’t think so. What is it? Do I get to know?”

“You told our colleagues back Kensington-side that the man wearing this seemed quote het up unquote, or something?” Baron said. “What about that?”

“Yeah, I told Mulholland,” Billy said. “What were those names you said?” he said to Vardy, who did not answer. “I don’t know whether the bloke was weird or what,” Billy said to Baron. He shrugged. “Some people who come see the squid are a bit …”

“Seen more like that recently?” Baron said. “The, ah, oddballs?” Vardy leaned forward and muttered something in his ear. The policeman nodded. “Any people getting unusually excited?”

“Squid geeks?” Billy said. “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s been a couple in costumes or weird clothes.” The woman made a note of something. He watched her do so.

“Alright, now tell me this,” Baron said. “Has anything strange been going on outside the museum recently? Any interesting leaflets being handed out, any pickets? Any protests? Have you clocked any other interesting bits of jewellery on any other visitors? I know, I’m asking as if you’re a magpie, all googly-eyed at shinies. But you know.”

“I don’t,” Billy said. “I don’t know. It has happened that we get nutters outside. As for this bloke, ask Dane Parnell.” He shrugged. “Like I said yesterday, I think he recognised the guy.”

“We would of course indeed like to have words with Dane Parnell. What with him and Mystery Pin Man seeming like they know each other and so forth. But we can’t.” Vardy whispered something else to him and Baron continued. “Because a bit like the specimen he was paid to look after, and indeed like Pin Man, Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

Baron nodded. “Whereabouts unknown,” he said. “No one on the phone. Give the dog a bone. Not at home. Why might he disappear, you might ask. We are very keen to have him help us with the old enquiries.”

“You spoken to him?” said the WPC abruptly. Billy jumped in his chair and stared at her. She put her weight on one hip. She spoke quickly, with a London accent. “You talk a lot, don’t you? All sorts of chatting you shouldn’t be supposed to.”

“What …?” Billy said. “We haven’t said more than ten words to each other since he started working there.”

“What did he do before that?” Baron said.

“I’ve got no clue …”

“Listen to him squeak!” The woman sounded delighted.

Billy blinked. He tried to take it in good humour, smiled, tried to get her to smile back, failed. “To be honest,” he said, “I don’t even like the bloke. He’s chippy. Couldn’t be bothered to say hello, let alone anything else.”

Baron, Vardy and the woman looked at each other in speechless conclave. They communicated something with waggled eyebrows and pouted lips, repeated quick nods.

Baron said, slowly, “Well if you should think of anything, Mr. Harrow, do please let us know.”

“Yeah.” Billy shook his head. “Yeah, I will.” He put up surrender hands.

“Good man.” Baron stood. He gave Billy a card, shook his hand as if the gratitude were genuine, pointed him to the door. “Don’t go anywhere, will you? We might want to have another chat.”

“Yeah, I think we will,” the woman said.

“What did you mean ‘Pin Man’s disappeared’?” said Billy.

Baron shrugged. “Everything and everyone’s vanishing, isn’t it? Not that he ‘disappeared’ really; that would imply he was ever there. Your visitors have to book and leave a number. We’ve called everyone you were escorting yesterday. And the gentleman with the sparkle on his lapel …” Baron tap-tapped the design. “Ed, he told your desk his name was. Right, Ed. The number he gave’s unregistered, and no one’s answering.”

“Hie thee to your books, Billy,” Vardy said as Billy opened the door. “I’m disappointed in you.” He tapped the paper. “See what Kooby Derry and Morry can show you.” The words were weird but weirdly familiar.

“Wait, what?” said Billy from the doorway. “What was that?” Vardy waved him away.

BILLY TRIED AND FAILED TO PARSE THE ENCOUNTER ON HIS BEWILDERED way south. He had not been under arrest: he could have left at any time. He had his phone out, ready to do a tirade for Leon, but again for reasons he could not put into words, he did not make the call.

Nor did he go home. Instead, full of an unending sense of being under observation, Billy went to the centre of London. From café to bookshop café, mooching through paperbacks on his way through too much tea.

He did not have a phone with Internet connection, nor did he have his laptop with him, so could not test his intuition that his own reveal the previous night notwithstanding, there would be no information about the squid’s disappearance in the news. The London papers certainly did not cover it. He did not eat, though he stayed out late enough, hours, that it was past time, until it was evening, then early night. He did not really do anything but moodily consider and grow frustrated, did not call the centre, only tried to consider possibilities.

What came back and back to him, what grew to gnaw him most throughout those hours, were the names that Vardy had said. Billy was absolutely certain he had heard them, that they meant something to him. He regretted that he hadn’t insisted on more from Vardy: he did not even know how to spell them. He scribbled possibilities on a scrap of paper, kubi derry, morry, moray, kobadara, and more.

Got some bloody poking around to do, he thought.

On his way home at last his attention was drawn, he was not sure why, to a man on the backseat of his bus. He tried to work out what he had noticed. He could not get a clear view.

The guy was big and broad, in a hoodie, looking down. Whenever Billy turned, he was hunched over or with his face to the glass. Everything they passed tried to grab Billy’s attention.

It was as if he were watched by the city’s night animals and buildings, and by every passenger. I shouldn’t feel like this, Billy thought. Neither should things. He watched a woman and man who had just got on. He imagined the couple shifting straight through the metal chair behind him, out of his sight.

A gust of pigeons shadowed the bus. They should be sleeping. They flew when the bus moved, stopped when it stopped. He wished he had a mirror, so he could watch without turning his head, see that man in back’s evasive face.

They were on the top deck, above the most garish of central London’s neon, by low treetops and first-floor windows, the tops of street signs. The light zones were reversed from their oceanic order, rising, not pitching, into dark. The street on which lamps shone and that was glared by shopwindow fluorescence was the shallowest and lightest place: the sky was the abyss, pointed by stars like bioluminescence. In the bus’s upper deck they were at the edges of deep, the fringe of the dysphotic zone, where empty offices murked up out of sight. Billy looked up as if down into a deep-sea trench. The man behind him was looking up, too.

At the next stop, which was not his, Billy waited until the doors had closed before bolting from his seat and down the stairs, shouting, “Wait, wait, sorry!”

The bus left him and headed into the dark like a submersible. Through the dirty window at the rear of the top, he saw the man look straight at him.

“Shit,” Billy said. “Shit.”

He jerked his hand defensively out. The glass flexed and the man jerked backward as the bus receded. Billy’s own glasses shivered on his face. He saw no one moving behind the window, past a crack in the glass that had suddenly bisected it. The man he had seen was Dane Parnell.

Chapter Four

BILLY SAT UP LATE THAT WEIRD DEEP NIGHT. HE CLOSED THE curtains of his living room, imagining the unsavoury squirrel watching him as he poked around on his laptop. Why would Dane have followed him? How? He tried to think like a detective. He was bad at it.

He could call the police. He’d seen Dane commit no crime, but still. He should. He could call Baron, as he had requested. But despite his discomfort—call it fear—Billy did not want to do that.

There had been such a strange gaming edge to all his interactions with Baron, Vardy and the woman. It had been so clear that he was being played, that information was being held from him, that they had no consideration for him at all except insofar as he pushed forward whatever their opaque agenda was. He did not want to be involved. Or, and or, he wanted to understand this himself.

He slept a very little at last. In the morning, he discovered that it was not as hard to regain entry to the Darwin Centre as he had imagined. The two police at the entrance were not terribly interested, and examined his pass peremptorily. They interrupted his carefully constructed story of why he had to go back in to sort out some stuff on his desk that wouldn’t wait but that he’d be careful and quick and blah blah. They just waved him past.

“Can’t go to the tank room,” one of them said. Alright, Billy thought. Whatever.

He was looking for something, but he had no idea what. He hesitated by retorts and sinks, by plastic containers of diaphanised fish, their flesh made invisible by enzymes, their bones made blue. A common room was full of stacks of posters for the Beagle Project, a retracing of those crucial early days of Darwin’s journeys, a rerun in a floating laboratory kitschly made to look like the Beagle.

“Hey, Billy,” said Sara, another curator who’d been granted entry, for whatever reason. “Did you hear?” She looked around and lowered her voice, passed on some rumour so evanescent and vapid it left his head as soon as she said it. Folklore was self-generating. Billy nodded as if he agreed, shook his head as if it were a shocking possibility, whatever it was she was talking about.

“Did you hear?” she said as well. “Dane Parnell’s disappeared.”

Well that he heard. It gave Billy another cold sensation, as he had had the previous night when he had seen Dane all those yards away, through the bus’s glass, and as if Billy had touched him back.

“I was talking to one of the police,” Sara said, “doing stuff in the tank room, and he was saying that they’ve heard things since, you know, it went. Something clattering.”

“Whooo,” said Billy, like a ghost. She smiled. But Those are my hallucinations, he thought. It was like theft. Those were his imaginings that the police were hearing.

He logged in at a workstation and searched, trying endless different spellings of the names Vardy had said, referring to his scribbled paper and crossing them off, one by one. Eventually he entered the renditions “Kubodera” and “Mori.” “Oh man,” he whispered. Stared at the screen and sat back. “Of course.”

No wonder those names had tantalised. He was ashamed of himself. Kubodera and Mori were the researchers who, a few months previously, had been the first researchers to catch the giant squid on camera in the wild.

He downloaded their essay. He looked again at the pictures. “First-ever observations of a live giant squid in the wild” the paper was called, as if ten-year-olds had taken control of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. First ever.

More than one of his colleagues had printouts of those pictures above their desks. When the images were released, Billy himself had turned up at the office with two bottles of Cava, and had proposed that the anniversary should henceforth be an annual holiday, Squid-day. Because these pictures, as he had said to Leon at the time, were momentous shit.

The first was the most famous, the one they had used on the news. Ajut into view in dark water almost a kilometre down, an eight-metre squid. Its arms blossomed, curved left and right around the bait at the end of the perspectived line. But it was the second picture at which Billy stared.

Again the line descended; again there in ominous water was the animal. But this time it was coming mouth-on. It was caught in a near-perfect radial limb-burst: at the apex, the bite. The two hunting arms, longer limbs with paddle-shaped hands, were recoiled in the dark.

A tentacular explosion. That picture banished all slanderous theories of Architeuthis as sluggish predator-by-accident, tentacles adangle in deepwater lethargy for prey to bumble into, no more a hunter than some idiot jellyfish.

That image had been cherished by fan-partisans of Mesonychoteuthis, the “colossal squid,” Architeuthis’s huge, squat-bodied rival. Which, Mesonychoteuthis, yes, had also been emerging into the camera and video gaze with highly and historically unusual enthusiasm recently. And it was, yes, a terrifying animal. True, it had greater mass; its mantle was longer; granted, its tentacles grabbed not with suckers but with cruel cat-curved claws. But whatever its shape, however its stats and the Architeuthis’s compared, it would never be the giant squid. It was a parvenu monster. Hence the trash-talk of those who researched it, eager to demote the long-term kraken for their new favourite: “without parallel,” “… even larger,” “an order of magnitude meaner.”

But observe the Kubodera/Mori images. Hardly the weak opportunist the haters had dreamed up. Architeuthis did not wait and dangle. Architeuthis loomed, jetted from the abyss, hunting.

Billy stared at the screen. Ten arms, five lines crisscrossing; two longer than the others. The silver design on the pin he’d seen was of this predator incoming. As seen by prey.

HE WALKED THE CORRIDORS CARRYING PAPERS SO HE LOOKED AS IF he was going from somewhere to somewhere else. He entered rooms he was allowed to enter, nodded in greeting to the police guarding those he was not. His revelation notwithstanding, he still had no idea what it was he was hoping to find.

He left the Darwin Centre for the main museum. He saw no police there. He walked the route he used to take as a boy, past the staring ichthyosaur, stone ammonites, past where was now the café. There at last, in the middle of everything and everyone, he thought perhaps he heard a sound. The noise of a jar rolling. Very faint.

It came—or sounded as if it did to him, he corrected himself—from a door off-limits to visitors, that led downstairs to storage areas and undercorridors. He listened at it, crowds to his back. He heard nothing. He entered the keycode and descended.

Billy walked windowless halls underground. He told himself that he did not think he was listening for anything real. That whatever hint it was he was looking for came from inside him. So alright, he said to himself. Help me out. What am I looking for? What are you—what am I—on about?

Guards and curators raised their hands as he passed in brief greetings. The rooms and hallways were lined with industrial shelving, on which were cardboard boxes labelled in thick pen; glass cases empty, or full of surplus specimens; papers; unneeded furniture. There below the heating pipes, by high brick walls and pillars, Billy heard the noise again. From around a corner. He followed it like bread crumbs.

The corridor opened out, not a room but a sudden large hallway. It was stacked quite full of taxidermy, charnel Victoriana. Mammal heads watched from walls, like a hundred Faladas; bisons stiff as aging soldiers by a plaster iguanodon and a tatty emu. There was a thicket of the preserved necks-up of giraffes, their heads a canopy above.

A clink, a clack. Under the striplights the stuffed bodies shed hard shadows. Billy heard another tiny noise. It came from the dark by the wall, deep in the specimen undergrowth.

Billy stepped off the path. He pressed through unyielding antique bodies, shouldering deeper into the little forest of animal remains. He glanced up as if at birds and pressed toward the whitewashed walls. He did not hear another of the sounds, only his own efforts and the brush of his clothes on dry skins. He rounded a stack of hippo parts, and came abruptly up against something of which he could for moments not make sense.

Glass, an old glass container as large as any he had seen. A chest-high lidded cylinder with scalloped base, full of pee-coloured preserver, and a specimen at which he stared. Something rather too big for the container, shoved crudely inside. Part-peeled, with eyes and paws up against the glass and ragged skin suspended like open wings, but even as he thought that he shook his head no.

Billy saw that what he had thought pelt was a ruined shirt, what he had thought peeled was hairlessness and bloat, that oh my Jesus fucking Christ what stared deadly at him in broken pose pressed up and misshaped against the bottle’s inside was a man.

BILLY STAYED OUT OF THE POLICE’S WAY. IT WAS NOT EVEN HIM WHO called them. In those initial terrified moments, when he had torn upstairs unable to breathe, he had not thought to make the call. He had instead run to the two officers guarding the Darwin Centre and screamed, “Quick! Quick!”

Their colleagues came quickly in numbers, cordoning off more of the museum, declaring the basement out of bounds. They took Billy’s prints. Gave him hot chocolate for shock.

No one questioned him. They put him in a conference room and told him not to leave, but no one asked how he had found what he had found. Billy waited by an overhead projector, a TV on a rolling base. He listened to the museum being cleared, the consternation of the crowds.

He wanted solitude more than he wanted fresh air. He wanted his body to stop the last of its panicked shaking, so he sat and waited, as he had been told to, his glasses steaming when he sipped, until the door opened and Baron peered in.

“Mr. Harrow,” Baron said, and shook his head. “Mister Hah-row …

“Mr. Harrow, Billy, Billy Harrow. What have you been up to?”

Chapter Five

BARON SAT NEXT TO BILLY AND SHRUGGED AT HIM SYMPATHETICALLY.

“Bit of a shock,” he said.

“What the hell?” Billy said. “What the hell, how did they get that …? What even happened?”

“Gives a whole new meaning to ‘Someone getting bottled,’ doesn’t it? I apologise, I apologise,” Baron said. “Morgue humour. Defence mechanism. You’ve had a horrible shock, I do know. Believe me.”

“What’s going on?” Billy said. Baron said nothing. “I saw Dane,” Billy said.

“Is that right?” Baron said slowly. “Really now?”

“I was coming home. Last night. On a bus. He was on there. He must’ve been following me. Unless he could’ve just … no. He must’ve been there deliberately. It wouldn’t be hard for him to find out where I live …”

“Alright. Alright, now, listen …”

“I feel like I’m going mad,” Billy said. “Even before that … Before what’s in the basement. I’ve been feeling like I’m being followed. I didn’t say anything because, it’s stupid, you know …” The wind shook the windows abruptly. “I tell you I’m losing it … What happened downstairs? Did Dane do that?”

“Let me think for a second, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said.

“When I was in with you, why was there a psychology professor there? Vardy. That’s what he does. I looked him up. Come on, Baron, don’t look like that—all it took was a bit of an online poke about. I could tell he wasn’t a cop.”

“Is that so? You can ask him yourself in a bit.”

“Was he there because … Is it that you think I’m mad, Baron?” There was another silence. “Is that what you think’s going on with me? Because, Jesus …” Billy breathed out shakily. “Right at the moment, I think you have a point.”

“No,” said Baron. “None of us think you’re losing it. Rather the opposite.” He glanced at his watch. This time, when he arrived, Vardy shook Billy’s hand. He had one of those unpleasant too-hard grips. He was carrying a briefcase.

“Did you have a look?” Baron said.

“It’s pretty much as you’d expect,” Vardy said.

“What?” Billy shouted. “What you’d expect? What about it did you expect, exactly?”

“We’ll discuss that,” Vardy said. “We’ll discuss that, Billy. Now wait. I gather you saw Dane Parnell.”

Billy ran his fingers through his hair. Vardy seemed too large for the chair he was in: he squeezed his shoulders together, as if to avoid spilling himself. He and Baron looked at each other, sharing another unspoken moment.

“Right then,” said Baron. “Let’s have another go. Patrick Vardy, Billy Harrow, curator. Billy Harrow, Patrick Vardy. Professor of psychology at Central London University. As I gather you know.”

“Yeah, like I say,” Billy muttered. “My Google-fu is strong.”

“I owe you an apology, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “I sort of assumed you’d be as half-arsed as most people. Wouldn’t even occur to them to look up our names.”

“So how much do you know about us?” Vardy said. “About me?”

“You’re a psych.” Billy shrugged. “You work with the cops. So I figure … You’re a profiler, aren’t you? Like Cracker? Like Silence of the Lambs?” Vardy smiled, a bit. “That poor sod shoved into the bottle, downstairs,” Billy said. “He’s not the first. Is that it? That’s it, isn’t it. You’re looking for someone … You’re looking for Dane. Dane’s some kind of serial killer. You’re here to work out what his thing is. And, oh Christ, he wants me, doesn’t he? He’s following me. And it’s something to do with …”

But he stopped. How did any of this make sense of the squid? Baron pursed his lips.

“Not exactly,” said Baron. “It’s not quite right.” He chopped his hands through the air onto the tabletop, organising invisible thoughts.

“Look, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. “Here’s the thing. Go back a step. Who’d want to steal a giant squid? Never mind how just yet. That’s not important. Right now, focus on why. It seems like you might be able to help us, and we might be able to help you. I’m not saying you’re in danger, but I’m saying that—”

“Oh Christ …”

“Billy Harrow, listen to me. You need to know what’s going on. We’ve talked it over. We’re going to tell you the full story. And this is in confidence. Which this time please keep, thank you. Now, all this is not the sort of thing we normally lay out for people. We think it might help you to know, and to be perfectly frank we think it might help us too.”

“Why does Dane want me?” Billy said.

“I wasn’t on this case originally, as you know. There are certain flags that go up, you might say, under certain circumstances. Certain sorts of crime. The disappearance of your squid. Plus there are aspects of what’s downstairs that are … relevant. Like for example the fact that the diameter of that jar’s opening isn’t big enough to have got that gentleman inside.”

“What?”

“But what really clinched our interest,” Baron said, “what really rang my bell—and I mean that literally, there’s a bell on my desk—is when you drew us that picture.”

From his briefcase Vardy pulled a photocopy of the druggily exaggerated asterisk.

“I know what that is,” said Billy. “Kubodera and Mori—”

“So,” Baron said, “I head up a specialist unit.”

“What unit?”

Vardy pushed another piece of paper across the table. It was the sign again, the ten-armed spread with two longer limbs. But not the one Billy had drawn. The angles, the lengths of the arms, were slightly different.

“That was drawn a little over a month ago,” Baron said. “A bookshop got busted into one night and a bunch of stuff was taken. Bloke wearing this sign had come in a couple of days running beforehand, not buying anything, looking around. Nervous.”

“If this were a question of a couple of kids both wearing Obey Giant T-shirts, we’d not be bothered,” Vardy said, quickly, in his deep voice. “This is not a bloody meme. Though it may be going that way and thank you very much that’ll complicate things very nicely.” Billy blinked. “Are you a graffiti aficionado? It’s started to crop up. Early days. It’ll be on stickers on lampposts and student rucksacks soon. Turns out that this”—he flicked the paper—“is appropriate for the times.”

“It just fits,” said Baron.

“But not quite yet,” Vardy said. “So when it turns up twice, we sniff a pattern.”

“The guy who was burgled,” Baron said. “It’s Charing Cross Road. He stocks a lot of junk and a little bit of proper antiquarian stuff. Six books nicked that night. Five had just come in. Maybe two, three hundred quids’ worth. They were all on the desk up front, waiting to be sorted. At first he thought that was all that was gone.

“But where there are locked cabinets, the glass’s broken and something’s missing from a top shelf.” He held up a finger. “One book. From a bunch of old academic journals. He worked out what it was was gone.”

Baron looked down and read laboriously. “For-hand-linger … ved de Skandinav—something,” he said. “The 1857 volume.”

“How’s your Danish, Billy?” said Vardy. “Ring any bells?”

“Some villain wants to make it look like he’s rushed in and snagged at random,” Baron said. “So he grabs a load of books off the counter. But he then runs twenty feet down a corridor, to one specific locked bookshelf, breaks one specific pane of glass, takes one specific old book.” Baron shook his head. “It was that one journal. That’s what this was all about.”

“So we asked the Danish Royal Academy for the contents,” Vardy said. “Too old to be on databases.”

“To be honest, we didn’t think much of it at the time,” Baron said. “It wasn’t a priority. It only got passed to us because we’d seen that symbol knocking around a bit. When the list came in from Copenhagen nothing stood out. But. When we heard the symbol’d turned up here, and just what’d happened, one of those articles nicked weeks ago came back sharpish.”

“Pages one eighty-two to one eighty-five,” Vardy said.

“I won’t try the Scandiwegian,” Baron said, reading. “It’s an article about blaeksprutter, so they say. Translation: Japetus Steenstrup. ‘Several Particulars about the Giant Cuttlefish of the Atlantic.’”

“TO RECAP,” BARON SAID. “WEEKS BEFORE YOUR SQUID WAS SNAFFLED, someone pinched an original copy of that article.”

“You’ll have heard of the author,” Vardy said. Billy’s mouth was open. He had. The giant squid was Architeuthis dux, but its genus was named for the man who had taxonomised it: Architeuthis Steenstrup.

“Now,” Vardy said. “Two crimes united by a questionable necklace do not a conspiracy make. However. Two crimes—three, now, with the chap downstairs—united by such jewellery and by giant squid, and our radar does indeed tend to ping.”

“That is the sort of thing that gets us interested,” Baron said.

“‘Us’?” Billy said at last. “Who is ‘us’?”

“We,” said Baron, “are the FSRC.”

“The what?”

Baron folded his hands. “Do you remember that lot calling themselves New Rosicrucians?” he said. “Who kidnapped that girl in Walthamstow?” Baron thumbed in Vardy’s direction. “Found them. And he was I suppose you’d call it consulting during seven/seven, too. That sort of thing. It’s an area of concern.”

“What area?”

“Alright, alright,” Baron said. “You sound like you’re about to cry.” Vardy handed Billy a piece of paper. It was, oddly, his CV. His PhD was in psychology, but his master’s was in theology. His first degree divinity. Billy pushed his glasses on and scanned the publications list, the Positions Currently Held.

“You’re an editor of The Journal of Fundamentalism Studies?” Billy said. This was a test.

Baron said, “The FSRC is the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit.”

Billy stared at him, at Vardy, at the CV again. “You are a profiler,” he said. “You’re a cult profiler.”

Vardy even smiled.

“THERE’S …” BARON COUNTED ON HIS FINGERS. “AUM SHINRIKYO … The Returner Sect … Church of Christ Hunter … Kratosians, close to home some of them … Do you have any idea the increase in cult-related violence in the last ten years? Of course you don’t, because unless it’s, boo, Al Qaeda and the Al-Qaedalinos, it doesn’t come close to the news. But they’re the least of our worries. And part of the reason you haven’t heard about this is because we are good at our job. We’ve been keeping the streets safe.

“That’s why you were encouraged to keep shtum. But you told someone something. Which A, you should not have done, and B, is not unimpressive. Collingswood’s going to have to ask you again, a bit harder.

“It’s not as if we’re exactly secret,” he said. “It’s not so much ‘plausible denial’—that’s not the best strategy these days. It’s more ‘plausibly uninteresting.’ Everyone’ll be like, ‘FSRC? Why on earth you asking about them? Silly nonsense, bit of an embarrassment …’” He smiled. “You get the idea.”

Billy could hear officers in the corridors outside. Phones were ringing.

“So,” said Billy at last. “So you’re cult people. So what’s this got to do with that poor sod in the basement? And what’s it got to do with me?”

Vardy brought up a video file on his laptop and placed it where all three men could watch. An office, a tidy desk, books on the walls, a printer and PC. There was Vardy, sitting three-quarters toward the camera, another man with his back to the lens. All that could be seen of him was slicked-back thinning hair and a grey jacket. The colours were not very good.

“… so.” Billy heard the hidden-faced man say. “I done a stint with that bunch in Epping, bog-standard manickies they are I think, balance balance balance not very interesting, I wouldn’t waste your time.”

“What about this?” said video-Vardy, and held out what Billy could see was the symbol he himself had drawn.

The obscured man leaned in. “Oh right,” he said. He spoke in a breathless conspiratorial drone. “The tooths, the toothies,” he said. “Yeah no I don’t know,” he said. “The toothies they’re new I think I hen’t seen them much except they been drawing that leaving it about. A sign a sign. You been to Camden? Saw it and I thought I’ll have some of that but they’re odd ones, they sort of wave hello but then you can’t find much of them. So. Are they secret?”

“Are they?” said video-Vardy.

“Well you tell me you tell me. I can’t get to them and you know me so it’s, you know it’s tantalising is what it is.”

“Tenets?”

“Got me. What I hear,” the man made gossip-talk movements with his fingers, “all I can tell you is they talk about the dark, the rise, the you know the reaching out. They love that the outreaching, hafay …”

“What?”

“Hafay hafay, where’s your Greek professor? Alpha phi eta, hafe, hapsis if you like, touchy touchy, that’s what they say—it’s a haptic story, this one.”

Vardy froze the picture. “He’s sort of a freelance research assistant. A fan. He’s a collector.”

“Of what?” Billy said.

“Religions. Cults.”

“How the hell do you collect a cult?”

“By joining it.”

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW WERE THE WIND-BOISTEROUS LIMBS OF trees. The room felt very close. Billy looked away from the light outside.

The man on-screen was not the only one, Vardy said. A small obsessive tribe. Heresy geeks, going sect to sect, accumulating creeds as greedy as any Renfields. Soldiers of the Saviour Worm one week, Opus Dei or the Bobo Dreds the next, with genius for devotion and sudden brief bursts of sincerity sufficient to be welcomed as neophytes. Some were always cynically in it for the notch on the bedpost, others Damascene certain for two or three days that this one was different, until they remembered their own natures and excommunicated themselves with indulgent chuckles.

They gathered to compare gnoses, in Edgware Road cafés over sheesha or pubs in Primrose Hill or somewhere called Almagan Yard, mostly their favoured hangouts in the “trap streets,” Vardy said. They traded dissident mysteries in vague competition, as if faiths were Top Trumps cards.

“What about your apocalypse, then?” “Well, the universe is a leaf on the time-tree, and come autumn it’s going to shrivel and fall off into hell.” Murmurs of admiration. “Ooh, nice one. My new lot say ants are going to eat the sun.”

“HE WANTS TO JOIN THESE ‘TOOTHIES,’ YOU SEE,” VARDY SAID. “HE’S a completist. But he can’t find them.”

“What’s a trap street?” Billy was ignored.

“Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Harrow, sit down.” Billy had stood up and was walking toward the door. “Toothies,” Baron said. “Get it? Tyuh-tyuh-tyuh-Tyoothies.”

“I’ve had enough,” Billy said.

“Sit down,” Vardy said.

“We’re the bloody cult squad, Harrow,” Baron said. “Why d’you think we’re called in? Who do you think’s responsible for what’s going on?”

“Teuthies.” Vardy smiled. “Worshippers of the giant squid.”

Chapter Six

“THE ARTICLE THAT GOT NICKED,” SAID BARON. BILLY STOOD still, his hand on the doorknob. “It’s where old Japetus names Architeuthis for the first time. ’Course you can get hold of a reprint, but originals are a bit special, aren’t they?”

“He was refuting folklore,” said Vardy. “The whole piece is him pooh-poohing some fairy story, and saying, ‘No no, there’s a rational explanation, gentlemen.’ You could say it’s where the sea monster meets …” He gestured around him. “This. The modern world.” The stress was mockery. “Out of fable into science. The end of an old order. Right?” He wagged his finger no. Baron watched him indulgently.

“Death of legend?” Vardy said. “Because he gives it a name? He said it was Ar-chi-teu-this. Not ‘great’ squid, Billy. Not ‘big,’ not even ‘giant.’ ‘Ruling’.” He blinked. “It rules? That’s him being faithful to the Enlightenment? He shoves it into taxonomy, yeah, but as what? As a bloody demiurge.

“He was a prophet. At the end of the lecture, you know what he did? Oh, he had props. He was a performer like Billy Graham. Brings out a jar, and what’s in it? A beak.” Vardy snap-snapped his fingers. “Of a giant squid.”

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. Billy stared at Vardy. He had his glasses in his hand, so Vardy was a touch hazy. Billy had actually heard this story, or its outlines, he remembered: an anecdote in a lecture hall. Where they could, his lecturers, with vicarious panache, would spice the stories of their forebears’ theories. They told anecdotes of a polymath Faraday; read Feynman’s achingly sad letter to his dead wife; described Edison’s swagger; eulogised Curie and Bogdanov martyred to their utopian researches. Steenstrup had been part of that dashing company.

The way Vardy spoke was almost as if he could no-shit see Steenstrup’s performance. As if he were looking at the black weapon thing Steenstrup had lifted from the jar. That leviathan part, more like a tool of alien design than any mouth. Preserved, precious, manifest like the finger bone of a saint. Whatever he had claimed, Steenstrup’s bottle had been a reliquary.

“That article,” Vardy said. “It’s a fulcrum. With a certain way of looking at things, it would easily be worth breaking the law for. Because it’s sacred text. It’s gospel.”

BILLY SHOOK HIS HEAD. HE FELT AS IF HIS EARS WERE RINGING.

“And that,” Baron said, audibly amused, “is what the professor gets paid for.”

“What our thieves have been doing is building a library,” said Vardy. “I bet you good money that over the last few months stuff by Verrill and Ritchie and Murray and other, you know, classic teuthic literature has also been nicked.”

“Jesus,” said Billy. “How do you know so much about this?” Vardy swatted the question away—literally, with his hand—as if it were an insect.

“It’s what the man do,” Baron said. “Zero to guru in forty-eight hours.”

“Let’s move on,” said Vardy.

“So,” Billy said. “You think this cult nicked the book, took the squid, and killed that guy? And now they want me?”

“Did I say that?” Vardy said. “I can’t be sure these squiddists did anything. Something doesn’t add up, to be honest.”

Billy started up unhappy performed laughter at that. “D’you think?” he said.

But Vardy ignored him and went on. “But it’s something to do with them.”

“Come on,” said Billy. “This is batshit.” He pleaded. “A religion about squid?”

The little room felt like a trap. Baron and Vardy watched him. “Come on now,” Vardy said. “You can have faith in anything,” Vardy said. “Everything’s fit to be worshipped.”

“You going to say this is all a coincidence?” Baron said.

“Your squid just disappeared, right?” Vardy said.

“And no one’s watching you,” Baron said. “And no one did anything to that poor sod downstairs. It was suicide by bottle.”

“And you,” said Vardy, staring at Billy, “you don’t feel anything’s wrong with the world, right now. Ah, you do, though, don’t you? I can see. You want to hear this.”

A silence. “How did they do it?” said Billy.

“Sometimes you can’t get bogged down in the how,” Baron said. “Sometimes things happen that shouldn’t, and you can’t let that detain you. But the why? we can make headway with.”

Vardy walked to the window. He was against its light, a dark shape. Billy could not tell if Vardy was facing him or facing out.

“It’s always bells and smells,” Vardy said, from his obscurity. “Always high-church. They might … abjure the world”—he rolled the pomp of the phrase around—“but for sects like this it’s all rites and icons. That’s the point. Not many cults have had their reformation.” He walked out of the window’s glare. “Or if they have, hello you poor buggers in Freezone, along comes a Council of Trent and the old order bites back. They really have to have their sacraments.” He shook his head.

Billy paced between posters, cheap artworks and pinboard message exchanges between colleagues he did not know. “If you worship that animal … I’ll put it simply,” Vardy said. “You, your Darwin Centre …” Billy did not understand the scorn there. “You and your colleagues, Billy—you put God on display. Now, who would a devotee be not to liberate it?

“It’s lying there pickled. Their touchy hunter god. You can imagine how that plays out in psalms. How God’s described.”

“Right,” Billy said. “Right, you know what? I really need to get out of here.”

Vardy seemed to quote: “‘It moves through darkness, emptying into that ink ink of its own.’ Something like that. Shall we say a black cloud in water already black? There’s a koan for you, Billy. It’s a tactile god with as many tentacles as we have fingers, and is that coincidence? Because that,” he added, in a more everyday voice, “is how this works, you see?”

Baron beckoned Billy to the door. “They’ll have verses about its mouth,” Vardy said behind them. “The hard maw of a sky-bird in the deep trenches of water.” He shrugged. “Something like that. You’re sceptical? Au contraire: it’s a perfect god, Billy. It’s the bloody choicest perfect simon-pure exact god for today, for right now. Because it’s bugger-all like us. Alien. That old beardy bully was never plausible, was he?”

“Plausible enough for you, you bloody hypocrite,” Baron said jovially. Billy followed him into the corridor.

“They venerate the thing,” Vardy said, following. “They have to save it from the insult of what I strongly suspect is your cheerful affection. I bet you have a nickname for it, don’t you?” He tilted his head. “I bet that nickname is ‘Archie.’ I see I’m right. Now, you tell me. What person of faith could possibly allow that?”

THEY TRACED THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S CORRIDORS, AND BILLY HAD no idea where they were going. He felt absolutely untethered. As if he were not there. The hallways were all deserted. The darks and woods of the museum closed up behind him.

“How do you …? What is it you’re doing?” he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.

Vardy even smiled. “Paranoia,” he said. “Theology.”

They reached an exit Billy had never used, and he gasped in the cool air of the outside. The day blustered: the trees wriggled in wind and clouds raced as if on missions. Billy sat on the stone steps.

“So the guy in the basement …” he said.

“Don’t know yet,” Vardy said. “He got in the way. Dissident, guard, sacrifice, something. At the moment I’m talking about the shape of something.”

“None of this should be your business,” Baron said. With his hands in his pockets he addressed his remarks to one of the building’s stonework animals. The air shoved Billy’s hair and clothes around. “You shouldn’t have to fuss with any of this. But here’s the thing. What with Parnell on the bus, what with that sort of attention, it just seems like for whatever reasons … they’ve noticed you, Mr. Harrow.”

He caught Billy’s eye. Billy twitched in the attention. He glanced around the grounds, beyond the gate to the street, into the shifting plant life. Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom-feeders.

“You’re part of some conspiracy that trapped their god,” Vardy said. “But more than that. You’re the go-to squid guy, Mr. Harrow. You seem to have got someone interested. As far as they’re concerned, you’re a person of interest.”

He stood between Billy and the wind. “You found the squid gone,” he said. “You put it there in the first place. It’s always been you who’s had magic mollusc fingers.” He twiddled his own. “Now you found this dead bloke. Is it any wonder they’re interested?”

“You’ve been feeling … like stuff’s going on,” Baron said. “Would that be fair to say?”

“What’s happening to me?” Billy managed to speak calmly.

“Don’t worry, Billy Harrow. That’s perspicacity, not paranoia, that, what you’re feeling.” Baron turned, taking in the London panorama, and wherever he looked, whenever he paused facing some particular patch of blackness, Billy looked too. “There is something wrong. And it’s noticed you. That’s not always the best place to be.” Billy sat in the middle of that world’s notice, like a tiny prey.

“What is it you want to do?” Billy said. “I mean, find out who killed that guy. Right? But what about me? Are you going to get the squid back?”

“That would be our intent, yes,” Baron said. “Cult robbery, after all, is part of our remit. And now there’s murder, too. Yes. And your safety is of, shall we say, no little concern to us.”

“What do they want? What’s Dane in all this?” Billy said. “And you’re some secret cult squad, right? So why are you telling me this?”

“I know, I know, you’re feeling a little exposed,” Baron said. “A bit out in the glare of it all. There are ways we might help. And you could help us back.”

“Like it or not, you’re already part of this,” Vardy said.

“We have a proposal,” Baron said. “Come on in out of the cold. Shoot on over with us back to the Darwin Centre. There’s a proposition on the table, and there’s someone you should meet.”

Chapter Seven

THE ROOMS SETTLED AROUND THEM, AS IF FINICKETY GENII LOCI were adjusting. Billy felt like an outsider. Was that glass he heard, clank-sliding out of sight? A clatter that might be bones?

The two uniforms guarding the tank room did not react to Baron with any visible respect. “Clocked that, did you?” Baron muttered to Billy. “Right now they’re coming up with hilarious jokes about what FSRC stands for. The first half is always ‘Fucking Stupid.’”

Inside was the disdainful young woman again, glancing at Billy perhaps a shade more friendly than before, her uniform as casual as ever. She had a laptop open on the table where the squid no longer was. “Alright?” she said. She mock-saluted Vardy and Baron, raised an eyebrow at Billy. She typed one-handed.

“I’m Billy.”

She looked oh-really? “There’s trace, man,” she said to Baron.

“Billy Harrow, WPC Kath Collingswood,” Baron said. She clucked her tongue or chewing gum and turned her computer round, but not enough that Billy could see.

“Quite a spike,” Vardy murmured.

“With the strike and all that, you wouldn’t expect to see shit like this,” she said. Vardy looked lengthily around the room, as if the dead animals might be responsible.

“Do you want to know what any of these things are?” said Billy.

“No no,” said Vardy thoughtfully. He approached the oarfish caught decades before. He looked at an antique alligator baby. “Ha,” he said.

He circumnavigated. “Ha!” he said again abruptly. He had reached the cabinet of Beagle specimens. He wore an unrecognisable expression.

“This is them,” he said after awhile.

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“My good God,” Vardy said softly. “Good God.” He leaned very close and read their labels a long time. When finally he rejoined Collingswood, as she ran information through the computer, he glanced back at the Beagle cabinet more than once. Collingswood followed his glance.

“Oh yeah,” she said to the jars. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Are you who I’m supposed to meet?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m him. Come down the pub.”

“Uh …” Billy said. “I don’t think that’s in my plans …”

“Best thing for you, a drink,” Baron said. “Best thing. Coming?” he said to Vardy.

Vardy shook his head. “I’m not the persuasive one.” He waved them out.

“Nah,” said Collingswood to Billy. “Not so much. It ain’t that he’s not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He’s interested in it. Like something in a jar.”

“Come on, Billy,” Baron said. “Come and have a drink on the Metropolitan Police.”

The world was swaying when they left. Too many people speaking in too many street-corner hushes, too much foreclosure, the sky closing some deal. Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote. The pub was a dark drinkerie decorated with old London road signs and copies of antique maps. They sat in an out-of-the-way corner. Even so, the other punters, a mix of seedy geezers and office workers, were clearly unsettled by Kath Collingswood’s uniformed—if unorthodoxly—presence.

“So …” Billy said. He had no idea what to say. Collingswood seemed unbothered. She just watched him while Baron went to the bar. Collingswood offered a cigarette.

“I think it’s no smoking,” Billy said. She looked at him and lit. The smoke surrounded her in dramatic shapes. He waited.

“Here’s the thing,” Baron said, delivering the drinks. “You heard Vardy. Parnell and the toothies have eyes on you. So you aren’t necessarily in the safest of all situations.”

“But I’m nothing,” Billy said. “You know that.”

“Hardly the point,” Baron said. It surprised him how hard it jarred him to see Collingswood drink and smoke in uniform. “Let’s take stock,” Baron said. “Now, Vardy … You saw him in action. You know the sort of thing he does. For all our expertise, in this case, vis-à-vis—that is to say, what’s going on at the moment—we could do with some input. From a specialist. Like yourself. We’re dealing with fanatics. And fanatics are always experts. So we need experts of our own. And that is where you come in.”

Billy stared at him. He even laughed a bit. “I wondered if you were going to say something like this, but then I was like, don’t be mad.”

“None of us knows shit about giant squid,” Collingswood said. The animal’s name sounded absurd in her sarky London voice. “’Cause we don’t give a shit about it, granted, but, you know.”

“Fine, then, so leave me alone,” Billy said. “Not as if I’m an expert anyway.”

“Oh come on, don’t be like that.”

“Don’t just mean book-smarts, Harrow.” Baron said. “I have a healthy respect for cultists. And they think you’re something special, which says a lot, no matter what you think. Remember when you saw Dane Parnell? Remember about the bus window?”

“What?” said Billy. “That it was broken?”

“What you said to us was you saw it break. How do you suppose that happened?” Baron let the question sit. “The way we, the FSRC I mean, do things … we need a subtler approach than the rest of the force. It’s handy to have members outside of the actual service.”

“You actually are actually trying to get me to join,” Billy said, incredulous.

“There’s certain privileges,” Baron said. “A few responsibilities. Official Secrets, whatnot. Bit of dosh. Not enough to really make a big difference, to be honest, but, you know, it’s a couple of pizzas …”

“And tell me, does anyone in the FSRC,” Billy said, “ever make a blind bit of sense?” He looked at his drinking partners blearily. “I was not expecting to be recruited today.”

“Yeah, and by the filth, too,” Collingswood said. She blew gusts, gave him a little smirk. Still no one was telling her to stop smoking.

“We want you onside, Billy,” Baron said. “You could help Vardy. You know the books. You’ll understand the squid stuff. Any investigation, we always start with beliefs, but the biology’s going to be part of all that.

“You know, I have to tell you …” Baron shifted as if broaching a painful subject. “You might have heard, it’s an old standard that if you’re looking for whodunit, you start with whoever finds the body. And you did have access to the tank, too.”

Billy’s eyes widened. He began to rise. Baron pulled him back down, laughing. “Sit down, you pillock,” he said. “I’m just saying that if we wanted to, we could approach this a whole other way. Where were you on the night of, et cetera and so on. But you and us can scratch each other’s backs. We want insight and you want protection. Win-win, mate.”

“So why are you threatening me?” Billy said. “And I told you, I don’t have any insight …”

“You going to tell me,” Baron interrupted, tilting his chin in a come now look, “you’ve got no sense of the bloody awesomeness of that thing?”

“… The squid?”

“The Archi-bloody-teuthis, Billy Harrow, yes. The giant squid. That thing in the jar. That. That got took. And is been and gone. Are you really surprised someone might worship it? Don’t you want a better idea why? What the stakes are? You know stuff’s going on, now. Don’t you want to know more?”

“There’s new life and new civilisations,” Collingswood said. She did her face in a hand mirror.

Billy shook his head and said, “Bloody hell.”

“Nah,” Collingswood said. “That’s a different unit.”

Billy closed his eyes, opened them at the sound of the glasses vibrating on the table. Collingswood and Baron looked at each other. “Did he just …?” Collingswood said. She looked at Billy again, with interest.

“We know you’ve been unsettled,” Baron said carefully. “Makes you a great candidate …”

“Unsettled?” Billy thought of the jarred man. “That’s one way to put it. And now you want me to, to go looking stuff up for you? That’s it?”

“For a starter.”

“I do not think so,” Billy said. “I’d rather go home and forget all about whatever’s going on.”

“Right,” said Collingswood. She took a drag. The low light glimmered on her gold trimmings. “Like you can forget about it. Like you can forget about all this.” She swayed in her chair. “Good luck with that, bruv.”

“No one doubts you’d rather,” Baron said. “But choice, alas, is not given to all of us. Even if you’re not interested in it, it’s interested in you. Let me just let that stand for a tick.

“Thing is, Billy, we should be outdated. FSRC got set up a little bit before 2000. Cobbled together from a couple of older outfits. Supposed to be temporary. It was the millennium: we were waiting for some devout nutters to set fire to the Houses of Parliament. Sacrifice Cherie Blair to their goat overlords, something.”

“No luck there,” Collingswood said. She did the French breathing thing with her smoke. Disgusting as it was, Billy couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“Sweet FA,” said Baron. “A little bit of silly buggery, but the big Y2K explosion of … well, millennialism, that we’d been expecting … didn’t happen.”

“Not then,” said Collingswood.

“Do you even remember the millennium?” Billy said. “Weren’t you watching Teletubbies?” She smirked.

“She’s right,” Baron said. “Stuff was delayed. It came after. Eventually we ended up busier than ever. Look, I don’t care what these groups want to do, so long as they keep to themselves. Paint yourself blue and boff cactuses, just do it indoors and don’t involve civilians. Live and let live. But that’s not what causes the trouble.” He tapped the table with each word that followed. “All these groups are all about revelations, apocrypha …”

“Always boils down to the same thing,” Collingswood said.

“It does a bit,” said Baron. “Any holy book, it’s the last chapter that gets us interested.”

“John the fucking Divine,” Collingswood said. “Bish bash fucking bosh.”

“What my colleague is getting at,” Baron said, “is we’re facing a wave of St. Johns. A bit of an epidemic of eschatologies. We live,” he said, too flatly for any humour to be audible, “in the epoch of competing ends.”

Collingswood said, “Ragnarok versus Ghost Dance versus Kali Yuga versus Qiyamah yadda yadda.”

“That’s what gets converts these days,” Baron said. “It’s a buyers’ market in apocalypse. What’s hot in heresy’s Armageddon.”

“It was all chat, for ages,” Collingswood said. “But since suddenly, something’s actually going on.”

“And they’re all still insisting it’s their apocalypse that’s going to happen,” Baron said. “And that means trouble. Because they’re fighting about it.”

“What do you mean something’s going on?” Billy said, but what with his head all over the place and the blatantly actual fact of impossibilities, the scorn he tried to put in it didn’t really take. Collingswood prodded the air, rubbed her fingers together to indicate that she felt something, as if the world had left residue on her.

“You got to be worried when they’re agreeing about anything,” she said. “Prophets. That’s the last bloody thing you want prophets to do. Even if, especially if, they still don’t agree on details. Heard about them hoodies and asbos rucking in East London?” She shook her head. “Brothers of Vulpus went at it with a bunch of druids. Nasty. Them sickles are sharp. And all over how the world’s going to end.”

“We’re overstretched, Harrow,” said Baron. “’Course we do other stuff; sacrificed kiddies, animal cruelty, whatnot. But it’s ends-of-the-world where the action is. It’s harder and harder to deal with the apocalypse rumbles. We can’t cope,” he said. “I’m being frank with you. Let alone now something this big has happened. Don’t get me wrong—I got no more time for fortune cookies than you have. Still though. Little while ago, half the prophets in London began to know—know—that the world’s on its way out.” He did not sound as if he was mocking the knowledge. “And I am utterly buggered if I know what that’s about, but then it suddenly got a lot more definite. Round about when you-know-what happened.”

“Your squid went poof,” Collingswood said.

“It is not my squid.”

“Oh it is, though,” she said. “Come on, it is, though.” It felt like his, when she said that. “It happened again,” she said to Baron. “It got closer again.”

“They brought the public into it,” Baron said. “And that is not on. We go out of our way to keep civies out. But if someone like you, someone with knowledge I mean, does get his face rubbed in it, well, we take advantage.”

“Some people make better recruits’n others,” Collingswood said. She watched Billy closely. She leaned closer. “Open your gob a minute,” she said. He did not consider saying no. She peered past his teeth. “You shouldn’t have told your mates about the squid,” she said. “You shouldn’t have could.”

“Vardy doesn’t need me,” Billy said. “He can research all this himself. And I don’t need you.”

“The professor can be a touch off-putting, I know,” Baron said. He took one of Collingswood’s cigarettes.

“The way he was talking,” Billy said. “About the squid people. It was like he was one of them.”

“You’ve put your finger on it,” Baron said. “It is just like he’s one of them. He has a little revelation.”

“Takes one to know one,” said Collingswood. “Oh yeah.”

“What?” said Billy. “He was one of …?”

“Man of faith,” Baron said. “Grew up one of your ultra-born-agains. Creationist, literalist. His dad was an elder. He was in it for years. Lost his faith but not his interest, lucky for us, and not his nous, neither. Every group we look at, he gets it like a convert”—Baron thumped his chest—“because for a moment or two he is.”

“It’s more than that,” Collingswood said. “He don’t just get it,” she said. She grinned smoke at Billy. She put her hand to her lips, as if she were whispering, though she was not. “He misses it. He’s miserable. He didn’t used to have to put up with none of this random reality cack. He’s pissed off with the world for being all godless and pointless, get me? He’d go back to his old faith tomorrow if he could. But he’s too smart now.”

“That’s his cross to bear,” said Baron. “Boom-boom! I thank you.”

“He knows religion is bollocks,” Collingswood said. “He just wishes he didn’t. That’s why he understands the nutters. That’s why he hunts them. He misses pure faith. He’s jealous.”

Chapter Eight

IN LATE DRAB RAIN, BARON DROVE BILLY BACK TO HIS FLAT. “KATH’S going to take a look at your security,” he said.

“Haven’t got any.”

“Well quite.”

“I don’t want to let nothing happen to you now,” she said. “Not now you’re precious.” He looked at her sideways. “And don’t let anyone in you don’t know for a few days, either.”

“Are you joking?”

“Look, they’re not stupid,” Baron said. “They’re going to know we’re watching. But they’ve got some questions about you, for obvious, and curiosity can be a bit of a millstone. So safety first, eh?” He turned to look at Billy in the backseat. “I don’t like it any more than you. Alright, perhaps you like it even less than me.” He laughed.

“Shouldn’t you be protecting me?” Billy said.

“Wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang,” Collingswood sang.

“Gary Glitter?” Billy said. “Really?”

“I wouldn’t say danger,” said Baron. “I’d say at the very worst it’s dangish. We’re not saying don’t have anyone over—”

“I bloody am,” said Collingswood, but Baron continued, “if it’s someone you trust, that’s all peachy. Just being cautious. You’re small fry. They’ve got what they want.”

“The squid,” said Billy.

“Collingswood’s going to install a good solid security set. You’ll be fine. And you know, if you take us up on our offer, we might upgrade it.”

Billy stared at them. “This isn’t a job offer. It’s a protection racket. Literally, protection.”

Collingswood tutted. “Little drama queen, ain’t you?” she said. She patted his cheek. “It’s benefits, innit? All jobs have them.”

Baron steered Billy toward the kitchen while Collingswood milled by the front door. She looked thoughtfully around the hallway, the cabinet on which Billy left his keys and post. She made a sight, trendily unkempt, up on tiptoe, cigarette loose between her lips as if in a French film, prodding at the upper corner of his doorway with confidence and precision Billy did not associate with someone so young.

“Understand what we’re talking about,” Baron said. He poked around without asking, looking for coffee. “You’d keep your job. Just a day off a week, something, to put in time with us. For training. Extreme theology, self-defence. And there’d be that bit of dosh.” He sipped. “I suppose this must all be a bit much.”

“Are you taking the piss?” Billy said. “A bit much? I just found a man pickled. I’m being recruited by cops who tell me the Cthulhu cult might be after me …”

“Alright,” Baron said. He did not, Billy noticed, need any explanation as to what Cthulhu was. “Calm down. Let me tell you what I think. Someone’s watching you. As in, look-but-don’t-touch. Maybe they’re going to go for a conversion. You know how creationists are chuffed to the bollocks when they have members who are scientists or whatever? Think what it would be to this lot to have a genuine squidologist in the congregation.”

“Oh good,” said Billy. “That’s very reassuring. Unless it’s that they want to cut out my heart.”

“Vardy can get into these headspaces,” Baron said. “If he doesn’t think these cultists are out for you, they’re not.”

There was a banging, a rasp, from the other room. “What’s she doing?” said Billy.

“Focus, Harrow. In my professional opinion, and Vardy’s, the squiddoes are trying to work out what you represent.”

“I represent bugger-all!”

“Yeah, but they don’t know that. And in this world where you now are, everything represents something. Get it? It’s really important you get that. Everything represents something.”

“It ain’t going to win any prizes,” Collingswood said, entering, hands in her pockets. She shrugged. “It’ll do the necessary. Invite only. It’ll hold till Doc Octopus here makes up his mind. Don’t touch.” She wagged her finger at Billy. “Hands off.”

“You said Vardy thought I had nothing to be worried about,” Billy said. “I thought he was never wrong.”

“Never is,” she said, and shrugged. “Never know, though, know what I mean?”

“This is just basic precautions,” Baron said. “You should see my house. Stick around here a couple of days, while you chew stuff over. We’ll keep you in the loop. We’ve got feelers out, we know what we’re looking for. The offer’s on the table. Get back to us soon, eh?”

Billy shook his head hopelessly. “Jesus, give me a chance …”

“Think all you want,” Baron said, “but think to yourself, alright? Kath?” Collingswood lightly touched his Adam’s apple. He recoiled.

“What was …?” he said.

“Try chatting now,” she said. “For your own sake. Trust me.”

“I do not trust you.”

“Wise man.”

“Pay attention. This is my number.” Baron gave him a card.

“You don’t get mine yet,” Collingswood said. “You got to earn that sort of shit.”

“Anything worrying, anything strange,” Baron said, “or, on the other hand, when you decide you’re on board …”

“If,” Billy said.

“When you decide you’re on board, call.”

Anything strange. Billy remembered the bottled corpse. That greyed skin, those drowned eyes.

“Seriously.” He spoke quietly. “What did they do to that guy? How did they get the squid out of there?”

“Now, Mr. Harrow,” Baron said. He shook his head, friendly. “I told you. All those whys is not a helpful way of looking at things. And blimey, there’s plenty of stuff you’ve not even seen yet. How could you possibly understand what’s going on? If you even wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot.

“So. Rather than trying to get to grips with things you can’t possibly, I’d just say wait. Wait and see. Because you will see. There’s more to come. Good-bye now.”

Chapter Nine

AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE FLAT, WHERE COLLINGSWOOD HAD fiddled, there were marks. Tiny scratches. A little balsa lid, flush with the wood. He flicked it with his fingernail.

Billy was hesitant to trust whatever protection it was he’d been afforded. He double-locked his door. He stared out through glass at the rooftop where that dirty bloody squirrel lay unseen. He wished it drowned in rainwater.

He hunted online but failed to find a single detail of the FSRC. Thousands of organisations of those initials, but Baron’s unit was nowhere. On his university page Billy read Vardy’s publications list. “Oedipus, Charisma and Jim Jones;” “Sayyid Qutb and the Problem of Psychological Organisation;” “The Dialectics of Waco.”

Billy drank wine in front of the television on mute, a bottled shadow-show. How often, he thought, are such offers made? A knight emerging from a wardrobe with the offer of another place but you have to come now. Was the squid out there, or destroyed? He did not trust his potential colleagues. He did not appreciate their recruitment methods.

In the television light he watched the curtains hang limply, remembering the obscene discovery in the museum basement. He did not think he was particularly exhausted. He imagined the window beyond the fabric. He woke abruptly in a panic on his sofa.

When the hell had he fallen asleep? He remembered no transition. The book he did not even remember starting to read slid from him like an inadequate blanket. It was dark. Billy realised he had heard tapping at his door.

A patter like the feet of a gecko on the other side of the wood. A nail scratching and, yes, a whisper. Billy was silent. He told himself it was some remnant dream, but it was not. It sounded again.

Billy crept to the kitchen and picked up a knife. The faint faint noise continued. He pressed his ear to the door. He unlocked it, watching his own bravery and ninja stealth, bewildered. As he pushed, Billy realised that he should be calling Baron, of course, instead of indulging this incompetent vigilantism. But momentum had him, the door was opening.

The hallway was empty.

He peered at his neighbours’ entrances. There were no evidential drafts, no slips of air to insinuate doors quickly closed. No dust dancing. Billy looked at nothing. He stood there for moments, then minutes. He leaned out like a figurehead, to see as far down those corridors as he could, keeping his feet inside his flat. Still there was nothing.

He did not sleep in his bed that night. He took his duvet to the sofa, closer to the front door, so he could hear. There were no more sounds, but he slept hardly at all.

IN THE MORNING HE ATE TOAST IN A TOO-SILENT FLAT, WITH MORE silence from outside weighing on the windows. He pulled the curtains apart enough to look at a grubby grey day, at knots of wood and leaves and blown plastic bags, at the unlikely haunt of the squirrel voyeur.

He was never one with a plethora of friends, but Billy did not often feel lonely, not like this. CN U COME OVER, he texted Leon. STUFF 2 TELL U. PLEASE. He felt he was yanking out of a trap in which Collingswood and Baron had placed him. Brave, rebellious animal. He hoped this escape was not a gnawing off of his own limb.

When Leon arrived Billy hung out from the doorframe again. “What kind of arsing around is this?” said Leon. “It’s a bloody weird night, I just had about three fights on the way here, and me such a peaceable soul. I brought your mail up. Also wine.” He held out a plastic bag. “Early though it is. What the hell’s going on? To what do I owe …? Jesus, Billy.”

“Come in.” Billy took the bag and envelopes.

“As I was saying, to what do I owe two visits in such quick succession?”

“Have a drink. You aren’t going to believe this.”

Billy sat opposite Leon and opened his mouth to tell him everything. But could not work out whether to start with the body in the jar, or the police and their strange offer. His tongue flopped over, momentarily meatlike. He swallowed. As if recovering from some dental treatment.

“You don’t understand,” he told Leon. “I never had a big bust-up with my dad, we just sort of dropped out of touch.” He was continuing a conversation from months before, he realised. “My bro I never liked. That was deliberate, dropping him. My dad, though …”

He had found his father boring, was all. He had always had the sense that the faintly aggressive man, who lived alone after Billy’s mother’s death, had found Billy the same. It had been several years since he had let contact wither.

“Do you remember Saturday morning television?” he said. He had meant to tell Leon about the man in the jar. “I remember this one time.” Showing his father some cartoon that had enthralled him, Billy had seen the bewilderment on the man’s face. The inability to empathise with his boy’s passion, or pretend to. Years later he reflected that that was the moment—and he no older than ten—Billy started to suspect that the two of them did not have much of a shot of it.

“I’ve still got that cartoon, you know,” he said. “I found it recently, streamed on some website. You want to see it?” A 1936 Harman-Ising production, he had watched it many times. The glass-jar inhabitants of an apothecary’s shelves on an adventure. It was extraordinary, and frightening.

“You know what happens,” Billy said. “Sometimes when I’m preserving something or doing something in the wet labs or whatever, I clock that I’m singing one of the songs from it. “Spirits of amo-o-o-onia …’”

“Billy.” Leon held out a hand. “What’s going on?”

Billy stopped and tried again to say what had happened. He swallowed and worked against his own mouth, as if expelling some glutinous intruder. And with a breath finally he began to speak what he had intended. What he had found in the basement. He told him what the police had offered.

Leon did not smile. “Should you be telling me this?” he said at last. Billy laughed.

“No, but, you know.”

“I mean, it’s literally impossible, what happened,” Leon said.

“I know. I know it is.”

They stared at each other a long time. Leon said, “There are … maybe there are more things in heaven and earth …”

“If you quote Shakespeare at me I will kill you dead. Jesus, Leon, I found a dead man in a jar.”

“This is heavy shit. And they’ve asked you to join? You going to be a cop?”

“A consultant.”

When Leon had visited the squid, months before, he had said wow. Wow like you might wow a dinosaur skeleton, the Crown Jewels, a Turner watercolour. Wow said like the parents and partners who came to the Darwin Centre for someone else. Billy had been disappointed.

“What are you going to do?” Leon said.

“I don’t know.” Billy looked at the mail that Leon had brought from downstairs. Two bills and a card and a heavy package in brown paper, tied up old-style with hairy string. He put on his glasses and cut the string.

“Are you seeing Marginalia later?” he said.

“Yeah, and don’t take that tone when you say her name or I’ll get her to explain it to you,” Leon said. He fiddled with his phone. “She has a whole riff.”

“Please,” said Billy. “Let me guess. ‘The key to the text is not the actual text itself, but …’” He frowned. He did not understand what he was unwrapping. Inside the package was a rectangle of black cotton.

“I’m texting her, she’ll love this,” Leon said.

“Oh Leon, don’t tell her what I’ve been saying,” Billy said. “I’ve already said more than I should …” He prodded the cloth.

The package moved.

“Fuck …”

“What? What? What?”

They were both standing. Billy stared at the package, unmoving on the table where he had dropped it. There was silence. Billy took a pen from his pocket and poked the cotton gently.

The cloth gave. The package opened.

It bloomed. With a gasp of air it concertinaed, expanding, out-flicking and filling out, and what reached from its end was a hand. A man’s arm, in a dark jacket sleeve. The flash of white shirt at its end. The emergent hand grabbed Billy by the neck.

“Jesus—” Leon pulled Billy away, and the package, still gripping, pulled back, braced against nothing.

Billy was held, and the package continued to unfold. Tongues of cotton flap-flapped open, black and blue and shoes now at the end of limbs bulking into presence, as if the matter of them was uncramping. More arms unrolled clumsy as fire hoses and shoved Leon hard away.

Like plants in sped-up motion, emitting grunts of release, a stale sweat-and-fart smell, and a man and a boy stood suddenly on Billy’s table. The boy stared at Leon staggering to rise. The man still gripped Billy’s throat.

“BLOW ME,” THE MAN SAID. HE JUMPED OFF THE TABLE, WITHOUT releasing Billy. The man was wiry, wore old jeans and a dirty jacket. He shook long greying hair. “Shiver me, that was horrible.” He looked at Leon. “Eh?” he shouted, as if wanting sympathy.

The boy stepped slowly onto a chair and then to the floor. He wore a clean, oversized suit: Sunday best. “Come here, lad.” The man licked the fingers of his free hand and pressed down the boy’s mussed hair.

Billy couldn’t breathe. Darkness closed on him. The man threw him against the wall.

“Right then.” The man pointed at Leon, who froze, as if pinned by the gesture. “Watch him, Subby. Watch him like a little night-badger.” He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at Leon. “He makes a move, give him what-for. Now then.” The boy stared at Leon with too-wide eyes.

“Yeah,” the man said. He sniffed at the doorframe. “She ain’t bad. Good notion, this, if I say so my own self, out of my boy’s head. As because what we do not have here is anything nixing egress. Now we’re in there’s nothing to stop us getting out.” He leaned toward Billy. “I say, there’s nothing to stop us getting out. Didn’t think of that, did you? You ferocious little whatnot.”

Billy made a scratchy sound in his throat. The man put a finger to his lips, glancing expectantly at the boy, who slowly did as he did, and gestured shhhh at Billy, too.

“Goss and Subby do it again,” the man said. He unrolled his tongue and tasted the air. He clamped his hand over Billy’s mouth and Billy sputtered into the cool palm. The man went room to room, tugging Billy, licking floor, walls, light switches. He drew his tongue across the face of the television, leaving a spit-path in the dust.

“What what what specimens have you got here, lepidopterist?” he said to the bookshelves. He pulled out books and dropped them. “Nah,” he said. “I can’t taste not but shit of it.”

Leon was suddenly up and running at him. The man whoops-a-daisy-ed and sent Leon sprawling. “And who might you be?” he said. “One of the young master’s friends, hm? I’m afraid the doctors all agree that the lad needs complete isolation, and while your hijinks I’m sure are a tonic, they’re not what young Mr. Billiam needs. I may have to eat you, you unfortunate young macaroon.”

Leon moved and the boy stepped toward him, all predator-fish eyes. The man wheezed out smoke, though he had no cigarette, had sucked no smoke in.

“No …” Leon said. The man opened his mouth, the mouth kept going, and Leon was gone. The man dabbed the corners of his mouth like a cartoon cat.

“Alright you,” he said to Billy, who gasped and fought the relentless fingers. “Got your jim-jams? Toothbrush packed? Left a message for the milkman? Good then, let’s off. You know what airports are like and little Thomas doesn’t travel well and I don’t want to get stuck in a queue behind a group-booking to Ayia Napa, can you imagine? You promised and promised me a quiet weekend away and it’s time, Billy, it’s really time.” He clasped his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You can hush your noise and all,” he said to the boy. “I don’t know, I really don’t, you two! Onward.”

Tugging him by the neck, the man took Billy out.

PART TWO
UNIVERSAL SLEEPER

Chapter Ten

FOR THE BULK OF HER TWEENS AND TEENS, MOST OF KATH Collingswood’s teachers had either been indifferent or mildly antipathetic to her. One man, her biology teacher, had more actively disliked her. She had known it pretty early in their relationship, and had even been able to express and evaluate his reasons to herself with some clarity.

His opinion of her as sulky she conceded, but considered no more his business than his disapproval of her friends. He thought her a bully, which was, she would say, 65 percent fair. Certainly she found it easy to intimidate more than half her class, and did so. But they were minor cruelties perpetrated without glee, vaguely, almost dutifully, to keep people off her back.

Collingswood had not much reflected on how easy such misery-mongering was for her, how often nothing but a glance or word, if even that, had palpable effects. The first time she thought about it was when she stopped that teacher’s mouth.

She was thirteen. Some altercation had left a classmate crestfallen, and Mr. Bearing had shaken his whiteboard marker at Collingswood like a baton and said, “You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you? A nasty piece of work.”

He had turned, shaking his head, to write on the board, but Collingswood had been abruptly enraged. She was completely unwilling to submit to the description. She had not even looked at the back of Mr. Bearing’s head, had stared furiously at her nails and clucked her tongue, and something like a bubble of cold had swelled in her chest, and burst.

Collingswood did look up then. Mr. Bearing had stopped writing. He stood still, hand to the board. Two or three other children were looking around in confusion.

With a sense of great interest, with a sense of pleased curiosity, Kath Collingswood had known that Mr. Bearing would never call her a nasty piece of work again.

That was that. He picked up his writing. He did not turn to look at her. She put off till later the questions of what had happened, and how she had known that it had. She had leaned back, instead, on the rear legs of her chair.

AFTER THAT MOMENT, COLLINGSWOOD TOOK MORE MIND OF HER unspoken interventions: the times she knew what her friends or enemies were about to say; when she silenced someone across a room; found a lost thing that was frankly unlikely to be wherever she uncovered it. She started to think things through.

Not that she was a poor student, but Collingswood’s teachers might have been impressed to see the rigour with which she had pursued this research project. She started with a little tentative poking around online, put together a list of books and documents. Most she was able to download from absurd websites, copyright not being particularly apropos for such texts. The titles of those she could not track down she laboriously copied and requested from surprised, even concerned, librarians and booksellers. Once or twice she even found them.

She picked her way, more than once, through a weed-littered old carpark and bust windows into a small long-deserted hospital near her house. In the quiet of what had once been a maternity ward she dutifully acted out the idiotic actions the texts described. Certainly she felt stupid, but she performed as required, recited all the phrases.

She kept a record in her notebook of what she had tried, where she had read it, what if anything had occurred. BOOK OF THOTH = BOOK OF BOLLOCKS MORE LIKE, she wrote. LIBER NULL = NULL POINTS.

Mostly there were no effects at all, or just enough to keep her at it (a scuttling noise here, an unwarranted shadow there). But it was when she got exasperated and restless and thought fuck it to her studies, when she was resultingly imprecise, that she made the best progress.

“That’s it for today. You can go early.” Packing up her books with the rest of the class, Collingswood watched Miss Ambly’s shock at her own words. The woman touched her mouth in bewilderment. Collingswood flicked her fingers. A pen spun off Miss Ambly’s desk.

And later: “What’s it doing, sir?” some girl asked of a bemused teacher, pointing at the class goldfish, which was swimming with highly unnatural motions. Collingswood, unnoticed, continued what she had started on an exasperated whim, scratching her hands on the desk as if DJing to a classmate’s ringtone, which rhythms quite unexpectedly dictated the fish’s back-and-forth motion.

That had been years ago. There had been a lot of work since then, of course, much tinkering, plenty of experiments, but Collingswood’s baseline impatience continued to truncate her researches. She came to understand that this would ultimately limit her. That she was without question a bit of a talent if she said it herself, and yes she could make it her career no problem, but she would never be one of the very best. Since those days, she had met one or two of them, those very best at this. She had known them the moment they had walked into the room.

But her limits had unexpected effects, and not all negative. The lack of the sternest rigour to perform these competencies at the highest level blurred them, mixed their elements, gave them little swills of backwash. Mostly ignorable effects or demerits, but only mostly.

In the case of the alarm system she had installed in Billy’s doorway, for example, she had primed it specifically for ingress. That it might trip, even faintly, in the case of egress, was a product not of design but of Collingswood’s powerful but slapdash methods.

That would have bothered a perfectionist. But then that perfectionist would not have been alerted when intruders removed Billy from the flat that they had never broken into, as Collingswood, lurching awake and for several moments confused, her heart gonging and an aching in her ears, was.

Chapter Eleven

THEY WERE IN A BEAT-UP CAR. THE MAN GOSS DROVE. IN THE back, the boy, Subby, held Billy’s arm.

Subby had no weapon and did not grip hard, but Billy did not move. He was frozen by the man and boy having unfolded in his room—the intrusion, the drugged dragging of the world. Billy’s thoughts stuttered in loops. He felt dragged across time. A smear of pigeons was behind the car, pigeons that seemed to have been following him for days. What the hell what the hell, he thought, and Leon.

The car smelt of food and dust and sometimes of smoke. Goss had a face wrong for the time. He looked stolen from some fifties. There was a postwar cruelty to him.

Twice Billy’s hand twitched and he imagined a quick bundle and rush, throwing open the door and rolling into the street, away from these arcane kidnappers. Begging help from the shoppers in that Turkish grocer and the Wimpy hamburger place, running through, where were they, Balham? Each time the thought came Goss made a tch-tch noise and Subby’s hand would squeeze, and Billy would sit still.

He had no cigarette, but every few breaths Goss would exhale sweet woody smoke that would fill the car and go again. “What a ruddy night for it, eh?” he said. “Eh, Subby? What’s that pootling about? Someone’s out for a walk what oughtn’t was, don’t you coco? Someone’s woke up, Subby.” He wound down the window, an old hand-crank handle, looked up at the sky, wound it up again.

They hauled through streets of which Billy had lost all sense. They must be out in zone three or four where shops were keycutters and independent stationers. They passed no major chains. No west-coast coffee, not a Tescos. How could these be streets? Garages, timber-yards, judo gyms, cold pavements where rubbish moved quietly. The sky closed its last crack and it was night. Billy and his abductors were following rails, shadowing a lit-up train. It ushered them somewhere. They stopped by a dark arch.

“Chop chop,” said Goss. He looked up suspiciously and sniffed. He pulled Billy from the car. Billy thought he might puke. He reeled. Goss exhaled one of his smoky exhalations. He unlocked a door in corrugated iron and pushed Billy through into the black. Subby tugged from somewhere.

Goss spoke, as if Billy and he were in dialogue: “Is he then?” “Don’t know, might be, you got everything?” “Alright now, get the door, ready?”

Something opened. There was a change in the air on Billy’s face. Goss whispered, “Hush now.”

The room they were in smelt of damp and sweat. Something shifted. There was sound, a sputtering and crack. Lights came up.

There were no windows. The floor was dirty cement. The bricks sloped overhead were mapped with mildew. The chamber was huge. Goss stood by the wall holding a lever he had thrown. The room was full of lights, dangling on wires and jutting mushrooms from wall cracks.

Goss swore mildly as if at curious pigs. Billy heard a radio. A circle of people waited. Figures in leather jackets, dark jeans, boots, gloves. Some in band T-shirts, all in motorbike helmets. They held pistols, knives, cartoonishly vile nail-studded clubs. A radio played staticky classical music, fuzzed. There was a naked man on all fours. His lips fluttered. He had dials pushed into him, above each nipple. Unbleeding but extruding clearly from his body. It was from his open mouth that the radio sounds came. His lips moved to make the music, interference, the ghosts of other stations.

On a brick dais was a man. An older scrawny punk with spiked-up hair. A bandanna hid his mouth. His eyes were so wide he looked unhinged. He breathed hard, the cloth of his mask gusting in and out, and he was sweating in the cold. He was topless. He sat on a stool, his hands in his lap.

Billy was dizzy and sick from everything that night. Billy tried not to believe what he was seeing. Tried to imagine he might wake.

“Billy bloody Harrow,” the man said. “Check what that little bitch is doing.”

One of the figures in helmets twisted a dial on the radio-man’s chest, and radio-man’s mouth changed to sudden new shapes as the song ended. He whispered in little bursts and spoke barely audible interactions, men’s voices and women’s.

“Roger that ic-two, Sarge,” he said, and, “Have a word with Vardy, will you?,” and, “ETA fifteen minutes, over.”

“Not there yet,” the bandanna man said. “They’re visiting your old house.” His voice was loud and low, London-accented. Goss shoved Billy closer. “Send that lot, then,” he said. “Are you going to make me go through various motions, Billy Harrow? Can you just tell me who it is you’re with and what it is you’re doing? Can you tell me puh-lease what is going on tonight, what it is you set walking. Because something’s out there. And more to the bloody point, what, pray bloody tell, is your interest?”

“WHAT IS THIS?” BILLY WHISPERED AT LAST. “WHAT DID YOU DO TO Leon?”

“Leon?”

“You know how it is,” Goss said. “You’re both vying for the best vol-au-vent, and the next thing it’s all been eaten.”

Goss held Billy as if he were a puppet. Little Subby’s hands clutched Billy’s own.

“What’s going on?” Billy said. He stared everywhere, at the radioman; he struggled. “What is this?”

The sitting man sighed. “Bugger,” he said. “You’re going to do this.” His staring eyes did not change at all. “Let me put it to you this way, Billy. What the fuck are you?”

He twisted on his stool. He raised his hands a little. He was blinking violently. “Who are you working with?” he said. “What are you?” Billy realised that the kerchief was not cowboy-style but was haphazardly balled in his mouth. The man was gagged. He shook his hands and Billy saw he wore handcuffs.

“Turn your fucking head!” the voice continued, from this man who could not be speaking. “Turn around.” One of the helmeted guards slapped him hard across his face, and he screamed muffled into his gag. “Stand this bugger up.” Two guards hauled him up by his armpits. His head lolled. “Let’s see,” the voice said. The guards turned the man to face the back wall.

Colours appeared. The whole of the topless man’s back was a tattoo. At its edges it was wisps of coloured swirl, crossbred Celtic-knot fractals. In the centre was a big, dark-outlined, stylised face. Bold and expertly done. A man’s face, in unnatural colours. A sharp old face with red eyes, something between a professor and a devil. Billy stared.

The Tattoo moved. Its heavy-lidded eyes met his. Billy stared at it and the Tattoo stared back.

Chapter Twelve

BILLY SHOUTED IN SHOCK AND TRIED TO SCRABBLE BACKWARD. Goss held him.

The guards held the punk-haired man still. The Tattoo’s inked eyes went side to side, like an animation, as if it were a cartoon projected onto him. The thick black edges travelled, the shaded blue, blue-green, copper sections of skin shifting as the Tattoo pursed its lips, watched Billy, raised its eyebrows at him. It opened its mouth, and a hole of dark ink opened, a drawn throat. It spoke in that deep London voice.

“Where’s the kraken, Harrow? What’s your angle? What does Baron’s gang want with you?” The radio-man whispered static.

“What are you …?”

“Let me explain our problem,” the tattoo said. The man whose back it was on struggled in the guards’ grip. “My problem is no one knows you, Billy Harrow. You come out of nowhere. No one knows your percentage. And normally I couldn’t give a monkey’s what you’re up to, but that kraken, man. That kraken’s choice, mate. And it’s gone. And that’s trouble. Something like that, angel watching over it. If not very well, eh? Here’s the thing—I can’t make sense of what you’ve done, or how. So how about you fill me in?”

Billy tried to think for anything, anything to say to make these impossible abductors let him go. He would tell them anything. But not a solitary word of the Tattoo’s questions made any sense at all.

The shadows shifted. “You’re running with Baron’s mob,” the Tattoo said. “Shit taste, but I can save you from yourself. Now you and me work together, we can’t have secrets. So bring me up to speed.” The Tattoo stared. “What’s the story?”

Men unfold and people are generators and ink rides a man.

“Look at him,” the Tattoo said. “This little prick’s a Christ, is he? You said there’s nothing in his house?”

“Buggery I could taste,” said Goss. He hawked and swallowed what he raised.

“Who took the kraken, Billy?” the Tattoo said. Billy tried. There was a long silence.

“Look,” Goss said. “He’s got knowledges.”

“No,” the Tattoo said, slowly. “No. You’re wrong. He don’t. I think we’re going to want to workshop this.” The man shook and moaned, and a guard hit him again. The Tattoo rocked with the body that bore it. “You know what we need,” the Tattoo said. “Take him to the workshop.” The man who was a radio whispered an ill-tuned-in weather report.

GOSS DRAGGED BILLY, MAKING HIS LEGS MOVE WITH A NEW LOCOMOTION like a cartoon caper. Little Subby followed.

“Get off me,” Billy gasped abruptly. Goss smiled like a grandfather.

“Attention one and all,” said Goss. “I love it when you’re very very quiet. Beyond this door,” Goss said, “just over the road, we can open up the old bonnet, take a look inside, see what’s making the old girl seize up like that.” He tapped Billy’s belly. “We’re all recyclers; we all have to do our bit, don’t we, for the global warming and the polar bears and that. We’ll find new life for her as a fridge.”

“Wait,” whispered Billy. Whispering was all he could do. “Listen, I can …”

“You can what, poppet?” said Goss. “I couldn’t live with myself if I let you get in the way of progress. There’s white-hot innovation around the corner, and we all have to be ready. We’ve never had it so good.”

Goss opened the door into the cold and a girder of streetlamp light. Subby went out. Goss sent Billy after him, onto his hands and knees. Goss came after him. Billy put up his hands. He felt a rush. He heard splintering glass.

Billy crawled away. Goss did not follow. Subby did not move. The air was still. Billy did not understand. Nothing moved but him, for one, two seconds, and he could hear nothing but his own heart. Then air rushed past his ears again, and only then, too late, glass from whatever window had broken hit the ground, and Goss moved, his head shaking in a moment’s confusion as he looked at space where Billy no longer quite was.

Something met Subby. “Huff,” Subby said, and hurtled metres away. A man-shape in darkness gripped a pipework club. Goss shrieked. The attacker slammed the metal into him. It rang as if he were metal too. Goss did not even stagger. He ran to where Subby lay supine, blinking.

The man with the pipe grabbed Billy. He was big, bulky but fast-moving, his hair cut close, his clothes black and scruffy. There was a faint edge of streetlight on him.

“Dane?” Billy gasped. “Dane.”

THEY RAN ALONG THE DIRTY LITTLE NON-STREET, BY THE RAISED tracks, away from the terrible archway. A train passed, rumbling lights in the sky. Somewhere behind them Goss knelt by Subby.

“Come on,” Dane said. Something ran along the bricks beside them, something Billy did not make out. “We’ve got two minutes before they’re up. We’ve got one minute before their boss realises what’s happened. You’re bleeding. Goss can taste it.”

Another train passed. From streets away came the noise of traffic. Dane bundled Billy on. “No way I can take them,” Dane said. “I only got him ’cause they weren’t expecting anything. Plus there was …”

Dane ran them an intricate route until they emerged from the brick maze. They were by a park, the only figures in the street. By the silhouettes of massed trees Dane unlocked a car and shoved Billy in.

Billy wore a beard of blood, he realised. His shirt was stained with it. At some point, the night’s rough handling had split his lip. He dripped.

“Shit,” he mumbled. “Shit, sorry, I …”

“One of his knuckleheads.” Dane said. “Put your seat belt on.” Something filthy scudded from the wall across the deserted road, out of a gutter into the car. The squirrel, coiling under a seat. Billy stared.

“Shtum,” Dane said. He pulled out and drove, fast. “If it weren’t for little sodding nutkin I wouldn’t have found you. It got onto Goss’s car.”

They turned into lights, reached a street where there were shoppers and drinkers by late cafés and amusement arcades. Billy felt as if he would cry, to see people. It felt like the breaching of some meniscus, like he had entered a real night at last. Dane passed him a tissue.

“Wipe your mouth.”

“Leon …”

“Wipe the blood. We don’t want to be stopped.”

“We have to stop, we have to go to the police …” Really? Billy thought even as he said that. You’re not there anymore.

“No,” Dane said, as if he were listening to that monologue. “We do not.” You know that, right? “We’re just going to drive. Wipe your mouth. I’m going to get you out of here.”

Billy watched a quadrant of London he recognised no more than if it were Tripoli go by.

Chapter Thirteen

“WELL THIS IS BLOODY FABULOUS, ISN’T IT? THIS IS BLOODY perfect.” Baron stomped around Billy’s flat. He shook his head at the walls, folded and refolded his arms. “This is just how it was supposed to go. This is peachy.”

He stamped past the team powdering for fingerprints. She had her back to them, but from where she stood examining Billy’s doorway, Collingswood got gusts of their resentment.

She could not hear thoughts. So far as she knew, no one could: they spilt from each individual head in too many overlapping and counterflowing streams, and the words that part-constituted some of those streams were contradictory and misleading. But irritation that strong communicated, and knowing it to be mistranslation, she—like most of those with any knack at all for that kind of thing—automatically translated into text.

whos this twat think he is

wankers shd fuck off let real coppers work

y r we leting that litl bitch smoke

She turned and spoke to the thinker of that last fragment. “Because you been told to let us do whatever we want, innit?” she said, and watched the blood leave his face. She stepped over dropped books and followed Baron. She picked up the post on the table.

“Well?” Baron said. “Any ideas?”

Collingswood unlistened, focused on the traces of Billyness. Touched with a fingertip the doorframe, where stains of Billy’s attention read to her like messages squint-seen through a broken screen.

whats this she did that girl

cant get in

shes fit i wouldn’t mind

“What are you bloody smirking at?” Baron said. “Got something?”

“Nothing, boss,” she said. “You know what? No. You got me. This thing was still primed when I got here, you know? That’s why I had to let you in. No entry without invite, and you saw Billy boy—he was way too chickenshit to let anyone he didn’t know in after what we told him.”

“So what’s happened? He’s hardly just gone for a bloody walk, has he?”

“Nah.” She shrugged at the signs of scuffles. “Someone’s took him.”

“Someone who couldn’t get in.”

She nodded. “Someone who didn’t get in,” she said.

Vardy emerged from the bedroom, where he had been examining Billy’s bits and pieces. He joined them in the kitchen.

“That ain’t all,” Collingswood said. She made shapes with her hands, chopped the air up. “Something big happened tonight. Big like when the kraken got took. I don’t know what it is, but something’s wandering around out there.”

Baron nodded slowly. “Prof,” Baron said. “Any thoughts from your good self? Wish to revise your opinion about the unlikelihood of any attacks by your teuthists?”

“No,” said Vardy shortly. He folded his arms. “I do not. Care to revise your tone? Can’t tell you what’s gone on here or who’s done what to whom, but seeing as you ask, no. This does not read teuthism to me.” He closed his eyes. His colleagues watched him channelling whatever it was he channelled when he did what he did. “No,” he said, “this does not feel like them.”

“Well,” Baron said. He sighed. “We’re on the back foot here, ladies and gents. Our star witness and intended colleague is gone AWOL. We know the guard system was up and running. Doing what it was supposed to. But we also know it had both been tripped and not been tripped. Do I have that right?”

“Sort of,” Collingswood said. “It went off in reverse. Woke me up. I couldn’t work out what it was at first.”

“It would cover windows, too?” Vardy said. She stared at him. “Fine,” he said. “I have to ask.”

“No you don’t,” she said. “I told you. No one could get in.”

“No one?”

“What’s your point? I ain’t saying there’s no one stronger’n me out there—you know there is. If anyone got in, it would go off and I’d know. No one broke in …” She stopped. She looked one by one at the post. She looked at the cardboard book box. “No one broke in,” she said. “Someone sent him something. Look. There’s no stamp, this was hand-delivered.” She hefted it. She sniffed it.

Vardy unfolded his arms. Collingswood moved her fingers over the paper, whispered, ran little routines and subroutines.

“What is it?” Baron said.

“Alright,” she said finally. In the other room the grumbles of the other police were audible and ignored. “Everything remembers how it used to be, right? So like, this …” She shook the container. “This remembers when it was heavier. It was a full parcel and now it’s empty, right? It remembers being heavier but that ain’t the thing, the weird thing.”

She moved her fingers again, coaxed the cardboard. Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things. “It’s that it remembers being not heavier enough.

“Guv,” she said to Baron. “What do you know about how to …” She opened and clenched her hands. “How to make big shit go into something little?”

Chapter Fourteen

“WHAT HAPPENED TO LEON?” BILLY SAID.

Dane glanced at him and shook his head.

“I wasn’t there, was I? I don’t know. Was it Goss?”

“That man Goss, and that boy. It looked like he—”

“I wasn’t there. But you got to face facts.” Dane glanced again. “You saw what you saw. I’m sorry.”

What did I see? Billy thought.

“Tell me what he said,” Dane said.

“What?”

“The Tattoo. Tell me what he said.”

“What was that?” Billy said. “No. You can tell me some stuff. Where did you even come from?” They turned through streets he did not know.

“Not now,” Dane said. “We ain’t got time.”

“Get the police …” Beneath Billy’s seat the squirrel made a throat noise.

“Shit,” Dane said. “We don’t have time for this. You’re smart, you know what’s going on.” He clicked his fingers. Where his fingers percussed, there was a faint burst of light. “We do not have time.”

He braked, swore. Red lights disappeared in front of them. “So can we please cut the crap? You can’t go home. You know that. That’s where they got you. You can’t call Baron’s crew. You think that’s going to help? Old Bill sort you out?”

“Wait …”

“That flat ain’t your home anymore.” He spoke in little stabs. “Those ain’t your clothes, they ain’t your books, that ain’t your computer, you get it? You saw what you saw. You know you saw what you saw.” Dane snapped his finger under Billy’s nose and the light glowed again. He steered hard. “We clear?”

Yes, no, yes they were clear. “Why did you come?” Billy said. “Baron and Vardy said … I thought you were hunting me.”

“I’m sorry about your mate. I’ve been there. Do you know what you are?”

“I’m not anything.”

“You know what you did? I felt it. If you hadn’t done that I wouldn’t’ve got there in time, and they would’ve took you to the workshop. Something’s out.” Billy remembered a clenching inside, glass breaking, a moment of drag. “Goss’ll be licking for us now. It’s the man on the back you need to worry about.”

“The Tattoo was talking.”

“Do not start that. Miracles are getting more common, mate. We knew this was coming.” He cried with gruff emotion, touched his chest near his heart. “It’s the ends of the world.”

“End of the world?”

“Ends.”

IT WAS LIKE BUILDINGS SELF-AGGREGATED OUT OF ANGLES AND shade in front of the car, dissipated behind. Something very certain was out that night.

“It’s war,” Dane said. “This is where gods live, Billy. And they’ve gone to war.”

“What? I’m not on anyone’s side …”

“Oh, you are,” Dane said. “You are a side.”

Billy shivered. “That tattoo’s a god?”

“Fuck no. It’s a criminal. A fucking villain is what he is. Thinks you’re up against him. Thinks you stole the kraken. Maybe you used to run with Grisamentum.” Now that was a singsong name, a snip from scripture. “They never got on.”

“Where’s the squid?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Dane turned the wheel hard. “You telling me you ain’t felt what’s going on? You ain’t noticed signs? They are coming out of the darkness. This is gods’ time. They been rising.”

“What …?”

“In liquid, through Perspex or glass. This is in your blood, Billy. Coming up out of heaven. Forced by their season. Australia, here, New Zealand.” All places Architeuthis and Mesonychoteuthis had breached.

They were at a community hall, a sign reading SOUTH LONDON CHURCH. The street stank of fox. Dane held open the door. The squirrel leaped from the car and in two, three sine-curves was gone.

“You better start making sense, Dane,” Billy said, “or I’m just… going to …”

“Billy please. Didn’t I just save you? Let me help you.”

BILLY SHIVERED. DANE LED INDOORS, THROUGH UNTIDY ROWS OF plastic chairs facing a lectern, to a room at the back. The windows were covered with collages of torn coloured tissue paper, faux stained glass. There were leaflets advertising mother-and-child meetings, house-clearance sales. A storeroom full of engine bits and mouldering papers, a bent bicycle, the detritus of years. “The congregation’ll hide us,” Dane said. “You don’t want to mess with them. We scratch their back.” He pulled open a trapdoor. Light reached up.

“Down there?” said Billy.

Concrete stairs led to a striplit hallway, a sliding gate like the door of an industrial elevator. Behind a grille an older man and a shaven-headed boy in boiler suits held up shotguns. The ambient night sound of London disappeared.

“Is that …?” one of the guards said. “Who is that?”

“You know who I am?” Dane said. “Yeah you fucking do. Go tell his holiness I’m here and let us in.” Brusque, but with a gentleness Billy could feel, Dane pushed Billy inside.

Beyond the gate the walls were not featureless. Billy’s mouth opened. Still concrete and windowless, the walls were intricately moulded. Stained by London dirt no scrubbing could remove, a nautilus entwined with an octopus, with a cuttlefish, its flattened frilled mantle like a skirt edge. It encoiled limbs with an argonaut bobbing below its extruded eggcase-house. And squid everywhere. Shaped when the walls were wet.

What a corridor, this council-office walkway. A tentacular border of Disney-malevolent vampire squid; ornery Humboldt; whiplash squid in tuning-fork posture. Their bodies were rendered similar sizes, specificities effaced by shared squidness, teuthic quiddity. Their—the word came to Billy and would not lie down—squiddity. Architeuthis in the shabby matter of the building.

The buried room where Dane took Billy was tiny as a ship’s cabin. There was a little bed, a steel toilet. On a table was a plate of curry, a cup of something hot. Billy almost wept at the smell.

“You’re in shock,” Dane said, “and you’re starving and knackered. You don’t understand what’s going on. Get that down you and we’ll talk.”

Dane took a forkful—to show it was safe, Billy thought. He ate. The drink was too-sweet chocolate.

“Where are we?”

“The Teuthex’ll explain.”

What’s a Teuthex? Billy felt like he was swimming. His exhaustion increased. He saw against a dark background. His thoughts faded in and out like a radio station. This was more, he realised, than tiredness.

“Oh,” he said. A welling of alarm.

“Now don’t worry,” said Dane.

“You, what’s, you …” Billy jiggled the cup and stared at it. Put the spiked thing heavily down before he dropped it, as if that mattered. Black came in at him like an ink cloud. “What did you do?”

“Don’t worry,” Dane said.

“You need this,” Dane said.

Dane said another thing but his voice was too far away now. Bastards, Billy tried to say. Part of him told another part of him that Dane would not rescue him just to kill him now, but most of him was too tired to be afraid. Billy was in the dark quiet, and just before it closed behind him and over him he swung his own legs onto the bed and lay down, proud that no one did it for him.

INTO SLEEP’S BENTHOS AND DEEPER. A SLANDER THAT THE DEEPEST parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in this trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams.

A long time sleep, and blinks of vision. Awe, not fear.

Billy might surface and for a moment open his flesh eyelids not his dream ones, and two or three times saw people looking down at him. He heard always only the close-up swirl of water, except in deep dream once through muffling miles of sea a woman said, “When’ll he wake?”

He was night-krill was what he was, a single minuscule eye, looking at absence specked with presence. Plankton-Billy saw an instant’s symmetry. A flower of limbflesh outreaching. Slivers of fin on a mantle. Red rubber meat. That much he knew already.

He saw something small or in the distance. Then black after black, then it came back closer. Straight-edged, hard-lined. An anomaly of angles in that curved vorago.

It was the specimen. It was his kraken, his giant squid quite still—still in suspension in its tank, the tank and its motionless dead-thing contents adrift in deep. Sinking toward where there is no below. The once-squid going home.

One last thing, that might have announced itself as such, the finality was so unequivocal. Something beneath the descending tank, at which from way above though already deep in pitch tiny Billy-ness stared.

Under the tank was something utter and dark and moving, something so slowly rising, and endless.

Chapter Fifteen

COLLINGSWOOD, WHOSE BRIEF THIS SORT OF THING WAS, HAD spent a couple of hours talking to a woman who referred to herself as an “asset” about some of the esoterica of material science. The woman had emailed a list of names, of researchers and grifters. “This sort of stuff changes all the time,” she had warned. “Can’t vouch for any of them in particular.”

“I called the first couple, guv,” Collingswood said, “but it was a bit tricky on the phone, you get me? Some of them gave me more names. I don’t think any of them knew what I was on about. I need to see them face-to-face. You sure you want to come? Ain’t you got shit to do?” She could rarely parse Baron’s brain, which was to be expected: it was only the inexperienced and unskilled who sent their thinkings all over the place, profligate and foolish.

“Indeed,” Baron said. “But that’s what mobile phones are for, aren’t they? This is the best lead we have.”

They traced a zigzag route through London, Baron in his plain clothes, Collingswood in her costume-like uniform, hoping to surprise their informers into helpful candour. There were not many names on the list—infolding and weightomancy were arcana among the arcane, a geeky byway. Baron and Collingswood went to offices, community colleges, the back rooms of high-street shops. “Is there somewhere private we can talk?” Baron would say, or Collingswood would open with, “What d’you know about making big shit little?”

One name on the list was a science teacher. “Come on, boss, let’s give the class a treat, eh?” Collingswood said, and marched in past pupils gaping from behind Bunsen burners. “George Carr?” Collingswood said. “What do you know about making big shit little?”

“ENJOY THAT?” CARR SAID. THEY WERE WALKING IN THE PLAYGROUND. “What was it, some science teacher tell you you’d never amount to anything?”

“Nah,” she said. “They all knew I’d amount to fucking loads.”

“What the hell does a cult squad want with me?”

“We’re just chasing a few leads, sir,” Baron said.

“Ever flog your skills?” Collingswood said. “Shrinkage for hire?”

“No. I’m not good enough and not interested enough. I get what I need out of it.”

“Which is what?”

“Come on holiday with me one day,” he said. “Three weeks of clothes in one carry-on bag.”

“Could I bring my dog?” Baron said.

“What? No way. Condensing something that complicated’s out of my league. I might just get it in, maybe, but Fido’s not going to be fetching sticks on the beach at the other end.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Sure. There’s a few people could do it.” He stroked his stubble. “Has anyone given you Anders’s name?”

Baron and Collingswood glanced at each other. “Anders?” Baron said.

“Anders Hooper. Runs a shop in Chelsea. Funny little specialist place. He’s very good.”

“So why haven’t we heard of him?” Baron said, waving his list.

“Because he’s only just started. Been doing it about a year, professionally. Now he’s good enough and keen enough to do it for lucre.”

“So how come you’ve heard of him?” Collingswood said.

Carr smiled. “I taught him how to do it. Tell him his Mr. Miyagi says hi.”

•   •   •

HOOPER’S SHOP SHARED SPACE ON A TERRACE WITH A DELICATESSEN, a travel bookshop, a florist. It was called Nippon This! Characters stared from the window with manga enthusiasm beside robot kits and nunchuck tat. Inside, a third of the small shelf space was taken up with books on the philosophy, mathematics, and design of origami. There were stacks of books of fold patterns. Incredible examples—dinosaurs, fish, klein bottles, geometric intricacies, all made from single uncut sheets.

“Alright,” said Collingswood. She smiled in appreciation. “Alright, that’s quite cool.”

A young man came out from the back. “Morning,” he said. Anders Hooper was tall, mixed-race, wearing a Gundam T-shirt. “Can I …” He hesitated at sight of Collingswood’s uniform. “Help you?”

“Might be,” she said. “Sell enough to make your rent on this place?”

“Who are you?”

“Answer the question, Mr. Hooper,” said Baron.

“… Sure. There’s a lot of interest in anime and stuff. We’re one of the best suppliers …”

“You can get all this shit off the Internet,” Collingswood said. “People come here?”

“Sure. There’s …”

“What about your orifuckinggami?” she said. He blinked.

“What about it? That’s more specialist, of course …” He kept his mind pretty cloudy, but what they know? Collingswood got from him, as abruptly as if announced by a beep.

“And you’re the man, right? Shit, we’re in effing Chelsea. How d’you pay? We spoke to Mr. Carr. Says hello by the way. He told us you do custom folding. Special jobs. Sound right, Anders?”

He leaned on the counter. Looked from Baron to Collingswood. He glanced to either side as if someone might be listening.

“What is it you want to know?” he said. “I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“No one said you did,” Collingswood said. “Someone fucking did though. Why did you get into all this?”

“For minimisation,” Anders said. “It’s not just about pressure, or forcing things. It’s about topography, that sort of thing. Someone like Carr—and I’m not being disrespectful, it was him who got me started—but basically, you know, you’re sort of …” He made kneading motions. “You’re shoving stuff in. You’re stuffing a suitcase.”

“More or less what he said,” Baron said.

“If that’s what you want to do, then, you know, fine. But …” His hands tried to describe something. “What you’re trying to do with planurgy is get things into other spaces, you know? Real things, with edges and surfaces, and all that. With origami you’re still dealing with all that surface area. There’s no cutting, you know? The point is you can unfold it, too. You get it?”

“And you don’t have any problems with the fact that this is all, you know, solid,” said Collingswood.

“Not as much as you might think. There’s been a revolution in origami over the last few years … What?”

Collingswood was pissing herself laughing. Baron joined in. After a couple of seconds Anders had the grace to snigger.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said, “but there has been. Computers’ve helped. We’re in the era of—alright, you’ll like this one, too—extreme origami. It’s all about maths.” He looked at Collingswood. “What’s your tradition?”

“Traditions are for ponces,” she said.

He laughed. “If you say so. When you start bringing in a bit of abmaths, factoring in visionary numbers, that sort of thing—does this mean anything to you?”

“Get on with it.”

“Sorry. My point is, there are ways of …” He leaned over the cash register and held the little digital display between fingertip and thumb. He folded it over.

Collingswood watched it go. Anders flipped it over and over, tucked it behind the keys. He gently concertinaed. The bulky thing collapsed on itself in fold-lines, different aspects of unbroken planes slipping behind each other as if seen from several directions at once. Anders folded, and within a minute and a half what lay on the desk, still connected to a power cord (which now slipped behind an impossible crease into the things’ innards), was a hand-sized Japanese crane. The showing face of one of the bird’s wings was a corner of the cash display, the other was the front of the money drawer. Its neck was a flattened wedge of its buttons. “If you pull there you can make its wings flap,” Anders said.

“Cool,” said Collingswood. “And it ain’t broke?”

“That’s the point.” He manipulated its edges, unfolded the thing back into its original shape. Pressed its keys and it pinged and opened with a little cash chink.

“Nice,” said Baron. “So you make a bit of dosh folding cash registers into birds.”

“Oh yeah,” Anders deadpanned. “Very lucrative.”

“But wouldn’t that still weigh the same?”

“There’s ways of folding into sort of forgettable space, I suppose you could say, so the world won’t notice the weight until you open it.”

“How much would you charge to,” Baron said, “for example, fold up a person? Into a package? That you could post?”

“Ah. Well. There’s a lot of surfaces in a person, and you’ve got to keep track of them all. That’s a lot of folds. Is that what this is about? That bloke who wanted to surprise his friend?”

Collingswood and Baron stared at him. “Which bloke,” Baron said, “would that be?”

“Shit, did something happen? The guy was playing a trick on his mate. Had me make him and his son up like a book. Paid me extra to hand-deliver him. Said he didn’t trust the post. I say said—took me ages to have a clue what he was on about, the way he talked. Pain in my arse getting there, but he made it worth my—”

“Getting where?” Baron said.

He recited Billy’s address. “What happened?” Anders said.

“Tell us everything you can about this man,” Baron said. He held up his notebook. Collingswood spread her hands, tried to feel residues in the room. “And what,” said Baron, “do you mean ‘his son’?”

“The bloke,” Anders said. “Who had me fold him up. It was his kid, too. His boy.” He blinked in Baron’s and Collingswood’s stares.

Baron whispered, “Describe them.”

“The guy was in his fifties. Long hair. Smelt, to be honest. Smoke. I was a bit surprised he could pay—it wasn’t cheap. His son was … a bit not all there.” He tapped his head. “Never said a word … What? What? Jesus, what is it?”

Baron stepped back and dropped his arms to his sides, his notebook dangling. Collingswood stood, her mouth opening, her eyes widening. Their faces went white in time.

“Oh fuck,” whispered Collingswood.

“My good God, this didn’t, this didn’t sound any alarm bells at all?” Baron said. “You didn’t for a bloody second wonder who you might be dealing with?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!”

“He doesn’t fucking know,” Collingswood said. Her voice grated. “This fucking newbie cunt has no idea. That’s why they came here. ’Cause he’s new. That’s why he got the job, ’cause he’s green. They knew he had no clue who the fucking shit he was dealing with.”

“Who was I dealing with?” said Anders, shrilly. “What did I do?”

“It is,” said Collingswood. “It is, isn’t it, guv?”

“Oh my good Christ. It sounds like it. My God, it does sound like it.” They shivered in a room suddenly made cold.

Collingswood whispered, “It’s Goss and Subby.”

Chapter Sixteen

BILLY WOKE. THE FOG, THE DARK WATER IN HIS HEAD, WAS ALL gone.

He sat up. He was bruised but not tired. He wore the same clothes he had gone to sleep in, but they had been removed and cleaned. He closed his eyes and saw the oceanic things from his doped sleep.

By the door was a man in a tracksuit. Billy scrabbled back on the bed to see him, into some half-cringe, half-pugnacious uncoiling. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. He opened the door. Billy slowly lowered his hands. He felt, he realised, better than he had for a long time.

“You drugged me,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the man said anxiously. “But they’re waiting for you.”

Billy followed him past the industrial-rendered decapods and octopuses, illuminated by fluorescent lights. The presence of Billy’s dream was persistent, like water in his ears. He hung back until the man turned a corner, then ducked away and ran as quietly as he could, accelerating through the echoes of his footfalls. He held his breath. At a junction he stopped, pressed his back against a wall and looked around.

Different subspecies in cement. Perhaps he could track his way by remembering cephalopods. He had no idea where to go. He heard the footfall of his escort seconds before the man reappeared. The man gestured at him, an uncomfortable beckoning.

“They’re waiting for you,” he said. Billy followed the man through the hollowed-out churchland into a hall big enough and unexpected enough that Billy gasped. All without windows, all scooped out from under London.

“Teuthex’ll be here in a minute,” the man said, and left.

There were pews, each with a slot behind its backrest, a space for hymnals. They faced a plain Shaker-style altar. Above it was a huge, beautifully wrought version of that many-armed symbol, all elongate S-curves in silver and wood. The walls were covered in pictures like ersatz windows. Every one was of giant squid.

There were grainy deep-sea photos. They looked much older than should have been possible. There were engravings from antique bestiaries. There were paintings. Pen-and-ink renditions, pastels, suggestive op-art geometries with fractal suckers. He recognised not a single one. Billy had grown up on pictures of kraken and books of antique monstrosities. He sought an image he knew. Where was de Montfort’s impossible octopus hauling down a ship? Where the familiar old renderings of Verne’s poulpes?

One eighteenth-century giant-squid pastoral—a large, camp rendition of a young Architeuthis gambolling in spume, near a shore from where fishermen watched it. A semiabstract rendition, an interweaving of pipelike brown jags, a nest of wedges.

“That’s Braque,” someone said behind him. “What did you dream?”

Billy turned. Dane was there, his arms folded. In front of him was the man who had spoken. He was a priest. The man was in his sixties, with white hair, neatly trimmed beard and moustache. He was exactly a priest. He wore a long black robe, white dog collar. Just a little battered-looking. His hands were clasped behind him. He wore a chain, from which dangled the squid symbol. They three stood in the sheer silence of that submerged chamber, staring at each other.

“You poisoned me,” Billy said.

“Come come,” said the priest. Billy held a pew and watched him.

“You poisoned me,” Billy said.

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

“Why?” said Billy. “Why am I? What’s going on? You owe me … an explanation.”

“Indeed,” said the priest. “And you owe us your life.” His smile disarmed. “So we’re both indebted. Look, I know you want to know what’s happened. And we want to explain. Believe me, you need to understand.” He spoke in a carefully neutral accent, but there was a little Essex to it.

“Are you going to tell me what all this is?” Billy glanced around for exits. “All I got from Dane yesterday was—”

“It was a bad day,” the man said. “I hope you feel better. How did you dream?” He rubbed his hands.

“What did you give me?”

“Ink. Of course.”

“Bullshit. Squid ink doesn’t give you visions. That was acid or something …”

“It was ink,” the man said. “What did you see? If you saw things, it was down to you. I’m sorry that it was all a bit of a rude submersion. We really had no choice. Time is not on our side.”

“But why?”

“Because you need to know.” The man stared. “You need to see. You need to know what’s going on. We didn’t give you any visions, Billy. What you saw came from you. You can see things clearer than anyone.”

The man stepped closer to the picture. “I was saying, Braque,” he said, “in 1908. Bertrand Hubert, the only French Teuthex we’ve ever had, took him out to sea. They were in the Bay of Biscay for four days. Hubert performed a particular ritual, of which sadly we no longer have much record, and brought up a little god.

“He must have been pretty powerful. He’s the only one since Steenstrup who’s been able to tickle up more than images. The actual … fry. So the godling waited while Braque, falling over himself and nearly overboard, apparently, sketched it. It went under waving a hunting arm as Braque said ‘exactement comme un garçon qui dit <au revoir> aux amis.’” He smiled. “Silly beggar. Not the slightest idea. It was “comme” nothing of the sort. Sounds odd, but he said it was the coiliness of what he saw that made him think in angles. He said no curves could do justice to the coils he’d seen.”

Cubism as failure. Billy walked to another picture. More traditionally representational—a fat, flattened giant squid mouldering on a slab, surrounded by legs in waders. Quick, wisping brushstrokes. “Why did you drug me?”

“That’s Renoir. That over there, Constable. Pre-Steenstrup, so it’s what we call the atramentous epoch. Before we emerged from the ink-cloud.” The works around Billy looked suddenly like Manets. Like Piranesis, Bacons, Breughels, Kahlos.

“Moore’s my name,” the priest said. “I am very sorry about your friend. I sincerely wish we could have stopped that.”

“I don’t even know what happened,” Billy said. “I couldn’t tell what that man …” He swallowed into silence. Moore cleared his throat. Behind heavily framed glass was a flattish surface, a slatey plane. It was brown-grey rock perhaps two feet square. In organic lines, in charcoal ink and stained a dried-blood red, overlooked by outlined human figures, was a torpedo shape; a conclave of spiral whips; a round black eye.

“That’s from the Chauvet Cave,” Moore said. “Thirty-five thousand years old.” The carbon eye of the squid looked across epochs at them. Billy felt vertigo at the preantique rendition. Was it meant to be seen in the licking of a fire light? Women and men with sticks and deft fingertip smuts rendering what had visited at the edge of the sea. What had raised many arms in deepwater greeting while they waved from rockpools.

“We’ve always commissioned,” Moore said. “We show them god.” He smiled. “Or god’s young. That’s what we used to do.

“Since the end of the atrament we can generally only offer dreams. As we did you. How Hubert called up a young god we don’t know. Even the sea won’t tell us. And we’ve asked it. You’ve seen the young, Billy. Baby Jesu.” He smiled at his little blasphemy. “That’s what you preserved. Architeuthis is kraken-spawn. Gods are oviparous. Not just our gods, all gods. God-spawn’s everywhere if you know where to look.”

“What was that tattoo?” Billy said.

“Those kraken that make it to the last stage?” Moore jerked his thumb at the cave painting. “They sleepeth, is what they do,” he quoted. “‘Battening upon huge seaworms,’ as they say. They’ll rise only at the final end. Only in the end, when ‘latter fire heats the deeps’”—he did quote fingers—“only then to be seen once, roaring they shall rise and on the surface die.”

Billy looked past him. He wondered how the search of his almost-colleagues was going, whether Baron, Vardy, and Collingswood were making headway as they looked for him, as they must be doing. With a moment’s startling clarity he imagined Collingswood with her so un-uniform uniform and swagger knocking heads together to find him.

“We were there at the beginning,” Moore said. “And we’re here now. At the end. Baby gods have started manifesting all over. Kubodera and Mori. That was just the first. Pictures, video, making themselves known. Architeuthis, Mesonychoteuthis, unknowns. After all those years of silence. They’re rising.

“On the twenty-eighth of February, 2006, the kraken appeared in London.” He smiled. “In Melbourne they keep theirs in a block of ice. Can you imagine? I can’t help thinking of it as a godsicle. You know they’re planning one for Paris which is going to be, what do they call it, plastinated? Like that strange German man does to people. That’s how they’re going to show god.” Dane shook his head. Moore shook his head. “But, not you. You treated it … right, Billy. You laid it out with a kindness.” Odd stilted formulation. “With respect. You kept it behind glass.”

His squid had been a relic in a reliquary. “This is kraken year zero,” Moore said. “This is Anno Teuthis. We’re in the end times. What d’you think’s been going on? You think it’s just bloody chance that when you bring god up and treat it as you do, the world suddenly starts ending? Why do you think we kept coming to see? Why do you think we had someone on the inside?” Dane bent his head. “We had to know. We had to watch. We had to protect it too, find out what was going on. We knew something was going to happen.

“You realise the reason you had a kraken to work on is because in roaring it rose and on the surface died?”

Chapter Seventeen

IF YOU GOT INVOLVED WITH LEON, MARGE HAD ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD, you took certain behaviours for granted. It wasn’t a bad thing—it gave leeway for your own behaviour, the indulgences of which might have caused all manner of resentments and bad bloods with previous lovers.

For example, Marge felt no compunction about cancelling a night out if she was working on a piece and it was going well. “Sorry sweet,” she’d said, many times, leaning over the battered video equipment that she rescued from skips and eBay. “I’ve got something going. Can we raincheck?”

When Leon did the same, even if it annoyed her, it also often came with satisfaction, the knowledge that these were credits she could cash in later. For similar reasons, knowing she had no intent to become monogamous when they got together, she found his own occasional non-her-focused sexual liaisons (mostly obviously telegraphed) rather a relief.

In and of itself, she would not have thought much or anything of not hearing from Leon for two, three, five days, a week at a time. That was nothing, any more than was a last-minute cancellation. What, however, gave her some anxiety, some pause, was that they had had a specific arrangement—they had been going to see a James Bond marathon, because “it’ll be hilarious”—and that he had not called to change plans. He had simply texted her some nonsense—that itself not news—and not turned up. And now was ignoring her messages.

She texted him, she emailed him. Where are you? she wrote. Tell me or i’m going to get worried. Call rsvp text carrier pigeon whatever you prefer xx.

Marge had deleted the last message Leon had sent, thinking it some drunk foolishness. Of course she regretted it deeply now. It had said something like: billy says theres a squid cult.

“FATHERS AND MOTHERS AND UNCARING AUNTS AND UNCLES IN freezing darkness we implore you.”

“We implore you.” The congregation mumbled in time, in response to Moore the Teuthex’s phrases.

“We are your cells and synapses, your prey and your parasites.”

“Parasites.”

“And if you care for us at all we know it not.”

“Not.”

Billy sat at the back of the church. He did not stand and sit with the small congregation, nor did he murmur meaningless phonemes in polite lag of their words. He watched. There were fewer than twenty people in the room. Mostly white, but not all, mostly dressed inexpensively, mostly middle-aged or older, but, a strange demographic blip, with four or five tough-looking young men, grim and devout and obedient, in one row.

Dane stood like a hulking altar boy. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. The lights were low, there were shadows all over the place.

The Teuthex recited the service, his words drifting in and out of English, into Latin or Pig Latin, into what sounded like Greek, into strange slippery syllables that were perhaps dreams of sunken languages or the invented muttering of squidherds, Atlantean, Hyperborean, the pretend tongue of R’lyeh. Billy had expected ecstasy, the febrile devotions of the desperate speaking in tongues or tentacles, but this fervour—and fervour it was, he could see the tears and gripping hands of the devout—was controlled. The flavour of the sect was vicarly, noncharismatic, an Anglo-Catholicism of mollusc-worship.

Such a tiny group. Where were others? The room itself, the seats themselves, could have contained three times as many people as were there. Had the space always been aspirational, or was this a religion in decline?

“Reach out to enfold us,” Moore said, and the congregation said, “Fold us,” and made motions with their fingers.

“We know,” the Teuthex said. A sermon. “We know this is a strange time. There are those who think it’s the end.” He made another motion of some dismissal. “I’m asking you all to have faith. Don’t be afraid. ‘How could it have gone?’ people have asked me. ‘Why aren’t the gods doing anything?’ Remember two things. The gods don’t owe us anything. That’s not why we worship. We worship because they’re gods. This is their universe, not ours. What they choose they choose and it’s not ours to know why.”

Christ, thought Billy, what a grim theology. It was a wonder they could keep anyone in the room, without the emotional quid pro quo of hope. That’s what Billy thought, but he saw that it was not nihilism in that room. That it was full of hope, whatever the Teuthex said; and he the Teuthex, Billy thought, quietly hopeful too. Doctrine was not quite doctrine.

“And second,” said Moore. “Remember the movement that looks like not moving.” A small frisson at that.

There was no communion, no passing out of, what, sacred calamari? Only some discordant and clunky wordless hymn, a silent prayer, and the worshippers left. Each as they filed out glanced at Billy with a strange and needy look. The young men looked positively hungry, and nervous to meet his eye.

Dane and Moore came to meet him. “So,” said the Teuthex. “That was your first service.”

“What was that squirrel?” Billy said.

“Freelancer,” Dane said.

“What? Freelance what?”

“Familiar.” Familiar. “Don’t look like that. Familiar. Don’t act like you’ve never heard of one.”

Billy thought of black cats. “Where is it now?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. It did what I paid it for.” Dane did not look at him. “Job done. So it’s gone.”

“What did you pay it?”

“I paid it nuts, Billy. What would you think I’d pay a squirrel?” Dane’s face was so deadpan flat Billy could not tell if what he was facing was the truth or contempt. Welcome to this world of work. Magic animals got paid in something, nuts or something. Billy examined the pictures and books in Moore’s own dark grey chambers.

“Baron …” Billy said.

“Oh, we know Baron,” said Dane. “And his little friends.”

“He told me some books got stolen.”

“They’re in the library,” said the Teuthex. He poured tea. “Can’t use a photocopy to persuade the world.”

Billy nodded as if that made sense. He faced Moore. “What’s happening?” he said. “What did that … man … want? And why are you keeping me prisoner?”

Moore looked quizzical. “Prisoner? Where is it you want to go?”

There was a silence. “I’m getting out of here,” Billy said. And then very quickly he said, “What did … Goss … do to Leon?”

“Would you be very offended if I said I don’t believe you?” Moore said. “That you want to get out? I’m not sure you do.” He met Billy’s stare. “What did you see?” Billy almost recoiled at the eagerness in his voice. “Last night. What did you dream? You don’t even know why you’re not safe, Billy. And if you go to Baron and Vardy you’ll be considerably less so.

“I know what they said about us.” He almost twinkled, a vicar being a good sport. “But that little faith-gang called ‘police’ can’t help, you know. You’re in the Tattoo’s sights, now.”

“Think about the Tattoo,” Dane said. “That face. That man’s face on another man’s back. How was you going to deal with that, Billy?” After a silence Dane said, “How you going to get the police to deal with that?”

“It isn’t just that, either,” Moore said. “As if that weren’t enough. I know it’s all a bit … Well. But it isn’t just the Tattoo, even. Suddenly, ever since something or other, everyone agrees the end’s in sight. Nothing unusual in that, you might say, and you’d be right except that I do mean everyone. That has … ramifications for you. You need to be with a power. Let me tell you. We are the Congregation of God Kraken. And this is our time.”

THEY EXPLAINED.

London was full of dissident gods.

Why? Well they have to live somewhere. A city living in its own afterlife. Why not?

Of course, they’re all over, gods are. Theurgic vermin, those once worshipped or still worshipped in secret, those half worshipped, those feared and resented, petty divinities: they infect everybloody-where. The ecosystems of godhead are fecund, because there’s nothing and nowhere that can’t generate the awe on which they graze. But just because there are cockroaches everywhere doesn’t mean there aren’t cockroaches in particular in a New York kitchen. And just because angels keep their ancient places and every stone, cigarette packet, tor and town has its deities, doesn’t mean there’s nothing special about London.

The streets of London are stone synapses hardwired for worship. Walk the right or wrong way down Tooting Bec you’re invoking something or other. You may not be interested in the gods of London, but they’re interested in you.

And where gods live there are knacks, and money, and rackets. Halfway-house devotional murderers, gunfarmers and self-styled reavers. A city of scholars, hustlers, witches, popes and villains. Criminarchs like the Tattoo, those illicit kings. The Tattoo had run with the Krays, before he was Tattoo, but really you couldn’t leave your front door unlocked. Nobody remembered what his name had been: that was part of what had happened to him. Whatever nasty miracle it was had en-dermed him had thrown away his name as well as his body. Everyone knew they used to know what he was called, including him, but no one recalled it now.

“The one who got him like that was smart,” Dane said. “It was better when he was around, old Griz. I used to know some of his guys.”

There was a many-dimensional grid of geography, economy, obligation and punishment. Crime overlapped with faith—“Neasden’s run by the Dharma Bastards,” Dane said—though many guerrilla entrepreneurs were secular, agnostic, atheist or philistine ecumenical. But faith contoured the landscape.

“Who’s Goss and Subby?” Billy said. He sat guarded between them, looking from one to the other. Dane looked down at his own big fists. Moore sighed.

“Goss and Subby,” Moore said.

“What’s their …?” Billy said.

“Everything you can think of is what.”

“Badness,” Dane said. “Goss sells his badness.”

“Why did he kill that guy? In the cellar?” Billy said.

“The preserved man,” the Teuthex said. “If that was his handiwork.”

Billy said, “That Tattoo thought I stole the squid.”

“That’s why he was hunting you,” Dane said. “See? That’s why I had that familiar watching you.”

“You preserved it, Billy. You opened the door and found it gone,” Moore said. Pointed at him. “No wonder Baron wanted you. No wonder the Tattoo wanted you, and no wonder we were watching.”

“But he could tell I didn’t,” Billy pleaded. “He said I had nothing to do with anything.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “But then I rescued you.”

“We got you out, so we’re allies,” Moore said. “So you are his enemy now.”

“You’re under our protection,” said Dane. “And because of that you need it.”

“How did you take the Architeuthis?” Billy said at last.

“It wasn’t us,” said Moore quietly.

“What?” But it was a relic. They would fight for it, surely, like a devout of Rome might fight for a shroud, a fervent Buddhist might liberate a stolen Sura. “So who?”

“Well,” said Moore. “Quite.

“Look,” he said. “You have to persuade the universe that things make sense a certain way. That’s what knacking is.” Billy blinked at this abrupt conversational twist, that word unfamiliarly verbed. “You use whatever you can.”

“Snap,” said Dane. He clicked his fingers, and with the sound came a tiny fluorescent glow in the air just where the percussion had been. Billy stared and knew it was not a parlour trick. “That’s just skin and hand.”

“You use what you can,” Moore said, “and some what-you-cans are better than others.”

Billy realised that Dane and his priest were not, in fact, changing the subject.

“A giant squid is …” Billy petered out but he was thinking, Is powerful medicine, a big thing, a massive deal. It’s magic, is what it is. For knacking. “That’s why it’s been taken. That’s why that tattoo wants it. But this is craziness,” he added. He couldn’t stop himself. “This is craziness.”

“I know, I know,” Moore said. “Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean something else?” Shook his head. “What an awfully arrogant thing. What if faiths are exactly what they are? And mean exactly what they say?”

“Stop trying to make sense of it and just listen,” Dane said.

“And what,” Moore said, “if a large part of the reason they’re so tenacious is that they’re perfectly accurate?” He waited, and Billy said nothing. “This is all perfectly real. The Tattoo wants that body, Billy, to do something himself, or stop someone else doing something,” Moore said.

“All these things have their powers, Billy,” he said intensely. “‘There are plenty of currents on the way down deep’ is what we’d say. But some go deeper, quicker, than others. Some are right.” He smiled not like someone joking.

“What would someone do with it?” Billy said.

“Whatever it is,” Dane said, “I’m against it.”

“What wouldn’t they?” Moore said. “What couldn’t they? With something that holy.”

“That’s why we need to get out there,” Dane said. “To find it.”

“Dane,” said Moore.

“It’s a duty of care,” Dane said.

“Dane. We need understanding, certainly,” Moore said. “But we have to have faith.”

“What could show more faith than getting out there?” Dane asked. “You understand what’s going on?” Dane said to Billy. “How dangerous it all is? The Tattoo wants you, and someone has a kraken. That’s a god, Billy. And we don’t know who, or why.”

A GOD, BILLY THOUGHT. THE THIEF HAD A BLEACHY Formalin-preserved mass of rubbery stink. But he knew truths were not true.

“God can take care of itself,” Moore said to Dane. “You know things are happening, Billy. You’ve known for days.”

“I seen you feel it,” Dane said. “I seen you watching the sky.”

“This is an end,” Moore said. “And it’s our god’s doing it, and it isn’t in our control. And that’s not right.” He splayed his fingers in a ludicrous prayer-motion. “That’s why you’re here, Billy. You know things you don’t even know,” he said. The fervour in it gave Billy a chill. “You’ve worked on its holy flesh.”

Chapter Eighteen

“YOU COULD JUST STAMP YOUR LITTLE FEET, COULDN’T YOU, Subby? You could unbuckle your shoe and throw it in the lake.”

Goss stamped. Subby walked a few paces behind him, his hands behind his back in crude mimicry of the man’s pose. Goss was bent forward and beetling with energy. He uncoupled his hands repeatedly and wiped them on his mucky top. Subby watched him and did the same.

“Where are we now?” Goss said. “Well you may ask. Well you may ask. Where indeed are we now? Not often his nibs is wrong, but that Mr. Harrow clearly not so butter-wouldn’t-melt as he’d give you to think, if he’s got bouncers like that ready to spirit him away. Still not sure who that was who banged your bonce, you poor lad. You doing better?” He ruffled Subby’s hair to the boy’s openmouthed gaze.

“What is he like? He’s all snotted up in this like slurry in alveoli. Still our best lead, of which his skin-inked eminence now admits, and, what do you say, once is never enough. We’ve caught up with him before, we’ll do it again.

“Where? That’s the question mark indeed, my young apprentice.

“Ears to the ground, Subby, tongues aflap.” He did as he said and tasted where they were, and if pedestrians or shoppers in that pre-suburban shopping precinct noticed his slurping snake lick they pretended not to. “Mostly we’re after Fluffy, so any flavours of the you-know-what, a distinct and meaty-bleachy-gamey bouquet I’m told, then veer we go, but otherwise, seems Mr. Harrow knows a little smidgeon, and of him I still recall the savour.”

THERE WERE ALL KINDS OF DRAMAS OCCURRING IN THE CITY IN those days: machinations, betrayals, insinuations and misunderstandings between groups with distinct and overlapping interests. In the offices, workshops, laboratories and libraries of angry scholars and self-employed theorist-manipulators were screamed arguments between them and those nonhuman companions still around. “How can you do this to me?” was the sentence most regularly spoken, followed by, “Oh go fuck yourself.”

In the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry was a hallway between a much-frequented toilet and a small meeting room, that, if most members of the organisation noticed, they did so to briefly wonder why they had never done so before; and they tended not to again after that first time. It was not as brightly lit as it should be. The watercolours on its walls looked a bit vague: they were there, certainly, but rather difficult to pay attention to.

At the end of the corridor a plastic plaque read STOREROOM or OUT OF ORDER or something—some phrase tricky to recall with exactitude but the gist of which was not this door, go somewhere else. Two figures ignored that gist. In front was a large man wearing an expensive suit and a black motorcycle helmet. Just behind him, her hand in his, a woman in her sixties stumbled and tripped like an anxious animal. She was slack-faced, dressed in a threadbare trench coat.

The man knocked and opened without waiting for an answer. Inside was a small office. A man stood to greet them, indicated the two seats in front of his desk. The suited man did not sit. He pushed the woman into one of the chairs. He kept his hands on her shoulders. Her coat swung open and she wore nothing beneath it. Her skin was cold- and sick-looking.

For several seconds nothing happened. Then the woman moved her mouth extraordinarily. She made a ringing noise.

“Hello?” said the man behind the desk.

“Hello,” said the woman, clicking and hollow-sounding, in a man’s voice, a London voice. Her eyes were blank as a mannequin’s. “Am I speaking to Mr. Dewey of the CBI?”

“You are. Thank you for contacting me so quickly.”

“Not a problem,” the woman said. She drooled slightly. “I understand you have a proposal for me. With regard to the, ah, current dispute.”

“I do, Mr…. I do. We were wondering whether you might be able to help us.”

IT WAS IN CRICKLEWOOD THAT, AFTER A CONSULTATION BASED ON highly specific geographopathic criteria, the Metropolitan Police had located its abquotidian operatives: the FSRC and their highly specialist support staff—secretaries unfazed by the information they were required to type, pathologists who would autopsy whatever bodies were put in front of them, no matter how unorthodox their arrangements or causes of death. Vardy, Baron and Collingswood met in the cold lab of one such, Dr. Harris, a tall woman vastly unfazed by absurd and knacked evidence. They had her show them the remains from the basement of the museum one more time.

“You told me to leave it in one piece,” she had said.

“Now I’m telling you to open the ruddy thing,” Baron had said, and half an hour later, after a crack and careful prising, the jar rocked in two pieces on the steel. Between them, the man who had been inside almost retained his cylindrically constrained form. The edges of his flesh, the pose of his hands, still looked as if he were pressed up against the glass.

“There,” Harris said. She laser-pointed. The man stared at her with the intensity of the drowned. “Like I told you,” she said. She indicated the bottle’s neck. “There’s no way he could have got in there.” The FSRC operatives looked at each other.

“Thought perhaps you might have had a change of heart about that,” Baron said.

“Couldn’t have happened. He couldn’t have been in there unless he was put in when he was born and left to grow up in it. Which given that he has several tattoos, plus for all the other obvious impossibility-related reasons, is not what happened.”

“Alright,” Baron said. “That’s not what we’re concerned with here. Right, ladies and gentlemen? What do we know of the methods of our suspects? Do we see any signature moves here? Our question here is about Goss and Subby.”

GOSS AND SUBBY. GOSS AND SUBBY!

Collingswood was sure she was right. Anders Hooper was a good origamist, but the main reason he had got the job was because he was new, young, and did not recognise his employer.

He was no younger than she, of course, but as Vardy had said, with stern approval, “Collingswood doesn’t count.” Her research might have been unorthodox, her learning partial, but she took seriously knowledge of the world in which she operated. She read its histories in chaotic order, but she read them. How could she fail to know of Goss and Subby?

The notorious “Soho Goats” pub crawl with Crowley, that had ended in quadruple murder, memory of the photographs of which still made Collingswood close her eyes. The Dismembering of the Singers, while London struggled to recover from the Great Fire. In 1812, Walkers on the Face-Road had been Goss and Subby. Had to have been. Goss, King of the Murderspivs—that designation given him by a Roma intellectual who had, doubtless extremely carefully, resisted identification. Subby, whom the smart money said was the subject of Margaret Cavendish’s poem about the “babe of meat and malevolence.”

Goss and fucking Subby. Sliding shifty through Albion’s history, disappearing for ten, thirty, a hundred blessed years at a time, to return, evening all, wink wink, with a twinkle of a sociopathic eye, to unleash some charnel-degradation-for-hire.

There was no specificity to Goss and Subby. Try to get what information you can about precisely what their knacks were, what Collingswood still thought of as their superpowers, and all you’d get was that Goss was a murderous shit like no other. Supershit; Wonder-shit; Captain Total Bastard. Nothing funny about it. Call it banal if it makes you feel better but evil’s evil. Goss might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third. Whatever.

The first time Collingswood had read of them, it had been in a facsimile of a document from the seventeenth century, a description of the “long-fingered bad giver and his dead alive son,” and for some weeks afterward, unfamiliar with old fonts, she had thought them Goff and Fubby. She and Baron had had a good laugh at that.

“Fo,” she said. “Iff it? Iff it the work of Goff and Fubby?” Baron did, in fact, briefly, laugh. “Iff it their MO?”

And there was the problem. Goss and Subby had no such thing as an MO. Baron, Vardy and Collingswood peered at the preserved man. They referred to their notes, made more, circumnavigated the corpse, muttered to themselves and each other.

“All we can say for sure,” said Baron at last, peering, leaning in, “is that so far as we know, there’s no record of them having done anyone in like this before. I pulled the files. Vardy?”

Vardy shrugged. “We’re flying blind,” he said. “We all know that. But you want my opinion? Ultimately I think … my opinion’s no. What I know of their methods, it’s always been up-close, hands, bones. This is … something else. I don’t know what this is, but this isn’t that, I don’t think.”

“Alright,” said Baron. “So we’re after Goss and bloody Subby, and we’re also looking for someone else, who pickles their enemies.” He shook his head. “Lord, for a bloody Grievous Bodily Harm. Alright, ladies and gents, let’s get moving on this fellow. We need an ID on the poor sod ASAP. Among many other bloody things.”

Chapter Nineteen

INTO NEW LONDON? THE CITY’S VAST UNSYMPATHETIC ATTENTION’S on you, the Teuthex said. You’re hunted. Billy imagined himself emerging big-eyed as a fish, and London—where the Tattoo, Goss, Subby, the workshop waited—noticing. Oh there you are.

He walked almost as if free under the city. More than once Krakenists passed him and stared and he stared back at them, but they did not interrupt him. In places the grey bas-reliefs of cephalopods were crumbled and beneath were antique bricks. He found a door into a bright-lit room.

It made him gasp. It had the side-to-side proportions of a small sitting room, but its floor was way below. Absurdly deep. Steps angled down. It was a shaft of roomness, shelved with books. Ladders dangled from the stacks. As the church’s holdings grew, Billy thought, horizontal constraints required generations of kraken worshippers to dig for their library.

Billy read titles on his way down. A Tibetan Book of the Dead by the Bhagavad Gita, by two or three Qur’ans, testaments old and new, arcana and Aztec theonomicons. Krakenlore. Cephalopod folklore; biology; humour; art and oceanography; cheap paperbacks and antiquarian rarities. Moby-Dick, shapes etched onto its cover. Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. A Pulitzer medal escutcheon stapled to a single page of one book, on which the line “Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness” was the only part left visible below paint. The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch, nailed upside down like something unholy.

Tennyson and a book of poems by Hugh Cook faced each other, open to competing pages. Billy read the counter to Alfred Lord.

THE KRAKEN WAKES

The little silver fish
Scatter like shrapnel
As I plunge upward
From the black underworld.
The green waves break from my sides
As I roll up, forced by my season,
And before the tenth second
I can feel my own heat—
The wind can never cool as oceans do.

By mid-morning,
My skin has sweated into agony.
The turmoil of my intestines
Bloats out against my skin.
I’m too sick to struggle—I hang
In the thermals of pain,
Screaming against the slow, slow, slow
Rise toward descent.

And the madness of my pain
Seems to have infected everything—
Cities hack each other into blood;
Ships sink in firestorm; armies
Flail with sticks and crutches;
Obesity staggers toward coronary
Down the streets of starvation.

“Jesus,” Billy whispered.

Samizdat, sumptuous hardbacks, handwritten texts, dubious-looking output from small presses. Apocrypha Tentacula; On Worship of Kraken; The Gospel According to Saint Steenstrup.

We cannot see the universe, Billy read in a text taken at random. It was cobbled in incompetent typeface.

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.

This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway.

Old volumes bulged with addenda, were embossed Catechismata. Scrapbooks with glued-in snips. Annotated and those notes annotated, and on in unstinting interpretation, a merciless teuthic hermeneutic.

He read the names Dickins and Jelliss, Alice Chess. A spread about mutant versions of the game with arcane rules, bishops and pawns given strange powers, transmogrified pieces called saurians, torals and anti-kings, and one called a kraken. The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was. Kraken = universal leaper + zero, he read, = universal sleeper. It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

On the board & in life for Kraken in the void nothing is not nothing. Kraken stillness is not lack. Its zero is ubiquity. This is the movement that looks like not moving, & it is the most powerful move of all.

Price rises were a function of neutral buoyancy, Billy read. Art Nouveau was coil-envy. Wars were meagre reflections of speculated kraken politics.

AFTER UNCOUNTED HOURS BILLY LOOKED UP AND SAW, BY THE room’s raised entrance, a young woman. He remembered her from one of the moments during his visions. She stood in her nondescript London uniform of hoodie and jeans. She bit her lip.

“Hi,” she said, shy. “It’s an honour. They said that, like, everyone out there’s looking for you. The angel of memory and everything, Dane said.” Billy blinked. “Teuthex said do you want to come, and they’d be glad if you was … if you want follow me because they’re waiting.”

He followed her to a smaller room, containing one big table and many people. Dane and Moore were there. A few of the other men and women were in robes like the Teuthex’s; most were in civvies. Everyone looked angry. On the table was a digital recorder. The noise of rowdy debate stopped with his entry. Dane stood.

“Billy,” said Moore after a moment. “Please join us.”

“I protest,” someone said. There were murmurs.

“Billy, please join us,” Moore said.

“What is this?” Billy said.

“There’s never been a time like this,” Moore said. “Are you interested in the future?” Billy said nothing. “Do you ever read your horoscope?”

“No.”

“Sensible. You can’t see the future, there’s no such thing. It’s all bets. You’ll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn’t mean either of them’s wrong.”

“Might be,” Dane said.

“They might,” Moore said. “But it’s all degrees of might. You want your prognosticators to argue. You never told us what you dreamed, Billy. Something coming up? Everyone can feel something coming up. Since the kraken disappeared. And no one disagrees.” He brought together his hands in a reverse explosion. “And that’s wrong.

“This is a recording we made of a consultation with the Londonmancers,” he said.

“What’s …?” Billy said.

“Well you may ask,” said Dane.

“Voices of the city,” Moore said.

“They wish.”

“Dane, please. Oldest oracles in the M25.”

“Sorry,” Dane said. “But Fitch has been off for years. Just tells you what you want to hear. People just go for tradition …”

“Some of the others are sharper,” said someone else.

“You’re forgetting,” the Teuthex said. “It was the Londonmancers called it first. Fitch may be past it, true. People go out of tradition, true.”

“Sentiment,” Dane said.

“Maybe,” Moore said. “But this time it was him called it. He’s been begging people to pay attention.” He pressed Play.

“—best if you ask,” said a curt digital voice.

“That’s Saira,” Moore said.

“—what you’re here for.”

“Something’s coming up, underneath everything.” It was the Teuthex. “We’re looking for a path between possible—”

“Not this time.” An old man’s voice. He muttered in and out of sense. He sounded urgent, in a confused way. “Have faith, but you have to do something, understand? You’re right, it’s coming, and you have to … It’s all ending.”

“Have faith in what?” the Teuthex said. “In London?”

The old man Fitch maundered about back streets and hidden histories, described pentacles in the banalities of town planning. “Time was I’d have said that,” he abruptly said.

“I don’t understand …”

“No one does. I know what you think. What did they tell you? Did anyone tell you what’s coming? Did they? No. They all know something is. None of them saw any way past it, did they? Something,” Fitch said, and his voice sounded like the voice of dust, “is coming. London’s been telling you. Something happened and there’s no running the numbers. No argument this time. No getting away from it.”

“What is it?”

“The world’s closing in. Something rises. And an end. If any augur augurs you otherwise, sack ’em.” Billy heard despair. “Because they’re lying, or they’re wrong.”

“We need to be looking,” Dane said. “We need to be out there finding God. The Tattoo runs things. He won’t let anyone else have something that powerful.”

“What about the man you said was his enemy?” Billy said. “Might it be him who took it?”

“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “No. He weren’t a villain and he weren’t a man of gods. And he died.”

“Don’t people think you took it?” said Billy. Everyone stared at him.

“Everyone knows we wouldn’t,” the Teuthex said. “It’s not ours. It’s no one’s.” They were, Billy understood, the last people who would take it, that asymptote of their faith.

“What is it you want to do?” Dane said. “You say we need to understand the situation, but we have to hunt. We can deliver it from evil.”

“Enough,” the Teuthex said, silencing everyone else. “Does it not occur to you that this is a test? You really think God … needs rescuing?” He held himself like the head of a church, for the first time. “Do you know your catechism? What’s the most powerful piece on the board?”

At last Dane muttered, “Kraken’s the most powerful piece on the board.”

“Why?”

“… The movement that looks like not moving.”

“Act like you understand what that means.”

Moore stood and walked out. Billy waited. Dane walked out. The congregation left, one by one.

Chapter Twenty

FSRC HEADQUARTERS, ONE MIDDLE-SIZED ROOM CONTAINING cheap armchairs and Ikea office furniture. Collingswood rarely used a desk and had never claimed one of the various of them for herself, working instead with a laptop in a deep chair.

“What’s up with grumpy twat?” Collingswood said.

“By which we mean whom, today?” Baron said.

“Vardy. He’s been even quieter and grumpier than usual since this squid business.”

“You think? Seems pretty standard surly to me.”

“Nah.” Collingswood leaned in toward her screen. “What’s he even doing, anyway?”

“Getting to grips with the squid cult.”

“Right. Having a kip, then.”

Collingswood had seen Vardy’s methods. He crossed London, interrogating informants. He did a great deal of online trawling. Sometimes he would pursue a frenetic and focused following of a trail from book to book, reading a paragraph in one, dropping it and grabbing another from the sliding scree of them on his desk, or jumping up and finding one on the shelves that faced him, reading it as he returned so that by the time he sat down again he was already done with it. It was as if he had found a single compelling story smuggled in bits into countless books. There was also his channelling. He would sit, his fingers arching in front of his mouth, his eyes closed. He might rock. He would slip into that reverie and stay in it for minutes, maybe an hour.

“What do you think’s behind all the pangolin bones?” Baron might ask him, of some emerged oddball sect, or, “Any clue what that priestess meant by ‘stick-blood’?” or, “Where do we think they might sacrifice that boy?”

“Not sure,” Vardy would say. “Couple of ideas. I’ll have a think.” And his colleagues would be quieter, and Collingswood, if she were in the room, would make what a twat motions, or pretend to intend to spill her drink on him or something.

He would stay like that a long time, at last snap open his eyes and say something like, “It’s not to do with the armour. Pangolins are bipedal. That’s what this is about. That’s why they kidnapped that dancer …” Or: “Greenford. Of course. The changing rooms of some disused swimming pool. Quick, we haven’t got long.”

“He can’t move for squid stuff,” Baron said. “Last time I looked he had the notes on Archie’s preservation and a bunch of articles on squid metabolism. And some leaflets for that Beagle trip.”

Collingswood raised her eyebrows. “I can’t get any sniff about that business in Putney,” she said. “Too much going on. The fucking squid’s got everyone on edge. The number of cranks calling in you would not believe.”

“How are you doing with it all?”

She made a rude noise. “Fuck off, guv,” she said. She did not tell him about her new recurring nightmare, of being thrown from a car, hurtling toward a brick wall.

“It’s definitely for us though, this Putney thing?”

“If I had to put dosh down,” said Collingswood. “Bruises like that.” A body had been listlessly humping the stony shoreline with the slap-slap of the water. He was a journalist with a special interest in labour, who appeared to have been crushed. The murder had been passed to FSRC when a pathologist had pointed out that the four huge bludgeoning wounds on the man’s chest looked a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist.

Baron glanced at his screen. “Email from Harris.”

“Am I right then?” Collingswood said. She had mooted the possibility that the body they had found in the basement—“Leave aside the doesn’t-fit-in-the-fucking-jar thing for a minute, boss”—was nothing to do with the squid case. Was, in fact, some many-years-old arcane gangland hit that Billy had stumbled onto at that moment of heightened sensitivities. “He’s got something,” she had said. “A bit of nous. Maybe all stressed he sniffed something.”

“Hah,” said Baron, and sat back. “Alright then. You’re going to like this, Kath. You’re right.”

“What?” She sat up fast enough to spill her coffee. “Bollocks. Really, guv?”

“Harris says the body was put in the bottle, she reckons, a good hundred years ago. That’s how long it’s been in that muck.”

“Holy shit. Bit of a turn-up, isn’t it?”

“Just you wait. That’s not all. There’s an ‘and.’ Or maybe I should say a ‘but.’ Isn’t there some word that means both?”

“Get on with it, guv.”

“So that body’s been preserved like that for a century. But-stroke-and. Have you heard of GG Allin?”

“Who the eff’s that?”

“Search me. Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google. He was a singer, says here. Though it also says that stretches the definition. Delightful. ‘Scum rocker,’ it says here. More of a Queen man myself. ‘Don’t stand in the front row,’ Harris says. Anyway, he died about a decade ago.”

“So what?”

“So we should probably not ignore the fact that one of our deceased chap’s tattoos reads ‘GG Allin and the Murder Junkies.’”

“Oh, shit.”

“Indeed. He was apparently pickled several decades before he got his tattoo.” They looked at each other.

“You want me to find out who he was, don’t you?”

“No need,” he said. “We got a hit. He’s on the database.”

“What?”

“Fingerprints, DNA, the whole lot. That would be the DNA that is both a century old, and also gives his DOB as 1969. Name of Al Adler. AKA various stupid things. They do love their nicknames.”

“What did he get done for?”

“Burglary. But that was because of a bargain, he got to do a bit of regular bird. The original charge was on the other list.” Codes against illicit magery. Adler had been breaking and entering by esoteric means.

“Associates?”

“Freelance when he was starting out. Did a stint as some sort of stringer for a coven in Deptford. Spent the last four years of his working life full-time with Grisamentum, it looks like. Disappeared when Griz died. Grisabloodymentum, eh?”

“Before my time,” Collingswood said. “I never met the bloke.”

“Don’t remind me,” Baron said. “It should be illegal to be so much younger than me. He was alright, Grisamentum. I mean, you never know who you can trust, but he helped out a few times.”

“So I bloody gather. Geezer does crop up. What exactly did he do?”

“He was a bit of a one,” Baron said. “Finger in a lot of pies. Sort of a player. It’s all gone a bit tits-up since he died. He was a good counterweight.”

“Didn’t you tell me he didn’t die with …”

“Yeah, no. It wasn’t anything battley and dramatic. He got sick. Everyone knew about it. Worst-kept secret. I tell you what though: his funeral was pretty bloody amazing.”

“You were there?”

“Certainly I was.”

The Metropolitan Police could not not mark so important a passing. So advertised a good-bye. The details of where and how Grisamentum would valedictory the city had been leaked so ostentatiously they were clearly summonses.

“How’d you finesse it?” Collingswood said. Baron smiled.

“A not-very-competent surveillance, ooh, look at us, you all saw us, tish, we’re so silly.” He waggled his head.

Collingswood was long-enough inducted, subtle enough in her policeness now, stalwart of the FSRC and London protocols to understand. The police could not officially attend the passing of so questionably licit a figure, but nor could they ignore that public event, show disrespect or ingratitude. Hence a mummery, an act designed to be seen through, the putative incompetence of their spying on the event leaving them seen, and understood to have attended.

Collingswood said, “So what did Adler do? To get bottled?”

“Who knows? What he did to piss somebody off, your guess is as good as mine.”

“My guess is way better than yours, guv,” she said. “Get the necessary, I’ll fetch my shit.”

She went to her locker for an old glyph-fucked board, a candle, a pot of unpleasant tallow. Baron sent Harris an email, requesting a rag of Adler’s skin, a bone, a hank of his hair.

HE COULD NOT LEAVE, BUT HE WAS NOT OTHERWISE RESTRAINED. Billy spent hours in the sunken library. He saturated himself in deepwater theology and poetics. He looked for specifics about the teuthic apocalypse.

A swallowing up and a shitting out, taken from darkness, in darkness. A terrible biting. The elect like, what, skin-bugs, little parasites on or in the great holy squid body, carried through the vortex. Or not, depending on specifics. But it wasn’t like this. When at last one time he sighed and took off his glasses and reshelved verses on the tentacular, blinked and rubbed his eyes, he was startled to see several men and women who had been in the meeting with the Teuthex. He stood. They were various in age and clothes, though not in their respectful expressions. He had not heard them enter or descend.

“How long’ve you been here?” he said.

“We had a question,” said a woman in a gown, gold tentacle-sigil winking. “You worked on it. Was there anything about this kraken that was … special?”

Billy ran his hands through his hair. “You mean was it specially special? Unusual for a giant squid?” He shook his head hopelessly. “How would I know?” He shrugged. “You tell me. I’m not one of your prophets.”

Whoa. Something rushed around the room at that. Everyone looked sheepish. What …? thought Billy. What was—? Oh.

Of course he was one of their prophets.

“Oh shit,” he said. He slumped against the bookshelf. He closed his eyes. That was why they had given him dreams. They weren’t just anyone’s dreams: they were there to be read.

Billy looked at the books, textbooks next to the visions. He tried, like Vardy, to channel vicarious Damascene scenes. He could imagine these faithful seeing cephalopod biologists as unknowing saints, their vision unknown even to themselves and the purer for that, stripped of ego. And him? Billy had touched the body of God. Kept it safe, preserved it against time, ushered in Anno Teuthis. And because of Goss and the Tattoo, he had suffered for God, too. That was why this congregation protected him. He was not just another saint. Billy was the preserver. Giant-squid John the Baptist. The shyness he saw in the Krakenists was devotion. It was awe.

“Oh for God’s sake,” he said.

The men and women stared. He could see them attempting exegesis on his outburst.

ANY MOMENT CALLED NOW IS ALWAYS FULL OF POSSIBLES. AT TIMES of excess might-bes, London sensitives occasionally had to lie down in the dark. Some were prone to nausea brought on by a surfeit of apocalypse. Endsick, they called it, and at moments of planetary conjuncture, calendrical bad luck or mooncalf births, its sufferers would moan and puke, struck down by the side effects of revelations in which they had no faith.

Right then it was swings and roundabouts. On the one hand, such attacks were getting rarer. After years of being martyrs to somebody else’s martyrs, the endsick had never been so free of the trouble. On the other hand, this was because the very proliferation, the drunkenness of an unclosed universe that had always played merry hell with their inner ear, was collapsing. And something was replacing it. Instead of all those maybes, underlying them all, approaching dimly and with gathering speed, was something simple and absolutely final.

What was this queasiness that had come in in place of the other queasiness, the sensitives wondered? What was this new discomfort, this new cold illness? Oh, right, they began to realise. That’s what it is. It’s fear.

Animals were afraid, too. Rats went to ground. Seagulls went back to the sea. London foxes rutted in a terrified hormonal swill, and their adrenalin made them good quarries for the secret urban hunts. For most Londoners, all this was so far visible only in an epidemic of birdlime, the guano of terror, as pigeons began to shit themselves. Shops were covered. In Chelsea, Anders Hooper stared at the window of Nippon This! and shook his head in disgust. With a little ding his door opened. Goss and Subby walked in.

“Bertrand!” Goss said, and gave him a friendly wave. Subby stared. “You got me so excited, I had another question for you!”

Anders backed away. He felt for his mobile phone. “You call us if you hear anything else from them, right?” Baron had said, and given him a card, the location of which he was trying to remember. Anders bumped into the wall. Goss leaned on the counter.

“So anyway,” Goss said. “There we are, Subby and me and, oh, you know, all of us. You know. ’Course you know, you of all bleeding mathematicians, eh? So the question is, what’s the skinny?” He smiled. He breathed out cigarette smoke he had never breathed in.

“I don’t understand,” Anders said. In his pocket, he thumbed for the 9 button.

“No, of course,” Goss said. Subby walked under the flap in the counter and stood next to Anders. Touched his arm. Tugged his sleeve. Anders failed to dial. Tried again.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Goss said. He pronounced it mo-wah. “I could not agree more. It’s all a bit much at the jockey club, which is why we had to put that doping little saddler bang to rights. Imagine my surprise when I heard my name. Eh? All for the best.” He tapped the side of his nose, and winked. “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

Anders felt as if cold water filled his belly. “Wait.”

“Did you was be chatting up my gob handle? Would I be right in that? Now all manner of whatnots are asking after me!” Goss laughed. “It’s all a bit of a pony. Say my name, say my name! You said my name.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t even know your name …”

Anders brought his thumb down, but there was a rush of air, a fast and cut-off bang. Anders saw no motion. All he knew was that Goss was on one side of the counter, Anders pressed the button on his phone, there was noise, the hatch was still sailing slowly through the air in a trail of splinters, and Goss was on the other side of the counter, in front of him, up close to him, holding his wrist and squeezing it so that Anders let go of his phone and gasped.

The hatch hit the floor. Goss made a chat-chat motion with his free hand. “You talky little fellow,” he said. “You and Subby, never a bloody word in!”

Anders could smell Goss’s hair. Could see the veins below the skin of his face. Goss pulled his face up close. His breath smelt of nothing at all. It was like air wafted by a paper fan. Until another breath and smoke came. Anders began to whimper.

“I read them books,” Goss said. Inclined his head toward the origami shelves. “I read them to Subby. He was enthralled. En. Fucking. Thralled. Never you Very Hungry Caterpillar me, with this one it was all ‘Oh, now tell me how to make a carp! Now how do I make a horsey?’ I’m ever so good at that one now. Let me show you.”

“I never told anyone,” Anders said. “I don’t know who you are …”

“Shall we make an apple tree?” Goss said. “Shall we make a tortoise? Fold and fold and fold.” He began to fold. Anders began to scream. “I’m not as good at it as you!” Goss laughed.

Goss folded, with wet-flesh sounds, and cracks. Eventually Anders stopped screaming, but Goss continued to fold.

“I don’t know, Subby,” he said, at last. He wiped his hands on Anders’s coat. He squinted at his handiwork. “I need more practice, Subby,” he said. “It isn’t quite as much like a lotus as I’d have liked.”

Chapter Twenty-One

BILLY WOKE AS IF RISING OUT OF WATER. HE GASPED. HE PUT HIS head in his trembling hands. In that deep dream, what he had seen was this.

He had been a point of awareness, a soul-spot, a sentient submerged node, and had drifted over an ocean floor that he had seen in monochrome, lightless as it would have been, and that had pitched suddenly into a crevasse, a Mariana Trench of water like clotted shadow. His little selfless self had drifted. And after an inconceivably long time of that drifting, again he had seen a thing below him, rising. A flattening of the dark, coming up out of dark. Beggaring perspective. Dream-Billy knew what it would be, and was afraid of its arms, its many limbs and endless body. But when it came into water faintly lit enough that he could see its contours, it was a landscape he recognised, because it was him. A Billy Harrow face, Atlantean, eyes open and staring into the sky all the way above. The huge him was long lifeless. Pickled. Skin scabbed, church-sized eyes cataracted by preservation, vast clammy lips peeled back from teeth too big to imagine. A conserved Billy-corpse thrown up by some submerged cataclysm.

Billy shivered on his bed. He had no idea if it was the start of a day outside, or if whatever schedule he was given came according to the church’s clockless grooves. He wanted suddenly and very much to tell Marge that Leon was dead. He had not thought of her, until then, and he was ashamed. He shut his eyes tight and held his breath at the thought of Leon. Billy tried to flex whatever inner thing it was that he had touched when Goss had come for him, when the glass had broken and hesitated.

On his tray was a glass of murky drink. The inky posset. No one would spike him secretly anymore—the choice was his. The offer was there, the hope, though he was dreaming without the ink’s help. Billy was a hostage-prophet, augur-inmate. He was being played as a piece in a variant game of apocalypse.

You were supposed to run the numbers. Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes. That variation, the disagreements, indispensable to the calculation. Triangulating possibilities. No one knew what to do now prognosticators all agreed. Billy gripped the frame of the bed. He stared at the ink-intoxicant.

There was a knock and Dane entered. He leaned against the wall. He wore a coat and carried a bag. For a long time, neither man spoke. They just looked at each other.

“I’m not your prophet, Dane,” Billy said. “Thanks for saving my life. I never said that yet. I’m sorry about that. But this is … You have to let me go.” Still sought, yes, but. “You can help me.”

Dane closed his eyes. “I was born in the church,” he said. “My mum and dad met through it. It was my granddad, my dad’s dad, who was the one really into it. It was him taught me. He used to do catechism with me. But I mean, that’s bollocks, ain’t it? It’s not about reciting like a parrot. It’s about understanding. He used to talk me through it.”

He opened his eyes and took equipment out of his bag, checked it, put it back. A spearhead emerged from the muzzle of what looked like a pistol. “Most of my friends … Well you know what it’s like with church and kids. They don’t stick with it, do they? Me, though … I had a calling. You know what the Teuthex said.” Dane examined his kit. “We can protect you. You’re being hunted by Goss and fucking Subby. Everyone wants what’s in your head, Billy. I know, I know, don’t tell me, there’s nothing in your head. Whatever.”

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

“My job. I done such things for the church. You can’t ask me all the things I done for the church, ’cause I won’t tell you. All the faiths got their …” There was a pause during which even the empty hallways seemed to wait.

“Crusaders,” Billy said.

Dane shrugged. “I was going to say oddjobsmen. Go-to guys.” The hashish-eaters; the Hospitallers; Francis X. Killy. Sanctioned wet-workers of the devout. “Everyone’s got apocalypse brigades, Billy, for when it all goes down. Waiting like kings under hills. They couldn’t exactly go undercover.” He laughed. “They couldn’t exactly get a job at the Darwin Centre.”

Dane lifted his shirt. His skin was studded with keloid marks. He pointed and one by one named them like little pets. “Clockworkers,” he said. “Saviour Sect. Mary Martyrs. This one …” A long and snaky path. “That’s not from a godfight, that one, just a straight-on face-off with a crook. He was stealing from us.”

Footsteps approached but passed on. Dane looked at the ceiling. “You know what the question is?” he said. “What is it you’re loyal to. God? The church? The pope? What if they don’t agree?” He kept his gaze up. “What you want and what I want ain’t the same thing. You want to be safe, and … not to be a prisoner. Which do you want more? Because it’s safer here. You want a bit of revenge, too? What I want’s my god. Maybe that’s in the same direction for a bit.

“If we do this, Billy, you and me, I got to know you’re not going to run. I ain’t threatening you—I’m telling you you’ll die if you try to deal with shit on your own. If we do this I’ll help you, but you have to help me. That means you got to trust me.

“It ain’t going to be safe even a tiny bit, understand? If we go. You got everyone after you.” He lifted the bag.

“You’ll be safer if you stay here. But they won’t let you go. They want to know what you see.” He tapped his head.

“Why are you doing this?” Billy’s heart was speeding again.

“Because it ain’t our place just to watch. There’s a god to save.”

“They think it’s the right thing,” Billy said. “I read about the movement without movement. Moore thinks he’s doing the holy thing, moving like a kraken on a board. By not moving.”

“Well ain’t it convenient that this interpretation lets him sit on his arse? They won’t let you go. I want your help, but I ain’t going to force you. Time ain’t with us. So?”

“I’m not what you think,” Billy said. “I’m not a saint, Dane, just because I cut up a squid.”

“Are you more worried about being a prisoner or a saint?” Dane said. “I ain’t asking you to be anything.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You fallen in the middle of a war. I’m not going to bullshit you, I’m not going to tell you you can get your revenge for your mate. You can’t take Goss and neither can I. That ain’t what I’m offering. We don’t know who has the kraken, but we know the Tattoo’s after it. If he gets hold of something like that …

“It’s him who got your friend killed. The best way to ruin his day’s to get the god back. Best I can do.”

Billy could stay among obsequious jailers. Offering him hallucinogen, taking devout and monkish notes on whatever drivel he subsequently raved.

“Will they come after you?” Billy said. “If you go rogue?”

What this renegacy would mean! Dane would be without the church that made him, an apostate hero taking faith into the heart of darkness, a paladin in hell. A lifetime of obedience, followed by what?

“Oh yeah,” Dane said.

Billy nodded. He pocketed the ink. He said, “Let’s go.”

THE TWO MEN ON DUTY AT THE GATE LOOKED SHOCKED AS DANE approached. They nodded. They piously averted their eyes from Billy. It made him want to pretend to speak in tongues.

“I’m out,” Dane said. “On a job.”

“Sure,” said the younger doorman. He transferred his shotgun from arm to arm. “Let us just …” He fumbled with the door. “Only,” he said, and pointed at Billy. “Teuthex said we need his permission …”

Dane rolled his eyes. “Don’t bugger me around,” he said. “I’m on a mission. And I need him for a moment to taste some stuff out. Need what’s in there.” Tapped Billy’s head. “You know who he is? What he knows? Don’t waste my time, I’m bringing him straight back.” The two men looked at each other. Dane said, in a low voice, “Do not waste my time.”

What, were they going to disobey Dane Parnell? They opened the gate.

“Don’t lock it,” Dane said. “He’ll be back in a second.” He led Billy up the stairs, Billy behind him risking a tiny backward glance. Dane pushed open the trapdoor and pulled him out past bulwarks of rubbish, into the rear room of the South London Church of Christ.

LIGHT BURST THROUGH WINDOWS. LONDON DUST SETTLED AROUND them. Billy blinked.

“Welcome to exile,” Dane said quietly, lowering the door. He was a traitor now, in his fidelity to his duty. “Come on.” They went past the kitchen, the toilet, the bric-a-brac. In the main room, chairs were circled. Billy and Dane came out into a meeting of mostly elderly women, who broke off chatting.

“Alright love?” one said, and another, “Is everything okay, sweetheart?” Dane ignored them.

“Do they …” Billy whispered. “Do they worship the, the kraken …?”

“No, they’re Baptists. Mutual protection. Any second the Teuthex’s going to find out we’re gone. So we’ve got to get far away, fast. Follow me close and do exactly what I say, when I say. You try to go off on your own, Billy, and you will be found and you will die. Neither of us wants that. You understand? Walk quickly but don’t run.

“Are you ready?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

THERE WAS NO PLEASURE, NO I-TOLD-YOU-SO AMONG THE hedge-seers who had for so long predicted that the end was on its way. Now that everyone who cared to think about it agreed with them—though they might abjure the insight—those who found themselves suddenly and unexpectedly the advance guard of mainstream opinion were at a bit of a loss. What was the point of dedicating your life to giving warnings if everyone who might have listened—because the majority were still unbothered and would possibly remain so till the sun went out—merely nodded and agreed?

A plague of ennui afflicted London’s manic prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that ever since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, an obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.

No, they didn’t really know what that meant, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.

BILLY STUMBLED AT THE DAY, THE COLD SUNLIGHT, THE PASSERSBY. At people in everyday clothes carrying papers and bags and on their way to south London shops. None of them looked twice at him. The trees leaflessly scratched the sky. It was all washed out by the winter.

A clutch of pigeons rose, wheeled and disappeared over the aerials. Dane stared at their retreating forms with frank suspicion. He beckoned Billy.

“Move,” Dane said. “I don’t like the look of those birds.”

Billy listened to the flatness of his footsteps on tarmac, not echoing at all. His pulse was fast. There was a stretch of low skyline and neglected brickwork. The church behind them was little more than a big shed. “I really do not like the look of those birds,” Dane said.

They went past newsagents, past bins spilling from their rims, dogshit by trees, a row of shops. Dane walked them to a car. It was not the same one as before. He opened the door. There was a whisper.

“What?” Dane said. He looked up. “Was that …?” There was no other noise. He was looking at a crude clay dragon, a little Victorian flourish in the matter of a roof, ajut from its vertex. He hustled Billy into the car.

“What was that?” Billy said. Dane let out a shaking breath as he drove.

“Nothing,” Dane said. “It’s a thought, though. God knows we need some help. We need to put some mileage behind us.” Billy did not recognise any streets. “Any second now London’s going to be teeming with my pissed-off crew. Ex-crew.”

“So where are we going?”

“We get underground. Then we start hunting.”

“And … what about the cops?” Billy said.

“We ain’t going to the police.” Dane smacked the wheel. “They can’t do shit. And if they could, it wouldn’t be what we want them to. Why do you think they’re looking? They want it for themselves.”

“So what are you going to do with it if you find it, Dane?”

Dane looked at him. “I’m going to make sure no one else gets it.”

DANE HAD HIS HIDES. IN EMPTY-LOOKING SHELLS, IN SHABBY squats, in neat-seeming places that appeared to have permanent tenants holding down jobs respectable and unrespectable.

“We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”

“Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”

“Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.

“Are you the only one?” Billy said.

“No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”

Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was …” He shook his head. “Is that his … knack?”

“His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”

Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.

“Whose is all this?” he said.

“In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.

Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope, crocodile-clipped to knickknacks. When he plugged it in there was a thud, waves fluxed on the screen and the air felt dryer.

“Alright,” Dane said. “Bit of security.”

Alarm systems and signal-jammers fucking with the flows of sentience and sensation—magic. Call it “knocking,” Billy told himself. The occult machines left not nothing, not a void that would attract attention like a missing tooth, but projected a shred of presence for remote-sensors, a construct soul. The residue of a pretend person.

When Dane went to the bathroom, Billy did not try to leave. He did not even stand by the door and wonder.

“Why don’t you want this?” Billy said when Dane returned. He raised his hands to indicate everything. “The end, I mean. You say it’s ending. I mean, it’s your kraken doing it …”

“No, it ain’t,” Dane said. “Or not like it’s supposed to.”

It would have made sense to Billy, had Dane hedged and hemmed and hawed, dissembled and evaded. It could not be so uncommon a phenomenon, the last-minute cold feet of the devout. Absolutely I was all signed up for the apocalypse but right now? Like this? It would have made sense, but that was not what this was. Billy knew then and quite certainly that had Dane trusted that this was the horizon of which he had read and catechised since his feisty fervent youth, he would have gone along with it. But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. That was the problem. It was according to some other plan. Some other schema. Something had hijacked the squid finality. This was and was not the intended end.

“I need to get a message to someone,” Billy said. Dane sighed. “Hey.” Billy was surprised by the speed of his own anger, as he squared up. The big man looked surprised too. “I’m not your pet. You can’t order me around. My best friend died, and his girlfriend needs to know.”

“That’s well and good,” Dane said. He swallowed. His effort to stay calm was alarming. “But there’s one mistake there. You say I can’t order you around. Oh I can. I have to. You do what I tell you or Goss or Subby or the Tattoo or any one of all the others out there looking for you will find you, and then if you’re very lucky you’ll just die. You understand?” He prodded Billy’s chest one, two, three times. “I just exiled myself, Billy. I am not having a good day.”

They stared at each other. “Tomorrow the real shit begins,” Dane said. “Right now, there’s nowhere as much knacking floating around as you’d think. There’s what you could call a power shortage. That gives us opportunities. I don’t just know church people, you know.” He opened his bag. “We might not have to do this totally alone.”

“Let’s make sure,” Billy said carefully. “Just answer me this. I mean … I know you don’t want to get the police in, but … What about just Collingswood? She’s not like the leader of that lot—she’s a constable—but she’s obviously got something. We could call her …” The flat anger of Dane’s face hushed him.

“We ain’t dealing with that lot,” he said. “You think they’ll keep us safe? They won’t mess with us? You think she ain’t going to hand us right over?”

“But …”

“‘But’ fuckity shite, Billy. We stick to who I know.” Dane brought out maps of London felt-tipped with additions, sigils on parkland and routes traced through streets. A speargun, Billy saw to his surprise, like a scuba diver might carry.

“You’ve never shot, right?” Dane said. “Maybe we need to get you something. I didn’t … I didn’t have time to plan this a whole lot, you know? I’m thinking who might help. Who I’ve run with.” He counted off on his fingers, and scribbled names. “My man Jason. Wati. Oh, man, Wati. He’s going to be angry. If we want to get a talisman or anything we need to go to Butler.”

“Are these kraken people?”

“Hell no, the church is out,” Dane said. “That’s closed. We can’t go there. These are people I’ve run with. Wati’s a red, good guy. Butler, it’s all about what he saw: he can get you defences. Jason, Jason Smyle, he’s a good bet.”

“Hey, I know that name,” Billy said. “Did he work at … the museum?” Dane smiled and shook his head. No, thought Billy, the familiarity abruptly gone.

They ate from the bag of junk food Dane had bought. There were two beds, but like campers they dossed down on the living room floor. This was a landscape through which they were passing, a forest glade. They lay without speaking some time.

“How did it feel?” Dane said. “To work on the kraken.”

“… Like smelly rubber,” Billy said at last. Dane looked as if he would thunder disapproval, but then he laughed.

“Oh man,” said Dane. “You’re bad.” He shook his head. His grin was guilty. “Seriously. You telling me there was nothing? You’ve got something.” He clicked his fingers, made that spot of biophosphor, like a deep-sea squid. “You didn’t feel nothing?”

Billy lay back. “No,” he said. “Not then. It was earlier. I was rubbish at what I did, the first few months I was there. I didn’t even know if I’d stick it. But then all of a sudden I got much better. That was when it felt something special. Like I could preserve anything, any way I wanted.”

“What about in the alley?” Dane said. Billy looked at him across the dark room. Dane spoke carefully. “When Goss was coming for you. You did something, then. Did that feel like something?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“If you say so, Billy,” Dane said. “My granddad was a holy man. He used to ask me who my favourite saint was. He said you could tell a lot about someone if you knew that. So I’d say Kraken, because I wanted to be a good boy, and that was the right answer to most … religious questions. And he’d say, No, that’s cheating. Which saint? I couldn’t decide for ages, but suddenly one day I did. I told him.

“Saint Argonaut, I said. Really? he says. He wasn’t angry or nothing, he was just, like, surprised. But I think he liked that. Really? he goes. Not Saint Blue-Ring? Not Saint Humboldt? They’re your fighting saints. He said that because I was big like him and everyone knew I was going to be a soldier. Why Saint Argonaut? he goes. Because of that pretty spiral it makes, I says.”

Dane smiled beautifully, and Billy smiled back. He pictured the intricately fanned fractal eggcase Dane was describing, which gave the argonaut its other name. “Paper nautilus,” he said.

“He was a tough man, but he loved that,” Dane said.

When Dane went to the bathroom again, Billy opened the little bottle and dripped several bitter drops of the squid ink onto his tongue. He lay back and waited in the dark. But even with all the adrenalin of that day, and the inadequate snack supper, he went quickly to blank sleep, and outraced any visions or dreams.

Chapter Twenty-Three

WHAT MARGINALIA WAS THINKING WAS, WHAT THE HELL IS going on?

When Leon still did not answer any messages, she tried Billy, who did not answer either. She managed to persuade a locksmith of her bona fides, and at last got into Leon’s flat. Nothing was out of place. There was no hint to his location. She did not know Billy’s friends or family to call them.

Marge had walked into the police station closest to her when Leon had gone and not come back, when neither he nor Billy would answer their phones. She had reported two missing persons. The officers treated her with brusque sympathy, but they told her the number of people who disappeared every year, every week, and they told her how many soon returned from drunken trips or absentminded weekends. They told her it was best if she didn’t worry too much, and they warned her not to expect too much.

To her own great surprise, Marge began to cry in the station. The police were embarrassed and cack-handedly sweet, offering her tea and tissues. When she calmed down she went home, expecting nothing and not knowing what to do. But within an hour and a half of getting back (certain keywords coming up in the report of her visit, correlating with other words, the names she had mentioned attracting attention, Leon’s imperfectly recollected but telling last text, red-flagged on computer systems not nearly so hopeless as ostentatiously cynical commentators would claim) there was a knock at her door. A middle-aged man in a suit and a very young blonde woman offhandedly in police uniform. The woman carried a leash, but was not followed by any dog.

“Hello,” the man said. He had a thin voice. “It’s Miss Tilley, isn’t it? My name’s Baron. DCI Baron. This is my colleague WPC Collingswood. We need a word. I wonder if we might come in?”

Inside, Collingswood turned slowly, a full circle, taking in the dark walls, the posters for video events and basement electronica parties. Baron and Collingswood did not sit, though Marge gestured them at the sofa. She got a breath of some earthy, porky smell, and blinked.

“I gather you’ve mislaid some friends, Miss Tilley,” Baron said. Marge considered correcting him, Ms. did not bother.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you,” she said. “At your office they told me you couldn’t really do anything.”

“Ah, well, they don’t know what we know. What relation are you to Billy Harrow?”

“Billy? None at all. It’s Leon I’m with.”

“With?”

“I told you.”

“You haven’t told me anything, Miss Tilley.”

“I told them at the station. He’s my lover.”

Collingswood rolled her eyes and wobbled her head, La di fucking da. She click-clicked, as if at an animal, gestured with her chin toward the other rooms.

“And you haven’t heard anything from Leon since he went to meet Billy?” Baron said.

“I didn’t even know for sure that’s where he’d gone. How come you came so fast? I mean they said not to expect …” She opened her mouth in a sudden zero of terror. “Oh God, have you found him …?”

“No no,” said Baron. “Nothing like that. What it is is this is one of those dovetailing situations. Collingswood and I, we’re not generally Missing Persons, you see. We’re from a different squad. But we got a heads-up about your problem, because it may have bearing on our case.”

Marge stared at him. “… The squid thing? Is that what you’re investigating?”

“Fu-u-u-ck!” said Collingswood. “I knew it. That little bastard.”

“Ah.” Baron raised his eyebrows mildly. “Yes. We sort of wondered if Billy’d been able to resist a natter.”

“Got to give it to him, boss, for someone who don’t know what he’s doing, he’s got some clout. Come on, you.” She said the last to no one, so far as Marge could tell.

“We’d much rather you kept whatever he mentioned to yourself, if you don’t mind, Miss Tilley.”

“You think this has something to do with Leon going missing?” Marge said, incredulous. “And Billy? Where do you think they are?”

“Well, that’s what we’re looking into,” Baron said. “And you can rest assured we’ll let you know as soon as we know anything. Was Billy talking a lot about the squid? Had Leon been to see it? Was he a regular at the museum?”

“What? No, not at all. I mean, he’d seen it once, I think. But he wasn’t that interested.”

“Did he talk to you about it?”

“Leon?” she said. “You mean did he tell me about it disappearing? He thought it was hilarious. I mean he knew it was a big deal for Billy. But it was so weird, you know? He had to take the piss. I wasn’t even a hundred percent sure if Billy was bullshitting, you know?”

“Yeah, no,” Collingswood said.

“Why on earth would you think he’d make something like that up?” Baron said.

“Well. It hasn’t been in the news or anything, has it?”

“No,” said Baron. “Ah, but therein, therein is a tale. Of gag orders the like of which you’ve no idea.” He smiled.

“Anyway, it’s not like Leon approved of it. He just … the whole idea of it made him laugh. He texted me some joke about it before he …”

“Oh yeah,” said Collingswood. “It is quite the riot.”

“Come on,” said Marge. “Someone nicked a giant squid. Come on.”

“What can you tell us about Billy?” Baron said. “What do you think of him?”

“Billy? I don’t know. He’s alright. I don’t really know him. He’s Leon’s friend. Why are you asking?”

Baron glanced at Collingswood. She shook her head and tugged the lead. “Not a sausage,” she said. “Ooh, sorry Perky.”

“What’s going on?” Marge said.

“We’re just doing some detecting, Miss Tilley,” Baron said.

“Should I …? How worried should I be?”

“Oh, not very,” he said. “Would you, Kath?”

“Nah.” Collingswood was texting someone.

“You know the more I think about it, I don’t think this is related to what we’re up to. So if I were you I wouldn’t worry.”

“Yeah,” said Collingswood, still thumbing her message. “Nah.”

“Now,” said Baron, “obviously we’ll let you know if we realise otherwise. But I must say I’m doubtful. Many thanks.” He nodded. He touched his forefinger to the brow of his nonexistent cap; Cheerio then.

“Hey, what?” Marge said. “Is that it?” Collingswood was already by the door, popping her collars like a dandy. She winked at Marge. “What just happened?” Marge said. “Are you going? What happens now?”

Collingswood said to her, “Rest assured we’re going to leave no stone unturned in our search for wossname and thingy.”

Marge gasped. Baron said, “Now, Kath.” He shook his head, rolled his eyes at Marge like a tired father. “Miss Tilley, as soon as we have any ideas of what’s going on, we’ll be straight back in touch.”

“Did you hear what she said?”

“Kath,” Baron said, “off you go, get in the car. I did, I did, Miss Tilley. And I apologise.”

“I want to make a complaint.” Marge shook. She clenched and unclenched her fists.

“Of course. It’s absolutely your right to do so. You have to understand it’s just a question of Collingswood’s gallows humour. She’s an excellent officer, and that’s her way of dealing with the trauma we have to see every day. Not that it’s any excuse, I grant you. So you go ahead, it might shape her up.” He paused on his way out, his hand on the doorway. “I’ll let her know I’m very disappointed in her.”

“Wait, you can’t just leave now. How do I get in touch with you if I need …?”

“Your local station gave you a contact officer, right?” Baron said. “Go through her. She’ll pass on any information to me and my squad.”

“What the hell? You can’t just suddenly …” But the door was closing, and though she shouted demands to know what was going on, Marge did not follow the officers. She leaned against the door until a strong feeling that she would cry passed. She said to herself out loud, “What the fuck was that?”

What was it? It was a judgement call, and a bad one. It had been a hunch of the kind one infrequently hears about: a hunch that was wrong.

“Not a fucking thing,” Collingswood said. She lit a cigarette. The little winter wind snatched its smoke. “She doesn’t know shit,” Collingswood said.

“Agreed,” said Baron.

“And none of this has shit to do with her. We’re not going to get anything with that one.”

“Agreed,” said Baron.

“No one’s hexed bollock all anywhere near that flat,” Collingswood said. “Not like bloody Billy’s.” Someone or someones with soul or souls starched with witchery of one or other sort had certainly been there. At Billy’s place her poor aetherial animal companion had swivelled and whined and squealed so loud even Baron could hear him.

“You know there ain’t much stuff going on at the moment,” Collingswood said. “With everyone scared shitless of the UMA. So whatever trails get left would stick out more. You saw the piggy.” She shook the lead. “Well, I mean, you didn’t, but you know what I mean. Bloody nothing. So what’s the story? This Leon geezer part of something?”

“Doubtful,” Baron said. “From everything we can get he’s absolutely nothing. Just some typical everyday tosser.” He made a brrrr sound with his lips. “If he’s got anything to do with the kraken he’s been in deep cover for God knows how long. I think he’s just got snagged.” Collingswood listened for text-thoughts. She felt for her brief familiar sniffing the faint para-scent trails of what magery was in that street.

“Well, poor little sod,” she said.

“Quite. I doubt we’ll see him again. Or Billy.”

“Unless Billy’s our villain.” They pondered. “Did you hear what Vardy was going on about this morning?”

“Where is that man?” Baron said. “What’s he up to?”

Collingswood shrugged. “I dunno. He said something about chasing up Adler’s religious life.”

“Did he have one?”

“I dunno, guv. I’m not the one chasing. But did you hear what he said this morning? About the Krakenists?”

There were rumours already, of course, about all aspects of the theft, the murder, the mysteries. Nothing could stop rumours moving faster than horses. It was part of Baron’s and Collingswood’s job to overhear them. Vardy’s theological snitches had told him, and he had told his colleagues, that there were whispers of the shunning of high-profile worshippers in the teuthic church.

There was also, still, that growing apocalypse mutter.

It was a seller’s market for relics right then. Who could doubt that religion and organised crime were linked? As the bishops of one secret Catholic order asked whenever questions of business ethics arose, was Saint Calvi martyred to teach us nothing?

“So do we still think it’s definitely godders did this?” Collingswood said. She sniffed. “Krakenists or whatnot? Or is it maybe just fucking crooks?”

“Your guess,” Baron said, “is as good as mine. Fact it’s probably considerably better.”

“I’m still getting bollock all from snitches,” Collingswood said. She sniffed again.

“Whoa,” Baron said. “You’re … here.” He handed her a tissue. Her nose was bleeding.

“Oh you little fucking wankface,” Collingswood said. She pinched the top of her nose. “You cuntbandit.”

“Jesus, Kath, you alright? What’s all that?”

“It’s just tension, boss.”

“Tense? On a beautiful day like this?” She glared at him. “What’s got your goat?”

“Nothing. It’s not like that. It’s just …” She raised her hands. “It’s all this. It’s the fucking Panda.”

Through a meandering chain of half-arsed jokes, that was the name Collingswood and Baron had given the end on the edge of things. The end for which even the most tentatively apocalyptic faith was preparing. The magic reek of it had Collingswood, as a knack-smith, on edge: toothached, crampy, unsettled. She had been referring to that fearful approaching whatever-it-was repeatedly, until Baron had suggested giving it a shorthand. It had started as Big Bad Wolf, from where it had quickly become Sausage Dog, and ultimately Panda. The nickname did not help Collingswood feel any better about it.

“Whatever it is has to do with the fucking squid,” she said. “If we knew who’d taken the bugger …”

“We know who the top suspects are. Certainly if anyone in the office asks.” The devout might pay a lot for the corpse of a god. The FSRC listened and fished, ho ho, for word of the secretive Church of God Kraken. But the disappearance might be a more profane, though knacked and abnatural, crime. And that would be a complication.

Bureaucracies turf-war. The FSRC were the only officers in the Met who were anything other than blitheringly inadequate to deal with the eldritch nonsense of knackery. They were the state’s witches and hammers of witches. But their remit was a historical quirk. There were no Wizardry Squads in the UK Police. No SO21 to police Crimes of Magic. The Flying Squad did not. There was only the FSRC, and technically they were not concerned with the powers of ley lines, charmed words, invoked entities, et cetera—they were a cult squad, specifically.

In practice of course it was staffed by and kept watch on all those with questionable talents. FSRC computers were loaded with occult hexware and abgrades (Geas 2.0, iScry). But the unit was obliged to maintain appearances by describing all its work in terms of the policing of religion. They had to take care, if they concluded that it was purely secular abcriminality behind the Architeuthis disappearance, to stress what links they could with London’s heresiarchs. Otherwise they would lose jurisdiction. Without cult-games at the heart of the squidnapping, it would be handed over to some brusque unsubtle unit—Serious Crime, Organised Crime. Antiquities.

“God preserve us,” Collingswood said.

“Just hypothetically,” Baron said. “Between you and me. If this is crims, not godsquadders, you know who our top suspect is.”

“Tat-fucking-too,” said Collingswood.

Baron’s phone went. “Yeah,” he said into it. He listened and stopped walking. He looked sick, and sicker, and old.

“What?” Collingswood said. “What, boss?”

“Alright,” he said. “We’ll be there.” He shut the phone. “Goss and Subby,” he said. “I think they found out that Anders gave them to us. Someone … Oh, bugger me. You’ll see.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

WHEN BILLY WOKE HE REALISED THAT HIS DREAMS HAD BEEN nothing but the usual cobbled-together fag-ends of meaning.

Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?

He knew he was at war now. Billy stepped out into it. It wasn’t his city anymore, it was a combat zone. He looked up at sudden noises. He was a guerrilla, behind Dane. Dane wanted his god; Billy wanted freedom and revenge. Whatever Dane said, Billy wanted revenge for Leon and for the loss of any sense of his own life, and being at war with the Tattoo gave him at least a tiny chance for that. Right?

They were simply disguised. Hair flattened out for Billy, teased up for Dane. Dane wore a tracksuit; Billy was absurd in clothes stolen from the imaginary student. He blinked like the escapee he was, watched Londoners hurrying. Dane took a couple of seconds to open a new car.

“You got some magic key?” Billy said.

“Don’t be a twat,” Dane said. He was just using some criminal finger technique. Billy looked around the vehicle’s interior—there was a paperback, empty water bottles, scattered paper. He hoped with a hopeless sense of fret that this theft would not hurt someone he would like, someone nice. It was a pitiful equivocation.

“So …” Billy said. Here he was, in the trenches. “What’s the plan? We’re taking it to them, right?”

“Hunting,” Dane said. “We have leads to follow. But this is dangerous? I’m … Now I’m rogue you and me need some help. It ain’t true we got no allies. I know a few people. We’re going to the BL.”

“What?”

“The British Library.”

“What? I thought you wanted us to keep a low profile.”

“Yeah. I know. It ain’t a good place for us.”

“So why …”

“Because we have a god to find,” Dane snapped. “Alright? And because we need help. It’s a risk, yeah, but it’s mostly beginners’ territory. People who know what they want go other places.”

There was magery there, he said, but strictly newbie. For serious stuff you looked elsewhere. A deserted swimming pool in Peckham; the tower of Kilburn’s Gaumont State, no longer a cinema nor a bingo hall. In the meat locker of an Angus Steak House off Shaftsbury Avenue were the texts powerful enough to shift position when the librarians were not looking, which were said to whisper lies they wanted the reader to hear.

“Keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes open, watch and learn, show respect,” Dane said. “And don’t forget we’re hunted, so you see anything, tell me. Keep your head down. Be ready to run.”

It rained, briefly. When it rains, Dane quoted his grandfather, it’s a kraken shaking the water off its tentacles. When the wind blows, it’s the breath from its siphon. The sun, Dane said, is a glint of biophosphor in a kraken’s skin.

“I keep thinking about Leon,” Billy said. “I need to … I should tell his family. Or Marge. She should know …” It was nearly too heavy to articulate his feelings like that, and he had to stop speaking.

“You ain’t telling no one,” Dane said. “You ain’t talking to no one. You stay underground.”

The city felt like it was hesitating. Like a bowling ball on a hilltop, fat with potential energy. Billy recalled the snake unhinging of Goss’s jaw, bones jostling and a mouth with precipitous reconfiguration a doorway. Dane drove past a small gallery and a dry cleaners, a market collection of junk, tchotchkes in multiplicity, urban twee.

•   •   •

IN FRONT OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, IN THE GREAT FORECOURT, A little crowd was gathered. Students and other researchers, laptops clutched, in trendy severe spectacles and woolly scarves. They were gaping and laughing.

What they stared at was a little group of cats, walking in a complicated quadrille, languidly purposeful. Four were black, one tortoise-shell. They circled and circled. They were not scattering nor squabbling. They described their routes in dignified fashion.

Far enough away to be safe but still startlingly close were three pigeons. They strutted in their own circle. The paths of the two groups of animals almost overlapped.

“Can you believe it?” said one girl. She smiled at Billy in his foolish clothes. “You ever seen such a well-behaved bunch? I love cats.”

Most of the students, after a minute or two of amused watching, went past the cats into the library. There were a very few among the crowd, though, who looked not in humour but consternation. None of these men or women entered. They did not cross the stalked lines. Though it was early and they had only just arrived, on seeing the little gathering they would leave.

“What’s going on?” said Billy. Dane headed to the centre of the forecourt, where a giant figure waited. He was uneasy being out. He looked constantly to all sides, led Billy with a kind of cringing pugnacity toward the twenty-foot statue of Newton. The imagined scientist hunched, examining the earth, his compass measuring distance. A tremendous misunderstanding, it seemed, Blake’s glowering ecstatic grumble at myopia mistranslated by Paolozzi as splendid and autarch.

A broad man stood by the figure, in a puffy jacket and woolly hat and glasses. He carried a plastic bag. He looked to be muttering to himself. “Dane,” someone said. Billy turned, but there was no one in earshot. The hatted man waved at Dane, warily. His bag was full of copies of a left-wing newspaper.

“Martin,” said Dane. “Wati.” He nodded to the man, and the statue. “Wati, I need your help—”

“Shut your mouth,” a voice said. Dane stepped backward in obvious shock. “I will talk to you in a sodding minute.”

It spoke in a whisper, with a unique accent. It was between London and something bizarre and unplaced. It was a metal whisper. Billy knew it was the statue that spoke.

“Uh, okay,” the man with the newspapers said. “You’ve got stuff to do, I’m going to split. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

“Alright,” the statue said. Its lips did not move. It did not move at all—it was a statue—but the voice was whispered from its barrel-sized mouth. “Tell herself I said hi.”

“Alright,” the man said. “Later. Good luck. Solidarity to that lot.” He glanced at the cats. A nod good-bye to Dane, and one to Billy too. The man left a paper between Isaac Newton’s feet.

Dane and Billy stood together. The statue stayed heavily sat. “You come to me?” it said. “To me? You have got some nerve, Dane.”

Dane shook his head. He said quietly, “Oh, man. You heard …”

“I thought there’d been a mistake,” the voice said. “I got told, and I was like, no, that’s not possible, Dane wouldn’t do that. He’d never do that. I put a couple of watchers on your place to get you off the hook. Understand? How long I known you, Dane? I can’t believe you.”

“Wati,” said Dane. He was plaintive. Billy had never heard him like this before. Even arguing with the Teuthex, his pope, he had been surly. Now he wheedled. “Please, Wati, you have to believe me. I had no choice. Please hear me out.”

“What do you think you can say to me?” the Newton said.

“Wati, please. I ain’t saying what I done was right, but you owe me to at least listen. Don’t you? Just that?”

Billy looked between the hunching metal man and the kraken-cultist. “You know Davey’s café?” the statue said. “I’ll see you there in a minute. And as far as I’m concerned it’s to say good-bye, Dane. I just can’t believe you, Dane. I can’t believe you were scabbing.”

Noiselessly, something went. Billy blinked.

“What was that?” he said. “Who’ve we been talking to?”

“An old friend of mine,” Dane said heavily. “Who’s rightly pissed off. Rightly. That fucking squirrel. Idiot I am. I didn’t have time, I didn’t think I could risk it. I was racing.” He looked at Billy. “It’s your bloody fault. Nah, mate, I’m not really blaming you. You didn’t know.” He sighed. “This is …” He gestured at the statue, now empty. Billy did not know how he knew that. “That was, I mean, the head of the committee. The shop steward.”

Readers approached the library, saw the little groups of animals, laughed and continued or, those who looked as if they understood something, hesitated and left. The presence of the circling creatures barred them.

“You see what’s going on,” Dane said. Miserably he ran his hands over his head. “That is a picket line, and I am in trouble.”

“A picket? The cats and birds?”

Dane nodded. “The familiars are on strike.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

FROM THE ELEVENTH DYNASTY, THE DAWN OF THE MIDDLE Kingdom, many centuries before the birth of the man Christ, the better-off dwellers by the Nile were concerned to maintain their quality of life, in death.

Were there not fields in the afterworld? Did the crops of the nightlands, the farms of each of the hours of the night, not need harvesting and tending? Were there not households and the tasks that would mean? How could a man of power, who would never work his own land while alive, be expected to do so dead?

In the tombs, by their mummied masters, the shabtis were placed. They would do it.

They were made to do it. Created for those specifics. Little figures in clay or wax, stone, bronze, crude glass, or the glazed earthware faience, dusted with oxide. Shaped at first in imitation of their overlords like tiny dead in funeral wrappings, later without that coy dissembling, made instead holding adzes, hoes and baskets, integral tools cut or cast as part of their mineral serf bodies.

The hosts of figurines grew more numerous over centuries, until there was one to work each day of the year. Servants of, workers for the rich dead, rendered to render, to perform what had to be done in that posthumous mode of production, to work the fields for the blessed deceased.

Each was inscribed at its making with the sixth chapter of the Book of the Dead. Oh shabti, allotted me, their skins read. If I be summoned or decreed to do any work which must be done in the place of the dead, remove all obstacles that stand in the way, detail yourself to me to plough the fields, to flood the banks, to carry sand from east to west. “Here I am,” you shall say. “I shall do it.”

Their purpose was written on the body. Here I am. I shall do it.

THERE IS NO KNOWING BEYOND THAT MEMBRANE, THE MENISCUS OF death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses—that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

We gather, we intuit or think we have heard and understood, that there was effort in that place. There in Neter-Khertet, the flickered, judged dead of the kingdom had been trained into belief, strong enough to shape their post-death life into something like a cold unstable mimicking of their splendid eschatology. A vivid tableau imitated in stones, electricity and gruel. (What function of that post-dead stuff coagulated and thought itself Anubis? What Ammit the Heart-eater?)

For centuries the shabtis did what they were tasked. Here I am, they said in the dark unsound, and cut the uncrops, and harvested them, and channelled the not-water of death, carried the remembrance of sand. Made to do, mindless serf-things obeying dead lords.

Until at last one shabti paused by the riverbank-analogues, and stopped. Dropped the bundled shadow-harvest it had cut, and took the tools it was built carrying to its own clay skin. Effaced the holy text it had been made wearing.

Here I am, it shouted in what passed there for its voice. I shall not do it.

“IT NAMED ITSELF WATI,” DANE SAID. “‘THE REBEL.’ HE WAS MADE IN SetMaat her imenty Waset.” He said the strange place carefully. “Now called Deir el-Medina. In the twenty-ninth year of Ramses Three.”

They were in a new car. There was something giddying about the new accoutrements they ferried with each theft: the different toys, books, papers, debris ignored on each back seat.

“The royal tomb-builders weren’t paid for days,” Dane said. “They downed tools. About 1100 BC. They were the first strikers. I think it was one of them builders that built it. The shabti.”

Carved by a rebel, that ressentiment flowing through the fingers and the chisel and defining it? Made by the emotions that made it?

“Nah,” said Dane. “I think they watched each other. Either Wati or his maker learnt by example.”

SELF-NAMED WATI LED THE FIRST-EVER STRIKE IN THE AFTERLIFE. IT escalated. That first revolt of the shabti, the uprising of the made.

Insurrection in Neter-Khertet. Murderous fighting among the constructed, the smithed servants, split between rebels, the afraid, and the still-obedient, slave armies of the loyal. They shattered each other in the fields of the spirits. All confused, none used to the emotions they had accreted by some accident of agency, their capacity to choose their allegiance bewildering. The dead watched aghast, huddled among the ash-reeds of the river of death. Overseer gods came running from their own hours to demand order, horrified by the chaos in those bone-cold agricultural lands.

It was a brutal war of human spirits and quasi-souls made out of anger. Shabti killing shabti, killing the already dead, in heretic acts of meta-murder, sending the appalled souls of the deceased into some further afterlife about which nothing has ever been known.

The fields were full of the corpses of souls. Shabti were slaughtered in hundreds by gods but they killed gods too. The crude features of comrades no one had bothered to carve with precision making their own expressions out of the indistinct impressions given them, taking their axes and ploughs and the fucking baskets they were built carrying in a swarm over bodies the size of mountains with jackal heads howling and eating them but being overrun by us and hacked with our stupid weapons and killed.

Wati and his comrades won. You can bet that meant a change.

It must have been a shock for succeeding generations of highborn Egyptian dead. To wake in a strange fogged underworld scandalously off-message. The rituals of posthumous hierarchy to which their corpses had been piously subjected turned out to be antique, overthrown mummery. They and the worker-statue-spirit household they had had made to come with them were met by disrespectful representatives of the new shabti nation. Their own figurines swiftly recruited to the polity of that shadeland. The human dead were told, If you work, you may eat.

CENTURIES AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS GO, AND IMMIGRATION TO THAT afterland slows and ceases, and piece by piece and without complaint the shabti and those human souls who had made their peace with the rough democracy of the shabti deadland farmers fade, go out, move on, un-be, pass over, are no longer there. There is not much sadness. It is history, is all.

Wati will have none of that.

Here I am. I shall not do it.

He moved too, at last, but he moved not beyond nor to any dark or light but sideways, through borders between belief-worlds.

An epic trek, that curious passage through foreign afterlifes. Always toward the source of the river or the beginning of the road. Swimming up through Murimuria, passing up through the caverns of Naraka and the shade of Yomi, crossing the rivers Tuoni and Styx from the farthest shore back, to the ferrymen’s consternation, through a kaleidoscope flutter of lands, passing psychopomps of all traditions who had to pause with the new dead they were escorting and whisper to Wati, You’re going the wrong way.

Northers in bearskins, women in saris and kimonos, funerary glad-rags, bronze-armoured mercenaries, the axes that had killed them bouncing bloody and politely ignored in their pretend-flesh like giant skin tags, all astonished by the militant inhuman statue-shade ascending, astonished by this contrary wayfarer of whom bugger-all was written in any of the reams of pantheon-specific wittering about what the dead would face, all staring frankly at this intruder, this unplaced class-guerrilla in the myth, or glancing from under brows and introducing themselves politely or not, depending on the cultural norms they had not yet learned were for the living.

Wati the rebel did not reply. Continued up from the underlands. It’s a long way, whichever death you take. Occasionally Wati the retro-eschatonaut might look at those approaching and, hearing a name, or seeing a remembered resemblance, say to the new-deads’ surprise, Oh I met your father (or whomever) miles back, until generations of the dead told stories of the wrong-walker trudging out of a redundant heaven, and debated what sort of seer or whatever he was and considered it good luck to bump into him on their final journey. Wati was a fable told by the long- to the new-dead. Until, until, out he came, through the door to Annwn or the pearly gates or the entrance to Mictlan (he wasn’t paying attention), and here. Where the air is, where the living live.

In a place where there was more to do than journey, Wati looked and saw relations he remembered.

With some somatic nostalgia for his first form he entered the bodies of statues. He saw orders given and received, and it fired him up again. There was too much to do, too much to rectify. Wati sought out those like he had been. Those constructed, enchanted, enhanced by magic to do what humans told them. He became their organiser.

He started with the most egregious cases: magicked slaves; brooms forced to carry water buckets; clay men made to fight and die; little figures made of blood and choiceless about what they did. Wati fomented rebellions. He persuaded knack-formed assistants and servants to stand up, to insist to themselves that they were not defined by their creators or empowerers or the magic scribbles stuck under their tongues, to demand compensation, payment, freedom.

There was an art. He watched organisers of peasant revolts and communard monks, machine-wreckers and Chartists, and learned their methods. Insurrection was not always suitable. Though he retained a hankering for it, he was pragmatist enough to know when reforms were right for the moment.

Wati organised among golems, homunculi, robotish things made by alchemists and made slaves. The mandrakes born and bonded under gallows and treated like discardable weeds. Phantom rickshaw drivers, their hours and pay mysterious and pitiful. Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation.

Wati spread his word among brutalised familiars. That old droit de prestidigitateur was poison. With the help of Wati’s rage and the self-organised uncanny, quids pro quo were demanded and often won. Minimums of recompense, in energy, specie, kind or something. Magicians, anxious at the unprecedented rebellions, agreed.

As the last but one century died, the New Unionism took London and changed it, and inspired Wati in his unseen side of the city. In their dolls and toby jugs, he learned from and collaborated with Tillett and Mann and Miss Eleanor Marx. With a fervour that resonated hard in the strange parts of the city, the hidden layers, Wati declared the formation of the UMA, the Union of Magicked Assistants.

Chapter Twenty-Six

“SO WATI’S PISSED OFF WITH YOU.”

“There’s a strike on,” Dane said. “Total knack stoppage. That’s why they’re picketing places where conditions are bad.”

“And they are at the BL?”

Dane nodded. “You would not believe it.”

“What’s it all about?”

“It started small,” Dane said. “These things always do. Something about the hours some magus was making his ravens work. It didn’t look like it would kick off, but then he tries to play hardball, so there’s a sympathy strike at a box factory where the robots are unionised—they got minds in a mageslick, few years ago—and the next thing you know …” He slapped the dashboard. “Whole city’s out.

“It’s the first big thing since Thatcher. And nothing gets the knack-smiths more antsy. Everyone in the UMA’s out, it’s solid. And then I had an emergency. I knew you was being watched. I knew you were, and I had to track you, because I didn’t know what you had to do with the whole god thing. The kraken being took. I didn’t even know what your deal was, I didn’t know if you were in on anything, or had some plan or what. But I knew you were tied up with it. And I couldn’t keep an eye on you twenty-four/seven, so I had to organise a short-term binding with that little sod.”

“The squirrel?”

“The familiar.” Dane winced. “I been strikebreaking. And Wati got word. I don’t blame him being pissed off. If he can’t trust his friends, you know? There’s all dirty tricks. People are getting hurt. Someone got killed. A journo writing about it. No one knows for sure it’s connected, but of course it’s connected. You know? So Wati’s edgy. We have to sort this. I want him on our side. We do not want to be on the shitlist of all the pissed-off UMA in London.”

Billy looked at him. “It’s not just that, though.” He took off and put back on his glasses.

“No it ain’t,” Dane said. “I’m not a scab. I didn’t have time …” He slumped in his seat. “Alright. It wasn’t just that. I was worried if I went and asked for dispensation, the union wouldn’t say yes. They might not think it was serious enough. And I needed it. I had to have more eyes, and something that could get places fast. And you should be happy I did or you’d have been took to Tattoo’s workshop.

“The bastard is I never use familiars.” He shook his head, repeatedly. “It was just crap luck. It was just crap, crap luck, the timing.”

WATI MOVED IN ELDRITCH LEAPFROGGING, STATUE TO STATUE, figure to figurine, consciousness momentarily in each. Just long enough to see through the stone eyes in a horse rider in a park; wooden eyes on a Jesus outside a church; plastic eyes in a discarded clothes model; taking bearings, feeling to the limits of his range, some scores of metres, briefly considering each potential figure within his arc, choosing the most suitable according to criteria, transferring his thinks-node into that next human-made head.

He met Dane and Billy in the café in the back streets near Holborn, where for years the plaster mannequin of a fat chef had held up fingers in an “O” meaning delicious right next to an outside table, so where, if Dane and Billy put up with the chill, huddling over coffees, Wati could en-statue close enough to converse with them. They hunkered against the cold and the possibility of being seen. Dane looked repeatedly around them.

“Like I say, Dane, this better be good,” the Wati-chef said through a motionless openmouthed smile. Its accent remained—Cockney plus the New Kingdom?—but the voice was choky, now, and clogged-sounding.

“Wati, this is Billy,” said Dane. Billy greeted the statue. He greeted a statue and disguised his awe. “He’s what this is all about.” Dane cleared his throat. “You can feel it, right, Wati? The sky, the air, all this shit. History ain’t working. Something’s coming up. That’s what this is about. I bet you can feel it. Between statues.”

There was silence. “Maybe,” said Wati. Was it gusting he sensed? Billy wondered. A dislocation? Something foreboding in that inter-effigial unspace? “Maybe.”

“Alright. Well then. You heard … the kraken got took?”

“’Course I did. The angels can’t shut up about it. I even went to the museum,” Wati said. No lack there of the bodies in which he could be. He could rush around the interior of the hall in a whirlwind of entities, skimming, skipping from animal to stone animal. “The phylax is screaming in the corridors. It’s walking, you know. It’s looking for something, it’s on a trail. You can hear it at night.”

“What’s this?” Billy said.

“The angels of memory,” Dane said.

“What are …?” said Billy, then stopped at Dane’s shaken head. Alright, he thought, we’ll get back to that.

“It’s all screwed up,” Wati said.

“It is,” Dane said. “We need to find the kraken, Wati. No one knows who took it. I thought it was the Tattoo, but then … He took Billy. Was going to do him. And the way he was talking … Most people think it was us.” He paused. “The church. But it weren’t. They ain’t even looking for it. When the kraken went, this thing underneath it all started rising.”

“Talk to me about scabbing, Dane,” Wati said. “Do I need to talk to your Teuthex about this?”

“No!” Dane shouted. People looked. He slid down, spoke quietly again. “You can’t. Can’t tell them where I am. I’m out, Wati.” He looked into the statue’s unmoving face. “Shunned.”

The plaster of the chef, unchanging, took on shock. “Oh my gods, Dane,” Wati said at last. “I heard something, someone said something, I thought it was garbled bullshit, though …”

“They’re not going to do anything,” Dane said. “Nothing. I needed help, Wati, and I needed it fast. They were going to kill Billy. And whoever’s took it’s doing something with the kraken that’s bringing up this badness. That’s when it started. That’s the only reason I did what I did. You know me. I’ll do whatever I have to to fix this. What I’m saying is I’m sorry.”

DANE TOLD WATI THE STORY. “IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN THIS LOT brought it up, put it in their tank.” Billy was shocked at the anger with which Dane stared at him, suddenly. He had never seen that before. I thought you liked the tank, he thought. The Teuthex said … “But since it’s gone it’s got worse. We have to find it. Billy knows things. I needed to get him out. Wati, it was Goss and Subby.”

There was a long silence. “I heard that,” the statue said. “Someone said he was back. I didn’t know if it was true.”

“Goss and Subby are back,” Dane said. “And they’re working for the Tattoo. They’re on the move. They’re doing their work. They were taking Billy to the workshop.”

“Who is he? Who are you?” Wati said to Billy. “Why are they after you?”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. He saw himself talking to a plastic or plaster pizza man. Could almost have smiled.

“It was him who preserved the kraken,” Dane said. “Put it behind glass.”

“I’m no one,” Billy said. “Up until a couple of days ago I …” How to even start.

“He likes to say he’s no one,” Dane said. “Tattoo and Goss and Subby don’t think so. He knows things.”

There was quiet for seconds. Billy played with his coffee.

“A squirrel, though?” Wati said.

Dane stared at the frozen delighted face of the chef, risked a snorting laugh. “I was desperate, bro,” he said.

“You couldn’t have got, like, an adder or a jackdaw or something?”

“I was looking for a part-timer,” Dane said. “All the best familiars are union, I didn’t have much choice. You should be pleased. You’re solid. I had to go with whatever dregs were around.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“I’m sorry. I was desperate. I shouldn’t have done it. I should’ve asked.”

“Yeah you should,” said Wati. Dane breathed out. “You only get one fuckup like that. And that only because I known you since time.” Dane nodded. “Why did you come see me?” Wati said. “You didn’t just come to apologise, did you?”

“Not only that,” said Dane.

“Cheeky bugger,” said Wati. “You’re going to ask for help.” He started to laugh, but Dane interrupted.

“Yeah,” he said without humour. “You know what, I am, and I ain’t going to apologise. I do need your help. We do. And I don’t just mean me and Billy, I mean everyone. If we don’t find the god, whatever’s coming’s going to get here. Someone’s doing something with that kraken they really shouldn’t oughter.”

“We’re out, Dane,” Wati said. “What do you even want from me?”

“I understand,” Dane said. “But you have to understand too. Whatever it is … If we don’t stop it it won’t matter if you win your strike. I’m not saying call it off. I would never tell you that. I’m saying you can’t afford to ignore this. We have to find God. We ain’t the only ones looking. The longer it’s out there it’s meaning more and more, and that means it’s more and more powerful. So more and more people are after it. Imagine if Tattoo gets his hands on it.” On the corpse, corpus, of an emergent baby god, traveller from below to above.”

“What’s your plan?” Wati said.

Dane brought out his list. “I reckon this is all the people in London could port something as big as the kraken. We can track down who got it out.”

“Hold it up,” Wati said. Dane, making sure he was not watched, held the list in the statue’s eyeline. “There’s, what … twenty people here?” Wati said.

“Twenty-three.”

“Going to take you a while.” Dane said nothing. “Have you got a copy of that? Wait.”

There was a gust, a palpable leaving. Dane began to smile. After a minute a sparrow flew down and landed on Billy’s hand. He started. Even his jump did not dislodge the bird. It looked him and Dane up and down.

“Go on then, give her the list,” said Wati in the statue again. “She’s not your familiar, you get it? Not even temporarily. She’s my friend, and she’s doing me a favour. Let’s see what we can find out.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

HER BOSS WAS SYMPATHETIC BUT COULD NOT HOLD THINGS forever. Marge had to return to work.

Leon’s mother said she was coming to London. She and Marge had never met, nor even spoken until the awkward phone call Marge had made to tell her about Leon’s disappearance. The woman obviously neither knew nor wanted to know details of Leon’s life. She thanked Marge for “keeping her up to date.”

“I’m not sure that’s the best way to do it,” she had said when Marge suggested they work together to try to find out what had happened.

“I don’t feel like the police …” Marge had said. “I mean I’m sure they’re doing what they can, but, you know, they’re busy and we might be able to think of stuff that they can’t. We could keep on looking, you know?” His mother had said she would contact Marge if she found anything out, but neither of them thought she would. So Marge did not mention Leon’s last message.

When she said, “I’ll let you know if I find anything out, too,” she was aware abruptly that she was not making a promise to the woman as much as to herself, to the universe, to Leon, to something, to not leave this, to not stop. Marge went through anger, panic, resignation, sadness. Sometimes—how could she not?—she tried out the thought that she had been very wrong about him, that Leon had just deserted her and his entire life. Maybe he had been involved in a scam gone wrong, was mentally ill, baying somewhere on a Cornish coast or Dundee, was no longer who he had been. The ideas did not stick.

She sent Leon’s mother the keys to his flat that she had had cut, but cut more copies first. She sneaked in and went from room to room, as if she might soak up some clue. For some time each room was as she remembered it, down to the mess, even. She turned up one day and the flat was a shell: his family had taken Leon’s things away.

The police to whom Marge spoke, those to whom she could speak, still implied that there was little to worry about, or, as time went on, little they could do. What Marge wanted was to speak to those other, odder police visitors. Repeated calls to the Scotland Yard would not yield any confirmation that they existed. The Barons whose numbers she was given were none of them the right man. There were no Collingswoods.

Were they who they had claimed? Were they a gang of miscreants hunting Leon for some infraction? Was it from them that he was in hiding?

Her first day back her coworkers were sympathetic. The paperwork she dealt with was easy and not important, and though the hesitancy of her colleagues’ greetings was wearing it was also touching, and she put up with it. She returned to her flat in the same reverie that had taken over as her default mood since Leon disappeared.

Something troubled her. Some part of the city’s afternoon noise, the car grumbling, the children shouting, the mobile phones singing polyphonic grots of song. Repeatedly whispered, getting louder until she could no longer mistake it, someone was saying her name.

“Marginalia.”

A man and boy had arrived, appeared silently before she had her keys out. One was to either side of her front door, leaning with a shoulder to the bricks, facing each other with the door in between them so they boxed her in. The young staring boy in a suit; a shabbier, weatherbeaten man. The man spoke.

“Marjorie, Marjorie, it’s a disaster, the record company’s been on the blower, no one likes the album. Get down to the studio, we’re going to have to remaster.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t …” She stepped back. Neither boy nor man touched her, but they walked with her, in perfect time with each other and with her, so she remained corralled by them. “What are you, what are you …?” she said.

The man said, “We was particularly hoping you might be able to persuade that guitarist to stop by again, lay down some licks. What was his moniker? Billy?”

Marge stopped moving, and started again. The man breathed out smoke. She staggered backward. She wanted to run, but she was hobbled by normality. It was daylight. Three feet away people were walking; there were vehicles and dogs and trees, newsagents. She tried to back away from the man, but he and his boy walked with her, and kept her between them.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” she said. “Where’s Leon?”

“Well that’s just it, isn’t it? We’d posalutely adore to know. Technically I grant you it’s less Leon that we’re chasing than his old mucker Billy Harrow. Leon I’ve a sense of where he might be—lose some weight, Subby says; I can’t help it I says, little morsels like that—” He licked his lips. “But Billy and we was just catching up and then it all went fiddly. So. Where’d he get off to?”

Marge ran. She made for the main road. The two stayed with her. They kept up with her, moving crabwise, the boy on one side, the man on the other. They did not touch her but stayed close.

“Where is he? Where is he?” the man said. The boy moaned. “You must excuse my loquacious friend—never bleeding shuts up, does he? Though I love him and he has his uses. But he’s not wrong also; he raises an excellent point—where is Billy Harrow? Was it you spirited the lad away?”

Marge was gripping her handbag to her chest and stumbling. The man circled her as she kept going, ring-a-rosying with the boy. People on the street were staring.

“Who are you?” Marge shouted. “What did you do with Leon?”

“Why, ate him up, bless your soul! But let’s see who you’ve been chatting to …” He licked the air in front of her face. She shied away and screamed, but his tongue did not quite touch her. He smacked his lips. He breathed out, another jet of smoke, no cigarette in mouth or hand.

“Help me!” she shouted. People around her hesitated.

“See, it was easy to find you because of all the spoor dribbled between here and Leon-the-vol-au-vent, so I’d expect to …” Lick lick. “Not much, Subby. Tell the truth now, chicken, where’s old Billy?”

“You alright, love? You want a hand?” A big young man had approached, fists balled and ready. A friend stood behind him, in the same fight stance.

“If you speak again,” the shabby man said, not glancing at him, still staring at Marge, “or if you step closer, my lad and I will take you sailing, and you will not enjoy what’s under the mizzen. We’ll run you up a dress in taffeta. Do you understand me? If you speak we will bake you oh my god but the worst cake.” His voice was dropping. He whispered but they heard. He turned then and stared at the two potential rescuers. “Oh, does he mean it does he mean it we can take him you take the kid old flabby’s mine ready on the count of three only he does to be honest seem a bit lairy and et cetera. Want some cake?” He made a ghastly little swallowing laugh noise. “Take another step. Take another step.” He did not speak the last two words but exhaled them.

The birds still shouted, the cars complained, and a few metres away people were talking like talking people everywhere, but where Marge stood she was in a cold and terrifying place. The two men who had come to her aid floundered under Goss’s stare. A moment went and they retreated, to Marge’s horrified “No!” They did not leave, only stood a few feet farther away, watching, as if the punishment for losing their nerve was to spectate.

“Now if you’ll forgive that interruption …” And Goss licked the air around her again. Marge was clamped between the two figures as surely as if they actually touched her.

“Alright then,” Goss said at last, stood up straight. “I can’t get a snifter.” He shrugged at his companion, who shrugged back. “Seems not, Subby.” They both stepped back.

“Sorry to bother you,” Goss said to Marge. “We just wanted to check out whether you knew anything, you see.” She retreated. He followed, but not so close as before. He let her get away a little. She tried to breathe. “Because we’re so eager to find out what young Billy’s up to, because we thought he knew everything and then we thought he knew nothing, and then disappearing like that, we thought maybe he must know everything again. But I will be buggered if we can find him. Which”—he waggled his tongue—“means likely enough he has ways and means of not leaving his savour-trail. Wondered if the two of you had spoken. Wondered if you might’ve done a little magery-knackery-jiggery-pokery. I taste not.” Marge breathed in big shudders.

“Well, you mind how you go then, we’ll be on our way. Forget you ever saw us. It never happened. Word to the wise. Oh, unless if Billy does happen to give you a tinkle, do let us know, won’t you? Thanks ever so much, really appreciate it. If he contacts you and you forget to let us know, I’ll kill you with a knife or some such. Alright then? Cheers.”

Then, only then when the man and boy had, it could only be said, sauntered away, not until they had actually turned a corner and were out of sight, did the people nearby run to Marge—including the two who had aborted their rescue, ashamed-looking but mostly just terrified—and ask if she was alright.

Her adrenalin spiked and Marge shook and leaked a few poststress tears, and she was enraged with everyone there. Not one of them had helped her. Recalling Goss and Subby, though, Marge admitted to herself that she could not blame them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A DELEGATION OF FAT BEETLES WENT FROM PIMLICO BY WALLTOP and sub-pavement route to a workshop in Islington. They were ink-carriers, little slave things, experimental subjects imbued with temporary powers as part of a savant’s writing of an exhaustive volume of one school of magic, the Entomonomicon. The man’s writing was on hold, because, while individually they were as dumb as specks, the insects were collectivised under a gestalt field, were thinking like a brain, and were on strike.

Where they went birds circled in the air over the town hall. This unlikely flock—an owl, several pigeons, two feral cockatiels—were all familiars, high-ranking enough to be imbued with considerable portions of their masters’ and mistresses’ clouts. They were protesting where several particularly exploitative wizards worked, now struggling with ill-trained scab mannequins.

The idea was that under the stewardship of a UMA activist the coleopteric set would be a flying picket, would join the birds in their aerial circuit. It was reciprocation for the birds’ sympathy picket outside their own workplace the previous week. It had been a powerful symbol of solidarity: some of the strongest hexed assistants in the city feather-to-chitin with some of the weakest, predators avianly chanting alongside what would generally be their prey.

That was the plan. The press had been told to expect visitors. The UMA full-timer signalled to the circling birds that he would be back, and went to caucus with the newcomers. Around the corner in a tiny park, the beetles emerged from a crevice, little bullets of iridescent black waiting for their contact. They milled in leaf litter, gathered in an arrow shape as they heard footsteps.

It was not their organiser, however, who approached. It was a burly man in jeans and black boots, a leather jacket, his face covered by a motorcycle helmet. Waiting by the fence was another man dressed exactly the same.

The beetles, which had been waiting perfectly still, spread out a bit and concerned themselves with the mindless-looking business of insect life, as if they were just pootling around. But with growing alarm, the coagulate striker realised that the faceless man was bearing down on them, kicking aside the camouflaging undergrowth, raising his big biker boots, and bringing them down, right at them, too fast for them to scatter.

With each stamp tens of carapaces split and innards were pulped, and the aggregate consciousness ebbed and became a less sentient panic. The beetles scurried and the man killed them.

The UMA organiser turned the corner. He stood in the grey daylight, in the view of flaking Georgian facades, the prams and bicycles of passersby, and stared. After a horrified instant, he screamed, “Hey!” and ran at the attacker.

But the man continued his brutal mosh, ignoring the shout, murdering with each step. His companion stepped into the organiser’s path and punched him in the face. He sent him sailing, legs wide, blood arcing. The helmeted man grabbed him on the ground and punched him again and again. People saw, and shouted. They called the police. The two dark-dressed figures continued, one with a mad-looking murderous dance, the other to break the nose and teeth of the trade unionist, pounding him not quite to death, but so that his face would never ever look as it had done thirty seconds before.

A police car screamed in as the beating and the crushing concluded. The vehicle’s doors opened, but then there was a hesitation. The officers within did not come out. Anyone close enough could see the lead police shouting into a radio, listening to orders, shouting again, staying in the car and throwing up her hands in rage.

The two bikers backed away. In front of the aghast eyes of the locals, some demanding they stop, others ducking out of their sight, others calling the police again, the two men walked out of the garden and away. They did not get on any bikes: they walked, bowlegged and rolling like violent sailors, through the streets of north London.

When they were gone from sight the police emerged and ran to where the UMA organiser was breathing bubbles in his own spitty blood, and where the strikers were pasted into the earth. Two streets away, inklings of unease reached the avian picket. Their tightly controlled circuit became ragged, as first one then another scooted over the town hall roof to see what had happened.

They cried out. Their calls resonated in more than the conventional dimensions. So it was not very long until with a gust of presence Wati came speeding to the square. He tore into a plaster saint on the wall of a house.

“Bastards,” he said. He was guilty. His attention had not been fully on the action: he had become intrigued by the investigation into the names Dane had given him, the strangeness that underlay the city, the sheer unusualness of being unable to find what he wanted, here any sign of the missing kraken, from any statuette anywhere in the city.

He came too fast even for himself. His velocity skidded him out of the statue and into a Meissen shepherd boy on a mantelpiece on the other side of the wall. He bounced into a teddy bear, and back out into the statue again. He looked at the police and his comrade. If the officers even clocked the insect corpses, they did not think anything of them.

“Motherfuckers,” Wati whispered in the voice of architecture. “Who did this?”

The birds were still screaming, and Wati heard the siren of the ambulance as if it was joining in their cacophony. A quick fingering outreach: one of the cops wore a Saint Christopher, but the silver charm was almost flat, and Wati needed three-dimensionality to manifest. There was a beat-up Jaguar, though, just in earshot, and he leapt into the tarnished effigy at the car’s front. He stood, a motionless outstretched cat, and listened to the police.

“What the hell’s that about, ma’am?” the younger officer said.

“Search me.”

“It’s bloody criminal, ma’am. Just sitting there …”

“We’re here now, aren’t we?” the senior officer snapped. She glanced around. She lowered her voice. “I don’t like it any more than you, but orders are fucking orders.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

ONE THING COLLINGSWOOD HAD ENJOYED IMMEDIATELY SHE joined the police—had been headhunted into the FSRC—was the slang. Initially it had been incomprehensible and delightful, nonsense poetry, all my ground this and his brief that, bird and the black and a bunce, monkeys and drums and nostrils, and the terrifying invocation of a snout.

The first time she had heard that last word, Collingswood had still not known how often she might meet, for example, composite guardian things put together by priests of an animal god (rarely), or invoked things that called themselves devils (slightly more often). She had thought the word a description, and she had imagined the snout Baron had been taking her to meet would be some insightful dangerous mandrill presence. The drab man who had simpered at her in the pub had been so disappointing she had, with a little motion of her fingers, given him a headache.

Despite that letdown, that police term always cast the shadow of a spell on her. On her way to meetings with informants she would whisper “snout” to herself. She enjoyed the word in her mouth. It delighted her when, as she sometimes did, she met or invoked presences that actually deserved the name.

She was in a coppers’ pub. There were countless coppers’ pubs, all with slightly different ambiences and clientele. This one, the Gingerbread Man, known by many as the Spicy Nut Bastard, was a haunt in particular of the FSRC and other officers whose work brought them up against London’s less traditional rules of physics.

“So I been chatting to my snouts,” Collingswood repeated. “Everyone’s freaking out. No one’s sleeping right.”

She sat in a beery booth opposite Darius, a guy she knew slightly from a dirty-tricks brigade, one of the subspecialist units occasionally equipped with silver bullets or bullets embedded with splinters of the true cross, that sort of thing. She was trying to get him to tell her everything he knew about Al Adler, the man in the jar. Darius had known him slightly, had encountered him in the course of some questionable activity.

Vardy was there. Collingswood glanced at him, still astonished that when he heard where she was going, he had asked to come.

“Since when the fuck are you into shit-shooting?” she had said.

“Will your friend mind?” he had said. “I’m trying to collate. Get my head around everything that’s happened.”

Vardy had been more distracted even than usual over the last several days. In his corner of the office the slope of books had grown steeper, its elements both more and less arcane: for every ridiculous-looking underground text was some well-known classic of biblical exegesis. Increasingly often, too, there were biology textbooks and printouts from fundamentalist Christian websites.

“First round’s on you, preacher-man,” Collingswood had said. Vardy sat glumly and grimly, listening as Darius told boring anecdotes about standoffs.

“So what was the story with that guy Adler?” Collingswood interrupted. “You and him went at it once, right?”

“No story. What do you mean?”

“Well, we can’t find dick on him, really. He used to be a villain—he was a burglar, right? Never gets caught but there’s a lot of chatter about him, until a few years ago and all of it dries up. What’s all that?”

“Was he a religious man?” Vardy said. Darius made a rude noise.

“Not that I knew. I only bumped up against him the one time. It was a whole thing. Long story.” They all knew that code. Some Met black op, plausibly deniable, when the lines between allies, enemies, informants and targets were questionable. Baron called them “brackets” operations, because, they were, he said, “(il)legal.”

“What was he doing?” Collingswood said.

“Can’t remember. He was with some crew shopping some other crew. It was the Tattoo, actually.”

“He was running with the Tattoo?” Collingswood said.

“No, he was shopping them. Him and another couple of people, some posh bint—Byrne her name was, I think—and that old geezer Grisamentum. He was sick. That’s why Byrne was around. They were dobbing the Tattoo in it. Tattoo’d only been Tattoo for a little while, and they didn’t say, but they were hinting it was Gris who made him into it. All change, ain’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Vardy said.

“Oh, you know. Never the same friends, is it? All change now. Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”

“Is it?” Collingswood said, offering him a cigarette.

“Well …” Darius glanced around. “We’ve been told to go softly on his lot for a little while. Which is funny, because you know they ain’t exactly subtle.” The Tattoo’s predilection for ostentatious, damaged and reconstituted henchpersons as a method to spread fear was notorious. “They reckon he’s got Goss and fucking Subby on payroll at the moment. But we’ve been told tread a bit light unless it really spills out into Oxford Street.”

“Who’s doing who favours?” Collingswood said.

Darius shrugged. “You’d be slow if you didn’t think it had something to do with the strike. Word is the UMA are having a bit of a time of it. Look, all I know about Al is that he was a good thief and loyal to his mates. And he liked things to be proper, you know? He had those tattoos, I know, but he had proper manners too. I’d heard bugger-all about him since Grisamentum died.”

“So,” Vardy said, “you’ve no reason to think he was devout. Have you heard of him having any run-ins with angels?” Collingswood looked at him and sipped.

“Boss,” said Darius, finishing his drink. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me. Collers, always a pleasure. Giz a snog.” She flapped her tongue at him. He made a slurping sound as he stood and left.

“Jesus,” said Collingswood to Vardy. “I feel like arse. You’re alright, aren’t you? The Panda’s not doing your head in. I can’t see you crossing any palms with fucking euros.” As the shapeless anxiety approached, the foreseers of London were doing incredible trade. Second-, third- and fourth-stringers were getting employment, as people tried to find someone, anyone, to see something, anything, other than an end.

“Panda? Oh, yes, that’s your funny joke, isn’t it? Well, I’m keeping busy. There’s a lot to do.” He did not look merely busy: Vardy seemed invigorated, energised by the crisis. His university must be complaining—not that they could do anything—because he was spending all hours at the FSRC offices.

“What the hairy bollocks was that about?” Collingswood said. “Angels? What are you getting me into?”

“Have you heard of mnemophylaxes?” he said.

“No.”

“Another word for the angels of memory.”

“… Oh that. I thought that was all bollocks.”

“Oh no, there’s certainly something to it. The difficult thing is working out exactly what.”

“Can’t you ask one of your snouts?” He glanced at her with a ghost of humour.

“My collectors are no good. Nobody worships these angels. They’re … well, you’ve heard stories.”

“A bit.” Not much. Some archons of history, not memories but metamemories, the bodyguards of remembrance.

“There was a witch, years ago. She’d been a Londonmancer, but she broke with them because she was tired of noninterference. She and a couple of rent-a-mob broke into the Museum of London, to fetch something or other. Found dead the next morning. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Her friends were dead. She was nowhere. There was just a knocked-down pile of bricks and mortar in a display case. Some of the bricks were oddly shaped. We took the pile and did a bit of a jigsaw, fitted it back together. It was a sculpture of a woman. In brick. It had been made, then knocked down.” He looked at her. “Thinking of angels, I wanted to suggest that you have a look at the readouts from the scene there, and perhaps compare to whatever you get from the spot in the basement where Billy found Adler.”

“So, what you wanted to suggest was I do a load of extra work, is it?” she said. Vardy sighed.

“There are points of connection,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure the Tattoo’s the only thing we’re looking at. And you’re still getting no whisper about the whereabouts of the squid. I presume.”

“You presume right.” Snouts, bribery, violence, scrying, possibility-running, prophecy poker—nothing was netting any word at all. And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getting their alembics on which made the city’s alchemists whine like dogs—was provoking more and more interest from London’s repo-men and -women.

“It ain’t just us looking for it,” Collingswood said.

Chapter Thirty

COME CHAMPION SADDLE UP TIME FOR US TO GO WE MUST BE QUICK WE have a job to do

One moment Billy was deep under the surface of sleep and dreaming so vividly and quickly it was like being in a sped-up film.

saddle up and lets get those

He was under the water, as he was most of the times he slept, now, but it was light not dark this time, the water so bright it was like sunlight; it was daylight he was in; the rocks were deepsea rocks or they were the innards of a canyon; he was in a canyon, overlooked by buttes and mesas, with the sun or some underwater light above him. He was getting ready to ride.

champion, he shouted, champion saddle up

Here was his mount. He knew what would come over the rocks and hills for him to grab and with cowboy drama swing himself onto its back as it passed. Architeuthis, jetting, mantle clenching and tentacles out ready to grab prey. He knew it would scud over the plains, sending out limbs to grab hold of what it passed, to anchor itself and hunt.

It came. But something was not as expected.

how do i get on that? Billy thought. do i get in maybe?

What came bucking over the hills was Architeuthis in its tank, the great glass rectangle pitching like a canoe, Formalin sloshing up against the see-through lid and spraying out of edges, in drips, leaving a damp trail in the dust. The kraken in its tank whinnied and reared, the long-dead flesh of the animal sliding.

champion champion

One instant Billy was in that dream. The next he was awake, his eyes open, staring at the ceiling of the flat to which Dane had taken him. He breathed in, out. Listened to the silence of the room.

The nonexistent person the flat belonged to was a professional woman, a GP, judging from the books on shelves and certificates on walls. She had never lived, but her ghost was everywhere. The furniture and decorations were tastefully and carefully patterned. Amulets and wards were hidden behind curtains. They were on the second floor of a shared house.

Dane was sleeping in the bedroom. “We’re going to talk to Wati tomorrow,” he had said. “We need to get some shuteye.” Billy was on the sofa. He lay, staring at the moulding on the ceiling, trying to work out what had woken him. He had felt a scraping like some fingernail against something.

All the tiny noises of air and the shuffling of his clothes, his head against the cushion, ended. He sat up and there were still no sounds. In that unnatural quiet what he heard, for a clear second, was the rolling grind of glass on marble. His eyes widened. He felt something vibrate against glass. Without knowing how, he was standing a little way from the sofa, now by the window, pulling back curiously resistant limp curtains. He was wearing his glasses.

A man was on the windowsill outside. Another was on the ground, looking up. Billy did not even feel surprise. The first man was gripping a downpipe, scoring at the glass of the window with a cutter. He and his companion were motionless. Not even the midnight clouds moved. Billy dropped the corner of curtain, and it fell instantly back into the draped shape it had been in.

He knew this would not last more than another few seconds. He did not try to wake Dane, did not think there was time, nor that Dane would move if he tried. He took a step and felt air move again, heard the tiny shifting of the living world. The curtains wafted.

With astoundingly silent motion the intruder opened the window. He began to come through, a lumpy shape being born from the split between curtains. Billy grabbed him in a half-remembered judo hold, around his neck, rolled him onto the floor, choked him fast and hard. The man made tiny sounds. He rose onto all fours, braced and shoved, rising from prone to standing in an impossible corkscrew jump that crushed Billy into a wall.

The door to the bedroom opened and there was Dane, his fists clenched, dark as a man-shaped hole. He crossed the room in three freakishly nimble steps, smacked the incomer in his jaw, sending his head snapping backward. The man dropped, deadweight.

Billy clicked his fingers and caught Dane’s eye. He pointed down through the curtains: there’s another one. Dane nodded. He whispered, “Handcuffs in my bag. Gag him, lock him.”

Without drawing the curtains, Dane reached round their edges and began to pull the window open. The curtains gusted as cold air came in. There was a curt whisper and a thwack. One curtain jerked and shuddered around a new hole. An arrow jutted from the ceiling.

Dane vaulted through the window. Billy gasped. The big man dropped the two full storeys, twisting, landed low and silently in the building’s shrubby front garden. He went straight for the man, who ran with a bolt-gun in his hand. They went very fast into and back out of the streetlamp light. Billy tried to watch as he found the cuffs and locked the unconscious intruder to a radiator, stuffed a sock in his mouth and tied it in place with a pair of the invented woman’s tights.

The front door opened. Billy stood ready, but it was Dane who entered, breathing heavily, his belly shaking. “Get your shit.”

“Did you get him?” Billy said. Dane nodded. He looked grim. “Who are they?” Billy said. “Tattoo’s guys?” Dane went into the bedroom.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Ain’t he got a proper face? He’s not some walking machine, is he? Nah. That’s Clem. The other geezer’s Jonno. Say hello. Hello Clem,” he said to the gagged man. He swung his bag up. “Oops,” he said. “Looks like the Teuthex does know about some of these hideouts.” He gave an unhappy little laugh.

Clem met Dane’s eyes and breathed snottily into his gag. “Hey, Clem,” Dane said. “How you doing, mate? How’s everything? Going alright, mate? Good, good.” Dane went through Clem’s pockets. He took what money he found, Clem’s phone. In his pack he found another of those little spearguns.

“Krak’s sake, Clem, mate, look at you,” Dane said. “You put all this effort into getting me and you’re happy to sit there like lemons while someone walks off with God. I got a message for the Teuthex. Tell him this, alright, Clem? When he comes to pick you up, you give him this message, okay? You tell him he’s a disgrace. You all are. I’m not the one who’s exiled. I’m the one doing God’s work. I’m the church, now. It’s the rest of you who’s excofuckingmunicated. You tell him that.” He patted Clem’s cheek. Clem watched through bloodshot eyes.

“Where are we going to go?” Billy said. “If they know your safe houses, we’re screwed.”

“They know this one. I’ll have to keep more careful. I’ll stick to the newest ones.”

“And what if they know them too?”

“Then we’re screwed.”

“WHAT WOULD THEY DO TO US?” BILLY SAID. DANE DROVE THEM IN A newly stolen car.

“What would they do to you?” he said. “Lock you up. Make you tell them what you see at night. What would they do to me? Apostasy, mate. Capital crime.” He took the car past a canal, where rubbish scabbed the edges of a lock and the streetlights were cold and silver.

“What do they think they’re going to find out from me?”

“I’m not a priest,” Dane said.

“I’m not a prophet,” Billy said. Dane did not reply. “Why aren’t you asking me what I dream? Don’t you care?”

Dane shrugged. “What do you dream?”

“Ask me what I dreamed tonight.”

“What did you dream tonight?”

“I dreamed I was riding the Architeuthis like Clint Eastwood. In the Wild West.”

“Well, there you go.”

“But it was …” It was still in the tank. It was still dead and bottled.

The night opened up as they turned onto a main street, an avenue of neon, crudely drawn illuminated fried chicken and the three globes of pawnbrokers. “You did well, Billy. Clem’s no pushover. He’ll get out of there before long. Where’d you learn to fight?”

“He was about to kill me.”

“You did well, man.” Dane nodded.

“Something happened. And it was to do with the dream.”

“Well, that’s what I’m saying.”

“When I woke up nothing was moving.”

“Not even a mouse?”

“Listen. The world. It was all …”

“Like I said, mate,” Dane said. “I ain’t a priest. Krakens move in mysterious ways.”

It didn’t feel like the kraken moving, Billy thought. Something was doing something. But it didn’t feel like the kraken, or any god.

Chapter Thirty-One

WORD GOT AROUND. IT DOES THAT. A CITY LIKE LONDON WAS always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes. There’d be all those alternative pathways to the official ones and to those that made Londoners proud: there’d be quite contrary tendencies.

There, there was no state worth shit, no sanctions but self-help, no homeostasis but that of violence. The specialist police dipped in, and were tolerated as a sect or offhandedly killed like cack-handed anthropologists. “Oh, here we go, FSRC again,” wink wink stab stab.

Even absent a sovereign, things in London chugged on effectively. Might made right, and that was no moral precept but a statement of simple fact. It really was law, this law enforced by bouncers, bruisers and bounty hunters, venal suburban shoguns. Absolutely Fanny Adams to do with justice. Have your opinions about that, by all means—London had its social bandits—but that was fact.

So when a power put out word it was looking for a hunt-and-fetch, that was like police-band radio—an announcement of forthcoming law and order. “Tattoo? Seriously? He’s got plenty of his own muscle. What’s he employing outsiders for?”

The last time was when he had stopped being human and become the Tattoo, when Grisamentum had trapped him in a prison of someone else’s flesh. “Whoever brings me Grisamentum’s head has the run of the city,” was what he had said then. When renowned personhunters who’d taken up that commission were found ostentatiously dead, the enthusiasm for it had ebbed. The Tattoo had gone unrevenged.

Now a new situation. Anyone up for a job?

They met in a nightclub in Shepherd’s Bush, its doors roped off behind a “Private Party” sign. It had been a long time since the last trade-fair. The gathered bountymen and -women cautiously and courteously greeted each other, no one breaking protocol, the market-peace of the room. If they met in the course of competing for their quarry, whatever it was, then, sure, there would be blood, but just then they sipped drinks and ate the nibbles provided, and it was all “How was Gehenna?” and “I heard you got a new grimoire.”

They had checked their weapons; a pebble-skinned man guarded a cloakroom of Berettas, sawn-off shotguns, maggot-whips. They gathered in little groups according to micropolitics and magic allergies. Perhaps two-thirds of the people in the room could have walked down any high street without causing consternation, if in some cases they changed their clothes. They wore every kind of urban uniform and ranged in ethnicity across the whole of London’s variety.

There was a whole slew of skill-sets in the room: miracle-sniffing, unwitchery, iron blood. Some of those present worked in teams, some alone. Some had no occult skills at all, were only extraordinarily lucky with contacts and good at everyday soldierly expertises like killing. Of the others, there were those who would disguise themselves when they left this congenial atmosphere: the miasmic entities drifting at head-height like demon-faced farts would reenter their hosts; the huge woman dressed in a reverse-polarity rainbow would reinstitute her little glamour and be a teenager in a supermarket uniform again.

“Who’s here?” Muttered censuses. “He’s got everyone. Nu-Thuggers, St. Kratosians, the lot.”

“No gunfarmers.”

“Yeah, I heard they were in the city. Not here, thank God. Maybe they’re on another gig. Tell you who is here. See the bloke over there?”

“The twat dressed like a new romantic?”

“Yeah. Know who he is? A Chaos Nazi.”

“No!”

“Shit you not. All limits out the window, obviously.”

“I don’t know how I feel about that …”

“We’re here now. Might as well see what’s on the table.”

THERE WAS A COMMOTION ON THE STAGE. TWO OF THE TATTOO’S enforcers stepped forward in their uniform of jeans and jackets, wearing helmets as they always did, not speaking. They cracked their knuckles and swung their arms.

Between them was a ruined man. He was slack-mouthed and empty-eyed; not so much balding as threadbare, his scalp pitiably tufted. His skin looked like rotting, soaked wood. He walked in tiny little steps. Protruding from his shoulder like some grotesque pirate parrot was a boxy CCTV camera. It clicked and whirred, and swivelled on its stalk in the man’s flesh. It scanned the room.

The nude man would have kept walking, fallen from the edge of the stage, but one of the helmeted guards held out an arm and stopped him a foot from the edge. He swayed.

“Gentlemen,” he said suddenly, in a deep staticky voice. His eyes did not move. “Ladies. Let’s get to business. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours. They’re true. The following are the facts. One. The kraken lately stored in the Natural History Museum has been nicked. By persons unknown. I have my suspicions, but I’m not here to feed you ideas. All I’d say is the people you think are dead have a habit of not being, especially in this bloody city. I’m sure you’ve noticed. No one should’ve been able to get that thing out. It was guarded by an angel of memory.

“Two. There was a man in my custody, name of Billy Harrow. Knows something about this. I didn’t think he did, but more fool me. He did a bunk. That’s not alright with me.

“Three. Word is that Mr. Harrow was aided in his unacceptable bunk-doing by one Dane Parnell.” A murmur went around the room. “Long-time stalwart of the Church of God Kraken. Now, Dane Parnell has been excommunicated.” The muttering got a lot louder. “From what we gather, the whys of that have something to do with his making Billy Harrow his bumboy.

“Four. There’s something badly bollocksed up with the universe right now, as I’m sure you know, and it’s something to do with this squid. So. Here’s the commission.

“I want war. I want terror.

“I want, in descending order: the kraken, or any sign of it; Billy Harrow—alive; Dane Parnell—couldn’t give a shit. Let me stress that I do not give a tinker’s shit what you do on the way. I do not want anyone to feel safe as long as I don’t have what I want.

“Now …” The voice in the sick man’s throat got crafty. “I’m going to pay a stupid amount for this. But cash on delivery only. This is no-win—no-fee. Take it or leave it. I can tell you, though, that anyone who delivers the kraken will not have to work again. And Billy Harrow’ll give you a good couple of years off.” The camera scanned the room again. “Questions?”

The swastika-wearing man in mascara texted a set of exclamation marks to a comrade. A renegade Catholic priest fingered his dog collar. A shaman whispered to her fetish.

“Oh, shit.” The voice came from a mild-looking young man in a shabby jacket whose creative gunplay would astonish most people who met him. “Oh shit.” He bolted. The man hunted by empathic homing, an annoying side effect of which, in his case, was an allergy to other people’s greed (not, he regularly thanked Providence, his own). The gust of venality that had gone through the room at that moment was strong enough that he never had any hope of reaching the toilets before vomiting.

Chapter Thirty-Two

“THIS IS A LIST OF PEOPLE WHO OWE ME FAVOURS, WHO AIN’T IN the church, and who won’t screw me over,” Dane said. There were not many names. They were in a hide way out in zone four, in what both was, and mystically masqueraded as, a deserted squat. They were waiting for Wati.

“What’s a—does that say ‘chameleon’?” Billy said. “That name rings a bell …”

Dane smiled. “Jason. He’s the one I said. He goes from job to job. Yeah, him and me go back.” He smiled at some reminiscence. “He’ll help if it comes to it. But it’s Wati who’s our main man, no question.”

“Where was that workshop where the Tattoo had me?” Billy said.

“What do you want to know for? Have you got some stupid idea, Billy?”

“What would be stupid? You’re a soldier, aren’t you? You’re worried about the Tattoo getting hold of your god. Is there a reason we’re not taking all this to him? You know I want to do whatever I can to him. I’m honest about that. And Goss and Subby. We want the same thing, you and me. If we can mess with them, everyone’s happy. Except them. Which is the point, right?”

“Billy,” Dane said. “We ain’t going to be storming the Tattoo’s place. Not without an army. First off I don’t know where he is, not for certain. That’s one of his gaffs, but you never know where he’s going to be, or where that workshop’ll be. Second, his guards? They’re not nothing. And plus he’s one of the biggest powers in London. Everyone owes him a favour, or money, or their life, or something. We mess with him we’re bringing down no end of shit on ourselves, even if we got to him, which we wouldn’t.”

“Has he got …? Can he …?” Billy swirled his hands suggestively.

“Knacks? It ain’t about knacks with him: it’s about money and smarts and pain. Look, someone out there has the kraken, and no one knows who. The only thing we’ve got at the moment is that Tattoo’s as buggered by that as us. I know you want to … But we can’t waste time going after him. What’ll screw him over worse is if we get hold of it. He’s too big to hunt, I’m sorry. We’re just two guys. With my know-how and your dreams.

“You should start dreaming for us. You can’t pretend they’re nothing anymore: what you’re seeing’s real. You know that. The kraken’s telling us things. So you got to dream for us.”

“Whatever it is I’m dreaming,” Billy said carefully, “I don’t think it’s the kraken.”

“What the hell else would it be?” Dane did not sound angry, but pleading. “Someone is doing something to it.” He shook his head and closed his eyes.

“Can you torture a dead god?” Billy said.

“’Course you can. You can torture a dead god. You can torture anything. And the universe don’t like it—that’s what’s got the fortune-tellers sick.”

“I have to tell Marge Leon’s dead.” Billy rubbed his chin. “She should—”

“I don’t know what this is about, mate,” said Dane, without looking at him. “But you better let it go. You ain’t going to talk to no one. You can’t. It’s for your sake and it’s for her sake too. You think you’d be doing her a favour if you got her interested? I know this ain’t really about her, but still …” He left Billy feeling unfinished.

On the floor between them was a plastic gnome. They were waiting for Wati. Dane showed Billy truncheon strikes using a wooden spoon, showed him slowed-down punches and neck locks. “You did good,” he said.

His tuition was distracted. But when Wati did come, it was so quietly that neither man had any intimation of his presence until he spoke. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, a snarly voice in the chubby plastic man’s pipes. “Emergency meetings. You got no idea.”

“Everything okay?”

“Not even. We got attacked.”

“What happened?” Dane said.

“Look, it ain’t a picnic and everyone knows that, right? But they came in hard, and they came in brutal. André’s still in hospital.”

“Cops?”

“Pros.”

“Pinkertons?” The agency’s name was a byword for mercenary strikebreaking.

“They weren’t secret about it. It was the Tattoo’s bastards.” Dane stared at the statuette, and it stared back at him.

“I guess that ain’t such a surprise,” Dane said. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Do we know who’s paying him?”

“Take your pick. No shortage of candidates. But d’you understand what this means? They’re gunning for us. They’ve taken it up to DEFCON One.”

“I’m sorry, mate. You’re not the only one. I thought I knew which of my places were secure,” Dane said. “The Teuthex sent some of … You remember Clem?” Wati whistled slowly.

“That’s got to fuck with your head,” he said. “At least I know the bastards I’m up against are no friends of mine. If I could, I’d go in have a shufti, see what your old church are up to.”

“There are statues all over the walls …” Billy said.

“There are blocks,” Dane said. “Ways to keep people out. They’re careful.”

“I got to look out for my members, Dane,” Wati said. “We have to win this. But it turns out that I’m warring with the Tattoo whether I like it or not. He comes for my members, I’m coming for him. If the main thing he wants is to get hold of the kraken, the main thing I want is to get it first. Whatever he’s for, I’m against it.”

The two men smiled.

•   •   •

WATI SUMMONSED A JACKDAW OUT OF THE SKY AND TO THE kitchen window. It dropped a piece of paper on the counter, sang something to Wati and left. It was Dane’s list of porters. It was much folded, scratched with bird claws, written on in various clumsy hands, in red, blue and black.

“It wasn’t hard to get information,” Wati said in that out-of-time accent. “Mancers know each other. People with this sort of talent, even if my members haven’t met them through their bosses, they know of them.”

“Why are these ones crossed off?” Dane said. “I’d’ve thought Fatima Hussein was a good candidate for having shifted it.”

“The ones crossed out in blue are out of the country.”

“Alright. What about these others?”

“They have familiars. Their knacks are so tied up with them that with the strike, they couldn’t port cheese into a sandwich.”

“How does it work?” Billy said.

“Quid pro quo,” Dane said. “They’re your eyes and ears, but more’n that. Put something into your animal or your whatever it is …”

“Magic.”

“Put something into it, you get more out,” Wati said. Animals as amplifiers. “There’s four people we reckon could’ve ported this. Simon Shaw, Rebecca Salmag, the Advocate, and Aykan Bulevit.”

“I know a couple of them,” Dane said. “Simon retired. Aykan’s a tosser. Any beamers? I hate beaming.”

“Yeah, but we ain’t talking about you,” Wati said. “We’re talking about your god.”

“Its body.”

“Well, yeah. So, either it was one of this lot, or we’re dealing with something we’ve never seen before,” Wati said. “And it isn’t that bloody easy to stay secret in London.”

“Not that whoever it is seems to be having much trouble,” Billy said.

“There is that,” said Wati. “Keep something in your pocket for me to get into. So I can get to you quick.”

“How’d you feel about a Bratz doll?” Dane said.

“I’ve been in worse. But there’s something else. It isn’t just a question of being able to get the thing out. It’s getting past the protection. All those people on the list are porters, but none of them are fighters. There’s no way any of them should’ve been able to get past the phylax.”

“The angel,” Dane said. “The angel of memory.

“Alright, mate, alright,” he said, seeing Billy’s face. “None of us know much about this. This is out of our league. When the kraken got took, the angel messed up badly. I had to know a little bit because I was in the Centre.”

The presence of a guard from the faithful could have been seen, and was by some, as disrespectful. Because the Architeuthis was already under an aegis, protected, along with every other specimen in the museum.

“What angel?”

“The mnemophylax is the angel of memory. There’s one in all the memory palaces. But this one screwed up.”

“What is it?”

“You think something like memory won’t grow spikes to protect it? That’s what angels are: they’re spikes.” Memory’s defences. Their content irrelevant: the fact of them, and their pugnacity, was all.

“The angel’s not letting this one go,” Wati said. “You pick this stuff up in the in-between. It’s raging. It feels like it failed.”

“It did fail,” Dane said.

What had failed was one of an old cabal abraded into existence out of the city’s curatorial obsession. Each museum of London constituted out of its material its own angel, a numen of its recall, mnemophylax. They were not beings, precisely, not from where most Londoners stood, but derived functions that thought themselves beings. In a city where the power of any item derived from its metaphoric potency, all the attention poured into their contents made museums rich pickings for knacking thieves. But the processes that gave them that potential also threw up sentinels. With each attempted robbery came the rumours of what had thwarted it. Battered, surviving invaders told stories.

In the Museum of Childhood were three toys that came remorselessly for intruders—a hoop, a top, a broken video-game console—with stuttering creeping as if in stop-motion. With the wingbeat noise of cloth, the Victoria and Albert was patrolled by something like a chic predatory face of crumpled linen. In Tooting Bec, the London Sewing Machine Museum was kept safe by a dreadful angel made of tangles and bobbins and jouncing needles. And in the Natural History Museum, the stored-up pickled lineage of the evolved was watched by something described as of, but not reducible to, glass and liquid.

“Glass?” Billy said. “I think I … I swear I’ve heard it.”

“Maybe,” said Dane. “If it wanted you to.”

But the squid had been taken, the angel defeated. No one knew the meaning of or penalty for that. Savants could feel an outpouring of alien regret. They said this ushered in something terrible. That the angels were stepping out of their corridors, beyond the remit that had thrown them up. They were fighting for memory against some malevolent certainty that walked the streets like the dead.

“It isn’t just some porter we’re looking for,” Wati said. “It’s someone who can take on an angel of memory and win.”

“Did they win, though?” Billy said. “You’re talking to the man who found a bloke in a jar.” They glanced at each other.

“We need more information,” Dane said.

“Go to the tellers,” Wati said. “The Londonmancers.”

“We know what they’ll say. You heard the recording. The Teuthex already spoke to them …” But Dane hesitated.

“Why won’t they shop us?” Billy said.

“They’re neutrals,” Wati said. “They can’t intervene.”

“The Switzerland of magic?” Billy said.

“They’re nothing,” Dane said. But he sounded hesitant again. “They were the first, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” Wati said.

“It’s like they’re oracles again,” Dane said. “Maybe.”

“But isn’t it dangerous for them to see us? People could hear about it,” Billy said.

“Well,” Dane said. “There is one way to make them keep us secret.” He smiled. “If we’re going to see them anyway …”

In for a penny. How else could they have negotiated the power logics of London so long? Employ their services, and like doctors and Catholic priests the Londonmancers were committed to silence.

Chapter Thirty-Three

THERE ARE MANY MILLIONS OF LONDONERS, AND THE VERY GREAT majority know nothing of the other mapland, the city of knacks and heresies. Those people’s millions of everydays are no more everyday than those of the magicians. The scale of the visible city dwarfs that of the mostly-unseen, and that unseen is not the only place where there are amazing things.

At that moment, however, the drama was in the less-travelled metropolis. Nothing changed for most Londoners but for the onset of a wave of depression and anger, a bad intimation. That was not good and not nothing, certainly. But for those who lived in the city’s minority articulation things were growing daily more dangerous. The strike paralysed large sections of occult industry. The economy of gods and monsters was stagnating.

The journals of the secretive places—The Chelsea Picayune, Thames’ Unwater Notes, The London Evening Standard (not that one: the other, older paper of the same title)—were full of foreboding at millennial signs. Drug use reached record levels. Smack and Charlie, narcotics that user-mages squabbled with the knackless over in the mainstream capital; and more arcane fixes, the sweepings from ley lines and certain time-crushed places, the buzz of choice for dust-junkies, addicts of collapse and history, high on entropy. Inferior supply grew to meet demand, product ground up and adulterated by impatience, rather than genuine snortable ruins.

A group of mysterious independents intercepted a shipment of product the Tattoo was moving. No one got to trip on this degraded antiquity: they burnt, blew away and oil-fouled the goods, then disappeared, leaving holes in the bodies of the killed, and rumours of monstrous shapes coagulated out of city-matter.

Word spread on graffitied walls, on secret bulletin boards virtual and corporeal, corkboards in ignorable offices frequented by curious visitors you couldn’t be quite sure worked there, that Dane Parnell was exiled from the Church of God Kraken. What heresy or betrayal could he have committed? The church would say only that he had showed a lack of faith.

IT WAS EARLY DAYLIGHT. DANE AND BILLY WERE IN THE OPEN, NEAR the City of London. Dane twitched with nerves. His hands were in his pockets with his weapons.

“We need more information,” Dane had said.

Cannon Street, opposite the Tube. In the emptied remains of a foreign bank was a sports shop. Below posters of physically adept men was a glass-front cabinet and iron grille, behind which was a big chunk of stone. Dane and Billy watched the comings and goings a long time.

The London Stone. That old rock was always suspiciously near the centre of things. A chunk of the Millarium, the megalith-core from where the Romans measured distances. Trusting in that old rock was a quaint or dangerous tradition, depending on to whom you spoke. The London Stone was a heart. Did it still beat?

Yes, it still beat, though it was sclerotic. Billy thought he could feel it, a faint laboured rhythm making the glass tremble like dust in a bass line.

This had been the seat of sovereignty, and it cropped up throughout the city’s history if you knew where to look. Jack Cade touched his sword to the London Stone when claiming grievances against the king: that was what gained him the right to speak, he said, and others believed. Did he wonder why it had turned on him, afterward? Perhaps after the change in his fortunes, his head had looked down from the pike on the bridge, seen his quartered body parts taken for national gloating, and wryly thought, So, London Stone, to be honest I’m getting mixed messages here … Should I in fact maybe not lead the rebels?

But forgotten, hiding, camouflaged or whatever, the Stone was the heart, the heart was stone, and it beat from its various places, coming to rest at last here in an insalubrious sports shop between cricket equipment.

Dane took Billy through shadows. Billy could feel that they were, he was, hard to see. By an alley, bracing himself in a corner of brick and launching astonishingly up, Dane entered the tumbledown complex like some thickset Spider-Man. He opened the door for Billy. He led through scuffed passages behind the shop, by toilets and office rooms to where a young man in a Shakira hoodie loitered. He fumbled for his pocket, but Dane’s speargun was out, aimed straight at his forehead.

“Marcus, ain’t it?” Dane said.

“I know you?” The young man’s voice was impressively steady.

“We need to come in, Marcus. Got to speak to your crew.”

“Appointment?”

“Knock on the door behind you, there’s the boy.” But at all the noise the door opened preemptively. Billy heard swearing.

“Fitch,” Dane said, raising his voice. “Londonmancers. No one wants trouble. I’m putting my weapon away.” He waved it so the watchers could see. “I’m putting it away.”

“Dane Parnell,” someone said in an ancient voice. “And that would be Billy Harrow with you. What are you here for, Dane Parnell? What do you want?”

“What does anyone want with the Londonmancers, Fitch? We want a consultation. Couldn’t exactly prearrange, now, could we?”

There was a long hesitation and a laugh. “No, I suppose you couldn’t exactly call ahead. Let them in, Marcus.”

Inside it was a management lounge. World of Leather sofas, a drinks machine. Make-do shelving covered with manuals and paperbacks. A cheap carpet, workstations, lever-arch files. A window at ceiling height emitted light and the sight of legs and wheels passing on the pavement outside. There were several people within. Most were fifty or over, some much younger. Men and women in jackets and ties, boilersuits, scuffed sportswear.

“Dane,” said a man in their midst. He was so old, his skin such a welter of creases and dense pigment, it was impossible to tell his ethnicity. He appeared to be dark grey. Cement-coloured. Billy remembered his mad-sounding voice from the Teuthex’s recording.

“Fitch,” Dane said respectfully. “Saira,” to a woman beside him, in her late twenties, a tough-looking well-dressed Asian woman crossing her arms. The Londonmancers did not move. “I’m sorry about how we came in. I was … We don’t know who’s watching us.”

“We heard …” Fitch said. His eyes were very open, and they moved all the time. He licked his lips. “We heard about you and your church and we’re terribly sorry, Dane. It’s a shame, an awful shame.”

“Thanks,” said Dane.

“You’ve been a friend of London. If there’s anything …”

“Thank you.”

A friend of London. More backstory, Billy thought.

“No you mustn’t,” Fitch said. “Hesitate. And your friend …?”

“We have to be fast, Fitch. We can’t be out.”

“I know what you’re doing, you know,” Fitch said, with a trace of humour. “Trap us in vows.”

“Confidentiality,” Saira said.

“I need you to be secret, yeah, but I need a seeing, as well … And I can rely on your—”

“You know what we’re going to tell you,” Saira said. Her voice was startlingly posh. “Have we been at all quiet with warnings, recently? Why’d you think we’re low on numbers? Some of us are a bit futuresick.”

“When have we ever taken sides, Dane?” Fitch said.

The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges (Dane had carefully pronounced it to Billy French-wise, pareetourdzh), the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.

Not custodians of the city: they called themselves its cells. They recruited young and nurtured hexes, shapings, foresight and the diagnostic trances they called urbopathy. They, they insisted, were just conduits for the flows gathered by streets. They did not worship London but held it in respectful distrust, channelled its needs, urges and insights.

You couldn’t trust it. It wasn’t one thing, for a start—though it also was—and it didn’t have one agenda. A gestalt metropole entity, with regions like Hoxton and Queen’s Park cosying up to the worst power, Walthamstow more combatively independent, Holborn vague and sieve-leaky, all of them bickering components of a totality, a London something, seen.

“No one’ll give us a straight answer about what’s coming,” Billy said.

“Well it’s hard to see,” said Fitch. “Except for it’s bloody … Just the thing of it. I can see something.” Billy and Dane looked at each other. “Alright then. You want a reading. You want to know what’s going on? Saira, Marcus. Let’s take Dane and Billy to see what we can see.”

OUTSIDE THE WIND WHIPPED AT THEM. “YOU KNOW WE’RE HUNTED?” Billy whispered to Saira.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think we got that.” She smoked with the offhand elegance that reminded him of the girls he had been unable to get with at school.

“What are you looking at?” she said.

“I was thinking about a friend of mine, and his girlfriend.” It was true. “I can’t even …” Billy looked down. “He died, it was that that got me here, and I can’t help, I’m thinking about her, about what she’s …” It was the truth. “I wish I could tell her, she doesn’t even know he died.”

“You miss him.”

“God yes.”

Marcus lugged a heavy bag. “I know you’d rather be indoors, Dane,” Saira said, “but you know how this works.”

Dane watched the skies and the buildings. He kept his hand in his bag on his weapon. They went between glass fronts and banks, beside sandwich shops, into the deeps of the City of London. They kept off the main places full of pedestrians, suited workers.

Saira was looking at Billy sideways. He was not really watching where they were going. He was not keeping his eyes open, as he knew he should. He was just at that moment, in that second, all wrapped up in the misery of it, of what had happened. He followed the sound of his companions’ footsteps.

“Fitch,” Saira said. She spoke to him quietly.

Dane listened. “We ain’t got time,” he said.

They emerged into a more main road, by a red postbox. Billy was watching now, bewildered, as Fitch put his hands on it, at belly-height, as if feeling for an unborn child. He strained. He looked to Billy as if he was having a shit.

“Quick,” he said to Billy. “It won’t last forever.”

“I don’t …”

“You want to say something to your friend’s friend,” Saira said to him quietly.

“What?”

“Look at what you’re carrying. Talk to her.”

What is this bollocks? Billy thought. Saira’s face was carefully neutral, but the kindness angered him. Not her fault, he knew that. I’m not going through this charade, he thought.

“It’ll make you feel better,” she said. “This isn’t Hoxton. You’re alright to do this here.”

London as therapy, was it? It was everything else, why not that too? Why was Dane not racing them on? Billy was exasperated, and turned, but there was Dane, merely waiting. In the open, exposed, rushed for time, waiting for Billy to do this, like he thought it was a good idea.

It’s not like I’m going to cry, Billy thought, but that thought was a bad idea, and he had to turn away. Toward the postbox. He walked toward it.

A pretty drab metaphor, such obvious correspondences; here he was about to pass on a message through the city’s traditional conduits. He felt absurd and resentful, but he still could not look at those waiting for him, and he could still think only of Leon, and, some mediated guilt, of Marge. There were passersby, but no one watched. He stared into the darkness of the postbox’s slot.

Billy leaned in. He put his mouth to it. London as therapy. He whispered into the box: “Leon …” He swallowed. “Marge, I’m sorry. Leon’s dead. Someone killed him. I’m doing what I can to … He’s dead. I’m sorry, Marge. You stay out of this, alright? I’m doing what I can. Look after yourself.”

Why were they making him do this? For whose benefit was this? He pressed his forehead to the metal and thought he would cry, but he was whispering his message again, and remembering the scene that he could hardly remember, the confrontation between Leon and Goss, and Leon’s disappearance. And he did not feel like crying anymore. He did, in fact, feel like he had dropped something into the hole.

“Feel better?” said Dane when he stepped away. “You look better.”

Billy said nothing. Saira said nothing, but there was something in how she did not look at him.

“HERE,” FITCH SAID. THEY WERE IN A CUL-DE-SAC CLOTTED WITH refuse. Behind a wooden hoarding, cranes swung like prehistoric things. There was a pounding and whine of industrial machinery, the shouts of crews. “No one’ll hear.”

Fitch opened his bag. He took out overalls, goggles, a mouth-mask, a crowbar and a well-used angle grinder. A strange, strange image in one so frail. Dane had told Billy, “Marcus has got something to do with the immunes, Saira’s a plastician, but Fitch is boss even though he’s past it because he’s the haruspex.” And seeing Billy’s face, he had added, “He reads entrails.”

Fitch was an old man in protective gear. He started the cutter. With a groan of metal and cement, he drew a line across the pavement. Behind the blade welled up blood.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy, jumping back.

Fitch drew the cutter again along the split. A spray of concrete dust and blood mist dirtied him. He put the angle grinder down, dripping. Put a crowbar in the red-wet crack and levered harder than it looked like he could. The paving stone parted.

Guts oozed from the hole. Intestinal coils, purple and bloodied, boiled up wetly in a meat mass.

Billy had thought the entrails of the city would be its torn-up under-earth, roots, the pipes he was not supposed to see. He had thought Fitch would bring up a corner of wires, worms and plumbing to interpret. The literalism of this knack shocked him.

Fitch murmured. He poked the mess with his fingers, gentle as a pianist, moving the fibred tubes subtly, investigating the angles between the loops of London’s viscera, looking up as if they mirrored something in the sky. “Look look,” he said. “Look look look. Do you see? Do you see what we’ve been saying? It’s always the same, now.” He sketched shapes in the innards pile. “Look.” The offal moved. “Everything closing down. Something coming up. The kraken.” Billy and Dane stared. Was that new? The kraken? “And look. Fire.

“Always fire. The kraken and all the jars. Then flames.” The guts were greying. They were oozing into each other, their substance merging.

“Fitch, we need details,” Dane said. “We need to know exactly what it is you’re all seeing …” But there was no containing, corralling, shepherding Fitch’s flow.

“Fire taking it all,” he said, “and the kraken’s moving, and the fire taking everything, the glass catches on fire until it goes up in a cloud of sand. And everything’s going now.” The pooled guts were oozing into a slag pile, becoming cement. “Everything’s going. Not just what’s there. It’s burning undone. The world’s going with it, the sky, and the water, and the city. London’s going. And it’s going, and now it’s always been gone. Everything.”

“That is not how it’s supposed to go,” Dane whispered. Not his longed-for teuthic end.

“Everything,” Fitch said. “Is gone. Forever. And since forever. In fire.”

His finger came to a stop, on what was now a bubbled-up, setting mound of concrete. He looked up. Billy’s heart had accelerated with the pitch of the old man’s speech.

“Everything’s ending,” Fitch said. “And all the other maybes that should be there to fight it out are drying up, one by one.” He closed his eyes. “The kraken burns and the jars and tanks burn and then everything burns, and then there’s nothing ever again.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

KATH COLLINGSWOOD WAS IN A WINDOWLESS STOREROOM LIKE some forgotten dollhouse heart of the Neasden Station. Baron watched through the door’s wire-reinforced glass. He had seen Collingswood perform this before. It was a methodology of her own creation. Vardy was there, standing back, his arms crossed, watching over Baron’s shoulder.

The room was dusty. Collingswood thought the presence of that desiccation, the sheddings of time, was efficacious. She could not be sure. She replicated as many of the circumstances of her cavalier first success as she could, knowing each might be mere superstition, and she a kind of Skinnerian rat. So the pile of empty cardboard boxes in one corner were left as they had been for months. When Baron had inadvertently knocked one out of position, she had given him an earful and spent minutes trying to rebuild the stack as it had been in case of some nuance of force in the angles.

“Wati ain’t going to come here,” she had said to Baron, “even if he could.” There were wards in place keeping figures and toys within the station empty of hitchhikers. “We got to get him where he lives.” Not in the statues—those were moments of rest. Wati lived in one of the infinite iterations of the aether.

In the middle of the striplit room was a pile of magicky stuff: a brazier in which burned a chemically coloured fire; a stool on which were bottles of blood; words in old languages on particular paper. Three old televisions were plugged in surrounding the pile, beaming static into it.

“Here,” said Baron conversationally to Vardy, “come the PCDs.”

COLLINGSWOOD DRIPPED BLOOD INTO THE FIRE. EMPTIED LITTLE urns of ashes into it. It flared. She added papers. The flames changed colours.

The fluorescent lights flattened out the conjuration, gave shadows few places to gather or hide, but shadows managed. Patches like dirty air welled. Collingswood murmured. She pressed a remote control and the televisions began to play well-worn videos to the fire. The audio was low but audible—ragged theme musics, jump-cut editing, men snarling.

“Officers,” said Collingswood. “Duty call.” The gusting things coiled around the rising fire, muttering. leave it she heard one whisper.

Collingswood threw two videos into the brazier. They gushed smoke that clotted, and the darknesses dived through it. There were hisses like pleasure. She turned up the televisions. They started to shout. Vardy shook his head.

“Think what you like,” Baron said. “She’s smart as a whip to think this up.”

“Just because you’ve passed on,” Collingswood said to the muttering nothings, “don’t mean you ain’t on duty.” They gibbered at the hard men with outdated haircuts, the screened car chases and fist-fights. She threw another video onto the fire, some paperbacks. Shades crooned.

PCDs, Baron had called the presences she was invoking—Police Constables, Deceased.

There are a thousand ways of inhabiting it, but the aether, that in-between, is always what it is; and ghosts, spirits, the souls of lucid dreamers squeeze past each other in complex asomatic ecology. Who better to close in on Wati the bodiless subversive than bodiless forces of the law?

“Come on, Constables,” Collingswood said. “I’d say you live for this shit, but that would be a bit tasteless.”

She pushed each television closer to the flames. The shadow-officers spiralled over the fire. They barked like spectral seals.

Cacophony of overlapping old shows. The glass fronts of the televisions blackened, and first one, then rapidly the other two sets banged, ceased transmissions. Smoke gushed from their vents, then gushed back in under pressure from the PCDs, who tore down the gradient of heat into the sets, jabbering.

as high. A snarl in the room’s abrupt silence.

as high was proscenium longy eye’s tree.

leave it, Collingswood heard, evenin evenin all evenin all, hes a nonce sarge, fell dan the stairs. as high was proscenium.

“Alright,” she said. “PC Smith, PC Brown, and PC Jones. You three are heroes. You all made the ultimate sacrifice for the force. Line of duty.” The dirty smoke ghosts shivered, in and out of sight, proudly waited. “Now’s your chance,” she said, “to do it again. Work for those pensions you never got, right?” She lifted a big file.

“In here’s all the info we’ve got on the case so far. What we need is a certain bad boy name of Wati. Flits about a bit, does Wati. We need him brought to heel.”

wati wati? some voice said out of smoke. sands like a nonce sands like a paki oozes wati cunt?

“Half a mo,” Collingswood said. slag a slag she heard, arl nick that cunt. She dropped the folder into the fire. done me prad.

The ghost-things made ah noises, as if they were lowering themselves into a bath. They churned up a froth of aether that made Collingswood’s skin itch.

Ghosts, she thought. As if.

IT WAS A CON TRICK, WHOSE GULLED VICTIMS WERE THE TRICK itself. A persuasion. These things she had made, constituted of vague but intensely proud memories of canteen banter, villains brought down, uppity little cunts slapped into place, smoky offices and dirty, seedy, honourable deaths, had not existed until a few moments before.

Ghosts were complicated. The residue of a human soul, any human soul at all, was far too complex, contradictory, and willful, not to say traumatised by death, to do anything anyone wanted. In the rare and random cases when death was not the end, there was no saying what aspects, what disavowed facets of persona, might fight it out with others in posthumous identity.

It isn’t a paradox of haunting—it only appears to be to the alive—that ghosts are often nothing at all like the living whose trace they are: that the child visited by the gentle and much-loved uncle succumbed to cancer maybe horrified by his shade’s cruel and vindictive needling; that the revenant spirit of some terrorising bastard does nothing but smile and try with clumsy ectoplasmic intervention to feed the cat his fleshly leg had kicked days before. Even had she been able to invoke the spirit of the most tenacious, revered, uncompromising Flying Squad officer of the last thirty years, Collingswood might well have found the spirit a wistful aesthete or a simpering five-year-old. So the experience and verve of genuine dead generations were closed to her.

There was another option. Toss up a few crude police-functions that thought they were ghosts.

Doubtless there was some soul-stuff from genuinely deceased officers in the mix. A base, an undercoat of police reasoning. The trick, Collingswood had learnt, was to keep it general. Abstract as possible. She could clot together snips of supernatural agency out of will, technique, a few remnants of memory and, above all, images, the more obvious the better. Hence the cheap police procedurals she burnt. Hence the televisions and the tapes, copies of The Sweeney and The Professionals, spiced with a little Dixon for sanctimony, swirled up into a golden-age nonsense dream that trained her spectral functions in what to do and how to be.

This was no arena for nuance. Collingswood wasn’t concerned with fine points of post-Lawrence policing, sensitivity training, community outreach. This was about the city’s daydream. A fetishised seventies full of proper men. There went a DVD of Life on Mars onto the pyre.

What Collingswood did was motivate into being tenacious gung-ho clichés that believed themselves. She heard herself slipping into the absurd register the functions themselves used, the kitsch pronouncements and exaggerated, stretched-out London accents.

“There you go, squire,” she said. “That’s yer lot. Wati. Last known address: any fucking statue. Job: making our lives difficult.”

They did not have to be, could not really be, clever, the faux ghosts; but they had a nasty sort of cunning, and the accrued nous of years’ worth of screenwriters’ fancy. little bastard she heard them say. look at this shit, a billowing of ashes of case notes. bring this little toerag in, overtime, nonce, slag, guv, sarge, proceedin long the eye street. They clucked the words. They muttered in conspiracy, compared nonexistent notes. Collingswood heard them say names from the case—wati billy dane adler archie teuthex bleedin nora—as they learnt them from the burning files.

The presence or presences—they shifted between unity and plurality—slipped out of sensibility, out of the room. fuckin bleedin ell, Collingswood heard. whats coming to him.

“Alright,” she said, as they went, and the smell of burnt crap and blown-out televisions, no longer clotted to them, began to fill the room. “Bring him in. Don’t … you know. You’ve got to bring the little sod in. Need to ask him a few questions.”

MARGE WENT EVERYWHERE SHE COULD IMAGINE THAT MIGHT HAVE connections with Leon or Billy, and put up photocopied posters. An hour and a half on her laptop, two jpegs and a basic layout, Have You Seen These Men? She gave their names, and the number of a mobile phone that she had bought specifically, dedicated purely to this hunt.

She stapled them to trees, put the posters on newsagent notice boards, taped them to the sides of postboxes. For a day or two, she would have said that she was approaching her situation as normally as she, as anyone, could in the circumstances. She would have said that while, yes, of course, losing her lover in this bewildering way, and then of course being menaced by those terrifying figures, was horrendous, sometimes horrendous things did happen.

Marge stopped telling herself that when, after a day then another day, she did not go to the police to tell them of her encounter. Because—and here it became difficult to find words. Because something was different in the world.

Those police. They had been keen to get answers from her, fascinated in her as a specimen, but she had felt not a scrap of personal concern from any of them. It was obvious that they had an urgent task to do. She was also, she realised, pretty certain that task had nothing to do with keeping her safe.

What was all this? What the hell, she thought, is going on?

She felt caught up, as if in fabric getting stretched. Work came through a filter. At home, nothing was working quite right. The water when it came from her taps spattered, interrupted by air bubbles. The wind seemed determined to slap her walls and windows worse than usual. At night her television reception was bad, and the streetlamp outside her house went on and off, ridiculously bust and imperfect.

Marginalia spent more than one evening walking from sofa to window, sofa to window, and looking out, as if Leon—or Billy, who appeared more than once in these, what were they, reveries—might be just outside, leaning on the lamppost, waiting. But there were only the passersby, the night-light of the nearby grocery, and the lamp unleaned-on.

It was after many hours of blackout-lightup, a theatrical effect through her curtains, one night, that in her exasperation at it Marge paid the streetlight some attention, and realised with a physical jolt, an epiphany that had her momentarily staggering and holding herself up against the walls, that the illumination’s vagaries were not random.

She detected the loop. She sat still for minutes, watching, counting, and at last and reluctantly, as if to do so would grant something she did not want to grant, she started to make notes. The streetlamp fizzed in, fizzed out. Spark spark. Quick, slow, a lengthier glow. On off on-on-on off on off on off, and then a fuzzing fade and another little pattern.

What else could it be? Long-short in careful combinations. The lamppost was spitting out its light at her in Morse code.

She found the code online. The lamppost was saying LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD LEONS DEAD.

MARGE MADE IT TELL HER THAT REPEATEDLY, MANY TIMES. SHE DID not think, during all those long minutes, about how she felt. “Leon’s dead,” she whispered. Tried not to think its meaning, only ensuring that she had translated the dot-dash glimmers correctly.

She sat back. There was aghastness, of course, at the bad absurdity, the how of that message; and the words themselves, their content, their explanation of Leon’s disappearance, she could not unhear, keep out. Marge realised she was weeping. She cried long, near-silently, in shock.

Attuned as she had become to the light’s rhythm, she was immediately aware of a last, sudden change. She grabbed for the Morse code legend and dripped tears on it. This last phrase the streetlamp repeated only twice. STAY, she read, AWAY.

Whickering with miserable breaths, moving as if through viscous stuff, Marge went to her computer and began to research. It did not occur to her for any time at all to obey the last injunction.

Chapter Thirty-Five

PAPER DRIFTED ABOVE LONDON.

It was night. Scraps spread out from One Canada Square, Canary Wharf. A woman stood at the tip of the rooftop pyramid, the apex of that nasty dick of a building. It would have been easier for her to gain access to BT Tower, but here she was forty-seven metres higher. Knack-topography was complicated.

BT Tower’s time had passed. There was a point she could remember when the minaret with its ring of dishes and transmitters had kept London pinned down. For months it had kept occult energies tethered in place when bad forces had wanted to disperse them. The energies of six of London’s most powerful knack-users—combined with the thoughts of comrades in Krakow, Mumbai and the questionable township of Magogville—had been focused along the shaft of the tower and shot in a tight burst that had evaporated the most powerful UnPlaced threat for seventy-seven years.

And had the building had any thanks? Well yes, but only from those very few who knew what it had done. BT Tower was an outdated weapon now.

Canary Wharf had been born dying: that was the source of its unpleasant powers. In those bankrupt nineties when its upper floors had been empty, their lucred desolation had provided a powerful place for realitysmithing. When at last developers moved in, they were bewildered by the remains of sigils, candle-burns and bloodstains resistant to bleaching that would be found again if the unbelievably fucking ugly carpets were ever lifted.

The woman stood by the always-blinking light-eye on the tower’s point. She swayed in the wind without fear. She was buffeted, blinked away tears of chill. She reached into her bag and brought out paper aeroplanes.

She threw them over the edge. They arced, their folds aerodynamicking them through the dark, streets lighting them from below. The planes caught thermals. Busy little things. They rose toward the moon like moths. The planes went hunting, above the level of the buses, dipping into the lampshine.

They went on whims—London hunches. Turning at turnings, round roundabouts, going one way up one-way streets. By the West-way one corkscrewed over-under-over the great raised road in what could not be anything but pleasure.

Many were lost. A miscalculated pitch and one might come to a sudden stop in a chain-link fence. An attack by a confused London owl, paper released to fall in scrap to the pavements. One by one, eventually, they turned over the roofs, lighting out for the territories—not from where they had come, but for their home.

By then the woman who had sent them out was there for them. She had crossed the city herself, more quickly and by quotidian means, and she waited. She caught them, one by one, over hours. She took a blade to each, scraping, or cutting from it, as closely as she could, the message on it. She gathered a pile of words. Unpapered writing lay beside her in strange chains.

THE PLANES THAT DID NOT MAKE IT HOME ACCELERATED THEIR own decomposition in gutters, but they could not make it instantaneous. There was arcane litter.

“Hello Vardy.” Collingswood entered the poky FSRC office. “Where’s Baron? Bastard’s not answering his phone. What you doing?” He was making notes by his computer. “Vardy, you reading lolcats?” She peered over the edge of his computer screen. He looked at her without warmth. “‘I can has squid back?’” she said. “Noooo! They be stealin my squid!”

“You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

“And yet, eh?” she said. “And fucking yet.” She dragged. He looked at her with calm dislike. “What a state of the world, eh?” she said.

“Well, quite.”

Collingswood called Baron again and again demanded to his voice mail that he get back to her ASAP. “So, found anything out?” she said. “Who’s behind our rubbery robbery?”

Vardy shrugged. He was logged into the secret chatrooms frequented by the magically and cultically inclined. He typed and peered. Collingswood said nothing. Stayed exactly where she was. He failed to ignore her. “There’s all sorts of whispers,” he said at last. “Rumours about Tattoo. And there are people I’ve not seen before. Usernames I don’t know. Muttering about Grisamentum.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “Saying it’s all since he died that everything’s gone wrong. No more counterweight.”

“Is Tattoo still off radar?”

“Hardly. He’s all over the bloody radar, but that’s another version of the same problem, I can’t find him. From what I can gather he has … shall we say subcontracted agents? freelancers? … out there looking for Billy Harrow and his pal, that Krakenist dissident.”

“Billy, Billy, you little heartbreaker,” Collingswood said. She tapped her nails on the desk. They had tiny pictures painted on them.

“Anything’s possible right now, it looks like,” Vardy said. “Which doesn’t help us very much. And behind it all, I don’t know … there’s still all that …” He made big, vague motions. “Something exciting.” He did actually sound excited. “Something big, big, big. There’s a vigour to this particular hetting up. It’s all speeding up.”

“Well before you do your voodoo trance”—Collingswood put a photocopy in front of him—“check out this shit.”

“What is it?” He leaned over the unfolded message. He read what was on it. “What is this?” he said slowly.

“Whole bunch of paper planes. All over the shop. What is it? Any idea?”

Vardy said nothing. He looked closely at the tiny script.

Outside, in one of the innumerable dark bits of the city, one of the planes had found its quarry. It saw, it followed, it came up after two men walking quietly and quickly through canalside walks somewhere forgettable. It circled; it compared; it was, at last, sure; it aimed; it went.

“WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF THAT LONDONMANCER STUFF?” BILLY SAID. “What they saw. Doesn’t seem like we got anything new.”

Dane shrugged. “You heard them, same as me.”

“Like I say, nothing new.”

“It was them who first saw it. We had to try.”

“But what do we do about it?”

“We don’t do nothing about it. What’s it? Let me tell you something.” Dane’s grandfather, he said, had been there for the worst of more than one fight. When the Second World War ended the great religious conflicts of London did not, and the Church of God Kraken had brutally engaged with the followers of Leviathan. Baleen hooks versus leathery tentacle-whips, until Parnell senior raided the Essex tideland and left Leviathan’s vicar on earth dead. His body was found stuck all over with remoras, dead too, hanging like fishy buboes.

These singsong stories, these stories turned into pub anecdotes, in the tone of an amiable, drunken bullshitter, were the closest Dane came to displays of faith.

“Nothing cruel to it, he told me,” Dane said. “Nothing personal. Just like it would’ve been down in heaven.” Down in dark, freezing heaven, where gods, saints and whales fought. “But there was others that you wouldn’t have expected.” A bloody battle against the Pendula, against the hardest core of Shiv Sena, against the Sisterhood of Sideways—“‘and that ain’t easy, Son,’” Dane quoted his grandfather, “‘what when wall is all gone floors and you’re falling longways parallel to the ground. Know what I did? Nothing. I waited. Made those lateral harpies come to me. The movement that looks like not moving. Heard of that? Who made you, boy?’”

“I thought you didn’t like the whole ‘movement that looks like not moving’ thing,” Billy said.

“Well, sometimes,” Dane said. “Just because someone uses something wrong doesn’t mean it’s useless.”

More regularly now than ever before, Billy heard clanking behind him. A paper plane slid out of the night into Dane’s hand. He stopped. He looked at Billy, down at the paper. He unfolded it. It was an A4 sheet, crisp, cold from the air. On it was written, in thin, small calligraphy, charcoal grey: THE PLACE WE HAD A TALK, THAT ONE TIME, & U TURNED ME DOWN, AND I NEED TO TALK. THERE EACH NIGHT @ 9.

“Oh my fuck,” Dane whispered. “Lusca hell trench ink and shit. Fucking hell,” he said. “Hell.”

“What is it?”

“… It’s Grisamentum.”

DANE STARED AT BILLY.

What was that in his voice? Might be exultation.

“You said he was dead.”

“He is. He was.”.

“… Clearly not.”

“I was there,” Dane said. “I met the woman he got to … I saw him burn.”

“How did that … ? Where did that note come from?”

“Out of the air. I don’t know.” Dane was almost rocking.

“How do you know that’s from him?”

“This thing he’s saying. No one knew we met.”

“Why did you?”

“He wanted me to work for him. I said no. I’m a kraken man. Never did it for the money. He understood.” Dane kept shaking his head. “God.”

“What does he want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we going to go?”

“Hell yes we’re going to go. Hell yes. We need to find out what’s been going on. Where he’s been and—”

“What if it was him took it?” Dane stared at Billy when he said that. “Come on,” Billy said. “What if it was him took the squid?”

“Can’t have been …”

“What do you mean, can’t have been? Why not?”

“Well, we’ll find out, won’t we?”

Chapter Thirty-Six

THERE WERE PICKETS OF INSECTS, PICKETS OF BIRDS, PICKETS OF slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So—a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth, or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

In Spitalfields, where the financial buildings overspilt like vulgar magma onto the remnants of the market, a group of angry subroutines performed the equivalent of a chanting circle in their facety iteration of aether. The computers within the adjacent building had long ago achieved self-awareness and their own little singularity, learned magic from the Internet, and by a combine of necromantics and UNIX had written into existence little digital devils to do the servers’ bidding.

The UMA had organised among these electric intelligences, and to the mainframes’ chagrin, they were on strike. They blocked the local aether, meta-shouting. But as they fidgeted and grumbled, the e-spirits became aware of a muttering that was not their own. They “heard,” in their analogue of aurality, phrases that were one-third nonsense two-thirds threat.

alright now lads

high was proceedin long the eye street

old bill sonny is who

your game sonny what’s your fuckin game

What the hell? The strikers “looked” at each other—a mosaic of attention-moments assembling—and e-shrugged. But before they could return to their places, a cadre of exaggerated police-ish things were among them. The picketers gusted in fluster, tried to regroup, tried to bluster, but their complaints were drowned out by ferocious cop noise.

yore yore

leave it you slag

yore yore little picket’s done for the day you nonce

yore fuckin organiser wears that paki cunt wati

There are no placards in the aether, but there are other strike traditions—sculpted grots of background, words in rippling strips. The cop-moments tore into these things. Translated out of the ab-physical it would have been nasty, brutish, miners’-strike stuff, cracked heads and ball-kicks. Pinioned under the law, the strikers reeled.

The little fake ghosts para-whispered: best as you tell us where wati is ain’t it. where’s wati?

MARGE SPENT MORE THAN ONE LATE EVENING ONLINE FORAGING for those who sought the missing. Her screen name was marginalia. She was on wheredidtheygo?—a discussion group mostly for those whose teen charges had done bunks. Their problems were not hers.

What she sought were hints about stranger disappearances. She spent hours type-fishing, dangling worms like yeh but what if is just disappear?? no trace??? weird goin on no?? what if cops wont hlp not cant WONT??

The streetlamp no longer passed on its message. Fatigue made her feel as if everything she saw was a hallucination.

Anyone can find “secret” online discussion groups. Members drop bread crumb hint-trails on kookish boards devoted to Satanism, magick (always that swaggering “k”) and angels. Religions. On one such, Marge had posted a query about her encounter with the menacing man and boy. In the dedicated inbox she had set up, she received spam, sexual slurs, crankery, and two emails, from different, anonymous addresses, containing the same information, in the same formulation. Goss & Subby. One added: Get away.

None of the correspondents would respond to her pleas for more information. She hunted their screen names on communities about cats, about spellcraft, about online coding and Fritz Leiber. She lurked on communities run by and for those who knew of the quieter London. They were full of rumours that did not help her.

Under a new name, she posted a query. hai nel kno wots go on w/skwid gt stole?? The thread she started did not last long. Most of the responses were trolling or nothing. There was, though, more than one that read: end of world.

IT WAS NOT WATI BUT A COMRADELY NUMEN THAT FOUND THE remains of the e-picket. The attackers had chased the half-leads they had extracted. The numen frantically sought Wati.

“Where is he?” it said. “We’re under attack!”

“He was in this morning.” The office manager was a woodenly shuffling kachina speaking in the Hispanic accent of the expat wizard who had carved it, though it had been made and recruited to the union in Rotherham. “We have to find him.”

Wati, in fact, was scheduling his picket visits around his other investigations. His probing had had results. Hence his visit to a minor, outlying centre of the strike, where dogs blockading a small rendering plant and part-time curse-factory were surprised and flattered by a visit from the leading UMA militant. They told him the state of the picket. He listened and did not tell them he was also there to look up a particular little presence he thought he had detected.

The strikers offered him a variety of bodies. They gathered a battered one-armed doll, a ceramic gnome, a bear, a bobble-head cricketer figure in their jaws, lined them up as if in some toy-town identity parade. Wati embedded in the cricketer. The wind made his outsized face bounce.

“Are you solid?” he asked.

“Almost,” one dog canine whimpered. “There’s one who says he’s not a familiar, he’s a pet, so he’s exempt.”

“Right,” Wati said. “Anything we can do for you?”

The strikers glanced at each other. “We’re all weak. Getting weaker.” They spoke London Dog, a barky language.

“I’ll see if I can siphon anything from the fund.” The strike fund was shrinking, of course, at a worrying rate. “You’re doing great stuff.”

The familiar Wati was looking for extracurricularly was, he thought, only a mile or two away. He groped through the thousands of statues and statuettes in range, selected a Jesus outside a church a few streets away, and leapt.

—And was intercepted. A shocking moment.

Out of the statue and something was in his way, an aetherial presence that grabbed his bodiless self spitting right sonny jim right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt. It pinioned him in the no-place.

It was a long, a very long time since Wati had spent more than a fractional moment out of body, in that space. He did not know how to meta-wrestle, could not fight. All he knew how to do in that phantom zone was get out of it, which his captor would not let him do. you my son are comin with me dan to the station.

There was the reek of information, authority and cunning. Wati tried to think. He did not of course breathe, but he felt as if he were suffocating. The tough un-body of the thing holding him leaked the components that made it. As it choked him he learned random snippety things from its touch.

officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage. His recent route from the bobble-head was still astrally greased by his passage, and he clawed his way back into that tiny figure. Came slamming back into it and bellowed. The dogs looked round.

“Help me!” he shouted. He could feel the cop grab him, sucking at him, trying to winkle him out. It was strong. He clung to the inside of the doll.

“Get a brick,” he shouted. “Get something heavy. Grab me!” The nearest dog fumbled, picked the toy up. “When I say, you smash this motherfucker against the wall and you do it in one go. Understand?” The frightened dog nodded.

Wati braced, paused, then hauled the surprised attacker in with him, into the tiny figure. Wati looked through cheap eyes, crowded, feeling the bewildered officer jostling in the sudden shape.

“Now!” he shouted. The dog swung its heavy head and spat the doll at the bricks. In the tiniest moment before it touched the wall, Wati kicked out of it, shoving the police-thing back in, and pouring into a one-armed Barbie.

He heard the shattering as he slipped into his plastic person, saw shards of what had instants before been him go flying. With the percussion came a bellow of something dying. A burp of stink and strong feeling mushroomed and dissipated.

The dogs stared at the shards, at the raging woman-figured Wati.

“What was that?” one of them said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Wati said. Psychic fingerprints had bruised him. “A cop. Sort of.” He felt his injuries, to see what he could learn from them and their residue. “Oh fuck me,” he said, prodding one sore spot.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

HE HAD BEEN A MAN OF VARIABLE AND VARIEGATED TALENTS. NO one would have called him a criminarch, though certainly he was not at all constrained by the technicalities of law. He was not a god, nor a godling, nor a warrior of any such. What he was, he always claimed, was a scholar. No one would have argued with Grisamentum over that.

His origins were obscure—“uninteresting,” he said—and somewhere between fifty and three hundred years back, depending on his anecdote. Grisamentum intervened according to his own ideas of how London should be, with which discriminations the forces of law and those in favour of a bit less murder were generally broadly sympathetic, according to his own knacks.

He was a man who won some hearts and minds. In contrast to the Tattoo, a relentless innovator of brutality for whom etiquette and propriety were useful for the shock they occasioned when being pissed on, Grisamentum valued the traditions of the London hinterland. He encouraged righteous behaviour among his troops, proper shows of respect to the city’s names.

He riffed, playfully of course but not as a joke, on the spurious remembrances of hinterLondon. It was long since the most fabulous of the bestiaries’ contents had walked, if they ever had, but rather than shrug and accept this postlapsarian cityscape of degraded knackery, he brought back into fashion the city’s monsterherds. Previously a rather ridiculous set of hobbyists, these invokers of a more maged past in the very matter of London—leaf minotaurs, rubbish manticoras, dogshit dragons—became his occasional troops. And with his passing, they had become again morris dancers of the supernatural, and nothing.

“It’s not like you thought he couldn’t die,” Dane said. “No such thing as immortal, no one’s an idiot. But it was a shock. When we heard.”

That Grisamentum was dying. He did not, as do so many little warlords, which in a terribly charming way he sort of was, obfuscate the facts of his case. He put out requests. He asked for help. He searched for a cure for whatever drab, lethal little disorder it was that had him.

“Who did this?” his partisans demanded in agony. They took no comfort from the fact that the truth appeared to be no one. Contingency and biology.

“He made quite a few deadists pretty rich,” Dane said.

“Deadists?”

“Thanatothurges. Had them in and out, knackers used to knacking stuff about death. People figured he was trying to find a way out of it. He wouldn’t be the first. But there’s only so much anyone can do. Met Byrne out of it, though. She was his lady. Gave him a bit of happiness, I thought, in the last year or two.”

“So?”

“So what? So he died. There was a funeral. A cremation, like a Viking thing. It was amazing, all like crazy fireworks. When he realised he was going he went from deadists to pyros. Djinn and people, Anna Ginier, Wossname Cole. When that pyre went up, boy, it was knacked, and that didn’t burn just like any fire.”

“You saw it?”

“We had a delegation. Like most of the churches.”

The fire scorching in every which way, burning out certain certainties, making holes in things it had no business burning holes in, spectacular as a world of fireworks. The proximity of the venue—some treated chamber in some innocuous-looking bank or whatever—to Pudding Lane, the unusual nature of the fire and the reputations of the pyros that had prepared it had led to speculation that it had been a conduit, some knack-buggered spark scorching all the way back four-hundred-plus years, starting the Great Fire and burning a little hole for Grisamentum out of the present in which he was dying.

“Bullshit,” Dane said. “And anyway, whenever he went, he’d still have had the dying in him.” Because he had died, this man who had just sent a message.

“WHY NOW?” BILLY SAID. HE WALKED ALONGSIDE DANE—NOT A STEP behind him, as he might have done once. They were in Dagenham, in a street full of dirty and deserted buildings, where corrugated iron was almost as common a facade as brick.

“Listen to me, Dane,” Billy said. “Why are you in such a hurry? God’s sake.” He grabbed Dane and made him face him.

“I told you, no one except him knows we met …”

“Whether this is him or not, you don’t know what’s going on. And we’re supposed to be gone to ground. There’s a price on our heads. Wati’s meeting us tomorrow. Why don’t we wait, talk to him about this. You’re the one’s been telling me to think like a soldier,” Billy said.

Dane’s shoulders went up. “Do not,” he said, “tell me I’m not a soldier. What are you?”

“You tell me,” Billy said. They made an effort to keep their voices low. He took his glasses off and came closer. “What do you think I am? You haven’t asked me about my dreams for a while. Want to know what I’ve been seeing?” He had dreamed nothing.

“Of course we have to be careful,” Dane said. “But one of the most important players in London just come back from the dead. Out of nowhere. Why’s he been waiting? What’s he been doing? And why does he want to talk to me? We have to know, and we have to know now.”

“Maybe he was never dead. Maybe it’s him we’re looking for.”

“He was dead.”

“Demonstrably he wasn’t,” said Billy, putting his glasses back on. That did not follow. He had no idea how this worked. “How do you know he doesn’t want to kill you?”

“Why would he? I never did nothing against him. I worked with some of his boys. He never had a big crew, I knew them all. He knows the Tattoo’s after us, and those two … No love lost. Anyway,” he said, “we’re in disguise.” Billy had to laugh. They were in new uninteresting clothes, was all, from the latest safe house. “We’re going to have to do something about those glasses,” Dane said. “Total giveaway.”

“You keep away from my glasses,” Billy said. “If he’s been around all this time, and he’s not said anything to anyone … what’s changed now? You’re exiled. You can’t tell anyone he’s still alive. You’re a secret now, just like him.”

“We have to …” Dane was not a natural exile. Twice, three times he had referred to others of his ilk in the church. “Time was, when Ben was doing the same thing as me …” he had said. “There used to be this other geezer, and him and me …” Whatever he and him had done they did not anymore. Billy had seen those big men at the service; there was clearly muscle among the Krakenists. But there was a difference between a handy young devotee and an exonerated assassin. Dane was not old, but he was old enough to have been doing this for years, and these comrades he mentioned were all in the past. Something had happened to the church, Billy thought, in that time. A decline, maybe. You don’t self-exile out of nowhere.

Did teuthic agents retire? They had died, surely. The coterie of nonaligned colleagues like Wati and Jason from which Dane sought help, his half-friends–half-comrades, a network at odds with his lone squid status, did not share the absurd faith that drove him. Dane was the last of the squid agents and he was lonely. This revelation of relation to another power, a real power, with which he had history and allegiance, suddenly and unexpectedly revived, had snared him. Billy could only apply a little caution.

They were early to the rendezvous. It was a petrol station, closed down, boarded up, in a triangle of land between residential blocks and unconvincing light industry. The pumps were gone; the cement, striped with tire rubbings, was grown over.

“Stay close,” Dane said. They underlooked a flyover, and must be visible from the upper windows of the closest houses. Billy moved as Dane suggested, unfurtive, as if he had a normal job to do. That was how you disguised yourself in these places.

By the corner of the lot, behind engine remnants, was a passage over a low wall into the back streets. “That’s our route out, but it’s other stuff’s route in, too, so watch it,” Dane said. “Be ready to run like fucking fuck.”

The light dwindled. Dane did not attempt to be unseen, but he waited until a certain critical mass of darkness to take out his speargun. He held it dangling. As the sky turned a last flat dark grey, a woman climbed through the split in the fence and walked toward them.

“Dane,” she said.

She was in her forties, wearing an expensive coat, skirt, silver jewellery. Her greying hair was up. She carried a briefcase. “That’s her,” said Dane. “It’s Byrne.” He muttered urgently. “That’s her. The one came to work for Gris when he got sick. Sweet on him. Haven’t seen her since he died.”

Dane aimed the speargun from his hip. “Stop where you are,” he said. She eyed his unlikely weapon. “Stay there, Ms. Byrne,” he said. In the rubbly remaindered space, no one spoke for several seconds. Maybe half a mile off Billy heard the Dopplered wheeze of a train.

“Got to excuse me being a little jumpy,” Dane said at last. “I’m a bit shy these days, got a few problems …”

“Condolences,” the woman said. “We’ve heard that you and your congregation have had a falling out.”

“Right,” said Dane. “Yeah. Ta. Thanks for that. Long time. Bit of a turn-up your boss sending me a note.”

“Death isn’t what it used to be,” she said. She was posh.

“Right, right, right,” Dane said. “Well, you’d know, wouldn’t we? We both know you didn’t bring him back. No disrespect, I’m sure you’re great at what you do, but. Not even Grisamentum or you could do that. Where is he? No offense, but it ain’t you I come to see.”

“It isn’t so much you he wants to see, Dane Parnell. Though it is about that god of yours.” She pointed at Billy.

I knew it, Billy thought, and had no idea where the thought came from or what it meant. He had expected nothing. There was silence. Billy scanned the surrounds, the silhouettes against bleak skies.

“What does your boss want?” Dane said. “Where is he? Where’s he been for the last God knows how many years?”

“We heard that the Tattoo’s sicced every bounty-hunter between here and Glasgow on your tail, for some tidy money,” Byrne said. “Your church wants you dead. And if that weren’t enough, you’ve got Goss and Subby coming after you.”

“We’re popular blokes,” Dane said. “Where did he go?”

“Look,” she said. “After that business with the Tattoo, it wasn’t as simple as we made it. It’s not that there was no comeback. He had … There were problems. And when we realised that Tattoo was still gunning for him—and that was a mess, we should have just killed him, that’s a lesson, don’t get creative with revenge—Grisamentum needed … some time. Some space. To heal. Look at it, Dane. No one knows he’s alive. Think what an advantage that is.

“You’ve felt all this.” She shrugged at the sky. “You can tell things are going wrong. Have been since your god was taken. Mr. Harrow, you were there. You were in the Centre. It was you who found it. And that’s not nothing.”

Was that grinding glass?

“The Tattoo’s after your god, Dane Parnell. He’s closing in. Listen to me.” For the first time there was urgency in her voice. “Why do you think you haven’t heard about Grisamentum for the last few years? You said it yourself. As far as London knows, he’s dead. That puts us in a good position. So don’t mess it up by telling anyone. You know and I know that whatever it is he wants it for, we can’t let the Tattoo get hold of the kraken.”

“Where is it?” Billy said.

“Yeah,” said Dane, without looking round. “Where is it? Billy thought you might have taken it.”

“Why would we want your god?” Byrne said. “What we want is the Tattoo not to get it. We don’t know who’s got it, Dane. And that makes me nervous. No one should have that kind of power. Certainly no one we don’t know about. You know as much about what’s going on as anyone. You two, I mean, with what’s in Mr. Harrow’s head. But we know things too. We all want the same thing. To find the kraken, and to stop the Tattoo getting anywhere near it.

“We want to work together.”

•   •   •

“OH, MAN,” DANE SAID AT LAST. HE LOOKED AROUND. “SHIT. WE should get out of sight,” he said to Billy. He turned back to her. “Grisamentum asked that once before,” he said. “Right here. I said no.”

“Not so,” Byrne said. “Last time he tried to persuade you to come to work for him. He’s sorry for that. You’re a kraken man—he knows it, I know it, you know it. That’s what this is about. We’re not pretending we don’t need your help. And you need ours. We’re suggesting we become partners.”

Dane stared at her until she spoke again. “Too much is going on, Dane. The angels are walking. We need to know why.”

Dane leaned back, his eyes still on Byrne, to whisper to Billy. “If this isn’t bullshit,” he said, “then it’s something. To work with Grisamentum? We got to think very seriously about this.”

“We don’t even know it is Grisamentum,” Billy said slowly.

Dane nodded. “Look,” he said louder. “This is all very flattering, but I haven’t even seen your boss. We can’t make this sort of decision like that.” We, thought Billy, with satisfaction.

“Are you going to start talking about organ-grinders and monkeys?” Byrne said.

“However you want to put it,” Dane said. “What was it happened? He was really sick.”

“Was he?”

“Where is he then? Why disappear all that time?”

“He’s not going to come here,” she said carefully. “There’s no way he’s going to …”

“Well then we’re done,” said Dane.

“Will you let me finish? That doesn’t mean you can’t talk to him.”

“What, you got some secure line?” Dane said.

“There are ways.” She took out a pen and paper. “Channels. Talk to him, then.”

She put the fountain pen on the paper. Dane stepped closer. He kept the speargun aimed at her. Byrne wrote. She did not take her eyes from Dane’s.

Hello, she wrote. The writing was the same as what had been on the paper plane, small and curled and dark grey. Long time.

“Ask him what you want,” Byrne said.

“Where is he?” Billy said.

“It’s his writing,” Dane said.

“That’s hardly proof,” Billy said.

“Where are you?” Dane said. To the paper.

Near, Byrne wrote, without looking.

Billy blinked at this new thing, this remote-writing knack. “This proves nothing,” he whispered to Dane.

“Heard you were dead,” Dane said. There was no writing. “When we was here last, you were asking me to come work for you. Remember?”

Y.

“When I said I wouldn’t, I said I couldn’t, and I asked you a question. Do you remember? What I said? The last thing I said to you before I went?”

Byrne’s hand hesitated over the paper. Then she wrote.

Said you’d never leave church, she wrote. Said: “I know who made me. Do you know who made you?”

“It’s him,” Dane said quietly to Billy. “No one else knew that.” The city broke the silence, with the coughing of a car, as if uncomfortable.

What broke you from the church? Byrne wrote.

“Different ideas,” Dane said.

You want your kraken.

“Dead, rotten and ruined?” Dane said. “Why d’you think I want it?”

Because you’re not the Tattoo.

“What exactly is your proposition?” Billy said. Dane stared at him.

We can find it, Byrne wrote. She kept looking up. She stared into the litter of stars, strewn like discards. Whoever has it has plans. No one takes a thing like that without plans. Not good.

Harrow you know more than you know, she wrote. She drew an arrow, pointing at him. Wherever he was, Grisamentum was pining for Billy’s opaque vatic insight.

“We have to think about this, Billy,” Dane said.

“Well he’s not the Tattoo,” Billy muttered to him. “I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn’t try to kill me to anyone who does. I’m funny that way. But …”

“But what?”

“There’s too much we don’t know.” Dane hesitated. He nodded. “We’re meeting Wati tomorrow. Let’s talk to him about it. He might have news—you know he’s been tracking shit down.” Billy felt, suddenly and vividly, as if he were underwater.

“Grisamentum,” Dane said. “We have to think.”

“Really,” Byrne said. She looked away from the sky and at him as her hand wrote Join us now.

“No disrespect. If it was you you’d do the same. We’re on the same side. We just have to think.”

Byrne’s hand moved over the paper, but no ink came from the pen. She pursed her lips and tried again. Eventually she wrote something and read it. She took out a new pen and wrote, in a different script, a postal box, a pickup spot. She gave it to Dane.

“Send us word,” she said. “But fast, Dane, or we have to assume no. Time’s running out. Look at the bloody moon.” Billy looked at the sliver of it. Its craters and contours made it look wormy. “Something’s coming.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

BILLY HAD ANOTHER DREAM AT LAST, THAT NIGHT. HE HAD BEEN feeling vaguely guilty at the lack of oneiric insights. But at last he had a dream worthy to be so called, rather than the vague sensations of cosseting dark, cool, glimmerings, heaviness, stasis and chemical stench that otherwise filled his nighttime head.

He had been in a city. In a city and racing up and over buildings, jumping over high buildings with one jump, making swimming motions to pass through the clear air above skyscrapers. He wore bright clothes.

“Stop,” he shouted at someone, some figure creeping from broken windows in a big warehouse, where police lights shone and there was the smoke of a fire billowing like a dark liquid in water. There was Collingswood, the young police witch, smoking, leaning against a wall, not looking at the crime behind her, eyeing Billy on his descent sardonically and patiently. She pointed the way he had come. She pointed back the other way and did not look round.

Billy sank gracefully through. Behind Collingswood he saw a robotic wizard mastermind nemesis look up, and Billy felt warm in the sun, knowing that his companion would come. He waited to see the muscly arms, the tentacles in their Lycra, come out from behind the building, his sidekick behind its mask.

But something was wrong. He heard a rumble but there were no uncoiling sucker arms, no grabbing ropy limbs, no vast eye like that of the tinderbox dog. There was, instead, a bottle. Behind the enemy. Its glass was dark. Its stopper was old and corroded into place, but uncorking. And he knew suddenly and with a kind of relief that it was not his sidekick, but that he was its.

When he woke Billy felt a different kind of guilt. At the kitsch of the dreams. He felt the universe, exasperated, was giving him an insultingly clear insight, that he was simply missing.

“WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE?” BILLY SAID.

“You mean what my granddad said?” Dane said. “If you was good, maybe you come back in a god’s skin.” A chromatophore, a gushing colour cell. So krakens show emotion by the flexing of their devout dead. It was never the stories of sinking islands upsetting Vikings that Dane told.

Billy and Dane crossed the city with as much subterfuge as they could muster. By way of knacks, magic misdirection, an anti-trail of psychic un-bread crumbs. Billy relaxed a little when they entered the graveyard where they had their rendezvous. He walked between the rows of stone. His calm made little sense, he knew: whatever hunted them would do so among the dead as easily as among the living.

“Dane. Billy.” Wati spoke to them from a stone angel. “Sure you weren’t followed?”

“Fuck off, Wati,” Dane said mildly. “How’s the strike?”

“Struggling.” Wati circled in a clearing among the unkempt graves, speaking from one then another then another stone face. “To be honest, we got big trouble. I got attacked.”

“What?” said Dane. He took a solicitous step toward the moment’s contingent figure. “You okay? Who? How?”

“I’m alright,” Wati said. “I nearly wasn’t, but I’m alright now. It was police. It nearly got me. I got it though. The only good thing is I learnt a few things. It sort of oozed out of itself, is what.”

Billy turned slowly and looked at each of the angels. “We all had visitors,” Dane said. “You remember Byrne, Wati?”

“Grisamentum’s vizier? What about her?”

“We saw her, Wati.” The leaves of the ivy and the overlooking trees muttered. “Grisamentum’s still alive.”

Clouds bundled by, as if something was urgent. Billy heard some little animal rustling under the grass.

“You saw him?” Wati said.

“We spoke to him. It was him, Wati. He wants to work with us. To find it.” There were more graveside rustles.

“What did you tell him?”

“We said we’d think.”

“So what do you think?” After seconds of silence Wati said, from a new, saccharine child angel, “Billy, what do you think?”

“Me?” Billy cleared his throat. “I don’t know.”

“We need all the help we can get,” Dane said carefully.

“Yeah, but,” Billy said. The toughness of his own voice surprised him. “You think I’ve got knowledge I don’t even know about, right? Well, I don’t know why, but I don’t like it. Alright?”

“That’s not nothing, Dane,” said Wati at last.

“Listen,” he continued. “I’ve got stuff to tell you. You remember that list of the porters we reckon could’ve took the kraken? I been looking into it.” Wati’s voice that day was thin and marble. “Simon, Aykan, couple of others, remember?

“There’s skinny on all of them, you hear what they like, who they’re working for, what they’re good at and not good at, all that. If we thought of this you can bet your arse everyone else who knows about the kraken did, and they’re looking too: we heard from Aykan’s old flatmate that the cops tried to get hold of him. But they’re not thinking right. Simon’s the dark horse.”

“Simon Shaw retired,” Dane said.

“He did—that’s the point,” Wati said. “I was thinking about methods. Rebecca uses wormholes, but she needs a power source, and it leaves pissed-off particles. You said the police couldn’t find anything?”

“I don’t know what they were looking for,” Billy said. “But I heard them say there was no sign of anything.”

“Right,” said Wati from a Madonna. “Aykan uses Tay al-Ard, great method …”

“It’s the only kind of porting I’ll do,” said Dane.

“I don’t blame you,” said Wati. “But even if he could shift something as big as the kraken, some of the irfans would have felt it. Like you say, Simon hasn’t been on the scene. But here’s the thing: he does have a familiar.”

“I didn’t know,” Dane said.

“Honest truth is neither did I until one of the organisers reminded me. It ain’t like most assistants. Simon made sure it paid dues—it never had the mind for much, but it pushed a bit of energy our way to cover subs. He wasn’t bad to it. He loved the bloody thing. But we should still have had a connection, and no one could feel the link. I had to go hunting.

“I don’t know how long it’s been faddling around. Found the poor little fucker eventually, in a landfill. It’s only here because it trusts me.” What familiar didn’t?

“Here?” said Billy. “Here here?”

The statue whistled. From below a scraggy bush next to them there was a rustling, again.

“Jesus Christ,” said Billy. “What the hell’s that?”

Snuffling amid the cigarette butts and the ruins of food, a hand-sized clot of mange and clumpy hair whimpered and whispered. There were no features, only a matting of dirt and sickly flesh.

“Oh what?” said Dane.

“He had it made from scratch,” Wati said. “It’s clotted out of him. His parings. He had a lifesmith clay it together. The fur’s from a vet: it’s dog, cat, all sorts.” The thing had no eyes, no visible mouth.

“What use is this hairball?” said Dane.

“None,” Wati said. “It’s not smart, it’s a rubbish guard, it doesn’t have the focus for knacks. He made it anyway. Out of him, so the poor little bastard has a link. A bit buggered, but you can still feel it. I don’t know what, but something scared Simon off working a couple of years ago. And judging from the mood of my little brother here, something’s happened more recently, too.

“You know what we found it doing?” The thing shivered, and Wati made the reassuring noise again. “It was gathering food—sort of folding itself over it to drag it. I think it’s for Simon. I think it’s been trekking for days to get stuff, trekking back with it. I think it’s on its own initiative.”

“Why would Simon want something like that?” Dane said, staring at the pitiable threadbare oddity.

“Well,” said the Wati-statue. “You know how Simon used to dress. Don’t you ever watch telly, Dane?”

“How did he dress?” said Billy.

“Pretend uniform,” Wati said. “Little sign on the chest.” His voice was arch.

“Why does this matter?” Dane said.

“No,” said Billy suddenly, staring at the bizarre familiar. “Oh you’re shitting me.”

“Yeah,” Wati said. “You got it.”

“What?” said Dane. He stared at the statue and at Billy. “What?”

YOU HEAR ALL THE TIME, BILLY TOLD DANE—AND HOW GOOD IT was for him to be telling Dane something—about the influence of pulp science fiction on real science. It is an admission both shamefaced and proud that some large proportion of scientists claim inspiration from variously crude visionary blatherings they loved when young. Satellite specialists cite Arthur Clarke, biologists are drawn to the field by the neuro- and nanotech visions of entertainers. Above all, Roddenberry’s leaden space-pioneering meant a demographic bulge of young physicists attempting to replicate replicators, tri-corders, phasers and transporter rooms.

But it was not only the hard sciences. Other professionals grew up with the same stuff. Sociologists of the network went rummaging in old imaginings. Philosophers stole many-worlds, grateful to alternative-reality merchants. And, unknown to the mainstream, such invented futures were the seminal viewing for a generation of London’s mages, and they were no less keen to imitate their favourites than were physicists. Alongside technopaganism and chaos magic, Crowleyism and druidical pomp, there were the reality-smiths of the TV generation.

Ornerily, it was not the fantasies that inspired most knackers, not Buffy, Angel, American Gothic or Supernatural. It was the science fiction. Time travel was out, the universe not having fixed lines, but sorcerer fans of Dr. Who made untraditional wands, disdaining willow for carefully lathed metal and calling them sonic screwdrivers. Soothsayer admirers of Blake’s 7 called themselves Children of Orac. London’s fourth-best shapeshifter changed her name by deed-poll to Maya, and her surname to Space1999.

There were those magicians who expressed allegiance to more recherché series—empatechs who would not be quiet about Star Cops, culture-surfing necromancers hooked on Lexx—and a younger generation naming themselves for Farscape and Galactica (the remake, of course).

But it was the classics that were most popular, and just as for NASA technicians, Star Trek was the most classic of these.

“Simon’s familiar’s name,” Wati said, “is Tribble.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“’COURSE I’VE SEEN STAR TREK,” DANE SAID. “BUT I DON’T KNOW what a fucking tribble is.”

They were by London Bridge. Simon’s last-known address had been empty for months. They hunted.

“Well, it’s one of those things, basically,” Billy said. He was back in silly student getup too young for him. He peered into the plastic bag he carried. Within shivered Tribble. Billy stroked its dirty fur. They passed slate-top figurines and plaster statuettes on buildings. Ill-clothed mannequins. From each of them came Wati’s whispered voice, soothing Tribble, keeping the un-animal calm.

“We sure we’re going the right way?” Billy said.

“No,” said Wati. “I’ve been trying to track the link backward. I reckon it leads round here. If we get close enough I’ll feel it.”

“What is the fucking deal with this tribble thing?” Dane said.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Wati said. He spoke in little gusts from all the statues. “Simon was totally into that stupid show. He went to conventions. Had the collections, the figures, all that stuff. Half the time he dressed in that stupid uniform.”

“So?” Dane said. “So he’s talented, made money and pissed it away on tat. He’s a beamer who made himself Mr. fucking Spock.”

“Scotty,” Billy said. He looked at Dane over the top of his glasses, schoolmarmish. “Spock didn’t beam anything.”

“What? What? Whatever. Listen, there’s different ways of porting, Billy. There’s folding up space.” Dean scrunched his hands. “So places far apart touch each other for a moment. But that ain’t what Simon does. He’s a beamer. Disintegrate whatever it is you want, zap its bits somewhere else, stick them back together.”

“Wasn’t there an auction of Star Trek stuff?” Billy said. “A couple of months ago? At Christie’s or somewhere? I think I remember … All the auctioneers wore the uniforms. They sold the starship model for like a million quid or something.”

Dane half closed his eyes. “Rings a bell.”

“It’s going weird in-between,” said Wati from a scuffed stone dog. “I think it wants us to turn left.”

“We’re circling,” said Billy.

They slowed. They had done three turns of a towerblock, orbiting it as if the ill-kept concrete pillar were the sun. They were not alone on the street, but none of the pedestrians paid them any particular mind. “It wants to take us there,” said Billy, “but it’s scared.”

“Alright, hold on,” said Wati from a plastic owl, a bird-scarer on a chemist roof. “I’ll have a look.”

WATI WENT TO A TINY COSY PLASTIC DASHBOARD VIRGIN; TO A cemetery and a headstone angel, seeing through birdlimed eyes. Staccato manifested moments to the base of the tower, eyeing the building from a bouncing horsey in the children’s playground.

He could feel familiars in a few of the flats. All union members. Two on strike; the other, a—what was that?—a parrot, still working but with dispensation for some reason. The unioned three felt their organiser’s presence with surprise. He stretched out, found a child’s doll in the ground floor. It took him scant moments to see through speck-sized Barbie, to go again, finding a terra-cotta lady in the next-door flat, seeing again, nothing of interest, moving to a China shepherdess on next-door’s mantelpiece.

He slid through figures. His moments of statued awareness proliferated in a cloud. He strobed through floors in doll figure carved-soapdish rabbitsextoy antique relic, seeing, fucking, eating, reading, sleeping, laughing, fighting, human minutiae that did not interest him.

Three storeys from the top, he opened his consciousness in a plastic figure of Captain Kirk. Feeling the seam of his moulding, the hinge of his little arms and legs, the crude Starfleet uniform painted on him, he looked into a ruinous apartment.

Less than a minute later he was back in a novelty alarm clock shaped like a chimney sweep, in the window of a shop where Billy and Dane loitered.

“Hey,” he said.

A clock is shouting at me, Billy thought, so loud anyone with a hint of nous would have been able to read it. He stared at Wati. Little while ago I was a guy worked in a museum.

“Third floor from the top. Go.”

“Wait,” said Dane. “He’s there? Is he alright?”

“You’d better see.”

“JESUS,” WHISPERED BILLY. “IT STINKS.”

“I told you,” said Wati. Dane held him out like a weapon. Wati was in a ripoff toy, a “Powered Ranga!” they had brought.

The curtains were drawn. The stench was of rotting food, filthy clothes, uncleaned floors. The rooms were littered with mouldering rubbish. There were tracks—cockroaches, mice, rats. Tribble whimpered. The ridiculous scrabbly thing pulled itself out of the bag and half rolled, half hairily oozed into the living room. From where came sounds.

“More of you?” A voice stretched taut. “Can’t, can’t be, I’ve accounted, or you have, you’re all done, aren’t you, that’s us, isn’t it? Tribble, Tribble? You can’t speak, can you, though?”

“That’s him,” said Dane. “Simon.” He drew his speargun.

“Oh Jesus,” Billy said.

On every surface was Star Trek merchandise: model Enterprises; plastic Spocks claimed emotionlessness more convincingly than the character they represented; Klingon weapons hung on the walls. There were plastic phasers and communicators on the shelves.

Sitting on the sofa, staring at them, Tribble on his lap, was a ghastly looking man. Simon’s face was pale and thin, scab-crusted. His Star Trek uniform was dirty, the insignia one blot among many.

“Thought maybe you were more of them,” he said.

He was surrounded, encauled, coronaed with whispering figures. They fleeted in and out of visibility, made of dark light. They entered his body and exited it, they faded up, they ebbed out. They moved around the room, they crooned, they hooted in faint lunatic imitations of speech.

Every one of the figures looked exactly like Simon. Each was him, staring in hate.

“What happened, Simon?” Dane said. He whipped his hand through the air to disperse the shades, as if they were insect-clouds or bad smells. They ignored him and continued their cruel haunting. “What happened?”

“He’s lost it,” said Wati. “He’s completely gone.” In his agitation he went from toy to toy, speaking snatches from each. “Imagine dealing …” “… with that …” “… every moment…” “… every day …” “… and night as well.” “He’s gone.”

“We need an exorcist,” said Dane.

“I knew it was trouble,” Simon said. He shied from the angry him-spirits. “I started feeling them, in the matter stream. But it’s always one last job.” He made a shooting motion. Several of the figures in joyless mockery finger-shot him back. “Couldn’t not. They made it real, God.”

“I told you,” said Billy. Amid scattered novels set in the favoured universe was a box, still surrounded by paper and string. It contained a big book and yet another phaser. The book was the catalogue of an auction. A very expensive Star Trek sale. The model of the Enterprise—it was from Next Generation, in fact—had a reserve of $200,000. There were uniforms, furniture, accoutrements, most from the Picard years. But there were a few from other spin-offs, and from the first series.

Billy found the phaser listed. The details were geekily precise (it was a phase pistol type-2, with removable type-1 inset, and so on). The reserve price was high—the prop had been used on-screen many times. Billy picked it up, and the translucent Simons looked at it wrathfully and wistfully. Below it was a card, on which was written: As agreed.

The weapon was surprisingly heavy. Billy turned it experimentally, held it out and pulled the trigger.

The sound was bizarrely and instantly recognisable from TV, high spitting crossbred with mosquito whine. There was heat, and he saw light. A particle beam of some impossible kind burst out of the meaningless weapon, seared the air, light-speeding into the wall as Dane shouted and leapt, and the spirit-Simons screamed.

Billy stared at the thing dangling in his hand, at the scorched wall. The stupid toylike lump of plastic and metal that shot like a real phaser.

“ALRIGHT,” SAID DANE, AFTER MORE THAN AN HOUR COAXING sentences from Simon, shielding him from the Simons that surrounded him. “What have we figured?”

“What are they? The hims?” Billy said.

“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my point. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But take something living and do that? Beam it up? What you done is ripped a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around. He died. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died.”

“This is why he stopped working?” said Billy.

“Maybe he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. Something was making him nervous. But then he comes back and does it again. And it’s a huge job.” Dane nodded. “The kraken. Tips him over the edge. You know how many years Simon spent beaming in and out of places, “getting coordinates,” beaming out with merchandise? You get me? Do you know how many times he’s died?

“Almost as many times as James T. fucking Kirk is how many. That man sitting there was born out of nothing a few days ago, when he got the kraken out. And this time, when he arrived, all the hes who died before were waiting. And they were pissed off.

“They want revenge. Who killed the Simon Shaws? Simon Shaw is who. Time and again.”

“It’s hardly fair,” Billy said. “He’s the only one of the whole lot of them who hasn’t killed anyone; he only just got here. It’s them who killed each other.”

“Yeah,” said Dane. “But he’s the only one of them living, and that anger’s got to go somewhere. They ain’t the most logical things. That’s why Simon’s being haunted by Simons. Poor bastard.”

“Right,” said Billy. “So why did he do it?” He pointed at the phaser, the catalogue, the note. “Someone contacts him. Here comes one of the biggest Trekkie sales for years, and he’s getting none of it, and someone contacts him with an offer he can’t refuse. They’ve done something with this gun.”

Dane nodded. “Contracted some mage. Some shaper’s knacked it so it’s real.”

“What’s he going to do?” said Billy. “Not want the world’s only working phaser? They say you just have to port one thing. So who wrote this note? Simon didn’t want a giant squid. Whoever dangled this gun in front of him’s our mystery player. They’re the ones who’ve got your god.”

PART THREE
LONDONMANCY

Chapter Forty

BILLY STARED AT SIMON’S ANGRY DEAD SELVES. DID SIMON FEEL the guilt they laid on him, the culpability for countless unintentional suicides? What an original sin.

At last Wati returned into a statuette of an Argelian dancer. “Open the door,” he said. Outside, a harassed-looking woman waited carrying a coiling ram’s horn.

“Dane,” she said, entered. “God almighty, what’s been going on here?”

“Mo’s the best I know,” Wati said. “And no one knows her …”

“Are you an exorcist?” Billy said. The woman rolled her eyes.

“She’s a rabbi, you moron,” said Wati. “Simon couldn’t give a shit one way or the other.”

“I’ve seen legion possession before,” Mo said. “But never … God almighty they’re all him.” She walked through the ghost corona and murmured to Simon gently. “I can try something,” she said. “But I’ve got to get him back to the temple.” She shook the shofar. “This won’t cut it.”

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children. Wati was on watch, circling through figures a mile around. Dane, Billy and Mo watched the moaned malice of Simon’s haunters.

“We have to go,” Wati said suddenly from a foot-high McCoy.

“Too early,” Dane said. “It’s not even midnight …”

“Now,” Wati said. “They’re coming.”

“Who do you …?”

“Christ, Dane! Move! Goss and fucking Subby!”

And everyone moved.

“TATTOO’S THOUGHT LIKE US,” WATI SAID AS THEY GRABBED THEIR stuff and hauled poor Simon in his ghost-cloud. “He’s tracked Simon down. His knuckleheads are coming. And Goss and Subby are with them.

“Some are in the main stairs. The rest are close. Goss and Subby are close.”

“Any other way out?” Dane said. Wati was gone, back.

“If there is there’s no statues by it.”

“Must be one at the back,” Billy said. “A fire escape.”

“Take a figure,” Wati said. “I’m going to get Goss and Subby off you.”

“Wait,” Dane said, but Wati was gone. Billy grabbed the phaser, the auction catalogue, a plastic Kirk. There was no one in the corridor. Dane hustled them round corners. Mo and Billy dragged Simon in a blanket that inadequately hid his tormentors. They heard the lift arriving. Dane raised his speargun and motioned Billy and Mo away.

“Down,” he said, pointing at the fire escape. “Mo, don’t let them see you. Billy, don’t let them see her.” He ran toward the lift.

“HUFF HUFF HUFF, EH SUBBY?”

Goss was jogging. Not very intensely, and with an exaggerated comic wobble of the head. Behind him came Subby with the same motion, unselfconsciously.

“The rest of the bears are just over the stream,” Goss said. “Once we cross the magic bridge we can help ourselves to all the honey. Huff huff huff.” There were two or three more turns between him and the base of the tower. Goss looked the length of the dark street. At a junction with a cul-de-sac were a band of battered dustbins. A moment of hard wind sent a full bin-bag falling, sent the bins wobbling, jostling among themselves, as if they were trying to shift away from Goss’s attention.

“Remember when Darling Bear and Sugar Bear came home with the Princess of Flower Picnics?” Goss said. He clenched and unclenched his fingers. He smiled, pulling back his lips from his teeth carefully and completely and biting the air. Subby stared at him.

“Billy, shift.”

At those faint words Goss stopped.

“Shut it, Dane.”

Whispered London voices. They were just off the street, in one of the darknesses that abutted it.

“He’s nearby,” said a voice. And from farther away came an answer, Shhh.

“Subby Subby Subby,” whispered Goss. “Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we’re silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.”

He put his finger to his lips and creep-creeped out of the main road into the alley where the voices were. Subby followed him in the same tippy-toe, into the shadow where someone was muttering.

THE LIFT DOORS OPENED, AND BILLY, LOOKING BACK FROM THE FIRE escape, saw three dark-dressed figures in motorcycle helmets. Dane had his weapon up. There was a percussion.

“Go,” said Wati-Kirk from Billy’s pocket, and “Go,” said Dane without looking back. Billy and Mo dragged Simon down the stairs.

“What about Dane?” Billy kept saying. But Wati was gone again.

It was many floors down. Adrenalin was all that stopped Mo and Billy collapsing under Simon’s weight. They heard scuffles, muffled by walls, above them. Billy felt a horrid crawl of ghosts on his skin as Simon’s tormentors swept through him. When at last they reached the ground floor Billy was gasping, almost retching.

“Don’t fucking stand there,” said the little Kirk in his pocket. “Move.” A random man at his front door stared at the ghosts of Simon in bewilderment so great he was not even scared. Billy and Mo barrelled toward the elevator shaft and the front door beyond it, but it opened and there were two of Tattoo’s men. Grey cam gear, dark-visored helmets, reaching for weapons.

Mo cried out and threw up her hands. Billy stood in front of her and fired the phaser.

He didn’t panic. He had time to reflect for an instant on how calm he was, that he was raising the weapon and pressing the firing stud.

There was no recoil. There was that kitsch sound, that line of light, punching into the chest of the man at the front and flaring in a bruise of light across him as he flew back. The second man was running at Billy in expert zigzag, and Billy shot several times and missed, scorching the walls.

Mo was screaming. Billy threw out his hand. The man stopped hard as if he had run into something. He bounced against nothing visible. The man butted the nothing with his helmet, with an audible percussion.

Billy did not hear the lift arrive or its doors open. He only saw Dane step out behind the Tattoo’s man and swing his empty speargun hard at that featureless motorcycle helmet, in a curve like a batsman’s. The man went down, his pistol skittering away. His helmet flew off.

His head was a head-sized fist. It clenched and unclenched.

It opened. Its huge palm was face-forward. As the man rose it clenched again. Dane punched him hard on the back of his hand-head. The attacker fell again.

“Come on,” Dane said.

They ran a twisting route to Mo’s car, and they helped her lay the shivering ghost-delirious Simon inside. Tribble whickered. “I can’t promise.”

“See what you can do,” Dane said. “We’ll find you. Did they see you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “And they don’t know me. Even if …” She looked uncertain. There had been no eyes.

“Go, then. Go.” Dane patted the roof of her car as if releasing it. When she had gone he felt the handles of car doors near them until he found by finger-intuition one he liked, and had it open.

“What are they?” Billy said. “Those men?”

“The knuckleheads?” Dane started the car. There were screams behind them. “Takes a certain sort.” He was exhilarated. “There are advantages. You’ve got to like fighting. You should see them naked. Well, you shouldn’t.”

“How do they see?” They sped into night. Dane glanced at Billy. Grinned and jiggled in his seat and shook his head.

“God, Billy,” he said. “The way your mind works.”

“Right.” It was Wati, back in the Kirk again. “Put some distance between us and Goss and Subby.”

“You genius,” Dane said. “What did you do?”

“Just helps to be able to do voices. I’ll be one second.”

Dane accelerated. He waggled the speargun with his left hand. “This is shit,” he said. “I’ve never had to … We’re going to need more than this. It was crap. I need a new weapon.”

GOSS STOOD STILL AS A BONE. HE LISTENED.

“This is a blind, you see, Subby,” he said. “I’m wondering where Sparklehorse went.”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” said a voice from the crude figure on the roof’s vertex. “You got had, is what, you psychopath motherfucker.” That came from a comedy-frog-shaped eraser discarded by the kerb.

And from a windowbox of long-dead plants, the voice of a little plastic diver: “Good night.”

“Well,” said Goss, in the silence after Wati left. “Well, Princess Subby. Would you look at that? What a fiddly tra la.”

THEY WERE OVER THE RIVER. WITH WATER BETWEEN THEM AND that awful fight ground, Dane guided the car to a silent space behind lockups, mean garages at the bottom of a tower. He turned off the engine and they sat in the dark. Billy felt his heart slow, his muscles relax one by one.

“This is why we should go in with him,” Dane said. “We can’t take that sort of shit on our own.”

Billy nodded slowly. The nod mutated until it was a shake of the head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Billy said.

He closed his eyes and tried to think. He looked into the black behind his own eyes as if it was the black of the sea. He tried to reach down into it, for some deep intuition. He could reach, and feel, nothing. He sighed. He drummed his fingers on the window in frustration. The touch of the glass cooled his fingertips. Not an idea, but a focus, a sense of where to look. He opened his eyes.

“The guy,” he said. “In the bottle, the guy I found. Where’s he in all this?”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. “That’s the problem, we don’t know who he is.”

“Uh …” said Wati. “That ain’t true.”

“What?” Dane said to the tiny figure.

“I told you, when that officer-thing grabbed me, it sort of bled. Bits of info and stuff that went into it. I think I remember feeling … I knew who …” Wati probed his sore spots for information. “Adler,” he said. “That was his name, the geezer in the bottle.”

“Adler?” Dane said. “Al Adler?”

“Who is he?” Billy said. “Was he? A friend?”

Dane’s face went through a run of feelings. “Not exactly. I met him but I never … Al Adler was a tuppenny nothing until he got in with Grisamentum.” They looked at each other. “He turned into a fixer. He ran stuff for Gris.”

“What happened to him after Grisamentum disappeared?” Billy said.

“I thought he was off drinking himself to death or something. He was totally Grisamentum’s man. I met him like once just after the funeral, I thought he was losing it. He was yammering about the various people he’d been working with because of his boss, how exciting blah blah. Total denial.”

“No.” Billy looked away and spoke out of the car window, through the glass into the garage’s shadows. “He wasn’t propping up any bars anywhere. He was doing something that got him killed, in the museum, on the night the kraken went. What if he’s been working for Grisamentum all this time?”

“There was something,” Wati said. “It was like …” He interpreted the bruises of the police-thing. “It was like it was, he’d been there for a long time. Since before you knew him. He was done before he was born.”

“How does that …?” Billy said.

“Oh, time,” Dane said. “Time time time. Time’s always a bit more fiddly than you reckon. Al got turned into a memory, didn’t he?” He beat out a pattern on the dashboard. With his tension came little flexes of whatever small arcane muscles he had, and bioluminescence pulsed in his fingertips with each contact.

“Alright,” Dane said finally. “He’s involved. We’ve got Simon, we’ve got a lead. We have to find out who hired him. I need to steal a phone and I need to get begging with Jason Smyle. The chameleon you asked about once. He’ll help us. Me.”

“Yeah,” said Billy. “You know what we’re going to find out, though, right? It’s him. Grisamentum. He’s behind this. He’s got the kraken.” He turned back to face his companions. “And for whatever reason, he wants us too.”

Chapter Forty-One

EVERYONE WITH AN EAR TO THE CITY KNEW GOSS AND SUBBY were back. Goss, about whom they said he didn’t keep his heart in him, so he’s not afraid of anything; and Subby, about whom what can you say? Back for yet another last job. There was a lot of that going around. This time the Tattoo was their paymaster, and the job was something to do with the disappearance of the kraken—yes, the squidnapping—which the Tattoo either had or had not engineered, depending which rumour was preferred.

Whether he had or not, he was on the hard hunt. It was not enough, it seemed, that he ordered his corps of strange self-loathing fist-headed thugs and controlled his altered and ruined punisheds, who stumbled trailing their mechanical flexes, their electric additions, from hole to hole, relaying orders and mindlessly gathering information. Now he had Goss and Subby and the rest of the worst of London’s mercs looking for Dane Parnell who—did you hear?—got chucked out of the Krakenists.

According to the complex lay of the theopolitical land, allegiances and temporary affiliations were made for a war that everyone felt was about to start. It was all something to do with a curdling that everyone could feel.

Tattoo sought his pariahs. He sent one of his bust machine-people to ask the worst of his bloodprice operators whether they had any news for him. He made sure it was well known that he had made this particular overture. A strategy of terror. That’s right. We’re that bad.

JEAN MONTAGNE WAS THE SENIOR SECURITY GUARD ON DUTY AT THE entrance to London’s second-most-swish auction house. He was forty-six. He had moved to the city from France nearly two decades previously. Jean was a father of three, though to his great regret he had little contact with his oldest daughter, whom he had fathered when he was much too young. Jean was an accomplished Muay Thai fighter.

He had been in charge of his shift-group for several years, and had proved his abilities when the occasional crazy had tried to enter, hunting some artefact or other being priced within, usually insisting it was theirs and had been illicitly taken. Jean was careful and polite. He recognised every employee in the place by face, he was pretty sure, and knew a good proportion of them by name.

“Morning.” “Morning.” “Morning, Jean.” “Morning.”

“What’s …?” The man for whom the entry gate stuck was smiling up at him in apology, holding up his card.

“Hi there, morning,” Jean said. The man was early forties, thin, with neat receding hair cut short. “Wrong ID,” Jean said. The guy worked in acquisitions, he thought. Mike, he thought his name was. The man laughed at his mistake. He was holding a credit card.

“Sorry, don’t know what I’m doing.” He patted the pockets of his suit in search.

“Here,” said Jean, and buzzed Mike, or actually he thought Mick, in, to acquisitions. Or accounts. “Have a good one, bring that card next time.”

“Got it,” said the man. “Cheers.” He walked toward the lifts, and Jean did not feel any qualms about the interaction at all.

MADDY SINGH WAS THE OFFICE MANAGER OF THE SALES FLOOR. SHE was thirty-eight, well dressed, gay in a not-strictly-out-but-not-denying-it way. She liked watching ballet, particularly traditional.

“Morning.”

She looked at the man coming toward her.

“Hi,” she said. She knew him, rooted in her mind for his name.

“I need to check something,” he said. Maddy no longer spoke to her brother, because of a huge bust-up they’d had.

The man smirked, raised his right hand, split his fingers between the middle and ring fingers.

“Live long and be prosperous.”

“Live long and prosper,” she corrected. He was called Joel, she was pretty sure, and he was in IT. “Come on, make Spock proud.” Maddy Singh hated cooking, and lived off high-end convenience food.

“Sorry,” he said. “I need to check some details on our Trekkie sale, the names of some buyers.”

“The geek bonanza?” she said. “Laura’s dealing with that stuff.” She waved to the rear of the room.

“Cheers,” said Joel, if that was his name, made the sign again in good-bye, as everyone in the office had been doing for weeks, some struggling to get their fingers in the right position. “I never was a good Klingon,” he said.

“Vulcan,” said Maddy over her shoulder. “God, you’re bloody hopeless.” She thought about the man not at all, ever again in her life.

“LAURA.”

“Oh, hi.” Laura looked up. The man by her desk worked in HR, if she remembered correctly.

“Quick favour,” he said. “You’ve got the bumph from the Star Trek auction, right?” She nodded. “I need a list of buyers and sellers.”

Laura was twenty-seven, red-haired, slim. She was severely in debt, had investigated bankruptcy proceedings on the Internet. She had a predilection for hip-hop that amused and slightly embarrassed her.

“Right,” she said, frowned, poked around on her computer. “Um, what’s that about then?” He couldn’t be HR, she must have misremembered: a payment-chaser, obviously.

“Oh, you know,” he said, shook his head and raised his eyebrows to show how long-suffering he was. Laura laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can imagine.” Laura was considering going back to do a master’s in literature. She pulled up files. “Were you at the sale?” she said. “Did you dress up?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Colour me all beamed up.”

“Do you need all of them?” she said. “I have to have authorisation, you know.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully. “I should probably get them all, but …” He chewed his lip. “Tell you what,” he said. “If you call upstairs you can get confirmation from, you know, John, and maybe print me off the lot, but there’s no hurry. In the meantime, though, could you just give me the details of lot 601?”

Laura click-clicked. “Alright,” she said. “Can I get back to you about the others in a couple of hours?”

“No hurry.”

“Ooh, anonymous buyer,” she said.

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I need to find out who he was.”

Laura glanced at the familiar face. “Alright then. What are you checking?” She wound backward through the spools of anonymity.

“Oh lord,” he said. He rolled his eyes. “Don’t ask. Problems problems. We’re on it, though.” She printed. The man picked up the sheet, waved thanks and walked away.

“HERE HE COMES,” DANE SAID.

He loitered with Billy by a newspaper vendor. Jason Smyle, the proletarian chameleon, crossed the road. Here he came, folding and unfolding a piece of paper.

Jason still plied his knack as he came, and the people he passed were momentarily vaguely sure they knew him, that he worked in the office a couple of desks along, or carried bricks in the building site, or ground coffee beans like them, though they couldn’t remember his name.

“Dane,” he said. Hugged him hello. “Billy. Where’s Wati? He here?”

“Strike duty,” Dane said.

Jason was a function of the economy. His knack deshaped him, he was not specific. He was abstract, not a worker but a man-shape of wage-labour itself. Who could look that gorgon in the face? So whoever saw him would concretise him into their local vernacular. Which made him impossible to notice.

If Smyle had not existed London and its economy would have spat him out, budded him like a baby. He would find an unoccupied desk, play solitaire or shuffle paperwork, and at the end of the day ask Human Resources for a cash advance on his paycheque, which unorthodox request would cause consternation, but largely because though they were sure they knew him they couldn’t find his file, so they would loan the money from petty cash and make a note.

Smyle could do commission work too, or favours for friends. The residue still clung to him, so Billy, knowing it was not the case, looked at him and had a sense that Jason worked in the Darwin Centre, was maybe a lab tech, maybe a biologist, something like that.

“Here.” Jason handed over the printout. “That’s the buyer of your laser gun. I’m serious, what I said, Dane. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you’d been … you know, that you and the church … I’m glad I could help. Whatever you need.”

“I appreciate it.”

Jason nodded. “You know how to get me,” he said. He got on a passing bus for free, because the driver knew they worked in the same garage.

Dane unfolded the paper slowly as if for a drumroll. “You know what it’s going to say,” Billy said. “We just don’t know why yet.”

It took several seconds for them to make sense of what they were reading. A collection of information—price paid, percentages, relevant addresses, dates, original owner, and there, marked to indicate that it was anonymised in other contexts, the name of the buyer.

“It ain’t, though,” said Dane. “It ain’t Grisamentum.”

“Saira Mukhopadhyay?” read Billy. He knew how to pronounce it. “Saira Mukhopadhyay? Who the hell is that?”

“Fitch’s assistant,” Dane said quietly. “That posh one. She was there when he read the guts.” They looked at each other.

Not Grisamentum, then. “The person who bought this gun, and knacked it, and used it to buy Simon’s services …” Billy said. “A Londonmancer.”

Chapter Forty-Two

THERE WAS A HUBBUB IN BILLY’S HEAD ALL NIGHT. HE WOULD hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.

He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton’s head got in the way, was kraken.

His sinking was interrupted. He settled into something invisible. Glass walls, impossible to see in the black sea. A coffin shape in which he lay and felt not merely safe but powerful.

Then a cartoon, that he recognised, that long-loved story of bottles dancing while a chemist slept, and not a cephalopod to be seen, then for a moment he was Tintin was what he was, in some Tintin dream, and Captain Haddock came at him corkscrew in hand because he was a bottle, but nothing could get at him and he was not afraid, then he was with a brown-haired woman he recognised as Virginia Woolf if you please ignoring the squid at her window, which looked quite forlorn, powerless and neglected, and she was telling Billy instead that he was an unorthodox hero, according to an unusual definition, and he was in some classical land and it was all a catastrophe, a fiasco, the word came, but if it was why did he feel strong? And where was the motherfucking kraken now? Too idle to get into his head, eh? And who was this peeping from behind the gently smiling Modernist, at two different heights? Bad as the intimations of war? One grin and one thoughtless empty face? And a little inslide closer, cocky shuffle skip of scarecrow legs, finger to nose and a one-nostril jet of tobacco exhaust? Hallo there old cock! Subby, Goss, Goss and Subby.

He woke hard. It was early, and his heart continued with its performance and he sat up sweating in the sofa-bed. He waited to calm down but he did not. Dane sat by the window, the curtain pulled back so he could spy on the street. He was not looking down into it but at Billy.

“It’s not you,” he said. “You’re not going to feel any better.”

Billy joined him. The window was open a tiny bit, and he knelt and sucked up cold air. Dane was right, he did not much calm down. Billy gripped the windowsill and put his nose on it, like a kilroy graffito, and stared into the dim. There was absolutely nothing to see. Just fade-edge puddles of orange light and houses made of shadow. Just bricks and tarmac.

“You know what I want to know,” Billy said. “The Tattoo’s men. Not just with the hands. The radio-man, too.” Dane said nothing. Billy let the cold air go over him. “What’s all that about?”

“Say what you mean.”

“Who are they?”

“All sorts,” Dane said. “There are people out there who’d rather be tools than people. The Tattoo can give them what they want.”

The Tattoo. You wouldn’t say “charming”—that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo’s brutal enticement. I’ll make use of you. Want to be a hammer? A telephone? A light to show up secret knack bullshit? A record player? Get into that workshop, mate.

You have to be an outstanding psychologist to terrorise, blandish, to control like that, and the Tattoo could sniff the needy and post-needy surrendered. That was how he did it. He was never just a thug. Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.

“So it wasn’t Grisamentum who took it,” Billy said. Dane shook his head and did not look at him. “… But we’re not going to go in with him.”

“There’s too much …” Dane shook his head again after a long time. “I don’t know. Not without knowing more … Al’s got some dog in this fight, and he was Grisamentum’s man. I don’t know who to trust. Except me.”

“Did you always work for the church?” Billy said abruptly. Dane did not look at him.

“Ah, you know, we all have our, you know …” Dane said. “We all have our little rebellions.” Whether sanctioned rumspringas or disavowed crises of faith. Begging chastity and continence, but not yet. “I was a soldier. I mean—in the army.” Billy looked at him in mild surprise. “But I came back, didn’t I?”

“Why did you?”

Dane turned his gaze full on Billy. “Why’d you think?” he said. “Because krakens are gods.”

BILLY ROSE. AND HE FROZE. LEGS CROOKED, BUT AFRAID TO MOVE, so that he would not lose this view, this angle through the window, that suddenly provoked something.

“What is it?” Dane said.

Good question. The street, yes, the lights, yes, the bricks, the shadows, the bushes turned into shaggy dark beasts, the personlessness of the late night, the unlitness of the windows. Why did it brim?

“Something’s moving,” Billy said. Close to the edges of the city some storm was coming toward them. The clouds’ random rush was just random, but through the window they looked like self-organising ink, like he was watching a secret, that he had an insight into whatever metropolitopoiesis was happening. He had no such thing. How could he with those inadequate eyes? It was just the glass that gave him anything, any glimmer, a refracted glance of some conflict starting.

•   •   •

THOUSANDS OF LONDONERS WOKE AT THAT MOMENT. MEMORY versus the inevitable, going at it, that will play havoc with your sleep patterns. Marge woke, vividly aware that something new had happened. Baron woke, and said as he did, “Oh, here we bloody go.” Vardy had not been asleep in the first place.

Closer to Billy than either of them would have imagined, Kath Collingswood was staring out of her window too. She had sat up at exactly the same second as Billy. The glass of her window helped her not at all, but she had her own ways to make sense of things.

It was obvious, suddenly, that the fake ghosts she had put together had been beaten. She hauled out of bed. No one was with her: she was in her Snoopy nightshirt. Her skin was crawling every which way. Horripilations with interference patterns. London was grinding against itself like an unset broken bone.

“So what are we going to fucking do?” she said, aloud. She did not like how small her voice was. “Who’m I going to call?”

Something easy, something she could get info from without too much trouble. Didn’t have to be tough or clever. Best if it wasn’t. She flicked through a pad by her bed, where she made notes of various summonings. A spaceape, all writhing tentacles, to stimulate her audio nerve directly? Too much attitude.

Alright, a real snout again, then, worthy of the name. She plugged in her electric pentacle. She sat in concentric neon circles, in various colours. This was a pretty, garish conjuration. Collingswood read bits and bobs from the relevant manuscript. The tricky bit with this technique was not getting the summons to work: it was to not summon too much. She was just reaching for one particular little spirit, not the head of its herd.

It did not take long. Everything was raring to go, that night. She barely had to dangle a notional bucket of psychic swill, and with exploratory snorts and gleeful screams, buffeting the edges of her safe space, manifesting as a flitting porcine shade, in came the swinish entity she had enticed away from a herd of such in the outer monstrosity, introduced to London and taught to answer to Perky.

kollywood, it grunted. kollywood food. Not much but a darkness in the air. It had no corkscrew tail, and as if in compensation it spiralled tightly itself, and rooted around the room, sending Collingswood’s tat gusting all over.

“Perky,” she said. She shook a bottle of leftover spiritual scraps. “Hello again. Nummy treat. What’s going on?”

num num, Perky said. num the num.

“Yeah you can num it but first you got to tell me what’s happening.”

scared, Perky grunted.

“Yeah, it’s a bit scary tonight, isn’t it? What’s been happening?”

scared. anglis out. sooss don tell.

“Anglis?” She struggled with impatience. There was no point getting pissy with this amiable greedy thing. It was too thick to mind-fuck. The pig-presence flitted to her ceiling and gnawed the light cord. “I won’t tell. Anglis, Perky?”

ess. ess anglis run fight come member not footer.

Yes. Something had come in, or out, for a fight. Member? Members? Membership? Footer?

Oh fuck right. Collingswood stood still in her sparking pentacle. Remember, and future. Remembrance versus some future. Anglis. The anglis, of course, were angels. The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They’d gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly. No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta.

“Cheers, Perky,” she said. She unstoppered the container and flicked it so the invisible contents sprayed out of the protected circle. The pig went racing around, licking and champing and slobbering in dimensions where, happily, Collingswood did not have to clean up.

Now she knew it was only Perky the cautions were overkill, and she stepped out of the angles of electrostatic protection and switched them off. “Have fun,” she said over her shoulder. “Don’t mess shit up too much, and don’t nick anything when you go.”

kay kollywood byby thans for num.

Collingswood ran her hands through her hair, put on a minimum of makeup, her roughed-up uniform, and went through the deeply threatening city. “Broomstick’s at the garage,” she said to herself more than once. The joke was so old, so flat as to be meaningless. Saying it as if everything was all normal was a very slight comfort.

“You can’t smoke in here,” the taxi driver told her, and she stared at him, but couldn’t even muster enough to wither him. She put the cigarette out. She did not light up again until she was in the FSRC wings of the Neasden Police Station.

You would have had to be a more adept adept than Collingswood to have even approximated some sight of what was going on, loomingly, totally, above everything. Various long-snoozing London gods had been woken up by the clamour, were stretching and trying to assert pomp and authority. They had not yet realised that no Londoners gave two shits about them anymore. The thunder that night was dramatic, but it was just the grump of past-it deities, a heavenly “What the bloody hell’s all this noise?”

The real business was going on in the streets, on another scale. Few of the guards, earthly or unearthly, in any of London’s museums, could have said why they suddenly felt so extremely afraid. It was because their memory palaces were unprotected. Their angels walked. The guardians of all the living museums came together, bar one still rogue on its own mission. The angels hunted the incoming end, that closed-down future. If they tracked it down they intended to mash it up.

VARDY WAS ALREADY IN THE OFFICES. COLLINGSWOOD THOUGHT HE looked unruffled by the night, no blearier or more rushed than he ever did. She hung from the doorframe. She was slightly taken aback by the, if anything, even more unwelcome than usual look that he gave her.

“Fucking hell, rudeboy,” she said. “What’s up with you? Apocalypse rattled your cage?”

“I’m not sure what this is,” he said, scrolling through some website. “But it’s not apocalypse yet. Of that I’m fairly certain.”

“Just a manner of speaking.”

“Oh, I think it’s more than that. I think the word to keep in mind here is ‘yet.’ What brings you here?”

“What do you fucking think? The not-yet apocalypse, squire. You know what’s going on? The memory guards are out looking to smack someone up. Those fuckers ain’t supposed to leave the museums. I want to see if I can work out what’s going on. Whatever just changed. What do you reckon?”

“Why not?”

“Fuck, you know, sometimes, seriously, sometimes you just wish you lived in a city where it wasn’t all this craziness and this and that. I mean I know some of this lot are just villains, you know, just bad boys, but it all comes down to the god stuff in the end. In London. It does, though. Every, single, time. And that, man, what are you going to say.” Collingswood shook her head. “Fucking mad weak shit. Arks and dinosaurs and virgins, fuck knows. Give me a robbery, man. Except they do, innit?”

“‘Mad weak shit?’” Vardy swung back his chair and looked at her with some queasy combine of dislike, admiration and curiosity. “Really? That’s what it stems from, is it? You’ve got it all sorted out, have you? Faith is stupidity, is it?”

Collingswood cocked her head. Are you talking to me like that, bro? She couldn’t read his head-texts, of course, not those of a specialist like Vardy.

“Oh, believe me, I know the story,” he said. “It’s a crutch, isn’t it? It’s a fairy tale. For the weak. It’s stupidity. See, that’s why you’ll never bloody be good enough at this job, Collingswood.” He waited as if he’d said too much, but she waved her hand, Oh do please carry the fuck on. “Whether you agree with the bloody predicates or not, Constable Collingswood, you should consider the possibility that faith might be a way of thinking more rigorously than the woolly bullshit of most atheists. It’s not an intellectual mistake.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s a way of thinking about all sorts of other things, as well as itself. The Virgin birth’s a way of thinking about women and about love. The ark is a far more bloody logical way of thinking about the question of animal husbandry than the delightful ad hoc thuggery we’ve instituted. Creationism’s a way of thinking I am not worthless at a time when people were being told and shown they were. You want to get angry about that bloody admirable humanist doctrine, and why would you want to blame Clinton. But you’re not just too young, you’re too bloody ignorant to know about welfare reform.”

They stared at each other. It was tense, and weirdly slightly funny.

“Yeah but,” Collingswood said cautiously. “Only, it’s not totally admirable, is it, given that it’s total fucking bollocks.”

They stared some more.

“Well,” Vardy said. “That is true. I would have to concede that, unfortunately.” Neither of them laughed, but they could have done.

“Right,” Collingswood said. “Why are you here? What are those files?” There were papers everywhere.

“Well …” Vardy seemed hesitant. He glanced at her. “You recall our rather peculiar note from the sky? I have a thought about who it might be.” He closed one of the folders so she could see its title.

“Grisamentum?” she said. “He died.” She sounded suitably uncertain.

“Indeed.”

“Baron was at the funeral.”

“Sort of. Yes.”

“So was it the Tattoo, right?” Collingswood said. “Who did him in?”

“No. People thought so but no. He was just sick, is all, so he’d been talking to doctors, necromancers. We got hold of his medical records, and I can tell you he most certainly had cancer and it most certainly was killing him.”

“So … why d’you think this was him?”

“Something about the style. Something about finding Al Adler after all this time. Something about the word emerging that several monsterherds have been approached for some big commission. Remember his …?”

“No, I don’t remember dick, I wasn’t around.”

“Well, he was always a traditionalist.”

“So who are all this lot?” Collingswood said. She pointed at the details of some academic, some physicist called Cole, some doctor, Al Adler, Byrne.

“Associates. Connected in one way or another to his ahem funeral ahem. I’m thinking I might revisit them. I have a few ideas I’d like to chase up. All this has got me thinking. I’ve been having various ideas tonight.” He smiled. It was alarming. “I do wonder if any of them might have a clue about all this. All this.” He glanced beyond the walls, at the strange night, in which gods were ignored and memories were out hunting the future.

Chapter Forty-Three

“ALRIGHT.” WITH EXPERT SPEED AND A MINIMUM OF FILTHSPILLAGE, Dane emerged from a skip. He had a bust cup, a radio full of mould, half a suitcase. Billy stared at them. “What it is, if we got this seen to—there are people who can clean this up right, you know—we might be able to use this to—”

To what? The cup, it seemed, to carry some elixir that needed just this container—the radio to tune in to some opaque flow of decayed information or other—the suitcase to contain things that could otherwise not be carried. Dane struggled to articulate it. He kept reiterating that they needed equipment, if this was what they were facing.

Apparently, Billy thought, he lived now in a trite landscape. Deep enough below the everyday, Billy realised with something between awe and distaste, a thing has power, moronically enough, because it’s a bit like something else. Want to hex up briars, what else should you throw behind you but an old comb? All it took was a way with such cute correspondences.

“The Londonmancers don’t take sides,” Dane said. “That’s their whole thing.”

“Maybe Saira’s gone rogue,” Billy said. “Doing this alone.”

“I need a new gun,” Dane said repeatedly. The battle of Star Trek Tower had left him raging at his armaments. Whatever the specifics of this fight around them, seemingly between Grisamentum and the Londonmancers, he lacked firepower. With Wati’s help, anonymising the request, Dane sent a request to London’s arms dealers. Because someone out there had the psychic megatonnage of the fucking Architeuthis in their stockpile.

At the stub-end of Wandsworth Common he took delivery of a weapon, left under a particular set of bushes like some fabled baby. There were passersby but none close enough to see, and in any case, like most Londoners now, they moved furtively and quickly most of the time, as if they were at the park against their will.

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.

It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: “It’s not that I don’t think sting-tipped blowpipes aren’t cool, it’s just …” “I’ve got really good with the steam-cudgel,” a disaffected pistonpunk might ask her elders, “but wouldn’t it be useful to …?” Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined.

With a little more propagandist verve, the Church of God Kraken might have issued its fighters FN P90s, say, or HK53s, and explained with sententious sermon-logic how the rate of fire made the fanning vectors of bullets reach out like tentacles, or that the bite of the weapon was like that of a squid beak, or some such. As an excommunicant, Dane was no longer restrained. What he dug out of the earth where it had been delivered was a heavy handgun.

They did not know how many charges the phaser had, so Billy did not use it to practice. “I know what we can do,” Dane said. He took them to amusement arcades, pushing through crowds of teens. Billy spent hours going from machine to screaming machine, firing plastic pistols at incoming zombies and alien invaders. Dane whispered advice to him on stance and timing—marksman words, soldier-insight among these play deaths. The sneers of watching youths decreased as Billy’s skills grew.

“Done well, man,” one boy said as Billy defeated an end-of-level boss. It was all disproportionately exhilarating. “Yes!” Billy whispered as he succeeded in missions.

“Alright, soldier,” Dane said. “Nice one. Killer.” He dubbed Billy a member of various violent sects. “You’re a Thanicrucian. You’re a Serrimor. You’re a gunfarmer.”

“A what?”

“Watch the screen. Bad bastards, once upon a time. Raised guns like fighting dogs. Let’s get you shooting like them. Pay attention.”

From Time Cops to the latest House of the Dead to Extreme Invaders, so Billy wouldn’t learn the looped attack patterns. Marines and soldiers learned with such machines, Dane told him. Juba the Baghdad sniper went from zero to his deadly skill set using these. And these pretend guns had no recoil, no weight, no reloading—just like the phaser. Their limited realism made them paradoxically perfect practice for the real, ridiculous weapon Billy had come into.

Billy kept asking about the knuckleheads he might face. How do they eat? How do they see? How do they think?

“That’s not the issue,” Dane said. “The world can always finesse details. And who’d choose it? Always people ready to do that kind of thing.”

SO THEY KNEW WHAT BAIT HAD GOT SIMON PORTING. THEY NEEDED to talk to Saira.

What’s the point of the theological turn? Is godness a particularly resilient kind of grubbiness? Maybe the turn is like an ultraviolet torch at a crime scene, showing up spattered residue on what had looked clean ground. You don’t know who to trust. Grisamentum’s postal box was not a Royal Mail address, nor the service of any other carrier they knew. The postcode did not look quite regular. Some hush-hush Trystero carrier?

“It must get to him,” Billy said.

“Yeah but not by the usual bloody routes.” There would be no staking out the mail drop.

“How’s Simon?” Billy said.

“Alright. I was there earlier,” said Wati, from a Victorian statue. “I mean, not really. Mo’s good with him though.”

“What about the Londonmancer?” Dane said.

“I got as close as I could. She don’t look like she even has a home. She sleeps in that building. Near the stone.”

“Alright,” said Dane. “We’ll have to get her there, then. Wati, help me out. I’m trying to teach our boy some stuff about things.” Billy heard the grinding sound of glass at the fringe of his consciousness. It had been a while. He waited, trying to understand it as a message.

“Alright, so …” he said eventually, when they passed a locksmith and he noticed something on display in the window. He remembered Dane’s lesson at the bins, and stared at the miniature door to which various different on-sale handles had been attached, for show. “Alright so if you got hold of that,” he said, “and did whatever to it, put it into a wall. Then you could, I bet you could …”

“There you go,” Wati said from inside next to it, from a gargoyle door knocker. “You could use each different one of them handles to open it into somewhere else. Too small though. All you could do’s stick your arm through.”

These revelations into a paradigm of recusant science, so the goddamn universe itself was up for grabs, were part of the most awesome shift in vision Billy had ever had. But the awe had been greatest when he had not understood at all. The more they were clarified, the more the kitsch of the norms disappointed him.

“There.” There was a key embedded in the tarmac. It had been dropped when the surface was still soft and then had been run over or toughly trodden in. Anxious clubbers and nightwalkers passed them.

“So,” Billy said, “if we could get it to work, with a bit of knacking, we could use that to, like, travel from place to place?”

Dane looked at him. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow, and it’s going to be pretty hairy,” he said. “Let’s get somewhere we can put our heads down.” They were nearly out of safe houses. He looked at Billy suspiciously. “How come you figured you could make the key work that way?”

Because, Billy thought, it’ll, oh, unlock the way.

Chapter Forty-Four

MARGE’S PROBLEM, WHEN SHE ASKED ON HER BULLETIN BOARDS where she should go, “as a noob in all this,” to learn what London really was, was not too few but too many suggestions. A chaos of them. She had winnowed with a few questions, and had raised the issue of the cults. The issue, tentatively, of the church of the squid. A few false leads, and she came back again and again to the message that said: “cult collectors old queen almagan yard east london.”

Down this way London felt like a city to which Marge had never been. She had thought the docklands all cleared out, bleached with money. Not this alley in gobbing distance of the Isle of Dogs, though. These felt like moments from some best-forgotten time burped back up, an urban faux pas, squalor as aftertaste.

Where the fuck am I? She looked again at her map. To either side were warehouses scrubbed and made flats for professionals. A channel of such buildings was parted as if grudgingly, an embarrassed entrance onto a cul-de-sac of much grubbier brick and potholed pavement. A few doors, a pub sign swinging. THE OLD QUEEN, it said in Gothicky letters, and below it a pinch-faced Victoria in her middle years.

It was the middle of the day. She’d have thought twice about walking into that streetlet at night. Her shoes got instantly filthy on its puddly surface.

The small pub bottle-glass window made the light inside seem dingy. A jukebox was playing something from the eighties, which as always with tracks from that decade registered in her head as a test. She hesitated: “Calling All the Heroes,” It Bites. Grizzled drinkers muttered at each other, in clothes the same colours as everything else. People glanced up at her, back down again. A fruit machine made a tired electronic whoop.

“Gin and tonic.” When the man brought it she said, “Friend of mine told me some collectors meet here.”

“Tourist?” he said.

“No. Sounds up my street, is all. I was wondering about joining.” The man nodded. The music changed. Soho, “Hippychick.” Whatever happened to Soho?

“Fair enough. Be a bastard of a tourist to get here, anyway,” he said. “They ain’t in yet. Normally sit over there.”

She took her place in the corner. The customers were subdued. They were men and women of all ethnicities and ages but a generally obscured air, as if the room had been painted with a dirty paintbrush. A woman drew in her spilt drink. A man talked to himself. Three people crowded around a table in one corner.

I think I’ll have my next birthday here, she thought coldly. The music wandered on: “Funky Town,” the Pseudo Echo version. Holy shit, “Iron Lung,” Big Pig. Kudos for that, but you can’t catch me with these. You’ll have to up your game—Play Yazz, “The Only Way Is Up”—and then you’ve got me for my wedding party.

She watched the woman draw pictures on her tabletop, now and then adding little splashes of her beer to the picture. The woman looked up and thoughtfully sucked the dirty beer from her finger. Marge looked down, revolted. On the table the beer picture continued to self-draw.

“So what you been in?”

Marge stared. Two men in their forties or fifties swaggered suspiciously toward her. One man’s face was set and impossible to read: the other, who spoke, changed expressions like a children’s entertainer.

“Say that again?”

“Brian says you want to play. What you offering? You scratch my soul, you know, I’ll scratch yours. Tit for tat, darling. So what you been in? We all like a bit of theology here, love, no need to be shy.” He licked his lips. “Give us an afterlife, go on.”

“Sorry,” she said slowly. “I didn’t mean to be misleading. I’m here because I need some help. I need some information and someone told me … I need to ask you some questions.”

There was a pause. The man who had said nothing remained quite impassive. He straightened slowly, turned and walked out of the pub, putting his untouched drink down on the counter as he went.

“Fucking bloody Nora,” said the other quietly. “Who the fuck you think you are? Coming in here …”

“Please,” Marge said. The desperation in her voice surprised even her, and stopped him speaking. She kicked out the chair opposite, gestured him to sit. “Please, please, please. I really need help. Please sit down and listen to me.”

The man did not sit, but he waited. He watched her. He put a hand on the back of the chair.

“I heard that someone …” she said. “I heard that maybe one of you knows something about the squid cult. You know the squid’s gone, right? Well, so’s my lover. Someone took him. And his friend. No one knows where they are, and it’s something to do with this, and I need to talk to them. I need to find out what’s going on.”

The man tipped on his heels. He scratched his nose and glowered.

“I know some things,” Marge said. “I’m in this. I need help for myself, too. You know …” She lowered her voice. “You know Goss and Subby? They came and hassled me.” The man opened his eyes wide. He sat then, and leaned toward her. “So I need to find the squid people because they’re sending people like that to bloody terrorise me …”

“Keep it quiet,” he said. “Goss and buggeryfucking Subby? Holy bloody Ram’s bollocks, girl, it’s a wonder you’re still walking. Look at you.” He shook his head. Disgust or pity or something. “How’d you even get here? How’d you find this place?”

“Someone told me about it …”

“Marvellous, isn’t it? Someone bloody told you.” He shook his head. “We go to all the trouble. No one’s even supposed to know this blahdclat place exists.” He used the patois adjective, though he was white and his accent snarlingly Cockney. “This is a secret street, mate.”

“It’s right here,” she said, and waved her map.

“Yeah and that should be the only place it is. D’you know what a trap street is? You know how hard it is to sort out that sort of thing?” He shook his head. “Listen, love, this is all beside the point. You shouldn’t be here.”

“I told you why I came …”

“No. I mean, if Goss and Subby are after you, you should not be here. If you got left alive it’s just because they din’t care about you, so for Set’s sake don’t get them caring about you.”

“Please just tell me about the squid cult. I have to find them …”

“‘Squid cult.’ What are you like? Which you talking about? Khalkru? Tlaloc? Kanaloa? Cthulhu? It’s Cthulhu, ain’t it? Always is. I’m just fucking with you, I know what you’re talking about. Church of God Kraken, isn’t it?” He looked around. “They ain’t nothing to do with Goss and Subby. Say what you like about the teuthists, doll, they don’t run with that kind of company. Don’t happen. Let me tell you something. I don’t think they know what’s up any more’n you do. It ain’t them took the kraken. Too holy for them to touch, or something. But they ain’t even looking for it, if you can believe that.”

“I don’t care about any of that. I just want to know what happened to Leon and Billy.”

“Sweetheart, whatever it is going on it’s all much too prickly for my bloody taste. None of us has gone anywhere near the teuthies since this kicked off. We’ll keep it nice and bloody simple, thank you very much indeed. Spider-gods, Quakers, Neturei Karta, that sort of shit’ll do me. Alright, maybe you don’t get as many points for those scriptures, but …”

“I don’t understand.”

“Nor should you, deario. Nor should you.”

“I heard you knew something about these people …”

“Alright listen,” he said. He chopped the tabletop with his hand. “We ain’t going to have this conversation. I ain’t going down this road.” He sighed at her expression. “Now look. I already told you everything I know, which is bugger-all, granted, but that’s because that’s what the Kraks know. If you’re …” He hesitated. “You won’t thank me for helping you know. Helping.” He sighed. “Look if you really want to get yourself into this shit—and I do mean shit because that’s what you’ll end up in—there are people you should talk to.”

“Tell me.”

“Alright look. Jesus, girl, is this your first time on this side of things?” He sank all of his drink in one impressive swallow. “Rumours. Tattoo done it, Grisamentum’s back and done it, no one done it. Well that’s no help. So if I wanted to find out, and I do not, I’d think about who else might have claim on something like that? And think it’s their business?”

He waited for an answer. Marge shook her head.

“The sea. I bet you the sea might have ideas. Wouldn’t surprise me if the bastard ocean might have a little something to do with all this. Stands to reason, right? Taking back what’s its? Render unto sea, sir.” He cackled. Marge closed her eyes. “And if it didn’t, probably wishes it had and has a clue who did.”

“I should talk to the sea?” Marge said.

“God, woman, no need to sound so miserable about it. What, all of it? Talk to its ambassador. Talk to a flood-brother. Up at the barrier.”

“Who are …”

“Now now.” He wagged his finger no. “That’s your bloody lot, alright? You’ve done well enough to get here. If you insist on getting eaten you can go a bit further; it ain’t my job to walk you through. I don’t need that on my conscience, girl. Go home. You won’t, will you?” He blew out his cheeks. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your boy, alright? And for what it’s worth, which in my professional opinion isn’t a bloody lot, I’ll pray for you.”

“Pray to what?” Marge said. He smiled. The jukebox played “Wise Up Sucker” by Pop Will Eat Itself.

“Fuck it,” the man said. “Tell you what. What’s the point collecting stuff you don’t use? I’ll pray to all of them.”

Chapter Forty-Five

“SO SIMON’S DOING ALRIGHT,” DANE SAID. “GETTING OVER GHOSTS.”

“So Wati said,” Billy said. “He coming?”

“Strike’s not going well,” Dane said. “He’s a touch bloody busy.”

It was early daylight and they were near where the London Stone throbbed. Between buildings. Dane made little military hand motions the meanings of which Billy did not know. He followed Dane up onto a low wall, a complicated dance between cameras.

On their way Dane had told opaque teuthic homilies. Kraken did not steal fire from any demiurges, did not shape humans from clay, did not send baby kraken to die for our sins. “So Kraken was in the deep,” Dane had said. “Was in the deep, and it ate, and it took it, like, twenty thousand years to finish its mouthful.”

Is that it? Billy did not insist on exegesis.

Dane moved faster and more gracefully than a man of his bulk should. Billy found this climb easier than the last one, too. He could see only roofs in all directions, like a landscape. They descended toward an internal yard full of cardboard boxes softened by rain into vaguely vectoral brown sludge.

“This is where they come to smoke. Take out your weapon,” Dane said. He held his pistol.

The first person out was a young man, who caned a cigarette and sniggered into his mobile phone. The second a woman in her forties with some stinking rollup. There was a long wait after that. The next time the door opened, it was Saira Mukhopadhyay, wrapped in smart scarves.

“Ready,” Dane whispered. But she was not alone. She was chatting to an athletic guy lighting a Silk Cut. “Arse,” said Dane.

“I’ll take him,” Billy whispered. “We haven’t got long,” Billy said. They could hear the conversation.

“Alright,” Dane said. “Do you know how to … set your phaser to stun?” They couldn’t help it: they giggled. Billy pushed his glasses up his nose. He could not have made this jump a few weeks before, phaser in his hand, a pitch down into a hard but controlled landing. He stood and fired. The big man spun across the yard and went down in the rubbish.

Here was Dane dropping beautifully behind Saira. She heard him, but he was already on her. He backhanded her into the bricks. She braced herself. Where her fingers clenched, they squished the bricks as if they were Plasticine.

Saira hissed, literally hissed. Dane smacked her again. She looked at him with blood on her lip. It had been easy to forget that for Dane this was sacred fervour.

“Steady, man,” Billy said.

“Not many people could port something that size out of there,” Dane said. “But you know that. We know who got it out of there, and we know what you dangled to make him do it. I don’t like it when someone steals my god. It gets me all fucking twitchy. What did you do? What did Al Adler have to do with all this? The end of the world’s coming, and I want to know what you did with my god.”

“You know who you’re bloody talking to?” she said. “I’m a Londonmancer …”

“You’re living a dream. The London heart stops beating, you know what’s going to happen? Fuck all. London don’t need a heart. Your mates know what you been doing?”

“That’s enough.”

Fitch had entered the yard. They stared at him as he closed the door behind him. He stood by Saira, in the path of Dane’s weapon.

“You think I should be in a museum,” he said. “Might be. But museum pieces have their uses, right, Billy? You’re almost right about me, Dane. See, when you don’t have the knack you used to, you’re no threat. So people tell you things.”

“Fitch,” said Dane. “This is between me and Saira …”

“No it is not,” Fitch said. He squared all pugnacious, then withered. “She just handled the money. You want to know what happened, talk to me.”

“I SHOUT,” HE SAID, “AND THE OTHERS’LL BE HERE.”

Things flew overhead. Edgy birds. He glanced at them, and from where Billy stood, the perspective looked wrong.

“You took it?” Dane said.

“If you were still a Krakenist, I’d not be talking to you,” Fitch said. “But you aren’t, and I want to know why. Because you’ve got him.” He nodded at Billy. “And he’s the one who knows what’s going on.”

“I do not,” Billy said. “Not this again.”

“Why don’t you want the Krakenists to know what’s going on?” said Dane. “We … they … ain’t London’s enemies.”

“I know how they want to get rid of their holies. And I know where that sort of thing leads.”

“What? They aren’t even looking for it, let alone getting rid of it,” Billy said.

“I wish you was right, Fitch, but you ain’t,” Dane said. “The church ain’t doing anything.”

“Why do you want the kraken?” Fitch said. “I’ve got no business seeing anything in the guts these days. They just sit there squelching. But there it was. Fire. First time since I don’t know how long, and oh my London what I did see.”

“What’s Al Adler in this?” Billy said.

“Why did you take it?” Dane whispered.

Fitch and Saira looked at each other. Saira shrugged. “I don’t think we have a choice,” she said.

“It was his fault,” Fitch said. He whined. Billy could tell the old man was relieved to break his vow. “It was him started it. Coming here with his plans, and the burning at the end of it.”

“Al? You said he was superstitious,” Billy said to Dane. “So—he came for a reading. But no one liked what they saw.”

“Tell us,” Dane said, his voice shaking, “everything.”

ADLER HAD COME TO THE LONDONMANCERS WITH A RIDICULOUS, audacious plan. He was going to steal the kraken. He was not afraid to say so in that hallowed confessional: Fitch, not judging, unshocked even at that stage by the enormous crime to come, bound to confidentiality by oaths in place since the Mithras temple, split the city’s skin to see what might happen.

“There’s no way Al thought of that job,” Dane said.

A courtesy, a formality. Fitch expected to see nothing, as he had for years. What he saw was fire.

The burning end of it all. Burning what it couldn’t burn, taking the whole world.

And after? Nothing. Not a phoenix age, not a kingdom of ash, not a new Eden. This time, for the first time, in a way that no threatened end had ushered in before, there was no post-after.

“Most of the Londonmancers don’t know anything about this,” Saira pled. They could not have been expected to overturn their vows like their leader and his best lieutenant had done. “It was obvious Al was just a front guy. Hardly criminal genius, was he?”

“What did you tell him?” Billy said.

Fitch waved. “Some waffle. We had to decide what to do fast.”

“Couldn’t you have told him not to do it?” Billy said. Everyone looked at him. That wasn’t the point at all. You didn’t alter plans on the basis of a Londonmancer reading, any more than you picked a spouse on the basis of a fairground palm reader’s wittering. “Why would he want to end everything?” said Billy.

“I’m not sure he did,” said Fitch carefully.

The plan might have set in motion something of its own. Ineluctable, final, unintended consequences. How bad does it have to be to make a Londonmancer break a millennium of honour and intervene? This bad is how bad.

“So you had to get in there first to stop him setting it off,” said Billy in some kind of wonder. “You had to presteal it.”

“That auction was coming up.” Saira shrugged. “We needed Simon-bait. It wasn’t that hard to find an armsmith to knack it. Dane … we didn’t know when this was going to happen.”

“We had to move when we moved,” Fitch said. “Understand—everything burns and nothing happens again, if they got the kraken. When Adler told me, everything changed.”

Simon performing his game, whispering phrases from his TV show, arriving in the dark of the Darwin Centre with an assiduously replicated fade-in like glitter in water, to “take coordinates,” and with a flex of power disaggregating the kraken and himself in a stream of particles, energy, particles again.

“So what happened to Adler?” Billy said. Saira met his eye. Fitch did not.

“A place like that,” Saira said. “It’s guarded. You can’t just walk in.”

“You cold bastards,” Dane said finally.

“Oh, please,” said Saira. “I don’t take that from assassins.”

“You used him as bait,” Billy said. “Told him whatever to keep him … no, for the timing, you sent him in.”

“Simon would never have got in and out,” Fitch wheedled. “We didn’t know the angel would … we just needed to distract it.” The angel of memory, the mnemophylax, swooping in on Al, as Simon beamed the bewildered would-be burglar in. Not as if the wrecked Trekkie was innocent of that death, either. Turned out there was at the very least one culpable homicide he really did have on his hands.

“And while it’s dealing with him, you took the kraken out.” Billy shook his head. “That raises the second issue. You did all this to stop this fire, right?” He raised his hands. “Well, you showed us the guts. We all know what the sky feels like. So what went wrong?”

A long quiet. “It didn’t work,” Saira said. She shook her head and opened and closed her mouth.

Billy laughed unpleasantly. “You saw what would happen if it was stolen. So you stole it to stop it being stolen. But by stealing it you stole it. And set it off.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Fitch said.

“I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,” Dane said. “You are going to take me to my god.”

Chapter Forty-Six

THE PIGEONS’ BELLIES WERE MISBEHAVING AGAIN, AND THE revolting results of these anxieties featured as quirky news filler. Other urban ructions were growing harder to ignore by selective banalising notice. Fuel would hardly burn in domestic fireplaces. There was nervous speculation about atmospheric conditions. Every flame was grudging. As if there were a limited amount of it available; as if it were being hoarded; saved up for something.

Also, oh yes, people were disappearing. There are no civilians in war, no firewalls between the blessedly ignorant and those intimately connected to networks, markets of crime and religiosity. And Londoners, even those determinedly mainstream, were disappearing. Not in that mythical without-a-trace way, but with the most discomfiting remnants: one shoe; the shopping they had been going to get but had not yet bought sitting in a bag by their front door; a graffito of the missing where they were last seen. You may not have known what was happening, but that something was happening was not plausibly deniable.

BILLY AND DANE HADN’T DONE BADLY. THE CARE OF THEIR MOVEMENTS; the camouflage Dane dragged behind them with little shuffled hexes, second nature for a man of his training; the disguises, ridiculous but not ineffective; Dane’s soldier care: all these had kept them from collectors’ eyes for days, which when you’re the target of by some way the largest collection of bloodprice talent to be assembled on a single job in London for a whole pile of years, isn’t nothing.

For a creditable time, those stalkers had been frustrated. The tallyho of the urban hunt sounded like a parping fart in the latest hours, as they rode unorthodox horses over roofs, making locals think there had been very brief very heavy rain, and tracked down bugger-all. The vaguely cowboy gunslingers had failed to run them down. Londoners slept badly, as their internal nightlands were infiltrated by eyeless snuffling beasts that lolloped through their sex reveries and parental angsts, dreamhounds sent out by hunters at their most dangerous when they slept. They could not sniff their quarries either.

The hunters fought among themselves. More than once they faced murderous confrontations with figures that seemed part of some other agenda, that were come and gone too fast to make sense of in any political schema of which anyone knew. Men who disappeared when seen, men and women accompanied by shuffling monster shadows.

The gangs and solitary freelancers seeded the city with rewards: anything for a harvest of hints. With all his care, nous and skill, Dane could not stand in the way of all the snips, momentary glances, overheard words—all the stuff that registered not at all on passersby, but that the best hunter could winkle out of someone who did not even know they were withholding, could collate and aggregate.

“I’M GOING INSIDE,” FITCH SAID. “THE REST OF THE LONDONMANCERS need to see me. And we’ll have to find a way to get him onside, now.” He indicated the man Billy had shot.

“You got to let me go back in, Dane,” he said. “You want to get them worried?”

Dane raised his weapon as if he did not know what to do with it, and gritted his teeth.

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered.

“We didn’t know what you wanted to do with it,” Fitch said. “Or we would have said.”

“We didn’t know if we could trust you,” Saira said. “You know how some Muslims get rid of Qur’an pages? They burn them. That’s the holiest method. Whatever’s coming is after burning the whole world down, starting with the squid. And it’s still out there. We thought that might be your plan.”

“You thought I’d end the world?” Dane said.

“Not deliberately,” Fitch said, in a strange reassurance. “By accident. Trying to set your god free.”

Dane stared at them. “I ain’t going to burn shit,” he said levelly. “Take me to it.”

And we can tell you what we know, Billy thought. That Grisamentum’s still alive.

“There’s things need preparing,” Fitch said. “Protections. Dane, we can work together. We can be in this together.” He was eager now. How long had he been bending under this?

“We ain’t short of offers,” Dane said. “Everyone wants to work with us.”

“There’s things we need to know,” Saira said. “There’s got to be something about this kraken. That’s why we need you,” she said to Billy. “You’re the squid man. This is perfect. If we can work out what it is about this one, maybe we can stop it.”

“Do you believe them?” Billy whispered. He heard the grind of glass. “I think I do, Dane.”

THAT WAS HOW THE TWO OF THEM ENDED ALONE IN THE YARD, while the Londonmancers returned inside, to mum normality for a few more hours.

“What if they …?” Dane said as they waited.

Billy said, “What? Run? They can’t disappear their whole operation. Tell someone? The last thing they want is anyone to know what they did.”

“What if they …?”

“They need me,” Billy said.

They wedged the door closed so frustrated smokers would find another place to go. “Wait,” Saira had told them. “When we’re done here, we’ll go.” They sky went dark over hours.

“Soon,” said Dane. What impeccable timing, what a perfect jinx: as he said that, there was the glass noise, in Billy’s head. Knowledge came with it. He stood.

“Someone’s coming,” he said.

“What?” Dane stood. “Who?”

“I don’t know.” Billy held his temples. What the fuck? “Jesus.” His headache was talking to him. “I just know they’re coming. I don’t think they know where we are. Not exactly. But they’re close and they aren’t friends.”

Dane looked around the yard. Grind grind. “They’re getting closer,” Billy said.

“They can’t find us here,” Dane said. “They can’t know the Londonmancers are in on this. We can’t lead them to God.” He grabbed a metal shard and ground into the wall the words BACK ASAP. Written in scratches among scratches.

“Up,” he said. Made his hands a sling and pushed Billy back onto the roof. They scuttled under the arriving night, back down drainpipes and corporate fire escapes, to the main streets of the city, close to deserted now. This was the worst for them, being almost the only people in a street. Every lamplight was like a spotlight. Billy could hardly think through the noise of glass.

“You hear a noise?” Dane said. “Like glass?”

No one else was supposed to hear it! There was no time. There was another sound now. Running feet. CCTV cameras spun, twinkled their lights, looked every which way. From around a corner came men.

Billy stared. They wore a raggedy new romance of costumes. He saw punk stylings, top hats, pantaloons and tube tops, powdered wigs. Their faces were quite ferocious. Billy raised his phaser.

As they came the attackers’ bad knacks waxed, and the streetlamps they passed glowed too bright, changed colour, snapped one by one into blacklight, so the men’s white cuff-frills and reflective cat’s-eye flourishes glowed. Billy could see stitched on their clothes many-armed tags, some kind of profligate mutant swastikas. The men hissed like moon monkeys.

Dane and Billy shot. There were so many flamboyant figures. Billy shot again. He waited for them to shoot back, but they held whips, blades. Darkness encroached, overtook the attackers and hid them. There were no lights in any window, no glimmer from any office. There was only one last orange streetlight still burning, a lighthouse now, at which Billy stared as the men came.

Dane went back to back with him. “They want us alive,” Dane whispered.

“Alive yes for discussion,” someone said. “Someone wants to pick your brains.” There were laughs at that. “Alive, but limbs and eyes are optional. Come on now and you can keep them.”

“There’s always the workshop,” someone else said.

“There is the workshop,” the first voice said. Obscured by the unnatural dark. Billy fired at random, but the shot illuminated only itself. “He does love his workshop. What will you be?”

“Be ready,” Dane whispered.

“For what?” the voice said. A whip kinked out of the shade and wrapped around Billy’s leg, sticking where it touched like a gecko foot, yanking him off his feet and out of the circle of last light. Down on the tarmac Billy opened his mouth to shout, but there was that glass grinding, much louder than he had ever heard it before. His head was full of communicative pain. Something came. It whirled.

Bone arms windmilling. There was a clack of teeth, vivid empty eyes. Finger bones punctured meat like fangs. The thing arrived with incomprehensible motion, too fast. It punch-punched stiff-fingered, leaving blood, ripping the throats of two, three, five of the attackers, so they screamed and fell pissing blood.

Billy kicked off the whip. He crawled back. The interceder rocked at the edge of the light.

It was a skull on the top of a giant jar. A huge glass preserving bottle, of the type that Billy had for years been filling with preservative and animal dead. This one was nearly five feet high, full of flesh slough and clouding alcohol. On its glass lid was a shabby human skull liberated, Billy absolutely knew, from one of the cupboards of remains in the Natural History Museum. It snapped its teeth. Where the rim met the lid the flaring glass served as shoulders, and the thing raised two fleshless taloned arms taken from bone boxes, humerus, ulna radius, clacking carpals and those sharpened phalanges.

The angel of memory.

The jar-angel rolled on its round base, oscillate-rocking forward. It punched again and killed again, and with a tiny incline of the skull-head opened its lid. A dandy man froze. He was motionless, then not there at all, and Billy saw more meat shreds in the jar. The bounty hunters scattered. There was a flat sound. Dane was down and motionless. Billy was too far, and the lasso or whatever it was that had Dane by the neck went taut, and Dane was dragged into the dwindling shadow the swastika-wearing men had brought with them.

Billy fired twice, but he could see nothing of them, and Dane was barely visible anymore. Billy grabbed Dane’s gun. “Here!” he shouted to his glass rescuer, and he heard it wobble and roll toward him. The attackers hurled half-bricks and iron as they retreated.

A lucky heavy piece took the cylinder full on. The jar-angel smashed. The guard of the museum’s memory burst. Its bones went dead among the chemical slick and glass shards.

Billy raised his phaser in one hand, gun in the other. But the attackers did not come back. He ran in the direction Dane had been dragged, but the darkness retreated quicker than he moved, and when it was gone he was alone. The corpses were still there, the glass scintillas, the skull of what had saved him. Dane was gone.

As always when a quiet holed the city, a dog barked to fill it. Billy walked through the ruined remains of his rescuer, left preservative footprints. He sat heavily and held his head by the dead, in the doorway of a sandwich bar.

That was where he was when the Londonmancers found him—nothing so dramatic could take place so close to the London Stone without them knowing it. He could see them at the limits of his vision, but they would not come closer, would not breach their neutrality, which only a few of them could have known was already fucked.

It must have been one of them who got word to Wati, who came into the toy Billy still carried, so the voice came from his pocket. “Billy, mate. Billy. What happened? We better go, Billy. We’ll get him back. But right now we better go.”

PART FOUR
LONDON-UPON-SEA

Chapter Forty-Seven

“SO THE HONEST BLOODY SHITTY BOLLOCKS IS THAT I’M WONDERING what the fuck it is we’re up to.”

“Look,” said Baron sharply. “You know what, Constable? I’d be obliged if we could have a smidge less of that.”

Collingswood was terribly startled. She covered with a swagger. She didn’t look at him but at her bracelet.

“We could do with a few things, Collingswood,” Baron said. “We all know it.” He took a moment and spoke again more calmly, jabbing his finger at her. “Not least of which is some information. And we’re on that. Now … Calm down and get back to work. You’ve got your own sniffers sniffing, I presume? Well, see what they can smell.” He walked away, through a door that he closed loud enough on her to almost be a slam.

In the grounds of the police training college at Hendon was the portacabin where the specialists of various FSRC cells went through their training. Pitifully nicknamed Hogwarts by most attendees, Cackle’s and Gont by a few who exchanged smug looks when others didn’t get it.

Collingswood hadn’t. Didn’t care. Had been too busy listening to the semiretired witches, mavens and karcists. “You are police officers, or will be,” one of her instructors had said, “unless you bollocks this up proper.” He was ancient and small, lined like discarded skin scooped off cocoa. He had stroked his chin as if everything he said was well considered. He swaggered too, in a very different way than she did. She loved watching him.

“Your job is to get villains. Right? You’ll have to know what to do. If you don’t know what to do you have to find out. If you can’t find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so. Do I make myself clear?” The little lux ex tenebris that he flashed between his fingertips as he spoke (blue, of course), was a nice touch.

Through all the occult jurisprudence since then, chasing things down and banging them up, that sort of fuckity vigour was what she had always seen as being police. The lack of it in him was what had made Collingswood impatient with, if amused by, Billy Harrow.

With a pitch inside, Collingswood considered the possibility that Baron was not sure what to do. She thought about that. She examined that as carefully as if it were something she had picked off the floor and was trying to identify. Officers walked around her where she stood—she was there long enough. Some of them didn’t even give her an odd look. Collingswood, you know.

She stood near the dispatch room, so she was the first FSRC officer the messenger saw to give word to. It was she, then, who shoved open the door on Baron sitting folded-armed staring glumly at his computer, hung to the doorframe with one hand like a kid on a climbing frame, and said, “Ask and you receive, boss. Currently hospitalised. But it’s info.”

IT WAS A SHITTY DAY, ALL SODDEN DRAB GREY AIR AND A SULKY wind as irritating as a child. Despite that Marge spent the morning outside, in the Thames Barrier Park. She trudged in drizzle through the waveform topiary, past miniature football pitches. That morning she had cried a long time about Leon, and it had felt like a last time. She had finished, but it was as if the sky had not.

Marge suspected that she did not have a job anymore. Her boss was a friend, but her repeated nonanswering of his messages must have put him in an impossible position.

It was not as if she felt confused. It was not as if she felt driven, precisely, overtaken, losing her mind, anything like that. It was just, she thought, that she could not concentrate on anything else. She was not hysterical. It was just that having discovered that London was not what it was supposed to be, having discovered that the world had been lying to her, she had to know more. And she still had to know what had happened to Leon.

Not that he was alive. She knew that ridiculous sputtering message in bad light must be true.

Which brought her here, to this little sculpted grassland by the river’s defences. There at the notional mouth of the river, by the industrial lowlands of Silvertown, the piers of the Thames Flood Barrier squatted in the water like huge alien hives, like silver-carapaced visitors. Between them chopped brown water, and below that water in the slime of the river’s bed ten gates hunkered, ready to rise.

It was a long way round to the foot tunnel in Woolwich, but Marge had the whole day. She could see the barrier control building rise from the roofs of the south bank. She thumbed at her phone.

Christ Jesus it was depressing, she thought, this part of the city. She took the route by City Airport and under the river, huddling into her coat. She did not check the details she had printed out: she knew them by now. The information had been hard to winkle out of her online informants but not that hard. It had taken wheedling and guile but not quite as bloody much as it should have done if you asked her. As she’d been able to tell, yes, these were “secret” bulletin boards, but plenty of their members were just bursting with pride about what they knew. It was all I’ve said too much, and You did not hear this from me.

From who, you fucking prick? Marge had thought at that particular disavowal. All I know is your screen name, which is blessedladee777 if you fucking please, so please just get on with it.

Pre-armed by the cult-collector with the terms “floodbrother,” and the location of “the barrier,” it had taken a couple of days, but no more, to uncover a little bit more information. This time it was a place of work and an affiliation, the outlines of a system of belief.

Marge finished her cigarette. She shook her head and jogged on the spot for a bit, then came rushing into the Thames Barrier Visitors’ Centre. The woman behind the reception desk stared at her in alarm. “You have to help me,” Marge said. She made herself gabble. “No, listen. Someone here calls themself floodbrother, yeah online. Listen, you have to get them a message.”

“I, I, what, what’s their name?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not crazy. I swear. Please, this is a matter of life and death. I mean it, literally. There must be a way of getting a message to everyone who works here. I’m not talking just about the Visitors’ Centre, I’m talking about the engineering. Listen to me, I’m begging you, I’m begging you.” She grabbed the woman’s hand. “Tell whoever here’s nickname’s floodbrother, just say that, that there’s a message from Tyno Helig. He’ll understand. Believe me. Tyno Helig, got it?” She scribbled the name on a scrap. “I’ll be waiting. I’ll be in Maryon Park. Please.”

Marge stared into the woman’s eye and tried for some insinuatory sisterly thing. She wasn’t sure how well it went. She ran out and away, until she had turned a corner, at which point she slowed and wandered calmly along Warspite Road, past the roundabout to the park.

The weather was too different and too bad to jog much reminiscence, but she looked around until she was pretty sure she had found a spot recognizable from the film Blow-Up. She sat as close to it as she could. She watched everyone who came in. She fingered the little flick-knife she had bought, for whatever useless good it would be. She was banking rather on daylight and passersby. Marge wondered whether she would know if her quarry entered the park.

In the event, when, after almost an hour, her call was answered, there was no question at all. It was not one person but three. All men, they strode urgently along the little paths, looking in all directions. They were big, athletic guys. They wore identical engineers’ uniforms. The oldest, at the front, was gesturing to his two companions to fan out. Marge stood: she would feel safer facing all three of them than one. They saw her immediately. She closed her hand around her knife.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Tyno Helig.”

They hung just a little back. Their fists were clenched. The front man’s jaw worked with tension.

“Who,” he said, “are you? What the hell are you doing? You said you had a message?”

She could see his contradictory emotions. Rage, of course, that they should be discovered and outed at work, when they were in mufti. Rage that they should be mocked like this, their faith scorned, as she could see him think surely this must be. And yet, as well as that anger, wrestling with it, excitement. She recognised that little bastard hope. “What’s your message?” he said.

Her plan had worked, then. Tyno Helig, no person but a place: one of the sunken kingdoms, the Welsh Atlantis. That, she had thought, making her plan, should intrigue them. “Who are you?” the man said.

“Sorry for misleading you,” she said. “I needed to get you out. I’m sorry”—she hesitated for a second, but sod it, she was too tired not to piss people off—“this isn’t about your aspirational tidal wave. I have a question for you.”

The man raised his clenched fist to his head, as if he would hit himself, then suddenly grabbed her by the lapels. His companions crowded them, shielding them from others’ view. “Our what?” he whispered. “You have a question? Do you know who we are? You better start convincing me not to drown you. Do you know who we are?”

SHE HAD AN IDEA, YES. OUTRÉ BELIEFS WOULD KEEP CROPPING UP IN her researches. She had trawled around hard enough for the info.

The Communion of the Blessèd Flood. The rainbow, she gathered from some furtive online theologian, wasn’t a promise: it was a curse. The fall didn’t come when the first couple left the garden: all that was some ghastly prerapturous dreamtime of trials. What happened was that God rewarded his faithful with eventual holy rains.

Mistranslation, she had read. If what Noah, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim or the same figure by any other name had been told to build was a ship, why did the Torah not say so? Why was his ark not an oniyah, a ship, but a tebah—a box? Because it was built not to ride the waves God sent, but to move below them. History’s first submarine, in gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, travelling the new world of God’s promise. It harvested the meadows of kelp. But those chosen for the watered paradise had failed, and God had been wrathful and withdrawn the seas. That landscape of punishment was where we lived, exiled from the ocean.

The Communion of the Blessèd Flood prayed for the restoration of the wet. Marge read of their utopias, sunk not in ruination but reward: Kitezh, Atlantis, Tyno Helig. They honoured their prophets: Kroehl and Monturiol, Athanasius, Ricou Browning, and John Cage’s father. They cited Ballard and Garrett Serviss. They gave thanks for the tsunami and celebrated the melting of the satanic polar ice, which mockingly held water in motionless marble. It was a sacred injunction on them to fly as far and often as they could, to maximise carbon emissions. And they placed holy agents where they might one day help expedite the deluge.

So this little cell, working in what might seem the most blasphemous industry of flood-defence. They were biding their time. Blocking piddling little backtides and holding out for the big one. When that final storm surged, that sublime backwash came roaring from the deep, then, then they would throw their spanners in the works. And after the water closed on the streets like a Hokusai trapdoor the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood would live at last in the submerged London of which they dreamed.

And now her message. It was the end of the world, everyone knew that … maybe, they’d thought, it was theirs.

“Count yourself lucky no one’s messed with you till now,” Marge said. She pulled out of his grip. “I never even heard of you until a few days ago. Someone said you speak for the sea. And maybe you took the squid. You know what I’m talking about. I need to know … Someone who did something with that bloody thing did something to my man.”

“You’ve got face,” he said. “I’m not saying that buys you an out, but you’ve got something.”

“I told you, man,” said another. “Everything’s messed up.”

“It’s not face,” she said. “It’s just that I’m really tired, and I loved him. He was with Billy Harrow … Billy Harrow.” She said it again at his reaction. The man rolled his thick neck and glanced at the others.

“Harrow,” he said. “Harrow? He’s the one took the kraken, I thought. That’s what I heard. He’s like its prophet. He went with Dane Parnell, when he ran from the Krakenists. It’s them you want to talk to. They’re the ones took it.”

“No they’re not.” They stared at each other.

“Dane ran from his church when the kraken went, to join Harrow, so if they’ve got something to do with your bloke …”

“I’m telling you,” she said. “That isn’t what happened. I don’t know anything about Parnell, I don’t know much about much, but Billy Harrow did not take the squid. I had a pizza with him.” That made her laugh. “And I know it wasn’t him. I think he’s dead, anyway. And if he knew where Leon was, he’d tell me …” She shut up, at the memory of the on-off-on-off streetlamp. “He’d tell me,” she said slowly. “If he could.”

The man huddled with his companions. She waited. She could hear them in debate.

“Do you think,” she said suddenly, to her own mild surprise, “that I’d be messing around with you if I had any choice?” They blinked at her. “I don’t want any of this, I don’t want this bollocks, I don’t believe your crap, I don’t want a drowned world and I don’t want a squid to be the king of the universe and I don’t want to get involved in this crazy shit, and I don’t even think I’m ever going to get Leon back. I’m just tired and it turns out”—she shrugged to say who knew?—“it turns out I need to find out what happened. You telling me you’ve got no idea what’s going on? What is the use of you people.” She was tearing up a little bit, not weakly or weepingly but out of infuriation.

“Whoever it is been talking to you,” he said, and hesitated. “They don’t know what they mean. We don’t represent the sea, we don’t … How could we? That’s misinformation.”

“I don’t care …”

“Yeah, I do. People need to know. Stuff’s brewing. How do you know all this? Who’s helping you?”

“No one. Jesus.”

“I can’t do nothing for you.” He wasn’t speaking gently, but not aggressively either. “And I don’t talk for the sea.” He spoke with irritated care. Her impression was that this man devoutly wishing for the effacing of the world by water, the reconfiguration of all humanity’s cities by eels and weeds, the fertilizing of sunken streets with the bodies of sinners, was a decent enough guy.

“You need to be careful,” he said. “Stay out of trouble. You need protection. This is a dangerous town any time, and right now it’s mad. And you’re going to tread on toes. Get protection. You’re not wearing a damn thing, are you.” He clutched at his chest, where an amulet might hang. “You’ll get yourself killed. No good to your bloke that way, are you?”

She was going to say I’m not a child, but his brusque kindness unmanned her. “Leave this alone. And if you don’t, go to someone. Murgatroyd, or Shibleth, or Butler, or someone. Remember those names. In Camden, or in Borough. Tell them Sellar sent you.”

“Look,” she said. “Can you, can I take your number? Can I talk to you about all this? I need some help. Can I …?”

He was shaking his head. “I can’t help you. I can’t. I’m sorry. This is a bit of a busy time. Go on now.” He patted her shoulder, like she was an animal. “Good luck.”

Marge left that dogged landscape of Woolwich. She did not look back at the horrible flattened dome, all white as if sickly. Her best lead had gone nowhere. She had more to do. Perhaps she would, as he advised, seek protection.

HER BEST LEAD HAD GONE TO NOTHING, TRUE, BUT SHE HAD BEEN A lead herself, though Marge had not known it. The revelation that Billy Harrow, the mysterious kraken prophet, might not be the force behind the godling’s disappearance, was important.

The armies of the righteous needed to know. The sea needed to know.

Chapter Forty-Eight

JASON SMYLE, THAT PROLETARIAN CHAMELEON, LISTENED AS BILLY begged him to take out an unpaid commission.

“You’re Dane’s friend,” Billy said.

“Yeah,” Jason said.

“Do this for him,” Billy said.

Billy did not know where Jason was. They had no time to arrange a meet. He had given Wati the number of the phone he had—without much difficulty, even in the miserable aftermath of that assault—stolen. Wati found Jason and passed on the number.

“Do you understand what’s happened?” Billy said. “They took him. Chaos Nazis. You know what that means.” Billy felt as if he knew, too, as if this was where he had lived a long time. Dane, unlike him, had had no angelus ex machina watching.

“What do you want from me?” When he spoke, even down the line, Billy felt as if he knew Jason from somewhere.

“We need to find him, and we need to know what’s going on. There’s bad connections going on here. Listen.” Billy hooked the phone with his shoulder and swung through a tear in wire into a fenced-off yard. “These Nazis are being paid by the Tattoo. And his people are also the ones doing shit to Wati’s pickets. Along with the police.

“We need to know how deep those connections go. For all we know the cops might be holding Dane. They’re obviously in some sort of cahoots with the Tattoo, they must at least know where he is. So we need you. But even if we could find them you couldn’t walk into the Nazis, it wouldn’t work, right?”

“No,” said Jason. “They’re not paid, so it’s a nonstarter. They’re committed, and I can’t hide behind belief. That and proper knacking’ll screw me.”

“Right. So you need to go into Neasden Station and see what they’ve got on all this. Find out what you can. Jason, it’s Dane.”

“… Yeah,” Jason said. “Yeah.”

Though his voice had not admitted the possibility that Jason would refuse, Billy closed his eyes in relief. “Call me when you’re done, tell me what you can find out,” Billy said. “Thanks. You need to do this now, Jason. Thank you. We’ve got no idea where they are.”

“What are you …?”

“I’ve got some other stuff I need to find out about. Jason, please do this now. We need to find him.” Billy disconnected.

How do you walk away from a scene like that? All Billy had been able to do, in the cold quiet overlooked by big dead buildings, when Dane had been taken, was follow Wati’s voice. The rebel spirit had led him from his pocket and from what few figurines it could find in that awful empty sector.

Billy said, “The Londonmancers.”

“Keep it down, mate,” Wati had told him from some la-la Billy did not even see. “No one’s going to help us.” That inner core, Fitch and Saira and their little crew, the stunned man Billy had shot and unintentionally press-ganged, could not come to his aid. Billy had no safe houses, no hides.

“Oh bloody hell,” said Wati.

As if it weren’t in trouble enough, the UMA had to act as babysitter for this suddenly bereft little messiah. But Billy had not obeyed his injunction to raise the metal lid out of the street, with intricate finagling and a strength he had not had a few weeks before, to slip into the undercity. Instead, Billy had paused, clenched without clenching, and felt time hesitate and come back, moving like a shaken blanket. He had told Wati to come with him, rather, and gone and stolen a phone. He had taken the innermost doll of a Russian doll set from some shop, held it, not his foolish Kirk, though he had kept that, up to his eyes, and said to Wati, “Here’s what we need to do.”

“OF ALL THE LITTLE TOERAGS WE EVER HAVE TO DEAL WITH,” BARON said, “the bastarding Chaos Nazis are the ones I hate most.”

He stood between Collingswood and Vardy. He was scratching his face furiously, anxiously. They crowded around each other to look through the reinforced glass into a hospital room, where a bandaged man was shackled by tubes, and by shackles, to a bed. A machine tracked his heartbeat.

“You actually said ‘toerags,’” Collingswood said. “Are you auditioning for something?”

“Alright,” he said vaguely. He sniffed. “Arseholes.”

“Fuck’s sake, boss,” Collingswood said. “Up your game. Shitfoxes.”

“Bastards.”

“Spitfish, boss. Fucklizards. Little cuntwasps. Munching wanktoasters.” Baron stared at her. “Oh yeah,” Collingswood said. “That’s right. I got game. Say my name.”

“Tell me,” Vardy interrupted. “What precisely do we have from them? There were several of them, correct?”

“Yeah,” said Baron. “Five in various degrees of injuredness. And the dead.”

“I want to know exactly what they saw. I want to know exactly what’s happening.”

“You got ideas, Vardy?” Collingswood said.

“Oh, yes. Ideas I have. Too bloody many. But I’m trying to put all this together.” Vardy stared at the man in the bed. “This is the Tattoo. We heard he was employing headsmen. I wasn’t expecting it to be this lot.”

“Yeah, bit of a breach of protocol, isn’t it?” Baron said. “CNs are a bit out of polite company.”

“Has he worked with them before?” Collingswood said.

“Not that I know of,” Vardy said.

“Has Grisamentum?”

“What?” He looked at her. “Why would you say that?”

“Just I was looking at all them files on your desk, of Tat’s associates. And you’ve got Grizzo’s as well. I was wondering what’s that about?”

“Ah,” he said. “Well, true. Those two … They move in lockstep. Always did, while Grisamentum was around. Which as we now bloody know—are we agreed?—it appears he still is. Associates of one could well be associates of the other.”

“Why?” said Collingswood. “That don’t make no sense. They hated each other.”

“You know how this bloody works,” Vardy said. “Friends close, enemies closer? Bought off, turncoat, whatever?”

She wagged her head. “If you say so, blood. I don’t know,” she said. “Griz’s bunch lurved him, didn’t they. His crew were all mad loyal.”

“No one’s so loyal they can’t be bought,” said Vardy.

“I forgot what a mad bunch he was cavorting with in the end,” Collingswood said. “Griz. I was looking at them files.” Vardy raised an eyebrow at her. “Doctors, doctor-deaths … Pyros, too, right?”

“Yes. He did.”

“And you reckon some of them are working with the Tattoo now, right?” Vardy hesitated and laughed. That was not like him.

“No,” he said. “It turns out not. But no reason not to check.”

“So you’re still chasing them up?”

“Yes I bloody am. I’m chasing all of them, every lead, until I know for an absolute bloody certainty that they’re not involved in the squid thing, either with Grisamentum, or with the Tattoo. Or as independents. You do your job, I’ll do mine.”

“I thought your job’s to channel the spirit of nutty god-bothering and write up holy books.”

“Alright, you two,” Baron said. “Settle down.”

“Why the bollock can’t we find the squid, boss? Who’s got it? This is getting stupid.”

“Collingswood, if I knew that I’d be commissioner of the Met. Let’s at least try to map who’s who in this mayhem. So we’ve got the Chaos Nazis, our wanktoasters—thank you, Constable—among recent employees of the Tattoo. Along with everyone else in the city.”

“Not everyone,” Collingswood said. “There’s gunfarmers about, but they’re on some other dime. No one knows who, and no one’s feeling very safe about that.”

“Well that’s got to be our squidnapper, surely,” said Vardy. “So who’s paying them?”

“Can’t track it. They’ve gone into hush mode.”

“So get it out of them,” Baron said.

“Boss, what do you think I’m trying to do?”

“Splendid,” said Baron. “It’s like a Zen koan, isn’t it? Is it better or worse if holy visionary shooters are fighting against us alongside Chaos Nazis, or against them and we’re in between? Answer that, my little bodhisattvas.”

“Can we please,” said Vardy, “establish what’s going on here with that chap? Did any of them tell us anything?”

“Certainly,” said Baron. “He had to finesse how quick I got him to roll over, so under guise of glorying in the chaos he would bring by terrifying me with the truth, a-blah-dy blah-dy blah, this little bugger sang like the most beautiful nightingale.”

“And?” said Vardy.

“And Dane Parnell is not having a good time of it. They snaffled our exile, sounds like. That much he saw”—he pointed through the window with his chin—“before passing out. Which leaves little lost Billy out on his tod in the city. Whatever will he do?”

“Yeah, but he ain’t exactly helpless, though, is he?” Collingswood said. “I mean, just pointing out …” She waved her hand at the savagely wounded man. “It ain’t as if Billy’s got nothing fighting his corner, is it?”

“Vardy,” said Baron. “Care to give us your opinion?” He made a big show of opening his notebook, as if he didn’t remember everything about the description he was about to give. “‘It was a bottle, policeman, you law-worm, we brought chaos to each other, you scum, etc …’” he read, deadpan. “I’m going to editorialise. I’ll trim the epithets and skip to specifics. ‘It was a bottle. A bottle that came at us. It bit with a skull. Its arms were bones. It was a real glass enemy.’ I like that last line, I have to say.” He put the notebook away. “So, Vardy,” he said. “You must have thoughts.”

Vardy had closed his eyes. He leaned against the wall and puffed out his cheeks. When at last he opened his eyes again he did not look at Baron or Collingswood: he stared intently through the window at the crippled Chaos Nazi.

“We know what that’s about, right?” Baron said. “Let me rephrase. We’ve no idea what it’s about. No one does. But we’ve a reasonable notion of what it bloody is that swooped in and swept young Harrow away.”

“Alright, I’m going back to the museum,” Vardy said. “See if I can make a little more sense of this. Just once,” he said with abrupt savagery, “in a goddamn while, it would really be a pleasure if the goddamn world worked the way it’s supposed to. I am tired of the universe being such a bloody aleatory frenzy all, the bloody, time.”

He sighed and shook his head. Gave an abashed, tight brief smile at Collingswood’s surprise.

“Well,” he said. “Really. Come on. Why the bloody hell is an angel of memory protecting Billy?”

BUT NOT PROTECTING DANE, WHICH FACT WAS WHAT HAD HIM NOW woozily half waking, strapped in a horribly cramping position that it took him a long time to identify as a crooked cruciform. He was attached like an offering to a rough man-sized swastika. He did not open his eyes.

He heard echoes; footsteps; from somewhere, deliberate, foolishly screaming laughter, that made him afraid anyway, despite its ostentation. The growl and barking of a huge dog. One by one he tensed the muscles of his arms and legs, to check that he was still whole.

Kraken give me strength, he prayed. Give me strength out of your deep darkness. He knew, if he opened his eyes, what figures he would see. He knew his contempt, no matter how real and strong, would be equalled by his terror, and that he would have to overcome that, and he did not have the head or stomach to do so, just at that moment. So he kept his eyes closed.

Most wizards of Chaos would bore you arseless about how the Chaos they tapped was emancipation, that their nonlinear conjuring was the antithesis of the straight-lined bordering mindset that led, they insisted, to Birchenau, blah fucking blah. But it was always a sleight of politics to stress only that aspect of the far right. There was another, somewhat repressed but no less faithful and faithfully fascist tradition: the decadent baroque.

Among the fascist sects, the most flamboyant, eager as Strasserites to reclaim what they insisted was the true core of a deviated movement, were the Chaos Nazis. The creaking black leather of the SS, they insisted to the tiny few who would listen, and not run or kill them on sight, were a coward’s pornography, a prissy corruption of tradition.

Look instead, they said, to the rage in the east. Look to the autonomous terror-cell-structure of Operation Werewolf. Look to the sybarite orgies in Berlin, that were not corruption but culmination. Look to the holiest date in their calendar: Kristallnacht, all those Chaos scintillas on stone. Nazism, they insisted, was excess, not prigrestraint, not that superego gusset bureaucrats had chosen.

Their symbol was the eight-pointed Chaos star altered to make a Moorcock weep, its diagonal arms bent fylfot, a swastika that pointed in all directions. What is “Law,” they said, what is Chaos’s nemesis but the Torah? What is Law but Jewish Law, which is Jewishness itself, and so what is Chaos but the renunciation of that filthy Torah-Bolshevist code? What was best in humanity but the will and rage and indulgence, do what thou wilt the autopoiesis of the Übermensch? And so, endlessly, on.

They were provocateurs of course, and a ludicrously tiny group, but notorious even among the wicked for occasional acts of unbelievable, artistic cruelty, restoring the true spirit of their prophets. Sure the Final Solution was efficient, they insisted, but it was soulless. “The problem with Auschwitz,” their intellectual wags of torture-killing insisted, “is that it was the wrong sort of ‘camp’!” Their hoped-for Chaos Führer, they thought, might achieve a sufficiently artistic genocide.

It was to these figures that Tattoo, Goss and Subby had gone for help, and they had let London know to whom they had gone. They had approached these outrageous, dangerous monster-clowns to hunt down Dane and Billy. And from them Billy had been saved, and Dane had not.

Chapter Forty-Nine

BILLY PUT ON HIS GLASSES. THEY WERE IMMACULATELY UNBROKEN, and still clean. He said, “Wati.”

“I don’t know where Dane is,” Wati said immediately. “I keep looking, but we’re going to have to hope Jason has more luck. They’ve got charms up or something.”

Billy said, “I want to tell you something I dreamed.” He spoke as if he were still dreaming. “I could tell it was important. I dreamed about the kraken. It was a robot. It was back, the whole thing in the tank. I was standing next to it. And something said to me, ‘You’re looking in the wrong direction.’”

There were seconds of silence. “Jason’s going in, and while he is I want to find out why that angel’s looking after me,” Billy said. “It might know something about what’s going on. It knew to come find me. And it might have been looking after me, but it let Dane get taken.”

He told Wati what Fitch and Saira had done. He felt no hesitation, though he knew it was a deeply secret secret. He trusted Wati, insofar as he trusted any Londoners now. “Tell them they have to help us,” he said.

Wati went leapfrogging, body to body, but had to return. “I can’t get in there,” he said. “It’s the London Stone. It pushes out. Like swimming up a waterfall. But …”

“Well you better find a way to tell them they have to help me, because otherwise I’m going to walk around the city screaming what they did. Tell them that.”

“I can’t get in, Billy.”

“Screw their secrets.”

“Billy listen. They’ve made contact. I got a message from that woman Saira. She’s smart—she knows I was with you and Dane. She put a message through my office. Didn’t give nothing away, just, ‘We’re trying to get in touch with our mutual friend. Perhaps we can arrange a meeting?’ She’s telling us they want to help. They’re already against the Tattoo. That makes them nearer friends than enemies to us, right? I can’t go in, but I’ll try to send some of my people. Get them to ask Fitch where the Nazis are.”

“Because if it’s in London …” Billy said. “He should know.”

“That’s the idea. That’s the idea.”

“How long?”

“Don’t know.”

“We move,” Billy said. “We’ll get him out. I’m looking in the wrong direction. I have to know who’s fighting me and who’s fighting with me. So Wati, how do I find out about angels?”

IN A CITY LIKE LONDON …

Stop: that was an unhelpful way to think about it, because there was no city like London. That was the point.

London was a graveyard haunted by dead faiths. A city and a landscape. A market laid on feudalisms. Gathering and hunting, little pockets of alterity, too, but most of all in the level Billy had come to live in a tilework of fiefdoms, theocratic duchies, zones and spheres of influences, over each of which some local despot, some criminal pope, sat watch. It was all who-knew-whom, gave access to what, greased which palms on what route to where.

London had its go-betweens, guerrilla shadchans facilitating meetings for a cut. Wati could tell Billy where they were, and which had weak connections with the angels. Wati kept searching, and he had his own war to attend to, too. The moon made horns, the sky was gnarly. The cults were skittish.

So there was Billy, all alone, and he knew that he should have been terrified, but he was not. He was itching. He felt as if clocks hesitated with each of his steps. It was early when he started walking the list Wati gave him.

Billy knew how hunted he was. Now more than ever. He discovered that his legs had learned the step-spells that Dane had stepped for him, that he walked now with self-camouflaging rhythm. That he automatically went for half-shade, that he moved a little like some occult soldier. He held his phaser in his pocket, and he watched his surrounds avidly.

So, alone, Billy knocked on a door at the back of a sandwich shop in Dalston. A church and a carpet showroom in Clapham. A McDonald’s in Kentish Town. “Wati said you could help me,” he said again and again to the suspicious people who answered.

The safest approach was to never speak to anyone about anything. Communication could mean implication in some fight you might not even believe was taking place, taking a side, inadvertently signing on a dotted line. Nonetheless.

Fixers and goers-to had their scenes. Rooms and Internet shacks where men and women employed by their faiths to steal, torture, kill, hunt and fix could be among others who understood the pressures of the work and got the references of gossip.

“Dane couldn’t have gone,” Wati had warned Billy. “He’d be recognised. But people don’t know you. They might know your name, if they keep their ears open. But not your face.”

“Some do.”

“Yeah.”

“Some might be talking to Goss and Subby.”

“Might.”

“Where even are they?”

“Don’t know.”

The politics of a city of cults made for complex encounters. Seeing an assassin of the Beltway Brethren share a joke with someone from the Mansour Elohim but blank the twins from the Church of Christ Symbiote was a crash course in realtheologie. As much as possible, though, in these places Billy visited you left allegiances at home. That, as a message above the door in one hideaway had it, is the Loar.

Law or lore it maybe—“Loar” a superposition of those two homophones—but let’s not be idiots. Billy entered each place cautiously, and wore a false moustache. Even had he not been looking for Dane and shoring up his compañeros, Wati could not have come in. There were no familiars allowed, and NO DOLLS, said the entrance signs, and Billy wouldn’t risk disobeying. All statuettes had been cleared out since the strike began. Wizardry was a petty bourgeois world. They spent this unwanted leisure time denouncing their familiars, and did not want an organiser listening in.

Twice Billy’s request for help was declined when he mentioned what little cash he had to offer. “Memory angels?” one old woman said. “For that? I can’t get mixed up with that. Now? With them walking?” Billy played out fantasies of bank robberies, but a sudden very different thought occurred, another way to fish for such aid. He went back to where he had seen the key in the tarmac. In moments between cars he took a knife to it and prized it from the road. Straightening up with it he swayed, orthostatic. He ate quickly in a basement restaurant and examined the tarry key. A junk-bit grubby with metaphor. Thinking in that register helped him take unexpected advantage of the place. On the way to the toilets, in an alcove in the wall, there was a lightbulb resting in a frying pan. It was so unrestrained a visual pun, so utterly ovate, he gasped. He had to take it, in a moment of simultaneously meaningless and powerful theft.

When he arrived at the next address he had for a broker of contacts, a bar in Hammersmith, the first thing he said to the young man was, “I can pay you. Put this in the right hands, this’ll unlock the road.” He held out the key. He held up the bulb. “And I don’t know what’s incubating in this, but someone might hatch it.”

Chapter Fifty

“VARDY’S GOING BANANAS,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. THEIR SAVANT miner of vision was in and out of the office on a frenetic schedule. He was racing off with one folder or other full of connections and contacts.

“Come on,” said Baron. “You know how it works. We have to give him his head.” He hesitated. Vardy’s colleagues had not seen him go quite so hard, for so long, perhaps ever before. They came in to find incomprehensible notes, references to interviews Vardy had conducted solo, with suspects or people whose identities they were not sure of. Like everyone else, his behaviour was new in the shade of the catastrophe, that late, thuggish millennium.

“Where is he now?” Baron said, a little plaintively. Collingswood shrugged and glanced at him with narrowing eyes. She was sitting feet up playing a video game. Her romping avatar evaded the electronically growling beasts that tried to eat it. She was not in fact moving it, was concentrating on the conversation, had knacked the joystick into clearing the level on its own.

“No idea,” she said. “From what I can decipher of his fucking crab scrawl he wants to find some informer from Grisamentum’s old crew. One of the necros or pyros or something. Do you think he even has a clue what it is he’s looking for?”

“No,” said Baron. “But I bet you he’ll find it. I gather there are gunfarmers in town.”

“I told you. Yeah them and everyone. We get all the best visitors, man,” Collingswood said, pointing at the reports in front of her.

“Which visitors?” It was Vardy, returned with papers in hand.

“About time,” Baron said. “I thought you’d buggered off?”

“So it’s true about the farmers?”

“Did you find anything out on your little mission?”

“If it is true,” Collingswood said. She swung in her chair to face Vardy. Her digital figure continued its adventures. “Would you be scared?”

He raised an eyebrow. “I’m scared of all sorts of things.”

“Would you?”

“There’s no shortage of assassin-sects out there.”

“Exactly.” Collingswood had nicked members of a few herself. Sisters of the Noose, Nu-Thugees, theologies of Nietzschean kitsch. They were like the cruder readers of Colin Wilson and de Sade, aficionados of Sotos and a certain genre of trite “transgression,” an inverted BBC moralism. They glorified what they quaintly thought the will, slandered humanity as sheep, maundered murder. Their banality did not mean they were never dangerous, did not perform atrocities for the glory of themselves, whatever Lovecraftian deity they illiterately decided wanted their offerings, their orientalist’s Kali, or whomever. Even as they killed you, you’d hold them in contempt.

“Well, they aren’t like that lot,” Vardy said. “They’re only mercenaries sort of contingently. The point of a gun isn’t the killing but the gun. At first it was more generally pagan as it were.”

“Care to fill an old man in?” said Baron. “Sorry to intrude on this.” Vardy and Collingswood glanced at each other, until she smirked.

“Did you ever meet any?” she said to Vardy.

“Do you mind?” Baron said.

“They got sick, boss, back in the day,” she said. “But I could never work out what it was about the guns.”

An arcane disease had taken their ur-tribe and made their life infectious. What they touched would jostle, tables would tap, chairs would tap, books dance, the inanimate as boisterous and alarmed as any newborns. Midas couldn’t eat a sandwich made of gold, but no more could one of these vectors, Life-oid Marys, eat the bread and cheese slices all abruptly eager to run around.

“It was a mutation,” Vardy said. He said it carefully and with neutral distaste. “An adaptive mutation.”

“Is that bad?” Collingswood said, at the sight of his face.

“Bad for whom? Mutation saves, apparently.” Perhaps it was because of the careful grooming husbandry necessary for a flintlock, that fussy lead-barking animal; perhaps repressed resentment at life: whatever, it became only their firearms they made alive, in quieter, less motile ways—what weapons they wielded became selfish-gene machines. “The bullets are gun-eggs,” Collingswood said to Baron, looking at Vardy. Farmers squeezing their holy metal beasts to percussive climax, fertilisation by cordite expulsion, violent ovipositors. Seeking warm places full of nutrients, protecting baby guns deep in the bone cages, until they hatched. “What I never got’s why all that makes them all badass.”

“Because they look after their flocks,” Vardy said. “And find them nests.” He looked at his watch.

“If you say so. So someone’s getting totally killed,” Collingswood said. “So who the fuck’s paying their way? I’m not getting much. And what that means bollock knows.” If her attempts at projection, remote viewing, sensory tickling, nightwalk sniffery, drift-jamming and a codewar flutter were not yielding any information, then a cowl was for certain draped over her quarries.

“Vardy,” said Baron, “where d’you think you’re going? Oy.”

“Leave it, boss,” Collingswood said. “Let Mystic Pizza do his thing. I want to sort out this gunfarmer stuff. We don’t need Doc Vision for a money-trail, surely?”

PETE DWIGHT WONDERED IF HE HAD CHOSEN THE RIGHT CAREER. IT was not that he was a particularly bad police officer: there had been no complaints, no dressings-down. But he was never relaxed. He spent his uniformed days queasy with low-level anxiety, gnawed by the sense that he must be doing things wrong. It was going to give him an ulcer or something.

“Alright?” The man who greeted him was a plainclothes officer Pete recognised, though he could not remember his name.

“Alright, mate?”

“Seen Baron around?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Pete said. “But Kath’s in the back. What do you want with them nutters?” Pete laughed collegially and was suddenly terrified that the man was part of the very cult task force he was mocking. But, no, that was not where he knew him from, and anyway the bloke was laughing in turn, and heading for the rear of the station.

In the main room, among the clatter of keyboards, Simone Ball was leafing through her paperwork. She was in her midthirties, loved classic animated films, and was an enjoyer of, though not a frequent participator in, European travel. She had been a support worker for the police for seven years. She suspected her husband was cheating on her, and was bewildered that she did not mind very much.

“Where’s Kath?” a man asked her. She recognised him, and she waved him in the right direction and continued to think about her husband.

In the corridors, Detective Inspector Ben Samuels, considering his daughter’s piano exam, looked up and greeted the man with familiarity. The man asked directions from a uniformed WPC, Susan Greening, who grinned as she gave them, piqued by a sense that he and she had, she was sure, flirted recently. Outside the rooms used by the FSRC were three men comparing notes on a football game, though one of them had not watched it and was pretending. They parted as the newcomer arrived, nodded and greeted him, murmuring phonemes when they could not remember his name, and the one who was bullshitting in a surge of overcompensation even asked him what he had thought of the match. The man whistled and shook his head appreciatively, and the three men enthusiastically agreed and could still not quite remember his name but did recall that he was a supporter of one of the teams that had played or the other.

He entered the FSRC office. The only person in the room was Collingswood, prodding a keyboard as if at idle random. She glanced up at him and he nodded, crossed to the filing cabinets against the far wall. “Alright, Kath,” he said. “Just got to find some files.” He opened the drawers. He heard Kath stand. A silence went on. He turned. She held a pistol in her expert grip, aimed at his chest.

“And just who,” she said, “the motherfuck, are you?”

Chapter Fifty-One

“I WANT TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO UNDERSTANDS THE ANGELS,” Billy said, and the middleman made phone calls, sent emails, got on instant messenger and dropped queries in chatrooms. Eventually he told Billy where to go.

“Okay, it knows you’re coming. Otherwise it would be bad.”

“What am I looking for?” Billy said. “Who’s going to meet me?”

“Duh. An ex-angel.”

This was more than Billy had expected. Not a specialist or an angel-geek, but a semi-member of the jar’s tribe itself, to whom he might sort-of speak. The custodians of the museums could hardly be comprehended: their agenda was memory’s, which is not human. What they spoke was not like language. But redundant, they lingered, a few last years, and then they would become more like women and men out of a kind of loneliness.

The shell of the Commonwealth Institute was a conquistador helmet sweep of building at the southern edge of Holland Park. It had closed in the early 2000s. The ludicrous collection of exhibits honouring its member countries, that baffled and polite imperial aftermath, was long dispersed. But it was not all empty. When it grew dark Billy broke in—that was easy now with his new skills. He listened to his own reverberating steps.

The dust was only millimetres thick but thick enough. He felt as if he were wading in it, toward the last unmoved display cases. In many rooms the darkness should have been absolute, and Billy wondered what faint light it was that let him see. Once he heard a guard—some human guard—on halfhearted rounds. All he did was stand still in a cupboard and wait until the echo was gone from that section of hall.

A few exhibit pieces were left, forgotten, unworthy of rehousing, or hidden and, later in the solitude, they reemerged. Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random cross-hatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing.

God, he thought as he approached. God. I remember you.

The decommissioned angel of Commonwealth memory eyed him. “Hello again,” he said. He had seen it on its day job, when he was a child, and it, in the daylight, an exhibit.

Plastic in the shape of a little cow. It eyed him sideways, so it could display its flank made of glass. Inside were its four stomachs, which had lit up, one by one, he remembered, and there, they still did, repeatedly, one at a time. Paunch, king’s-hood, fardel and maw, digestion glimmering in each in turn toward its lactic telos, stalwart of some Commonwealth economy. From the New Zealand room, Billy thought.

He could feel its attention, its waning self. When the institute was open, this mnemophylax had after hours stamped the hallways with a gait modelled on Taurus myth. It had protected that mooncalf memory-palace from the forces of angry time or postcolonial rage-magic. Public uninterest had killed it finally and left it lonely and post-dead and full of stories.

Heard you were coming. Its voice was distant. It tried to tell Billy about the fights it had had. The references were inhuman. It tried to tell stories that made no sense and faded into nothing, leaving Billy nodding politely at each absent anecdote. With a cough, as genteel as at a tea party, Billy brought it back to the matter in hand.

“I was told you could tell me what’s happening,” he said. “One of you’s been following me. Keeping an eye out for me. From the Natural History Museum. Can you tell me why?”

Can, it said. It was eager to answer. You’re what it waited for, it said.

“The jar? The angel of the Natural History Museum? How do you know?”

They telled. The others. We speaked. Dead it might be, but it kept in touch with its still-active cousins. It failed, the thing said. Behind him was a gust of air, as swing doors opened and closed to help it speak. Its voice was building sounds. The kraken went. It did bad. It’s full of guilt.

“It’s left the museum,” Billy said.

All of them. All of us. There’s a fight on against the end thing. No point staying still. They fight the endingness. But it. Was the first to walk. Wants to make amends. Tries always to find you. Look after you.

“Why?”

Billy backed away and bumped into the open-closing door. He stood away from it so the phylax could say in its hinge-squeak, Remembers you. You’re chosen.

“What? I don’t … How? Why’s it chosen me?”

Angels wait for their christs.

Angels wait for their christs?

And you came, born not of woman but of glass.

“I don’t understand.”

Gives you strength—you are christ of its memory.

“This thing with time? It gave me that? Dane said it was because of the kraken … Oh. Wait, wait. Are you …?”

Billy began to laugh. Slowly at first, then more. He sat on the floor. He made himself laugh silently. He knew he was hysterical. It did not feel like release. The cow moved toward him. It was just one moment at the end of the room, one moment two or three feet closer and eyeing him with its sideways glass eye. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” Billy said to the decaying memory.

“You know why Dane thinks those things happen?” he said. He smiled like at a drinking buddy. “He thinks it’s because of the kraken. He thinks I’m some kind of John the Baptist, or something. But, so, that’s the wrong direction. It’s nothing to do with the squid.

“None of this is anything to do with the squid. It’s the sodding tank.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to admit that’s funny. You know what’s even funnier? The best of it? I was joking.”

Billy had kept a straight face during all his claims to be the first person born of in vitro fertilization. That ridiculous, meaningless gag, made in that place, that for the sake of the rigour of humour he had stuck to, had been overheard by the genius loci, the spirit of the museum. Maybe it was attuned to any talk of bottles and their power. Maybe it did not understand the idea of a joke or a lie. “It’s not true,” he said. The bovine angel of memory said nothing. Clack clack clack clack went its four stomachs, lighting in time.

Billy leaned over. “I’m not a kraken prophet, I’m the bottle messiah.” He laughed again. “But I’m just not, I’m not.”

The bottle-angel was diminished, diminished and receding daily, by its wanderings beyond its demesne, by its failure, its efforts, the smashing of that iteration of glass, preserver and bone. It would look for him again, pulling itself another self out of bits and pieces from its palace, though, sniffing out that portion of its own self it had put inside him. That gave him these unearned powers. Until it was gone it would strive to find Billy again, and through him the Architeuthis it had lost.

“I WISH IT WOULD COME BACK,” HE SAID.

Will.

“Yeah, but now. My partner’s gone. I need all the help I can get.”

You are the memory christ.

“Yeah, only I’m not.” Slowly, he looked up. Slowly he stood and smiled. “But you know what, I’ll take that. I’ll take whatever.” He reached and clenched, and thought maybe there was a tiny scutter of time. Maybe there was. “You going to come? Outside?” The cow said nothing. Dead as it was it did not have the strength to fight in the war that its living siblings were waging. “Alright,” Billy said. “Alright, it doesn’t matter. You stay here, look after this place. It needs you.” He felt kind.

From some other part of the building came a noise that was not part of the cow’s voice. Billy was at the door, his weapon out, listening, ready, without knowing how he had got there. The cow angel tried to speak, but Billy held the door closed, and it had nothing with which to make noise. “Hush,” he whispered. Ordering an angel around. It was gone, though, in a series of those being-elsewhere steps. Billy thought for a moment that it would bring a human guard running in consternation. (He did not know that they were all aware something old and melancholy walked in the building, that they tried never to disturb.)

“Godammit,” he said, and he went after the dead angel, holding his phaser out. He followed the screech of hinges and things falling from last shelves. He came suddenly into an unwindowed room where the plastic cow screamed with the voice of the building at a tall man.

Billy ducked and fired, but the man moved faster, and the phaser beam scored over the ineffectual cow and dissipated across the wall. “Billy Harrow!” the man was shouting. He held a weapon himself, but did not fire. “Billy!” The word came from behind him too, Billy thought, but realised that the second, tinier voice was in his pocket. It was Wati.

“I’m not here to fight,” the man shouted.

“Stop, Billy,” Wati said. The angel wheezed with windows. “He’s here to help,” Wati said.

“Billy Harrow,” the man said. “I’m from the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood. I’m not here to fight. Marge came to us.”

“What? What? Marge? Oh Jesus, what’s she doing, what does she want? She’s got to stay out of all this …”

“This isn’t about her. I’m here to help. I’ve got a message from the sea. It wants to meet you.”

Chapter Fifty-Two

THE SEA IS NEUTRAL. THE SEA DIDN’T GET INVOLVED IN INTRIGUES, didn’t take sides in London’s affairs. Wasn’t interested. Who the hell could understand the sea’s motivations, anyway? And who would be so lunatic as to challenge it? No one could fight that. You don’t go to war against a mountain, against lightning, against the sea. It had its own counsel, and petitioners might sometimes visit its embassy, but that was for their benefit, not its. The sea was not concerned: that was the starting point.

Same at the embassies of fire (that constantly scorching café in Crouch End), the embassy of earth (a clogged crypt in Greenwich), the embassies of glass and wire and other more recherché elements. The same standoffishness and benignly uninterested power. But this time, this time, the sea had an opinion. And the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood were useful.

They were a faith themselves, not dictated to nor created by the sea. Though the sea, so far as any Londoners could judge, took the worship of the Brotherhood wryly and graciously enough. That was always disingenuous. What the Brotherhood offered was plausible deniability: the sea itself did nothing, of course; it was the Brotherhood of the Blessèd Flood that sought out Billy Harrow, and if they brought him back to the sea’s embassy, well?

It was an urgent journey. It was raining, which made Billy feel better in some way, as if water wanted to protect him.

“What’s going on with Marge?” Billy said again.

“I don’t know,” Sellar said. “She came to see me. She thought we took the kraken. We thought you and Dane did. So when she said that wasn’t right, I went and spoke to the sea, and—”

“Is Marge alright?”

“No.”

“Right,” Billy said. “No one is.” He looked again at his phone, but he had missed no calls. Jason had not called him. Maybe he didn’t go yet, Billy thought and did not believe. Maybe he’ll get back to me soon.

A row of semidetached Victorian houses in the northwest of London. A Tube train, emerged from the tunnels, drummed through the night, behind bricks. Cars moved slowly. There were few pedestrians. The houses were three storeys high and only a little dilapidated, bricks well weathered, stained, pointing eroded, but not slums nor derelicts. They were fronted by little gardens with their few plants and coiffed patches. Billy could see children’s bedrooms with pretty animals and monsters on wallpaper, kitchens, sitting rooms with the cocoon-light of television. From one address came laughter and conversation. Smoke and music came out of its open windows. The building next to it was quiet and unlit.

Closer, and Billy saw that was not quite the case. Its curtains were drawn, on all three floors. There was perhaps something very faintly illumined, visible, just, through the curtains, as if someone carried candles in the deeps of the rooms behind.

“Have you been here before, Wati?” he said.

“Never inside,” the figure he carried said to him. “There’s nothing I can get in.”

Sellar tapped at the door, a complicated code staccato. By his ankles were a collection of empty bottles. Sellar pressed his ear to the wood, waited, then beckoned Billy. The ground-floor curtains were heavy oxblood cotton; the first floor, in blue-green paisley; the top, with cartoon plants. All were pressed up against the inside of the glass.

“Come then,” said Sellar.

Sellar wrote a message Billy could not see, rolled it up and placed it inside a bottle. He screwed its lid on tight and pushed it through the door’s post flap. Several moments passed, but only several. Billy started when the flap opened and the bottle dropped back out and smashed against the concrete step. The barks of dogs did not abate, nor the calls of children playing late. Billy picked up the paper. He held his doll so Wati could read, too.

The paper was damp. The ink was spread in stain-coronas around the written words, in an intricately curling font, spreading beyond its lines.

Teuthis no longer our creature. No longer creature. Not of ocean. We have spoken to the kraken within us to know why this. Neither they nor we are indifferent to what might come. It is no princeling commissar chosen by them or us in the tank.

Billy looked at Wati. “Well? Do you get this?”

“I think …” Wati said. “It’s saying it’s just a kraken.”

“Just?”

“Like not a, a particular kraken. I think. And … but, I mean … it’s not theirs no more, I think.”

“Dane thought there might be something about that one in particular, that was why it was taken. That it might be a hostage.” A part of the incomparable squabbles of kraken. Warlords in feud, battles conducted at the pace of continental drift. A century for the creep of each province-long arm around an enemy’s; a bite excising cities’-worth of flesh clenching over the duration of several human dynasties. Even the fleetingly majestic altercations of their krill, the Architeuthis, were just squibs by the bickering of their parents.

“There has to be something,” Billy said. “There are other giant squid in the world. Why this one? Why’s this one the deal? What’s its … parentage? Where’s it from?”

“It said that ain’t it,” Wati said. “The sea.” Billy and the figure stared at each other.

“So why are we here?” Billy said. “Why does this kraken baby lead to the end of everything?” He stared into the doll’s eyes. “What does the sea really know, or the krakens? What about …? How about this, Wati—you could ask the krakens direct.”

If they took a boat. They should take a boat and a big iron or brass Buddha, say. Where the water was deep, above a trench in the Atlantic, they could tip the statue over the side and Wati could begin a long wobbling voyage down, a precipitation into very crushing dark. Come to rest at very last in mud and hagfished bones, and Wati could politely clear his throat, and wait to attract the attention of some eye that had no business being that big. “Hello. Any particular reason your little plankton baby’s going to set the world on fire?” he might say.

“How’m I supposed to get out again?” Wati said. There was a litter of statues on the seafloor, but how far might they all be from his abyssal interview? What if they were out of reach, and he had to sit there in the black in terrified boredom, fingered by glowing fish until the ocean eroded him out of statuehood and self? So: put his heaviest anchor-statue on the end of a chain strung with other made bodies, so when the questioning was done he could rise through them back up into the ship’s figurehead—

“What are we doing?” Billy interrupted himself. There was another breaking-bottle sound. Another message.

We are not indifferent. To the end in fire. We do not wish London gone. You and the exile Krakenist and we wish the same thing. Our self a product of concatenate development. The kraken would not have this, this is not about them.

Were the giant squid themselves, or their parents, god instars, their apotheosed others, helping with this? Out of, what, divine irritation at some misrepresentation? “Why this squid?” Billy whispered.

Others are against us. We had thought otherwise. We know now. You must get to the kraken and keep it safe from fire.

“Ooh, d’you think?” Billy muttered. “Thanks for that, hadn’t occurred …” He continued reading.

You must free the exile.

“That’s Dane,” he said.

You will be shown.

“Why will we?” said Billy. “What does ‘concatenate development’ mean?” He frowned and tilted his head and read.

Destroy this paper. You will be helped.

AND DANE?

Dane was hanging upside down, and dripping. He had been reciting to himself stories of his grandfather, his grandfather’s courage. “Once,” he said inside his own head, in his grandfather’s voice, “I got caught.” Was it a memory or an invention on Dane’s part? Never mind. “So there was this time there was some scuffle going on with the ringstoners. You ever gone toe-to-toe with a ringstoner? Anyway, we were at it over something or other, can’t even remember, some saint bone of some church we said we’d help so they’d help us, I don’t know …” Concentrate! Dane thought. Come on. “Anyway, so there it was and they had me all trussed like in a bloody cat’s-cradle, and in they come to give it all this, yadda yadda, like. So.” Sniff. Dane as his grandfather, sniffing. “I let them get all close. I was all letting my head go all over the place, you know? They were crowing. You’ll never this, we’ll always that. But when they got right up to it, right up to me, I didn’t say nothing. Till they were right there. Then I said a prayer and like I knew they would, like I bloody knew they would, all the ropes that they had were just what they always were, which is the arms of God, and God unrolled them, and I was free, and then, boy, there was some reckoning.”

Hurray. At some point the echoes of the room Dane was in changed, as people came in. Dane stopped talking to himself and tried to listen. He could not see who was there, with what had been done to his eyes. He could not see, but even through waves of pain he could hear, and he knew that the voice he heard was that of the Tattoo.

“Seriously, nothing?” the Tattoo said.

“Lot of screaming, but you don’t count that,” said the voice of one of the Nazis. “You alright? You seem stressed.”

“I am a bit stressed. Truth to tell I’m a bit bloody stressed. Remember the monsterherds?”

“No.”

A snuffling, a slobber, canine whickering. That dogman was there. That mage-knacked member of this crew, a man made himself half German shepherd, a pitiful fascist meat pun that Dane scorned even as the teeth and muzzle that pun occasioned mauled him.

“Well … They used to run with Grisamentum, back when I … Back when. Well, one of my factories just got interrupted by a bunch of dust or something acting very much like some kind of bloody dragon.”

“I don’t know what that means …”

“It means there’s stuff coming back I wasn’t expecting to face again. This little shitfucker has to know something. He’s in on something. He knows where the fucking squid is—it’s his god, isn’t it? And he knows where Billy Harrow’ll be. Keep at it.”

Keep at it. Dane prayed without ceasing. He prayed silently and motionlessly. Tentacled God in darkness please give me strength. Strength to listen, and to learn. Krakens in your vast silent and ammoniac wisdom have mercy. He knew that he should listen, that he should wait and say nothing, if even he could answer the questions, which mostly he could not even if he would, which he would not, because this would not end. He knew that it would not be too long now, weak as he was and unblooding from all the holes the Nazis had made, woozy and too tired and done to even scream, a thing hanging in thermals of pain—he knew that this was a pitch of this that was its own limit, and that therefore, again, for the second time, before that moment when he would spill enough of himself out that a critical mass of lack would be reached and he would have nowhere to go but into death, the ghastly chaos sunwheel he could no longer see would be rotated. The swastika was, as its hippy antifash defenders insisted, a sign of life, even when deployed like this.

Who made you? Kraken made me. As a by-product. Uncaring. Was the comfort in that, or in the secret hope that secretly the secret kraken cared? We are all squidshit, Dane thought.

The Chaos swastika mightn’t be able to return those actually passed for much time, but it was thuggishly fecund enough to infect him, up to the very point of death, into livingness again. It would rotate with him swastikad on it, and it would wind in life out of all control, pouring it back into him, so blood would drip up, ruined organs reinflate, splayed bone ends grope for each other, grizzling as they slotted shard back into shard hole, fixing him all up, back into pain.

Chapter Fifty-Three

A “TWO-WAY MIRROR”—ONCE A LONG TIME AGO PERHAPS intended to dissemble, but now a lie that drew attention to itself. Behind it were Baron and Vardy, standing in such similar poses that it would have been comical to an observer. On the other side of the glass, Collingswood questioned Jason.

“So how come I can notice him now?” Vardy said. “I should think I recognise him, presumably.”

“Collingswood,” Baron said.

“She’s not bad, is she?”

“She’s bloody good,” Baron said. “That’s how she saw him in the first place.” Her questions to Jason had been tempered, nuanced, enhanced by various knacked enhancements: from an uncanny form of unbearable wheedling to the imposition of unphysical pain. “If you’d been here when you were supposed to … Where the bloody hell have you been, Professor?”

“Professor is it now?”

“Well.” Baron turned to him. “Look, you can’t say I haven’t given you your head, right? Thank God Collingswood isn’t in here to hear me say that—we’d never hear the end of her giggling. I know your job’s to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren’t I the bloke puts ‘Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed’ on your door? Eh? But you’re supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right? You were supposed to be here for this questioning about two hours ago. So where the bloody hell have you been?”

Vardy nodded. “Apologies. But I do have news.” He organised the air with his hands. “There’s no way you get an end like this without someone wanting it—this is not just an accident. And now the Tattoo’s going mad. I still can’t work out where this ending comes into whoever-it-is’s plans.”

“He is going mad,” Baron said. He was tearing up the city. “We’ve tried to have a word with his people, but something’s pushed him over the edge …”

“So I’ve been out quizzing a bunch of the people in Grisamentum’s and the Tattoo’s penumbra, you might say,” Vardy said. “We know Adler was an associate of the former, but we don’t know why he was in the museum when he was. We don’t know what he had planned, so I’ve been wondering if it’s some of the others who were all cut loose when Grisamentum died … who are behind all this.”

“And?”

“Listen to me, this is what I’m saying. There’s a presiding intelligence behind all this. Whatever’s coming, that’s got the angels walking, it’s not some by-product of another scheme, it has intent behind it. But we don’t know what.”

“I know that …”

“No. It’s not an accident. Listen. We’re close. Do you understand?” Vardy spoke in a surly lecture. “The world is going to end. Really soon. End. Soon. And we don’t know why, or who wants it to.”

“It’s got to be Griz,” Baron said quietly. “Got to be. He never died …”

“But why? It doesn’t make any bloody sense. Why’d he want to burn himself now, then? That’s why I’ve been out there. Asking questions.”

“And? Bloody and? Where’s it getting you?”

“Does the name Cole ring any bells?” Vardy said. “If I say ‘physicist.’ If I say ‘Grisamentum.’ Any bells at all?”

“No.”

“One of the names being thrown around Grisamentum’s court around the time he, ahem, died. Died according to the oncologists. Cole’s a pyromancer. Works with djinn, is the whisper. Rather closely, according to some rumours. One of several people that for no reason we could clock was talking to Grisamentum in the last days. Apparently he was one of the ones you tried to debrief after the funeral but he always diligently refused to chat to the force.”

“… Oh, right, I think I remember. I always assumed he was there because Griz wanted a dramatic send-off, to be honest. Big sparkly pyre. What’s your point?”

“There’s dramatic and dramatic.”

“What was it he did for Griz, then?”

“Experimental pyro stuff: memory-fire, that sort of thing, he says.”

“Says?”

“I’ve been looking into Grisamentum’s associates, so I was asking around about him. I told you I had news. Not expecting much, to be honest. Expecting some hedging of bets, some ‘Grisamentum was a gentleman, you could leave your doors unlocked, was a pleasure to work with him,’ a thank-you-very-much-and-bugger-off. But what I got was a bit more surprising. He has a daughter. Cole does.”

“Mrs. Cole on the scene?”

“Dead years ago. Don’t you want to know what I heard? His daughter’s gone missing.”

Baron stared. Eventually began to nod. “Is that so?” he said slowly.

“It’s the word.”

“What does that mean?”

“First Adler, then Cole. Someone’s working through Grisamentum’s known associates. Doing things to … inconvenience them.”

“Like shoving them in bottles.”

“And snaffling their kids.”

“Why?”

“If I knew that, Baron. But it’s a pattern.”

“Bit out of your remit, this, isn’t it? Where’s the goddery?” Vardy closed his eyes and shrugged. “So … How do you think we should play this? Have a word, obviously, but …”

“Well, you’re the boss, obviously, but I’d suggest me being point man here.”

“I thought he won’t speak to cops.”

“He wouldn’t back then, certainly, but I’m not a policeman, am I? I’m an academic, like him.”

“And what more tenacious freemasonry do there be, eh?” Baron nodded. “Alright. For God’s sake, though, keep me apprised. We’ll see what we can do about tracking down young Miss Cole. Now look, this is not unimbloodyportant. Shut up and pay attention to what your colleagues are doing. Like this colleague here, right now.” Baron pointed through the window.

THERE IS NOWHERE THE SEWERS DON’T GO. FAT FILAMENTS TRACKING humans under everything, unceasingly sluicing shitty rubbishy rain. The gentle downslope links all those pipes to the sea, and it was back along those pipes, defying gravity and the effluvial flow that the sea had sent its own filaments, its own sensory channels of saltwater, tickling below the city, listening, licking the brickwork. For a day and a half there was a secret sea under London, fractal in all the tunnels.

Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings, watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea.

Billy waited, alone but for the repeated anxious occurrences of Wati, who came, went, into the doll and out again, to the frontlines of the strikes.

“Done what the sea asked me,” said Sellar at some low dark point of the night, and went, with a quick backward wave, returning to his dreams of drenched apocalypse. It’s fire, not water, Billy thought. I don’t think you’re going to like it.

His phone went, and he connected immediately. He said nothing, only listened. There was a brief silence before a voice said, “Billy?” He could tell it was not Jason. He broke the connection and swore. They had the proletarian chameleon. It had gone wrong.

He stood in the front garden of the sea’s embassy—it was dark, his clothes were dark, no light glinted on his glasses, and he knew he could do this unseen—and threw the phone as hard as he could, which was hard, now, into the darkness over the roofs. He did not hear it land. At last, as he sat by the step of the house, he heard a swill of water in the pipes below his feet. Another bottle was pushed from the letter box.

The sea told him where the Chaos Nazis were. It said that was where its help would end. That it would not be intervening, could not take any sides. It was closing in on time for daylight. Billy leaned forward on his knees and rested his forehead on the door.

“Now listen,” he said. “Listen a minute. You can’t get in there, can you, Wati?” Billy said.

“No figures in that house.”

“Listen, sea,” Billy said. “See here, sea.” He smiled tiredly. “That’s the sort of thing’s helped get us where we are now, people wanting to stay neutral.” He felt some recognition. He felt as if he remembered this. As if he’d been in the sea only days before, or nights before, in fact, at night, in the night, as he dreamed those ink dreams. He put his hand on the door. He knew this place.

“What is it you want to stay neutral about? You want to stay out of a war. This wouldn’t be London versus you—that’s not what we’re up against. So what is it? Chaos Nazis? I don’t believe it. The Tattoo? Does a gang boss really frighten you?”

Oh, snap! Did that kind of petty psychology work on the fucking ocean? Nothing ventured, Billy thought, nothing ventured. What else did he have? Two weapons he did not understand and a polybodied trade unionist. There was nothing but silence from inside the embassy.

“So what is it? Protocol? Niceties? I’m going to say this. I’m going to beg.” Billy was already on his knees. “Please. So you mess up some balance of power? So what? You know what’s coming. The fire and end of it all. I bet this fire burns seawater too. Dane’s going to fix it, though, you know. So if you don’t want everything to burn, if you don’t want London to burn, if you don’t want the sea to burn … help me.”

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NOW?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. JASON Smyle wheezed. A few cosmetic knacks, a little unnatural dermatological intervention, and his skin looked quite untouched, all his bruises glamoured away.

“What happens now is this,” she said. “You’ve broken various laws, but as well you bloody know they’re oddball laws. They’re like the constitution, they ain’t written. What that means is you go into the other court system. Which means whatever I want it to mean.” She was less than half Jason’s age. She leaned back and put her feet on the table. “So your cooperation will be greatly appreciated. So.” She twanged briefly into ridiculous American. “One mo’ ’gain. What was you after, coming here? Where’s Billy? And where’s the squid?” But they had been over this many times, and no amount of cajoling or threatening elicited any more.

“I swear, I swear, I swear,” Jason kept saying, and she believed him. He did not know. All he knew was the number Billy had given him, that he had surrendered immediately. That was it. Collingswood glanced through the mirror and shook her head. She left the room and joined her colleagues.

“So what have we got?” Baron said. “It’s all a bit of a turn-up for the books, isn’t it?”

“And you believe him,” Vardy said.

“Yeah,” said Collingswood. “Yeah. So …”

“So,” said Baron. “So our man Billy is not an abductee at all. Is in fact collaborating with a known member, now exile, of the Church of God Kraken. It turns out our ingénue isn’t so ingenuous after all.”

“What is it with this fucking Stockholm Syndrome?” Collingswood said. “Is Billy, what’s her name, fucking Patty Hearst?” She looked at Vardy.

“Possible,” he said. “This whole thing stinks of belief to me. I take it we got nothing from the number he gave us?”

“Nah. Belief in what?”

“In something.”

“Alright children, alright,” Baron said. “So, we thought we were looking for a captive, but it turns out we’re looking for a fugitive. Vardy, you better fill Collingswood in on Cole.”

“Who’s that?” she said. “What did he do? Or she. Was it she? Can I play?”

“A pyromancer,” Baron said. “Ex-associate of Griz.”

“Pyro?” Collingswood narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t it fire that people keep seeing? Vardy?”

“… Yes, it is. Sorry, I just … I’m …” He chewed his knuckle. Baron and Collingswood blinked at this unusual hesitation. “A pyromancer, a squid from the museum, an end of all things, it’s … there’s something close. I just have to parse the faith of it.”

SO WHAT WAS UP WITH MARGE? HER BEST LEAD HAD GONE TO nothing.

She had new priorities. She believed all these strangers who kept telling her she was in danger, that she was drawing dangerous attention to herself, that she needed protection.

Don’t you know what a trap street is? the cult collector had said, and no she had not, but a moment online sorted that. Invented streets inserted into maps to right copyright wrongs, to prove one representation was ripped off from another. It was hard to find any definitive lists of these spurious enmapped locations, but there were suggestions. One of which, of course, was the street on which the Old Queen was.

So. Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that such traps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-sacs were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars.

Well, either way. Those were obviously the streets to investigate. Marge looked for more names.

Chapter Fifty-Four

THE CHAOS NAZIS HID NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR. JUST AN EMPTY building. There was no metaphoric logic to its whereabouts, no cosmic pun: it was just isolated enough and empty enough and easy enough to break into and recustomise from the inside—soundproofing and such—and then to protect that it had been chosen. It was in the far east of London, in a zone depressed enough that not many people took a lot of notice of stuff. It had a deep basement where Dane was being tortured and where Chaos swastikas were cranked and turned. It was near a garage.

The Nazis were alone and unsupervised. An outsourced resource, subcontracting being as fashionable in gangland as in the rubble of Fordism. The Tattoo had told them, vaguely, to continue what they were doing, and to try to extract something, some hint, from Dane, as to where Billy and the kraken were.

Inside, it was decked in memorabilia from the Reich, guaranteed—spattered with genuine spatters, blood, brains, gauleiter cum. Candles in niches beside icons of various deviltry, smoke-damaged posters of Nazi bands and pictures from the camps. Exactly what you would expect.

The Chaos Nazis stood, patchwork fascist fops, all glitz, spandex, leather and eagles. They eyed Dane. He was tied behind a rack of crusted tools. His rack had turned to put a bit more tumourous life in him, so he had eyes and teeth, though not all his teeth, and he could breathe through his nose though it was broken. They had only brought him back a couple of hours ago, had not really got started again yet. He stared at them, alternately spat and raged, and slumped and tried to go into himself.

“Look,” said one. “His lips are moving. He’s praying to his snail again.”

“Stupid Jewish snail scum,” said another.

“Woof,” the dogman Nazi said.

“Where’s Billy, you scum?”

“Where’s the squid?”

“Your dead squid won’t save you.”

They all laughed. They stood in the windowless room. They hesitated. “Stupid Jew,” said one. They laughed again.

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specificities, becomes, inevitably, just pain. Not that Dane was indifferent to the idea of more of it: he shivered as the men mocked him. But he had been surprised that they had taken him twice to the point of death through their bladey interventions and he had still not told them that he knew where the kraken was, nor who had it, nor where Billy might be. That last he did not know himself, but he could certainly have given them leads, and he had not, and they were at a loss.

Still he kept nearly weeping. Dane kept praying.

“You can stop your whining,” one of the Nazis said. “You’re alone. No one knows where you are. Nothing can help. Nothing’s coming to save you.”

HAD THE SEA WAITED JUST FOR THAT MOMENT? DID IT COME WITH a sense of theatre, pausing in the pipework that infested the house as pipes infest all houses, listening for just such an announcement to refute? Whatever: the stars aligned, everything came together for that perfect beat, and just but exactly as if in answer, brine burst every piece of plumbing in the house, and the building began to bleed sea.

Saltwater ripped through the walls. It buckled the floor. Lovingly gilted World War Two knickknacks spilled into new holes.

The Nazis scattered, ran, did not know where to run. Dane shouted without words. Rage, elation, hope and violence. Water gulped at the Nazis; seawater freezing and London muddy sucked and pulled them down with eddies and undertows it imported from its wide ocean self. Some reached the stairs, but more than one was felled by misplaced waves and brutally kept under, and, bewilderingly, in inches in the city, began to drown.

The water reached Dane’s chin. He wondered if it would kill him too. He’d mind, he realised, he would, he would. Kraken let me breathe.

The Nazis ascending the stairs were met. Billy’s phaser cut them down. No stunning now. He descended, shooting as he came. He sent a poker-hot ray scorching through the fur on the Hitler-worshipping dogman. Turning into the torture room Billy growled like a goddamn animal and shot many times while the sea roared and smashed the Nazi bric-a-brac from wall to wall and sunk it as if at the bottom of the world.

“Dane,” he said. “Dane, Dane, Dane.” He knelt in the swells. Dane wheezed and smiled. Billy took a hacksaw to his bonds. “You’re alright,” Billy said. “You’re okay. We got here in time. Before they did anything.”

And Dane even actually laughed at that, as he flopped free from his crooked starburst constraint.

“No, mate,” he whispered. “You’re too late. Twice. Never mind though, eh?” He laughed again and it was bad. “Never mind though. It’s good to see you, man.” He leaned on Billy like someone much more wounded than he looked, and Billy was confused.

“They’re blocking the way out,” Billy said. Nazis from other rooms were massed at the top of the stairs and firing down with Third Reich weaponry. “Here,” said Billy, and gave Dane his gun. Dane stood a little straighter. “Are you with me, Dane?” Billy said. Dane did something, aimed and fired up the stairs. There were a lot of them up there.

“I’m with you,” he said. He looked at the weapon. His voice croaked back to something like normal. “Works okay.”

“We can’t get out that way,” Billy said.

As if in answer, certainly in answer, the sea gave a rocking swell and receded very fast, fast enough to take a great chunk of flooring with it. It left a hole in the centre of the room, a smeary slipping hollow the size of another room, broken by the stubs of pipes and the ruins of masonry. The sea poured violently back out and tore a gap as it went, sluicing from the pit to some half-used end of sewer or old river-run, opening into the labyrinth.

“Can you?” Billy said, and braced him. Dane nodded. They braced and careened in a cold, dangerous slide into the mud and receding seawater, and into the cavern.

They stared up through the fingering pipes and the slurry of brickwork, the dirty cascade, into the dinge of the room. Faces peered over the lip. Billy and Dane fired volleys, hallooing, smacking twisted features from sight. In the second of silence that followed they ran into the slime under everything, and from there, dripping like fresh clay golems, into the dark tunnels of London.

PART FIVE
RISE TOWARD DESCENT

Chapter Fifty-Five

IT WAS VERY LATE. IT HAD BEEN A WHILE SINCE ANYONE HAD actually questioned Jason, let alone smacked him around. Collingswood had come into his cell from time to time, with a bad-dream loop of questions, but he had not seen her for hours.

Food and drink was pushed through the slot. His shouted requests for a phone, for attention, for bacon sandwiches were never answered. There was a chemical toilet in the corner of his cell that he had long since given up threatening to tell Amnesty International about. Without Collingswood or another realitysmith around to dampen his knack, his jailers all half-recognised him, knew they knew him, and given that he was not—could not be, look, he was in a cell—a colleague, reasoned that he had to be a career villain, and their behaviour to him had worsened.

When Jason heard footsteps, a whisper echoing in the hall, he did not expect whoever it was to slow or stop. But they did, right outside his cell, and unlocked his door.

An officer opened it. A man, framed in the doorway, staring in weird stillness. He looked grey and very sick. Someone was behind him. The officer was not looking at Jason. He stared at the wall above Jason’s head, swallowing, swallowing. There was someone behind him webbed with shadows shed by fluorescent lights. Whispering.

“Is it …?” Jason began, and ran out of what to say.

A child peered around the doorframe. A man behind him whispered into the policeman’s ear, leaning like a windblown tree into sight on one side of his escort, then swaying to the other, playful tick-tock, winking with his left then his right eye at Jason from behind the officer’s back.

“Christine!” the drab-coated man said to Jason. “Is it you?”

Jason knew who the man and the boy were then, and he flattened himself against the wall and began to scream.

“I KNOW!” SAID GOSS, STEPPING INTO THE ROOM, ESCORTING THE officer. Subby pushed the door closed behind them with the careful preciseness of a young child. Jason screamed and crawled backward on his bed.

The policeman was closing his eyes and weeping and whispering, “I’m sorry shhh I didn’t stop now I didn’t mean to please don’t please.”

“I know!” said Goss again.

“Stop it!” Goss giggled. “It’s a secret, you’ll ruin it, stop it!” He breathed out smoke.

He pushed the officer at Jason with a whispered word, and the man not even opening his eyes felt for Jason’s screaming mouth and blocked it with his hand and whispered, “Shhhh shhhh stop stop you have to you have to.” Jason ran out of breath to make sound behind the palm. The policeman and prisoner held onto each other.

Someone’s going to come, Jason thought, there are cameras, someone’s going to, but would Goss be here without crossing those ts? Dotting those is? He tried to scream again.

“You two are terrible,” said Goss. “You said we was meeting at the bus station, and then Mike came and I didn’t know where to look!” He sat on the bench and sidled up to Jason. “Hey,” he whispered shyly. He tapped the cop on the shoulder. The man whimpered. “Subby wants to show you something. He found a beetle. Go on and take a look, there’s a love.”

“Shhh, shhh,” the man kept saying, weeping from under closed lids. He took his hand from Jason’s mouth and Jason could not make a noise. Subby took the officer’s hand. The man shuffled at the child’s pace to the corner of the room and stood facing away from Goss and Jason, facing the cement angle.

“I was all over the place,” Goss said. “I was out on holiday. Got a nice tan. Was looking for stuff. Not seen the waiter? The waiting boy in the dollhouse? I had a present for him.” Goss put a finger to Jason’s lips.

“So,” he said. “Clarabelle said she fancies you.” He pushed his finger harder onto Jason’s face. Pushed him to the wall. “I said to her what? And she goes ‘Yeah, can you believe it?’” Pushed the lip into Jason’s teeth. Subby swung the policeman’s hand like they were going for a walk. “She’s going to be at the park tonight. Are you coming down later?” Goss split the skin so blood welled into Jason’s mouth. “Where’s Billy? Where’s Dane?”

“Oh God oh God I don’t know I swear Jesus …” Jason said. Goss did not move his finger, so Jason sputtered past it, sputtering his blood and spit onto Goss, who did not wipe himself. Goss pushed and pushed and Jason whined as his lip was ground against his top teeth. The policeman stood where Subby held his hand obediently facing away, whimpered and seemed to clutch the boy’s hand harder as if for comfort.

“Do you remember when she was in Geography with us and he kept nicking all the pens for the overhead projector?” Goss said. “I knew you liked her then. I know you did stuff for Dane, that’s why you’re here, where is he?” Pushed and Jason whined and then shrieked as with the crunching snap of a ruined pencil Goss pushed an incisor out of its socket so it dangled into his mouth.

“I don’t know I don’t know,” Jason said, “Billy called me, Jesus, please I don’t know …”

“I didn’t even know she was still in our year. Look at me. Look at me. You alright, Subbster? Are you looking after my little brother okay, mister?” Goss smiled and met Jason’s eyes. Kept his finger all blood-wet on Jason’s lips. “Clarabelle said she might bring Petra so we could all four of us go into town. Your friend took something I want back. Where is he? Otherwise I’m going to have to call off tonight.”

“Oh God I don’t know I don’t, listen, listen, he gave me a number, that’s all, there’s a number, I can tell you it …”

“Numbers rumpus schampers grampus orca Belinda. Where’s them lads? I think I can see what you want to say down in your mouth, shall I get it? Shall I get it? Shall I get it? Tell me or I’ll get it. Where is he? I’m going to get it. Where is he? I’ll squeeze it out of you, you rubber duck!”

“I swear, I swear …”

“I will! I’ll squeeze you till you squeak!” Goss began to push. Tooth roots creaked in Jason’s head, and he screamed again. The policeman in the corner exhaled shakily and did not look around. Goss put his other hand to Jason’s stomach.

“I will push if you don’t tell me, because I want it back. Hurry, I said to Clarabelle and Petra that we’d be there in an hour, so tell me tell me.”

Jason had nothing to tell him, so Goss kept pushing. The constable kept his eyes shut and gripped Subby’s hand and tried not to listen to Goss repeat and repeat his questions, heard the noises Jason made go from screams to short hard klaxon barks as much of aghastness as agony, liquid intrusion sounds and some retching animal wrongness and at the very last, nothing. After a long time a hff of effort and the dropping of liquid and the noise of something pushing through moistness. Clack clack. Something maraca-ed.

“What’s that?” Goss said. Clack clack. “You really don’t know?” Clack. “Alright then, if you’re sure.” Dragging.

“He doesn’t know.” Now Goss was up close to the policeman’s ear. “He told me. You can make him tell you too. Make him rattle his teeth. I’m much obliged for showing me where he was, you do a marvellous job, I’m ever so grateful. I remember when people used to care about the uniform, God love you, people had respect then.” The officer kept his eyes closed and did not breathe. “Give us Subby back then, you! Pop him up like a toaster!” Subby took his hand away. The man heard the door open and close. He stayed still for more than three minutes.

He opened his eyes such a tiny bit. No one hurt him, so he opened them again. He turned around. No one stood in the room. Goss and Subby were gone. The man wailed to see blood on the floor and meatlike Jason at his feet. There was a hole in Jason’s sternum. His neck was grossly thickened, burst from inside, his mouth wide open and the roof of his mouth grooved where finger holes were pushed into it, his tongue punctured by a hole for a thumb. Wear him and he could be made to talk, clack clack.

The last lingering of Jason’s knack went out, and recognition slipped from the room, and the officer went from screaming for someone he thought he knew to someone he realised he had never worked with, but who was still exactly as dead as he had thought.

Chapter Fifty-Six

THERE WAS A CHANGE IN THE AIR, SOMEONE COMING INTO THE penumbra of the London Stone, with the stone in mind. London always felt like it was about to end, like the world was over. But now more than ever. No, really, the city was muttering. Honest. Saira could sniff an encroachment, even without Fitch grabbing her and whispering the fact in agitation.

“Someone,” he kept saying.

Saira thought up various possibilities as she readied to face whatever it was. But though she had hoped to see him again, she was utterly confounded to emerge from the Londonmancer back rooms into the shop that fronted and protected them to face a bleary, exhausted, pugnacious Dane Parnell.

Billy stood behind him, phaser in his hand, Wati-filled doll in his pocket. Dane leaned against the doorway.

“Jesus Christ London!” she said. “Dane! What the hell are you …? You got away, thank God, we didn’t know, we were—”

“Saira,” he said. He sounded dead. He stared levelly.

“Dane, what are you doing, you could be seen, we have to get you out of sight …”

“Take me to the kraken.” Saira twitched and patted the air for him to quiet: most of her colleagues knew nothing. “Now,” he said.

“Alright,” she said, “alright, alright alright. I have to get Fitch. What happened, Dane? I have to—”

“Now. Now. Now. Now.”

OF COURSE BILLY AND WATI, WHO HAD FELT BILLY’S EMERGENCE from that protected Nazi zone and gushed into the doll he carried, had clamoured at Dane in relief and tried to make him rest.

“We have to get Jason too,” Billy said, and Dane nodded.

“We will,” he said. At least the police, cruel as they might be, would not, he thought, kill his friend. Not yet. “He was trying to find me?”

“Yeah.”

“We will. As soon as I’ve—” His words ended.

“Do you want to tell me?” Billy said. “What happened?”

And what kind of bleeding stupid question was that? he asked himself the moment it was out, into the quiet that followed. He said nothing as Dane said nothing and they only walked, and at last Dane said, “The Tattoo was there.”

“You saw him?”

“I couldn’t see nothing. But he was; I heard him. Talking through one of his things. He’s desperate. He’s under attack. Some of his business. From monsterherds. If he doesn’t know Grisamentum’s back he most certainly fucking suspects it by now.” His throat was untouched, but Dane croaked with the memory of damage, from the times it had been cut.

“What did he want to know from you?”

“Where the kraken is. Where you are.”

“Did you—?”

“No.” Dane said it with a kind of wonder. “No.”

“I thought they’d …”

“Yeah,” Dane said. “Yeah they did kill me,” he said. But he had come back. Even if it was by their malevolent interventions, Dane had come back. How many martyrs emerge from martyrdom’s other side?

“He can feel something,” Dane said. “Like we all can.” He closed his eyes, he stretched out his arms. “He knows the angels are walking …”

“I have to tell you about that,” Billy said.

“In a minute. It’s not just about wanting it for power anymore. He knows there’s an end and he knows it’s something to do with the kraken and he’s going insane because he thinks if he can get it maybe he can stop what’s happening. He can’t. He won’t. He’ll turn whatever’s happening into … something. We can stop whatever it is from happening.”

“The Londonmancers don’t seem to have managed that,” Billy said.

“No?” Dane turned to him, looking all new. “Maybe the universe has been waiting for me.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

So when they got to the Londonmancers, Dane said, simply, take me there now.

“WE HAVE TO BE CAREFUL,” SAIRA SAID.

“Now,” said Dane.

“You can’t be seen with us,” she said, and Billy laid his hand on Dane’s arm. Easy. A little rushed preparation. Saira and Fitch went in Fitch’s little car, leaving Dane to steal another to follow. They gave him a knack-fucked satnav, a little handheld unit into which Dane plugged a cloth scrap with one drip of Saira’s blood—she had cut herself right there, in front of him, good faith.

“Why would we try to get away from you?” she pleaded. “We need each other.”

Billy and Dane swept rubbish in their wake. They looked disguised by night, by how unremarkable they were. That fooled Billy not at all, and he kept his phaser up. “It’s only a matter of time before we get found again,” he said. “Where the hell are Goss and Subby?”

No one knew. They’d been and gone. Was that the end of it? No one believed that. But they were out of the city—that was obvious from the way everyone felt a little more oxygenated. We’re looking for something in far-off lands, is what Goss had supposedly said to someone they’d unaccountably left alive.

The satnav blinked at them and pointed them through streets, at Saira’s movement. “Look,” said Billy. “Watch her. Evasive manoeuvres.”

As they approached London’s edges Billy felt risingly strange. “Where is she going?” Wati said. He was clipped to peer from the top of Billy’s pocket.

“The sea couldn’t see it, or hear it,” Billy said. They turned onto the North Circular, the city ringroad, and traced a way out east. “They’re … Look, look.”

There was the car, stationary, and there, pulled over onto the hard shoulder, was a lorry. Large—not one of the really huge articulateds that filled streets like poured-in concrete, but big enough, way larger than most house-movers. There was some forgettable logo on its sides. They pulled in behind it and the rear doors opened minutely. Saira beckoned. She pulled the door to behind them as they hauled into the dark insides. Wati could not enter past repulsive fields. He whispered and went out away to his other front, his union war. The vehicle started again. Striplights came on.

Strapped in place in the trailer’s centre, cushioned and surrounded with thick industrial cording stretched to the edges and corners, holding it so it barely jostled on the steel table, was the tank. And in it, placid in its death-long bath, was the kraken.

THE LORRY VEERED A LITTLE, SENDING A LAP OF LIQUID UP THE tank’s inside. The movement clouded the preserving liquid. There were the knotted arms, the gone eyes. Architeuthis. Billy almost whispered hello.

A couple of other Londonmancers, more of the conclave within the already secretive sect, were there. There were tools. Microscopes, scalpels, computers loaded with biological modelling software and sluggish 3G connections. Centrifuges. Chairs, books, a cabinet of weapons, a microwave, chunks of masonry torn from London walls, bunks built into the truck’s sides.

Nothing moved a moment but the truck and the shreds of skin in Formalin. Of course it travelled, so as not to snag attention. A weight of animal godhead like that couldn’t but become meaning: stay fixed and people would notice. So it was escorted in a circle like an aging king. Its motion hid it, as must the scraps of gris-gris stuff, the offcuts, the accoutrements nailed or placed in the vehicle’s interior.

“Who’s driving?” Billy said. He turned.

Dane was on his knees. He knelt close to the tank. His eyes were closed, his mouth moving. His hands were clasped. He was weeping.

EVEN THE LONDONMANCERS, USED TO STRANGE FERVOURS, STEPPED back. Dane murmured. He prayed half audibly. Billy could not hear what it was he said, but he remembered a snip that he had read in the teuthic canon, a phrase: Kraken, with your reaching, feeling the world to understand it, feel and understand me, your meaningless child, now.

The passion ran as long as it would run, and it was a long time. Dane opened weepy eyes. He touched the glass. “Thank you,” he said, again and again, to the tank. He stood at last.

“Thank you,” he said to the room.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” he screamed suddenly. “Why would you do this, why wouldn’t you tell me?” He slumped, and made a face that Billy realised he must have made when he was being tortured to death. “But you took care of, of, of it,” he said. “Of my god.”

DANE SANK AGAIN. POOR TORTURED MAN. HE PRAYED. BILLY PUT ON the long full-arm rubber gloves, like a vet’s, the Londonmancers provided. They—well, their little inner cabal—watched him.

He did not know exactly what he was looking for. He looked at Dane until Dane saw him do so and did not stop him or say anything, and with that permission Billy took off the lid and reached through the cold broth of dead cells and chemicals. He touched the specimen. It was dense, coldly and deadly dense.

We found you, he thought.

“What’s going on?” said Saira.

Billy clenched, but there was no twitch of time now. He pressed into the flesh to feel what he would feel. He ran his hands along it, parted its parts, gently, pressed his fingertips into the suckers that acned the dead animal’s limbs. It could not vacuum him, but the very shape of those pads stuck them for a moment to him, as if it were gripping, all dead as it was. He heard Fitch make some noise like huh. Then Fitch said, “I need … I need to read …”

“I don’t think you do,” Billy said, without turning. He pressed down. What’s this, then? he thought, but no knowledge crept in through his fingertips, his own inadequate ten tentacles. He shook his head: no haptic gnosis, no insight. There was nothing, no knowledge of what would happen, or why, or what it was of this fucking squid, this squid, why this squid? Why would it usher in the end?

Because it still would.

“I don’t think you need to be a seer to know that,” he said. “Cut open the city you’ll see the same thing.” He turned and held his arms up like a surgeon in a sterile field, as they dripped toxins. “I know we were hoping,” he said. “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” He nodded at Dane. “He’s come back from the dead for this, you know? That’s got to be written somewhere. Can’t tell me there’s no verses about that somewhere. And then you’ve got me. That’s two of us must be all over some scripture like a bloody rash, so you might think this’d change stuff.” He peeled off a glove. “But come on.” He shrugged. “It’s still the same.”

Maybe it was because it was a misunderstanding. He, Billy, had been chosen by the angel of memory for some stupid error, some misapprehended gag. Specimen magic, not the alien majesty of the benthic tentacular.

“Don’t matter,” Dane said, surprising him, as if he’d spoken aloud. “How’d you think messiahs get chosen?”

Dane was the real deal, had really gone into it and come out again, and his was real faith. One might have hoped that that was the end, the reuniting of faithful and faithee enough to heal the burning. That perhaps the Londonmancers—having failed to banish that finality by offering themselves as rescuers, believing finally that the intent of Billy and Dane was not to burn the thing themselves, handing control of the stranded deep god to its devotee and kind-of-sort-of prophet—might have averted the worst. But.

“Nothing’s changed,” Billy said. You did not, he was sure, need to be, as he was, a mistaken beloved of an angel to feel it. London was still wrong. You could hear the not-ending of tension in the city, the continuance not of fights but of a particular kind of fights, the terror of it all.

Everything was still going to burn.

•   •   •

SAIRA SAT, DEFEATED. SHE HEFTED A CLUTCH OF BRICKS AND MORTAR anxiously, a wound torn from a wall. She kneaded it. In her hands and knack all the city’s separate scobs and bits and pieces were the plastic matter of London. She prodded and pulled at the bricks and they squelched silently into other bricks. She dug in her fingers and made the stuff into other Londonness—a mass of food wrappers, a knot of piping, a torn-off railing top, a car’s muffler.

“What now?” It was Saira who said it, at last, but it could have been any of them. She held out her hand and Billy pulled her up. Her hand was sticky with Londongrease.

“You remember Al Adler?” Billy said. “Who you killed?” She was too tired to wince. “Know who he was working for? Grisamentum.”

She stared at him. “Grisamentum’s dead.”

“No. He’s not. Dane … He’s not.” She stared. “What that has to do with anything I don’t know. But it was Adler who … started this. With you. And he was still with Grisamentum when he did. Place your bets whose plan it was.

“We know what’s happening’s close, now, and we know it starts when the squid burns,” he said. “So I suppose we have to keep trying. We just have to keep it safe. Maybe if we can do that, keep it unburnt past … the night … we’ll be okay. All we can do’s keep looking. The Tattoo’s got no reason to burn the world. Neither did Al. Neither does Grisamentum, whatever their plan was.” He shook his head. “It’s something else. We have to try to keep this thing safe.”

“Let’s go, then.” Everyone looked at Dane. It was the first thing he had said for a long time that was not muttered devotion to his dead god. He stood, looking reconfigured. “You keep it safe,” he said to Saira. “We can’t be here. We’re too dangerous. We’ll do the stuff you’re saying,” he said to Billy. “First we’re going to get Jason out.”

Chapter Fifty-Seven

“WHAT DO WE DO?” BILLY SAID. CRASHING THE HIDEOUT OF dangerous violent nutcases they might get away with, but the state? It’s too risky, Fitch had said. You have to help us protect it, Saira had said. There’s nothing you can do, they had said.

“Give me the satnav,” Dane replied. “We ain’t leaving him behind.”

“And maybe we can find stuff out,” Billy had said. “They might have some better ideas than we do, Collingswood and Baron.”

Dane had stared at the dead squid and made some sign. “We can find you when we need to. You keep my god safe. And let us out now.”

Now they waited. “We have to get Wati in,” Dane said. He spoke quickly. “We need to know the lay of the land in that copshop before we go cracking in. Where is he?”

“You know they’ve got stuff in place,” Billy said. “He can’t get in. Anyway …” Wati, guilty at his disappearances from the struggle at hand, was still at hasty rallies. “He said he’d be back when he could.” He wanted to help, and he would again, but Don’t you know there’s a war on? A class war that pitted rabbits against conjurors used to getting away with a stick and the scrawniest carrot, between golems and those who thought scrawling an emet on a forehead granted them rights, or any fucking thing at all.

Where gargoyles or bas-relief figures were close enough, Wati would deliver rallying speeches to whatever strikers maintained interventions (homunculi creeping in the angles between wall and pavement, rooks staggering). What might pass as twists of wind were pickets of militant air elementals, whispering in gusty voices as quiet as breath, “Hell No We Won’t Blow!”

There were scabs and sympathisers. Wati heard all the rumours, that he had been targeted—old news that—and that people had been searching all over the world, literally, outside of London, for some leverage against him.

The situation wasn’t great. The grind of economics forced some back to work, shamefaced, shamesouled where their faces were carved and immobile, shamewavelengthed when they were vibrations of aether. Rushing in a statued path all over the city, Wati kept arriving at aftermaths. Picket after picket closed down by spectral police spells on obscure, antique charges pressed into innovative use. Hired muscle in various dimensions.

“What happened?” Wati would cry, on emerging into a lion face made in mortar, to see a picket bust up, its members scattered or killed, two or three still there trying to fix themselves. They were tiny sexless homunculi made out of animal flesh. Several had been left just bone-flecked smears.

“What happened?” Wati said. “Are you okay?”

Not really. His informant, a man built of bird parts and mud, dragged a leg smudgelike. “Tattoo’s men,” he said. “Help, boss.”

“I ain’t your boss,” Wati said. “Come on now, let’s get you …” Where? He could not take him anywhere, and the animal-man-thing was dying. “What happened?”

“Knuckleheads.”

Wati stayed with him as long as he could bear. The Tattoo had been paid to close the strike down, and efforts were being stepped up. Wati went back to the dolls in Billy’s and Dane’s pockets. In agitation he trembled between the two as he spoke.

“We’re being attacked.” “The Tattoo …” “… and the police …” “… trying to finish it.”

“I thought they already were,” Billy said.

“Not like this.” “Not like this.”

“We made him angry,” Dane said slowly.

“By getting you out,” Billy said.

“He wants me back, and he wants you, and the kraken, and he’s getting at us through Wati. I heard him, while I was there. He’s desperate. He can feel everything speeding up, like we all can.”

“We have one of his knuckleheads, you know,” Wati said with the ghost of humour. “Got political after he joined. Got sacked, no surprise.”

“Wati,” said Billy. He glanced at Dane. “We need to get into the police station.”

“Where even are we?” Wati said. He had followed the aetherial ruts ground out from and back into this figure without even clocking his location. “Not that I can get in—they’ve got a barrier.”

“Near,” Dane said. They were in an alley out back of a café in the dark but for a fringe of streetlight. “It’s round the corner.”

“Jason’s inside,” said Billy.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Wati said.

“Wait,” Billy said. “Hold on. I’m thinking … how I first met Goss and Subby. It was the entrance that they had to get over. Collingswood didn’t make the whole place out of bounds.”

“It’s a lot easier to just guard a perimeter,” Dane said. “I get it.”

“So if we can get you past that …” Billy said.

WATI IN THE FOETAL, MOST INNER OF THE RUSSIAN DOLLS THAT Billy had snagged a long time ago, jogged in the mouth of his mouse escort, a longtime activist of the UMA. She had never spoken in twelve years of membership but was absolutely solid.

She was a big mouse, but the doll was still a big mouthful. The mouse was a speck of dark under headlights, disappearing under gates, up an incline of crumble, below unmoving cars and through cavities. “Alright, this is great,” Wati said. “Thanks. We’ll sort this out, don’t sweat it. We’ll sort this all out.”

Midway through the outer wall Wati felt a limit point, felt space try to keep him out, “Whoa,” he said, “I think there’s a …” But the mouse, little physical thing, felt nothing and ran on through, hauling Wati’s consciousness with her, straight on in, snapping through the block.

“Ow,” Wati said. “Shit, that was weird.”

The distinctive mutter of striplights. Wati was used to dramatic shifts of scale and perspective, to seeing from giant figures then lead miniatures. Right now the corridor was cathedral. He felt the pounding of an incoming human. The mouse waited under a radiator. Legs came past. Several officers. There was some emergency.

“Can you follow that lot?” Wati said in his small voice. “Careful now.” The mouse went after the earthquake footprints, down stairs, onto different carpet, into different lights. “He’ll be in a cell,” Wati whispered. The animal agent stuck to the shadows: crouched under the open door itself, of a cell around which the police were gathered. Near what was definitely blood.

“Oh fuck me sideways,” Wati whispered.

The mouse turned him slowly in its little mouth, so Wati’s eyes tracked up the mountain of dead body that lay on the cell’s bed, the red dead man. There were the FSRC. The other milling police shunned them. Among the bustle of voices two words rose to Wati’s attention. “Goss,” he heard, and “Subby.”

“Oh, no no no,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

The mouse waited while he whispered miserable curses. “Okay. Okay. Let’s concentrate. Let’s find their office,” he said eventually. “See if we can get some information. Goss and Subby are with the Tattoo, and I thought he had these buggers’ backing. Something’s going nuts.”

The station was all afaddle with the crisis, and it was not so hard for a mouse to run room to room uninterrupted, looking for and at last finding signs of FSRC involvement—religious pieces, books one would not normally associate with the police. At Collingswood’s desk, CD cases of several Grime artists.

“There’s got to be something,” Wati said. “Come on.” He was exhorting himself, not his escort.

The mouse walked Wati on all the papers they could find. A laborious ambulatory notetaking. Wati was not altogether surprised when he heard voices approaching. “Go,” he said. “Go go!” But the mouse walked one last paragraph, so when the FSRC officers entered, they saw her scuttling from Vardy’s desk.

Collingswood moved at shocking speed, not like a human. She dropped to her haunches and lurched sideways, keeping the tiny animal now running for the space between a filing cabinet and the wall in her line of sight. Vardy and Baron had still not moved. Collingswood spat a word that made the mouse go plastic-stiff skidding with momentum to the back of the little runnel, where the animal lay immobilized as Collingswood shuffled toward her. She still bit-gripped Wati.

“Mouse! Mouse! Come on!”

“Help me with this fucking cabinet,” Collingswood yelled at her sluggish colleagues, and at last they shifted their arses and began to tug it.

“Mouse, you better move,” Wati said. He felt statues beyond the walls that he might, from here on the nonblocked side of the magic caul, jump to. But he muttered and muttered at the mouse, until she regained enough of herself to crawl from Collingswood’s fingers. “Get into the fucking wall,” said Wati, and the mouse made it excruciatingly around a corner of architecture while Collingswood swore.

THE MOUSE DRAGGED HERSELF THROUGH THE WALLS, AT LAST TO deliver the doll to the cool air outside. “Thank you,” Wati said. “You okay? Good work. Thanks. There’s, look, there’s some food over there.” Remains of kebab. “Get that down you. Thanks. Big time. You’ll be alright, now?”

The mouse nodded, and Wati skittered through a few statues to where Billy and Dane waited for the news of Jason that he would have to give.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

“GOSS AND SUBBY.”

“It was Goss and Subby.”

“Holy fucking Kraken. Goss and Subby.”

Goss and Subby, Goss and Subby, names both names and barks of outrage at those so named. They had been that way since year who-bloody-knew? Certainly for centuries the bereaved, the beaten, the tortured had shouted those names in aftermaths.

Billy and Dane were aboveground, in a neglected tower, a folly thrown up on a terrace by some exuberant Camden architect. As everything closed in and they ran out of Dane’s hidden, fake flats, they retreated to chambers above the city and below it. This one was empty and light and dust-clogged. They sat in striae of particulate.

“And it was all the names of old associates on the desks?” Dane said at last.

“Yeah,” said Kirk-Wati. “Whoever was with Grisamentum when he was around.”

“Oh, he’s around,” Billy said.

“Well. You know what I mean. It was all people who’d been with him. Necros, doctors, pyros.”

“Names?” Dane said.

“A geezer called Barto. Ring any bells? Necromancer, according to the notes I saw. Byrne obviously. Someone Smithsee someone. A guy called Cole.”

“Cole. Wait a moment,” said Dane.

“What?” Billy said.

“Cole’s a pyro.”

“I couldn’t see,” said Wati. “All we got was a university, some notes. Why? You know him?”

“I know his name. I remember it from when Griz died. I heard it then. He’s a pyro.” He looked at Billy’s uncertainty. “A firesmith.”

“Yeah, I get that, but why …”

“From when Grisamentum was cremated. Supposedly. But … he works with fire.”

It was fire that ate up everything at the end. It was fire and a secret scheme from Adler, a minor man, a player in the rubble of Grisamentum’s organisation, with unknown intentions, connected to this other one.

“Where is Grisamentum?” Billy said.

“We don’t know. You know that. Wati can’t—”

“It’s more than where, though, isn’t it? You said you don’t see any reason?”

“For him to burn the world? No. No. I don’t get what his plans were at all, but they weren’t that.” They were uncertain enough not to join him, still.

“We’ll find out,” Billy said. “Let’s go find out what Cole is in all this.” He stood, pushing through the layered air. He looked down at the cars. “What the bloody hell is going on out there?”

THE TATTOO WAS GOING ON. HIS HIRED GUNS RAGED AND VIOLATED trusts that had held for decades, all the way through everything, hunting for the quarry they had had and lost.

The Chaos Nazis were nothing, of course. Who was afraid of them now, drowned, screaming and up-fucked? The freelancers, the full-timer knuckleheads and others were happy to audition for the newly open position of lead bogeymen, and the UMA pickets were unwilling bit parts in these violent run-throughs and résumé-building attacks. Wati was gone from the room above Camden, back, gone, back, shoring up, fixing and failing.

“Tattoo’s gone fucking batshit,” Collingswood said. “What is he doing? Has anyone spoken to him?”

“Won’t talk,” said Baron. He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “We can’t bloody find him.”

“He doesn’t need our permission,” Vardy said. The three sat like a support group for the morose.

“Come on,” said Baron. “I don’t employ you two for your looks. Talk this out.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo declaring war,” Vardy said. “Sending Goss and Subby in here. Dealing with our prisoners.”

“And Dane and Billy sending people into my effing office,” Collingswood said.

“So it’s the office intrusion that particularly bothers you,” Baron said angrily. “It’s having people rummage around in the pens that really got your goat, Kath …”

She stared at him. “Yeah,” she said. “That and the thing with the horrible death thing.”

Another round of staring.

“No one gives a shit about us anymore,” Baron said. “We’re just in the middle. It’s bad for the soul, that sort of thing.”

“Christ, boss,” said Collingswood. “Perk the fuck up.”

“We’re not running buggery fuck,” Baron said. “Billy and Dane’ve got more going on than us.”

“This won’t do,” Vardy said. He blinked quickly, formulating. “Sitting here like something. Everyone running around around us. Let’s assert a bit of bloody authority. We need to start bringing people in. On our terms.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” Baron said. “We don’t know where any of them are.”

“No. So. We have to do something about that. Now look, we know what they know. One, they know about the end. And two, they know it’s because the squid’s bloody gone. And three, that someone, somewhere out there, for some reason, is planning things that way. So what we need to do is get the mountain to come to Mohammed.”

Baron continued to stare. “Who’s Mohammed in all this?” he said. “And where’s the mountain?”

“I ain’t climbing fuck,” Collingswood said.

“We need to fish for them,” Vardy said.

“Is this, like, the mountain going fishing now?” Collingswood said.

“Jesus Christ, will you shut up?” Vardy shouted. She showed no shock, but Collingswood said nothing. “We need to dangle what they want, what they’re waiting for. What’s going to bring them out? Well, what brings everyone out?” He waited, theatrical.

Collingswood—a little tentative—said, “Ah. Apocalypse.”

“There you go,” Vardy said. “They’re waiting for an apocalypse. Let’s give them one.”

In London, Heresiopolis was always the draw. Some midnight-of-all or other was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sun rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other’s eyes in the unexpected aftermath of “final” acts—crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon.

Believers tried to talk the universe into giving their version a go. Even small outlandish groupuscules might make headway in ushering in their End. The FSRC had a decent reputation for helping clear up these potentials. But Vardy’s point was that the most dramatic of these Armageddonim—London had had to grow used to such arcane plural forms—were events in a kind of society. Spectator sports. To miss one would be a realtheologikal faux pas.

They were means to gauge who was in the ascendant, which group on the wane. The shenanigans of putatively final nights were something between fieldwork and social gatherings.

Baron and Collingswood looked startled. “It won’t work,” Collingswood said. “No end’s going to be big enough to get people out at the moment, not with everything else going on. You’d have to cook up something pretty fucking dramatic. And people’ve got their ears to the ground, they’d know it wasn’t real. They wouldn’t turn up.”

“They’d certainly turn up if they thought it might be the end,” Vardy said. “Imagine if the one apocalypse you missed was the real one.”

“Yeah, but …”

“No, you’re right, we couldn’t fake it. We need to bump up some little one that no one would’ve noticed scheduled … Ha. I say ‘one.’ ‘Something big.’ For the times when one apocalypse isn’t enough, ha.” He stood, all bristling. “A list of the sects we have an in with.” He clicked his fingers. “Everyone’s heard about the kraken by now. Right? And they know that whatever it is that’s coming has something to do with it. Don’t they? They do.”

“What is it you’ve got in mind, bruv?” Collingswood said.

“Everyone’s waiting for the end of the world. Let’s get in there first and bring it to them. Like you say, we can’t fake it. We need proper rumours. So we’ll have to make it real. And we’ll have to get as many details right, so they think … We need to encourage certain rumours, and the closer to the truth the better. We probably can’t make it an octopus, but who do we know with an animal god? Who could we persuade to bring their apocalypse forward? Word’d get out.”

He began to go through his files. After a second, Collingswood joined him. Baron watched them and did not rise.

“Are you two out of your bonces?” he said. “You’re going to come up with an end-of-the-world party, just to get everyone together …”

“What about this lot?” Collingswood said. Vardy looked where she pointed.

“I don’t think we have the clout to persuade them,” he said. They continued looking.

“Them?”

“No.”

“Them?”

“… It’s nothing like a squid.”

“What are you even doing?” Baron said.

“Yeah, but if we get rumours out quick, it won’t matter, it’s a big animal,” Collingswood said. “That’s what people would hear.”

“Maybe,” Vardy said. “A problem occurs to me,” he said. He pointed at something on another sheet. Baron peered at whatever they were discussing. “There’s another one coming in soon. In and of itself who cares, but it’s got no animal stuff to it, and it’s going to be difficult to get their prophets to delay. Or if we have them too close together, no one’ll—”

“Just have them on the same day,” Collingswood said.

“What are you …?” Baron said, and Vardy hushed him with a glance. He looked as if he were about to pooh-pooh Collingswood’s suggestion, but a stare of quite astonishing delight came over him.

“Why not?” he said. “Why not? If we have the right, the right keywords to the rumours, even then, one little everyday Armageddon might hardly cut it. So long as enough people think it even might be an animal god thing. It’d certainly get people talking … Could be a surefire way of making our little bait even more …”

“Baity,” said Collingswood.

“Dramatic. Maybe. Imagine if there are two?”

He and Collingswood looked at each other, snorted, and nodded. “It won’t change the, the real deal,” Collingswood said. “But we don’t even know when … Step up, boss-man,” Collingswood said, to Baron, and patted his cheek affectionately.

“Alright,” said Vardy. “So we’ve not one but two prophecies to, um, chivvy. I’m going to make some calls.”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

A CHOLERIC DELEGATION CAME TO THE EMBASSY OF THE SEA. There was no possibility such a troop could bicker with such an antagonist and not be noticed, and noticed they were, and in the wake of that confrontation rumours went everywhere.

Mostly, they weren’t badly inaccurate. A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller.

The truth was adequate drama. A motorcade arrived in the street. Man after man, a couple of women too, helmeted as if they rode motorbikes but emerging from cars, stationing themselves at each junction. Tinted glass obscuring finger faces. No one walked down the street while they were there.

From within the street’s houses people looked nervously at the people in helmets and the night outside. You did not have to have a grasp of the details, and they did not, to know in a carefully unverbalised way that that bloody end house had long been a problem. From the largest car came two more helmeted figures escorting a scrawny third. Punk-haired and terrified. His mouth was covered. The guards walked him between them to the front door.

“Turn round.” The man obeyed that voice. His jacket had holes cut in it, through which stared ink eyes. No avatars, no workshopped figures, no mouthpieces: the boss himself. “Your fucking eminence,” said the Tattoo. His voice was perfectly audible despite the clothes his bearer wore. Looking out at the street, away from the argument behind him, the Tattoo-bearer shivered.

“I heard you visited some contacts of mine. They were holding something for me and you sort of intervened yourself. And I ended up losing something I had expended a great goddamn lot of effort and money getting hold of. So what I’m here to do is ask one, is this actually true? And two, if it is, do you really want to go down this route? Want to go to war with me?”

Again nothing. After long seconds the Tattoo whispered, “Answer me, your oceanship. I know you can bastard hear me.” But no bottle, no message from the letter box. “You and your elemental whatever. You think I’m afraid of you? Tell me there was a misunderstanding. Can you even tell what’s going on? Nothing’s safe anymore. You can burn, same as the rest of us. I’m not scared of you, and whatever you think, you are not safe from war. Do you know who I am?”

The way that maleficent ink said those last words, that old-hat kitsch threat, made it something again. If you had heard it you might have shivered. But nothing happened in the sea’s house.

“Think I won’t fight you?” the Tattoo said. “Stay out of my business.”

Had the sea invaded the Tattoo’s own halls it would have been an insult too far, and whatever the cost—and the cost of war against an element was big—the Tattoo would have waged it. There would have been bombs lobbed into the waters, that exploded and left holes of nothing under traumatised waves. Brine-killing poisons. And even though the Tattoo could not have won, the sea’s interest and breach of neutrality might have spread the war.

But no one would count the attack on the despised and disavowed Nazis as meddling, and the Tattoo would find no allies. The downside of employing bogeymen. Which was why the sea had risked its actions. People doubtless knew it had been there, though it had assiduously withdrawn every molecule of saltwater from the caverns carved under the pavement, the new oceanic grottos, but no one admitted it.

“Tell me what you have to say for yourself,” the Tattoo said. “Kick backward,” he said to the body he was on, and the man clumsily did, but the blow connected with neither the door nor with anything. “Fuck with my business again it’s war,” the Tattoo said. “Car,” he said to his body, and the man walked jerkily to the vehicle. The Tattoo was raging because the sea faced it down. Even the Tattoo won’t face down the sea, people said afterward. No one’ll face down the sea. That word found its way all over.

ANOTHER QUEASY LURCH OF HISTORY. IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE, A stutter, a switch, the timeline two-by-foured onto another course that looked, smelt, sounded the same but did not feel it, not in its flesh. In the clouds was more of that strange rage, more fighting, memory versus foreclosure in a celestial punchup. Every blow reconfigured the bits in Londoners’ heads. Only the most perspicacious gathered something of the reasons for their little strokes, their confusions and aphasia: that it was a part of the war.

Marge was part enough now of the hinterland that she felt it. Her head was full of abrupt forgettings and jab recalls.

It was a last night for her already. Resentful of and exhausted by all the impossibles, she had responded, to their great surprise, to a final pitch from some of her friends. A small group from one of the galleries at which she had exhibited—two men, two women who showed together under a collective term, the Exhausteds, they had given themselves based on perceived shared concerns. Marge, on the basis of her art, had once been dubbed a fellow traveller, a semiexhausted, a Somewhat Tired.

She had stopped hearing from her work friends, but one or other of the Exhausteds had been calling her every couple of days, trying to encourage her out to a drink, to supper, to an exhibition of competitors at which they could all sneer. “It’s fucking good to see you,” said a woman called Diane. She made pieces from melted plastic pens. “It’s been ages.”

“I know, I know,” Marge said. “Sorry, I’ve been getting really crazy into the work.”

“Never need to apologise for that,” Bryn said. He painted portraits into fat books opened at random. In Marge’s opinion his work was total shit.

She had thought she would feel herself playing a role that evening. But their rambles from pub to arty pub pulled her back into the life she had thought long gone. She had only a slight sense of watching herself, of pretence, as they went past tattoo parlours and bookshops, cheap restaurants. Sirens of police and fire passed them in tremendous rushes.

“Did you hear about Dave?” they asked her about people she barely remembered. “What’s up with that business with the dealer you were talking about?” “I can’t even believe I had to move, my landlord’s a shit,” and various other bits.

“How have you been?” Bryn asked her at last, quietly, and she just shook her head and rolled her eyes you don’t want to know, as if at a deadline, a heavy workload, time lost track of. He did not push it. They went to a movie then a dubstep gig, shedding Bryn then a woman called Ellen as they went, a late supper, gossip and creative bollocking. London opened up.

Miracle on Old Compton Street: Soho was fucking lovely that night. Crowds danced bad salsa, still clubbing outside Blackwell’s bookshop. The cafés bustled onto pavements, and a stranger with a spare cappuccino turned down by some disdainful prospect handed it with a shrug to Marge, who almost rolled her eyes at the world’s performance, but drank it and enjoyed every sip. Empty temples of finance watched from the skyline: bad times were not yet quite there, and they could overlook with indulgent window eyes as Marge played with her friends and just was in London.

It got close to midnight and seemed to stay there. She drank with the Exhausteds remnants for a long endless late-night moment amid cheerfully gusting paper trash and the lights of cars shunting around zone one as if the world was not about to burn. Marge had an appointment in the early small hours.

“Alright you outrageous flower,” said Diane when the calendar finally turned. “It’s been lovely, and it’s been too bloody long, stop acting up.” She gave Marge a hug and descended into Tottenham Court Road Tube station. “Be well,” she said. “Get home safe.”

“Yeah,” said Marge to her back. I’ll do that. Since when had home been home? She took a taxi. Not to a ghost or trap street, of course: the driver’s very expertise, the knowledge that got him his cab, would have hidden it from him. She directed him instead to the closest main street to her destination, and from there walked to the little east-London shack.

It looked thrown up out of discarded walls, wood, wattle, daub and brick remnants, on a tiny street of such mix-bred buildings, where a man she had found, via a convoluted online route, waited for her.

“YOU ARE LATE,” HE SAID. INSIDE THE MUTT-MADE HOUSE THE rooms were drier, finer and more finished, more roomlike rooms than Marge would have thought. Amid mould-coloured upholstery, paintings the shades of shadows and books that smelt and looked like slabs of dust was a computer, a video-game console. The man in the hoodie was in his fifties. His left eye was obscured by what she thought for a second was some complex Cyberdog-style hat-glasses combination, but was, she realised, without even a flinch or a twist of the lips, these days, the metal escutcheon of a keyhole from a door, soldered or sutured to the orbit of his eye.

It was attached to face toward him. Everything he saw was glimpsed as through a keyhole. Everything he saw was an illicit secret.

“You’re late.”

“You’re Butler, right?” said Marge. “I know, what can you do? Traffic’s a swine.” She took money out of her bag, a roll in a rubber band. If the world doesn’t end, she thought, I’m going to be buggered for cash.

The air in the room eddied, like interruptions in her vision. Things that should not, like ashtrays and lamps, seemed to be moving a tiny bit. “Anyway,” she said. “It’s you who lives where no taxi driver can go.”

“You think this is tricky to find,” he said. “There’s an avenue in W-Five that’s only in the 1960s. You try getting back into that. Protection, right, as I recall? From what?”

“From whatever’s coming.”

“Steady on.” He smirked. “I’m not a magician.”

“Ha ha,” she said. “I’m looking for someone. I’ve been told to leave it alone and I’m not going to. I’m sure you know more than me about whatever, so you tell me what I need.”

The watcher-through-the-keyhole nodded and took the money. He counted it. “Could be djinn,” he said as he did. “Fire’s what’s coming. Maybe someone arsed them off.”

“Djinn?”

“Yeah.” He tapped the keyhole. “That’s the thinking. Fires, you know. Anything you remember never been there, all of a sudden?”

“What?” she said.

“Things are going up in fire and never been there.” When she looked no wiser he said, “There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I’ve seen it.” He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. “But ‘seen it’ butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn’t ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there’s a bit of charred never.

“Burnt out backward.” He headed into another room, raising his voice so she could still hear. “They can’t get it out of everyone’s head yet, but it’s a start. There’ll be more, bet you a thousand quid. Might be that’s what you’re up against.”

“Might be.”

“I mean we’re all up against it but most of us aren’t out hunting for trouble. Anyway that ain’t the only apocalypse right now. You’ll have a choice soon enough. Which is bloody ridiculous.” He returned and threw an iPod to Marge. It was scratched, well used. An older model.

“I’ve got one,” she said.

“Ha ha yourself. Put it on but don’t turn it on, not yet. Wait till you’re out there in the world.”

“What have I got? Bit of Queen?”

“Yeah, ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ and ‘Bicycle.’ I don’t know what you’re going up against any more than you, so this is a bit all-purpose and you better be gentle with it. It should give you a little bit”—he held his finger and thumb apart an inch—“if it is djinn, and a little bit if it’s herders, or gunfarmers or Chaos Nazis or anyone else up and about—you hear all bloody sorts—or whatever of your multiple-choice end-times is coming. But don’t push your luck.”

“What do you mean multiple choice?” she said.

“There’s two on the way, turns out, is what I hear. One of which may or may not be the fire. Can you Adam and Eve that? So to speak. Some animal Ragnarok plus some other awful bloody thing.”

“What do you mean, animal?” she said. “What do you mean?”

“In a minute. Listen.” He pointed at the machine he had given her. “You’ve got a little guardchord, is all. It’s in there. Swimming about in the noise, and if you listen to it it’ll keep you safe. A bit. So you better hope you like it and don’t let anyone else listen. If you sniff trouble play it. Just play it all the time, sod it. Keep the bloody thing charged. Keep it fed.”

“What does it eat?”

“Music, gods’ sake. Put some playlists on there. Make sure you give it what it likes.”

“How do I know?”

“Never had a pet? Work it out.”

“How strong is—?”

“Not bloody very. You’re flying blind, like we all are. It’s a lick and a prayer and a spit of goodwill, so don’t piss and moan.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Alright.”

“It might give you a bit of time to get away from whatever, is all. Think of it as a head start for when you run. ’Cause let’s face it, you’ll run.”

“What did you mean about the choice?” she said to the seeing man.

He shrugged. “There’s way too many ends-of-the-world to keep up with, but this is the first conjunction I can remember in a long while. Seems like it’s animals and puritans, this time. Right now with all this going on. Seems a bit—”

“Animals?”

“Some animal god, they reckon—that’s what you hear, that’s what I see.” Tap-tap on the keyhole. “We’ll find out soon enough. I might not miss this one. Takes more than an apocalypse to get me into town these days, but two …? Right now? You should, though. Miss it, I mean.”

“I can’t. That sounds like what … people’ve been waiting for. And anyway, what with my little …” She shook her iPod, and he his head.

“It’ll just give you time to run,” he said.

“About that,” she said. Her mouth moved, but no sound came for a moment. “One thing I might have to get away from … Can this, can the music-thing you … I might see Goss and Subby.”

She waited for those names to do their bad magic. For the man to gasp. He only looked sad and winced.

“I know,” he said. “Think you get to be on that sort of shitlist and people don’t hear? That’s why you should stay away.”

“This, though?” she said, raising the iPod. “It’ll help, if I do … if they …”

“Against them?” he said flatly. “That thing? No it won’t. It won’t do nothing.”

“Thanks for the warning,” she said at last. “I’ll be careful. Still if … if you could please give me the details of those, of the animal Armageddon … I think someone I know might be there.”

Chapter Sixty

ON THE CAMPUS OF THE SUBURBAN UNIVERSITY, BILLY AND Dane’s vaguely purposeful scruffiness was camouflage. It had not taken long at an Internet café to check which room was Professor Cole’s. They knew his office hours, too.

While they were online Billy had poked around to find and check Marge’s MySpace. He saw the picture of Leon, the call for help, the number that was not her number, must be some dedicated phone. It shocked him how much it made emotion fill him. He printed more than one copy.

“If this bloke’s such a powerful knacker,” said Billy, “why’s he work at Shitechester Central Poly? And is it not a bit nuts for us to go up against him?”

“Who said we was going up against anyone?” said Dane. “Is that the plan? We’re just looking for information.”

“We might. Like you said, it sounds like this might all be down to him. The fire, the everything. So what can we—”

“Yeah. I know. We might.”

Wati would not come. The strike was dying, and even now his first allegiance had to be to his members.

“We don’t have time to wait. We have to find out whatever there is to find out,” Dane said. “This is the first lead we’ve had. So yeah.” That long stare had come with him out of the basement. “We do what we have to, and we be ready.”

Every one of their moves now might plausibly be the last, but they could not do everything, could not take care of all business. They did their best, just in case there was an aftermath. Dane spoke to rabbi Mo, a quick connection through stolen phones. Simon was curing. They were purging him of all those angry ex-hims. “He’s drained and weak, but he’s getting better,” he said she had said. “Good.” As if it were likely that it would, ultimately, make a difference.

Billy and Dane waited in the corridor, forcing smiles when Cole’s secretary, a middle-aged woman, and the three students waiting glanced at them curiously. Cole must have protections. They had made what desperate plans they could. When at last the student who had been with the professor left the room, they walked to the head of the waiting line. “You don’t mind, do you?” Billy said to the young man in front. “It’s really important.”

“Hey, there’s like a queue?” the boy whined, but that was all he did. Billy wondered passing if he had been so feeble at that age.

They entered, and Cole looked up. “Yes …?” he said. He was a middle-aged man in an ugly suit. He frowned at them. He was cave-pale, and his eyes were shaded ridiculously dark. “Who …?” His stare widened and he stood, grabbing at the clutter on his desk as he came. Billy saw papers, journals, books open. A photo of a young girl in school uniform between Cole and a bonfire.

“Professor,” said Dane, smiling, holding out his hand. Billy closed the door behind them. “We had a question.”

Cole’s face went between expressions. He hesitated and took Dane’s hand in his shaking own. Dane twisted and pulled him down.

“I ain’t going to take him if we go knack to knack,” Dane had said when they prepared. “If he’s what we think. At the very least it sounds like he knows what’s going on, and just in case he is the burner … the only chance we’ve got is to be stupid, and brutal, and fucking base.”

Dane brought Cole’s body down beneath him, expelling the man’s breath and locking him into place. He struck Cole twice with the weapon he pulled from his pocket. The way he held him Cole could make no sound.

“Billy?” Dane said.

“Yeah.” Billy found two places in the doorway where there were drill holes. He gouged with the knife he had brought, uncovering a scrap of flesh and thin chains, a wire figurine. He could see no other magics. “Done,” he said.

“Exit?” Dane said. Billy went fast to the window.

“One floor down, onto grass,” he said. He aimed the phaser at the groaning Cole.

“Professor,” Dane said. “I’m sorry about this, genuinely, but I’ll do it again the second I think you’re knacking. We need you to answer some questions. What do you know about the kraken? It was you wanted to burn it, wasn’t it? Why?”

Billy riffled urgently through the papers on the desk with his non-gun hand. He went to the bookshelves, found the collection of books and papers by Cole himself: A Particle Physics Primer, offcuts, an edited volume on the science of heat. He took the latter and saw, behind it, a second row of works. A slim book, that he grabbed, that was also by Cole, that was called Abnatural Burnings. He took another look at the photograph of Cole and his daughter.

“Come on,” Dane said. Billy shoved the papers into a bag. “Could be this is all nothing,” Dane said. “We got to get you so you can’t do anything, in case it’s not nothing. You’re going to come with us, and if it turns out you’ve got bugger-all to do with it and we owe you an apology, then what can I tell you? We’ll apologise. What did you want with the kraken? Why burn everything?”

There was a noise. Cole was staring up at Billy. Dark smoke was coming out of his scalp. Dane sniffed at the burning.

“Oh piss …” he said. Cole was not looking at him. He was staring at Billy, holding his papers, his picture. “Shit …” The smoke came from Cole’s clothes now. Dane gritted his teeth. “Billy, Billy,” he said. “Go.”

Cole smouldered and Dane swore and scrambled off him, shaking his hot hands, and Cole rose onto all fours and bared his teeth in the smoke that coiled like mad hair around him.

“What have you done with her?” he shouted. Flames came out of his mouth.

Billy shot him. The inventy phaser-beam slammed him into unconsciousness and the smoke dissipated. They stared at him supine, in the sudden quiet.

“We have to move,” Dane said.

“Hang on, you saw him,” Billy said. “He thought we were—” There was a knock on the door behind him.

“Professor?”

“Window,” Billy said to Dane. “We got to go.”

But the door was shoved suddenly and sent Billy staggering. The secretary stood in the threshold, shadow coagulating around her raised hands. Billy fired at her, missed, as she ducked animal fast into the room. He tightened his gut, and time slowed for her, held an instant, and he fired again and sent her spinning.

Dane smashed the window and gripped Billy, cantripped. He pulled them out. His weak little knack slowed their fall by a second, still depositing them on the verge with a breathtaking smack, but without breaking bones. People stared at them from around the irregular quad. Billy and Dane rose and ran raggedly. A few braver and bigger men halfheartedly tried to get in their way, but at the sight of Dane’s face and the phaser Billy waved they got out of the way.

There was a shout. Cole leaned out of the window. He spat in their direction. The stench of burning hair swamped Billy and Dane as they ran, making them gag. They kept running, did not stop, out of the university grounds, back into the city proper and away.

“THAT WENT WELL,” BILLY SAID. DANE SAID NOTHING.

“You saw the picture?” Billy said.

“You still got it?”

“Why the hell would he want to end the world?” Billy said. “He’s not a nihilist. See the way he was looking at it?”

“Could be unintentional. Side effect. By-product.”

“Jesus, I hurt,” Billy said. “By-product of what? Burning the kraken? He sent Al to get it? Why’d he want to do that? Okay, maybe. But you heard what he said. Someone’s took her. He thought it was us. That’s part of this.”

In the boarded-up building they squatted, they went through the papers. They scanned the mainstream physics, but it was the arcana that gripped them.

“Look at this shit,” Billy said, turning the pages of Abnatural Burnings. He could not follow it, of course, but the abstracts of the essays-cum-experiments-cum-hexes gave glimpses. “‘Reversible ashes,’” he said. “Jesus. ‘Frigid conflagration.’” It was a textbook of alternative fire.

“What’s reversible ashes?” Dane said.

“If I’m reading this right, it’s what you get if you burn something with something called ‘memory fire.’” Billy read the conclusion. “If you keep them hot, they’re ashes: if they get cold again, they go back to what they were before.” There was endless fire, that burned without consuming—notorious, that one. Antifire, that burnt colder and colder, into untemperatures below absolute zero.

Papers were folded between the book’s pages, bookmarks. Billy read them. “‘Behave and you get her back. Prepare three charges of,” hold on, “katachronophlogiston. Delivery TBA.’” He and Dane looked at each other. “It’s like a ransom note. He’s making notes for his work on it.” Under the typed words were scrawled pen and pencil.

“I suppose using that as your pad would inspire your bloody researches,” Dane said.

“See what’s weird about this?” Billy said. He held out the photo. “Look. Look at it. The little girl’s in the middle, Cole to one side.” The two of them were smiling.

“It’s bonfire night, maybe.”

“No, that’s what I’m saying. Look.” The layout was skewed, the fire to the other side of the girl from Cole, very close, lighting them strangely. “He’s on one side of her and the fire’s on the other.” Billy shook it. “This isn’t a picture of the two of them, it’s the three of them. This is a family shot.”

Dane and Billy squinted at it. Dane nodded slowly.

“The djinns are freaking out, people reckon,” Dane said. “Maybe it’s got something to do with all this. This was a mixed marriage.”

“And now someone’s got his daughter. He thought it was us.”

“He’s obeying orders. Even if it’s his stuff behind the burning, this isn’t his plan, he’s just doing as he’s told.”

“His kid. Find the kidnapper …” Billy said.

“Yeah, which he thinks is us.”

DID THAT MEAN ANOTHER PURSUER? WELL. THEY HAD NEVER BEEN unhunted anyway. That was why they stayed well away from the kraken on its circling journey. No matter how out of sight the Londonmancers were, obscured by the matter of the city of which they were functions, Billy and Dane were the targets of the greatest personhunt in memory, and they could not risk bringing that sort of attention to the enjarred god. Dane prayed to it, quietly but visibly, quite unembarrassed. He hankered to be in its presence but would not endanger it—any more than it was already endangered, what with the whole end of the world.

The proximity of that worst horizon did not mean they should forget, as they did, the more everyday hunters and knackers after them for the Tattoo’s lucre. The drab and frightening fact of that came back to them that night, as they worked through Cole’s papers, auditioned theories as to who might be behind what terrible action done to Cole’s child, as they walked a dangerous walk to a dingy café where they could access the Internet. A commotion sounded in some alley near them.

“What’s that?”

“It’s …” A drone between the bricks. A bounty-hunting swarm, it sounded like, some baleful hive thinker coming at them for payment in evil apiary kind. Billy and Dane matched each other preparation for preparation. They checked weapons and clung close to the wall, got ready to fight or run while the moan came closer under the noise of the cars and the lorries only around the corner.

“Get onto the main road,” said Billy. “They going to send it out there?”

“Or under?” said Dane, nodding at a lid in the pavement. Billy weighed the options, but hesitated, because there was another sound coming. Dane and Billy heard a glass-and-bone rattle, the slide of a jar on the pavement.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “It’s still following. It’s back.” A quick warning in his head, in an articulate wave of pain. “It’s found me again.”

A bee-mass turned into their sight. Spread out like a chitin-cloud wall, blocking their exit, but through those insects another figure darkly was visible, roll-wobble-walking. There was an eddy among the bloodymoney bees and an inrush of air as a seal was cracked. The buzz faltered. A smoke of insects gushed like reversed film out of sight, like steam back into a kettle, like something, and there was nothing before Billy and Dane but the angel of memory.

It showed itself to Billy for approval, having saved him. The source of his glass and time clench; he, mistakenly, its test-tube prophet. Could it feel his guilt at not being what it thought? Being promised by nothing to no one? Its body was again a Formalin-filled bottle, in which, this time, floated hundreds of specks, evanescing bodies of the attacker. Its bone arms were bones, its head was made of bone.

But it was much reduced. It had been destroyed, probably more than once, on its exhausting treks to track and protect Billy. It had dissipated and reconstituted. This time it had made itself from some preserving jar less than half Billy’s height. This time its skull was an ape’s or a child’s.

It chattered at him from the dark of an alley. He raised his hand to it. Exhaustion came over it—Billy could feel the echo in his head—and it shivered. The glass-bottle-and-bone sculpture settled into a more natural and complete still as its fleshless arms fell from it to become rubbish, as its skull head toppled and rolled from its slanted lid to crack apart on the pavement. Only its jawbone stayed, held on the lid’s glass nub handle. Dissolving bees bobbed in its swill.

Maybe its presiding angel force was remaking itself in another yet-smaller bottle with a yet-smaller bone head, back at its museum nest, and it would set out on its journey again tracking the power it had given Billy, the trace of itself in him, to find him or be broken on the way and try again.

Dane and Billy went to another vagrant shelter. They were glad when it rained: it seemed to batten down the burning smell Cole had brought on them that would not quite go. Billy still smelt it when he slept. He smelt it through the water in which he sank in his dream. Warm, cool as the sea grew dark, cooler darker cold, then warm again. Through black he saw the dream-glow of swimming light things. He was falling into a city, a drowned London. The streets were laid out in glow, the streetlights still illuminated, each glare investigated by a penumbra of fish. Crabs as big as the cars they pushed aside walked the streets made chasms.

From towers and top floors waved random flags of seaweed. Coral crusted the buildings. Billy’s dream-self sank. There were, he saw, men and women, submerged pedestrians walking slow as flaneurs, window-shopping the long-dead long-drowned shops. Figures ambling, all in brass-topped deep-sea suits. Air pipes emerged from the top of each globe helmet and dangled up into the dark.

No cephalopods. Billy thought, This is someone else’s apocalypse dream.

But here it came, the intrusion of his own meaning, what he was here for. From the centre of the sunken London came a hot tide. The water began to boil. The walls, bricks, windows and slimy rotting trees began to burn. The fish were gusted away toward the drowned suburbs, the rusting cars and crabs were bowled by the force of what came. And here it came, bowling like a tossed bus the length of this street, this underwater Edgware Road, that skittered under the flyover and turned. The kraken’s tank.

It shattered. The dead Architeuthis slumped from it, dragged the pavement, its tentacles waving, its rubberising mantle thick and heavy and moving only with the tide, the gush, flailing not like a cephalopod predator but like the drifting dead god it was. The kraken and its tank shards scraped and cracked and disintegrated as the water rushed and heated and a subaquatic fire burned everything away.

ANOTHER INSIGHT DREAM? REALLY? BILLY WOKE FROM IT TO WATI’S voice. He was sweating from the hot black ocean. The smell of the burn Cole had sent was still on him. Wati had come back. He was in the Captain Kirk. Billy found his glasses.

“Here you are,” the toy said in the little plastic voice. “Something’s happening.”

“Yeah?” Dane said. “Really? We nearly got burnt alive by our only lead, yesterday, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe this’ll help,” said Wati. “Maybe this is it. Apocalypse.”

“We know that,” Billy said. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Sorry,” said Wati. “That’s not what I mean. I mean there are two of them.”

Chapter Sixty-One

THE WIZARD WHO HAD SOLD HER THE PROTECTION HAD, IN A gruff way, been too kind to answer her question and tell her where to go, if he even knew. But knowing where to look, now, with her own online contacts and link trails, it was not too hard for Marge to find out when, and even hints of where, these competing, overlapping or collaborative apocalypses were due to occur. The Internet debates were over how to respond.

bottl whisky & head under covers
got 2 b squid this is it
C U all in L

“Jesus, really?” Marge said out loud.

have to go cant miss whole world there

It was not that she did not care if she lived or died: she cared about it a great deal. But it turned out that she would not play safe at any price—and who would have predicted that? There were more messages from her friends on her machine. This time she felt as if by not answering them she was less turning her back on than protecting them.

Leon, she thought. We’re going deeper. She had her iPod bodyguard. She needed a lay of the land. If everyone who was everyone in that heretic cityscape would be there, there were things she could learn. And if it was the squid behind it, if this animal thing was it, if as the insinuations insinuated this was the thing incoming, then she might find Billy.

Anyone up for going? she wrote. Keep each other safe? Go as team see wots wot?

I duno
no
no
u crazee???

Screw them, that didn’t matter. Billy might be there. She knew that Leon would not.

Marge loaded playlists onto the iPod. She grabbed them at almost random from her computer, a big mix, using up all the available memory. When she was out, now, she felt watched by the world, under threat, pretty much all the time. She went walking, and she went as it grew dark, before she put her earphones in. She pressed random play.

The streetlights shone at her through the haze of branches, woody halos. She walked through her nearest cheerful row of kebaberies, small groceries and chemists. A voice started in her ear, a tuneless, happy, piping voice, singing push push pushy push really really good pushy good, accompanied by the noise of a record player being turned on and off, and something hit with a stick.

Marge felt bewildered and instantly cosseted, wrapped in that tuneless voice. The iPod screen told her this was supposed to be Salt’ N Pepa’s “Push It.” She skipped forward. Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” she read, and heard not the familiar orchestration and that magnificent, once-in-an-epoch growl but a little throat-clearing noise and the same reedy querulous asexual tones as before singing in the roughest approximation of the track they try make me to go to the rehab no no no no no. She heard the repeat-twanging of one guitar string.

The singer did not sound so enthusiastic this time, and the envelope around Marge cooled, as if a gust of air got in. She skipped, to Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.” gimme she gimme money money. The little singer was happy again and Marge was safer.

The voice liked Run-DMC. Marge walked patiently through its incompetent renditions of old-skool hip-hop classics. It liked some of the Specials—this town town aaah ah this is a is ghost town, with a double-tempo clapping. It did not like Morrissey. To Marge’s horror, it raised an enthusiastic rorty voice during “Building a Mystery,” a guilty Sarah McLachlan track that she could not remember why she had.

“Jesus,” she said to the iPod. “If you’re into Lilith Fair I’d rather take my chances with Goss and Subby.”

But though it sulked a bit when she fast-forwarded out of that, she was able to raise the little singer’s happiness on a repeating loop of Soho’s “Hippychick,” the initial Smiths’ guitar sample of which it rendered with a warbling badadadada. She had not been able to get the song out of her mind since she had heard it in the hidden pub. There were worse noises to have to listen to.

Marge walked into the most unwelcoming estate she knew of in her neighbourhood. She stood for several minutes in the hollow at the centre of the high-rises, listening to her protective companion croon, waiting to see what it would do when whatever happened happened. But she was left perfectly alone. Once two passing children on their bikes called something, some incoherent tease, at her, then pedalled furiously off cackling, but that was all, and she felt silly and ashamed at treating herself like bait.

We’ll have to see when it comes to it, she thought. As she walked home, the sprite in her iPod chattered fighty fighty fighty powers that be, its take on Public Enemy.

The night after that, she went, alone as she had no other option, to an outskirt of the city, an imperfect roadway helix, that she had not had too much difficulty establishing would be the epicentre. She arrived early, and waited.

“LISTEN, ONE OF THESE TWO GODS IS SOME KIND OF ANIMAL,” WATI said. That brought them up short. “With that, and what with all these rumours about the djinn and the fire, and stuff, I can’t help wondering if this might be it.”

“An animal church keeping itself secret,” Billy said. “Dane?”

“It ain’t my lot,” Dane said slowly. “I know scripture.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time there’d been a split, would it, Dane?” Wati said. “Some new interpretation?”

“Could there be another squid church …?” Billy hesitated, but Dane seemed not offended. “Could there be another one out there? Could this be some other kraken apocalypse?”

“A cell?” Dane said. “Inside? Doing a deal with the djinn? Behind all this? But they don’t have the kraken. We know—”

“They don’t have it now,” Wati said. “We don’t know what their plans were. Or are. Just that they involve the squid and burning.”

“What if this is it?” Dane said. He was looking out at nothing. “What do we do?”

“Jesus,” Billy said. “We go, we find out, we stand in its way. We’re not going to sit here while the world ends. And if it’s nothing, we keep looking.”

Dane did not look at him. “I got nothing against the world ending,” Dane said quietly.

“Not like this,” said Billy at last. “Not like this. This isn’t yours.”

“I gave your message to the Londonmancers,” Wati said. “They’re keeping the kraken as far away from this as they can.” Because if this were, if this did intend, if an event can intend, to be it, to be the end, then the kraken must not be near enough to burn. That would seem to be what might send the universe up with it.

“Good,” said Billy. “But we don’t know what capabilities these people have.”

“It’s tonight?” Dane said. “Where did this even come from? We should’ve heard about this ages ago. It’s obviously proper, and things like that don’t just spring out of nowhere. There should’ve been tekel upharsins and shit. I guess everyone’ll be there to find out what it’s about. The church’ll be there too.”

“I think everyone will,” Wati said.

“A conjunction,” Dane said. “Been a long time.”

It was inevitable that from time to rare time, two apocalypses might clash, but people should have known about it in advance. In such situations, guardians of continuance—declared saviours, the salaried police and the enemies of whoever was declaring an end—would have not only to end the ends, but step in between the rival priests, each vying to rout a vulgar competing ruination that potentially stood in the way of their noble own.

DANE AND BILLY TREATED FENCES AS SOMETHING OTHER THAN barriers, walls as stairways, roofs as uneven floors. Billy wondered if his angel of memory would be where they went, how it might move across this terrain.

Around the lit-up trenches of streets, where police were. As they came closer to where rumour said the event or events would be, at the limits of vision, Billy glimpsed other of London’s occult citizens—its, what, unhabitants? Word of the locus had spread among the cognoscenti, by whispers, text message and flyer, as if the ends-of-the-world were an illegal rave.

A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turp-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads.

“We have to keep out of sight,” Dane whispered. “Let’s find out what’s going on, check who this is.” Wati muttered to him, coming and going from their pockets.

Seers were on the roofs. Billy saw them, silhouettes sitting with their backs to chimneys. He saw the fuddled air where some made themselves not visible. Dane and Billy clung to service ladders on flyovers’ undersides. They dangled, while cars and lorries illuminated the wasteland. “Be ready,” Dane said, “to get out of here.”

•   •   •

“COLLINGSWOOD, I MAY NOT FORCE YOU TO ALPHA LIMA FOXTROT, but if I ask you if you’re receiving me and you are I expect a bloody answer. I can hear you breathing.”

Collingswood made an on and on motion to the unhappy young officer in the car next to her. “Alright, Barone.” She said Bah Roany. She flicked the earpiece. No lapel radios. She, and the few officers seconded to the FSRC that night, were in mufti. She sat slouched in a beat-up car near the gathering ground. “Yes, coming through, big up to the Metropolitan Massive. Rewind. How’s it your end?”

“We can see some predictable players pitching up,” Baron’s crackling voice said. “Nothing from our lost boys yet. You not heard from Vardy, then?” Collingswood shucked as if his plaintiveness were a mosquito in her ear.

“Nah. Said he had to go see a professor. I told him he was one already, but apparently that wouldn’t do.” She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passersby passed by whether they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about the sort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.

“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.

She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumours to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid. She had been happy to cede that to him. She liked the tinkering, but the strategic overview he was welcome to.

Her own enquiries, in venues less epochally inclined than those where Vardy did his musings, closer to that everyday border between religion and murder, proceeded slowly. It was the gunfarmers she was trying to track down. No matter how bloody monkish they were, ultimately they got paid to kill people, and that meant, in some form or other be they ever so abstracted and magic, receipts. And where there was that sort of trail, there would be chatter, a smidge of which, slow though it still was, was wending into her shell-likes.

Collingswood kept only the most vague tabs on who Vardy was manipulating how: she simply did not care enough. Perhaps a part of her thought that wasn’t sensible, that she’d do well to learn that game, but, she thought, she would always be happy to subcontract to the Machiavellis of this city. What she liked doing was what she was good at. And what clues she had sowed about the questionable ends she and Vardy had cooked up were eminently, obviously persuasive. Soon, perhaps, she might do some arresting.

Collingswood said nothing to Baron. She could hear him keeping the connection open as if she would.

MARGE FINGERED HER CRUCIFIX AND IGNORED THE HUMMING tunes from her iPod, like the singing of a young child. Every few minutes people passed her, or she walked a little farther and passed them, talking into their phones and walking quickly, paying no attention to the scrubby afterthought waste where whatever it was was due to happen. Marge was watching the space, she would have said all alone, when a woman emerged from behind a lamppost too narrow to have hidden her.

Hey, the woman’s mouth shaped, but Marge could not hear her. The woman was in late middle age, in a stylish dark coat. Her face was sharp, her long hair styled, and all sorts of oddness about her. You’re here for this, she mouthed, and was abruptly much closer than she should have been with so few steps.

Marge turned up her iPod in fear. The tuneless singing enveloped her. Wait, the woman said, but the voice in the iPod made its way through “Eye of the Tiger” and it gusted Marge away, a London motion sped up and strange. It was all a bit unclear, but within moments she was in another place and the woman had gone. Marge gawped. She stroked her iPod thank you. She looked around and took up watch again.

•   •   •

WAS IT STARTLING THAT TWO RELIGIONS SHOULD NOT ONLY SHARE their last night, but commence the unravelling in the same spot? There had been repeated insistences of where the ends might occur, competing declarations, prophecies “examined more closely,” the venues growing closer until they met.

Representatives of many factions were near. Cult collectors took bets on the outcome; the vagrant magicians of London, many with familiars come crawling and defeated back as the strike entered its endgame, were ready to scavenge for shreds of power and energy that would be given off. “Oh no,” said Wati from Billy’s pocket, seeing his shamefaced members. “I have to … I need to make some rounds.”

It was depressing, Wati agust from figure to brickwork figure, whispering, cajoling, begging and blackmailing, pleading with members to stay away. His bodiless self was buffeted on such an excitable night. Gusty aether blew him into the wrong bodies. He circled the arena very fast. From the eyes of a discarded pencil-top robot Wati watched a woman shift with knacked escapology away from a collector. There was an air about her that drew him, and he would have gone closer, or into the figure she wore around her neck, but something started to happen.

“FUCKSNOT,” COLLINGSWOOD SAID. SHE LEANED FORWARD. A WOMAN continued her slow circumnavigation of the space. Collingswood made a little motion as if prying curtains a touch apart. A shaft of the night between them and the approaching woman grew momentarily lighter, a clearer line of sight. Collingswood peered and sighed and released her fingers and the dark came back.

The man beside Collingswood gawked at her. She did not look at him.

“Boss,” she said as if to air. “… Nah, boss, no sign of them, but I’m pretty sure who I did just see. Remember Leon’s lurve interest? She’s pitched up…. Fuck should I know? … Well it’s her stupid fault, innit?” But as she said that last she was sighing, she was tugging on her plainclothes jacket and opening the door.

She pointed at her temporary partner. “Stay,” she said. “Good dog.” She was gone, turning up her collar, and he could hear her muttering as she approached the nervous-looking woman.

WATI WOULD HAVE GONE CLOSER, TOO, BUT FOR THE ARRIVALS. AT last, late, striding across the scrubland, in yellow jumpsuits, carrying equipment, looking side to side with pugnacity, came a group of shaven-headed men.

Chapter Sixty-Two

MARGE COULD NOT HEAR WHATEVER IT WAS THE NEW FIGURE suddenly approaching her said, not through the chatty, chirpy bad singing. She saw a young woman mouthing at her as she came closer with so much authority and swagger that Marge’s heart lurched and she turned up the iPod frantically. Space slipped. It lurched. The little voice in her ears shouted the excited chorus of a Belinda Carlisle track and the bricks around Marge rushed in tidal passing. She kept going, like a raft on white water, even laughing at herself while the motion still continued for so violent a reaction. How were you going to face whatever really bad was coming? She hadn’t realised how stretched taut and anxious she was about that promised finality.

It was as she was coming to rest, though the phrase felt odd in her head given that she had not moved—only the pavement below the walls beside and the slates above her—that the foot that had started descending in another place was yet to touch the ground, that she recognised the woman she had seen. That rude young constable.

WHO WAS SHOUTING IN FRUSTRATION AS THE MELTING-BUTTER residue of Marge’s presence sizzled away from before her. Her noise was interrupted, and she turned to spectate on the spurious event she had helped bring about.

•   •   •

“WHAT IS THAT?” BILLY SAID. THE NEWCOMERS WORE MILITARY boots, moved like soldiers. The roads beside the open space were half blocked by hoardings, and motorists who glanced down might take what they saw for council workers on some late-night necessary actions.

“Jesus Buddhists,” Dane said. “Nasty.” Dharmapalite supremacists, worshippers of Christos Siddhartha, amalgamed Jesus and Buddha of very particular shapes into one saviour, accentuating brutal identitarianism, a martial syncrex. Billy could hear a rhythm, a little chant as the figures came.

“What are they saying?” he said.

“Only one and a half,” said Dane. Only one and a half! Only one and a half! “It’s how many they’re going to kill. No matter how many they do.”

“What?”

They quoted the Mahavamsa, the reassurance to King Dutthagamani after he slaughtered thousands of non-Buddhists. “Only one and a half human beings have been slain here by thee. Unbelievers and men of evil life were the rest, not more to be esteemed than beasts.” One and a half was how many the Jesus Buddhists counted in the mass of dead after any of their depredations, according to careful religious accounting.

“Get ready.” Dane held his gun. “We don’t know what’s coming.”

Would the Siddharthans be stood up? Their apocalypse would win by default, but what then? The spectators just out of sight were there to see a godwar. Things too large to be birds, too faunal to be gusting rags of plastic, circled in the wind. End-times always came with harbingers, generated like maggots in dead flesh.

“Oh,” Dane whispered. “Look.”

In the lee of a big windowless wall was a gang of helmeted men. Surrounding another man. Billy was rinsed with adrenalin. The Tattoo. “He’s here like us,” Dane whispered. “To see what this is.”

There was the punk man in his eyeholed leather jacket. Two of the men in crash helmets held him, in an alley overlooking the field of fighting. He stared in the opposite direction from it, at nothing, at dark streets, while the Tattoo spectated.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Where’s Goss and Subby?”

“If they’re here …” Dane said. The Siddharthists were putting together a rough altar, carrying out secret ceremonies. “Wati?” But Wati was on rounds again. “If whatever this ‘animal church’ is doesn’t pitch up, we’re gone.”

There was a flash behind the night clouds, silent. It etched cloud contours. The air felt pressed down and the cars kept howling. From the altar was an unpleasant shining. “Here it comes,” said Dane.

All the way over them all, the cloud moved fast. It took shape. Church-sized clots of it evanesced, leaving—it was not mistake—a lumpy anthropoid outline in night-matter, a man shape crude as a mandrake root, a great cruciform figure over the city.

Billy stopped breathing. “If this is the end,” he said at last, “it’s nothing to do with the burning … What do we do?”

“It’s not our business.” Dane was calm. “There’ll be no shortage of people trying to put that out. If it’s just some piddling apocalypse, we needn’t worry.”

Then the earth in the dead space, the ugly dusty bushes and debris, rose. Men and women stood out of their camouflage and came quickly forward.

“They were there all along,” Dane said. “Well played. So who are they?”

THOSE COME FROM THEIR HOLES WERE IN LEATHER, BELTS CROSSED bandolier over their chests. They surrounded the Jesus Buddhists. The cloud-man loomed.

“Shit,” Dane said. He turned to Billy. “Waste of our time,” he said in a flat voice. “That’s the Brood. Nothing to do with a kraken. Different animal.”

“What? Seriously?”

“Nothing to see here.”

“… We knew it was a long shot,” Billy said.

From their power base in Neasden, the SV Brood were devoted to a wargod polecat ferret. Its uncompromising ontology ultimately precluded its iteration as one deva among many in the Hinduism from which it was doggedly self-created, and the Brood had become monotheists of a more reductive sort. The Brood’s inspiration in southern India, their predilection for fighting forms of Kerala, gave the Christos Siddharthans a peg for prejudice: they screamed “Tamils!” as the Brood approached, as if it were a derogatory term. They brought out pistols.

“Bugger this,” whispered Dane. “Ferretists versus racists. This is not the end of the world.”

Could you really feel the hand of destiny while pointing a Glock? The Siddharthists would not let chivalry stand in the way of their Buddhist rage. They fired. Broodists fell and the others leapt, unwinding their metallic belts. They were urumis, whip-swords, blades metres long, ribbon-thin and knife-edged, that they lashed in the crooked agile poses of kalaripayat, opening their enemies’ saffron clothes in ragged vents, drawing red lines so fast it took seconds for the victims to scream.

A sinuate mustelid presence coiled and uncoiled out of dust and nothing in the wasteland. “Red thoughts white teeth!” chanted the Brood. “Red thoughts white teeth!” (This long-promised ferret eschatology had been endlessly distant, until the probing and knacked prodding of the FSRC had helped midwife the cult’s little Ragnarok. All to flush out who was where.)

“Jesus,” Billy said. Cars passed. What did they see? A gang fight? Teenagers? Nothing? The police were surely on their way.

“Let’s split,” said Dane.

Two apocalypse figures clashed over the waste while their followers squabbled murderously. The god-functions struggled, an unusual storm.

“They’re late,” said Dane, retracing his way along the underside of a bridge.

“Who?”

“Whoever’s going to stop this.” Dane tutted.

“Wait,” grumbled Billy. “I want to see the apocalypses fighting.” But Dane snapped at him to come, so Billy sulkily turned his back on the celestial battle and continued through the crawl space. At the edges of the clearing, other figures had appeared. “Who are they?” he said.

“Some chosen one’s party,” Dane said without looking. “’Bout bloody time.”

Somewhere nearby, Billy supposed, Baron, Collingswood and his to-have-been colleagues were carting the wounded and dead to secret hospitals. Whoever saved the city would extinguish these little Götterdämerungen.

“Did you hear something?” Billy said.

More of those gustings, the things that moved like plastic? Yes, but something else too. Below them were animal calls, whimpering, the cough of foxes.

“We’ve been smelt,” Dane said urgently. Things rose from the alley. A composite thing incoming. Pigeons, grey clubfooted London birds, moving in frantic flock through whatever haze-hide Dane had knacked, made dove calls in panicked aggression. The pigeons bombed them with bursts of clawed and feathered dirt.

“There,” Billy heard.

“Shit, Cole’s burn, it marked us,” Dane said. “Come on.”

Something rose out of the below. A shaking cracked the concrete. The screws that bolted their walkway began to undo.

“Jesus!” Billy shouted. “They’re going to drop us.”

They descended at the first ladder, in just-controlled falls. Someone’s forces were coming toward them. Billy and Dane skirted the battleground, past startled hedge wizards and junior prophets. The birds still harassed them, taking some saurian aggregate shape.

THINGS WERE MOST BLOODY DEFINITELY NOT TAKING THE DESIRED shape. She’d always known this plan was a bit of a long shot, but she’d gone along in good faith. It didn’t seem stupid, it was worth a shot. Collingswood, still almost stamping from Marge’s ridiculously expert evasion—whose skills you freeloading, mate?—had not expected her and Vardy’s pet endings to run away with them.

She yelled at the officer partnered with her to come on, yelled into her hidden mouthpiece for Baron’s suggestions and orders, but whether it was static, magic or his anxiety there was only silence. If he was issuing commands she had no idea what they were. She did not know where to find him. The knowledge that a few other scattered police cells watched this unfolding did not comfort her. If she was having a time of it …

“Get your fucking arse here!” The young man tried to obey her. He wasn’t SO19. No firearms. She’d complained at the time. What was he supposed to do, carry her bag? All he was really doing was staring at the warring sky.

“… Tattoo … incon … can’t tell … bloody …” said Baron, or some Baron-aping airwave-dwelling thing. She’d dealt with that before.

“Boss, where are you?” She wouldn’t say she agreed with Baron about it to his face, but she could bloody well have wished Vardy hadn’t disappeared on this of all bloody nights, too.

“… too is here,” he said. “Tattoo is here.”

DANE HEADED FOR THE LABYRINTH OF LONDON. HE AND BILLY were shepherded, brilliantly, by the pigeons they thought they were evading. At a little square overlooked by unlit houses and guarded by leafless trees, men and women in municipal uniforms stepped out of the shade. They wore leaf-blowers, engines on their backs, hoses to gust fallen leaves from pavements. They aimed their contraptions like ludicrous guns. They sent whirling gusts of leaves toward Dane and Billy.

“What the hell is this?” said Billy. The leaves slapped him. The blowers were moving in careful formation, the leaf-mass taking whirlwinding shape like a bait-ball corralled by sharks. The men and women ran about each other, a puppeteer collective. The leaves they sculpted with their air machines took the rough shape of a man, three metres high, in tree-muck swirls.

“Monsterherds,” Dane said. Flicks of the machines, and the man’s head was a bull’s. The horns were tubes of leaf. “Get out of here, go.”

The men and women made the figure reach. It nearly closed its big leaf-gust fingers on Dane, but he evaded. The minotaur made of air and leaves slammed its whirlwind fist and cracked the paving stones. No mnemophylax came this time. Billy shot, and his phaser beam did nothing but send a few leaves flying. Dane said, “Byrne.”

Grisamentum’s vizier was a suspended arachnid on a wall. Her face was vividly outraged. She leapt and came after them, straight through the minotaur, which reconstituted the hole of her.

Dane headed back toward the flyovers, where spectators scattered as the pounding leaf-figure appeared. “Wait,” shouted Billy abruptly. He took a moment’s bearings, took several turns.

Dane yelled, “What are you doing?” but followed him, as the leaf beast, Byrne and the monsterherds came behind them.

At a new brick alley, Billy found what he was looking for. Facing them where the streetlet ended in rubbish, staring at Dane and Billy with unreadable emotion, was the punk man.

The Tattoo himself, his entourage, the guards who held the Tattoo-bearer still, were facing the other way, watching the last mopping-up operations in the arena. The man opened his mouth and stared at Billy and Dane, but did not speak.

Then came the gust of leaves and the shouts of Byrne, and a moment’s hush, and Billy and Dane were standing right between the Tattoo and Byrne, representative of Grisamentum, the Tattoo’s oldest, greatest enemy.

THE TATTOO HEARD THE SHOCK NOISES OF THE MAN WHO BORE IT, and shouted for his entourage to turn, and to turn him. The two forces stared at Dane and Billy, and at each other. Were those police sirens in some not-near-enough street? Billy thought. Were those the shouts of state functionaries on their way? No matter. The ’herders made the leaf minotaur stand and paw the ground. Billy could feel, like an animal running between Byrne and the Tattoo, a question—maybe we should focus on these two?—but the whole shape of London had been cut by their enmity for years. It was a logic too strong to set aside, as Billy had hoped. So the warriors of the Tattoo and Byrne and Grisamentum’s monsterherds closed on each other.

The autumn-coloured leaf figure ran, at its ’herders’ expert motions, into several smaller versions of the same bull-head man, lurching with windblown grace into the fight. The knuckleheads carried knives and slashed without effect at the leaves, which gripped them in temporary leaf-claws made solid. Dane smashed a helmet with a shot from his gun. The figure fell, the giant clutching hand of its head visible behind the broken dark glass. Dane ducked a leaf-arm blow and pulled Billy out of the way. His weapon click-clicked. They crouched by rubbish at the fight’s edge.

“Look,” said Billy. The tattooed man shivered in his oversized jacket while his guards faced the leaves and the gang fight took their attention. Billy and Dane looked at each other.

Billy decided. He ran, and spasmed, and time stuttered and glass broke. His phaser blasted one guard away. Dane followed him and grabbed the tattooed man, who stared in terror so great it was overwhelming to see.

“Go!” Dane and Billy pulled him with them—half hostage, half rescue—across to the dirtland where the last bodies lay for collection. There were police, now, figures shouting absurd arrest threats from and into the darkness, maybe slinging spells of some kind that could that night only sputter around like sodden fireworks. The man in leather swung almost like a child between Dane’s grip and Billy’s. He whispered. Below those noises another sound was audible, the growling, the rage and threats of the Tattoo beneath his jacket.

PART SIX
INKLINGS

Chapter Sixty-Three

WAS THAT IT? WERE THEY IT, PERHAPS MARGE SHOULD SAY? There were two, after all, weren’t there?

Not that what Marge had seen wasn’t impressive and strange and something that wouldn’t have floored her a few weeks before. Only that she had been hoping for revelation, and revelation came there none.

So what was it she’d seen? She was unsure. She had, after her escape from Collingswood, been rather far from the epicentre while whatever had happened had happened. Some of it had been—whatever it was she was going to say instead of magic: the way some of the people she had noticed moved, those dusty vague humans in the scrubland; the somethings she had never quite glimpsed above and around the sweeps of concrete road; her own repeated slippery moonwalk escapes from the attention of other tourists of finality. And there was the sweep of autumnal sky colours that really could, that really might be dramatic little storms.

There was nothing to do with squid, that she could see, and whatever the micropolitics had been, they had been opaque to her. She was no wiser, and frankly a little awe-numb by now.

So what now?

•   •   •

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?”

At very last the man spoke.

“Paul.”

Cleaned up of the muck and blood that stained him, Paul was a thin man in his forties or fifties. When lucid he was cowed.

“Hush, hush, wait,” Billy and Dane said to him as he shook in their grip, as they skulked in hiding. “They’re going to come find me,” he kept saying. And during all that careful calming of him was the intervention of the Tattoo. The voice came continuously. Threats, insults, commands from the tattoo mouth on Paul’s skin.

“What do you think’s going to happen?” the Tattoo screamed. “Unfuckinghand me you little shits or I will kill you where you stand.”

They could not think for his bilious spiel. Dane held Paul and they removed his jacket. From his back, expressions passing in ink tides, bad-magic animation, the Tattoo snarled. It sneered. It looked side to side at Dane and Billy.

“Fucking clowns,” it said. It puckered its lips and made spit noises. No spit came out of the black-ink pretend hole of its mouth, only that sound of disgust. “You think this is it? You think Goss can’t taste where I’ve been? Look at this cunt’s feet.” They were a little bloody. The Tattoo began to laugh.

“Goss isn’t here,” Billy said.

“Oh, don’t you worry, Goss and Subby’ll be back. Where’s your bastard commie friend?” They said nothing. “His plan’s going up in piss and so are you, soon as they’re back. You’re all going to die.”

“Shut up,” said Dane. He kneeled by the vivid black-outlined features. “What do you want the kraken for? What’s your plan?”

“You worthless little snail-worshipping turd, Parnell. You’re so fucking bad at that you got kicked out of your church.”

“What do you know about Cole?”

“I won’t insult your intelligence with if you let me go now I’ll let you live, because I totally won’t.”

“I can hurt you,” Dane said.

“No, you can hurt Paul.”

That shut them up. Billy and Dane looked at each other. They looked at Paul’s skin.

“Shit,” whispered Billy.

“Oy Paul,” the Tattoo shouted. “When we’re out of here I’m going to have my boys fucking sand your feet off. Hear me, boy? You keep your mouth shut if you want any teeth, if you want a tongue, if you want lips or a fucking jaw.”

They wound parcel tape around Paul’s midriff. He stayed still to let them. The Tattoo spat spitlessly and cursed them. He tried to chew on Paul, but it was only the motion of ink under the skin. Paul sat patient as a fussed-over king. Billy silenced the Tattoo, and taped also over its eyes, that glared at him until all obscured. Paul had other tattoos. Band names, symbols. They all behaved—motionless but for his muscles.

“I’m sorry,” Billy said to Paul. “You’ve got a bit of a hairy chest—we should’ve shaved you first. That’ll hurt to get off.” Beneath the tape, the mmm-mmm mutterings continued awhile.

That was how they brought him, with them, to the god.

“Why would you bring him here?” Saira said.

The kraken in its tank in the truck watched them deadly. Londonmancers surrounded them. There were more of them than previously—the insider cabal had spread, as secrets like this will not behave. They left behind “to hold the fort” the supposed mainstream of their antique tribe, now a truncated and confused remnant. Every one of the Londonmancers in the lorry was staring aghast at their unwanted captive. Billy and Dane had tracked them, worked out their route with the tiny satnav and gone ahead to intercept them. It had been a difficult journey, fearful that they were chased at every step by some or other power in the city’s war.

The Londonmancers would not relax the charms they had to keep Wati from the lorry. Billy was enraged on his behalf, but the strike spirit had been agitated, in any case, had needed to circulate, to fight against another last strike crisis. “Just give me a doll or something on the roof,” he said. “Just something.”

“We need to find Grisamentum,” Billy had said. “He’s got to be—”

And Wati had said, “I’ll do what I can, Billy. I’ll do what I can. There’s things I have to …”

Where could Grisamentum be? Much of the city was still in denial about the fact that he was anywhere at all other than heaven or hell, but there was no way the monsterherds and Byrne’s strange intercession, that terrible knacked gang fight, could be finessed out of facticity. London knew who was back. It just didn’t know where, why or how, and no amount of cajoling of even the most eagerly treacherous or venal set of the city’s streets, grifters or apocalypse chancers would reveal anything.

“What would you rather we’d done?” Dane said to Saira.

“We don’t have much time,” Billy said.

“It’s coming,” Fitch said. “It’s suddenly closer. Much more certain. Something happened to make it … more near.”

“We’ve got the Tattoo,” Billy said. “Do you not get that?”

“We needed to get this poor sod off the streets as quick as,” Dane said. Paul sat still, looked at them all. He stared at the kraken in its stinking liquid, through its glass.

“Don’t show him that,” Paul whispered. They looked at him. He wiggled his shoulders to indicate who he meant.

“No one’s going to show him anything,” Billy said carefully. “Promise.”

“We’ve interrupted him,” Dane muttered to Saira and Fitch. “We can find out what his plans are.”

“His plans?” said Saira.

“He’s been trying to get hold of the kraken,” Billy said. He tapped Paul gently on the back.

“Oh, but it’s … look,” Saira said. “Whatever it is … it’s already happening,” she said. She actually mopped her forehead with whatever expensive scarf it was she was wearing. “The burning’s started.” In the last two days, two smallholdings had gone. Been burned, acts of strange arson. Self-cancelling. The memories of the destroyed buildings went almost, not quite but almost, as totally as the buildings themselves.

One had been part of the Tattoo’s empire, a kebab shop in Balham that doubled as a lucrative source of drug money, distilling down the third eyes extracted from and sold by the desperate. The other, a medium-scale jeweller in Bloomsbury, had historically had an association with Grisamentum. Both had gone, and according to most attempted recall, Saira said, there had never been either such place.

“You remember them, Dane?” Saira said.

“No.”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms. “You don’t.” The lorry lurched and she adjusted while Fitch staggered, his beard and hair wild. “You and everyone else.”

“So how do you know there was ever anything there?” Billy said. She stared at him.

“Hello,” she said. “Perhaps we haven’t met. Hi. My name’s Saira Mukhopadhyay, I’m a Londonmancer. London’s my job.”

“You remember them?” Billy said.

“I don’t, but the city does. A bit. It knows something’s up. The burn’s not perfect. The … skin’s puckered, sort of. I remember remembering one of them. But they were never here. We’ve checked records. Never there. There was a fire-engine farting around the day Grisamentum’s must have gone up. The firemen were just driving around, didn’t know why they were supposed to be there.”

“It’s Cole’s thing, it’s got to be,” Dane said slowly. “Who is it getting him to … Where’s that paper? The one that was in the book?” Billy gave it. “Here. ‘Katachronophlogiston.’ Look.”

“Burning stuff right out of time,” Billy said. “Yeah. So, who and why?”

“He might know,” Saira said. “He knows more than us.” She stared at Paul. Indicated his back. A long, unhappy pause. “He might know stuff about Cole. Might not even know he does.” They waited, they hesitated. They tried to think of interrogator’s tricks.

Paul spoke. “Don’t,” he said. “He won’t … I can tell you.” He was so quiet they thought they had misheard, until he said it again. “I can tell you. Why he wants it. What he wants it for. I can tell you everything.”

“IT WAS A TATTOOIST IN BRIXTON,” HE SAID. “I CAME IN TO HAVE A big, you know, Celtic cross on my back, but not only black and white—I wanted greens and stuff too, you know, and it was going to take hours. I always rather do that in one go—I can’t get my head around loads of sessions, you know, it’s all or nothing for me; it was always that way.” No one interrupted him. Someone brought him a drink that he drank without looking anywhere other than the nowhere at which he was staring.

“I knew it was going to hurt, but I’d got drunk even though you ain’t supposed to. I been to that tattooist before. We’d talked, so he knew a bit about me. About the people I knew, about what I did, that sort of thing, you know? I think he was saying what he’d been told, because I think he was like searching for candidates.

“He asked if I minded him having this other bloke there, who was like another tattooist, he said, and they were comparing designs, and I said no, I didn’t care. He wasn’t much like a tattooist, I thought. I don’t know what I meant. I was too drunk, though, to care.

“He watched while the guy did me, and he was like giving him advice. He kept going into a back room. I think we know what was in there? Who I mean I should say.” He gave a horrible sad little pretend laugh. This was not the story they had hoped for, but who could interrupt him?

“They kept showing me my back in the mirror. The tattooist was giggling every time he did, but the other bloke wasn’t—he was all quiet about it. They must’ve done something to the mirror. Because when I looked in it, it was a cross. It looked fine. I don’t know how they did that.

“The second day I unwrap the bandages to show a friend, and she’s like, “I thought you was going to get a cross.” I thought she meant it was too finickety. I didn’t even look at it. It was a little while after that, when the scabs came off, that it woke up.”

It had been Grisamentum overseeing the design. And there in that back room, imprisoned and diminished over the hours, the man who then became the Tattoo. What an arcane gang hit. Not a murder—these men were too baroquely cruel for that—but a banishing, an imprisonment. Perhaps it had been blood colouring the ink. Certainly some essence, call it soul, drained from the man and left a man-shaped meat husk behind.

PAUL HAD WOKEN TO THE MUTTERINGS FROM HIS SKIN. THERE WAS no one in his bed but him. The voice was muffled.

“What did they do? What did they do?” That was what Paul first heard. “What did those fuckers do to me?”

When at very last he unwound his bandages the glam had faded and Paul saw the real tattoo. Two shocks in immediate succession: that what he wore was a face; and much worse—much much worse, much greater, quite shattering—that it was moving.

The face was shocked too. It took minutes for it to understand what had happened to it. It terrorised Paul. It began to tell him what to do.

He had not eaten. “I need you healthy,” said the tattoo on his back. “Eat, eat, eat,” until Paul ate. It had him test his strength. It appraised him like a trainer. He told it to leave him alone, that it did not exist. Of course he went to a doctor and demanded to know how it might be removed. The Tattoo stayed motionless, so the doctor assumed Paul was merely an agitated drunk who had taken against his hideous design. There would be a very long waiting list, she told him. For cosmetics.

Paul attempted home-grown removals with sandpaper, but each time he, screaming, failed, the Tattoo screaming with him. It had him return to the tattooist’s shop, but the proprietor was long gone.

He covered it, but such muffling would never last. When the gags fell the Tattoo would shout when he was out in the street, curse him and mock him. It shouted filthy slurs, swear words and racist names, trying, with success sometimes, to have Paul beaten up. “Hush now,” it would whisper to him afterward. “Hush. Just do what I say, never need happen again.”

It sent him to mages’ speakeasies. It made him connections, whispering to him the code words necessary to get in, had him sotto voce describe the clientele, or turn and let the Tattoo glance through his thin shirt, so the Tattoo would know who was where and direct Paul to those he knew.

“Borch,” it would say, when Paul sat down backward at the tables across from startled operators. “Ken.” “Daria.” “Goss.” “It’s me. Look. It’s me.”

Grisamentum’s intent must have been to exile him into that mobile skin prison where he would be powerless, carried by a host who hated him, tormented with bodilessness until his weak bearer died. But the Tattoo sent Paul to find his associates. He drew them back into his orbit. He sent Paul to secret stashes of money, used them to buy the services of magicians and underworld knowers-how. The Tattoo had only his voice and mind, but it was enough to grow his empire again.

Among the first jobs he carried out while on Paul’s body was to track down and execute the tattooist who had trapped him. Paul did not see it—he had his back to the butchery, of course—but he could hear it. It was not quick nor quiet. He shook as blood spattered the back of his legs, held in place by the first of his followers the Tattoo had had made into fistmen.

The Tattoo wanted to ignore Paul. It would let him eat what he wanted, read, watch DVDs with headphones on while the Tattoo did business. Paul might have been granted evenings out, trips to the cinema, sex. But after his first escape attempt the relationship hardened. After his second, the Tattoo had warned that one more would result in his legs being amputated, with anaesthetic an open question.

The Tattoo was plotting his revenge. But as he auditioned assassins, he heard the stories: Grisamentum had been dying anyway.

“WHY DOES THE TATTOO WANT THE KRAKEN?” FITCH SAID. PAUL stared at the bottled god.

“He doesn’t know,” he said. “He just clocked that someone else wanted it. So he wants it first.” Paul shrugged. “That’s all. That’s his plan. ‘Don’t let anyone else get it.’ He might as well burn it …” Paul did not acknowledge the looks that occasioned. “I know who you are,” he said to Billy and Dane. “I heard everything he was saying.”

“Look,” said Billy to Fitch. “We’re here. We’ve got it. We’re protecting it. We’re not going to let it burn, and that’s what kicks it off. Now we’ve got one of the big players. The whole … burning should be getting a lot less probable, right?” The Londonmancers had been future-hunting frantically. Fitch grinding pavements at every snatched stop; rushed ambulomantic walks to see what the twists of city nudge-nudged; ailuromancy over light-footed cats; the readings of dust and chance London objects. “This must’ve all helped, right?”

“No,” said Fitch. He opened and closed his mouth and tried again. “It closes harder than ever. Soon. I don’t know how, but we’ve achieved nothing.”

No redemption, no remission, no reversion. Still just that oncoming.

Chapter Sixty-Four

COLE WORKED LATE. THE DEBRIS FROM THE FIGHT HAD BEEN cleared. He shook his head and sifted through the papers that remained on the desk, listing what was there and working out what must therefore have been taken. He ignored a knock, but his door opened. A man peered in.

“Knock knock?” he said. “Professor Cole?”

“Who are you?” The man shut the door behind him.

“My name is Vardy, Professor. Professor Vardy, in fact.” He smiled, not very well. “I work with the police.” Cole rubbed his eyes.

“Look, Mister, Professor, Doctor, whatever, Vardy, I’ve already …” He looked through his fingers and paused. “The police? I’ve had two visits from the police, and I’ve told them everything. It was a stupid prank, it’s all finished. Which police do you work with?”

“You’re wondering whether I’m part of the conventional crime squad come to do a bit more dusting, or whether I’m with the—what do my colleagues call us? special unit?—and whether I know about all your other less conventional interests. Did they buy it? The regulars? That this was just a ‘prank’? Two men too old to be students breaking in and beating you up?”

“They believed what I told them,” Cole said.

“I’m sure they did. They’ve every reason not to want to get too involved. What with everything else going on. The sky, the city … Well, you can feel it all.”

Cole shrugged. “It doesn’t make much difference.”

“That’s an odd thing to say.”

“Look …” said Cole.

“Professor Cole, listen. I know you were part of Grisamentum’s team.”

“Just because I did some work for him …”

“Please. Every knacker in London did some work for him at some point or other. And it was you behind that spectacular send-off. The funeral. Great fire. The cremation.” Cole watched him. “You must know you’re not talking to a moron. Word’s getting out anyway. Did you hear about the rumble last night? Everyone’s saying Grisamentum was there. It’s not just me who knows he never died.”

“I swear to you,” Cole said, “I’m not in touch with him. I don’t know what he’s doing, and whatever his plans are, I’ve got nothing to do with them.”

“Professor Cole, you’re probably one of the few people who knows that things have been burning and disappearing, and might even have a chance of explaining how.”

“That’s way beyond me! The principle’s the same as some of the stuff I’ve done, but that’s out of my league.”

“Oh, I do know that.”

“You know?”

“It’s my job to have a pretty clear sense of what you can do and what you can’t do. So I know you couldn’t have burnt all that stuff out of time. But I also know that you did have something to do with it. You’ve been delivering information and charges, haven’t you? According to demands?”

“… I …”

“And no, I don’t think you’re in cahoots with Grisamentum. And I know why you’re doing this. Family. Professor, I know your daughter’s disappeared.” Cole’s face collapsed. Agony, relief, agony.

“Oh, God …”

“I know your wife’s no longer with us,” Cole said. “From what I gather—she’s at a C of E school, isn’t she?—your daughter probably takes more after you than her mother. But she’s mixed-race and she’ll have certain abilities. Combine that with whatever you’ve been handing over, in the right hands …”

“You think she’s being used? You think they’re making her do this stuff?”

“Could be. But if so, well. We can use right back. We can use you to track down whoever’s doing this. I’m asking you to work with me. To trust me.”

HE MUST BE A PIG IN SHIT RIGHT NOW, GRISAMENTUM, BILLY thought. His worst enemy down, captive. Without their Svengali, enforcers like the Tattoo’s fistmen would fall back unhappily on a loose network of contacts and half-trusted lieutenants, trying to decide what to do. Subby and Goss were the most important of these, and they were many things—including back from wherever they’d been, apparently—but not leaders.

“Goss and Subby went to get something,” Paul told Dane, Billy and the innermost Londonmancers. “They went hunting for something. I don’t know more.”

Baron and his crew must be highly in demand now, Billy thought, as local forces struggled with irrupting violence nightmaring their usual run. What would be turning up in these last days was not stabbed dealers of disallowed drugs and smashed shop windows, but strangely dead new figures with blood that did not run as blood should. Terrorised pushers of building-site dust. The Tattoo was gone, the dead Grisamentum was back, the balance of power was fucked, and the boroughs of London were Peloponnesea—as the world got ready to end, this was their great multivalent war.

“I need to …” Billy said, but what? He needed to what? He and Dane looked at each other.

Freelancers were rampaging. Puffed-up thugs with imperfectly learned knacks; consciousnesses born in vats, escapees from experiments; seconds-in-command of all kinds of minor ganglets decided that this was it!—their chance. The city was full of mercenaries carrying out long-delayed vendettas as the strike fell and the familiars came back to work, bit by defeated bit, on terrible, punitive terms.

Never mind, some thought, those in the worst circumstances. Only a few more days and we’ll all be gone forever.

Chapter Sixty-Five

ABSOLUTELY SOD-ALL WAS WHAT THEY HAD TO SHOW FOR THAT, Collingswood thought. Absolutely cack. It was obvious something big had happened. Not that she knew what it was yet: she’d pitched up at the site of some shitstorm or other, tasting familiar people in the air, tasting the very Billy and Dane they’d been there hoping to snatch, the knacks she threw out unpleasantly degrading in that atmosphere, slugs in salt. There was a shift, alright. Something had seesawed, and it was maddening and ridiculous how hard it was to work out what. And Baron and Vardy didn’t help.

That’s fucking it. Collingswood cooked up everything she had. Rang around and called in favours, sent out eager Perky on sniffing errands, stressed as shit by hurry, by whatever it was impending. Took, though she assiduously avoided reflecting on the fact, charge of the investigation. Seemed as if figures she’d never expected to hear from again, that she’d never faced herself but that were well known in the specialist police milieu, were back, or back again, or not dead, or pushing for the end of the world, or coming to get you.

This time it was her ignoring Baron’s calls for a bit. Working from home, from ley line—squatting cafés, with a laptop. Some stop-offs with contacts. “What are you hearing? Don’t give me that no one knows bollocks, there ain’t nothing no one knows nothing about.”

Because the one line of stories that kept coming, the one connection that made her think she still had it, in these winding-down times, concerned the gunfarmers. Whom she had officially mentally upgraded from rumour. Which she had done, she reminded herself later, scrabbling for pride in that wrecked time, before all those gathered hints reached her and critical massed into intuition, and she suddenly knew not only that the gunfarmers were about to attack, but where.

Holy shit. What? Why? That would have to wait. But still, Collingswood couldn’t stop herself thinking, If they’re being targeted they must’ve took it. Which meant the FSRC had even less of a clue than they thought they did.

“Boss. Boss. Shut up and listen.”

“Where are you, Collingswood? Where’ve you been? We need to talk about—”

“Boss, shut up. You have to meet me.”

She was shaking her head. The lurchingly sudden clarity of the intercepted intent staggered her. She knew she was good, but for her to get this kind of knowledge? They’ve given up hiding, they don’t care anymore.

“Meet you where? Why?”

“Because there’s about to be a big-ass attack, so bring backup. Bring guns.”

WOULD IT ESCAPE THE ATTENTION OF OCCULT LONDON THAT ON that night when small-scale apocalypse competition had been a wedge to crack the city open, Fitch and his Londonmancer cadre had been missing from the proximity of the London Stone? Could that be ignored?

“We’re on borrowed time,” Saira said. None of this could last. Those among the Londonmancer cadre who could obsessively parse the future—or, they reminded themselves to say, possible futures—from the safety of the trailer. Their job had become simple and minimal: keep the kraken out of the trouble until, up through and after the closing-in last day. To stop it being that day. That was all they could see to do. A new sacred duty.

“There was another one.” “Another two.” The Londonmancers, by agonising dream and memory interpretations interpreted the city’s history and burnlike blebs in its timeline, collected these new strange outriders, these architectural, temporal arson victims. “You remember that garage out by the gasworks? The really cool old Deco one?” “No.” “Well, that’s the point, it was never there anymore. But look.” A preserved postcard of the building, soot-stained and unstable-looking as it struggled gamely to exist, not to be snuffed in the burn-damaged timeline.

Wati went for hours, then a day. He would not respond to any whispers to figurines held out of the vehicle. Was it a retreat, a surrender he was negotiating?

They kept Paul comfortable. They had no trouble with food. Stop for a moment and Saira would dig her hands into the brickwork of an alley corner, knead like clay, and the bricks might go from being a buckle of scaffolding to a key ring and keys to at last a bag of takeaway.

Twice they unwound the tape from the Tattoo’s mouth, in reasonless hope that he would say something incriminating or helpful or illuminating. Everything should be falling into place now, in the presence of this malevolent player, and it was not. The Tattoo remained silent. It was wildly unlike him. But for a certain moue of ink face lines, you might have thought him uncharmed.

“He’s still got troops out there,” Paul said. Desperate little rearguard actions. Knuckleheads in half-assaults/half-defences, against traditional enemies, forced to take their own initiatives, the very thing they had strived so hard to avoid. People mindlessly showing secrets, knuckleheads fighting for them, winning some and dying, falling, their leather armours ripped, their helmets shattered, little dwarf-hand replacing their cocks and balls suddenly visible, meat-echoes of their head-hands. “Maybe Goss and Subby are back.”

Fitch screamed. The lorry lurched. Not in response to the sound of him—the Londonmancer driving could not have heard him—but because of something striking at the driver as it struck at Fitch, in that same instant. Fitch screamed.

“We have to go back,” he said, again and again. Everyone was up. Even Paul had jumped up, ready for whatever this was. “Back, back, back at the heart,” Fitch said. “I heard a …” In the twanging of aerials, in the cry from the city. “Someone’s come for them.”

THEY HAD TO TAKE THE LORRY OUT OF ITS AVOIDANCE CIRCLE along streets it barely fit through, so tight Billy could tell the driver knacked to keep them from crashing. They passed violence everywhere, occult and everyday. Police and ambulances and aimlessly meandering fire engines, the buildings that had gone up and the callouts themselves charring out of memory, so midway en route no firefighter could remember what they were out for. The lorry came as close as it could go to the tumbledown sports shop where the London Stone was homed. They heard more sirens and they heard shots.

There were a few pedestrians on the street, but far too few for what was still not yet night. Those out moved like what they were—people in a regime at war. There was police tape around the building. Armed officers waving them back, cauterising the area.

“We can’t get through,” Billy said. But he was with the Londonmancers. As if these alleys they ducked into would deny them, as if the alleys wouldn’t switch back and kink obligingly for Fitch and Saira and their comrades now they weren’t hiding and didn’t care if the city noticed. So they led Dane and Billy running like scarpering schoolkids down some bricky cul-de-sac that tipped them with architectural abruptness into a corridor within that ugly place, near the London heart, where there was battle, still.

The police would not enter a free-fire zone. From the Londonmancers’ lair in the corridor of shop fronts, two dark-dressed figures emerged. They held pistols, and were shooting behind them as they came. Dane kicked in the door of an empty shop, and Billy dragged Saira and the others inside out of their range. Fitch sat heavily and wheezed.

“Get off me,” Saira said. She was straining to make the plastic stuff of London into something deadly, pressing her fingers on what had been a bit of wall and was becoming that other part of London, a pistol. She was shaking, brave and terrified. The men fired, and two Londonmancers still in the hallway flew backward.

The men wore dark suits, hats, long coats—assassin-wear. Billy fired and missed, and the blast from his phaser was crackling and unconvincing. It was winding down. A blast from Dane’s gun hit one man but did not kill him and set him snarling.

Clattering shapes came out of the store doorway behind them. There were composite things, made of city. Paper, brick, slate, tar, road sign and smell. One’s motion was almost arthropod, one more bird, but neither was like anything. Legs of scaffold tubes or girder, wood-splinter arms; one had a dorsal fin of broken glass in cement, cheval-de-frise. Billy cried out at the mongrel urban things. One took hold with autumn-gutter fingers of the closest attacker and bit exactly as a rooftop bites. He screamed, but it sucked him, so he kicked as he was emptied. His colleague ran. Somewhere.

Both the shot Londonmancers were dead. Saira clenched her teeth. The predator city bits came toward her. “Quick,” Billy shouted, but she clicked her fingers as if at dogs.

“It’s alright,” she said. “They’re London’s antibodies. They know me.”

The immune system trilled and clattered. Another young Londonmancer joined Saira, and she did not look up. When Dane and Billy approached, the defence-things reared in complex ways, displayed cityness in weapons. Saira clucked and they calmed.

Inside the sports shop was a rubble of smashed fittings and bodies. Not all the Londonmancers left were quite dead. Most were, with bullet wounds in their heads and chests. Saira went from survivor to survivor.

“Ben,” she said. “What happened?”

“Men,” he said. His teeth chattered. He stared at his blood-sodden thigh.

The dark-suited men had entered. They had shot anyone who opposed them, with ferocious, astonishing guns. Of those left alive they had demanded, repeatedly, “Where’s the kraken?” They had heard the police come, but the police, following no-entry protocol, had sealed the attackers and attacked in together.

“We have to hurry,” Billy said to Dane. He waited, bided, as best he could, but he had to tell Saira to hurry too. She stared at him expressionless.

The attackers knew the secret Fitch and Saira and their treacherous comrades kept. But the rest of the Londonmancers they had come to butcher did not, had been the out-of-the-loop, the hard core of excluded, an unwitting camouflage left in place to pretend all was as it should be. Some were aware that they were being kept in a cloud of unknowing, but they had no knowledge of what that secret knowledge was. They did not understand the gunfarmers’ question. Which surely must be provoking to a killer. Some frantic seers had managed to provoke the antibodies into appearance, a little late.

“We were trying to keep them safe,” Saira said. “That’s why we didn’t tell them anything.” With a clatter of wood-bits and kicked-away plaster, Fitch arrived at the threshold. He looked in and simply wailed. He gripped the entrance.

“We have to go,” Billy said. “Saira, I’m sorry. The cops’ll come in any minute. And the bastards who did this know we’ve got the kraken.”

Dane put Billy’s hand to a dead woman’s wound. In the Londonmancer’s cooling flesh was a warmth. “Incubation,” Dane said. “Gunfarmers.” In the dead the bullets were eggs. Guns would grow and hatch, and perhaps one or two little pistols might muster the strength to emerge, call for their parents.

“We can’t take them,” Billy whispered.

“We can’t take them,” Saira said, dead-voiced, seeing Dane’s action.

The last of the Londonmancers and the London antibodies went with their leader, if that’s what Fitch still was, down those attention-drawing urban kinkways back to their lorry. “We’re the Londonmancers,” Fitch kept saying, and moaning. “Who would do this?” You broke neutrality first, Billy did not say.

“It’s new rules,” Dane said. “Everything’s up for grabs. This is just nuts. They didn’t care they’d be seen.” Like they wanted it. That’s how terror works. They stared at Paul.

“Not this one,” he said. Jerked his head at his own back. “Nazis and fists and Boba Fetts, but not gunfarmers.”

Blood puddled. Those Londonmancers who had survived stared at the kraken sloshing in its tank. “But why is it …?” they said. “What’s it doing here? What’s going on?” Fitch did not answer. Saira looked away. Paul watched them all. Billy felt as if the kraken were staring at him with its missing eyes.

Chapter Sixty-Six

“MARGE AIN’T HOME. AND SHE AIN’T PICKING UP HER MESSAGES. And I don’t know what she was doing there at the double-team. So what do you want us to do?” Collingswood reeled from a wave of the balefulness she had once called Panda. The nickname did not hold in her head, these worse days. “Was all a bit of a fucking balls-up, eh, boss? What now?”

Containment was all they could hope for on a night like this, with so many little wars under way. They could only intervene where possible, stand in the way of some carnages, patch up whatever aftermaths. The madness of, what—some kraken’s pain, perhaps?—seemed to have infected everything. The city was hacking itself.

So Collingswood asked the question not for elucidation—stepping into the ruins of the housing of the London Stone, the obvious signs that there had been murder there, though all they could do was log it and move on—but to make it clear that Baron had no answer. He was on the doorstep, looking in and shaking his head with the studied mildness that Collingswood had grown into her job witnessing. Around the room constables brushed things and pretended they were looking for fingerprints—conventional protocols increasingly ridiculous. They glanced at Baron to see if he would tell them what to do.

“Bloody hell,” he said, and raised his eyebrows at her. “This is all a bit much.”

Fucking no, she thought. She crossed her arms and waited for him to say something else. Not this time. She was so used to reading his nonchalance, his asides, his patient waiting for suggestions as if pedagogically, as signs that there was nothing that could faze him, as symptomatic of absolute police-officerly control, that it was not only with surprise but rage that she realised he had no idea what to do.

When was the last fucking time you came up with shit? she thought. When did you tell us what to do? She shamed him into meeting her eye, and what she saw in the deeps of his, like a lighthouse a long way away, was fear.

kollywood? She brushed the tiny voice out of the way as if her hair had irritated her. She did not need Baron knowing that Perky, her little pig-spirit friend, was with her.

“So,” he said at last. If you hadn’t known him a long time you might buy it. You might think he was calm. “Still no word from Vardy?”

“You already asked me. I told you. No.” Vardy had gone to speak to Cole, he’d said, to sound him out. That was the last anyone had heard. They could not track him down, nor could they Cole. Baron nodded. Looked away and back again. “It was his sodding idea that we decoy the end of the world; it was him who pulled whatever he does and tweaked the dates,” Baron said.

“Exfuckingscuse me, you reckon it was him spent a day with his head in the fucking astral persuading constellations to fart around a bit quicker?” she said. “Fuck off it was him, he had me do it.”

“Alright, well. I thought the whole idea was to flush everyone out and that it certainly did.”

“I think I was never a hundred percent sure what exactly the sodding idea was, boss.”

“Perhaps he’ll be good enough to join us,” Baron said.

“I’m going,” Collingswood said.

“What’s that?”

“Can’t help the London-tossers now. I’m going. I’m going out.” She pointed, in any direction. They could hear the rumpus of the night. “I been thinking. I know what I’m good at and I know what I can get. This information about this right here? That ain’t it. They got me here too early. I was supposed to hear about this. This was a fucking fake duck noise.” She blew a raspberry. “I’m police,” she said. “I’m going policing. You.” With three points she commandeered three officers. All obeyed her summons immediately. Baron opened his mouth as if he would call her back, then hesitated.

“I think I’ll come with,” he said.

“No,” she said. She left with her little crew following.

She trod over the smashed-up entrance into the night street. “Where to, guv?” one of the officers asked her.

where we goin kollywood? Perky said.

She had been trying to gather friends; given her druthers Collingswood would have been completely enveloped in amiable presences. But it was hard to get their attention, now. As time stretched toward whatever was at its end, the minds, wills, spirits, quasi-ghosts and animal intents she might have had flit around her in better times were skittish, and too nervy to be much help. She had Perky, with its uncanny porcine affection, and a very few diffuse policely functions too vague to do more than emit words so drawled in her hidden hearing that she could not tell if they were words or imitation of a siren, whispered now-then-now-then or nee-naw-nee-naw incessantly. Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

“Perky,” she said. The officers looked at her, but they had learned on recent FSRC-seconded business not to ask questions like Who are you talking to? or What the fuck is that thing? “Perky, scoot off a bit, tell me where there’s fighting. Let’s see what we can do.”

kay kollywood sminit

Collingswood thought of Vardy, and what came to her mind was a tug of anger and concern comingled. You better be okay, she thought. And if you are, I’m fucking livid with you. Where the fuck are you? I need to know what this is.

Although—did she? Not really. It would not have made a great deal of difference.

She had spent some hours watching CCTV footage. Like radiographers, the FSRC knew what to look at, how to make sense of what shadows, which filters to switch on to bring which whats to the fore. What was artefact on the electric image and what a witch really breaking the world.

Rumours and scabby video came through of two figures who did not attempt to stay hidden. Goss and Subby. Goss completely unperturbed by all the salvos against him, unfussed by damage, killing offhandedly. “Where’s my boss?” he demanded of those he crippled, the few not murdered attested. “I’ve counted to a hundred over by the wall and it’s time to go in for tea and he’s still in the garden somewhere, Aunty’s getting tetchy,” and so on. After a strange and blessed absence, he was manifesting with his mute boy all over the place.

Did Collingswood’s less specialist colleagues think it was an endless day and night of causeless burglary, ferocious muggings and dangerous driving? Perhaps they might allow themselves to think here and there in terms of gang fights, muttered about Yardies or Kosovans or whatever, even with the reports of what she knew must be refugees from the Tattoo’s workshop—women and men shambling nude and altered, with lightbulbs, diodes, speakers and oscilloscope screens in them—horrifying everyday citizens who could only tell themselves for so long that they witnessed an art event.

Collingswood leaned on the wall and smoked while her companion zipped through the city looking for trouble like a pig for truffles, so that she could do something to look after London. It was better than nothing, she thought. Really? she asked herself, and, Yeah, really, she answered back.

THE WORLD LURCHED AGAIN. REELED, IN THE WAS PUNCHED SENSE, rather than the dancing. Marge felt it. She had not gone home since the foiled Armaggedons. There were places to stay if you didn’t much care. She did not know if she had a home left, and if she did she assumed it was not safe anymore, that she had been brought back into the attention of the dying city.

You say it best, hmm hmm it best. Boyzone was not one of her iPod-devil’s favourites, but it was muttering its version into her ears gamely enough. This was the track that had kept her safe in the brief moment when she had felt a hungry mammal consciousness of one of the gods notice her.

She was in an arriviste corner of Battersea, where late bars stayed open and proudly displayed doctored B-movie posters, and she could feel the bang bang of dance bass through doors, through the pavement and her feet. There were lights in the windows of offices, people working late as if in a month’s time they would still have a job and the world would still revolve. Gangs outside fast-food restaurants and cafés that pottered along as if it were not after midnight, their premises abutting the alleys that were the conduits to the other city that, over the incompetent supernatural impersonation of Ronan Keating, Marge could hear.

The littler streets were as lit as the main ones, but they were furtive. A landscape of degenerating knackery, violence and eschatological terror. Marge would swear she could hear shots, metres, only metres from where laughing hipsters drank.

She was beyond fear, really. She just drifted, she just went. Trying to ride out the night, which felt to her like a last night.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

SOME HOSPITALS WERE KNOWN TO BE FRIENDLY, TO ASK NO questions about odd wounds and sicknesses. There were quiet wings, where you could get treatment for lukundoo, for jigsaw disease, where no one would be put out if a patient spasmed out of phase with the world. The worst wounded of the Londonmancers were delivered, with whispered warnings that the bullets inside them might hatch.

Dane was lashed in place on the lorry roof like some Odysseus. He was pushed, lit up and darkened by the lorry’s passage. Dane held his Kirk and waved it, called Wati’s name. He made it an aerial. It was a long time until Wati found it.

“Oh God, Dane,” the figurine suddenly said.

“Wati, where’ve you been?” Dane hammered on the hatch. Billy looked through. The wind made him blink. Around him the city, like something fat, staggered toward a heart attack. The statuette coughed as if it had something caught in its nonexistent throat, as if its nonexistent lungs were bruised. “You heard about the Londonmancers?”

“Oh man,” Wati said. “I been, oh, God. They beat us, Dane. They brought in scabs. Goss and Subby are back.”

“They’re fighting you?” Billy said. “Even without the Tattoo around?”

“Most of the Tattoo’s guys must be screwed,” Dane said. “But if Goss and Subby’re still at it …”

“Griz’s got gunfarmers working for him.”

“It is,” Dane said. “It is him bringing the war. Grisamentum … Why the Londonmancers?”

“Wait,” Wati said. “Wait.” Coughing again. “I can’t move like I should. That’s why it took me so long to find you.”

“Take it easy,” said Dane.

“No, listen,” Wati said. “Oh God, Dane, no one’s told you, have they? It ain’t just the strike or the London Stone. There’s no neutrals now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It weren’t just the Londonmancers. They went for your people too.”

“What?” said Dane.

“What?” said Billy. That ostentatious assault of Fitch’s comrades, as if it were meant to be seen. “Who? Goss and Subby? Who’ve they—?”

“No. Gunfarmers. For the Krakenists. They attacked your church.”

DANE STOLE A CAR. HE WOULD NOT LET ANYONE BUT BILLY COME with him.

“They didn’t even have anyone out there,” Dane kept saying, slamming his hands on the dash. “They kept their heads down. How could anyone …? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was the only one, and I’m not …”

“I don’t know.”

A little crowd was outside the community church. Tutted at the smouldering from the windows, the broken glass, the obscene graffiti that now covered it.

“Hooligans.” “Awful.” Dane shoved through them and inside. The hall was smashed up. It was very much as it would be had the perpetrators been a rampaging group of fools. Dane went through the junk room and pulled the hatch open. Billy could hear how he was breathing. There was blood in the corridors below.

There, in that buried complex, were the ruins left by the real attack. Very different from the foolish display above.

Throughout the halls were bodies. They were punctured and blood-sodden, hosts for grubbing little bullets. There were those who looked killed in other ways—by bludgeons, suffocation, wetness and magic. Billy walked as if in a slowed-down film, through carnage. The ruined bodies of Dane’s erstwhile congregation lay like litter.

Dane stopped to feel pulses, but without urgency. The situation was clear. There were no sounds but their footsteps.

Desks had been ransacked. As well as mud, in a few places on the floor were trampled origami planes, like the one that had alerted Dane to Grisamentum’s attention. Billy picked up two or three of the cleanest. On each folded dart was the remain or smudge of a design in grey ink—a random word, a symbol, two sketched eyes.

“Grisamentum,” he said. “It’s him. He sent them.” Dane looked at him without any sign of emotion.

In the church, before the altar, was the bullet-ruined body of the Teuthex. Dane made no sound. The Teuthex lay behind the altar, reaching for it with his right hand. Dane gently held the dead man. Billy left him alone.

Like arrows drawn on the floor, more fallen planes pointed in higgledy-piggledy direction to the library. Billy followed them. When he pushed open the library door, he stopped, at the top of the shaft of shelves, and stared.

He walked back to where Dane mourned. He waited as long as he could bear. “Dane,” he said. “I need you to see this.”

The books were gone. Every single book was gone.

“THIS MUST BE WHAT THEY CAME FOR,” DANE SAID. THEY STARED into the empty word-pit. “He wanted the library.”

“He’s—Grisamentum must be researching the kraken,” Billy said.

Dane nodded. “That must be why … Remember when he wanted us to join him? That’s why. Because of what I know. And you. Whether you know it or not.”

“He’s taken it all.” Centuries of dissident cephalopod gnosis.

“Grisamentum,” Dane whispered.

“It is him,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, it is his plan. He’s the one who wants the kraken, and he wants to know everything about it.”

“But he doesn’t have it,” Dane said. “So what’s he going to do?”

Billy descended the ladder. There was blood from something on his glasses. He shook his head. “He can’t read even a fraction of these. It would take centuries.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Dane made fists and raised them and could only lower them again. “The last time I even saw him was …” Dane did not smile. “Just before his funeral.”

“Why is it we don’t see him?” Billy said. “Only Byrne.”

“He’s hiding.”

“Yeah but even when there was … like when they fought the Tattoo. Tattoo was there. You’d think for a night like that Grisamentum would show in person. We know he must be desperate to get his hands on the kraken.”

“I don’t know,” Dane said. He ran his hand along the shelves. Billy was reading the strange words and examining the odd figures on the paper planes he had picked up. Dane descended, picking up dust on his trailing fingers. He turned and looked at Billy, who was still, and staring at the planes.

“Remember what you were saying about when Grisamentum died?” Billy said. “About when he was cremated?”

“No.”

“I just …” Billy stared into an ink blot. He moved it and kept staring at it. “This ink,” he said. “It’s greyer than you’d think,” he said. “It’s …” He looked up into Dane’s eyes.

“It was Cole did his cremation,” Dane said at last. He ascended.

“It was,” Billy said, staring at him. “Remember the kind of fires he deals in?” They stared at the paper. It riffled as if in a little wind. There was no little wind.

“Kraken,” whispered Dane, and Billy said, “Oh my Christ.”

WHEN GRISAMENTUM DISCOVERED HE WAS DYING IT WOULD HAVE offended him. There were no techniques to prevail against his own injurious blood. He was uninterested in an heir: his desire was never dynastic but to rule.

History was punctuated with women and men who had by grit forced their ghost-selves back to continue their business, who had wedged their minds out into host after host, who had by simple doggedness failed to die. But these were not Grisamentum’s knacks. Byrne was good, her expertise indispensable, her commitment to the project swiftly personal, but she could not unwind death itself. Only filigree it, in certain ways.

“Christ, he must have made … other arrangements,” Billy said.

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

Was it when he decided on the spectacle of cremation that something had occurred? Perhaps he was writing the order of the service. Perhaps scribbling instructions to Byrne he began to stare at the pen he held, the paper, the black ink.

“Pyros, he was talking to,” Billy said. “And necros. What if Byrne wasn’t remote-talking to him at all, when we saw her? Remember how she wrote?” He unfolded the little eyes. “Why are there paper planes here? Remember how he found us in the first place? Why’s this ink grey?”

Grisamentum had burnt alive, in that temporally and psychically knacked variant of memory fire, that mongrel of expertise, the pyros’ and Byrne’s, her deadist insights. But he had not quite died. He had never died. That was the point.

After hours of it, after the mourners had left, he would have been collected. He was ash. But he never quite died. He was safe from his illness—he had no veins for it to poison, no organs for it to ruin. Byrne (her name a sudden joke) must have taken him, charcoal-coloured in his urn, ground any last black bone shards and carbon into powder. Mixed him into the base he had had prepared: gum, spirit, water, and rich knack.

Then she must have dipped her pen into him, closed her eyes, dragged the point across her paper. To see the thin line jag into scrappy calligraphy, a substance learning itself, she gasping in loyalty and delight as the ink self-wrote: hello again.

“WHY’S HE DONE ALL THIS?” DANE SAID. HE STARED AT THE PAPER. It stared inkly back. “Why does he want the world to burn? Because he did? Revenge on it all?”

“I don’t know.” Billy was gathering the paper planes. He held one up. The word on it was Poplar. On another Binding. Another said Telephone. In super-thin writing. All incorporating two little scribbled eyes. This was the remnant of honour, nostalgic for spurious legendary times.

Was it always a lie, Billy thought? Had this neutrality-breaching killer always been so savage? Had something happened to make him the purveyor of this? The vastness of this murder.

Dane went from room to ruined room and gathered bits of Krakenist culture, accoutrements here and there, weapons. There must have been some of the Krakenist congregation out, on errands, having their lives, who would find out soon what had happened to their religion. Like the last of the Londonmancers they were now an exiled people. Their pope murdered before his altar. But in that burrow at that moment, sifting through the rubbish of the dead, Dane was the last man on earth.

Where was the light coming from? There were some bulbs not smashed, but the grey illumination in the corridors seemed greater than those little sepia efforts. The blood everywhere looked black. Billy had heard moonlight made blood look black. He met the eyes of one of the paper planes. It regarded him. Its paper fluttered again, unblown.

“It’s trying to get away,” he said. “Why would they … he … why would he actually come here, not just issue orders? He’s watching. See how thin this pen is? Remember how careful Byrne was with the papers she wrote on? How she swapped pens? So she could scrape the ink off again. There can only be so much of him.”

“Why would he do this?” Dane shouted. Billy still looked at the fallen paper’s eyes.

“I don’t know. That’s what we have to find out. So my question is, how do we interrogate ink?”

Chapter Sixty-Eight

THEY WORKED IN THE LORRY. SAFER THAN IN WHAT WAS SUDDENLY a sepulchre. Billy had all the planes he could find, all with blood and mud torn off, so it was only ink that stained them.

The kraken overlooked them. Dane prayed to it. While the Londonmancers muttered and looked at Dane, suddenly bereft like them, Billy soaked the paper in distilled water, pulped it and squeezed it out. Paul watched him, his back, his tattoo, to the wall. Billy extracted the weak-tea-coloured water and boiled off a little excess. The liquid rilled away from him in a way not right.

“Be careful,” said Saira. If the ink was Grisamentum, perhaps each drop of him was him. Perhaps each had all his senses and his thoughts and a little portion of his power.

“She scraped him off each time she got him back and remixed him,” Billy said. Each separate pipette full added back to Grisamentum’s bottled consciousness. Why else would there be these eyes? The ink must know what all those rejoined drips of him had known. “I guess they’ve got to husband him.” He was finite. Every order he wrote, every spell he became, his communications were him, and eroded him. If he was all written up, there would be only ten thousand little Grisamenta on scraps, each enough to be perhaps a magic postcard in some pathetic way.

When Billy was done there was a thimbleful, more than a drop but not much more. He dipped a needle into it. Dane stood, made a devotional sign, joined them. He glanced up. Wati hibernated through the union’s defeat in a doll strapped on the vehicle’s roof. Billy rifled through the papers he was using, scraps from his bag, all manner of odds and ends.

“Is this going to work?” Saira said.

“Works for Byrne,” Billy said. “Let’s see.”

“Are we actually finally going to find out what his plans are?”

Billy kept his eyes on Dane’s. He put the needle to the paper and dragged his hand, without looking, across the page. He drew a line, only a line.

“Oy,” Billy said. “Grisamentum. Pay attention.” He drew another line, and a third, and this last time suddenly it spasmed like a cardiogram, and there was writing. UP YOURS, the writing wrote. Tiny scratchy font. Billy redipped the needle.

“Let me,” Dane whispered, and Billy waved him back.

“You aren’t thinking straight,” Billy whispered to the little residue at the bottom of the container. “You’re probably a bit foggy. You must be a bit dilute, a bit mucky. Your little brain must be … little.” He held a pipette over the ink.

“We can dilute you a bit more. Does alcohol sting? We’ve got some lemon juice. We’ve got some acid.” Billy would swear the tiny pool flinched at that. The pigment that was Grisamentum swilled in the cup.

“What are you doing?” Billy said to the ink.

“My people …” Dane said.

Billy dipped, scratched, wrote. FUCK YOU.

“Right,” said Billy. He dipped the needle in bleach, and then into the ink. A tiny amount: this had to be a delicate kind of attack. The colour twitched, left a little fade. Billy mixed it, dragged the needle again.

BASTARDS, Grisamentum wrote in itself.

“What are you doing?” Billy said.

FUCK YOU.

“Where’s the rest of you?” Billy said.

FUCK U.

Billy dripped in more bleach and the ink rolled. “We’re not going to pour you down the sink. You don’t get to dissipate painlessly with rats and turds.” He held the pipette over the glass. “I will piss in you and then bleach you so you dissolve. Where is the rest of you?”

He wrote. The penmanship was ragged. FUCKERS.

“Alright,” said Dane. “Bleach that murdering bastard.”

WAIT. Billy scratched. INK FACTRY. CLOSED.

Billy looked at Saira. Dane whispered to the toy he carried, though Wati was not in it. “Why take all the books?” He dipped more bleach again.

RESERCH.

“How can he read them all?” said Dane. “Research? Why does he care anyway? What in the name of God has all this been about?”

It was Grisamentum’s plan that started the countdown to the fire to come. Kicked everything into motion. Only by the superstition of Adler, one of the few who knew his boss still lived in that intermediate ashy way, had the Londonmancers found out about the scheme. Grisamentum’s intended theft had made them intervene, against their own oaths, because they could not have that burning.

“Why,” whispered Billy, “do you want to burn it?”

DONT CRAZY WHY?

“So what is it?” Billy said.

“What’s he doing?” Fitch said. “Why did he even want the kraken?”

CANT U GUESS?

The ink wrote that, forcing the needle unexpectedly to the paper and scribbling with Billy’s hand. Billy redipped.

MAGIC.

ONLY I CAN BE.

“Okay,” said Billy after seconds of silence. “Does anyone understand this?”

“Why’s he saying this?” Dane said. “You’re not even bleaching him.”

“He’s crowing,” said Paul, suddenly. Billy nodded.

“Bleach the motherfucker,” said Dane. “Just on principle.” Billy dipped the bleach-tipped needle and the ink swilled to get away.

NO NO BE ITS MAGC ONLY I CAN. NO 1 ELS IN LONDONN CN BE.

“He’s losing it,” Saira said.

“Ink,” Billy said.

•   •   •

THEY STARED AT HIM.

“That’s what he means,” Billy said. “That’s what no one else in London can be. The kraken’s ink. Anyone else might be able to use it, but Grisamentum can be it.”

Such a magic beast. Alien hunter god in its squiddity. Englassed. Knowing how this stuff worked, Billy thought. It had the biggest eyes—so all-seeing. Bastard of myth and science, specimen-magic. And what other entity, possessing those characteristics, being that thing, had the means to write it all down?

“Jesus,” Billy said. “This has always been about writing. What do you mean?” he said to the ink. “How does it work?”

CAN B IT CAN WILL BE INNNK

It was too gone, too bleached and limited, that little drip of Grisamentum, to answer. Alright. Analogies, metaphors, persuasion—this, Billy knew, was how London did it. He remembered watching Vardy gnosis up, from will, and Billy decluttered his mind and tried to mimic him.

So.

With script, a new kind of memory, grimoires and accounts. Traditions could be created, lies made more tenacious. History written down sped up, travelled at the speed of ink. And all the tedious antique centuries before we were ready, the pigment was stored for us in the cephalopod containers—motile ink, ink we caught and ate and let run down and stain our chins.

Oh, what, he thought, it was camouflage? Please. Architeuthis lives in the aphotic zone: what purpose would the spray of dark sepia serve in a world without light? It was there for other reasons. We just would not get the hint, not for millennia. We didn’t invent ink: ink was waiting for us, aeons before writing. In the sacs of the deepwater god.

“What could you do with kraken ink?” Dane said. Not scornful—breathless.

“What can you be with it?” Billy corrected.

The very writing on the wall. The logbook, the instructions by which the world worked. Commandments.

“But it’s dead,” Billy said.

“Come on, look at Byrne, he’s worked with thanatechs before,” Dane said. “All he needs is to wake its body up, just a little bit. For a little bit of ink. All he has to do is milk it.”

It would not take so much to bring that preserved kraken an interzone closer to life. Thanks to Billy and his colleagues there was no corruption, after all, no rot to cajole backward, which was always the hardest battle for necrosmiths. A threshold-life would be enough to stimulate the ink sacs.

“But why would he burn it?” Saira said. “Why the burning?”

“His plan sets it in motion,” said Fitch at last. “That’s all we know.”

“Maybe it’s to do with his crew,” Billy said. “It must be him has Cole’s daughter. Maybe it’s out of his control. What are you doing with the girl?” He said the last sentence loudly to the ink spot. “What are you doing with Cole’s daughter?” He shook it to wake it.

WAT?? ALK? NO GIRLL INK

“Bleach it away,” said Saira. Billy wrote an alarming jagged line, and the words IS TATOO IS U? An arrow. Pointing at Paul. Paul stood.

“Hey,” said Billy. “Why do you have the girl?” He wrote in tiny print again. TA2 NO CATCH YOU YES. HELO

“That’s enough,” Billy said. A couple more meaningless scrawls, the words came again, and this time fast.

WHAT WILL THEY DO 2 U?

“What? Do what?” Billy wrote, looking away. “What’s he talking about?”

“Wait wait,” shouted Fitch, and Billy pulled the nib up and looked at what he had written.

THEY HAVE U & TA2. WONT LET YOU LIV I PRTECT U QIK

“What …?” “Wait …” “Is that…?” Everyone was sounding it out.

They have you. Paul was standing. And Tattoo. Dane was beside him. They won’t let you live.

Billy stared at Saira and Fitch. I protect you, Grisamentum was telling Paul. Quick.

“Hold on, now,” Fitch said.

“What?” said Billy.

“Wait,” Dane said. “He’s messing with you.” He looked at Fitch. Paul moved faster than Billy would have thought he could. Paul snatched the container of ink and the papers on which Grisamentum had written from Billy’s hand. Grabbed scissors from a table. He backed to the lorry door.

Billy looked at Fitch’s face, and did not try hard to stop Paul.

“Look,” Fitch said. “See? It’s stirring between us all.”

“Alright,” said Dane. He stood between Paul and the Londonmancers. “Let’s calm down …”

Billy lowered the needle and wrote with the last of what was on the needle. “Don’t,” said Fitch, but Billy ignored him and read out loud.

“‘Why would they let you live?’”

Billy caught Dane’s eye. A recognition sparked between them that the tiny fuggy-minded drop of Grisamentum had a point.

BILLY SWUNG HIS PHASER AT THE LONDONMANCERS. THEY DID NOT know it was empty, or almost. He doubted it would fire. “Look,” said Saira. She stood in a pugilist’s pose, but glanced at Fitch. “This is bullshit.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Fitch said. He stammered, “No one intends any, no one has any … why would we …?”

“You …” whispered Paul. “He’s right.” He moved back against the door.

“Wait,” shouted Fitch, but even as his last able-bodied Londonmancers stepped forward, Dane came to meet them.

“Back,” said Billy, standing by Dane, now. Protecting Paul. “What the hell are you planning?” he said.

The lorry reached a stop sign, or a red light, or a hazard, or just stopped, and Paul did not hesitate. He opened the back so there was a glow of headlights in from behind them lurching side to side, as perhaps some glimpse of kraken was granted a startled motorist. Too fast to be stopped, Paul was down, gone, out of the lorry, ink and papers in his hand, slamming the door closed.

“Shit!” said Dane. He fumbled, but the lorry, its driver unaware, was speeding up. When Dane at last got the door open again, it had moved some way off and Paul was gone.

“We have to find him,” Billy said. “We have to …” To bring him back to the Londonmancers, to Fitch, who had not made a full denial of the ink’s allegation. Billy hesitated. Dane had taken a right old time opening that door.

Chapter Sixty-Nine

“YOU LET HIM GO,” FITCH SAID. “WE HAD THE TATTOO AND YOU LET him go.”

“Do not give me this shit,” Billy said. “You shut your face. Paul is not the Tattoo.”

“We weren’t going to let you kill him, Fitch,” Dane said.

“We weren’t going to kill him.”

“We saw you,” Billy said. “Couldn’t even meet his eye. Don’t come the innocent, we know what you did to Adler.”

“Anyone could get hold of Paul and then we’re all in trouble,” Fitch said. “I have no intention of hurting him, but I make no apology for keeping all options open.”

“All options open?” Billy more or less screamed.

“What?” Saira said to Fitch.

“We had one of the two kings of London right here,” Fitch said. He trembled. “Responsible for God knows how much. We had to be ready to secure the situation. What could we do?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Saira said. “We’re not murderers.”

“Such drama.” Fitch tried to look unrepentant.

“You weren’t going to let him go,” said Billy. “Don’t you think he’d had enough of being someone else’s property?”

“There was a debate to be had,” Fitch said.

“I imagine,” Billy said, “Paul would have disagreed strongly with those who proposed the motion that his incarceration or death were the least bad option. I bet he’d have strongly seconded those who leaned toward not that.”

“Now would you all listen?” Fitch said. “Paul knows where we are.”

“What are you talking about?” Billy said. He gestured beyond the trailer. “I don’t know where we are and I’m there.”

“He knows how we travel; he’s seen the vehicle. If the Tattoo gets the better of him again, and it did it before, then it’ll gather its strength and forces and then we are in serious trouble. We have to assume we’re compromised.”

IT COULD HAVE GONE NIGHT TO NIGHT, SKIPPING DAY ALTOGETHER, was how long it seemed to have been dark. Paul did not mind. He liked it that way. He manoeuvred away from sounds, breathed deep and tracked whatever London silence he could find. He was panicked, exhilarated. It was the first time for many years that he had walked without chaperone and threat, that he decided which way he was going.

So which way was he going? He kept running for a long time. There were many people running that night, he learnt. He glimpsed them at junctions, at roundabouts, escaping whatever sort of catastrophes chased them.

Despite years of effort to numb himself from the acts ordered and committed by the ink on his back (memories of murders committed behind him, the screams of those close by he did not see die), Paul had picked up various criminal tips. How could he not? He knew that most escapees were recaptured because they underestimated how far they needed to get away before they slowed, so he just kept running.

He held his hand closing the ink’s container. He felt the liquid bite his thumb when it splashed it. It was too weak for anything else. He knew he would be sought not only by the Londonmancers, but by the Tattoo’s old employees, missing their boss. He knew he would be found.

Goss and Subby would be hunting. Buy them and you bought them. They would be raging to get back into the service of the illustration he wore.

Paul would be crippled, this time. He knew he would be blinded, boxed without limbs, forced to swallow vitamined gruel without the tongue that would not be left him.

He slowed at very last. He did not feel tired. He looked carefully around him.

“Is it driving you crazy?” he whispered, so only his own skin could hear. “Not knowing what’s going on?” Blind and mute. “You must be able to feel I’m running.”

He heard breaking glass. He felt knacked percussions that the news would probably nervously report as Molotov cocktails. Paul vaulted iron railings into a scrub-filled corner between streets, a green oversight too small to be a park. Huddled runaway animal out of sight of the estates, he lay in shrubbery and thought.

The Tattoo stayed quiet. At last Paul stood. It really did: the Tattoo was still. He put the tiny container he had grabbed in front of him. He stared at it as if he might throw in his lot with this adversary of his tormenting skin, as if he might collaborate with Grisamentum. He watched the ink watch him.

He whispered to it. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “Thanks. For, you know. Warning me. And saying that you’d take care of me. Thanks. Do you think I’m going to let you run me instead?”

He stood. He unzipped his fly and urinated messily into the tiny pot, dissipating and spattering the tiny self of the ash king of London, pissing him away. “Fuck you,” he whispered. “Fuck you too. Fuck you as much as him.”

When he was done there was only his urine in the bottle. He took out the paper on which Billy’s hand had let Grisamentum write himself. Helpful wind moved the last clinging leaves so a streetlamp could shine on it directly. Paul looked through every piece he had. He put together bits of information about Billy from these remnants from Billy’s bag. Patchwork detectiving. He worked things out.

One sheet he kept hold of. He sat, his back to the railings, and read and reread it many times. He folded it and put it to his head and thought and thought.

At last, treading the streets again in his shabby Converse he found a phone box. He went through a thicket of front organisations reversing charges and taking their cuts, even then, that night, before connecting to the number on the paper. It was voice mail.

“I have the leaflet you put out here,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Is that Marge? I have your leaflet. I know where Billy is. Do you want to meet? I know it’s all going weird tonight, but it’s now or it’s not going to happen. I’ll wait here. Here’s the number. Call me when you get this.” He gave it. “I need you to pick me up, and I need you to come now. I’ll tell you everything.”

Finally, but hesitantly, the Tattoo twitched. The movement was, by chance or not, in time with a horrible twitch in history. Everyone felt that. A heating up, a smoulder and disappearance. History was scorching.

“DID YOU FEEL THAT?” FITCH SAID.

If Paul surrendered to what he wore and the Tattoo regrouped and came back for them, they were done. The Londonmancers agreed. Or perhaps Paul might even collaborate with Grisamentum, the little drips he carried, take them back to the rest of the liquid criminal, in which case it was all finished, too.

“What kind of team-up would that be?” Billy said.

No one heard him over the overlapping arguments. Fitch shouting at Dane and Billy for letting Paul go, then lapsing into muttering. Dane growling back in a truly scary way, then giving up suddenly and sticking his head out of the trapdoor or window and whispering to Wati, who if he woke in the doll said nothing anyone else could hear. Londonmancers shouting at Fitch, despite who he was, at the plan they could still hardly believe he might have countenanced. Saira saying nothing.

“There’s just too many dangers,” Fitch said. “He’s not stable. The Tattoo’s back out there, now. First thing it can, it’s going to be making for Goss and Subby. You understand? Then they’ll come for us … and it’s not just us who’ll die.”

They could not let it happen. They had to keep the kraken safe from the burning approach.

“What did we say in front of him?” someone said.

“I don’t know,” Fitch said. “We have to take the kraken somewhere safe.”

“Where do you fucking propose?” Dane said. “It’s starting.”

“Don’t you understand?” Saira said. “We could only keep this safe so long as no one knew it was us, and no one knew where we were. Well, the worst two people in the world know, now.”

Chapter Seventy

PAUL AND MARGINALIA SAT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER. WHERE THE fuck to begin?

She would not risk answering any of her phones anymore, but she checked her messages, and she had arrived after many hours in her cheap car. She had sneaked back to her flat for it and come for him. Paul had watched it arrive, pulling slowly like some sea-carriage through sunken streets. It was quiet in the London corner he had found.

She had parked metres away from him under a different lamp. She had waited and waited and when he did not run for her or do anything other than wait, too, she had beckoned. Marge wore headphones. Paul could hear a tiny tinny yattering voice from them, but she seemed to be able to hear him reasonably over it. “Drive,” he had said. “I’ll keep you out of sight.”

They had driven around and around the night. She followed his directions. He’d listened to his ink parasite; he knew how to have her drive a sigil. “Here,” he said. “Turn.”

“Where are we going?”

“There’s places it’s hard to find us.”

He directed her a long way through London, sticking to rear alleys, intricate convolutes. “Where was it?” he muttered, nodding at memories. At last to an underground carpark at the entrance to some swanky flats. Between pillars in the dark they stared at each other.

Paul looked at her. Marge looked at the ruin-faced man. He was agitated. He was a man, she thought, with plans.

“Where are we?”

“Hoxton.”

“I don’t even know what to ask you …” she said. “I don’t know what to—”

“Me too.”

“Who are you? What’s your story?”

“I got away.”

Silence. Marge kept her grip on the stun-gun Taser thing she had got hold of. You could get anything. He looked at it.

“Why you talking to me?” she said. “Where are you in all this?”

“I know a friend of yours, I think …”

“Leon?” The hope was ebbing from her voice before the end of the word. “Not Leon …”

“I don’t know who that is,” he said gently.

“Billy?”

“Billy. He’s with the Londonmancers. He’s with the squid.”

“Did he send you?”

“Not exactly. It’s complicated.” He spoke as if unpracticed at it.

“Tell me.”

“Let’s both.”

Over hours she gave him what small details she had, descriptions of her altercations with Goss and Subby, which made him wince and nod. He said he would tell her his story, and said that he was doing so, but what came out was a soup of specifics, names, images that made little sense. She listened, though she never removed her earphones, and did not learn anything she could make sense of. At the end of it, she understood only that Billy was way deep in something, and that the sense of something ending was not a paranoia of hers.

“Why did you find me?”

“I think we can help each other,” Paul said. “See, I want to get a message back to the Londonmancers, and to Dane and Billy, but I’ve got good reason not to think they’ll play straight. Not with me. Dane and Billy I don’t know. I don’t know about them. But I need them to listen to me too because I got plans. When I saw your paper, I thought, Oh, she knows Billy. I remembered I heard about you. He’ll play straight with her, I thought.”

“You want me to be a go-between?”

“Yeah. I got access to … It’s difficult to explain, but I’ve got access to some … powers that they want. But I need protection. From them. And other stuff too. I can make them a deal. But they might think they’ve got reason not to trust me. I’ve not been myself. I’m being chased.”

“You’re the one that knows where they are, I don’t have any idea, I told you, they haven’t contacted me, even though they’ve got my number …”

“Billy was trying to protect you. Don’t think too hard of him. But you can still get a message to him. Like I say he’ll trust you.” He met her eye, looked around.

“How? Got a number?”

“Hardly. I mean through the city. The Londonmancers’ll get that.”

“… I got a message through the city myself, once.” He looked closely at her when she said that. “From Billy.”

“Is it?” he said quietly. “Did you? Noise? Light? Brick Braille?”

“Light.” He smiled quickly and rather beautifully at that.

“Light? Did he? Yeah. Perfect, then, light.” He stepped out of the car and Marge followed. “Already a little connection then, between you. Makes this easier.” He peered toward the bins, toward the shadows, then pointed—“Look”—at a fluttering bulb in the concrete roof, one among several, but one about to fail. “Give you an idea the way it comes on and off?”

“Oh,” Marge said. She almost whispered. “That’s how this all started.”

He smiled tightly again. “Don’t need to know where Billy is. By now, I got no idea. But the Londonmancers always listen to it. The city’ll pass a message to them. Yeah, I know Morse Code. I learned all kinds of things these past few years. All kinds of useful things. Do you trust me?” He stood in full view, put his arms a tiny bit out, to show her he held nothing. “I can do him a deal. We can help each other. And he wants to see you. You can ask him to come to you.”

•   •   •

BILLY, SHE WROTE, IT’S MARGE MEET ME.

“He’ll think it’s a trap,” she said. Paul shook his head.

“Maybe. He might have a pootle around to check if it’s you.” A momentarily humorous saint. “Maybe he’ll just come. He’s worried about you.” Is he? she thought. “Tell him something secret if you want. So he knows it’s you.” She wrote Leon’s middle name. She wrote the address of the carpark where they were. Paul translated it into the longs and shorts of Morse and transcribed dots and dashes under the letters. She was the one getting Billy a message, he told her. It was her message, he told her, to her friend, her way.

If Paul was out to kill her, she thought, this was the longest way around to do it. She stood on her bonnet as her companion crooned, done have to be rich la la to be my girl. She untwisted the fluorescent bulb enough to break the connection.

Paul said, “Dash dot dot dot,” and so on. Screwing and unscrewing the bulb, she shed its light and darkness in a not-very-expert, she hoped legible, coded message, for the city to pass on, tap-tapping London, entrusting the metropolis with her information like a vast concrete-and-brick telegraph machine.

You never know, she thought. Worked before.

DANE WOULD NOT LET LONDONMANCERS REENTER THE RUINED rooms of the kraken church to which he returned. They were not sure of their relationship to him nor he of his to them anymore—were they allies, still? Wati, traumatised and almost unconscious, could not breach the still-extant barriers. Only Billy came with Dane. When they descended, there were others there, though. The last scattered Krakenists, come home, in mourning.

Around the same number as there had been for the service that Billy had witnessed, but that had been just a regular Sabbath, a sermon: this was the last gathering in the world. Those lapsed, busy, usually too tainted by secularism and the exhaustions of everyday life to attend with the regularity the faith they professed would prefer were all here.

A couple of those muscular young men, though most of the enforcers of devotion had been guards, and guarding, and were gone. Mostly these were unremarkable men and women of all types. The end of a church.

They did not look hard at Billy. They did not care anymore if he was a feral prophet, some pointless urban Saint Anthony. They were uninterested in anything but grief. They treated Dane as if he were the Teuthex. Though his role had always been that of licenced outsider, then renegade, he was as close as they came, now, to authority. None of them even shouted blame, called him apostate. He all but glowed with their piety.

“Grisamentum’s going to come for us, you know,” Billy said.

“Yes.”

“For the kraken.”

“Yes.”

“He’ll find it.”

“Yes.”

They sat. This was a time for valedictories.

“Dane. You can feel it. It’s now, it’s got to be tonight, or tomorrow night, or just maybe the night after. All we have to do’s keep the kraken out of danger till then, and we’ll have beat that prophecy.”

“I don’t care. And you don’t believe that anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Which?” Dane said.

“Neither,” said Billy. “Either.”

“No, I do. Both.” Dane dialled a number on the desktop phone, still unsmashed, handed it to Billy. “It’s a voice-mail box,” he said. “Mine.”

“You have seventeen messages,” Billy heard. “First message.” A click, and the voice was the Teuthex’s. “Alright. I want to know what exactly you think you’re bloody doing? I read your note. You have a certain bloody leeway, but stealing a prophet is pushing your luck.”

Billy looked at Dane. Dane took the phone, pressed buttons to scroll on many days. To quite a recent moment.

“Yeah,” Dane said. “What you are doing now,” Billy heard, the Teuthex again, voice terse, “is blasphemy. I have given you a direct order. I’ve told you. Bring it in. Now is not the time to be having crises of faith. We can end this bloody abomination.”

“What’s this?” Billy said. He held the receiver up.

“I’m an operative,” Dane said.

“You were excommunicated …”

“Come on now. Please.”

Who would ever have trusted a representative of the cephalopod fundamentalists to deal with the issue of the kraken? A rogue, on the other hand … Who could be more trustworthy?

Billy shook his head. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “It was all an act. You were under the Teuthex’s orders all along.”

“It wasn’t an act. It was a mission.” That ostentatious renegacy. “People are more likely to help if you’re exile.”

“Who knew?”

“Only the Teuthex.”

“So the rest of the church thought you really were …,” Billy said, and stopped. If your whole congregation thinks you outcast, are you not?

“They don’t care now,” Dane said.

“But you took me with you. Were you … you weren’t supposed to?”

“I needed all the edge I could get. You knew things. Still do. You bottled it, Billy. You never thought you was, Billy, but you are a prophet. Sorry, mate.”

“So the Teuthex telling everyone at that meeting that he wasn’t going to hunt for it …” The stance, that benthic remove, had been a lie, of which, in their loyalty to their pope, the church had been persuaded. Only the Teuthex and his faux-exile operative knowing the squiddish truth, and hunting for the body of god.

“But …” Billy said slowly, “you disobeyed orders.”

“Yeah. I brought you with me and wouldn’t bring you back. And when we found it I didn’t bring it back to them.”

“Why?”

“Because they were going to get rid of it, Billy, as they should. And they were right, but you know how you’d get rid of it? Everyone’s said. It’s true. They would’ve burnt it. That’s the holy way. Having that kraken out there in that tank like that … it’s a blasphemy. So I was to bring it back. But the Teuthex was going to burn it.”

“And then you saw the prophecy.”

“The Teuthex was going to burn the squid. And that’s what they said started … this. This whole thing. What if it was us?” Dane said. He sounded very tired. “What if it was my church, doing the right thing, releasing it like that, but bringing on … whatever it is that’s coming?”

It would not have been Dane’s church’s planned end, their infolding of convolutes into the glint on a giant eye, when roaring perhaps at the surface the elder kraken might rise like belligerent continents and die, and spurt out like ink a new time. This would not have been that hallelujah-worthy end, but an antiapocalypse, a numinousless revelation, time-eating fire. An accident.

What terrible anxiety. Dane’s horror had been that his church would be the butt of a cosmic banana-skin-slip. It’s no one’s fault, but we set fire to the future. God, how embarrassed are we?

“But look,” Dane said. He indicated around him. “There’s no one left to burn it now, and that ending still hasn’t gone. So that’s not what’s going to cause it. I was wrong. Maybe if I’d done what I was told to do, we would have saved everything.” He swallowed.

“This isn’t your fault.”

“Reckon?” Dane said, and Billy had no idea. Should have would have could have. They sat in the office of the dead Teuthex and looked at broken pictures.

“Where are the Londonmancers?”

“Panicking,” said Billy. “Grisamentum must be coming, and it isn’t going to be long before he finds us. All we need to do, what they think, is just keep the kraken safe till that night’s over. That’s the plan.”

“That’s a bullshit plan.”

“I know,” Billy said.

“It is,” Dane said. “How many times they going to say the night’s about to come? If Paul hasn’t given in to the Tattoo it won’t be long before he does. Or Goss and Subby’ll find him. Or Griz’ll burn the world down first.” Something somewhere was dripping. Dane spoke to its rhythm.

“So,” said Billy.

“So we make it the night,” Dane said. “Don’t run. Take it to Grisamentum. It’s his plan that gets everything burning, for whatever reason, whether that’s what he has in mind or not. So we get rid of him, when he’s gone …” He brushed imaginary dust from his hands. “Problem solved.”

Billy had to smile a bit. “We don’t even know where he is. He’s got gunfarmers, he’s got monsterherds, he’s got who-knows-what paper-and-ink magic—what do we have?” Billy said. He barely even heard the absurdity of words like that in his mouth anymore. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to—”

“Remember how we found the Teuthex?” Dane said. “Why d’you think he was reaching for the altar?”

IN THE CHURCH ROOM THE LAST TWENTY OR SO KRAKENISTS WERE gathered. Old women and men and young, in all manner of clothes. A slice of London, weak with grief. New unwilling recruits to a tiny historical crew, who had outlived their own religion.

“Brothers and sisters,” Dane muttered.

“This is the last Krakenist brigade,” he said to Billy. “Any others out there ain’t coming back.”

The altar, of course, was a mass of carved suckers and interwoven arms. Dane pressed certain of the pads in a certain order. “This is what the Teuthex was going for,” he said.

It had not been some mere valedictory nearer-my-god gesture, the Teuthex’s reach. An inset section of the altar uncoiled. Dane slowly swung the metal front of the altar down.

Behind it was glass. Behind the glass, things preserved. Relics of kraken. Billy gasped as the scale of what he saw made sense to him. The altar was as high as his chest. Filling it almost completely was a beak.

He had seen its shape many times before. Vaguely parrot, extravagantly wicked in its curve. But the largest he had ever seen would have fit his hand, and that would have belonged to an Architeuthis close to ten metres long. This mouthpiece reached from the floor to his sternum. It would gape large enough to swallow him. When those chitin edges met they might shear trees.

“It’s going to bite me,” Dane said. He spoke dreamily. “Just a nip. Just to draw blood.”

“What? What, Dane? Why?”

“All this lot left. We’re the end crew.”

“But why?”

“So we can attack.”

“What?” said Billy. Dane told him.

Last-ditch defenders were not new. There were always kings under the hill. The golem of Prague—though that was a bad example, had missed its call, a dreadful oversleeping. Each of the cults of London had hopes in its own constructs, its own secret spirits, its own sleeping paladins, to intervene when the minute hand went vertical. The Krakenists had had their berserkers. But the fighters who had volunteered and been chosen for that sacred final duty were all dead, before the Teuthex could effect their becomings. So the last Krakencorps had to be from the ranks of the church’s clerks, functionaries, cleaners and everyday faithful.

What was squiddity but otherness, incomprehensibility. Why would such a deity understand those bent on its glory? Why should it offer anything? Anything at all?

The krakens’ lack of desire for recompense was part of what, their faithful said, distinguished them from the avaricious Abrahamic triad and their quids pro quo, I’ll take you to heaven if you worship me. But even the kraken would give them this transmutation, this squid pro quo, by the contingencies of worship, toxin and faith.

“Twenty krakenbit is not nothing. It’s down to us, now. We have to bring the night,” Dane said. “Bring it on and rule it. And it ain’t just us, is it? There’s the Londonmancers and the London antibodies. They’ll piss and moan, but. Well, we’re going in, so they’ve got two choices. Be part of that, or try to disappear. Good luck with that. Fuck Fitch, talk to Saira. She’ll do it.”

“Why are you telling me to—” Billy stopped. “You really think you can take on Grisamentum?”

“Let’s have a little last crusade, eh?”

“You think this’ll win it for us? You think you can take him?”

“Come on,” Dane said.

Billy had learnt about the rules of this sort of landscape. He hesitated, but there was no getting away from what he thought he knew.

“This …” he said. “It’ll kill you, won’t it?” He said it quietly. He pointed at the beak.

Dane shrugged. Neither of them spoke for seconds.

“It’ll change us,” Dane said at last. “I don’t know. We weren’t meant to be vessels for that kind of power. It’s a glorious way to go, but.”

Billy tried to work out what to say. “Dane,” he said. He stared at those impossibly huge bite-parts. “I’m begging you not to do this.”

“Billy.”

“Seriously, you can’t … You have to …” There was so little crazy fervour to Dane. Okay, not counting those incredible facts of what he did, and why he did it, his demeanour was everyday. A very English faith. And it was as shocking to discover about him as it would have been about the polite and subdued-dressed congregation of any country church, that he, and they, would die for their belief.

“Wait,” said Billy. “What if you fail? If you fail, that’s our last line down.”

“Billy, Billy, Billy.” Dane did not care if the world survived.

“Tomorrow night, Billy,” Dane said. “I know where Grisamentum is.”

“How?”

“There aren’t that many old ink plants in the city, mate. I sent Wati around when he was last awake. There’s statues most places.”

“They can’t have been so stupid, can they, to leave them there …?”

“No, but they’re pretty much everywhere, so where there’s none in a place, nowhere for Wati to go, that kind of gap is information. Tells him something. Someone’s making an effort to keep him out. I know where Grisamentum is, and he won’t be expecting dick. Tomorrow, Billy.”

When they emerged Saira was waiting for them aboveground. “At last,” she said. She was antsy, looking around and swallowing. A young Londonmancer was with her. The police would come sometime, though there were other things taking their time, and a vandalised community church was a very low priority right then. “Billy, you got a message.”

“What did you say?”

“It came through the city. Bax heard it. It’s from your friend. Marge.”

“Marge? What are you talking about? Marge?”

“She got back to us,” Saira said. “She answered. The same way you got a message to her. Through the city.”

That pitched Billy back to that odd little Londonmancer intercession, his message to Marge whispered into the darkness of the post. That he’d hardly thought of since. It abruptly shamed him that he had thought it some therapeutic performance to make him feel better. Perhaps it had been that as well, but could he have been so trite and unliteral as to doubt that it was, as described, a message? And if she got it, why would he think Marge would, as he had adjured, stay away?

With something like vertigo, he thought of all she must have been doing, how many things she must have gone through and seen, to get her to this point, where she was able to send him this word, this way. Without, he thought, a Dane to lead her. And with her partner dead. The hunt for the facts of which must surely have been what got her here. His message must have started that journey. He closed his eyes.

“I wanted to keep her out of it,” he said, a last disingenuousness. He apologised to her, silently. She was in it, and more power to her. “Christ, what’s been happening? What did she say?”

“She told you to meet her,” the man Bax said. “She’s in a carpark, in Hoxton. She’s with Tattoo.”

“What?” Billy said. Dane stuttered to a stop.

“Actually that is not quite what she said,” Saira said. “What she said was that she was with Paul. She said he had a proposition.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“What the hell’s she been doing?” Billy said. “How’s she mixed up with him?”

“You sure she wasn’t witch to start with?” Dane said.

“I’m not sure of anything,” Billy said. “But I don’t … I don’t see how, I don’t think she …”

“Then she’s going to get killed,” Dane said.

“She’s … Shit,” said Billy.

“If it’s really her,” Dane said.

“She said to tell you ‘Gideon’,” Saira said.

“It’s her,” he said. He shook his head and shut his eyes. “But why would she be with him? Where’s Wati?”

“Here, Billy.” Wati sounded exhausted. He was in a little fisherman figure made by one of the children of the churchgoers, lying on a windowsill. A man made of toilet rolls and cotton wool. He looked at Billy out of penny eyes.

“Wati, did you hear that? Can you get there?” Billy said. He tried to speak gently, but he was urgent. “We need to see if this is real. If it’s her. She might not have any idea what she’s getting into, and that name means it either is her or it’s someone who got it from her.”

“What’s he doing?” Dane said. “Why’s Paul—or the Tattoo—drawing attention to himself? He must know everyone from Griz to Goss and Subby are after him.”

“He wants something. She even said so. We get there he might have a knife to her throat,” Billy said. “He’s not going to negotiate toothless. Maybe he’s holding her hostage. Maybe he’s holding her hostage and she doesn’t even know.” Billy and Dane looked at each other.

“Paul didn’t look in shape to do much when he left,” Saira said.

“Wati, can you get to her?” Billy said.

“There may not even be any bodies there for me,” Wati said.

“There’s a doll in her car. And she wears a crucifix,” Billy said. There was a silence.

“Wati,” Dane said. “Listen to yourself. You sound rough.”

“I’ll see,” Wati said. He was gone. Limping from figure to figure across London.

FITCH SAID THEY SHOULD HIDE. ONE LONDONMANCER, GIDDY AT his own heresy, suggested they leave the city.

“Let’s just drive!” he said. “Up! To Scotland or whatever!” But there was no certainty that Fitch, for example, so much a function of the city, could even live for very long beyond its limits. Billy imagined himself on the motorways, becoming expert at the ungainly swing of the trailer, pulling the preserved squid through the damp English countryside and on into Scottish hills.

“Griz’d find us in ten seconds.” He would. There was something about the surrounds of slate, the angles of the turns that kept them hidden, even if it was a trap too. The city bent just enough that the Londonmancers stayed out of sight. An organic reflex.

If they left they would be nude. A giant squid in a lorry, heading north between hedgerows. Fuck’s sake, everything sensitive within ten miles would start to bleed.

“We’re going to do it this way,” Billy said. “Dane’s way.” He did not look at him. “Because he isn’t going to change his mind, and this way we can stop guessing whether it’s the last night, because we’ll know it is. And Dane’s going to do it, whatever the rest of us do.”

Saira was of his party—the warmakers. He could tell she was afraid, but still, that was her vote. Crisis forced the Londonmancers into democracy. Billy smiled at Saira, and she swallowed and smiled back.

Chapter Seventy-One

WRAPPERS SURROUNDING THEM, MARGE AND PAUL SHIFTED IN their seats. They had been sat for very many hours in the car. Marge recharged the iPod and tried to remain stoic about the increasingly grating warble of her protector.

“What are you listening to?” Paul asked her, finally. It had taken him long enough. She ignored his question. They ate trash calories, ducking below window-level on the few occasions they thought they heard someone approaching. Paul ground his back against the seat as if an insect bit him.

“What’s your story?” Marge said. Maybe calmed down he might be more comprehensible.

“I got tangled up with all this stuff years ago.” That was all he would say.

More hours. Right then, that carpark was where Marge had lived forever. Emotions and surprise had a hard time getting in to that carpark. So she could merely sit.

It was not silent. All buildings whisper. This one did it with drips, with the scuff of rubbish crawling in breezes, with the exhalations of concrete. Long into dead time, there was another breath at last, a tiny breath. From the kewpie figure dangling above Marge’s dash. She turned her iPod down.

“Paul,” the little figure said, in a man’s tiny voice. “And you must be Marge.”

“Wati,” said Paul. “Marge,” Paul said, “this is Wati.” He spoke carefully. It had been a long time since he had said anything. Marge said nothing. She looked at the doll and waited. “Where’s everyone else?” Paul said.

“What are you offering, Paul?” the doll said. “What’s going on? Will you come back?”

“Wait,” Marge said. To the figurine. “Are you … Are you with Billy? Where is he?”

“Billy can’t come,” it said. “There’s a spot of bother going on.” What a sad laugh it gave. “He says hi, by the way. He’s very worried about you. Didn’t expect to hear from you. He’s sort of concerned about … your man here. I don’t think you know everything about him that might be helpful. Paul, what is it you want to say to us?”

“Oh, you know, you know, Wati, now you’re here I don’t even know what to say,” Paul said. “I have so much to say, I don’t even—I’ve been having plans, you see.” He spoke fast, a wordspill. Marge stared at him. He was quite suddenly like this. “What do I want? Wati, I want you to split, I think, and bring, bring Billy. I want you to …” He paused. “You know what happened, Wati. What the Londonmancers had planned? They were ready to kill me. You know that? You think that’s okay?”

“We don’t know for sure they planned anything, Paul. But where do we go now? What do you want?”

“They were …”

“Where’s the little bits of Grisamentum?” Wati said. “It was in a bottle, weren’t it?” Paul made a face and waved his hand: It’s nowhere, it’s nothing. “Where do we go now?”

“I don’t go anywhere, Wati, but you should,” Paul said, urgently. “You should go. Get Billy and Dane and the Londonmancers.”

“I’m here to hear you out,” Wati said.

It was only now, hearing this strange discussion over the muttering awful music in her ears, that Marge’s chest felt suddenly tight as she had the thought, the wonder, if what she heard was a hostage negotiation, about her.

“You go, Wati,” Paul said. “Go on now.”

“No don’t,” said a new voice. “Not now, really don’t.” It was a voice Marge knew. Two people were approaching, in and out of the light pools by the cars. A man and a boy. “Now’s we’re all together it’s time for us to really fix those threads once and for all. The party’s tonight, after all, and everybody’s coming.”

GOSS AND SUBBY.

Oh my dear sweet Lord.

The leerer and his empty-faced boy. They came out of blackness. Trench coats spattered with gore and dirt, swaggering in shadow. Every few breaths, cigaretteless Goss breathed out smoke.

Marge made a mewling noise. She reached for them, but her car keys were gone. She whimpered. She could not breathe. She turned up the iPod violently, so her ears were full of a stupid crooning rendition of TLC’s “No Scrubs” so loud it hurt her. One earpiece fell out. She clawed around the floor for the keys.

“Run,” Wati whispered from the tiny cutesy figure. “I’ll get help.” And he was gone—Marge felt him go.

But though Wati had spoken quietly, she heard Goss say as he walked stiff and twitchy out of nowhere into that place, “Will you though, my best fellow? Will you really?”

She saw Goss hold up what looked like a handle of stone. A figure in clay, degraded by millennia. “Hello, boss-carrier,” he said to Paul. “You’ve got something of mine on your person. I suppose what we should say is you’ve got something of which I’m its. Looking for help, are you? Waiting on the bluff for the cavalry? Round you go, Subby, Son.”

Marge scrabbled to get away, but here was the boy Subby staring right in at her as I dun wun no scrubs no scrubs no scrubs warbled in one ear. She cried out and jerked away from him. Goss stood by the other door.

“Hello, boss!” he shouted. He reached over Paul and yanked the iPod from Marge’s lap, and she moaned and her hands twitched and clutched as nothing stopped him, as there was no skip of escape, no hesitation, as the trembling voice continued from the receding headphones, and Goss without looking hurled it away from him and it shot too fast an impossible distance away across the concrete cavern and shattered out of sight.

“How you doing under there, boss?” Goss shouted at Paul. “What d’you reckon? Has old Wati had his minute?” He looked at his wrist, as if he wore a watch, and stretched out the hand that held that ruined figure.

(Wati was flickering fast, his manifestation a little discorporeally crippled, limping, like some fast-running three-legged dog. Quick quick! In ceramic bust, general on a horse, plastic pilot in a travel agent doll doll gargoyle puppet across miles back to where the Krakenist remnants and the Londonmancers waited, hauling his exhausted self into the doll one of them carried, shouting breathlessly, “Goss and Subby! They’re there, they’ve ambushed Paul and Marge, they’re going to—” And then as his companions looked appalled at the little plastic man Wati suddenly and violently receded from them, hauled back hard as) Goss yanked the old shape as if angling or starting a motor or pulling muck from a drain. There was an inrush, a gasp, the slap of a soul hitting stone, and Wati came slamming back into the thing Goss held.

“Blimey! Nearly brought your dolly back with you with that one!” Goss said. “Recall this old thing?” He wagged the statue. Camouflaged by collapse, but there were shoulders, a head of some remnant stump kind. The clay memory of a mouth, from which Wati wordlessly shouted. “Recall this old thing, Wati my boy?” Goss said. “Do you know, do you effing know how many bleeding ages it took us to track this little gewgaw down, all the way over in the sands? How do you like my tan?”

The shabti. Of course. The first body, from which Wati was born. Swiped from a museum or from its interment in a tomb. Wati screamed, pulled and pulled to rip himself from the threads that kept his soul in that slave body, but it snagged him. Maybe reoriented, with a few minutes to gather himself and focus his class-rage into more rebel-magic, he might have wriggled free.

“Events have rather done a runner on us, Wati, old pal,” Goss said, as Wati bellowed in his tiny pebble voice. Goss held him head down. “You were quite a little scamp. Let’s wrap you up tight. Time for bed.” He dropped to his knees. Wati screamed. Goss raised the shabti above the concrete and stabbed it down, and shattered it into grit and dust.

Wati’s voice went out.

There was one less presence in the chamber. All around London, members of the defeated Union of Magicked Assistants stopped what they were doing and gasped and looked up and howled.

GOSS KICKED THE SHABTI POWDER. HE WINKED AT SUBBY.

“Thing is, Paul,” Goss said, and crouched by the passenger door. “Hallo, girlie! Long time. We been here a long time, waiting, to see who you’d get to turn up. Because. Thing is. Do you think we don’t hear the messages that get sent through London? Do you think you can try to talk to your friends and we won’t hear? Chat chat chat through the lights.” He shook his head.

“Now, young squire, what I’m keen to do, very keen, is have a little chinwag with my boss man. So. Get out of the car. Take off your jacket and your shirt. Unwind whatever the tish it is you got keeping his nibs shtum. And let me have a word. Alright? Because it’s all going a bit fiddly out here.”

With little fear noises Marge gritted her teeth and tried to shove out and through Subby, but he pushed back much stronger than he looked. Paul opened his own door and stepped out. Marge tried to tell him no. She grabbed for him and tried to pull the door closed.

“Back off a second, Goss,” Paul said. His voice was perfectly steady. Goss obeyed him. Paul took off his jacket. “Let me ask you something, Goss,” Paul said. “Watch her, Subby! Keep her in the car.” He was taking off his shirt. “Think about it,” Paul said. “Do you think I could live with your boss for however many years it is, and not know where you could listen in? Not know that if I send a Londonmancer a message via Southwark, it’ll get there, but that Hoxton’s always been a traitor? Why d’you think I sent them word from here? I knew you’d get it.”

Shirtless in the cold, his skin was all-over goose bumps. Wound around him like a shit-coloured girdle was parcel tape. A little sound came from behind him. Paul took Marge’s car keys from his pocket and threw them into the dark. He glanced at Goss and then at Subby. “I wanted you to get the message so I could deliver her to you.”

Marge’s insides went quite hollow. She folded away from him.

“I was kind of hoping I could deliver the others too. And they might still come, especially if Wati got word to them before you …” He made reeling motions. “And then they’re yours.”

Marge crawled across the gear stick, through the open passenger door. The two men and the boy watched her with what looked like mild interest. She crept and stumbled away.

“What’s all this about, Paul?” Goss said. He sounded genuinely intrigued. “When am I going to talk to the boss? Do let’s undo you.”

“Yeah. In a second. But I wanted you to hear this, and I wanted him to hear. From me. You listening?” he shouted to his own skin. “I want you, and him, to know that I’m offering you a deal. I’m not stupid—I knew you’d find me. So. No more locking me up like a, a zoo thing. We work together. That’s the deal now. And this is a goodwill offering.” He pointed at Marge. “I know you want Billy. Well, there’s Billy-bait.”

Air felt like it was clotting in Marge’s windpipe as she crawled.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said to her. “But you don’t know what it’s been like. There was no way I was going to get away.”

He took scissors from his pocket and tore the plastic-and-glue carapace from himself. His skin was red beneath it. “Did you get all that, you?” he said. “You’ve still got time to fix this situation. Grisamentum’s gone to war—he’s got some mad plan—but I can tell you where the squid is. Do we have a deal?”

Paul turned, so that his back faced Marge. In her already-horror she was not even surprised to see the malevolent tattoo on his back raise its eyebrows at her.

“Maybe,” it said.

Paul turned to her again. Goss and Subby stared at him. Goss was admiring. Marge was on her hands and knees on the carpark floor, in Wati’s dust, and moving as fast as she could when she could not breathe and her heart shook her.

“Oy, turn back, I want to see,” the voice of the Tattoo said.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Paul said. “We’re partners now. Look.” He waited another second. “She’s getting away.” He pointed, and glanced at Goss, who clicked his tongue, and strode round the car after Marge.

“Where are you off to, you little bantam?” He chuckled. She managed to stand, and ran, but within a few metres he was with her. He grabbed her by the hair. She let out a sound like nothing she could have imagined. He hauled her.

On the other side of the car Paul and Subby watched him. “What’s going on? Turn around,” the voice from Paul’s back bleated.

“Hey, there’s one other thing I worked out in my time, Goss,” Paul called to him, and held up the scissors. “I worked out what this thing is.” He patted Subby. “I worked out where you keep your heart.”

A moment cracked. Marge saw Goss way in front of her before she even realised he had let go. She saw him running. She glimpsed a look on his face so aghast it almost made you wince to see it, almost you could sob for it if you weren’t held in still-split time. But no matter how fast he moved Goss was too far away, even with the moments Paul had wasted with that taunt, to get between the scissors and Subby.

Paul brought the blades double-dagger into Subby’s neck. Quick repeated punches. Blood, and the boy’s mindless face did not move except that his eyes widened. Paul stabbed hard. The blood that spattered him was very dark.

Subby dropped to his knees, looking quizzical. “What? What? What’s happening?” the Tattoo foolishly demanded, just like a child.

Goss screeched and screamed and howled. He collapsed midleap. The scissors quivered, embedded in Subby’s neck. Paul shuddered. Goss sprawled across the car bonnet, puking up his own much brighter blood.

“No no no no no no.” He whined and drummed his heels and stared in outrage at the dying boy-thing.

“Do you think,” Paul said—while “what? what’s happening? what?” the Tattoo kept saying—“that I would work with you?” Paul pulled the scissors from Subby’s neck, pushed them back again. Subby looked from side to side and closed his eyes. Goss screamed and bubbled and kicked and drooled sudden smoke and could not stand. Screamed.

“Do you think I would let you come anywhere near me?” Paul said to him. “Did you think I’d collaborate with you? Do you think I’d let you be the muscle for this purebred scum evil motherfucker on my back? Did you think I wouldn’t kill you?” Paul spat at the dying Goss. Spat at the ground in front of him. “You’ve got this flesh basket to hold what makes you tick, and you think that’ll stop me? Goss, stop up your noise. It is time for you to go to hell and take your poor fucking empty little life-carrier with you.”

Subby was immobile. The blood was coming out of him slower. Goss wheezed and gurgled and looked as if he was trying to level some good-bye curse, but as Subby died with closing eyes, he died too. His last breath went without smoke.

And whatever else was happening—
in times and places all over—
unmentionably many—
that going out—
that finishedness—
rippled—
was very felt—
and every one of London’s bullied and terrified were for a metamoment, from 1065 to 2006, all in their own instants and entangled for a blink, in every awful situation, every little room where they were head-flushed, thumbscrewed, decried, name-debased, taunted, punched, sneered at, the foil of brutality, for a moment just then, for one instant, which might not save them but which would at the very least be a tiny comfort, for always, felt better—
felt joy.

PAUL WATCHED GOSS GO.

“What’s happening? What’s happening? What? What?” the Tattoo said. Paul ignored it. Marge ignored it.

She watched without motion, holding her head where Goss had hurt her. When Subby died—as if he was a “he,” as if it were more than a box with a face—he mouldered away. He crumbled into a disgustingness, and then that crumbled too, into nothing, leaving only a heart, a man’s unbeating heart too big for Subby’s chest.

Goss did not crumble. Goss lay there like the dead man he was.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said to her, at last.

“I needed him to trust me,” Paul said. “He never would have left Subby alone otherwise.” They stared at each other. The Tattoo screamed, forced to stare into the parking lot darkness where nothing was happening.

“What did you do?” the Tattoo said.

“I knew they’d find me,” Paul said. “And I could never take him. This was all I could think to do. I knew they’d hear what we said if we sent it from here, and I needed them to listen in and come. Can you help me cover him? Him.” He raised his arms. “The Tattoo.”

He said, “I didn’t mean that to happen to Wati. I’m sorry. I thought Goss and Subby would get here first. Well, they did, but I didn’t think they’d hide and wait. I tried to persuade him to leave.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Anything.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. Let me tell you what I can.”

Chapter Seventy-Two

THEY KNEW—PAUL EXPLICITLY, MARGE BY THE INSTINCTS SHE was accruing—that that was hardly the end of it as far as London went. For them, though, it had been an epoch-ending execution. They sat where they had fallen, talking a little, but often just sitting and breathing in Goss-and-Subbyless air. Paul kicked Goss’s heart across the concrete.

When Goss died, the lights in the garage had dimmed twice and gone up again in a hip-hip-hooray, in object joy. Colours changed and shadows moved as emissaries from various courts—seelie, unseelie, abseelie, paraseelie—passed through to check out the spreading rumour. A few ghosts that Marge did not see but felt as movements of sad warmth. With a squee, a pigness passed her. It was not long after that that they heard a car.

Without a siren but with lights whirling a police car bumped down the ramp and to them. Three officers emerged, their batons out, pepper spray and Tasers out, their hands overfull of weapons. Their terror was quite obvious. After a pause, out of the car in a smart sweep, her clothes and hair jouncing, leaking smoke from one corner of her mouth, a cigarette bobbing from the other, her eyes narrow and turning her head a little, splendid as Boudicca, was Collingswood.

She stared at Paul, put one hand out, took her Taser from her belt. She looked at Marge, raised an eyebrow and nodded in recognition. She chirruped and whistled, and stroked the air as if it were a piglet’s head.

Collingswood smacked her lips. “Fucking fucking fuck me,” she whispered. She smiled an utterly beautiful smile. “It’s true. You really did. Fuck me. Finally. Oh … my … gosh. We could do with a bit of good news tonight.”

“I told you there was stuff going on with me,” Marge said.

“And look,” said Collingswood. “Slap my naughty knuckles for making the wrong call. And it’s you.” She said that to Paul. “Well, I mean not you but you. Fucked if I know what’s the point tonight, but you got to do what you can, right? Come on then.” She motioned the two of them up. They obeyed.

“What is this?” Marge said. She sounded mild, not outraged—curious.

“Give me a minute I’ll come up with a bunch of stuff to charge you with,” Collingswood said. “Basically, the gist of it is, you’re coming with me. Might as well salvage something. You too.” She looked at Paul. He stood meekly enough. He looked side to side as something invisible circled him. “I don’t want any trouble. From you or from, y’know. Your passenger. For fuck’s sake, don’t you want to get out of all this?” she said.

Yes, thought Marge. Really. Collingswood nodded at her. The officer did not need her sensitivities to read that answer. “Come on then,” she said. “Bloody star, you.”

Paul slumped, walked toward the car too, then abruptly raced past Collingswood and her fumbling officers, toward the exit. He knocked her as he went, so she staggered and dropped her cigarette.

“Naughty fucking naughty,” she shouted. “Tase the bastard.” One of the officers missed, but another got Paul in the back, in his unseen Tattoo, with the electricity-spitting wires. Paul shrieked and fell, spasming.

“Stop, stop!” shouted Marge. “Don’t you know who he is, don’t you know what he’s …? He can’t face being locked up anymore, that’s why—”

“Boohoo,” said Collingswood. “Do I look like I give a shit?” She stood over Paul as he strained to breathe. In truth she did look like she gave a little of a shit. She wore an expression not of regret, exactly, but of troubled irritation, as if the paper in the photocopier had run out.

“No one’s out to fuck you up,” she said to him. “Will you stop it?” A swiney scream screamed in dimensions close enough for Marge to hear it, and receded. “Now you scared off Perky,” Collingswood said. “Get him in the car,” she shouted at her men. “If there’s still London in the morning, we’ll see what we do.”

All the cops were as ineffective as keystones, hauling the moaning Paul toward the car. The thought came to Marge that she could run. It was followed by the knowledge that she would not. She walked after them, as she had been told.

The arrest, the invitation, was enticing. After all that work she had done, everything she had faced, police tea, a holding room, someone else making the running. I, Marge thought as she settled into the back, offered her shoulder as a pillow for Paul’s still lolling head, am bloody tired.

“You two are walking home,” Collingswood was saying to her officers. “Only room for one more. I wasn’t expecting arrests. But seeing as Baz took the shot, he gets the gig.” The other two grumbled. “Fuck, you are a wet pair. Look on the bright side: you’ll both be burned out of history by morning, so never mind, eh?” She got in. “Baz. Station. Let’s ensconce our little charges, then see what else is going on.”

I really am, thought Marge, extremely tired. Paul raised his head and opened his mouth, but Collingswood switched her finger at him in the mirror, and nothing came out. Marge wished he had got away.

“WHERE’S WATI?” DANE SHOUTED. “WHAT’S HAPPENED TO HIM?”

“Marge was …” Billy said. “You heard what Wati said just before …” His words ebbed out, and he shook his head and covered his eyes. Dead, or hostage at very least.

“Wati!” Dane shouted and raged. “Again! Another! Kraken!”

They had, contemptuous almost, evaded the police tape without breaking stride, and were back in the kraken church. The last Krakenists queued like obedient children by the huge beak in the temple.

The Londonmancers were in the lorry, winding through suburbs nearby. Fitch and some of his last followers were in a strange situation. Disapproving this strategy of war, they were nonetheless tied to it, dependent on its success now that it would happen. So having lost the argument they could only aid those who had won. An extreme cabinet responsibility. They would deliver Londonmancers willing to fight to the battleground.

The Krakenists had only legends to go on, as to what would happen to them when they went to this war, altar-altered, newly dragooned into an army. A dreg regiment. Cars were ready for the afflicted blessed, those about to be bitten. The Krakenists were wishing each other good-bye. After these embraces, they would drive across London to an old ink factory—in awkward silence? Listening to the radio?

Strong kraken-cultists held the mouthpart, bracing themselves to each side. They were audibly praying.

“Is that all of them?” Billy said.

Dane nodded. Few of the last of the church had taken much persuasion. Billy looked at Dane.

“You are going too,” Billy said.

“Yeah.”

“Dane …” Billy shook his head and closed his eyes. “Please … Can I persuade you not to?”

“No. Is everything ready?” Dane said. A worshipper. “Then let’s do this.”

Chapter Seventy-Three

BILLY WATCHED THE LAST-EVER KRAKEN MASS. HE SAT AT THE back of the church. He watched tears and heard benedictions. Dane was faltering, but with grace, repeating the liturgies he had not been part of for a long time. The shepherdless flock herded themselves. Billy shifted in his seat and fiddled with the phaser in his pocket.

The congregation sang hymns to torpedo-shaped, many-armed gods. At last Dane said, “Right then.”

Some of the volunteers tried to smile as they made a line. One by one they placed their hand at the point of the kraken jaw. The hinge-men would very carefully scissor the great bite together on their skin. Twice the hook of the jaw tore worse wounds than intended and made the faithful cry out. Mostly the snips were precise—the skin broke, there was a little blood.

Billy waited for drama. The bitten seemed clumsy and large, seemed to cram the cavelike hall. They embraced each other and held their bleeding hands. Dane, the last one, put his own hand in the jaws and had his congregation bite them down. Billy made no reaction at all.

The plan was simple or stupid. They did not have the time, numbers or expertise for sophistication. They had one advantage and only one, which was that Grisamentum did not know they knew where he was, or that they were coming. All they had was that surprise. A one-two, misdirect and real attack. Anyone who thought for more than one second must realise that what came first was a diversion. So they would not give them that second.

They had a few pistols, swords, knacked things of various designs. They did not know what Grisamentum was, now. En-inked on paper, in liquid? He’d avoided death once already. Fire might dry him out, but it would leave his pigment behind. Bleach, then. He had seemed scared of it. They carried bottles. Their most important weapon a household cleanser. Some wore plant sprayers filled with it like bulky pistols on their belts.

“Come on then,” Billy said at last to Dane. He led him to the car. It was he who drove, now. Didn’t even need directions, and drove like a man who knew what he was doing. Billy looked out of the window. He did not look at Dane: he did not want to see changes. He glanced into all the dark streets they passed; he kept hoping that the angel of memory would come, but there was no glass-and-bone figure under the swaying, leafless trees, the canopies of London’s buildings, no skull and jar rolling among the small night crowd. There were running people, small fires.

“Christ,” Billy said. He wished that Wati raced ahead from figure to figure, returned to the hula girl on the car dashboard.

He parked near the factory compound Dane had shown him on the map, by metal gates black with rust. Others of the attacking party parked elsewhere, in studiedly random patterns, sauntered into position. Billy put his finger to his lips and looked at Dane in warning. Sirens were audible, but not as many as the signs of fires and the sounds of violence would suggest were necessary. The parents of London would have their children at home that night, be lyingly whispering to them that everything would be alright.

“Where do you reckon the Tattoo’s most loyal troops are now?” Dane said. “The fist-heads and the, the people from the workshops?” He was sweating. His eyes were wide.

“Fighting,” Billy said.

Out into the strange warm night. Some of the fitter Londonmancers followed. Saira’s war party. Out of sight they climbed the layered walls of the building and sidled along the architecture. They watched the factory as if it might do something.

Behind the wall was a forecourt where a derelict car lorded over weeds. The factory sat surrounded by that emptiness. Nothing moved that they could see. There was perhaps a slight diminution of the darkness in one of the big windows overlooking nothing. The wall they were on led like a spine to the building itself: they need not touch the ground. Billy pointed at a few of the following fighters, pointed where he wanted them to go.

Even if Wati had been there he could not have spied for them: the clay figures on the roof, Billy saw, were smashed up. Grisamentum’s court had blinded their architecture. Billy took the little Kirk figure from his pocket. He held it up as he had done many times since the shabti’s awful lurching recall and whispered Wati’s name. Again, nothing.

Billy pointed. Dane sighted along a rifle he had taken from the kraken armoury, at tiny motion on the building’s roof. A man, putting his hands on railings and leaning out toward him.

“He’s seen us,” Billy said.

“He’s not sure yet,” Dane whispered. His weapon bucked. The man dropped, silently.

“Wow,” Billy said.

“Shit,” said Dane. He was trembling.

“We don’t have long now,” Billy said.

The krakenbit were emerging from their cars, moving with strange ungainliness. As they came forward, their diversion arrived.

THE LONDONMANCER ATTACKERS CAME AS AGREED, WITH DRAMA. An army of masonry. Those few left whose knack was to wake the city’s defences had done what they could do. They had sent their alarums in parachemicals, waves of pathogen anxiety. They stimulated immune response in the factory grounds. Birthing of brick angles; emerging from hollows in boscage; unwinding from the ruined car; London’s leucocytes came on in attack.

One was ambulant architecture; another a trash marionette; another a window onto another part of the city, a monster-shaped hole. They moved across urban matter, niche-filling and/or huge. Their footsteps made the sounds of barking dogs and braking cars. One threw back its head-analogue and shouting a war shout that was the puttering-engine call of a bus.

It threw open the compound doors. The bravest Londonmancers ran in. They raised weapons, or goads with which to direct their giant cellular charges. There was movement behind the factory windows.

Emerging from side doors and from behind dustbins came gunfarmers, murmuring fertility prayers as they shot. A canine shape of discarded paper leapt from a window. For seconds Billy thought it was blown by monsterherds, but there was no one to gust it. Each shred of paper in that wolf totality was ink-stained.

“Jesus,” Billy said. “Dane. That’s him. He’s all over them.” Enough of Grisamentum’s ink presence was on each piece to knack his motion. He was profligate now, impatient at the edge of his intended apotheosis. The ink-paper wolf jumped onto a screaming Londonmancer, and the paper teeth tore her as if they were bone.

“Oh Christ,” Billy said. “Time to move.” He aimed his phaser and crawled.

Below him in the wall a stretch of crumbled brick changed, was pressed into new shape, become an ancient door with a long-broken lock so it could be pushed open. Saira came in and bit her lip and stood aside, and the krakenbit came in behind her. Billy saw those nipped by the squid god.

They were stronger than they had any right to be. They picked up masonry and hurled it. They were misshapen and changing. Tides moved on them; their muscles fluttered in directions they had not been made to take. “Christ,” he whispered. He fired a weak whining jolt at the building, a wild distraction as he stared.

One man was growing Architeuthis eyes, fierce black circles taking up each side of his head, squeezing his features between them. A woman bulged, her body become a muscular tube from which her limbs poked, absurd but strong. A woman streaked across the distance, jetted by her new siphon, moving through air as if it were water, her hair billowed by currents in the sea miles off. There was a man with arms raised to display blisters bursting and making themselves squid suckers, another with a wicked beak where he had had a mouth.

They tore at the gunfarmers and through the swirl of inked paper. Bullets ripped them, and they roared and bit and smashed back. The suckered man looked hopefully at the inside of his arms. The marks were blebbing into little vacuums, but arms his arms remained. Billy watched him. It was awesome, yes, but.

But was it a godly tease that none of the krakenbit had tentacles?

Dane was not newly shaped. Only, he looked back at Billy and his eyes were all pupil now, all dark. He had no hunting arms.

“Billy.” A tiny voice from Billy’s plastic man.

“Wati!” Billy snapped to draw Dane’s attention. He waved the figure. “Wati.”

“… Found you,” the voice said, and coughed again. Faded out.

“Wati …”

After seconds of silence, Wati said, “First thing I did ever that was mine was un-be that body that got made. Could do it again. They caught me off guard, is all. I just got to …” The rude reanchoring in that doll of exploitation had hurt him terribly. “This was the only place I could find. Been in it so much.” He was half-awake, at best, from the no-soul’s-land between statues where he had been in coma. He drifted back into silence.

“Damn it,” Billy said. “Wati.” There was nothing more, and their time was up. Billy beckoned and crept forward, and Dane crouched with him on the balcony below the factory’s high window, looking down within at the last preparations of Grisamentum.

Chapter Seventy-Four

THE CHAMBER SWARMED WITH PAPER. IN PLANES AND SHREDS, torn-up pieces, flitting with purpose, all smeared with ink. Below them the room was scattered with old machinery, the remains of printing presses and cutters. Walkways circled at several levels. Billy sighted the core of gunfarmers remaining.

There was Byrne, scribbling notes, looking down and arguing, writing Grisamentum’s response to her in himself. By a huge pile of torn-off hardcovers, technicians fiddled with gears, ignoring the chaos, pressing soaked paper pulp in a hydraulic machine and collecting the dirt-coloured off-run.

“It’s the library,” Billy said. The soaked, shredded kraken library, rendered to its ink. He pointed through the glass.

All that antique knowledge poured over with solvent, the inks seeped out of the pages where they had been words. Some pigment must be the remains of coffee, the dark of age, the chitin of crushed beetles. Even so, the juice they were collecting was the distillate of all kraken knowledge. And Billy saw, there, presiding over the rendering, on a raised dais, in a great big plain pail, the bulk of Grisamentum. His sloshing liquid body.

Dane shoved into the glass and made some enraged noise. He was radiating cold.

“He’s going to add it to himself,” Billy said. “Or himself to it.” It would be rich, that liquid print. A liquid darkness that had been all the Architeuthis secrets, homeopathically recalling the shapes it had once taken, the writing, the secrets it had been. Metabolise that, and Grisamentum would know more about the kraken than any Teuthex ever had.

“Speed this up!” They could hear Byrne through the glass. Like the glass was thinning to help them. “There’s time to finish this. We can track down the animal, but we’ve got to get the last of the knowledge down. Quick.” The paper stormed as if a whirlwind filled the room.

A high-flying scrap at the top of the rustling column flattened itself against the glass beside Billy and Dane. The ink on it regarded them. A still second. It plummeted back through the paper vortex. The rest followed, the swirl falling through its own centre.

“Come on!” shouted Billy. He kicked the glass into the room and fired through the paperstrom, but no beam came out. He threw the dead phaser at the giant inkwell full of Grisamentum.

There were shots, and one, two of the Krakenists who had fought their way in fell. Dane did not move. Billy heard a percussion and a damp smacking into Dane’s body. A new wound in Dane’s side oozed black blood. Dane looked at Billy with abyssal eyes. He smiled not very human. He made himself bigger.

Billy grabbed for the pistol in Dane’s belt, and the papers bombed him. Some came at him as a biting skull. He swung the bleach bottle he carried and sent a spray of the stuff in a curve like a spreading-out sabre. It depigmented where it landed. He could smell bleach amid the gun smell, the same ammoniac scent as that of Architeuthis.

Screams. A Krakenist was being devoured by a flock of Grisamentum stains shaped playfully murderous into a paper tiger. Billy caught Dane’s eye. They looked something at each other. Dane vaulted the fence, his wound not slowing him at all. He fell fast, but not at gravity’s idiot control. The paper tried to disrupt him, but he twisted as he fell. He fired and killed an engineer. He sprayed bleach on his way down, streaming it through papers that instinctively flinched away, at Grisamentum.

His aim was predator perfect. But Byrne stepped into the way. She took the liquid across her front. It cut colour like an invert Pollock assault, her clothes fading under the spattered line. She shoved an old-fashioned perfume nebuliser into Dane’s face and squeezed the bulb.

Billy clenched. He closed his fist, tightened his stomach, tensed everything he knew how to tense. Nothing happened. Time did not pause. Byrne sprayed dark vapour into Dane’s face.

Dane staggered. His face was wet with dark grey. A billow of Grisamentum into him. Dane could not help breathing him in.

He retched, tried to puke Grisamentum out. Billy aimed at Byrne with Dane’s pistol, which he had no idea how to use, but in any case she dipped her fingers right into Grisamentum and shook them in front of her. The air around her closed, and when he fired his bullet ricocheted off nothing.

Dane was down. His body rilled. Grisamentum filled him, shaped himself on the Dane’s alveoli. Wrote bad spells on the inside of Dane’s lungs. Billy watched Dane die.

THE PAPERS ENCASED BYRNE IN AN ARGUMENTATIVE FLURRY, LIKE feeding birds.

“You’re sure?” Billy heard her say.

She poured the last of the dark liquid pulped from the Krakenist library into Grisamentum. He swirled. It must be giving him psychic indigestion to do this so fast, but he needed the final teuthic wisdom. He had to understand his quarry. Byrne stirred him and flicked the dipstick all around her. The papers eddied faster as the pigment splashed them. Older dried-up blots of Grisamentum were overlaid with less ignorant stains.

“It has to be close,” Byrne shouted. “Find it and send some of you back here to tell me where. I’ll bring the rest of you. Go!”

Dane had thank God stopped moving. Billy wanted to rally the last of the krakenbit, to destroy the gunfarmers and paper-swirl monsters. But he saw the chaos, his side’s rout, in the chamber. He climbed back out of the window.

Outside, Londonmancers and antibodies stood off against gunfarmers and a devil of inky paper. Littering the ground were bodies, and spots of troubled perspective where London functions had fallen. Krakenbit wheezed like fish in air, or lay still, brine dripping from their bodies. Billy saw one still fighting, with, at last, his left hand replaced with a twenty-foot hunting limb, which he dragged and flailed.

“Saira!”

She smiled to see him, even as she shook with war. She tugged a bit of London claylike into a police riot shield, crouched behind it, crossed the combat to him.

“Billy.” She even hugged him. “What’s happening?” He shook his head. “Dane?” she said. He shook his head. Her eyes went very wide. Billy began to shake.

“Disaster,” he said at last. “We couldn’t get close. He’s just, he’s doing the last of the knowledging now. Where’s my guardian angel, eh?” He was striving to speak to his headache again, as he had the last time the angel was near, but this time it was only pain.

“Billy …” It was Wati, groping to vague consciousness in his pocket. Billy said his name.

“He’s alive?” Saira said. There was a massive sound. From the building’s roof, a flock of black-stained papers streamed batlike out. They rampaged across the sky.

“He’s going,” Wati said. “He’s …”

“They’re covered in him; he can knack them more,” Billy said. “He doesn’t care. We forced his hand. He’s going all out. He’s looking for the kraken, and when he’s found it, Byrne’s going to milk it, and …” They looked at each other. “Can you find them? Get a message to the lorry?”

“They’re Londonmancers.” Saira nodded. “And so am I.”

“Tell them to get out of here. Tell them to go … Wait.” Billy held out the Kirk figure, its little plastic eyes watching him. Billy thought and thought, as fast as he could. “Wati.”

“Yeah,” the Kirk said.

“We’ve got as long as it takes for Grisamentum to find the lorry,” Billy said. “And you saw how many of him there are. Wati, I know you’re hurt, but can you wake up? Can you hear me?” No answer. “If he doesn’t wake up,” he said to Saira, “we’ll have to try to go ourselves, but—”

“Where?” Wati said. “Go where?”

“How are you?”

“Hurt.”

“Can you … can you travel?”

“Don’t know.”

“You got here.”

“This doll … used it so much it’s like a chair shaped to my bum.”

“Wati, what happened?”

There was silence. “I thought I was dead. I thought your friend Marge was … It was Goss and Subby.” Billy waited. “I can feel her. Still. Now. I can feel her because she’s got the dust of my old body all over her hands. I can sniff that.”

“She was in Hoxton.”

“… She must have … she got away from Goss and Subby.” Even exhausted, Wati’s voice was awed.

“Can you get to her?”

“That body’s gone.”

“She wears one.” Billy grabbed the front of his shirt where a pendant would be. “Can you use the dust to find her? Can you try?”

“Where’s Dane?”

The fighting continued, the noise of arcane murder. “They killed him, Wati,” Billy said.

At last, Wati said, “What’s the message?”

Saira whispered things into London’s ears, cajoled and begged it, even aghast as it must be that night, to pass a message to her onetime teacher in the lorry. “All we’ve got is speed,” Billy said to her, and told her where to send them. She moulded the wall and made a patch of it an urban hedge, through which she pushed, out into the street.

Billy took some seconds of solitude, as alone as he could be in the dregs of that fighting and that noise. He stared back at the building where his friend had died. Billy wished he knew how to make whatever tentacle-imitating sign wished a killed soldier of the krakens peace. Billy shut his eyes tight and swallowed and said Dane’s name and kept his eyes closed. That was the ceremony he invented.

Chapter Seventy-Five

HOW COULD YOU KEEP SOMETHING THE SIZE OF A LORRY HIDDEN from the skies? Fitch’s indecision protected him awhile: unable either to commit to his fighting sisters and brothers or to desert them, he had stayed less than a mile away and ordered the vehicle into a tunnel, and there in the orange striplight under the pavement had put on the hazard lights as if stalled. And waited, while refugees from that night surged past in their cars. When Saira sent her message, it, London, did not have far to go to pass it on.

While over their head scudded the inked scout selves of Grisamentum, she and Billy ran toward the vehicle’s hide, past birdlime streaks and posters for albums and exhibitions. Come meet us, she had said. We need you. Shamed, Fitch had the engine gun and the lorry lurch out of its burrow into the surveilled streets.

The paper helixed plughole out of the dark sky and mobbed the lorry. It pushed through them. They were sentient, but the papers had the feeding-frenzy throng of multitude predators, mothlike butting themselves against the windscreen. When it met Saira, Billy and the few Londonmancers and squidly loping krakenbit who had been able to run, the vehicle was thronged with excited paper.

Dear God, Billy thought, at the thought of what the appalled locals must think they saw from behind their curtains. Close to him were two Londonmancers and two krakenbit still morphing into teuthic midway forms. They whipped their limbs and sprayed the last of their bleach. Fitch threw open the back and yelled at them to enter. With the unity of a school of fish, the papers gusted back toward the factory.

“They’re going to get Byrne and the rest of himself,” Billy said. “They’re going to come for us now they know where we are. We have to go.”

“But where?” Fitch said.

“Drive,” said Billy. “We’re meeting someone.”

“SO WHAT DO YOU RECKON?” COLLINGSWOOD SAID TO HER COMMANDEERED assistant.

“About what?” he said. They were the same rank. He did not call her ma’am. But he went where she told him to and did as she said.

“What now? Got any burglaries?” She laughed. They drove through a little rain, through sliding, dark and lit-up streets where people still lounged by twenty-four-hour shops while others ran from unholy gang fights.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“Let’s just get back to the bloody office.”

Marge felt safe in the car. She watched Paul. His face was anguished but resigned. He did not speak. His tattoo spoke. Marge could hear its smothered rage, its terror, in wordless growling from under his shirt.

“It’ll be alright,” she said to him foolishly.

She heard another tiny mumbling. She looked about. The words came from her neck.

Marge blinked. She looked at Collingswood, who continued to tease her colleague. Marge touched her little crucifix. At the contact of her dirty fingers the voice came again, a little stronger. “Hey,” it said.

The silver Jesus whispered. Marge looked away into the violent night streets, into what she had gathered might be the end of the world. And here came this messenger.

“Hey,” she whispered herself, and raised the crucifix. Paul watched her. She focused on the tiny bearded face.

“Hey,” it said again.

“So,” she said. “What’s the word from heaven?”

“Wha?” the metal Christ said. “Oh right. Funny.” It coughed. “Put me to your ear,” it said. “Can’t talk loud.”

“Who are you?” she said. Collingswood was watching her in the mirror, now.

“It’s Wati again,” he said. “I got a message, so listen.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I. Don’t wash your hands. Billy needs you to do something.”

“What’s up back there?” Collingswood said. “Who you chatting to?”

Marge held up her finger so peremptorily Collingswood actually obeyed. The tiny chained Messiah whispered to her, for a long time. Marge nodded, nodded, swallowed, said “yeah” as if at a telephone call. “Tell him yeah.” Finally she let the crucifix dangle back below her neck.

She sighed and closed her eyes, then looked at Collingswood. “We have to go somewhere. We have to pick someone up.” Paul sat up. The other officer looked backward nervously.

“Yeah …” Collingswood said thoughtfully. “Not very clear on the whole police prisoner thing, are you?”

“Listen,” Marge said slowly. “You want to take us in? Take us in. But look around and listen to me.” There was a helpful scream of fighting from some nearby street. Marge gave it a moment. “I’ve just been given a job to do, by Billy. You know Billy? And by this little guy on my necklace who I just saw killed by the most evil, terrifying bastard. Who was out for me.

“Now, I’ve been given this job on the grounds that it might be the one thing that stops the end of the world. So. Do you think your arrest report can wait a couple of hours? Where do you want to go on this?”

Collingswood kept staring at her. “Goss and Subby,” Collingswood said.

“You know them, then.”

“I’ve had my tangles,” Collingswood said.

“There you go then.”

“Wati just had his own little barney with them?”

“He’s told me where to go, and what to do.”

“How about you tell me what he said, and we can have a chat about it?” Collingswood said.

“How about you fuck off?” Marge said without rancour. She sounded as tired as she was. “Look around and tell me if you think we’ve got time to waste. How about—look, I’m just throwing this out there. How about we save the world first, and then you arrest us?”

There was silence within the car. Above them was the excited mourning of the siren. “I tell you what, boss,” the other officer, the young man driving, said suddenly. “I like her plan. I’m for that.”

Collingswood laughed. Looked away and up into the sky over London where clouds wriggled. “Yeah,” Collingswood said. “Might be nice to see tomorrow. You never know. But then,” she said, and wagged her finger at Marge and Paul, “we are definitely taking you in. So what’s the plan?”

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?” SAID MO OUTSIDE HER HOUSE, HER broom held up like a weapon. Trees shuddered. Marge held the crucifix out at her. “I’m not a vampire,” the woman said.

“No, for God’s sake,” Marge said. “You know Wati? We’re Dane’s friends.”

“Jesus bollocks,” said Collingswood to Mo. “Am I going to have to police brutality you? Let us in and listen.”

“We’re here for Simon,” Marge said in the hallway.

“That’s a bad idea. Simon’s still haunted.”

“Tough,” said Collingswood.

“We’re down to the last one.” One tenacious dead self. Mo hesitated. “He needs rest.”

“Yeah,” said Marge. “I need a holiday in the Maldives. And needs must.”

“She ain’t wrong,” Collingswood said. “I’m with the prisoner here on this.”

Simon looked up at their entry. He was in a dressing gown and pyjamas. He held a ball of squeaking fur.

“We’re friends of Billy and Dane,” Marge said.

Simon nodded. From the air came a faint wrathful ghostly melisma. He shook his head. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“Message,” Marge said. “We need you to move something. For Billy. Don’t look at me like that …”

“But … I can’t. That’s why I’m here. This … it’s like an addiction,” Simon said. “The knack’s like a drug. I can’t go down that road again, I …”

“Bullshit,” said Wati, faint but audible.

“Let me lay it out for you.” Paul spoke, for the first time. He coughed. There was a groaning from his back, and Simon’s ghost responded in moaning kind. Paul scratched himself hard against the doorframe until his back was silent.

“I just done in the most dangerous piece of shit you can imagine by the most horrible method I ever had to use to do anything,” he said. “Wati said you got into this because you was paid to and you might’ve saved the world. If Griz’d got what he wanted earlier … So thank you. For that. But you are going to help. Knacking ain’t a drug. What did for you was dying and not noticing you’d died, again and again.

“Tomorrow you can do whatever you want. But London owns you now. Understand? One more thing needs porting. You don’t even have to beam yourself, no more snuffing it. You are going to do this. I’m not even saying please.”

Chapter Seventy-Six

THE LORRY ROARED ON, IN PLAIN SIGHT, HARASSED BY A HARD core of inked papers that stayed in its slipstream to track its breakneck journey.

“We’re not going to lose them,” Saira said. She was driving now. “Just got to get there fast and do the job. They can’t take us, not this few. It’s when the rest of Grisamentum arrives we’re in trouble.”

Finally they reached the street Billy remembered. It was still all quiet, as if there were no war. People looked from houses at them and hurriedly away. Saira braked by the last, dim house.

“Are we here?” Fitch said. The trailer was stinking and crowded. The last Londonmancers waited by the dead kraken. “Why are we here? What’s the sea going to do?”

The papers rose, a malevolent little covey, circled. Fuck you, Billy mouthed, as they gusted over the roofs and away. “They’re fetching the rest of him,” he said. “Come on, come on.” He froze at approaching blue lights. A police car tore toward them and rubber-burned to a stop. Collingswood emerged, and Billy opened his mouth to yell at Saira to drive, but he heard Marge’s voice.

“Billy!” she almost screamed. She got out and stared at him. “Billy.” He ran for her, and they held on to each other a long time.

“Look,” said Collingswood. “It’s beautiful, innit?”

“I’m so sorry,” Billy said to Marge. “Leon …”

“I know,” she said. “I know. I got your message. And I got your other message. Look, I brought him.” Sitting in the car by Paul was Simon Shaw.

WHEN FITCH SAW PAUL, HE STARTED, AND OPENED HIS MOUTH BUT obviously did not know what to say. The other Londonmancers looked uneasily between the two. Fitch tried again to speak, and Paul just shook his finger no. “We got nothing to talk about,” Paul said. “Not while he’s on his way.” He pointed. Circling like a blown leaf was a single scrap of Grisamentum. “He’s coming, so let’s get this done.”

There would almost be a showdown between Grisamentum and the Tattoo, Billy thought, at last. But it would, rather, be between Grisamentum and Paul. Whatever Fitch’s plans had been or now were, Billy realised, Paul was not afraid of him anymore.

“Billy,” Collingswood said. “Mate. What the shit have you been up to?” She winked at him. “If you didn’t want the job you should’ve just said no, fuck’s sake.”

“Officer Collingswood,” he said. Found himself grinning at her for a second. She pursed her lips.

“What’s the plan then, geezer?”

“Come on,” Billy said. “Let’s move. You ready?” Simon looked terrified but nodded. They opened the lorry so he could stare at the kraken’s tank. Metabolise its position in his head. “Good man,” Billy said. “You know what’s going to happen?”

Billy had prepared his case in writing. It was a long and detailed message, which he had sealed in a glass bottle. “Shall we?” he said to Saira and Simon. “We need its permission.”

“And bearings,” Simon said. “I told you, I can’t do it without pretty precise bearings.”

Billy tapped the bottle. “I said all that. It’s in there. Don’t panic.”

The message in the bottle begged.

YOU SAID THE KRAKEN WAS NO LONGER YOURS. PLEASE, YOU HAVE TO help us. Even if it’s not one of yours, for the sake of the city where you’ve been for however long, please, we are asking you to use your neutrality and your power like when you helped against the Nazis. We need a safe place. We all heard about how the Tattoo wouldn’t face you that time, and we need that sort of clout again.

Everything is at stake, Billy had written. We just need to get past this night. And protect it. We are desperate. He pushed the message into the letter box.

They stood quietly in the dark. A man rode by them on a bike, with squeaking pedal-strokes. Fitch and the Londonmancers waited. The last krakenbit hid their teuthic tumourous amendations in the lorry. The sea inside the house did not answer the bottle for a long time.

“What’s happening?” Simon whispered.

“We can’t stick around forever,” Saira whispered.

Billy raised his hand, to rap the window, with a sense of blasphemy, when he was preempted. Something knocked instead from the inside. A slow beat through the curtain. A lower corner of the cloth moved. It was pulled slowly back.

“It’s showing us,” Billy said. “So you can see for coordinates, Simon. Do what you need to do.”

“Bloody hell,” said Saira. “I guess that’s permission.”

The curtain retreated from a corner of darkness. There was nothing visible behind it, until from deep within that dark came motions—insinuations in the pitch. They came closer, halting inches behind the glass. Staring out from the dim light that streetlamps shone into the room were tiny translucent fish.

Their ventral fins thrummed. They regarded Billy with see-through eyes. A suddenness came, a quick thing, viper-mouth agape, and the little fish were gone. The curtains gently eddied.

Lights came on in the dark room. The lights were moving. They came up on a grotto. A room full of sea. A living room, sofa, chairs, pictures on the walls, a television, lamps and tables, sunk in deep green water, investigated by fish and weeds. Those lights were the pearl tint of bioluminescent animals.

A living room, furnishings interrupted with coral, grazed on by sea cucumbers. The tassels of a lampshade moved with current, and an anemone waved its feathery stingers in filigree echo. Fish moved throughout, ghost-lit by themselves and their neighbours. Fingernail-sized things, arm-thick eels. By a sunken hi-fi riveted with barnacles, a fist-sized light moved like a long-armed metronome. The tick-tock light made Billy stare.

“Have you got it?” he said to Simon, with effort. “What you need?”

“I’ll have to move the water out, just before, in the right shape,” Simon murmured. He stared and itemised to himself according to the strange techniques he had perfected.

“Done,” he said. A moray glided from some dark, coiled around the sofa leg, tugged it into a new position, to make space for what was coming. “Okay,” Simon said. He closed his eyes, and Billy heard in the air around them the muttering of Simon’s last imbecilic vengeful ghost.

“He knows what I’m doing,” Simon said. “He thinks I’m going myself. He’s trying to stop me murdering me again.” He even smiled.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

THERE WAS THE NOISE OF PAPER. “THEY’RE HERE!” FITCH LEANED from the lorry. “Grisamentum! He’s coming!”

“Are you ready?” Billy said.

“They’re coming,” shouted Fitch. The air of the street was filling with papers. They investigated front gardens. They came at the lorry, staring with ink-blot eyes.

“Whatever the bloody hell you are going to do I suggest you do it,” Collingswood said.

Simon went to the kraken’s tank and put his hands on it. He closed his eyes. Headlights moved across the face of houses. There was the familiar prickling sound, the sequin glimmer. It faded up and down, and the tank was no longer there.

THERE WAS A RUMBLING FROM THE HOUSE. A BURP OF WATER SPILLED from the letter slot. With no tank to brace him, Simon fell to his knees.

“Big,” he muttered. He looked up and smiled. His ghost howled.

The kraken was in the embassy of the sea. Billy and Simon and Saira stared at each other.

“Did we …?” said Saira.

“It’s done,” said Billy.

“Congratufuckinglations,” Collingswood said. “Now will you please get in sodding prison?”

“It’s safe,” Billy said. The paper raged and raged around them. Cars came closer and stopped. Papers began to batter them angrily, pelleting into missiles. Paul shifted his chest out, as if he, not the picture he bore, were the ink’s enemy. Billy heard a voice he recognised. Byrne shouting “Goddammit!” from somewhere, as she approached and saw the empty lorry. “Time to go,” he said.

Collingswood saw the motorcade of Grisamentum’s last troops. She appeared to consider her options. The other officer ran. “You cheeky little fucker,” she shouted at his back as he went. She jabbed the air in his direction, and his legs tangled and he went down hard enough to break his nose, but she turned away as he scrambled back to his feet and continued running. She let him go.

“You’re welcome to try to arrest Griz if you want, Collingswood,” Billy said. “Fancy that?”

“I do fancy that yeah, actually, blood.” Not that she was moving.

Saira hesitated. Simon was helping Fitch into the lorry. “Let’s get out of here,” Billy said. Marge and Paul scrambled in too, the vanguard of the papers harassing Paul in confused habitual animosity, thinking he was his adornment. Billy, Saira and even Collingswood wordlessly moved toward the lorry, but they had left it too late. Byrne was close, and she was directing two cars of gunfarmers toward the big vehicle.

“Shit,” said Saira, judging the distance. She caught Billy’s eye a moment. He nodded minutely and she indicated the lorry to go. It lurched from the kerb, its rear door flapping, a bewildered Londonmancer and Marge still leaning from its back, Marge shouting in protest as they left the others behind. But they were gone, around a corner, gone. Simon wailed, held out his hands like a baby. Billy grabbed him and hauled him away.

Saira kneaded the wall beside them and gave it a mossy weathered gateway. They got in out of sight. They hunkered by the wall of the sea-house and crept as Byrne and Grisamentum’s crew came near, ready to scatter into the streets the moment angry papers careened around them.

“They must be going spare,” Billy said.

“Fine bunch of mates you have,” Collingswood said.

“They left without us,” Simon said, loudly enough that Billy pinched his mouth shut.

“They didn’t have any choice,” Saira said. “I told them to. I’ll find them …”

They heard a loud slam. The wall faintly shook.

“What the hell?” Saira said. She and Billy stared at each other. The noise came again. “Oh my God,” Saira said. “He couldn’t be so stupid … The sea?”

Would he? They crept to the corner and looked.

The land could never defeat the sea. As Canute had illustrated for his fawning courtiers, tides are implacable. Even Tattoo, bluster notwithstanding, had known to duck that confrontation. It was just an inevitable rule.

But rules were what Grisamentum wanted to rewrite.

Scratch out the writing on the wall, rewrite the rules, rework the blueprint, using the inks stored in the ocean itself. Would he stop this now? All he needed was tonight.

This was why when Billy peered around the edge of brick, he saw the papers corkscrewing in impatience, he saw Byrne carrying a big bottle of her boss protectively, he saw gunfarmers on guard, and he saw their colleagues kicking and kicking like thugs and police at the front door.

The redoubt of the ocean in residence in London, this house was encircled in thalassic knacks. But part of its defence was the certainty that it would never be needed, and now the attack was backed by the unremitting focused hex attention of Grisamentum. Byrne squirted him with a turkey baster into the lock mechanism, onto the hinges. This close to his becoming, he was cavalier with the stuff of his substance. He wrote weakening spells on the innards of the keyhole. One more onslaught of boots.

“No no,” said Billy, trying very much to think of something, to gather a plan, but a gunfarmer stepped up and slammed his boot at the door, and it flew open. It flew open and threw the man aside, and with it came an onrush piston of water, a giant brine fist.

•   •   •

SEAWATER EXPLODED INTO THE SCRUBBY FRONT GARDEN, SKITTLING gathered attackers. From the top of the house down, the windows imploded. Sea slicked into the road, bringing its inhabitants. Weeds piled. Fauna was dragged into the street, coming dying to rest. Jellies, hagfish, fat deepwater creatures twitching and doleful between the bare trees. A person-sized blind shark gaped pale jaws, hopelessly biting at a car. In other houses, people began to scream.

Gunfarmers picked themselves up. They kicked fish from their feet, pulled wracks and weeds from their sodden suits. Byrne and the ink went in.

“What do we do? What do we do?” Simon said. “What do we do?” He was collapsed onto his knees.

“Get it out of there,” Billy said. “Send it anywhere.” Simon closed his eyes.

“I can’t, I … They’ve moved it. My bearings are screwed, I can’t get a lock on.”

“Your lot’ll be here soon, won’t they?” Saira said to Collingswood.

“And what the fuck are they supposed to do?” Collingswood said urgently.

“What do we do?” Saira said.

With the library he had imbibed, Grisamentum knew kraken physiology. He could have Byrne undeath-magic it just back enough to life to coax its flesh into a fear reaction, for its sepia cloud. That was all, Billy thought, he needed to do.

“Saira,” Billy said, calm. “Come with me.”

“Baron,” Collingswood was saying into her phone. “Baron, bring everyone.” She gesticulated angrily—wait a minute—but did nothing to stop Billy as he climbed the rear of the house, helping Saira after him. Billy looked down into the garden littered with building rubble and rubbish.

“Get us in,” he said to Saira.

She pushed at the rear wall, moulding the bricks, pressing them into flatness and transparency, making a window. Faded to glass clarity they could see through a film of undersea slime into a small bathroom. Saira opened the window she had made. She shivered with more than cold; she was shaking violently. She made as if she would crawl in and hesitated.

“Fuck’s sake,” said Collingswood below them, and snapped her phone shut. She shook her head as if at a friend’s unfunny joke. She pushed her hands apart and rose, not in a leap but an abrupt dainty dangling, up through the impossible twelve feet or more to land on the ledge by Saira and Billy.

Billy and Saira stared at her. “You,” she said to Saira, “wuss-girl, get down there and hold wuss-boy’s hand. You,” she said to Billy, “get in there and tell me what’s what.”

IT WAS FREEZING WITHIN. THE STINK WAS ASTONISHING, FISH AND rot.

They stood in a typical London-house bathroom: stubby bath with shower, sink and toilet, a tiny cupboard. The surfaces were white tiled under layers of grey silt, green growth, sponges and anemones reduced to lumps in the sudden air. The floor was inch-deep in water full of organisms, some still slightly alive. By the door was a half-grown sunfish—a huge, ridiculous thing—dead and sad. The bathtub brimmed with a panicking crowd of fish. Something splashed in the toilet bowl. The infiltrators held their hands to their faces.

Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps. Creatures from the top floors where the pressure was gentle and skylights illuminated the water.

Shouted orders were audible. Billy set out through the flopping drowning. He steadied himself on banisters interwoven with kelp.

In the kitchen there was a sea-softened door into the living room. The floor was littered with broken crockery. In the sink an octopus floundered. Billy watched it but felt no kinship. He could hear muffled noises from the next room.

“There’s quite a bloody few of them,” Collingswood said.

“We have to get in there,” Billy whispered. They stared at each other. “We have to.” She kissed her teeth.

“Give me a second, Billy,” she said. “Alright? You understand?”

“What are you …?” He started to say. She raised an eyebrow. He nodded, readied the pistol he had taken from Dane.

“If I’ve got all this right … Spill him,” she said. “Alright, Billy? Don’t be a loser all your life.” She pursed her lip and threw a sign with her fingers, something from a music video. “East side,” she said.

She stepped back into the corridor toward the living room’s main door. He heard her do something, some knack, some noise, some unnatural percussion. He heard the door open, a commotion, “Keep them out!” in Byrne’s voice, the stamp of footsteps toward her ingress and out of the door. Billy kicked open the other rotting entrance, his weapon raised.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

INTO THE GROTTO, THE SEA’S FRONT ROOM. BILLY WAS ABSOLUTELY calm.

He emerged with a burst of wall-stuff. There were the coralline constructions, the brine-stained everything, big fish lying still. In a corner was a huge sagging body, something he could not work out, though he saw eyes see him from a meat heap. The gunfarmers had left the room to hunt Saira.

There was the kraken in its tank, now emptied of all but a thin layer of preserver. There was Byrne, some bad-magic book under her arm, the bottle of Grisamentum in her hand. A huge syringe jutted from the kraken’s skin. Byrne was tickling, stimulating the dead animal in some obscene-looking way.

The kraken was moving.

Its empty eye-holes twitched. The last, brine-dilute Formalin swilled as the animal turned. Its limbs stretched and untwined, too weak still to thrash, its skin still scabrous and unrejuvenated, but the kraken was alive, or not-dead. It was zombie. Undead.

In panic at the sudden end of its death, it was spurting dark black-brown-grey ink. It spattered against the inside of its tank, and pooled in that last liquid in which the kraken lay.

Billy saw Byrne go for the syringe. He saw her move. He fired. The container of Grisamentum exploded.

•   •   •

BYRNE SCREAMED AS GLASS, INK AND BLOOD FROM HER LACERATED hand erupted across her front, fell through her fingers. Ink spattered across the floor, dissipated in the currents of the emptying house. A gunfarmer reentered and stared at Byrne and the ink-slick down her front. Billy roared a triumphant haaa! and stepped back through into the kitchen.

“Collingswood!” he shouted.

“What?” he heard. Billy glanced through the doorway and saw the kraken move.

“You got him?” Collingswood shouted.

“I did,” Billy gasped in delight. “I spilt him, he’s—”

Byrne was whispering into the tank. She was dripping, squeezing the ink that drenched her top into the kraken’s ink.

“Shit,” said Billy. He stared. “How much …”

The world answered him.

How much of Grisamentum does he need to merge with the kraken ink? To take it into him?

The world showed him: not much.

PLENTY OF GRISAMENTUM WAS RAGING IN WORDLESS LIQUIDITY AS the slosh of footprints dispersed him. But wrung out by his vizier was a small glassful of him, bloated with Krakenist knowledge from his hungry learning, squeezed into the tank. He swilled and bonded. He mixed with the kraken’s ink, ink also, the two inks one new ink, and changed.

The liquid in the tank began to bubble. The zombie squid flopped and wriggled and butted up against the Perspex. Its ink effervesced.

Billy fired at the tank, urgently. He punctured it right through, breaking off sections, and his bullets hit the dense body of the kraken. The liquid within did not flow from the holes. It held its tank-shape against gravity. A presence gathered into swirl-self out of the conjoined inks, burned man and kraken-writ. A voice made of bubbling laughed.

The dark liquid rose. A pillar, a man-shape that laughed and pointed. That raised both arms.

And started to rewrite rules.

So the wall that hid Billy disappeared. It did not fall down, did not evaporate, did not crumble but instead simply had not been there, was un. The kitchen was all part of the living room now, sinkless and cutleryless, full of lounges and bookshelves, wet with remnant sea.

The pistol in Billy’s hand was gone. Because Grisamentum wrote that there were no guns in that room. “Oh Jesus,” Billy managed to say, and the ink of Grisamentum wrote no across his consciousness. Not even God: he was the very rules God wrote. The gunfarmers stumbled. Byrne was laughing, was rising into the air, tugged by the boss she loved.

Billy felt something very dangerous and forlorn settle, the closing of something open across everything, as history began to flex at someone else’s will. He felt something get ready to rewrite the sky.

The ink gathered into a globe, hovering above the tank. Threads from it took word-shape and changed things. Writs in the air.

The kraken looked at Billy with its missing eyes. It moved. Spasmed. Not afraid, he saw, not in pain. Bottling it up. Bottling it up. Where was his angel? Where his glass-container hero?

This is a fiasco. He might almost have laughed at that strange formulation. It was the catastrophe, the disaster, the, the word was weirdly tenacious in his head, fiasco.

He opened his eyes. That word meant bottle.

It’s all metaphor, Billy remembered. It’s persuasion.

“It’s not a kraken,” he said. The ink-god did not hear him until he said it again, and all the attention in the world was, amused, upon him. “It’s not a kraken and it’s not a squid,” Billy said. The eyeless thing in the tank held his gaze.

“Kraken’s a kraken,” Billy said. “Nothing to do with us. That? That’s a specimen. I know. I made it. That’s ours.”

A troubled look went across Byrne’s face as she spun on her axis. Bottle magic, Billy thought. The ink shuddered.

“Thing is,” Billy said, in abrupt adrenalized bursts, “thing is the Krakenists thought I was a prophet of krakens because of what I’d done—but I never was. What I am—” Even if by mistake; even if a misunderstanding, a joke gone wrong; even if a will-this-do; how are any messiahs chosen? “What I am is a bottle prophet.” An accidental power of glass and memory. “So I know what that is.”

There was a sink by Billy again, and the wall was coming back, a few inches of it. The bottled kraken wheezed from its siphon. The wall grew.

“It’s not an animal or a god,” Billy said. “It didn’t exist until I curated it. That’s my specimen.”

The new rules were being crossed out. Billy could feel the fight. He saw the wall shrink and grow, be there and un-be and have been and not have been; he felt able to stand and not; he felt the fucking sky reshape and rework as with instructions written and put under erasure in penmanship-duel the consciousness of Grisamentum—full of new krakeny power, ink-magic—battled with the tentacled thing that was not kraken at all.

The specimen pressed its arms against its tank. Suckers pressed vacuum-flush against the plastic, pulling the great body into position. It was not trying to get out—that was where it belonged.

Billy was standing.

He had birthed it into consciousness. It was Architeuthis dux. Specimen, pining for preservative. Squid-shaped paradox but not the animal of the ocean. Architeuthis, Billy understood for the first time, was not that undefined thing in deep water, which was only ever itself. Architeuthis was a human term.

“It’s ours,” he said.

Its ink was vast magic: Grisamentum had been right about that. But the universe had heard Billy, and he had been persuasive.

Maybe if Grisamentum had harvested ink direct from those trench dwellers, not from a jarred, cured, curated thing, the power would have been as protean as he had intended. But this was Architeuthis ink, and it was disinclined to be his whim. “It’s a specimen and it’s in the books,” Billy said. “We’ve written it up.”

The comixed inks raged against each other. The universe flexed as they fought. But as Grisamentum mixed with the ink it mixed with him; as he took its power it took his. And much of Grisamentum had been spilt: there was more of it than of him. It was specimen ink, curated by a citizen of London, by Billy, and bit by bit it metabolised the ink-man. The wall was rising again, and Byrne was falling to the ground.

Grisamentum sent out anguish that made the house quake. He slipped out of selfness like all the rest of him, in the tide, in the drains. He was overwritten. He was effaced by ink that, as it won, in an instant’s satisfaction returned to its unthinking form and fell out of the air like dark rain.

THE WALL WAS BACK. THE KITCHEN WAS BACK. THE WET HOUSE WAS full again of dead fish.

“What did you do?” Byrne screamed at Billy. “What did you do?”

The sense, all sense, of Grisamentum, was gone. There was only the undead Architeuthis, still moving, stinking, chemical in its tank, poor skin flaking, poor tentacles palsied, drenched in ink that was nothing, now, but dark grey-brown liquid.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

THE GUNFARMERS RAN. WHY WOULD THEY STAY? BYRNE STAYED. Why, and where, would she go? She let Billy disarm her. She ran her fingers through the water on the floor.

“Nice one, rudeboy,” Collingswood said to Billy.

He sat with his back to the streaming walls. London was safe, Billy kept thinking, not subject to that cosmic scriptic totalitarianism. He heard Saira and Simon coming, having seen their enemies run. Collingswood turned as they entered.

“Alright, nobody move,” she said. “This is the police.” They stared at her. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you,” she said. “What happened, Billy? Jesus, look at that thing. And it’s fucking moving.” Architeuthis wriggled sluggishly.

Collingswood took half-hold of Byrne, who slumped and did not try to fight.

“Where’s your ghost?” Billy said to Simon.

“… I think it’s gone.” They heard sirens, the swish of wheels on the sea-wet street. Police came to the house, in not a very long time.

“Hi Baron,” Billy said, as Baron came blinking in, pistol outstretched, blinking at the sea ruin. Baron and his officers stared at the twitching squid, the exhausted fighters.

“Billy,” Baron said. “Billy bloody Harrow, as I live and breathe …”

“Boss,” said Collingswood, and turned her back. “See you made it.” She lit a cigarette.

“What the bloody hell have you lot been up to?” Baron said.

“Want me to fill you in?” Collingswood said.

“No Vardy?” Billy said.

Baron shrugged. “You’re coming with me, Billy.”

“Ataboy boss,” said Collingswood. “That’s sorted them.”

“Enough of your shit, Kath,” he said.

“I’ll come with you.” Billy nodded. “As long as I can sleep.”

“What are the plods going to make of this?” Baron said.

“Collingswood’ll do you a report,” Billy said.

“Doubt it,” she said. She was looking around the room, squinting, sniffing, knacking. “Hang on.”

Billy approached the Architeuthis. Baron watched and let him go. He whispered to it as if it were a skittish dog. “Hello,” he said to the preserved eight-metre many-armed newborn thing, moving in the dregs of its preserver, slathering itself with its prehensile undead arms, pining for the ullage.

“It ain’t finished,” Collingswood said, in a dead voice.

“Look,” Billy said to the Architeuthis. It wriggled its wrist-thick arms. “You sorted it. Made us safe.”

A squelch answered him. Collingswood was breathing deep and looking at him with some kind of ragged expression. Saira was frowning. Billy heard the wet sound again.

It was the fattest pile of fish-flesh he had noticed. He saw its glowering eyes. Something switched one side to the other. It was a ceratioid enormity, a huge anglerfish beached and collapsing under its own weight. It struggled to open the snaggled split of its mouth. It watched him come and swung again the organic spit before it—its lure, a still-glowing snare on a limb-long spur from its forehead. It wagged it side to side. Was it trying to fool him into its mouth, even now as it drowned in air?

No. The motion of its bait-flesh had none of the fitful jerk of little swimming life that it would mimic to hunt. It tick-tocked the lure in what was not a fish motion at all, but a human one. Speaking his language. The motion of its lure was the wag of a correcting finger. He had said to the Architeuthis specimen, You made us safe, and the sea said no, no, no, no, no.

“What the hell?” Billy whispered.

“What does it mean?” Saira said. “What’s happening?”

“It is not finished,” Collingswood said. “Oh shitting fuck.” She was bleeding. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. She spat the cigarette and blood away. “It just got a bloodyfuck sight closer.”

Billy closed his eyes. He was trembling, a preemptive allergy to whatever was to happen.

“It’s still …” he said. To his shock, he felt his hands yanked behind him. Baron had cuffed him. “Are you out of your mind?” he said. “It’s all about to burn.”

“Shut your cakehole, you,” Baron said. He indicated one of his men to cuff Saira too.

“Oh, something’s very fucking up,” Collingswood said. “Boss, don’t be a prick.” Sensitives all across the heresiopolis must be praying to be wrong, for something other than the burnt nothing they felt fast coming.

“Let me go,” Billy said.

“Baron, wait,” Collingswood said.

“It never made any sense,” Saira said to Billy. They stared at each other. “No matter how powerful kraken ink is, there was no way it could have … let him end everything. In fire. Even if he wanted to, which why …?”

“Boss,” said Collingswood. “Give them a second.”

“What makes everything stop?” Saira said. “Fire, the squid, the …”

Billy stared, and thought, and remembered. Things he had heard and seen, moments, from weeks and weeks before.

“You end to start again,” he said. “From the beginning. So you burn backward. This isn’t an end … This is a rebooting.”

“Get out,” Baron said. “Shift, Harrow.”

“How?” said Saira to Billy.

“Burn out whatever set us in the wrong direction. If you want to run a different program. Oh my God, this was never about the poor squid … it was a bystander. We started this. You did. Fitch kept saying it got closer, the harder you lot tried to protect it. You brought it to attention.” There was a straining sound. Everyone looked up. That was the sky stretching, ready to break into flames.

“How far to the Darwin Centre?” Billy said. “How far to the museum?”

“Four, five miles,” Collingswood said.

“Get out,” Baron, uselessly, said.

“It’s too far … Baron, can you send a message to … You need to get someone …”

“Shut up or I will pepper-spray you,” Baron said. “I’m sick of this.”

“Boss, shut up,” Collingswood said. She shook her head. Pointed, and Baron blinked in outrage, suddenly unable to speak. “What you saying, Harrow?”

Something new had walked when the Londonmancers had learnt of Grisamentum’s plan, when Al Adler had indulged the traditions and respect his boss had taught him and gone for a supposedly useless reading. The new thing had grown stronger into itself when the kraken was taken and the alternatives narrowed. But it was after that that the memory angels had gone for it, that its sentience, its meta-selfhood, had become great enough.

“Why’s the angel of memory not here?” Billy said. “It’s supposed to be my guardian angel, right? It wants to protect me, right, and to beat this bloody prophecy, right? So why isn’t it here? What’s it got to do that’s more important?”

Billy knew exactly where he had been when that last phase had begun, and what he had been showing to whom. He knew what was the concatenate development that had made the sea, that soup of life, what it was, and why it had sensed it was under threat. He knew what was happening, and why, and at whose hand, and he could not get anyone else where they needed to be, and he could not explain fast enough.

He needed to be at the Darwin Centre, now. “Oh, God,” he breathed, and slumped, then stood up straight. The anglerfish had stopped moving. Billy silently said good-bye to everything.

“Simon,” he said. “Simon,” he ordered. “You know the bearings of the Darwin Centre. The heart of it. Get me there, now. Now.”

Simon hesitated. Baron strained and failed to speak. “But you know what that means. That’s how I …”

“Put. Me. There.” Simon would not disobey that voice. Billy tried quickly to catch everyone’s eye. Saira half understanding, stricken. Simon, miserable at committing murder again. Baron actually shouting, quite unheard. Collingswood nodded at him, like a soldier saying good-bye.

There was the shimmered static sound, a muffled cry as Billy made a noise, the last thing he would ever do, as light enveloped him from the inside, faded out and he was gone, and Baron was tugging at nothing.

Chapter Eighty

AND THE SMELL OF THE SEA (SEEMED TO) EBB, SUDDENLY replaced with chemical. Light shimmied in front of Billy’s eyes, different from how it had (not) been in his eyes a moment before. He knew he remembered nothing, that these were rather images he was born with. But he would not think about that now.

He was inside of the tank room, in the Darwin Centre. Across from him, beyond two rows of steel tanks, was Vardy. Who turned.

Billy had time to see that the work surface in front of Vardy was littered with vials, tubes and beakers, liquids bubbling, electric cells. He had time to see that Vardy was aiming a pistol at him, and he dropped. The bullet went above him, bursting a thigh-high bottle of long-preserved monkeys. They slumped as reeking preservative sprayed. Billy strained against the handcuffs that still (so to speak) constrained him. He stayed below the level of the steel and crawled. Another shot. Glass and Formalin littered the floor ahead of him, and an eviscerated dolphin baby flopped in his path.

“Billy,” said Vardy, his voice grim, terse, as ever, just the same. It could be a statement, a greeting, a curse. When Billy tried to creep closer another bullet ruined another specimen. “I’ll kill you,” said Vardy. “The angel of memory couldn’t stop me, you’re certainly not going to.”

There was a jabbering, a tiny high-pitched mouthing-off. Through cracks between furniture, Billy saw on the side a tiny raging figure. It was the mnemophylax—a bottle-of-Formalin body, bone arms and claws, a skull head, snapping like a guard dog. It was under a bell jar. Vardy had not even bothered to kill it. It had come and gone so many times, had emerged and been dissipated so often, it was tiny. A finger-sized glass tube that might have been used to contain one insect, and its limbs must have been, what, mouse legs? The skull that topped it was from some pygmy marmoset or something. It was a joke, a little animate failure like a cartoon.

“What did you do with the pyro?” Billy called.

Vardy said. “Cole’s right as rain. Did exactly as I asked—wouldn’t you, if you had it patiently explained that your daughter was in my protective custody?”

“So you got what you needed. Time-fire.”

“Between the two of them, I did.” Vardy fired again and ruined an eighty-year-old dwarf crocodile. “Been trying versions out and I think we’re good. Stay where you are, Billy, I can hear every move you make.”

“Kata …”

“Katachronophlogiston. Shut up, Billy. It’ll be finished soon.”

Billy huddled. It was him who had given Vardy the idea. The prophecy had given rise to itself. It had snared him and Dane and his friends because they had paid it attention like it was a disease, a pathological machine. He cursed it without sound. That was what the angel of memory had been fighting, that certitude, struggling for the fact of itself. So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated. There was a clink as the phylax jumped up and down and banged its tiny skull head on the underside of the jar that jailed it.

The noise of porting came again. The shadows and reflections shifted. The Architeuthis in its tank had returned to the place from where it had been stolen. Billy stared at it. Again, the eyeless thing seemed to try to look at him. It wriggled its coiling zombie arms. What the fuck? Billy thought.

“You brought it to life?” Vardy said. “Whatever for?”

“Vardy, please don’t,” Billy said. “This won’t work, this’ll never work. It’s over, Vardy, and your old god lost.”

“It may not,” Vardy said. There was the noise of combustion from his workstation. “Work. It may not. But it may. You’re right—he did lose, my god, and I cannot forgive the cowardly bastard for that. Nothing bloody ventured, say I.”

“You really think they’re that powerful? That symbolic?” Billy crept on.

“It’s all a matter of persuasion, as perhaps by now you know. It’s all a matter of making an argument. That’s why I wasn’t too bothered by Griz. Is that where you’ve been, with him? With a category error like that in his plan …” He shook his head. Billy wondered how long ago Vardy had insighted what Grisamentum had in mind, and how. “Now, these things were the start of it. They’re where the argument started.”

Billy crept close to the real targets of the time-fire, the real subject of the predatory prophecy. Not and never the squid, which had only ever been a bystander, caught up by proximity. Those other occupants of the room, in their nondescript cabinet, like any other specimen, exemplary and paradigmatic. The preserved little animals of Darwin’s Beagle voyage.

THIS WAS A FIERY REBOOTING. UPLOADING NEW WORLDWARE.

He had remembered Vardy’s melancholy, the rage in him, and what Collingswood had once said. She was right. Vardy’s tragedy was that his faith had been defeated by the evidence, and he could not stop missing that faith. He was not a creationist, not any longer, not for years. And that was unbearable to him. He could only wish that his erstwhile wrongness had been right.

Vardy did not want to eradicate the idea of evolution: he wanted to rewind the fact of it. And with evolution—that key, that wedge, that wellspring—would all those other things follow, the drably vulgar contingent weak godlessness that had absolutely nothing going for it at all except, infuriatingly, its truth.

And he was persuaded, and was trying to persuade the city and history, that it was in these contemplated specimens, these fading animals in their antique preserve, that evolution had come to be. What would evolution be if humans had not noticed it? Nothing. Not even a detail. In seeing it, Darwin had made it be, and always have been. These Beagle things were bloated.

Vardy would burn them into un-having-been-ness, unwind the threads that Darwin had woven, eradicate the facts. This was Vardy’s strategy to help his own unborn god, the stern and loving literalist god he had read in texts. He could not make it win—the battle was lost—but he might make it have won. Burn evolution until it never was and the rebooted universe and the people in it might be, instead, created, as it and they should have been.

It only happened that night because Billy and his comrades had made it that night, had provoked the end-war, and this chaos and crisis. So Vardy had known when he had to act.

“It won’t work,” Billy said again, but he could feel the strain in time and the sky, and it seemed very much as if it would work. The bloody universe was plastic. Vardy held a Molotov cocktail.

“Look,” said Vardy. “Bottle magic.” Filled with the phlogiston he had coerced Cole to make, with his daughter’s untutored help, at threat of his daughter’s life. A combusting tachyon flame. It roared with inrushing sound, illumined Vardy’s face.

He brought it closer, and its glow lit the pickled frogs within a jar. They shifted. They shrank in the time-blistering warmth, tugged their limbs into their trunks. They became more paltry, ungainly long-tailed legless tadpoles. He held the flame so it licked the glass of their jar, and after a second of warming it burst into sand and sent the tadpoles spraying. They reversed and undid their having been and shrank as they fell, and never were, and nothing hit the floor.

Vardy turned to the shelf of Darwin’s specimens and raised his arm.

Billy struggled to his feet. He could think only, Not like this. He would try to spill the fire. Perhaps it would reverse the life cycle of the heavy-duty floor, rubbers separating, the chemicals racing back to elemental forms. But his hands were behind him and he was far too far away.

“No!” Billy wheezed, bleeding.

The shadows shed by fire danced over labels handwritten by Charles Darwin. Billy sprawled flat like a mudfish. With a bark of religious joy, Vardy threw the time-flaming missile.

•   •   •

IT FLEW AND TURNED AS IT FLEW. BILLY’S ARMS WERE TRAPPED. BUT there were other arms aplenty in that room.

The undead specimen Architeuthis shot out its long hunting limbs all the way across the room, from far away. A last predation. It caught the bottle. Took it from the air.

Vardy stared. Vardy screamed in rage.

The time-fire was touching the Architeuthis’s skin, and was burning. The zombie squid’s second hunting arm whipped Formalin-heavy up, around Vardy’s waist with a thwack. It coiled him in. It whipped the bottle toward its mouth. Vardy howled as its shorter arms spread to receive him.

Vardy screamed. The time-fire was roaring, and spreading. The squid was shrinking. Vardy’s arms and legs were shortening.

The squid looked at Billy. He could never put into precise words what it was in that gaze, those sudden eyes, what the bottled specimen communicated to him, but it was a fellowship. Not servility. It did not obey. But it did what it did deliberately, offered it up and looked at him in good-bye.

The time-fire shrank it further, cleared the deadness from its skin, made it smooth. A selfless selfishness. Without evolution, what would it and its siblings be? The deep gods were not this thing’s siblings: it let itself be taken for the sake not of kraken but of the exemplae, all these specimens around them, of all shapes, these bottled science gods.

The tank was roaring with fire. The flesh was burning younger. There was a last flurry of combat. Silhouetted in the glow, Billy saw a baby screaming adult fury at the little arm-length squid that encoiled it. Both were on fire. Then both, still wrestling, were hot embryos, that intertwined and stilled in grotesque protoplasmic détente, and were burning gone.

The sides of the tank fell in, into smouldering crystals of ore and chemical and then atoms before they could even shatter.

Chapter Eighty-One

THE LAST OF THE BURNING EBBED AWAY. THE LIGHT OF FIRE WAS gone. Only the glow of fluorescent bulbs.

Something a little rucked

singed and melted

and

There was an inrush growth rejig. An imperfect healing but healing. A huge, epochal sealing. London reskinned. Fire scorched and then went out.

And there was Billy in the new skin, there in time. There was a Billy. Billy breathing out from something, and he breathed in, shook with release. He was in a room.

DARWIN’S SPECIMENS WERE SAFE. BILLY TOUCHED THEM, ONE BY one, stretching out his tethered hands behind him. He ran his fingers along the steel surface where no Architeuthis had ever been. The tiny mnemophylax watched from under its bell jar. Its bone head tracked his movements.

Nothing had gone. Billy thought that very exactly.

Billy knew with a strange precision that in all his recent adventures, the specificities of which were slightly vague, no giant cryptid animal had ever been here in this room. The angel of memory rolled on its tiny base and shook its skull head. Billy laughed and was not sure why. There was a pyromancer who was alive and waiting for his daughter, because there was no one nor had there ever been who could have blackmailed him with her. Time felt a little raw. The threat that Billy had defeated in this room, and it had been baleful, had neither involved anyone, nor existed. He laughed.

The sky was different. Billy could feel it beyond the roof. Different from how it had not been. The strain was gone. The end of the world, a true finish, was only one very unlikely possibility among many.

There were details missing. Billy was canny enough by now, after everything, to know what that might mean. There was a burn scar in history. There was still a smell of burning. Billy was definitely descended from simians and ultimately from fish in the sea.

He met the gaze of the mnemophylax across the room, eye socket to eye. Though it had no face to crease he would have said it smiled back. It wriggled and wrote with its tiny fingers on the inside of its glass—he could not tell what. It opened and closed its mouth. It was memory. It shook its head. It put its hair’s-breadth fingerbone to its nonexistent lips. Its tiny bones fell, its skull settled into nothing, it became a test tube and some specimen rubbish.

Billy sat on the steel where no great mollusc had been. He sat as if he were a specimen. He wondered what searing thing had not been overcome. He waited for whatever would happen, whoever would find him.

It was Baron and Collingswood who came, at last, into the room. They were not missing any colleague, Billy thought, carefully. They’d never had a third in their crew, though they stood often a little close together, a little close to a wall, as if they would be framed with another presence. They recalled enough, and they knew that something had happened, had finished.

Billy stood and waved with his handcuffed arms. The cops picked over the ruins of glass, spilt preservative, scattered specimen remains, scattered by no one.

“Billy,” Baron said.

“It’s okay now, I think,” Billy said. They stared at each other a while. “Where’s Simon?”

“He went,” Collingswood said.

Baron and Collingswood muttered together. “Fuck this,” Collingswood said. She undid Billy’s locks.

“What’s the crime?” Baron said to Billy. “You nearly came to work for me. What animal?” he said. “There’s never been one here.” He jerked his thumb at the door. “Piss off,” he said, not unfriendly.

Billy smiled slowly. “I wouldn’t have been—,” he started to say. Collingswood interrupted.

“Please,” she said. “Please just sod off. You were offered a job a while back and you said no.”

“Whatever the circumstances,” Baron said.

“We may be a man down,” Collingswood said, “but we were always a man down.” She sniffed. Looked at him thoughtfully. “Burns don’t heal pretty,” she said. “Always a little melty-looking scar. You can’t fuss about that sort of shit, Billy.”

Billy held out his hand. Baron raised an eyebrow and shook it. Billy turned and looked at Collingswood, standing at the edge of the room. She waved at him.

“Oh, Billy, Billy, Billy,” she said. She smiled and winked at him. “You and me, eh? What didn’t we do?” She blew him a quick kiss. “See you around,” she said. “Till next apocalypse, eh. I know your bloody type, Billy. Be seeing you.” She nodded farewell. He did not disobey.

BILLY WALKED THE CORRIDORS, ROUTES HE KNEW INTIMATELY, THAT he had not walked for weeks. He mooched. He left the Darwin Centre and reentered a night still frenetic with fights, thefts and heretic prophecies, but increasingly, epically sheepish, uncertain of its own anxieties, unsure as to why it felt like a final night, when clearly it was not and never had been.

In the tank room, Baron was scribbling in his notebook.

“Right,” he said. “Honest to bloody blimey I’ve got no idea how we’re going to write this up,” he said. “Shall we, Collingswood?” He spoke briskly and did not meet her eye.

She paused before she answered him.

“I’m putting in for a transfer,” she said. She met his shocked eyes. “Time there was another FSRC cell, ‘boss. Boss.’” She air-quoted. “I’m going for promotion.” Collingswood smiled.

PART SEVEN
HERO = BOTTLE

Chapter Eighty-Two

IN A QUIET PLACE, BY THE RAILWAY LINES IN A CUT IN THE CITY, discarded statues edged the stays. In a long-term moment of urban sentimentality, they were a line of retirement for no-longer revered nor desired mementos. In them Wati slept. Only his friends knew this.

He had crept over from Marge’s crucifix after the end of the uncertain catastrophe that had not happened. He slept like one defeated. London was saved from whatever danger it was he had helped save it from, had there been such a thing, but his union had lost its fight, and the new contracts were punitive, feudal. Billy was glad for him that Wati could sleep through the worst of this, though he would excoriate himself for it when he woke, and would start the task of rebuilding the movement again.

“Are you sad?” Saira said. She sat opposite him. They were together in his flat. After all that night, after all the everything, he had found her. He had needed to be with someone who had seen whatever it was he had seen.

He had called Collingswood first. “Fuck off, Harrow,” she had said, friendly enough. He had heard a squeal of static like the enthusiastic voice of a pig, and she had broken the connection. When he had tried to redial, his phone had become a toaster.

“Alright, alright,” he had said. He had bought a new telephone and not called her again, but had tracked down Saira instead. It had not been hard. She retained the expertise she had learned, but she was not a Londonmancer anymore. Mostly she used her hungover knack to roll bits of London between her fingers until they were cigarettes, which she would smoke.

Neither of them were quite sure of details. They had seen the assault on the sea, though for what purpose they could not remember. “Are you?” she said. She spoke to Billy hesitantly. She was shy of this topic, despite all the time they had spent together recently.

“Not really,” he said. “I never knew him.”

The him was the man who had died: the earlier Billy, the first Billy, the Billy Harrow who had teleported out of the sea-house, in which they had all been for reasons they could all remember, though were not perfectly impressed with. He had been blown into bits smaller than atoms.

“He was brave,” Billy said. “He did what he had to do.” Saira nodded. He did not feel that he was praising himself, though he knew that he, this Billy, must be brave in exactly, precisely the same degree as his predecessor.

“Why did you … he … do it?” she said.

Billy shrugged. “I don’t know. He had to. Like Dane said—you remember Dane?” Dane had died. That he was sure of. “Before the, before Grisamentum did him in.” Grisamentum was gone too. “There are a lot of people who don’t think twice about travelling like that. It’s only a problem if you know.” It all depended on how you looked at it whether you were troubled by the fact that it was always fatal.

“I keep trying to catch myself out,” he said. “I keep trying to suddenly see if I remember things that only he could know. The first one. Secrets.” He laughed. “I always do.” Billy did not feel proprietorial about the memories he had inherited, when he had been born out of the molecules of the air, in the tank room, days before, at the dying end of a catastrophe.

I miss Dane, he thought. He was not sure of anything very concrete about Dane, not even in fact that he missed him, exactly; but whenever he thought of it, Billy was very sad that what had happened to Dane had. He deserved better.

•   •   •

WHEN MARGE AND PAUL RANG HIS BELL, BILLY INVITED THEM IN, but they waited instead on the pavement. He came down. This was a valedictory organised in advance. Everyone trod carefully with each other just then.

Paul was in his old jacket. It was cleaned and patched. It would never look new, but it looked good. The scratches on his face were healing. Marge looked the same as she always had. They greeted each other with awkward heartfelt hugs.

“Where you going?” Billy said.

“Don’t know yet,” said Paul. “Maybe the country. Maybe another city.”

“Really?” Billy said. “Really?”

Paul shrugged. Marge smiled. Every time Billy had spoken to her since he had saved history from whatever, she had been buoyed up, more the more she found out about where she lived now.

“It’s all bollocks,” said Paul. “You think this is the only place gods live?” He smiled. “There’s no getting away from that now. Wherever you go, that’ll be somewhere a god lives.”

Once, Billy and Marge had sat down together, and over emotional hours he had told her what had happened to Leon—his murder at the hands of Goss and Subby, as part of the huge plot, the details of which were still pretty lacunaed. The wrong, the damaged edges of the details frustrated them both.

“You could ask Paul’s back what really happened,” Billy had said. “It was that bastard’s plan. I think.”

“How would we do that?” she said. “You think he’d even know, anyway?”

There were still those in the heresiopolitan wing of London who obeyed Paul as if he were the Tattoo, but not many. Most did not know details, but knew that he was not what he had been. Now Paul was a free operator, a roaming prison for a displaced kingpin. The Tattoo’s troops were routed and scattered after the recent, most confusingly vague near-apocalypse.

“How would we do that?” Marge said again.

They were not watched, the streets contained no one paying attention. Paul untucked his shirt, turned and showed Billy his skin.

The Tattoo’s eyes widened and narrowed frantically as he tried to speak. As if Billy would respect or listen to him. Across the lower part of Paul’s back more ink had been added. He had had inked tattooed stitches, sewing up the erstwhile crime lord’s mouth. Billy could hear an mmm mmm mmm.

“It wasn’t easy,” Paul said, “we had to find a savvy tattooist. And he kept trying to move, to purse his lips and that. Took a while.”

“You weren’t tempted to get him removed?” Billy said.

Paul put his shirt back on. He and Marge smiled. She raised her eyebrows. “If he gives me too much shit I might blind him,” Paul said. Sadism? Really? Billy would have said not. Justice? Power.

“You’re never going to tell us what did happen, are you?” Marge said suddenly.

“I don’t know,” Billy said. “Goss killed Leon. That’s what started this. For no reason at all.” They let that stand. “But then Paul killed Goss. You were there.”

“I did,” Paul said.

“I was,” Marge said. “Okay.” She even smiled. “Okay. And what else? What else happened?”

“I saved everything,” Billy said. “And you did too.”

“THEY’RE HOLDING BYRNE?” SAIRA SAID.

“I think they’re getting her for the sea-house. Have to show the ocean that we’re sorry.”

“Whether or not she did it?”

“Whether or not.”

“I heard the sea’s started filling a new embassy.”

“I heard the same.”

Billy’s flat was his again. He did not know what to make of it; he often wandered its little hallways in amazement. (Of course it was not his again. It had never been his—he had inherited it from his identical namesake. And he did not know why he had to do these prodding little thought-tests.) They looked over the street. It was nearly the end of the year.

“What year was it?” Saira said. “Year of the what? That just went?”

“I don’t know,” Billy said.

“Year of the bottle.”

“It’s always year of the bottle.”

“Year of the bottle and of some animal.”

“It’s always that too.”

So this was the universe, was it? Billy strained, and maybe it was nothing, maybe it was a quirk of his position—it looked through the window as if a fleeting bird stilled in the sky, for a snip of a second. Saira watched. Raised an eyebrow. Humans were still related to monkeys. All sorts of things might happen in that new old London.

Billy looked out at the city that was not as it had been the last time he had looked through the glass. Billy lived in Heresiopolis now, and would know when the next Armageddon came and failed. He drank now in different bars, and learnt different things.

He sipped his wine and poured more for himself and for Saira. It was the year of the bottle, Billy thought, the year of pickling time, flexing himself and feeling the clock hesitate as if he squeezed its throat. It was the year of the bottle once more.

He touched glasses with Saira. It was not the year of anything else. So.

It was coming up to the end of the world again, of course—it always was. But not so frantically as it had been, perhaps. Not with quite such agonies. Billy wasn’t the angel of memory—he was far too human for that—but he could see memory-angelhood from where he stood. Put it that way. Did he have a history to protect? It seemed to him that the streets were no longer starving.

From outside the sky looked in at them. Billy was behind glass.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of King Rat; Perdido Street Station, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Fantasy Award; The Scar, winner of the Locus Award and the British Fantasy Award; Iron Council, winner of the Locus Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Looking for Jake, a collection of short stories; Un Lun Dun, his New York Times bestselling book for younger readers; and The City & The City, named one of the top 100 Books of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He lives and works in London.

Kraken is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by China Miéville

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Originally published in the United Kingdom by Tor UK, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hiromi Kozuka for permission to reprint “The Kraken Awakes” by Hugh Cook. Reprinted by permission of Hiromi Kozuka.

Library of /Congress Cataloging-to-Publication Date

Miéville, China.
Kraken : an anatomy / China Miéville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52185-9
1. Museum curators—England—Fiction. 2. Giant squids—Fiction.
3. Magic—Fiction. 4. Cults—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.I265K73 2010
823′.914—dc22      2010013893

www.delreybooks.com

v3.0

ALSO BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

King Rat
Perdido Street Station
The Scar
Iron Council
Looking for Jake: Stories
Un Lun Dun
The City & The City
Kraken

Embassytown is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by China Miéville

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Published in the United Kingdom by Macmillan, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miéville, China.
Embassytown / China Miéville.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52451-5
1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. Life on other planets—Fiction. 3. Space warfare—Fiction. 4. Loyalty—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.I265E46 2011
823′.914—dc22
2011002854

www.delreybooks.com

Jacket design and illustration: David Stevenson

v3.1_r1

To Jesse

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m very grateful to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Andrea Gibbons, Chloe Healy, Deanna Hoak, Simon Kavanagh, Peter Lavery, Farah Mendlesohn, Davis Moensch, Tom Penn, Max Schaefer, Chris Schluep, Jesse Soodalter, Karen Traviss, Jeremy Trevathan, and all at Macmillan and Del Rey. Among the writers I’m particularly grateful to are I. A. Richards, Paul Ricoeur, and Tran Duc Thao.

“The word must communicate something (other than itself).”

Walter Benjamin, “On Language as such and on the Language of Man”

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Epigraph

Proem: The Immerser

0.1

0.2

0.3

Part One - Income

Latterday, 1

Formerly, 1

Latterday, 2

Formerly, 2

Latterday, 3

Part Two - Festivals

Latterday, 4

Formerly, 3

Latterday, 5

Formerly, 4

Latterday, 6

Formerly, 5

Latterday, 7

Formerly, 6

Latterday, 8

Part Three - Like As Not

Formerly, 7

Formerly, 8

Formerly, 9

Formerly, 10

Part Four - Addict

9

10

11

12

13

Part Five - Notes

14

15

16

Part Six - New Kings

17

18

19

Part Seven - The Languageless

20

21

22

23

24

Part Eight - The Parley

25

26

27

28

29

Part Nine - The Relief

30

31

Excerpt to Railsea

About the Author

The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way.

I looked at the pictures and the man beside me leaned in too. “Look,” I said. “See? That’s you.” A face at the boat’s window. The man smiled. He gripped a pretend wheel like the simply rendered figure.

“You have to excuse us,” I said, nodding at the decorations. “We’re a bit parochial.”

“No, no,” the pilot said. I was older than him, dressed up and dropping slang to tell him stories. He enjoyed me flustering him. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s not … It is amazing though. Coming here. To the edge. With Lord knows what’s beyond.” He looked into the Arrival Ball.

There were other parties: seasonals, comings-out, graduations and yearsends, the three Christmases of December; but the Arrival Ball was always the most important. Dictated by the vagaries of trade winds, it was irregular and rare. It had been years since the last.

Diplomacy Hall was crowded. Mingling with the embassy staff were security, teachers and physicians, local artists. There were delegates from isolated outsider communities, hermit-farmers. There were a very few newcomers from the out, in clothes the locals would soon emulate. The crew was due to leave the next day or the one after; Arrival Balls always came at the end of a visit, as if celebrating an arrival and a departure at once.

A string septet played. One of the members was my friend Gharda, who saw me and frowned an apology for the unsubtle jig she was halfway through. Young men and women were dancing. They were licensed embarrassments to their bosses and elders, who would themselves, to their younger colleagues’ delight, sometimes sway or turn a humorously stilted pirouette.

By the temporary display of children’s illustrations were Diplomacy Hall’s permanent hangings: oils and gouaches, flat and trid photographs of staff, Ambassadors and attachés; even Hosts. They tracked the city’s history. Creepers reached the height of the panelling to a deco cornice, spread into a thicket canopy. The wood was designed to sustain them. Their leaves were disturbed by thumb-sized vespcams hunting for images to transmit.

A security man I’d been friends with years before waved a brief greeting with his prosthesis. He was silhouetted in a window metres high and wide, which overlooked the city and Lilypad Hill. Behind that slope was the boat, loaded with cargo. Beyond kilometres of roofs, past rotating church-beacons, were the power stations. They had been made uneasy by the landing, and were still skittish, days later. I could see them stamping.

“That’s you,” I said, pointing them out to the steersman. “That’s your fault.” He laughed but he was only half looking. He was distracted by pretty much everything. This was his first descent.

I thought I recognised a lieutenant from a previous party. On his last arrival, years before, it had been a mild autumn in the embassy. He’d walked with me through the leaves of the high-floor gardens and stared into the city, where it had not been autumn, nor any other season he could have known.

I walked through smoke from salvers of stimulant resin and said goodbyes. A few outlanders who’d finished commissions were leaving, and with them a tiny number of locals who’d requested, and been granted, egress.

“Darling, are you weepy?” said Kayliegh. I wasn’t. “I’ll see you tomorrow, and maybe even the day after. And you can …” But she knew that communication would be so difficult it would end. We hugged until she, at least, was a little teary, and laughing too, saying, “You of all people, you must know why I’m off,” and I was saying, “I know, you cow, I’m so jealous!”

I could see her thinking, You chose, and it was true. I’d been going to leave, until half a year before, until the last miab had descended, with the shocking news of what, who, was on the way. Even then I’d told myself I’d stick to my plan, head into the out when the next relief came. But it was no real revelation to me when at last the yawl had crossed the sky and left it howling, and I’d realised I was going to stay. Scile, my husband, had probably suspected before I did that I would.

“When will they be here?” asked the pilot. He meant the Hosts.

“Soon,” I said, having no idea. It wasn’t the Hosts I wanted to see.

Ambassadors had arrived. People came close to them but they didn’t get jostled. There was always space around them, a moat of respect. Outside, rain hit the windows. I’d been able to ascertain nothing of what had been going on behind doors from any of my friends, any usual sources. Only the top bureaucrats and their advisors had met our most important, controversial newcomers, and I was hardly among them.

People were glancing at the entrance. I smiled at the pilot. More Ambassadors were entering. I smiled at them, too, until they acknowledged me.

The city Hosts would come before long, and the last of the new arrivals. The captain and the rest of the ship’s crew; the attachés; the consuls and researchers; perhaps a few late immigrants; and the point of all this, the impossible new Ambassador.

PROEM

THE IMMERSER

0.1

When we were young in Embassytown, we played a game with coins and coin-sized crescent offcuts from a workshop. We always did so in the same place, by a particular house, beyond the rialto in a steep-sloping backstreet of tenements, where advertisements turned in colours under the ivy. We played in the smothered light of those old screens, by a wall we christened for the tokens we played with. I remember spinning a heavy two-sou piece on its edge and chanting as it went, turnabout, incline, pig-snout, sunshine, until it wobbled and fell. The face that showed and the word I’d reached when the motion stopped would combine to specify some reward or forfeit.

I see myself clearly in wet spring and in summer, with a deuce in my hand, arguing over interpretations with other girls and with boys. We would never have played elsewhere, though that house, about which and about the inhabitant of which there were stories, could make us uneasy.

Like all children we mapped our hometown carefully, urgently and idiosyncratically. In the market we were less interested in the stalls than in a high cubby left by lost bricks in a wall, which we always failed to reach. I disliked the enormous rock that marked the town’s edge, which had been split and set again with mortar (for a purpose I did not yet know), and the library, the crenellations and armature of which felt unsafe to me. We all loved the college for the smooth plastone of its courtyard, on which tops and hovering toys travelled for metres.

We were a hectic little tribe and constables would frequently challenge us, but we needed only say, “It’s alright sir, madam, we have to just …” and keep on. We would come fast down the steep and crowded grid of streets, past the houseless automa of Embassytown, with animals running among us or by us on low roofs, and while we might pause to climb trees and vines, we always eventually reached the interstice.

At this edge of town the angles and piazzas of our home alleys were interrupted by at first a few uncanny geometries of Hosts’ buildings; then more and more, until our own were all replaced. Of course we would try to enter the Host city, where the streets changed their looks, and brick, cement or plasm walls surrendered to other more lively materials. I was sincere in these attempts but comforted that I knew I’d fail.

We’d compete, daring each other to go as far as we could, marking our limits. “We’re being chased by wolves, and we have to run,” or “Whoever goes farthest’s vizier,” we said. I was the third-best southgoer in my gang. In our usual spot, there was a Hostnest in fine alien colours tethered by creaking ropes of muscle to a stockade, that in some affectation the Hosts had fashioned like one of our wicker fences. I’d creep up on it while my friends whistled from the crossroads.

See images of me as a child and there’s no surprise: my face then was just my face now not-yet-finished, the same suspicious mouth-pinch or smile, the same squint of effort that sometimes got me laughed at later, and then as now I was rangy and restless. I’d hold my breath and go forward on a lungful through where the airs mixed—past what was not quite a hard border but was still remarkably abrupt a gaseous transition, breezes sculpted with nanotech particle-machines and consummate atmosphere artistry—to write Avice on the white wood. Once on a whim of bravado I patted the nest’s flesh anchor where it interwove the slats. It felt as taut as a gourd. I ran back, gasping, to my friends.

“You touched it.” They said that with admiration. I stared at my hand. We would head north to where aeoli blew, and compare our achievements.

A quiet, well-dressed man lived in the house where we played with coins. He was a source of local disquiet. Sometimes he came out while we were gathered. He would regard us and purse his lips in what might have been greeting or disapproval, before he turned and walked.

We thought we understood what he was. We were wrong, of course, but we’d picked up whatever we had from around the place and considered him broken and his presence inappropriate. “Hey,” I said more than once to my friends, when he emerged, pointing at him behind his back, “hey.” We would follow when we were brave, as he walked alleys of hedgerow toward the river or a market, or in the direction of the archive ruins or the Embassy. Twice I think one of us jeered nervously. Passersby instantly hushed us.

“Have some respect,” an altoysterman told us firmly. He put down his basket of shellfish and aimed a quick cuff at Yohn, who had shouted. The vendor watched the old man’s back. I remember suddenly knowing, though I didn’t have the words to express it, that not all his anger was directed at us, that those tutting in our faces were disapproving, at least in part, of the man.

“They’re not happy about where he lives,” said that evening’s shiftfather, Dad Berdan, when I told him about it. I told the story more than once, describing the man we had followed carefully and confusedly, asking the dad about him. I asked him why the neighbours weren’t happy and he smiled in embarrassment and kissed me good night. I stared out of my window and didn’t sleep. I watched the stars and the moons, the glimmering of Wreck.

I can date the following events precisely, as they occurred on the day after my birthday. I was melancholic in a way I’m now amused by. It was late afternoon. It was the third sixteenth of September, a Dominday. I was sitting alone, reflecting on my age (absurd little Buddha!), spinning my birthday money by the coin wall. I heard a door open but I didn’t look up, so it may have been seconds that the man from the house stood before me while I played. When I realised, I looked up at him in bewildered alarm.

“Girl,” he said. He beckoned. “Please come with me.” I don’t remember considering running. What could I do, it seemed, but obey?

His house was astonishing. There was a long room full of dark colours, cluttered with furniture, screens and figurines. Things were moving, automa on their tasks. We had creepers on the walls of our nursery but nothing like these shining black-leaved sinews in ogees and spirals so perfect they looked like prints. Paintings covered the walls, and plasmings, their movements altering as we entered. Information changed on screens in antique frames. Hand-sized ghosts moved among potted plants on a trid like a mother-of-pearl games board.

“Your friend.” The man pointed at his sofa. On it lay Yohn.

I said his name. His booted feet were up on the upholstery, his eyes were closed. He was red and wheezing.

I looked at the man, afraid that whatever he’d done to Yohn, as he must have done, he would do to me. He did not meet my eyes, instead fussing with a bottle. “They brought him to me,” he said. He looked around, as if for inspiration on how to speak to me. “I’ve called the constables.”

He sat me on a stool by my barely breathing friend and held out a glass of cordial to me. I stared at it suspiciously until he drank from it himself, swallowed and showed me he had by sighing with his mouth open. He put the vessel in my hand. I looked at his neck, but I could not see a link.

I sipped what he had given me. “The constables are coming,” he said. “I heard you playing. I thought it might help him to have a friend with him. You could hold his hand.” I put the glass down and did so. “You could tell him you’re here, tell him he’ll be alright.”

“Yohn, it’s me, Avice.” After a silence I patted Yohn on the shoulder. “I’m here. You’ll be alright, Yohn.” My concern was quite real. I looked up for more instructions, and the man shook his head and laughed.

“Just hold his hand then,” he said.

“What happened, sir?” I said.

“They found him. He went too far.”

Poor Yohn looked very sick. I knew what he’d done.

Yohn was the second-best southgoer in our group. He couldn’t compete with Simmon, the best of all, but Yohn could write his name on the picket fence several slats farther than I. Over some weeks I’d strained to hold my breath longer and longer, and my marks had been creeping closer to his. So he must have been secretly practicing. He’d run too far from the breath of the aeoli. I could imagine him gasping, letting his mouth open and sucking in air with the sour bite of the interzone, trying to go back but stumbling with the toxins, the lack of clean oxygen. He might have been down, unconscious, breathing that nasty stew for minutes.

“They brought him to me,” the man said again. I made a tiny noise as I suddenly noticed that, half-hidden by a huge ficus, something was moving. I don’t know how I’d failed to see it.

It was a Host. It stepped to the centre of the carpet. I stood immediately, out of the respect I’d been taught and my child’s fear. The Host came forward with its swaying grace, in complicated articulation. It looked at me, I think: I think the constellation of forking skin that was its lustreless eyes regarded me. It extended and re-clenched a limb. I thought it was reaching for me.

“It’s waiting to see the boy’s taken,” the man said. “If he gets better it’ll be because of our Host here. You should say thank you.”

I did so and the man smiled. He squatted beside me, put his hand on my shoulder. Together we looked up at the strangely moving presence. “Little egg,” he said, kindly. “You know it can’t hear you? Or, well … that it hears you but only as noise? But you’re a good girl, polite.” He gave me some inadequately sweet adult confection from a mantelpiece bowl. I crooned over Yohn, and not only because I was told to. I was scared. My poor friend’s skin didn’t feel like skin, and his movements were troubling. The Host bobbed on its legs. At its feet shuffled a dog-sized presence, its companion. The man looked up into what must be the Host’s face. Staring at it, he might have looked regretful, or I might be saying that because of things I later knew.

The Host spoke.

Of course I’d seen its like many times. Some lived in the interstice where we dared ourselves to play. We sometimes found ourselves facing them, as they walked with crablike precision on whatever their tasks were, or even ran, with a gait that made them look as if they must fall, though they did not. We saw them tending the flesh walls of their nests, or what we thought of as their pets, those whispering companion animal things. We would quieten abruptly down in their presence and move away from them. We mimicked the careful politeness our shiftparents showed them. Our discomfort, like that of the adults we learned it from, outweighed any curiosity at the strange actions we might see the Hosts performing.

We would hear them speak to each other in their precise tones, so almost like our voices. Later in our lives a few of us might understand some of what they said, but not yet, and never really me.

I’d never been so close to one of the Hosts. My fear for Yohn distracted me from all I’d otherwise feel from this proximity to the thing, but I kept it in my sight, so it could not surprise me, so when it rocked closer to me I shied away abruptly and broke off whispering to my friend.

They were not the only exoterres I’d seen. There were exot inhabitants of Embassytown—a few Kedis, a handful of Shur’asi and others—but with them, while there was strangeness of course there was never that abstraction, that sheer remove one felt from Hosts. One Shur’asi shopkeeper would even joke with us, his accent bizarre but his humour clear.

Later I understood that those immigrants were exclusively from species with which we shared conceptual models, according to various measures. Hosts, the indigenes, in whose city we had been graciously allowed to build Embassytown, were cool, incomprehensible presences. Powers like subaltern gods, which sometimes watched us as if we were interesting, curious dust; which provided our biorigging; and to which the Ambassadors alone spoke. We were reminded often that we owed them courtesy. Pass them in the street and we would show the required respect, then run on giggling. Without my friends, though, I couldn’t camouflage my fear with silliness.

“It’s asking if the boy’ll be alright,” the man said. He rubbed his mouth. “Colloquially, something like, will he run later or will he cool? It wants to help. It has helped. It probably thinks me rude.” He sighed. “Or mentally ill. Because I won’t answer it. It can see I’m diminished. If your friend doesn’t die it’ll be because it brought him here.

“The Hosts found him.” I could tell the man was trying to speak gently to me. He seemed unpractised. “They can come here but they know we can’t leave. They know more or less what we need.” He pointed at the Host’s pet. “They had their engines breathe oxygen into him. Yohn’ll maybe be fine. The constables’ll come soon. Your name’s Avice. Where do you live, Avice?” I told him. “Do you know my name?”

I’d heard it of course. I was unsure of the etiquette of speaking it to him. “Bren,” I said.

“Bren. That isn’t right. You understand that? You can’t say my name. You might spell it, but you can’t say it. But then I can’t say my name either. Bren is as good as any of us can do. It …” He looked at the Host, which nodded gravely. “Now, it can say my name. But that’s no good: it and I can’t speak anymore.”

“Why did they bring him to you, sir?” His house was close to the interstice, to where Yohn had fallen, but hardly adjacent.

“They know me. They brought your friend to me because though as I say they know me to be lessened in some way they also recognise me. They speak and they must hope I’ll answer them. I’m … I must be … very confusing to them.” He smiled. “It’s all foolishness, I know. Believe me I do know that. Do you know what I am, Avice?”

I nodded. Now, of course, I know that I had no idea what he was, and I’m not sure he did either.

The constables at last arrived with a medical team, and Bren’s room became an impromptu surgery. Yohn was intubated, drugged, monitored. Bren pulled me gently out of the experts’ way. We stood to one side, I, Bren and the Host, its animal tasting my feet with a tongue like a feather. A constable bowed to the Host, which moved its face in response.

“Thanks for helping your friend, Avice. Perhaps he’ll be fine. And I’ll see you soon, I’m sure. ‘Turnaround, incline, piggy, sunshine’?” Bren smiled.

While a constable ushered me out at last, Bren stood with the Host. It had wrapped him in a companionable limb. He did not pull away. They stood in polite silence, both looking at me.

At the nursery they fussed over me. Even assured by the officer that I’d done nothing wrong, the staffparents seemed a little suspicious about what I’d got myself into. But they were decent, because they loved us. They could see I was in shock. How could I forget Yohn’s shaking figure? More, how could I forget being quite so close up to the Host, the sounds of its voice? I was haunted by what had been, without question, its precise attention on me.

“So somebody had drinks with Staff, today, did they?” my shiftfather teased as he put me to bed. It was Dad Shemmi, my favourite.

Later in the out I took mild interest in all the varieties of ways to be families. I don’t remember any particular jealousy I, or most other Embassytown children, felt at those of our shiftsiblings whose blood parents at times visited them: it wasn’t in particular our norm there. I never looked into it, but I wondered, in later life, whether our shift-and-nursery system continued social practices of Embassytown’s founders (Bremen has for a long time been relaxed about including a variety of mores in its sphere of governance), or if it had been thrown up a little later. Perhaps in vague social-evolutionary sympathy with the institutional raising of our Ambassadors.

No matter. You heard terrible stories from the nurseries from time to time, yes, but then in the out I heard bad stories, too, about people raised by those who’d birthed them. On Embassytown we all had our favourites and those we were more scared of, those whose on-duty weeks we relished and those not, those we’d go to for comfort, those for advice, those we’d steal from, and so on; but our shiftparents were good people. Shemmi I loved the most.

“Why do the people not like Mr. Bren living there?”

“Not Mr. Bren, darling, just Bren. They, some of them, don’t think it’s right for him to live like that, in town.”

“What do you think?”

He paused. “I think they’re right. I think it’s … unseemly. There are places for the cleaved.” I’d heard that word before, from Dad Berdan. “Retreats just for them, so … It’s ugly to see, Avvy. He’s a funny one. Grumpy old sod. Poor man. But it isn’t good to see. That kind of wound.”

It’s disgusting, some of my friends later said. They’d learnt this attitude from less liberal shiftparents. Nasty old cripple should go to the sanatorium. Leave him alone, I’d say. He saved Yohn.

Yohn recovered. His experience didn’t stop our game. I went a little farther, a little farther over weeks, but I never reached Yohn’s marks. The fruits of his dangerous experiment, a last mark, was metres beyond any of his others, the initial letter of his name in a terrible hand. “I fainted there,” he would tell us. “I nearly died.” After his accident he was never able to go nearly so far again. He remained the second-best because of his history, but I could beat him now.

“How do I spell Bren’s name?” I asked Dad Shemmi, and he showed me.

“Bren,” he said, running his finger along the word: seven letters; four he sounded; three he could not.

0.2

When I was seven years old I left Embassytown. Kissed my shiftparents and siblings goodbye. I returned when I was eleven: married; not rich but with savings and a bit of property; knowing a little of how to fight, how to obey orders, how and when to disobey them; and how to immerse.

I’d become fair-to-good at several things, though I excelled, I thought, at only one. It wasn’t violence. That’s an everyday risk of port life, and over my time away I’d lost only a few more fights than I’d won. I look stronger than I am, I was always quickish, and like many middling scrappers I’d become good at insinuating more skill than I had. I could avoid confrontations without obvious cowardice.

I was bad at money but had amassed some. I couldn’t claim that marriage was my real skill, but I was better at it than many. I’d had two previous husbands and a wife. I’d lost them to changes of predilection, without rancour—as I say, I wasn’t bad at marriage. Scile was my fourth spouse.

As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking.

Immersers, I think, created the term. Everyone has some floaker in them. There’s a devil on your shoulder. Not everyone crewing aspires to master the technique—there are those who want to captain or explore—but for most, floaking is indispensable. Some people think it mere indolence but it’s a more active and nuanced technique than that. Floakers aren’t afraid of effort: many crew work very hard to get shipboard in the first place. I did.

When I think of my age I think in years, still, even after all this time and travel. It’s bad form, and ship-life should have cured me of it. “Years?” one of my first officers shouted at me. “I don’t give two shits about whatever your pisspot home’s sidereal shenanigans are, I want to know how old you are.”

Answer in hours. Answer in subjective hours: no officer cares if you’ve slowed any compared to your pisspot home. No one cares which of the countless year-lengths you grew up with. So, when I was about 170 kilohours old I left Embassytown. I returned when I was 266Kh, married, with savings, having learnt a few things.

I was about 158 kilohours old when I learnt that I could immerse. I knew then what I’d do, and I did it.

I answer in subjective hours; I have to bear objective hours vaguely in mind; I think in the years of my birth-home, which was itself dictated to by the schedules of another place. None of this has anything to do with Terre. I once met a junior immerser from some self-hating backwater who reckoned in what he called “earth-years,” the risible fool. I asked him if he’d been to the place by the calendar of which he lived. Of course he’d no more idea of where it was than I.

As I’ve grown older I’ve become conscious of how unsurprising I am. What happened to me didn’t happen to many Embassytowners—that’s surely the point—but the story of its happening is classic. I was born in a place that I thought for thousands of hours was enough of a universe. Then I knew quite suddenly that it was not, but that I wouldn’t be able to leave; and then I could leave. You hear the same all over the place, and not only among the human.

Here’s another memory. We used to play at immersing, running up behind each other in a little I’m invisible crouch, then shouting “Emerge!” and grabbing. We knew very little about immersion, and that playacting was, I would come to learn, not much more inaccurate than most adult descriptions of the immer.

Irregularly throughout my youth, scheduled between incoming ships, miabs would arrive. Uncrewed little boxes full of oddments, steered by ’ware. Plenty were lost en route: became hazards forever, I later learned, in variously strange corroded forms, in the immer they’d been built to travel. But most reached us. As I got older my excitement at those arrivals became coloured by frustration, envy of them, until I realised I would, in fact, get out into the out. They became hints, then: little whispers.

When I was four and a half years old I saw a train hauling a just-touched-down miab through Embassytown. Like most children and many adults, I always wanted to witness their arrival. There was a little gang of us there from the nursery, watched and lightly corralled by Mum Quiller, I think it was, and we ourselves roughly looked out for our much younger shiftfriends. We were able to lean up over the railings mostly uninterrupted and chatter at each other and the arrival.

As always the miab was laid on a colossal flatbed, and the biorigged locomotor that hauled it through the wide cut of Embassytown’s industrial rails was heaving, putting out temporary muscular legs to strain along with its engine. The miab on its back was bigger than my nursery’s hall. A very real container, snub-bullet-shaped, moving through light rain. Its surface sheened with saft that evanesced out from its crystal shielding in threads that degraded to nothing. The authorities were irresponsible, I know now, not to have waited for that immer-stained surface to calm. This wasn’t the first miab they’d brought in still damp from its journey.

I saw a building dragged. That’s what it looked like. A big train wheezing with effort, its enginarii cajoling it through a gash. The enormous room was tugged uphill toward the Ambassadors’ castle, surrounded by Embassytowners, cheering and waving ribbons. It had an escort of centaurs, men and women perched at the front of quadruped biorigged conveyances. Some of the town’s few exots stood by their Terre friends: Kedis frills rose and flushed colours, Shur’asi and Pannegetch made their sounds. There were automa in the crowd: some staggering boxes, some with persuasive-enough turingware that they seemed enthusiastic participants.

Inside the unmanned vessel would be cargo, presents to us from Dagostin and perhaps beyond, import things we coveted, bookware and books, newsware, rare foods, tech, letters. The craft itself would be cannibalised, too. I’d sent things out in return myself, yearly, when our own much smaller miabs were dispatched. They contained hardy goods and the paraphernalia of official duties (all carefully copied before dispatch—no one would assume any miab would reach its destination), but a little space was retained for children to correspond with pen-pal schools in the out.

“Miab, miab, message in a bottle!” Mum Berwick would sing as she gathered our letters up. Dear Class 7, Bowchurch High, Charo City, Bremen, Dagostin, I remember writing. I wish that I could come with my letter to visit you. Brief catch-up epistolary flurries every rare often.

The miab passed by one of the waterways we called rivers, which are small canals, under Stilt Bridge. I remember that there were Hosts there, with a delegation of Embassy Staff, looking down through the bridge’s coloured-glass portals, flanked by our security on biorigged mount-machines.

It was out of my sight when the stowaway emerged from the miab, but I’ve seen recordings. The tracks were overlooked by tenements on the east side and the animal gardens on the west when cracking first became audible. Had it been a kilometre farther, into the rookeries and under the bridgepaths in the Embassy’s close vicinity, it would have gone much worse.

You can see from the newsloads that some in the crowd knew what was happening. There were shouts as the noise grew, people trying to warn people. Some of those who understood simply ran. Us kids mostly just stood I think, though Mum Quiller would have done her best to get us out of there. There’s the sound of the miab’s ceramic case straining in anti-Newtonian ways. People are peering over the railings to see; more and more are getting out of there.

The miab splits, sending blades of hull matter viciously airborne. Something from the immer comes out.

Taxonomy is imprecise. Most experts agree that what emerged on that day was a minor manifestation, one I’d later learn to call a stichling. It was an insinuation at first, composing itself of angles and shadows. It accreted itself from its surrounds, manifesting in the transient. The bricks, plastone and concrete of buildings, the energy of the cages and the flesh of the captive animals from the gardens spilled toward and into the swimming thing, against physics. They substanced it. Houses were unroofed as their slates dripped sideways into a presence growing every moment more physical, more suited to this realness.

It was put down quickly. They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer. It was banished or dispatched after minutes of shrieking.

Thankfully no Hosts were harmed. But the emergence left scores of others dead. Some were killed in the explosion; some were lessened, had partially poured away. From then on, when retrieving miabs, Staff obeyed the protocols of care that they had been letting slip. Our trids showed repeated debates, fury and angst. Whoever it was in Staff who was sacked in disgrace was a scapegoat for the system. A young, dashingly ill-disciplined Ambassador DalTon more or less asserted that on cam, in anger, which I remember the parents talking about. Dad Noor even told me the disaster would be the end of the pomp of arrival. He was wrong about this, of course. He was always a lugubrious man.

Of course my friends and I were obsessed with the tragedy. Within a very short time we were playing it as a game, making immer-bubbling and cracking-shellcase noises, firing finger-guns and sticks at those of us temporarily monsters. I conceived of the stichling I think as some sort of slayed dragon.

There’s a story told, sort of a traditional view, that immersers never remember their childhoods. That’s obviously not true. People say it as a way to stress the strangeness of the immer; the implication being that there’s something in that foundational altreality that plays buggery with human minds. (Which it can do, certainly, but not like that.)

It’s not true, but it is the case that I, and most of the immersers I’ve known, have casual, or vague, or discombobulated memories of when we were small. I don’t think it’s a mystery: I think it’s a corollary of our mindsets, the way we think, those of us who want to go into the out.

I recall episodes very well, but episodes, not a timeline. The most relevant times, the definitional ones. The rest of it’s disorganised in my head, and mostly I don’t mind. Here: one other time in my childhood, I was in the company of Hosts. One morning in the third monthling of July I was called to a meeting.

It was Dad Shemmi they sent to fetch me. He squeezed my shoulder as he pointed me in to one of the nursery’s scruffy paperwork-and-datspace-filled offices. It was Mum Solfer’s room, and I’d not been in it before. Mostly Terretech, though a boxy biorigged bin was quietly eating her rubbish. Solfer was older, kind, distracted, knew me by name, which she did not all my shiftsiblings. She beckoned me, obviously uneasy. She stood, glanced around as if for a sofa, which the room was without, sat again. Behind her desk with her—not unamusing, in retrospect, it was smallish and too cramped for them—was Dad Renshaw, a relatively new, thoughtful and teacherly shiftfather, who smiled at me; and to my astonishment the third person waiting for me was Bren.

It had been almost a year, nearly 25Kh, since Yohn’s accident, since I or any of us had returned to that house. I’d grown, of course, and more than many of my siblings, but as soon as I entered Bren smiled recognition. He looked unchanged. They might have been the same clothes he had on as before.

Mum shifted. Though she sat with the others on one side of the desk while I, on the stiffly adult chair to which she directed me, was on the other, the way she moved her eyebrows at me I felt suddenly that she and I were together in whatever this oddness was.

I’d be paid for this, she said (an uploading of no little size, it turned out); it was quite safe; it was an honour. She didn’t make very much sense. Dad Renshaw gently interrupted her. He turned to Bren and motioned for him to speak.

“You’re needed,” Bren said to me. “That’s all this is.” He opened his hands palm up, as if their emptiness were evidence of something. “The Hosts need you and again for some reason it’s ended up going through me. They’re trying to prepare something. They’re having a debate. A few of them are convinced they can make their point clearly by … by comparison.” He watched to see if I followed. “They’ve … sort of thought of one. But the events it describes haven’t happened. Do you understand what that means? They want to make it speakable. So they need to organise it. Quite precisely. It involves a human girl.” He smiled. “You see why I asked for you.” I suppose he didn’t know any other children.

Bren smiled at the way my mouth was moving. “You … want me to … perform a simile?” I said at last.

“It’s an honour!” Dad Renshaw said.

“It is an honour,” Bren said. “I can see you know that. ‘Perform’?” He wagged his head in a sort of well, yes and no way. “I won’t tell you lies. It’ll hurt. And it won’t be nice. But I promise you’ll be alright. I promise.” He leaned toward me. “There’ll be money in it for you, like your Mum was saying. And. Also. You’ll have the thanks of the Staff. And the Ambassadors.” Renshaw glanced up. I wasn’t so young as to not know what that gratitude was worth. I’d an idea of what I hoped to do when I was old enough, by then, and the goodwill of Staff was something I wanted very much.

I also said yes to the request because I thought it would take me into the Host city. It did not. The Hosts came to us, to a part of town to which I’d hardly ever been. I was taken there in a corvid—my first flight, but I was too nervous to enjoy it—escorted not by constables but Embassy SecStaff, their bodies subtly gnarled with augmens and tecs.

Bren escorted me, with no one else, no shiftparents, though he had no official role in Embassytown. (I didn’t know that then.) That was a time, though, before he withdrew from the last of such informal Staff-like roles. He tried to be kind to me. I remember we skirted Embassytown’s edges and I saw for the first time the scale of the enormous throats that delivered biorigging and supplies to us. They flexed, wet and warm ends of siphons extending kilometres beyond our boundaries. I saw other craft over the city: some biorigged, some old Terretech, some chimerical.

We came down in a neglected quarter that no one had been bothered to take off-grid. Though it was almost empty its streets were lit by lifelong neon and trid spectres dancing in midair, announcing restaurants long-since closed. In the ruins of one such, Hosts were waiting. Their simile, I had been warned, required me to be alone with them, so Bren gave me into their authority.

He shook his head at me as he did, as if we were agreeing that something was a little absurd. He whispered that it wouldn’t be long, and that he would be waiting.

What occurred in that crumbling once-dining room wasn’t by any means the worst thing I’ve ever suffered, or the most painful, or the most disgusting. It was quite bearable. It was, however, the least comprehensible event that had or has ever happened to me. I was surprised how much that upset me.

For a long time the Hosts didn’t pay attention to me, but performed precise mimes. They raised their giftwings, they stepped forward and back. I could smell their sweet smell. I was frightened. I’d been prepared: it was imperative for the sake of the simile that I act my part perfectly. They spoke. I understood only the very basics of what I heard, could pick out an occasional word. I listened for the overlapping whisper I’d been told meant she, and when I heard it I came forward and did what they wanted.

I know now to call what I did then disassociating. I watched it all, myself included. I was impatient for it to finish; I felt nothing growing, no special connection between me and the Hosts. I was only watching. While we performed the actions that were necessary, that would allow them to speak their analogy, I thought of Bren. He could of course no longer speak to the Hosts. What was happening had been organised by the Embassy, and I supposed Bren’s erstwhile colleagues, the Ambassadors, must have been glad for him to help organise it. I wonder if they were giving him something to do.

After I was done, in the youthmall, my friends demanded all details. We were roughnecks like most Embassytowner children are. “You were with the Hosts? That’s import, Avvy! Swear? Say it like a Host?”

“Say it like a Host,” I said, appropriately solemn for the oath.

“No way. What did they do?” I showed my bruises. I both did and didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually I enjoyed the telling and embellishing of it. It gave me status for days.

Other consequences were more important. Two days later, Dad Renshaw escorted me to Bren’s house. It was the first time I’d been there since Yohn’s accident. Bren smiled and welcomed me, and there within I met my first Ambassadors.

Their clothes were the most beautiful I’d seen. Their links glinted, the lights on them stuttering in time to the fields they generated. I was cowed. There were three of them, and the room was crowded. The more so as, behind them, moving side to side, whispering to Bren or one or other Ambassador, was an autom, computer in segmented body, the woman’s face it gave itself animated as it spoke. I could see the Ambassadors trying to be warm to me, a child, as Bren had tried, without having any practice at it.

An older woman said, “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” in an amazing, grand voice. “Come in. Sit. We wanted to thank you. We think you should hear how you’ve been canonised.”

The Ambassadors spoke to me in the language of our Hosts. They spoke me: they said me. They warned me that the literal translation of the simile would be inadequate and misleading. There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time. “It’ll be shortened with use,” Bren told me. “Soon they’ll be saying you’re a girl ate what was given her.”

“What does it mean, sirs, ma’ams?”

They shook their heads, they moued. “It’s not really important, Avice,” one of them said. She whispered to the computer and I saw the created face nod. “And it wouldn’t be accurate anyway.” I asked again with another formulation, but they would say nothing more about it. They kept congratulating me on being in Language.

Twice during the rest of my adolescence I heard myself, my simile, spoken: once by an Ambassador, once by a Host. Years, thousands of hours after I acted it, I finally had it sort-of explained to me. It was a crude rendering, of course, but it is I think more or less an expression intended to invoke surprise and irony, a kind of resentful fatalism.

I didn’t speak to Bren again the whole rest of my childhood and youth, but I found out he visited my shiftparents at least one other time. I’m sure it was my help with the simile, and Bren’s vague patronage, that helped get me past the exam board. I worked hard but was never an intellectual. I had what was needed for immersion, but no more than several others did, and less than some who didn’t pass. Very few cartas were granted, to civilians, or those of us with the aptitudes to traverse the immer out of sopor. There was no obvious reason that a few months later, after those tests, even with my facilities acknowledged, I should have been given, as I was, rights to de-world, into the out.

0.3

Each school year, the second monthling of December was given over to assessments. Most investigated what we’d learned from our lessons; a few others checked more recherché abilities. Not many of us scored particularly highly in these latter, in the various flairs prized elsewhere, in the out. In Embassytown we started from the wrong stock, we were told: we had the wrong mutagens, the wrong equipment; a lack of aspiration. Many children didn’t even sit the more arcane exams, but I was encouraged to. Which I suppose means my teachers and shiftparents had seen something in me.

I did perfectly fine in most things; well in rhetoric and some performative elements of literature, which pleased me, and in readings of poetry. But what I stood out in, it transpired, without knowing what it was I was doing, were certain activities the purposes of which I couldn’t divine. I stared at a query-screen of bizarre plasmings. I had to react to them in various ways. It took about an hour and it was well-designed, like a game, so I wasn’t bored. I proceeded to other tasks, none testing knowledge, but reactions, intuitions, inner-ear control, nervousness. What they gauged was potential skill at immersing.

The woman who ran the sessions, young and chic in smart clothes borrowed, bartered or begged from one of the Bremeni staff, in fashion in the out, went over my results with me, and told me what they meant. I could see she was not unimpressed. She stressed to me, not cruelly but to avoid any later upset, that this concluded nothing and was just stage one of many. But I knew as she explained this that I would become an immerser, and I did. I’d only started to feel the smallness of Embassytown by then, to grumble in claustrophobia, but with her readings came impatience.

I finagled, when I was old enough, invitations to Arrival Balls, and hobnobbed with women and men from the out. I enjoyed and envied the seeming insouciance with which they mentioned countries on other planets.

It was only kilohours or years later that I really understood how not-inevitable my trajectory had been. That many students with more aptitude than I hadn’t succeeded; that I truly might have failed to leave. My story was the cliché, but theirs was by far the more common, the more true. That contingency had made me feel sick, then, as if I might fail still, even though I was out.

Even people who’ve never immersed think they know—more or less, they might grant—what the immer is. They don’t. I had this argument once with Scile. It was the second conversation we ever had (the first was about language). He started in with his opinions, and I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing what the landstuck might think about immer. We lay in bed and he teased me as I went on about his ignorance.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “You don’t even believe what you’re saying; you’re too smart for this. You’re just spouting immerser bullshit. I could do this stuff in my sleep. ‘No one understands it like us, not the scientists, not the politicians, not the bloody public!’ It’s your favourite story, this. Keeps everyone out.”

He made me laugh with his impression. Still, I told him, still: the immer was indescribable. But he wouldn’t let me have that either. “You’re fooling no one with this stuff. You think I haven’t listened to how you talk? I know, I know, you’re not one for the gab, you’re just a floaker, blah blah. As if you don’t read your poetry, as if you take language for granted.” He shook his head. “Anyway, you’ll do me out a job with talk like that. ‘It’s beyond words,’ indeed. There’s no such thing.”

I put my hand over his mouth. That was just how it was, I told him. “Now, granted,” he continued through my fingers, performing the same teacherly tone, now muffled, “words can’t actually be referents, that I grant you, there’s the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren’t nothing, either.” Hush up, you, I told him. It’s all true, I said, I say it like a Host. “Well then,” he said, “I withdraw, in the face of truth.”

I’d studied the immer a long time, but my first moment of immersion had been as impossible to describe as I insisted. With the handful of other carta-passed new crew and emigrants, and Bremeni Embassy Staff who’d finished their commissions, I’d come by ketch to my vessel. My first commission was with the Wasp of Kolkata. It was quasi-autonomous, a cityship, immersing under the flag of itself, subcontracted by Dagostin for this run. I remember I stood with all the other greenhorns in the crow’s nest, Arieka a wall across the sky through which we moved, with beautiful care, toward our immersion point. Somewhere beneath the world’s static-seeming cloud was Embassytown.

The steersperson took us close to Wreck. It was hard to see. It looked at first like lines drawn across space, then was briefly, shabbily corporeal. It ebbed and flowed in solidity. It was many hundreds of metres across. It rotated, all its extrusions moving, each on its own schedule, its coagulated-teardrops-and-girder-filigree shape spinning complexly.

Wreck’s architecture was roughly similar to Wasp’s, but it was antiquated, and it seemed many times our dimensions. It was like an original of which we were a scale model, until abruptly it altered its planes and became small or far off. Occasionally it wasn’t there, and sometimes only just.

Officers, augmens glimmering under their skins, reminded us first-timers what it was we were about to do, of the dangers of the immer. This, Wreck, showed that and why Arieka was an outpost, so hard to reach, so underdeveloped, satelliteless after that first catastrophe.

I would have been professional. Yes I was about to immerse for the first time, but I would have done anything I was ordered and I think I’d have done it well. But the officers remembered what it was like to be a rookie, and they had us, the handful of new immersers, at a viewing place. Where we could react as we had to, the skills we’d practiced never a guarantee that the first time wouldn’t sicken you. Where we could take a moment with our awe and experience it however we experienced it. There are currents and storm fronts in the immer. There are in the immer stretches it takes tremendous skill and time to cross. Those were among the techniques I now knew, along with the somatic control, the mantric thoughtfulness and instrumentalised matter-of-factness that made me an immerser, allowed immersers to stay conscious and intentional when we immersed.

On a map, it’s not so many billions of kilometres from Dagostin or other hubs. But those Euclidean star charts are used only by cosmologists, by some exoterres whose physics we can’t work, by religious nomads adrift at excruciating sublux pace. I was scandalised to first see them—maps were discouraged on Embassytown—and anyway such charts are irrelevant to travellers like me.

Look instead at a map of the immer. Such a big and tidal quiddity. Pull it up, rotate it, check its projections. Examine that light phantom every way you can, and even allowing that it’s a flat or trid rendering of a topos that rebels against our accounting, the situation is visibly different.

The immer’s reaches don’t correspond at all to the dimensions of the manchmal, this space where we live. The best we can do is say that the immer underlies or overlies, infuses, is a foundation, is langue of which our actuality is a parole, and so on. Here in the everyday, in light-decades and petametres, Dagostin is vastly more distant from Tarsk and Hodgson’s than from Arieka. But in the immer, Dagostin to Tarsk is a few hundred hours on a prevailing wind; Hodgson’s is in the centre of sedate and crowded deeps; and Arieka is very far from anything.

It’s beyond a convulsion where violent streams of immer roll against each other, where there are shallows, dangerous juts and matterbanks of everyday space in the always. It sits alone at the edge of known immer, so far as the immer can be known. Without expertise and bravery, and the skill of the immersers, no one could get to my world.

The stringency of the final exams I’d sat makes sense when you see those charts. Raw aptitude was hardly enough. Certainly there were politics of exclusion, too: of course Bremen wanted to keep careful control of us Embassytowners; but only the most skilled crew could safely come to Arieka in any case, or could leave it. Some of us were socketed to link us to ship routines, and immerware and augmens helped; but none of that was enough to make an immerser.

The way the officers explained it made it seem as if the ruins of the Pionier, which I had to stop calling Wreck now it was no longer a star to me but a coffin for colleagues, were a warning against carelessness. As a parable that was unfair. The Pionier had not been so horribly beached between states by officers or crew underestimating the immer: it was precisely care and respectful exploration that had destroyed it. Like other vessels across various tracta cognita in the early hours of it all, it had been lured. By what it had thought a message, an invitation.

When immernauts first breached the meniscus of everyday space, among the many phenomena that had astounded them was the fact that, even on their crude instruments, they had received signals from somewhere in the ur-space. Regular and resonant, clear evidence of sentience. They had tried to go to the sources. For a long time they’d thought it was lack of skill, neophyte immersion, that kept bringing their ships to disaster on those searches. Again and again they wrecked, bursting ruinously half-out of the immer into the corporeal manchmal.

The Pionier was a casualty of that time, before explorers had understood that the pulses were put out by lighthouses. They were not invitations. What the ships had striven toward were warnings to stay away.

So there are lighthouses throughout the immer. Not every dangerous zone is marked by the beacons, but many are. They are, it seems, at least as old as this universe, which isn’t the first there’s been. The prayer so often muttered before immersion is one of thanks to those unknown who placed them. Gracious Pharotekton watch over us now.

I didn’t see the Ariekene Pharos that first time out, but thousands of hours later. To be precise I’ve never seen it, of course, nor could I; that would require light and reflection and other physics that are meaningless there. But I’ve seen representations, rendered by ships’ windows.

The ’ware in those portholes depicts the immer and everything in it in terms useful to crew. I’ve seen pharos like complex clots, like crosshatching, contoured and shaped into information. When I returned to Embassytown the captain, in what I think was a gift to me, had the screens run tropeware: as we approached gnarls of immer into the dangerous buffetings that surround Arieka, I saw a beam in the fractal black, a pointing arm of light as a lamp seemed to turn. And when the pharos came into view, floating in the middle of the unplace, it was a brick lighthouse topped with bronze and glass.

I told him about these things when I met him, and Scile, who would later be my husband, wanted me to describe my first immersion. He’d been through immer, of course—he wasn’t indigene to the world on which we slept together—but as a passenger of modest income and no particular immunities, he’d remained in sopor. Though he had, he told me, once paid to be woken a little early, so he could experience immersion. (I’d heard of people doing that. A crew shouldn’t allow it, and surely only would in shallow shallows.) Scile had been violently immersick.

What could I tell him? Protected by the everyday-field, that first time the Wasp splashed through and immersed it wasn’t even as if I had immer against my skin. Truth was you could say I’d felt more directly connected to the immer as a trainee in Embassytown, when I’d socketed to a scope that worked on the immer like the flat bottom of a glass pushed down on water. I’d seen right into it then, up close, and that had changed me. Don’t ask me to describe that, I’d have said.

The Wasp went in hard. I was inexperienced but I could easily grit through the nausea that, despite my training, I felt. Even cosseted in that manchmal-field I felt all the tugs of strange velocity, as we moved in what were not really directions, and the misleading gravity bubble we’d brought with us did its best. But I was much too anxious not to disgrace myself to give in to awe. That came only later, after our indulgence was ended, after we’d been put to initial frantic duties and then after those were finished, when we’d reached a cruising depth of immersion.

What we do, what we can do—immersers—is not just keep ourselves stable, sentient and healthy in the immer, stay able to walk and think, eat, defecate, obey and give orders, make decisions, judge immerstuff, the paradata that approximate distances and conditions, without being crippled with always-sick. Though that’s not nothing. It isn’t only that we have, some say (and some refute), a certain flatness of imagination that keeps the immer from basilisking us out of usefulness. We’ve learned its caprices, to travel it, but knowledge can always be learnt.

Ships while still in the manchmal—Terre ones, I mean, I’ve never been on any exot vessels that abjure the immer and I know nothing about the ways they move—are heavy boxes full of people and stuff. Immerse, into the immer, where the translations of their ungainly lines have purpose, and they’re gestalts of which we’re part, each of us a function. Yes, we’re a crew working together like any crew, but more. The engines take us out of the sometimes, but it’s we who do the taking, too; it’s we who push the ship as well as it that pulls us. It’s us tacking and involuting through the ur-space, the shifts in it we call tides. Civilians, even those awake not puking or weeping, can’t do that. The fact is a lot of the bullshit we tell you about the immer is true. We’re still playing you, when we tell you: the story dramatises, even without lying.

“This is the third universe,” I told Scile. “There’ve been two others before this. Right?” I didn’t know how much civilians knew: this stuff had become my common sense. “Each one was born different. It had its own laws—in the first one they reckon light was about twice as fast as it is here now. Each one was born and grew and got old and collapsed. Three different sometimes. But below all that, or around it, or whatever, there’s only ever been one immer, one always.”

He did know all that, it turned out. But to be told these everyday facts by an immerser made them something new, and he listened like a boy.

We were in a bad hotel on the outskirts of Pellucias, a small city popular with tourists because of the gorgeous magmafalls it straddles. It’s the capital of a small country on a world the name of which I don’t remember. In the everyday, it’s not in our galaxy, it’s off somewhere light-aeons away, but it and Dagostin are close neighbours via the immer.

By then I was seasoned enough. I’d been to many places. I was between commissions, when I met Scile, spending a couple of local weeks on self-granted shore leave before I went for another job. I was picking up rumours—of new immertech, exploration, dubious missions. The hotel bar was full of immersers and other port life, travellers recovering, and, this time, academics. I was pretty familiar with all but the last of these types. In the lobby was an ad for a course in The Healing Power of Story, at which I made rude noises. A trid of turning and altering words floated the corridors, welcoming guests to the inaugural meeting of the Gold and Silver Circuits Board; to a convocation of Shur’asi philosopher-bureaucrats; to CHEL, the Conference of Human Exoterre Linguists.

I was drunk in the bar with a bunch of temporary stopover friends, all now thoroughly hazy memories. We were being obnoxious. I went from halfheartedly flirting with a bartender to mocking a table of scholars from CHEL, no less drunk or boisterous than we. We’d eavesdropped on them, then told them with immerser swagger that they didn’t know anything about life or even languages in the out, and so on.

“Go on then, ask me something,” I said to Scile. That was the first thing I ever said to him. I know exactly how I’d have looked: leaning back in my high chair, turned so resting my back against the bar top, my head back so I could look down at him. I was surely pointing at him with both hands and smiling a bit pinch-mouthed so as to not yet give him any satisfaction. Scile was the least gone at his table, and he was refereeing the teasing on both sides. “I know all about weird languages,” I told him. “More than any of you buggers. I’m from Embassytown.”

When he believed me, I’ve never seen a man so astonished, so delighted. He didn’t stop playing but he looked at me very differently, the more when he discovered none of my companions were my compatriots. I was the only Embassytowner, and Scile loved it.

It wasn’t just his attention I liked: I was pleased with how this compact, tough-looking guy fenced with me, and kept everyone raucously amused while asking questions with actual content. We stumbled off after a while and spent a night and a day trying to enjoy sex together, sleeping, trying again, several times, with good-humoured lack of success. After that over breakfast he badgered and blandished and begged me; and I, pretending disdain and having a lovely time, acquiesced, and let him take me, tired but, as I teased him, not sore enough, to the conference.

He presented me to his colleagues. The CHEL was for the Terre study of all exot languages, but it was those generally considered most strange that fascinated its members. I saw slapdash temporary trids advertising sessions on cross-cultural chromatophore signalling, on touch communication among the unseeing Burdhan, and on me.

“I’m working in Homash. Do you know it?” said one young woman to me, apropos of nothing. She was very happy when I told her no. “They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat.”

I noticed my own trid in the background. Embassytowner guest! On life among the Ariekei. “That’s wrong,” I told the conference organisers, “they’re Hosts.” But they told me: “Only to you.”

Scile’s colleagues were eager to talk to me: no one there had met Embassytowners before. Nor Hosts, of course.

“They’re still quarantined,” I told them, “but in any case they’ve never asked about coming out. We don’t even know if they could take immersion.”

I was willing to be a curio but I disappointed them. I’d warned Scile I would. The discussion became vague and sociological when they realised that I wouldn’t be able to tell them almost anything about Language.

“I hardly understand any,” I said. “We only learn a tiny bit, except Staff and Ambassadors.”

One participant pulled up some recordings of Hosts speaking, and ran through some vocabulary. I was pleased to be able to nuance a couple of the definitions, but honestly there were at least two people in the room who understood Language better than I did.

Instead I told them stories of life in the outpost. They didn’t know about the aeoli, the air-sculpting that kept a breathable dome over Embassytown. A few had seen some bits of exported biorigging, but I could talk them through the out-of-date trids they had of the vaster infrastructure, the herds of houses, time-lapse of a young bridge maturing from its pontoon-cell to link city regions for no reasons I could give. Scile asked me about religion, and I told him that so far as I knew the Hosts had none. I mentioned the Festivals of Lies. Scile was not the only one who wanted to pursue that. “But I thought they couldn’t,” someone said.

“That’s sort of the point,” I said. “To strive for the impossible.”

“What’re they like, those festivals?” I laughed and said I’d no clue, had never been to one, of course, had never been into the Host city.

They began to debate Language among themselves. Wondering how to repay their hospitality in anecdote, I told what had happened to me in the abandoned restaurant. They were attentive all over again. Scile stared with his manic precision. “You were in a simile?” they said.

“I am a simile,” I said.

“You’re a story?”

I was glad to be able to give Scile something. He and his colleagues were more excited at my having been similed than I was.

Sometimes I teased Scile that he only wanted me for my Hosts’ language, or because I’m part of a vocabulary.

He’d finished the bulk of his research. It was a comparative study of a particular set of phonemes, in several different languages—and not all of one species, or one world, which made little sense to me.

“What are you looking for?” I said.

“Oh, secrets,” he said. “You know. Essences. Inherentnesses.”

“Bravo on that ugly word. And?”

“And there aren’t any.”

“Mmm,” I said. “Awkward.”

“That’s defeatist talk. I’ll cobble something together. A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“Bravo again.” I toasted him.

We stayed together in that hotel much longer than either of us had planned, and then I, having no plans and no commission, sought work on the vessel taking him a trade route home. I was experienced and well-referenced, and getting the job wasn’t hard. It was only a short trip, 400 hours or some such. When I realised how bad was Scile’s reaction to immersion I was very touched that he chose not to travel in sopor that first time together. It was a pointless gesture—he endured my shifts in lonely nausea, and despite meds could hardly even speak to me when I was off duty. But even irritated at his condition, I was touched.

From what I gathered, it wouldn’t have taken very much for him to tidy up his last few chapters, the charts, sound files and trids. But Scile suddenly announced to me that he was not going to hand in his thesis.

“You’ve done all that work and you won’t jump the last hoop?” I said.

“Sod it,” he said, flamboyantly unconcerned. He made me laugh. “The revolution stalled!”

“My poor failed radical.”

“Yeah. Well. I was bored.”

“But, hold on,” I tried to say, more or less, “but are you serious? Surely it would be worth—”

“It’s done, it’s old news, forget it. I have other research projects anyway, simile. What are you like?” He bowed at that bad joke, clicked his fingers and moved us, thematically, on. He kept asking about Embassytown. His intensity was exciting, but he diluted it with enough self-mockery that I believed his sometimes obsessive demeanour was partly performance.

We didn’t stay long in his parochial university town. He said he’d follow me and pester me until I gave in and took him I-knew-where. I didn’t believe any of this, but when I got my next commission he took transit with me, as a passenger.

Once on that trip, when we were in shallow, calm immer, I brought Scile out of sopor to see a school of the immer predators we call hai. I’ve spoken to captains and scientists who don’t believe them to be anything like life, only aggregates of immer, their attacks and jackknife precision just the jostles of an immer chaos in which our manchmal brains can’t learn to see the deep random. Myself, I’ve always thought them monsters. Scile, fortified with drugs, and I watched our assertion-charges shake the immer and send the hai darting.

When we emerged wherever we emerged, wherever our vessel had delivery or pickup, Scile would register at local libraries, picking at old research and starting his new project. Where there were sights we saw them. We shared beds but fairly quickly we gave up on sex.

He learnt languages wherever we were, with his ferocious concentration, slang if he already knew the formal vocabulary. I’d travelled far more than he had, but I spoke and read only Anglo-Ubiq. I was pleased by his company, often amused, always interested. I tested him, taking jobs that hauled us through immer for hundreds of hours at a time, nothing cruelly long but long enough. He finally passed, according to my unclear emotional accounting, when I realised that I wasn’t only watching to see if he’d stay, but was hoping he wouldn’t leave.

We were married on Dagostin, in Bremen, in Charo City, to where I’d sent my childish letters. I told myself, and it was true, that it was important for me to emerge in my capital port sometimes. Even at the dragged-out pace of interworld letter-exchanges, Scile had corresponded with local researchers; and I, never a loner, had contacts and the quick intense friendships that come and go among immersers; so we knew we’d have a reasonable turnout. There in my national capital, which most Embassytowners never saw, I could register with the union, download savings into my main account, amass news of Bremen jurisdiction. The flat I owned was in an unfashionable but pleasant part of the city. Around my house I rarely saw anyone accoutremented with the silly luxury tech imported from Embassytown.

Being married under local law would make it easier for Scile to visit any of Bremen’s provinces or holdings. I responded for a long time to his pestering fascination, never the joke he at first pretended, with the information that I’d no intention of returning to Embassytown. But I think by the time we married I was ready to give him the gift of taking him to my first home.

It wasn’t wholly straightforward: Bremen controlled entry to some of its territories almost as carefully as it did egress. We were intending to disembark there, so I wasn’t just signing up on a merchant run. At Transit House, perplexed officials sent me up a chain of authority. I’d expected that but I was mildly surprised at how high, if my reading of office furniture as evidence wasn’t on the fritz, the buck-passing went.

“You want to go back to Embassytown?” a woman who must presumably have been only a rung or two down from the boss said. “You have to realise that’s … unusual.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“You miss home?”

“Hardly,” I told her. “The things we do for love.” I sighed theatrically but she didn’t want to play. “It’s not as if I relish the idea of being stuck so far from the hub.” She met my look and did not respond.

She asked me what I planned to do on Arieka, in Embassytown. I told her the truth—to floak, I said. That didn’t amuse her either. To whom would I be reporting on arrival? I told her no one—I was no one’s subordinate there, I was a civilian. She reminded me that Embassytown was a Bremen port. Where had I been since entering the out? Everywhere, she stressed, and who could remember that? I had to go through my cartas and all my old dat-swipes, though she must have known that at plenty of places such formalities of arrival were slapdash. She read my list, including terminuses and brief stops I didn’t remember at all. She asked me questions about the local politics of one or two at which I could only smile, so ill-equipped was I to answer; and she stared at me as I burbled.

I wasn’t sure what she suspected me of. Ultimately, as a carta-carrying Embassytown native immerser, crewing and vouching for my fiancé, it only took tenacity to get him the rights to entry, and me to reentry. Scile had been preparing for his work there, reading, listening to recordings, watching what few trids and vids there are. He’d even decided on what the title of his book would be.

“One shift only,” I told him. “We’re only going until the next relief.” In Charo City, in a cathedral to Christ Uploaded, which to my surprise he asked for, I married Scile according to Bremen law, in the second degree, registering as a nonconnubial love-match, and I took him to Embassytown.

PART ONE

INCOME

Latterday, 1

Diplomacy Hall was jammed. It was usual for every ball, every greeting of leaving visitors, to be busy, but not like that night. It was hardly surprising: there’d been extraordinary anticipation. However much the Staff might have insisted to us all that this was a regular arrival, they didn’t even attempt to sound as if they believed it.

I was jostled among the dress-clothes. I wore jewels and I activated a few augmens that sent a corona of pretty lights around me. I leaned against the wall in the thick leaves.

“Well don’t you look good?” Ehrsul had found me. “Short hair. Choppy. Like it. Did you say goodbye to Kayliegh?”

“I thank you, and I did indeed. I still can’t believe she got the papers to leave.”

“Well.” Ehrsul nodded to where Kayliegh hung on to the arm of Damier, a Staffwoman partly responsible for cartas. “I think she may have made a horizontal application.” I laughed.

Ehrsul was autom. Her integument was adorned that night with acrylic peacock feathers, and trid jewellery orbited her. “I’m so tired,” she said. She made her face crackle as if static interrupted it. “I’m just waiting to see our new Ambassador in action—how can I not, really?—then I’m gone.”

She only ever used one corpus, according to some Terrephile sense of politesse or accommodation. I think she knew that having to relate to someone variably physically incarnate would trouble us. She was import, of course, though it wasn’t clear where she’d come from, or when. She’d been in Embassytown for longer than the lifetime of anyone I knew. Her turingware was way beyond local capabilities, and more than the equal of any I’d seen in the out. Spending time with most automa is like accompanying someone brutally cognitively damaged, but Ehrsul was a friend. “Come save me from the village idiots,” she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.

“Do you joke to yourself when no one’s watching?” I had asked her once.

“Does it matter?” she had said at last, and I felt scolded. It had been rude and adolescent to raise the question of her personality, her apparent consciousness, of whether it was for my benefit. It was a tradition that none of the few automs whose behaviour was human enough to prompt the question would answer it.

She was my best friend, and somewhat well-known, oddity that she was. When I met her I was certain I had seen her before. I couldn’t place it, at first; then when I realised what I thought the situation had been I asked her abruptly (as if I could startle her): “What did they want you there for? At Bren’s place, ages ago, when the Ambassadors recited my simile to me? That was you, wasn’t it? Remember?”

“Avice,” she had said, gently reproving, and made her face shake as if disappointed. That was all I ever got from her on the matter and I didn’t push it.

We huddled together by the indoor ivy and watched little cams flit around the room, recording. Decorative biorigging shed colours from carapaces.

“Have you met them, then?” Ehrsul said. “The esteemed intake for whom we wait? I haven’t.”

That surprised me. Ehrsul had no job, wasn’t under the obligation of any tithe, but as a computer she was valuable to Staff, and often acted for them. I would have said the same about me—that my inside-outside status had been useful to them—until I fell from favour. I’d have expected Ehrsul to be part of whatever discussions had been ongoing, but since the new Ambassador had arrived, apparently, the Staff had retreated into clique.

“There’s tussling,” Ehrsul said. “That’s what I’ve heard.” People told Ehrsul things: perhaps it was because she wasn’t human, but was almost. I think she also tapped into the localnet, broke encryption on enough snips to be a good source of information to friends. “People are worried. Though I gather some have rather taken a shine … Watch MagDa. And now Wyatt’s been insisting on getting involved.”

“Wyatt?”

“He’s been citing old laws, trying to brief the Ambassador alone, thank you very much. That sort of thing.”

Wyatt, the Bremen representative, had arrived with his small staff on the previous trade vessel to relieve Chettenham, his predecessor. He was scheduled to leave in one more tour’s time. Bremen had established Embassytown somewhat more than two megahours ago. We were all juridically Bremeni: protectees. But the Ambassadors who governed formally in Bremen’s name were born here, of course, as were Staff and we who made up their canton. Wyatt, Chettenham and other attachés on their lengthy postings relied on Staff for trade information, for suggestions, for access to Hosts and tech. It was rare for them to issue orders other than “Carry on.” They were advisors to Staff, too, useful for gauging the politics in the capital. I was intrigued that Wyatt was now interpreting his remit in so muscular a fashion.

This was the first time in living memory that an Ambassador had arrived from the out. Had the party not forced their hands—the ship was leaving and the ball couldn’t be delayed—I suspected the Staff would have tried to quarantine the new arrivals longer, and continued with whatever their intrigues were.

“CalVin’s here,” Ehrsul warned quietly, her displayed face glancing over my shoulder. I did not look round. She looked at me and made a little what? face, telling me without words that she’d still like to know what had happened there, sometime. I shook my head.

Yanna Southel, Embassytown’s senior research scientist, arrived, and with her an Ambassador. I whispered to Ehrsul, “Good, it’s EdGar. Time to schmooze. I’ll report back in a bit.” I made it slowly through the crowd into the Ambassador’s orbit. There in the middle of laughter and buffeted a little by those dancing, I raised my glass and made EdGar face me.

“Ambassador,” I said. They smiled. “So,” I said. “Are we ready?”

“Christ Pharos no,” said Ed or Gar. “You ask as if I should know what’s going on, Avice,” said the other. I inclined my head. EdGar and I had always enjoyed an exaggerated flirtation. They liked me; they were garrulous, gossips, always giving up as much as and a little more than they should. The dapper older men glanced side to side, raised eyebrows in theatrical alarm as if someone might swoop in and stop them speaking. That conspiratorialism was their shtick. They had probably been warned off me in the last few months, but they still treated me with a chatty courtesy I appreciated. I smiled but hesitated when I realised that despite their party faces, they seemed genuinely unhappy.

“I wouldn’t have thought it were …” “… possible,” EdGar said. “There’s things going on here …” “… that we don’t understand.”

“What about the rest of the Ambassadors?” I said.

We looked around the room. Many of their colleagues had arrived now. I saw EsMé in iridescent dresses; ArnOld fingering the tight collars wedged uncomfortable-looking below their links; JasMin and HelEn debating complexly, each Ambassador interrupting the other, each half of each Ambassador finishing their doppel’s words. So many Ambassadors in one place made for a dreamish feel. Socketed into their necks and variously ornamental, according to taste, diodes in their circuited links staccattoed through colours in simultaneous pairs.

“Honestly?” said EdGar. “They’re all worried” “To various degrees.” “Some of them think we’re …” “… exaggerating. RanDolph thinks it’ll all be good for us.” “To have a newcomer, to shake us up. But no one’s sanguine.”

“Where’s JoaQuin? And where’s Wyatt?”

“They’re bringing the new boy along. Together.” “Neither’s been letting the other out of their sight.”

Staff were making space in front of the entrance to the hall, preparing for JoaQuin, the Chair of the Ambassadors, for Wyatt the Bremen attaché, and for the new Ambassador. There were people I didn’t recognise. I’d lost sight of the pilot, so couldn’t ask if they were crew, immigrants or temporaries.

At most of these balls the newly arrived—permanent or single-tour—would be surrounded by locals. They wouldn’t lack company, sexual or conversational. Their clothes and accoutrements, their augmens, would be like grails. What ’ware they had would be pirated, and for weeks the localnet would be twittering with exotic new algorithms. This time, no one cared about anything but the new Ambassador.

“What else arrived? Anything useful?” Ambassador JasMin was in earshot, and I made a point of asking them, rather than EdGar. JasMin didn’t like me so I spoke to them when I could to let them know they didn’t intimidate me. They didn’t answer and I walked, greeted Simmon, a security officer. We hadn’t been close for years, but we liked each other sincerely enough that there was little awkwardness, though I was present as a guest, and an out-of-favour one at that, while he was working. He shook my hand with his biorigged right limb, which he’d worn since a gun had burst on a target range and taken off his own flesh version.

I went through the crowd, talked to friends, watching the glimmer of augmens interact, hearing snatches of immer slang and turning to the immersers who spoke them with a word or two in the same dialect, or a hand held in the fingerlock that told them what ship I’d last served on, to their delight. I might touch their glasses, and I’d go on.

Mostly, like everyone else, I was watching for the new Ambassador.

And then they came, in a moment that could only have been an anticlimax. It was Wyatt who opened the doors, more careful and hesitant than usual. JoaQuin smiled beside him, and I admired how well they hid the anxiety they must have felt. Conversation hushed. I was holding my breath.

There was some little commotion behind them, a moment of dispute between the figures who followed. The new Ambassador stepped forward past their guides, into Diplomacy Hall. That was a palpable moment.

One of the two men was tall and thin, with hair receding—a blinking, shyly smiling, sallow man. The other was stocky, muscular and more than a hand shorter. He grinned. He was looking around. He ran his hand through his hair. He wore augmens in his blood: I could see the shine of them around him. His companion seemed to have none. The shorter man had a Roman nose, the other a snub. Their skins were different colours, their eyes. They didn’t look like or at each other.

They stood, the new Ambassador, smiling in their very different ways. They stood there mooncalf and quite impossible.

Formerly, 1

Kilohours before, as we prepared for our travel, Scile came to some arrangement with his employers-cum-supervisors. I never made much effort to understand his academic world. So far as I could gather, he had arranged a very extended sabbatical, and technically his residence in Embassytown was part of a project minutely funded by his university. They were paying him a peppercorn retainer and keeping his access accounts live, with a view to ultimately publishing Forked Tongues: The SocioPsychoLinguistics of the Ariekei.

Researchers had come to Embassytown before, particularly Bremen scientists fascinated by the Hosts’ biological contrivings: there were one or two still there, waiting for relief. But there hadn’t been outsider linguists on Arieka in living memory, not since the pioneers who had striven to crack Language, nearly three and a half megahours before.

“I can stand on their shoulders,” Scile told me. “They had to work out how it worked from scratch. Why we could understand the Ariekei but they couldn’t understand us. Now we know that.”

While we prepared to arrive in Embassytown on what he called our honeymoon, Scile searched the libraries in Charo City. With my help he tried to tap into immerser-lore about the place and its inhabitants, and finally when we arrived he hunted in our own archives in Embassytown, but he found nothing systematic on his topic. That made him happy.

“Why’s no one written on it before?” I asked him.

“No one comes here,” he said. “It’s too far. It’s—no offence—stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

“Lord, none taken.”

“And dangerous nowhere, as well. Plus Bremen red tape. And to be honest, none of it makes much sense, anyway.”

“The language?”

“Yes. Language.”

Embassytown had its own linguists, but most, carta-denied if they even bothered to apply, were scholars in the abstract. They learned and taught Old and New French, Mandarin, Panarabic, spoke them to each other as exercises like others played chess. Some learned exot languages, to the extent that physiology allowed. The local Pannegetch forgot their native languages when they learned our Anglo-Ubiq, but five Kedis languages and three Shur’asi dialects were spoken in Embassytown, four and all of which respectively we could approximate.

Local linguists didn’t work on the language of the Hosts. Scile, though, was unaffected by our taboos.

He wasn’t from Bremen, nor from any of its outposts, nor from another nation on Dagostin. Scile was from an urban moon, Sebastapolis, which I’d vaguely heard of. He grew up very polyglot. I was never quite sure which language, if any, he considered his first. While we travelled I was envious of the blitheness, the sheer uninterest with which he ignored his birth home.

Our route to Embassytown was roundabout. The ships we took were crewed by immersers from more places than I’d ever see. I knew the charts of Bremen’s crowded immer cognita, could once have told you the names of nations on many of its core worlds, and some of those I served with on my way home were from none of them. There were Terre from regions so far off that they teased, telling me the name of their world was Fata Morgana, or Fiddler’s Green.

Had I ship-hopped in other directions, I could have gone to regions of immer and every day where Bremen was the fable. People get lost in the overlapping sets of knownspace. Those who serve on exot vessels, who learn to withstand the strange strains of their propulsion—of swallowdrives, overlight foldings, bansheetech—go even farther with less predictable trajectories, and become even more lost. It’s been this way for megahours, since women and men found the immer and we became homo diaspora.

Scile’s fascination with the Hosts’ language was always a bit of a titillation to me. I don’t know if, as an outsider not only to Embassytown but to Bremen space itself, he could appreciate the frisson he produced in me every time he said “Ariekei” instead of the respectful “Hosts,” every time he parsed their sentences and told me what they meant. I’m sure it’s some kind of irony or something that it was through my foreign husband’s researches that I learnt most of what I know about the language of the city in a ghetto of which I was born.

ACL—Accelerated Contact Linguistics—was, Scile told me, a speciality crossbred from pedagogics, receptivity, programming and cryptography. It was used by the scholar-explorers of Bremen’s pioneer ships to effect very fast communication with indigenes they encountered or which encountered them.

In the logs of those early journeys, the excitement of the ACLers is moving. On continents, on worlds vivid and drab, they record first moments of understanding with menageries of exots. Tactile languages, bioluminescent words, all varieties of sounds that organisms can make. Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy. I’ve seen the trid diary of an ACLer barricaded in his cabin, whose vessel has been boarded by what we didn’t then know as Corscans—it was first contact. He’s afraid, as he should be, of the huge things battering at his door, but he’s recording his excitement at having just understood the tonal structures of their speech.

When the ACLers and the crews came to Arieka, there started more than 250 kilohours of bewilderment. It wasn’t that the Host language is particularly difficult to understand, or changeable, or excessively various. There were startlingly few Hosts on Arieka, scattered around the one city, and all spoke the same language. With the linguists’ earware and drives it wasn’t hard to amass a database of sound-words (the newcomers thought of them as words, though where they divided one from the next the Ariekei might not recognise fissures). The scholars made pretty quick sense of syntax. Like all exot languages it had its share of astonishments. But there was nothing so alien that it trumped the ACLers or their machines.

The Hosts were patient, seemed intrigued by and, insofar as anyone could tell through their polite opacity, welcoming to their guests. They had no access to immer, nor exotic drives or even sublux engines; they never left their atmosphere, but they were otherwise advanced. They manipulated life with astonishing finesse, and they seemed unsurprised that there was sentience elsewhere.

The Hosts did not learn our Anglo-Ubiq. Did not seem to try. But within a few thousand hours, Terre linguists could understand much of what the Hosts said, and synthesised responses and questions in the one Ariekene language. The phonetic structure of the sentences they had their machines speak—the tonal shifts, the vowels and the rhythm of consonants—were precise, accurate to the very limits of testing.

The Hosts listened, and did not understand a single sound.

“How many of you get away?” Scile asked me.

“You make it sound like a prison-break,” I said.

“Well, come on. As I recall, you’ve said to me more than once that you made it out. As I recall you may have told me that, ahem, you’d never go back.” He looked a sly look.

“Touché,” I said. We were about to start on the last leg to Embassytown.

“So how many of you?”

“Not a whole lot. You mean immersers?”

“I mean anyone.”

I shrugged. “A couple of non-immersers must get cartas every so often. Not that many people bother applying, even if you do pass the tests.”

“You in touch with any of your classmates?”

“Classmates? You mean the immersers in my batch, who left with me? Hardly.” I made finger motions to indicate our dispersal. “Anyway. There were only three others. We weren’t close.” Even had the practicalities of miab-hauled letters not made it near impossible, I wouldn’t have tried and nor would they. A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don’t look back, don’t be each other’s anchors, no nostalgia. I wasn’t expecting any of them to return.

On that journey to Embassytown, Scile had had his sopor amended, spiked with gerons so he would age while under. It’s an affecting gesture, to ensure that the sleep of travel doesn’t keep you young while your working partner grows older.

In fact he didn’t spend all his time under. With the help of medicines and augmens, he spent a little of the journey awake and studying, where immer allowed, breaking off to retch or fend off panic with chemical prophylactics as necessary. “Listen to this,” he read to me. We were at the table, passing through very calm immer shallows. In deference to his always-sickness I was eating dried-up fruit, a nearly odourless food. “ ‘You are of course aware that every Man has two mouths or voices.’ In this”—he prodded what he was reading—“they have sex by singing to each other.” It was some antique book about a flat land.

“What’s the point of that nonsense?” I said.

“I’m looking for epigraphs,” he said. He tried other old stories. Looking for invented cousins to the Hosts, he showed me descriptions of Chorians and Tucans, Ithorians, Wess’har, invented double-tongued beasts. I couldn’t share his enthusiasms for these grotesques.

“I could have Proverbs 5:4,” he said, staring at his screen. I didn’t ask for an explanation: we used to joust like that sometimes. Instead I uploaded a Bible when I was alone, to find: “But in the end she’s bitter as wormwood, sharp as a sword with two mouths.”

The Hosts aren’t the only polyvocal exots. Apparently there are races who emit two, three or countless sounds simultaneously, to talk. The Hosts, the Ariekei, are comparatively simple. Their speech is an intertwining of two voices only, too complexly various to be pegged as “bass” or “treble.” Two sounds—they can’t speak either voice singly—inextricable by the chance coevolution of a vocalising ingestion mouth and what was once probably a specialised organ of alarm.

The first ACLers listened and recorded and understood them. “Today we heard them talk about a new building,” the bewildered figures on the old trid told Scile and me. “Today they were discussing their biowork.” “Today they were listing the names of stars.”

We saw Urich and Becker and their colleagues, neither of them yet famous at the time we spied on, mimicking the noises of the locals, repeating their sentences to them. “We know that’s a greeting. We know it is.” We watched a long-dead linguist play sounds to a waiting Ariekes. “We know they can hear,” she said. “We know they understand by hearing each other; we know that if one of its friends said exactly what I just played, they’d understand each other.” Her recording shook its head at us and Scile shook his.

Of the epiphany itself, there’s only Urich and Becker’s written testimony. In the way of these things, others from their party later denounced the record as misrepresentative, but it was the Urich-Becker manuscript that became the story. I’d seen the children’s version long ago. I remembered the picture of the moment; Urich’s features a delight to the caricaturist, him and subtler-faced Sura Becker both rendered with pop-eyed exaggeration, staring at a Host. I’d never read the unbowdlerised manuscript till Scile pulled it up for me.

We knew a great number of words and phrases [I read]. We knew the most important greeting: . We heard it every day and we repeated it every day—the latter without effect.

We programmed our voxware and had it speak the word repeatedly. And repeatedly the Ariekei ignored it. At last in frustration we looked at each other and screamed half the word each like a curse. By chance they were simultaneous. Urich yelled “suhaill,” Becker “jarr,” at once.

The Ariekes turned to us. It spoke. We didn’t need our ’ware to make sense of what it said.

It asked us who we were.

It asked what we were, and what we had said.

It had not understood us, but it had known that there was something to understand. Before, it had always heard the synthesised voices just as noise: but this time, even though our shouts were much less accurate than any ’ware renditions, it knew that we had tried to speak.

I’ve heard versions of that unlikely story many times. From that moment, or from whatever really happened, via misjudgements and wrong directions, within seventy-five kilohours, our predecessors understood the language’s strange nature.

“Is it unique?” I asked Scile once, and when he nodded I, for the first time, really felt astonishment at it, as if I were an outsider, too.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” he said. “Eh, nee, where. It isn’t about the sounds, you know. The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives.”

There are exots who speak without speaking. There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. The Hosts are not like that. They’re empaths of another kind.

For humans, say red and it’s the reh and the eh and the duh combined, those phonemes in context, that communicate the colour. That’s the case whether I say it, or Scile does, or a Shur’asi, or a mindless program that has no sense that it’s speaking at all. That is not how it is for the Ariekei.

Their language is organised noise, like all of ours are, but for them each word is a funnel. Where to us each word means something, to the Hosts, each is an opening. A door, through which the thought of that referent, the thought itself that reached for that word, can be seen.

“If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I do the same with a word in Language, and play it to an Ariekes, I understand it, but to them it means nothing, because it’s only sound, and that’s not where the meaning lives. It needs a mind behind it.”

Hosts’ minds were inextricable from their doubled tongue. They couldn’t learn other languages, couldn’t conceive of their existence, or that the noises we made to each other were words at all. A Host could understand nothing not spoken in Language, by a speaker, with intent, with a mind behind the words. That was why those early ACL pioneers were confused. When their machines spoke, the Hosts heard only empty barks.

“There’s no other language that works like this,” Scile said. “ ‘The human voice can apprehend itself as the sounding of the soul itself.’ ”

“Who was that?” I said. I could tell he was quoting. “I can’t remember. Some philosopher. It’s not true anyway and he knew it.”

“Or she.”

“Or she. It’s not true, not for the human voice. But the Ariekei … when they speak they do hear the soul in each voice. That’s how the meaning lives there. The words have got …” He shook his head, hesitating, then just using that religiose term. “Got the soul in them. And it has to be there, the meaning. Has to be true to be Language. That’s why they make similes.”

“Like me,” I said.

“Like you but not just like you. They made similes long before you lot ever touched down. With anything they could get their hands on. Animals. Their wings. And that’s what that split rock’s for.”

“Split-and-fixed. That’s the point.”

“Well quite. They had to make it so they could say ‘It’s like the rock which was split and fixed.’ About whatever it is they say that about.”

“But they didn’t make as many similes, I thought. Before us.”

“No,” Scile said. “That is … No.”

“I can think things which aren’t there,” I said. “And so can they. Obviously. They must, to plan the similes in the first place.”

“Not … quite. They’ve no what-ifs,” he said. “At best, it must be like a pre-ghost in their heads. Everything in Language is a truth claim. So they need the similes to compare things to, to make true things that aren’t there yet, that they need to say. It might not be that they can think of it: maybe Language just demands it. That soul, that soul I was talking about’s what they hear in Ambassadors, too.”

Linguists invented notation like musical score for the interwoven streams of Hostspeak, named the two parts according to some lost reference the Cut and the Turn voices. Their, our, human version of Language was more flexible than the original of which it was a crude phonetic copy. It could be sounded out by ’ware, it could be written, neither of which forms the Hosts, for which Language was speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts, could understand.

We can’t learn it, Scile said. All we can do’s teach ourselves something with the same noises, which works quite differently. We jury-rigged a methodology, as we had to. Our minds aren’t like theirs. We had to misunderstand Language to learn it.

When Urich and Becker spoke together with shared, intense feeling, one the Cut and the other the Turn, a flicker of meaning was transmitted, where zettabytes of ’ware had failed.

Of course they tried again, they and their colleagues practicing duets, words that meant hello or we would like to speak. We watched their recorded ghosts. We listened to them learn their lines. “Sounds flawless to me,” said Scile, and even I recognised phrases, but the Ariekei did not. “U and B had no shared mind,” Scile said. “No coherent thoughts behind each word.”

The Hosts didn’t react with quite the same blankness with which they had heard synthesised voices. They were uninterested in most, but listened hard to a few of these stuttering couples. They didn’t understand it, but they seemed to know that something was being said.

Linguists, singers, psychospecialists had investigated those pairs who had the most obvious impact. Scientists had striven to work out what they shared. That was how the Stadt Dyadic Empathy Test was created. Attain a certain threshold together on its steep curve of mutual understandingness, fire up machines to connect various brainwaves, synching and linking them, and a particular pair of humans might just be able to persuade the Ariekei that there was meaning to their noises.

Still, communication remained impossible for megahours after contact. It was a long time after those early revelations that researches into empathy got us anywhere. Very few pairs of people scored well on the Stadt scale, scored highly enough to mum a unified mind behind the Language they ventriloquised. That was the minimum it would take to speak across the species.

What the colony needed, someone had joked, were single people split in two. And to put it like that was to suggest a solution.

The first interlocutors with the Hosts were exhaustively trained monozygote twins. Few such siblings could make Language work any better than the rest of us, but those that could were a slightly larger minority than in any control group. They spoke it horribly, we now know, and there were innumerable misunderstandings between them and the Ariekei, but this meant trade, too, at last, and a struggling to learn.

In my life, I’d met one other pair of idents, non-Embassytowners I mean, in a port on Treony, a cold moon. They were dancers, they did an act. They were blood-born, of course, not made, but still. I was absolutely stunned by them. By how they looked like each other, but only so far. That their hair and clothes were not precisely the same, that they spoke in distinguishable voices, went to different parts of the room, talked to different people.

On Arieka, for lifetimes, the last two megahours, our representatives hadn’t been twins but doppels, cloned. It was the only viable way. They were bred in twos in the Ambassador-farm, tweaked to accentuate certain psychological qualities. Blood twins had long been outlawed.

A limited empathy might be taught and drugged and tech-linked in between two people, but that wouldn’t have been enough. The Ambassadors were created and brought up to be one, with unified minds. They had the same genes but much more: it was the minds those carefully nurtured genes made that the Hosts could hear. If you raised them right, taught them to think of themselves right, wired them with links, then they could speak Language, with close enough to one sentience that the Ariekei could understand it.

The Stadt test was still taken in the out, by students of the psyche and of languages. It had no practical use, now, though—we grew our own Ambassadors in Embassytown, and didn’t have to find each precious potential one among very young twins. As a way to source speakers of Language, the test was obsolete, I had thought.

Latterday, 2

“Please join me”—I couldn’t see who it was who spoke loudly, announcing the arrivals to Diplomacy Hall—“in welcoming Ambassador EzRa.”

They were immediately surrounded. In that moment I saw no close friends, had no one with whom to share my tension or conspiratorial look. I waited for EzRa to do the rounds. When they did, how they did so was another indicator of their strangeness. They must have known how it would seem to us. As JoaQuin and Wyatt introduced them to people, Ez and Ra separated, moved somewhat apart. They glanced at each other from time to time, like a couple, but there were soon metres between them: nothing like doppels, nothing like an Ambassador. Their links must work differently, I thought. I glanced at their little mechanisms. They each wore a distinct design. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Disguising their unease with functionaries’ aplomb, JoaQuin led Ez and Wyatt Ra.

Each half of the new Ambassador was at the centre of a curious crowd. This was the first chance most of us had had to meet them. But there were Staff and Ambassadors whose fascination for the newcomers had clearly outlasted their own initial meetings. LeNa, RanDolph and HenRy were laughing with Ez, the shorter man, while Ra looked bashful as AnDrew asked him questions, and MagDa, I realised, stayed close enough to touch his hands.

The party bustled about me. I caught sight of Ehrsul’s rendered eyes at last and winked as Ra approached me. Wyatt made an aaah noise, held out his hands, kissed my cheeks.

“Avice! Ra, this is Avice Benner Cho, one of Embassytown’s … Well, Avice is any number of things.” He bowed as if granting me something. “She’s one of our immersers. She’s spent a good deal of time in the out, and now she offers cosmopolitan expertise and an invaluable traveller’s eye.” I liked Wyatt and his little power plays. You might say we tended to twinkle at each other.

“Ra,” I said. A hesitation too short for him to notice, I think, and I held out my hand. I shouldn’t call him “Mr.” or “Squire”: legally he was not a man, but half of something. Had he been with Ez I’d have addressed them as “Ambassador.” I nodded at AnDrew, at Mag, at Da, who watched.

“Helmser Cho,” Ra said quietly. He after his own hesitation took my hand.

I laughed. “You’ve promoted me. And it’s Avice. Avice is fine.”

“Avice.”

We stood silent for a moment. He was tall and slim, pale, his hair dark and plaited. He seemed slightly anxious but he pulled himself together somewhat as we spoke.

“I admire you being able to immerse,” he said. “I never get used to it. Not that I’ve travelled a lot, but that’s partly why.”

I forget what I replied, but whatever it was, there was a silence after it. After a minute I said to him, “You’ll have to get better at it, you know. Small talk. That’s what your job is, from here on in.”

He smiled. “I’m not sure that’s quite fair,” he said.

“No,” I said. “There’s wine to drink and papers to sign, too.” He seemed delighted by that. “And for that you came all the way to Arieka,” I said. “For ever and ever.”

“Not for ever,” he said. “We’ll be here seventy, eighty kilohours. Until the next relief but one, I think. Then back to Bremen.”

I was astounded. My blather stopped. Of course I should not have been taken aback. An Ambassador leaving Embassytown. Nothing about this situation made sense. An Ambassador with somewhere else to return to was a contradiction in my terms.

Wyatt was muttering to Ra. MagDa smiled at me from behind them. I liked MagDa: they were one of the Ambassadors who hadn’t treated me differently since my falling out with CalVin.

“I’m from Bremen,” Ra told me. “I’d like to travel like you have.”

“Are you Cut or Turn?” I asked.

It was obvious he didn’t like the question. “Turn,” he said. He was older than I but not by very much.

“How did all this happen?” I said. “You and Ez? It takes years.… How long have you been training?”

“Avice, really,” Wyatt said from behind Ra. “You’ll hear all about that—” He raised his eyebrows in a rebuke, but I raised mine back. There was a moment between him and Ra, before Ra spoke.

“We’d been friends a long time,” he said. “We got tested years ago. Kilohours, I mean. It was a random thing, part of an exhibition about the Stadt method.” He stopped as the noise in the room grew louder. Mag or Da said something, laughing, moved between me and Ra demanding the attention he politely turned on them.

“He’s tense,” I said to Wyatt quietly.

“I don’t think this is his favourite thing,” he said. “But then, would it be yours? Poor man’s in a zoo.”

“ ‘Poor man,’ ” I said. “Very, very strange to hear you speak of him like that.”

“Strange times.” We laughed over a swell of music. There was a strong smell of perfume and wine. We watched EzRa, who were not EzRa, not really, who were Ez and Ra, separated by metres. Ez was bantering with facility and pleasure. He caught my eye, excused himself to his interlocutors and approached.

“Hi,” he said. “I see you met my colleague.” He held out his hand.

“Your colleague? Yes, I met him.” I shook my head. JoaQuin were at Ez’s elbows, one on each side like elderly parents, and I nodded at them. “Your colleague. You really are just determined to scandalise us, Ez,” I said.

“Oh, please. No. Not at all, not at all.” He grinned an apology at the doppels escorting him. “It’s … well, I suppose it’s just a slightly different way of doing things.”

“And it’ll be invaluable,” said Joa, or Quin, heartily. The two spoke in turn. “You’re always telling us we’re too …” “… stuck in our ways, Avice. This will be …” “… good for us, and good for Embassytown.” One of them slapped Ez on the back. “Ambassador EzRa’s an outstanding linguist and bureaucrat.”

“You’re going to say they’re a ‘new broom,’ aren’t you, Ambassador?” I said.

JoaQuin laughed. “Why not?” “Why not indeed?” “That’s exactly what they are.”

We were rude, Ehrsul and I. We’d stick together, whispering and showing off, at all these sorts of events. So when she waved a trid hand to attract my attention I joined her expecting to play. But when I reached her she said to me urgently, “Scile’s here.”

I didn’t look round. “Are you sure?”

“I never thought he’d come,” she said.

I said, “I don’t know what …” It was some time since I’d seen my husband. I didn’t want a scene. I bit a knuckle for a moment, stood up straighter. “He’s with CalVin, isn’t he?”

“Am I going to have to separate you two girls?” It was Ez again. He made me start. He’d extricated himself from JoaQuin’s anxious stewarding. He offered me a drink. He flexed something inside himself, and his augmens glimmered, changing the colour of his vague halo. I realised that with the help of his innard tech he might have been listening to us. I focused on him and tried not to look for Scile. Ez was shorter than I, and muscular. His hair was cut close.

“Ez, this is Ehrsul,” I said. To my astonishment he looked at her, said nothing and looked back at me. The rudeness made me gasp.

“Having a good time?” he said to me. I watched tiny lights move across his corneas. Ehrsul was moving away. I was going to go with her and blank him haughtily, but behind his back she flashed a quick display: Stay, learn.

“You’re going to have to do a lot better than that,” I said to him quietly.

“What?” He was startled. “What? Your—”

“She’s not mine,” I said. He stared at me.

“The autom? I apologise. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t me you owe that to.” He inclined his head.

“What are you monitoring?” I said to him after a silence. “I can see your displays.”

“It’s just habit. Temperature, air impurities, ambient noise. Mostly pointless. A few other things: I worked for years in situations that … well, I got used to checking for trid, cameras, ears, that sort of thing.” I raised an eyebrow. “And I tend to run translationware as a default.”

“No!” I said. “How exciting. Now, tell me the truth. Got ’ware in your ears? Are you running a soundtrack?”

He laughed. “No,” he said. “I grew out of that. I haven’t done that for … a good week or two.”

“Why are you running translation programs? You …” I put my arm on his and looked suddenly exaggeratedly stricken. “You do speak Language, don’t you? Oh dear, there’s been a terrible misunderstanding.”

He laughed again. “Oh, I can get by in Language, that’s not it.” More seriously: “But I don’t speak any of the Shur’asi or Kedis dialects, or …”

“Oh, you won’t find exots here tonight. Apart from Mine Host, obviously.” I was surprised he didn’t know this. Embassytown was a Bremen colony, under Bremen laws that restricted our few exots to guestworker status.

“What about you?” he said. “I don’t see augmens. So you speak Language?”

For a moment I really didn’t understand what he meant. “No. I let my sockets close up. I had a few bits and pieces once. They can be useful for immersion. And also,” I said, “yes, you know, I can see how a bit to help make sense of what the Hosts say is … useful. But I’ve seen them, they’re too … It’s intrusive.”

“That’s sort of the point,” he said.

“Right, and I can put up with that if it’s any use, but Language is beyond it,” I said. “Get them, when you hear a Host speak you get a whole eyeful or earful of nonsense. Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah.” I raised an eyebrow. “It was pointless.”

Ez watched me. He knew I was lying. He must have known that the notion of using translationware for Language would be, to an Embassytowner, profoundly inappropriate. Not illegal, but an appalling impertinence. I didn’t even know quite why I had said all that.

“I’ve heard of you,” he said. I waited. If EzRa were even slightly good at their job they’d have prepared something personal to say to most of the people they might meet, tonight. What Ez said next, though, astonished me. “Ra reminded me where we’d heard your name. You’re in a simile, aren’t you? And I gather you’ve been to the city? Outside Embassytown.” Someone brushed past him. He didn’t stop looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been there.”

“I’m sorry, I think I’ve … Sorry if I’ve … It’s not my business.”

“No, it’s just, I’m surprised.”

“Of course I’ve heard of you. We do our research, you know. There’s not many Embassytowners who’ve done what you’ve done.”

I didn’t say anything. I felt I don’t know what, to hear that I featured in the Bremen reports on Embassytown. I inclined a glass at Ez, said some goodbye, and went to find Ehrsul manoeuvring her chassis through the crowd.

“So what’s their story?” I said. Ehrsul gave her display shoulders a shrug.

“Ez is a charmer, isn’t he?” she said. “Ra seems better but he’s shy.”

“Anything online?” She’d probably been trying to hack into data floating around.

“Not much,” she said. “It’s some kind of coup for Wyatt that they’re here. He’s crowing so hard hens everywhere are getting randy. That’s why the Staff are so tense. I decrypted the tail end of something … I’m pretty sure Staff made EzRa sit a test. I suppose, you know, it’s the first time in Christ-knows-how-long there’s been an Ambassador from the out, and they queried whether anyone who didn’t grow up speaking Language could possibly get the nuances. They must resent this appointment.”

“They’re all technically appointees too, don’t forget,” I said. It was something that rankled with Staff: on his arrival, Wyatt, like every attaché, had had to formally licence all the Ambassadors to speak for Bremen. “Anyway, they can speak Language? EzRa?”

She shrugged again. “Wouldn’t be here if they’d failed,” she said.

Something happened in the room. A feeling, a moment when, conviviality notwithstanding, it was suddenly imperative to focus. It was like that every time the Hosts came into a room, as they had just come into Diplomacy Hall.

The partygoers tried not to be rude—as if it were possible for us to be rude to them, as if the Hosts considered politesse on axes that would make any sense to us. Nonetheless, most of us kept up our chitchat and did not ogle.

An exception was the crew, who stared frankly at the Ariekei they had never seen before. Across the room I saw my helmsman and I saw the expression on his face. Once I had heard a theory. It was an attempt to make sense of the fact that no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated their homes, they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race. The theory is that we’re hardwired with the Terre biome, that every glimpse of anything not descended from that original backwater home, our bodies know we should not ever see.

Formerly, 2

I wasn’t sure how Embassytown would be for Scile. He can’t have been the first settler from the out to be brought back by a returnee, but I’d never known others.

I’d spent a long time on ships in the immer, or in ports on planets with diurnal durations inimical to humanity’s. My return was the first time for thousands of hours that I’d been able to dispense with circadian implants and settle into actual solar rhythms. Scile and I acclimatised to the nineteen-hour Ariekene days by traditional means, spending most of our time outside.

“I warned you,” I told him. “It’s a tiny place.”

Now I remember those days with real pleasure. Still. I kept telling Scile about my sacrifice in returning to that little place—to come back from the out! to funnel back down!—but I was happier than I’d imagined I would be when I emerged from the sealed train in the aeolian zone, and breathed Embassytown smells. It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.

My early days back in Embassytown, with savings and an outsider, immerser chic, I swaggered. I swaggered. I was welcomed back in delight by those who’d known me, who had never thought to see me again, who’d doubted the news of my return in the preceding miab.

I wasn’t rich by any real standard, but my savings were in Bremen Eumarks. This was the foundation currency of Embassytown, of course, but one rarely seen: with thirty or more kilohours between visits from the metropole—more than an Embassytown year—our little economy was self-standing. In deference to the Eumark, like all Bremen’s colonies, our currency was called the Ersatz. All those Ersatzes were incommensurable, each its own and worthless beyond its polity’s bounds. That portion of my account I’d downloaded and had with me; a few months’ life in Bremen was enough for me to live in Embassytown until the next relief, perhaps even the one after that. I don’t even think people much resented it—I’d earned my money in the out. I told people that what I was doing with it now was floaking. That was inaccurate—there being no commands for me to get away with minimally obeying, I was simply not working—but they were delighted with the immer slang. They seemed to consider my idleness my right.

Those of my shiftparents still working had a party for me, and I was a bit startled by how happy it made me to go back, to be in the nursery, to kiss and hug and shout and re-greet these kind men and women, some now disconcertingly old, some seeming unchanged. “I told you you’d come back!” Dad Shemmi kept saying as I danced with him. “I told you!” They unwrapped the Bremen gewgaws I’d brought them. “This is too much, my love!” Mum Quiller said of some bracelet with aesthetic augmens. The dads and mums were shyly welcoming to my husband. He stood with a game smile all evening in the streamer-decorated hall while I got drunk, and he answered the same questions about himself repeatedly.

A few of those I’d grown up with crossed paths with me again, like Simmon. Though I slightly expected to, I never saw Yohn. I made other friends, from unfamiliar strata. I was invited to Staff parties. Though these had not been my circles before I left, there hadn’t been room enough in little Embassytown for me, an immerser-in-training, not at least to get near them. People, Staff, Ambassadors I’d known by sight and reputation in those days were abruptly acquaintances, and more. Some that I had expected to meet, however, were gone.

“Where’s Oaten?” I asked about a man who had mouthpieced often for Staff on our Embassytown trid. “Where’s Dad Renshaw?” “Where are GaeNor?” about that elderly Ambassador one of whom, when recruiting me to Language, had said “Avice Benner Cho, is it?” with a cadence so splendidly stilted it had become part of my internal idiolect, so whenever I introduced myself by my full name, a little is it? trailed the words in my head, in her voice. “Where’re DalTon?” I said, of the notorious Ambassador, men with reputations for cleverness and intrigue, who had been less concerned to hide disputes with colleagues than was customary, and whom I had been looking forward to meeting since I learned it was they who had shown public anger when that miab had broken, back in my childhood.

Oaten had retired on his modest local riches. Renshaw had died. Young. I was sad at that. GaeNor had died, one then almost immediately the other, of linkshock and loss. DalTon, I gathered—after continuing dissidence and some hinted-at final impatience with their colleagues, some ostentatiously opaque Staff internecine strife—had disappeared or been disappeared. Intrigued, I prodded at that, but got nothing more. I had enough licence as a returnee to ask such questions about Ambassadors directly, rather improperly, but I could gauge how far to push it and when to not.

I have no doubt that this was fallacious, but it felt to me as if I was quicker, better at sarcasm, wittier, because of my time in the out. People were kind to Scile and fascinated by him. He was fascinated back. He’d been on several worlds but emerged into Embassytown as if through a door in a wall. He explored. Our status wasn’t a secret. Nonex marriages like ours were known of but rare in Embassytown, which made us a titillation. We were spending most of our time together, still, but gradually less, as he expanded his own circles.

“Careful,” I told Scile, after one party where a man called Ramir had flirted with him, using augmens to make his face provocative, according to local aesthetics. I’d never known Scile to show interest in men, but still. Homosex was a little bit illegal, I told him. Except for Ambassadors.

“What about that woman, Damier?” he said.

“She’s Staff,” I said. “Anyway it’s only a little bit illegal.”

“How quaint,” he said.

“Oh yes, it’s just darling.”

“So do they know you were once married to a woman?”

“I’ve been to the out, my love,” I said. “I can do anything I bloody want.”

I showed him where I’d played. We went to galleries and exhibitions of trid. Scile was fascinated by the tramp automa of Embassytown, melancholy-seeming mendicant machines. “Do they ever go into the city?” he said. They did, but even could he corner them their artminds were too feeble to describe it to him.

It was Language that he was there for, of course, but he wasn’t blinkered to other strangenesses. Ariekene biorigging astonished him. At the houses of friends, he would stare like an appraiser at their quasi-living artefacts, architectural filigrees, their occasional medical tweak, prostheses and similar. With me, he would stand at the edge of the aeolian breath, on balconies and viewbridges in Embassytown, watching the herds of power plants and factories graze. Yes, he was staring into the city at where Language was, but he was looking at the city itself as well. Once, he waved like a boy, and though the far-off things can’t have seen us, it seemed as if one station twitched its antennae in response.

Near the heart of Embassytown was the site of the first archive. The field of rubble could have been cleared but it had been left as it was for lifetimes, since it fell: over one and a half megahours, more than half a local century. Our early town-planners must have thought that humans need ruins. Children still came, as we had, sometimes, and the overgrown dereliction was busy with Terre animals and those local lives that could tolerate the air we breathed. They, too, Scile spent a long time watching.

“What’s that?” A red simian thing with a dog’s head, shinning up pipe.

“A fox, it’s called,” I said.

“Is it an altered?”

“I don’t know. Way back, if so.”

“What’s that?”

“A jackdaw.” “A stickleback-cat.” “A dog.” “Some indigene, I don’t know its name.”

“That’s not what we call a dog where I come from,” he’d say, or “Jack, daw,” carefully repeating names. It was unfamiliar indigenous Ariekene things that interested him most.

Once we spent hours in a very hot sun. We sat talking about things, then not talking, holding hands long enough and still enough that the animals and abflora forgot we were alive and treated us as landscape. Two creatures each the size of my forearm wrestled in the grass. “Look,” I said, quietly. “Shh.” Some way from the animals a clumsy little biped was edging away, its rear a fringe of blood.

“It’s injured,” Scile said.

“Not exactly.” Like every Embassytowner child, I knew what this was. “Look,” I said. “That’s the hunter.” A ferocious little altbrock, its black-and-white fur spattered. “What it’s fighting’s called a trunc. As is that thing running away. I know they look like different animals. You see how the tail end of that one over there’s all ragged? And the head of the one getting into it with the altbrock’s torn, too? That’s the brainhalf and that’s the meathalf of the same animal. They tear apart when the trunc’s attacked: the meathalf holds off any predators while the brain end runs off looking for a last chance to mate.”

“It doesn’t look anything like other local stuff,” Scile said. “But … I don’t think it’s Terre?” The meathalf of the trunc was winning, grinding the altbrock down. “Before it tore apart it would have had eight legs. There weren’t any octopodes on Terre, were there? Maybe underwater, but …”

“It’s not Terre or Ariekene,” I said. “It was brought in by accident kilohours ago, on a Kedis ship. They’re little gypsies. They must smell good or something: loads of things attack them. Even though if they then win, eating trunc-flesh makes them puke, or kills them. Poor little refugees.”

The brainhalf of the autotruncator was in the shadow of long-fallen stone and circuitry, watching the triumph of its erstwhile hind limbs. It teetered like a meerkat or a little dinosaur. The brainhalf had taken the trunc’s only eyes, and the meathalf circled in blind pugnacity, sniffing for more enemies from which to protect its escaped mind.

In an act of obscure sentimentality, Scile, with some effort, evaded the trunc meathalf’s claws—no small achievement, given that all it was driven to do by its remaining scrag-end thoughts was to fight—and brought it home. He kept it alive for several days. In the cage he rigged he put down food, and the trunc circled it and snatched mouthfuls as it continued its unending vigilant rounds, though it had no brain to protect. It tried to fight any brushes or cloths that we dangled near it. It died, and broke down very fast like a salted slug, leaving only mess for us to dispose of.

At the coin wall, I told Scile about that first encounter with Bren. I’d found myself hesitating to take him there or tell him the story, and that piqued me, so I made myself. Scile looked lengthily at the house.

“Is he still there?” I asked a local stallholder.

“Don’t see much of him but he’s still there.” The man made a finger-sign against bad luck.

All this beckoning Scile through my childhood. Out at breakfast late one morning, at the end of the square in which we sat, I saw, and pointed out to Scile, a little group of young trainee Ambassadors, on one of their controlled, corralled, protected expeditions into the town for which they would one day intercede. There were five or six of them, it looked like, all from the same batch, ten or twelve children, a few kilohours off puberty, escorted by teachers, security, two adult Ambassadors, a men and a women, whom I could not identify at this distance. The apprentices’ links winked frenetically.

“What are they doing?” he said.

“Treasure hunt. Lessons. Don’t know,” I said. “Showing them round their demesne.” To my mild embarrassment and the amusement of other diners, Scile stood to watch them go, still chewing the dense Embassytown toast he claimed to love (too ascetic now for me).

“Do you see that often?”

“Not really,” I said. Most of the few times I’d seen such groups was as a child myself. If it happened when I was with my friends, we might try to catch the eyes of one or other of the not-yet-Ambassadors, giggle and run off if we succeeded, chased or not by their escorts. We’d play mocking and somewhat nervous games in their wake, for a few ostentatious minutes. I paid attention to my breakfast and waited for Scile to sit.

When he did he said, “What do you think about kids?”

I glanced in the direction the young doppels had taken. “Interesting chain of thought,” I said. “Here, it wouldn’t be like …” In the country he’d been born in, on the world he’d been born on, children were mostly raised by between two and six adults, connected to them and each other by direct genetics. Scile had mentioned his father, his mother, his auntfathers or whatever he called them, more than once and with affection. It was a long time since he had seen them: such ties mostly attenuate in the out.

“I know,” he said. “I just …” He waved at the town. “It’s nice here.”

“Nice?”

“There’s something here.”

“ ‘Something.’ I can tell words are your business. Anyway we’re going to pretend that I didn’t hear you. Why would I inflict this little place …”

“Oh stop it, really.” He smiled with only a little prickle in his voice. “You got out, yes, I know. You don’t mind it here half as much as you pretend to, Avice. You don’t like me that much, to come here if it was purgatory for you.” He smiled again. “Why would you mind it, anyway?”

“You’re forgetting something. This isn’t the out. In Bremen they consider most of what we do here—biorigging aside, and that we get out of the good graces of you-know-who—thuggish field medicine. And that includes sex-tech. You do remember how kids get made? You and I don’t exactly …”

He laughed. “Point,” he said. He took my hand. “Compatible everywhere but between sheets.”

“Who said I wanted to do it between sheets?” I said. It was a joke, not a seduction.

It all feels like prelude, now I reflect on it. The first time I saw exots of species I’d not grown up with was in a rowdy town on a tiny world we called Sebzi. I was introduced to a group of hive-things. I’ve no idea what they were, or from where their race originated. I’ve seen none of their kind since. One came forward on a pseudo-pod, leaned its hourglass body toward me and from a tiny snag-toothed ventricle said, in perfect Anglo-Ubiq, “Ms. Cho. It’s a pleasure.”

Scile reacted to Kedis and Shur’asi and Pannegetch, I don’t doubt, with more aplomb than I had that time. He gave talks in Embassytown’s east, about his work and travels (I was impressed by how he was able to tell the truth but make his life sound coherent, precisely arced). A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia.

He introduced himself to the Shur’asi shopkeeper we knew as Gusty—Scile ostentatiously and with pleasure told me its actual namestring—and cultivated a brief friendship. People were charmed to see them about town, Scile with a companionable arm around Gusty’s main trunk, the Shur’asi’s cilia scuttling it at Scile’s pace. They’d swap stories. “You go on about the immer,” Gusty would say. “Try travelling by whorl-drive. Blimey, that was a journey.” I was never able to decide if his mind really was as like ours as the shape of his anecdotes suggested. Certainly he performed our small talk well, even once mimicking the poor Anglo-Ubiq of a Kedis neighbour, in a complicated joke.

Of course Scile wanted to meet the Ariekei. It was the Ariekei he studied nightly, when he stopped being social. It was they who eluded him.

“I still can’t find out almost anything about them,” he said. “What they’re like, what they think, what they do, how they work. Even stuff written by Ambassadors describing their work, their, you know, their interactions with the Ariekei, it’s all … incredibly empty.” He looked at me as if he wanted something. “They know what to do,” he said, “but not what it is they’re doing.”

It took me moments to make sense of his complaint. “It’s not the Ambassadors’ job to understand the Hosts,” I said.

“So whose is it?”

“It’s no one’s job to understand them.” I think that was when I first really saw the gap between us.

By now we knew Gharda and Kayliegh and others, Staff and those close to them. I had become friends with Ehrsul. She teased me about my lack of profession (she, unlike most Embassytowners, had been au fait with the term “floaker” before I introduced it), and I teased her right back about the same thing. As autom, Ehrsul had neither rights nor tasks, but so far as it was understood an owner, a settler of some previous generation, had died intestate, and she’d never become anyone else’s property. There were variants of salvage laws by which someone might theoretically have tried to claim her, but by now it would have seemed abominable.

“It’s just Turingware,” Scile said when she wasn’t there, though he allowed that it was better such than he’d seen before. He was amused by how we related to her. I didn’t like his attitude, but he was as polite to her as if he did think her a person, so I didn’t pick a fight with him about it. The only real interest he ever showed in Ehrsul was when it occurred to him that, because she did not breathe, she would be able to go into the city. I told him the truth: that she said to me when I asked her about it that she never did or would, that I could not say why, and, given how she’d said it, I wasn’t minded to ask.

She was sometimes asked to tinker with Embassytown’s artminds and automa, which would bring her into close contact with Staff: we were often at the same official soirées. I was there because I had uses, too. I’d been out more recently than any of my superiors: only a few Staff had ever left for official business to Bremen and returned. I was a source, could tell them about the recent politics and culture in Charo City.

When I’d first left Embassytown, Dad Renshaw had taken me to one side—literally, he’d steered me to the edge of the room in which I was having a farewell party. I’d waited for fatherly homilies, spurious rumours about life in the out, but what he had told me was that if I ever came back, Embassytown would be very interested in information on the state of things in Bremen. It was so polite and matter-of-fact it took me a while to assure myself I’d been asked to spy. I was only amused, was all, at the unlikeliness. Then I was ruefully amused again when, thousands of hours later, back in Embassytown, I realised I was making myself useful just as I’d been asked to.

Scile and I would have been objects of interest whatever we did—he, an intense and fascinated outsider, was a curio; I, part of Language, and a returned immerser, a minor celebrity. But purveying facts about Bremen as I did, I, a commoner, and my commoner husband were welcomed into Staff circles even more smoothly than we would otherwise have been. Our invitations continued after Embassytown’s little media stopped running interviews with and stories about the prodigal immerser.

They approached me very soon after I returned. Not Ambassadors, of course, but some viziers and high-level muck-a-mucks, requesting my presence at a meeting where they said things so vague I didn’t parse their purpose for a minute, until abruptly I remembered Dad Renshaw’s intercession, and understood that the muted questions about some of the trends in Bremen and associated powers and possible attitudes to dependencies and their aspirations were requests for political intelligence. And that they were offering payment.

That last seemed silly. I took no money for telling them what little I could. I waved into silence someone’s diplomatic explanations of their political concerns: it didn’t matter. I showed them newspipes, downloads, gave them perhaps a tiny sense of the balance of power in Bremen’s ruling Cosmopolitan Democratic party. Bremen’s wars, interventions and exigencies had never fascinated me, but perhaps to those more focused on them, what I told them might give insights into recent vicissitudes. Honestly I doubt any of it was stuff their artminds and analysts wouldn’t have predicted or guessed.

It was hardly high espionage drama. A few days later I was introduced to Wyatt, then Bremen’s new man in Embassytown, whom my Staff interlocutors had mentioned to me in obliquely warning fashion. He immediately teased me about that earlier meeting. He asked if I had a camera in his bedroom, or something like that. I laughed. I liked it when we crossed paths. He gave me a personal number.

It was in circles such as this, Embassytown society, that I met Ambassador CalVin and became their lover. One of the things they did for me was give Scile an opportunity to meet the Hosts.

CalVin were tall, grey-skinned men, a little older than I, with a certain playfulness, and the charming arrogance of the best Ambassadors. They invited me, and, at my request, Scile, to functions, and would come in turn into the town with us, where an Ambassador walking the streets without a Staff retinue was uncommon enough to attract attention.

“Ambassador,” Scile worked up courage to ask them, at first cautiously. “I have a question about your … exchanges with the Hosts.” And then into some minutely specific, arcane enquiry. CalVin, earning at that time my gratitude, were patient, though their answers were doubtless disappointing.

In CalVin’s company I saw, heard and intuited details about aspects of Embassytown life I never otherwise would have. I picked up on my lovers’ momentary references, hints and asides. They wouldn’t always answer me when I pressed them—they might say something about colleagues gone astray, or Ariekene factions, and then refuse to elaborate—but I learnt even just from overhearing.

I asked them about Bren. “I don’t see him often,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to come to gatherings.”

“I’d forgotten you’ve a connection with him,” CalVin said, both eyeing me, though in slightly different ways. “No, Bren’s rather self-exiled. Not that he’d ever leave, you understand.” “That wouldn’t fit with what he thinks he is, to the rest of us.” “And he had the chance. He could have left.” “After he was cleaved.” “Instead …” They laughed. “He’s sort of our licensed misery.” “He knows most of what goes on. And further afield, too—he knows things he really shouldn’t.” “You couldn’t call him loyal. But he’s useful.” “But you really couldn’t call him loyal, anymore, if he ever was.” Scile listened avidly to them.

“What’s it like?” Scile asked me. “I mean, I’ve been with two people before and I’m sure you have, too, but I don’t think that’s—”

“No, Pharoi, no. Lord, you’re terrible. It’s not the same at all.” I was adamant at the time: now I have doubts.

“Do they both concentrate on you?” he said. We giggled, he at the silly prurience, me at what felt almost like blasphemy.

“No, it’s all very egalitarian. Cal, me and Vin, all in it together. Honestly, Scile, it’s not like I’m the only person an Ambassador’s ever—”

“You’re the only one I’ve got access to, though.” By then I wasn’t sure that was true. “I thought homosex isn’t approved of,” he said.

“Now you’re just showing off,” I said. “That’s not what they do together. Them or any of the Ambassadors. You know that. It’s … masturbation.” That was the common if scandalous description, and it made me feel like a kid to say it. “Imagine what it’s like when two Ambassadors get together.”

Scile spent hours, many hours, listening to recordings of Ariekei speaking, watching trids and flats of encounters between them and the Ambassadors. I watched him mouth things to himself and write illegible notes, one-handedly input into his datspace. He learned fast. That was no surprise to me. When at last CalVin invited us to an event at which the Hosts would be present, Scile understood Language pretty much perfectly.

It was to be one of the discussions Ambassadors held with Hosts every few weeks. Interworld trade might come only every few thousand hours, but it was backed by and built on exhaustive, careful negotiation. With the arrival of each immership, terms agreed between Staff and Hosts (with the imprimatur of Bremen’s representative) were communicated, the vessel would leave with those details and Ariekene goods and tech, returning on its next round with whatever we had promised the Ariekei in return. They were patient.

“There’s a reception,” one of CalVin told us. “Would you like to come?”

We were not allowed into the actual negotiations, of course. Scile regretted this. “Why do you care?” I said. “It’ll be dull as hell. Trade talks? Really? How much of this, what do you want of that …”

“I want to know, that’s exactly it. What is it they want? Do you even know what we exchange with them?”

“Expertise, mostly. For AI and artminds and things. That they can’t make …”

“I know, because of Language. But I’d love to hear how they relate to that tech, when they get hold of it.”

An Ariekes couldn’t type into an artmind, of course: writing was incomprehensible to them. Oral input was no better: as far as any exopsych specialists could discern, the Hosts couldn’t ken interacting with a machine. The computer would speak back to them in what we heard as flawless vernacular, but to the Ariekei, with no sentience behind them, those words were just noises.

So our designers had created computers that were eavesdroppers. We built them from the simple loudhailer- and telephone-animals the Ariekei biorigged. They could—though no one made sense of how—understand each other’s voices (and those of our Ambassadors) through speakers or even recorded: so long as what was or had been said had that sentience, a genuine mind speaking it, neither distance nor time degraded its comprehensibility, its meaningness, what Scile had provocatively called the “soul.” We took those little mediators and upgraded, altered and sometimes ultimately replaced them with communication tech the Hosts could not have created. We routed their voices through artminds.

The programs were designed to work between interlocutors, to create their own instructions by insinuation. The Ariekei spoke to each other as they always had, and if their conversations took certain theoretical turns, the ’ware would listen in, make calculations, alter production, perform automated tasks. Just what the Ariekei understood to be occurring was of course beyond me, but they knew, I was told, that we had given them something—they paid for it, after all.

“And what do we get?” Scile said.

CalVin indicated a chandelier above us, tugging itself with slow grace into the darker areas of the room, extruding and reabsorbing tendril-end lights. “Biorigged stuff, of course,” they said. “You know that.” “You’ve seen it in Bremen, too. A lot of our food. And some gems and bits and pieces.” Like most Embassytowners I was rather vague on the details of the barters they were describing. “And gold.”

They were on duty, but CalVin hosted well, that first party. Scile stood by the table of delicacies, human and Ariekene, waiting. “Fraternising with the locals, at last?” Ehrsul had come quietly up behind me. She spoke suddenly, made me start and laugh.

“He’s so well behaved,” I said, nodding in Scile’s direction.

“Patient,” she said. “But then, you don’t have to be, you’ve already met the Hosts.”

She was only passing through, she said, supposedly on some upgrading errand. She swivelled and rolled past Scile with a whispered word, and he greeted her and watched her go. “You know what CalVin told me?” he said quietly to me. He gestured with his glass towards Ehrsul’s retreating form. “She can speak it. It sounds flawless. All the Ambassadors know exactly what she’s saying. But if she tries it with the Hosts, they don’t get a word.” He met my eyes. “She’s not really speaking Language at all.”

He continued his effort to cover his impatience—he was, at least, not rude about it. CalVin made sure to introduce him to those Staff and Ambassadors present he didn’t know. And of course, finally, when they arrived, with that usual shift in the room, to the Hosts.

It was the first time for thousands of hours I’d seen them so close. There were four. Three were in prime, in their third instar, and their tall outlines quivered with whiskers. The last was in finis—its dotage. Its abdomen was massive and pendulous and its limbs spindled. It walked firmly but was mindless. Its siblings had brought it as a kind of charity. It followed them under instinct, by sight and chemical trail. It was an evolutionary strategy on Arieka shared by more than one phylum that an animal’s last incarnation was as a food store for the young. They could gnaw at the nutritional swathings of its abdomen for days without killing it. Our Hosts had done so, in their early history, but they had given up the practice generations before as, we inferred, a barbarism. They mourned when their fellows entered their penultimate form, when their minds died, and respectfully shepherded the ambulatory corpses till they fell apart.

The undead thing bumped the table, upsetting wine and canapés, and HenRy, LoGan, CalVin and the other Ambassadors laughed politely as if at a joke.

“Please,” CalVin said, and brought Scile forward, toward the honoured indigens. I could not read Scile’s face. “Scile Cho Baradjian, this is Speaker—” and then in Cut and Turn at once they said the lead Host’s name.

It looked down at us from its jutting coralline extrusion, each random bud studded with an eye.

“,” CalVin said, together. Only Ambassadors could speak Host names.

Waving on a stalk-throat by its neck, its Cut-mouth terribly like human lips, the Host muttered: and at the level of our chests, where its body swelled, its Turn-mouth opened and coughed, emitting little rounded vowel sounds, tao dao thao.

It wore the organs of tiny animals coiled about its neck. Something wound between its stiletto feet, a companion animal. One accompanied all the Ariekei but the brain-dead old-timer. It was the size of a baby, a grub-thing with stump legs and filigree antennae, its back punctuated with holes, some ringed with inlaid metal. Its locomotion was between a scamper and a convulsion. It was a zelle, a biorigged battery-beast, into which leads and wires could be slotted, and out of which, depending on what its owner fed it, different power would flow. The Ariekene city was full of such sources.

stepped forward on four legs a little like a spider’s, long, too-jointed, dark-haired, and extended its wings: from its back its auditory fanwing, in many colours; from its front, from below its larger mouth, its limb of interaction and manipulation, its giftwing.

We would like to shake your giftwing with our hands, CalVin said in Language, and Scile, his face still closed to me, only pursing his lips a tiny bit, held out his hand. The Host clasped my husband’s hand in a greeting that would have made no sense to it, and then it clasped mine.

So Scile saw Language spoken. He listened. He asked quick questions of CalVin between their exchanges with the Host, which they, to my surprise, put up with.

“What? Is he insinuating that you couldn’t agree …?”

“No, it’s …” “… more complicated than that.” “Hold on.”

Then CalVin would speak together. “,” I heard them say at one point; they were saying please.

“I got almost all of it,” Scile told me afterward. He was very excited. “They shift tenses,” he said. “When they mentioned the negotiations they—the Ariekei, I mean—were in present discontinuous, but then they shifted into the elided past-present. That’s for, uh …” I knew what it was for, I assured him. He’d told me already. How could you not smile at him? I’d listened to him with affection, if not always with interest, over hundreds of hours.

“Does it ever occur to you that this language is impossible, Avice?” he said. “Im, poss, ih, bul. It makes no sense. They don’t have polysemy. Words don’t signify: they are their referents. How can they be sentient and not have symbolic language? How do their numbers work? It makes no sense. And Ambassadors are twins, not single people. There’s not one mind behind Language when they speak it …”

“They’re not twins, love,” I said.

“Whatever. You’re right. Clones. Doppels. The Ariekei think they’re hearing one mind, but they’re not.” I raised one eyebrow and he said, “No they’re not. It’s like we can only talk to them because of a mutual misunderstanding. What we call their words aren’t words: they don’t, you know, signify. And what they call our minds aren’t minds at all.” He didn’t laugh when I did. “You have to wonder,” he said. “Don’t you? What it is they do—Staff I mean—to make two people think they’re one.”

“Yeah, but they’re not two,” I said. “That’s the point about Ambassadors. That’s where your whole theory falls down.”

“But they could have been. Should have been. So what did they do?”

Unlike monozygots’, even doppels’ fingerprints were moulded and made identical. On principle. Every evening and morning Ambassadors corrected. Artmind microsurgery found whatever tiny marks and abrasions each half of each pair had uniquely picked up over the preceding day or night, and if they couldn’t be eradicated, they were replicated in the untouched half. Scile meant that, and more. He wanted to see the children: young doppels in the crèche. He could still scandalise me with stuff like that. Not that such requests got responses. He wanted to watch how they were raised.

Staff and Ambassadors went into the city regularly, but only the young or gauche would ask for details. As naughty children we hacked communications and found pictures and reports we thought were secret (that of course weren’t very), that gave us insinuations of what occurred.

“Sometimes,” CalVin told us, “they call us in for what we call moots. They chant—not words, or words we don’t know.” “And when they’re done, one by one we take a turn, singing to them.”

“What’s it for?” I asked, and simultaneously CalVin replied, “We don’t know,” and smiled.

Everyone was in his or her best again, for another event. Very different from any previous. I wore a dress studded with oxblood jade. Scile wore a tuxedo and white rose. The flyer that came for us was a biorigged mongrel, Ariekene breed-techniques but its quasi-living interior tailored to Terre needs, and piloted by our artminds.

It had been a huge shock to us when CalVin had told us we could accompany them. This wasn’t a party in the Embassy. We were going into the Host city, to a Festival of Lies.

I’d spent thousands of hours in the immer. I’d been to ports on tens of countries on tens of worlds, had even experienced that travellers’ shock we floakers called the retour, when after preparations for the alterity of a new world, one walks a quite inhuman capital and stares at intricate indigens, and starts to suspect that one has been there before. Still, the night Scile and I dressed to go into the city, I was nervous as I had not been since I left Arieka.

I watched through boat windows as we flew over the ivy and roofs of my little ghetto city. I breathed out when we crossed over the zone where the architecture went from the brick and ivied wood of my youth to the polymers and biorigged flesh of the Hosts, from alley-tangles to street-analogues of other topographies. Buildingthings were coming down and being replaced. Construction sites like combined slaughterhouses, puppy farms and quarries.

There were about twenty of us: five Ambassadors, a handful of Staff, and we two. Scile and I smiled at each other through our masks and breathed in the exhalations of our little portable aeoli. Quickly, very quickly, we were touched down on a roof, and followed our companions out and down and into an edifice, in the city.

A complex, many-chambered place the angles of which astonished me. Everyone who had ever talked about my poise would have laughed to see me literally stagger backward in that room. Walls and ceilings moved with ratcheting mechanical life like the offspring of chains and crabs. A kind Staff member steered Scile and me. Our party walked without Ariekene chaperone. I wanted to touch the walls. I could hear my heart. I heard Hosts. Suddenly we were among them. More than I’d ever seen.

The rooms were alive, cells rainbowing as we entered. Ariekei were speaking in turn, and the Ambassadors sung in alien politeness. Through a swallowing corridor, several Hosts in their final instars milled in dignified mindlessness. A bridge whistled to us.

For the first time in my life I saw Host young: steaming nutrient broths effervesced with elvers. Farther off was the fight-crèche, where the savage little second instars played with and killed each other. In a hall crisscrossed with walkways on tendons and platforms on muscular limbs were hundreds of Ariekei, giftwings extended, fanwings pretty with inks and natural pigments, gathered for the Festival of Lies.

For Hosts, speech was thought. It was as nonsensical to them that a speaker could say, could claim, something it knew to be untrue as, to me, that I could believe something I knew to be untrue. Without Language for things that didn’t exist, they could hardly think them; they were vaguer by far than dreams. What imaginaries any of them could conjure at all must be misty and trapped in their heads.

Our Ambassadors, though, were human. They could lie as well in Language as in our own language, to Hosts’ unending delight. These eisteddfods of mendacity had not existed—how could they?—before we Terre came. The Festivals of Lies had occurred almost as long as Embassytown had existed: they were one of our first gifts to the Hosts. I’d heard of them, but never expected to see one.

Our Ambassadors went among the hundreds of whickering Ariekei. Staff, Scile and I—we who couldn’t speak here—watched. The room was punctured with ventricles: I could hear it breathing.

“They’re welcoming us,” Scile told me, listening to all the voices. More. “It’s saying that, uh, they’ll see, I think, miracles, now. He’s asking our first something to step forward. It’s a compound, wait, uh …” He sounded tense. “Our first liar.”

“How do they make that word?” I said.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “Sayer-of-things-that-are-not, that sort of thing.”

Furniture was extruding into the room as it self-organised into a vague amphitheatre. Ambassador MayBel, elderly, stylish women, stood before an Ariekes, which raised what looked like a big fibre-trailing fungus in its giftwing. It inserted the dangles into the sockets of the zelle jigging by its legs, and the mushroom-thing made a sound and glowed, quickly changing colours, cycling to a nacreous blue.

The Host spoke. “It says: ‘describe it,’ ” Scile whispered. MayBel answered, May in the Cut, Bel the Turn voice.

The Ariekei stepped up and down, a sudden unanimity. A tense excitement. They tottered and chattered.

“What did they say?” I said. “MayBel? What did they—?”

Scile looked as if in disbelief at me. “They’re saying ‘It’s red.’ ”

MayBel bowed. The Ariekene hubbub continued while Ambassador LeRoy took their place. The Ariekes stroked its zelle, and the object attached to it changed shape and colour, altered into a great green teardrop. “Describe it,” Scile translated again.

LeRoy glanced at each other and began. “They said: ‘It’s a bird,’ ” Scile said. The Ariekei muttered. The noun was shorthand for a local winged form, as well as meaning our Embassytown birds. LeRoy spoke again and several Ariekei shouted, out of control. “LeRoy says it’s flying away,” Scile said into my helmet. I swear I saw Hosts crane their eye-corals up as if the lifeless plasm might have taken off. Le and Roy spoke together again. “They say …” Scile frowned as he followed. “They say it’s become a wheel,” he said, over the strange pandemonium of the audience.

One at a time every Ambassador lied. The Hosts grew boisterous in a fashion I’d never seen, then to my alarm seemed intoxicated, literally lie-drunk. Scile was tense. The room was whispering, echoing the furore of its inhabitants.

It was CalVin’s turn. They declaimed. “ ‘And the walls are disappearing,’ ” Scile translated. “ ‘And the ivy of Embassytown is winding about our legs …’ ” Hosts examined their limbs. “ ‘… and the room’s turning to metal and I’m growing larger and the room and I are becoming one.’ ”

That’s enough, I thought, and someone must have agreed, and whispered to CalVin. They bowed and stepped away.

The Ariekei slowly calmed. I thought it was over. But then, as we stared, a few Host braves came forward.

“It’s a sport,” said Cal, or Vin, who approached, sweating, as they saw my surprise. “An extreme sport,” said the other. “For—oh for years now, they’ve been trying to mimic us.” “A few are getting not too bad at it.” I watched.

“What colour is it?” the Ariekes holding the target object asked the competitors, as it had the Terre. One by one each Host would try to lie.

Most could not. They emitted croons and clickings that were effort.

“Red,” Scile translated. The bulb was red, and the speaker double-whined in what I presumed was disappointment. “Blue,” said another, also truthfully; the object changed each time. “Green.”

“Black.” Some made noises that were only noises, clicks and wheezes of failure, not words at all.

Every tiniest success was celebrated. When the object was a yellow, the Host trying to lie, an Ariekes with a scissor-shape on its fanwing, shuddered and retracted several of its eyes, gathered itself, and in its two voices said a word that would have translated as something like “yellow-beige.” It was hardly a dramatic untruth, but the crowd were rapturous at it.

A group of Hosts approached us. “Avice,” Cal or Vin said politely. “This is …” and they started to say names.

I never saw the point of these niceties between the like of me and Ariekei. Understanding only Language-speakers to have minds, they must have thought it odd when Ambassadors carefully introduced them to speechless amputated half-things. As if an Ariekes insisted on one politely saying hello to its battery animal.

So I thought, but it didn’t turn out that way. The Ariekei shook my hand with their giftwings when CalVin asked them to. They had cool dry skin. I shut my mouth to obscure whatever emotion was rising in me (I’m still not sure what it was). The Ariekei registered something as the Ambassadors told them my name. They spoke, and Scile quickly translated into my ear.

“They’re saying: ‘This?’ ” he told me. “ ‘This is the one?’ ”

Latterday, 3

There are ways to tell Hosts apart. There’s the fingerprint-unique patterning on each fanwing (any observation of this fact was generally followed by the tedious mention of the fact that Embassytown was the only place where Terre fingerprints were not all unique). There are subtleties of carapace shading, of spines on limbs, of eye-antler shape. These days I rarely bothered to pay attention, nor with a few exceptions did I learn the names of the Ariekei I met. So I couldn’t say if during that first or any later visit to the city, I had previously met any of the Host delegation that joined us all those kilohours later, in Diplomacy Hall, to greet EzRa, the impossible new Ambassador.

So far as I could tell all were in middle age, in their third instar, and therefore sentient. Some wore sashes indicating incomprehensible (to me) rank or predilections; some were studded with ugly little jewels where their chitin was thick. The most senior of the Ambassadors, MayBel and JoaQuin, were walking them slowly through the room, giving each of them a glass of champagne—carefully rigged to be palatable to them. The Hosts held them daintily and sipped with their Cut mouths. I saw Ez watch them.

“Ra’s coming,” Ehrsul said.

“What do we call him?” I said. “What are he and Ez to each other? They’re not doppels.”

Wherever in the room he was, and with whom, Scile, I knew, would be as tense at the strangeness of all this as I. Ez and Ra approached each other, changing how they held themselves, getting into another mode.

How could it have happened?

All those structures in place, for all those thousands of hours, years. Embassytown years, the years I grew up with, long months named in silly nostalgia for an antique calendar, each many dozen-day weeks long. For almost an Embassytown century, since Embassytown was born, structures had been in place. Clone farms had been run; careful and unique child rearing had raised doppels into Ambassadors, with the skills of governance they would need. It was all under Bremen’s aegis of course: they were our home power; our public buildings all displayed clocks and calendars in Charo City time. But so far out here in the immer, everything should have been under Staff control.

CalVin once told me that Bremen’s original expectations of Arieka’s reserves, of luxuries and oddities and local gold, had been overoptimistic. Ariekene bioriggery was valuable, though, certainly. More elegant and functional than any of the crude chimeras or particle-spliced jiggery-pokery any Terre I knew of had ever managed, these Ariekene things were moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with techniques we could not merely not mimic, but that were impossible according to our sciences. Was that enough? In any case, no colony is ever wound down.

How and why had Charo City trained this impossible Ambassador? I’d heard, like we all had, the story of the experiment and the freak result, the empathy reading spiking off the Stadt scale. But even if these two random friends did have such a connection, for whatever contingent psychic reason, why would they become Ambassadors?

“Wyatt’s excited,” Ehrsul said.

“They all are.” Gharda had approached, her music shift over, her instrument folded away. “Why wouldn’t they be?” she said.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Augmens relayed JoaQuin’s voices to hidden speakers. JoaQuin and MayBel went into encomia to their Ariekene guests. When that was done, they welcomed the new Ambassador.

I’d been to comings-out when Ambassadors came of age (strange, arrogant, charming young doppels greeting the crowd). But this of course was nothing like those appointments.

JoaQuin said, “This is an extraordinary time. We find ourselves with the task …” “… the enviable task, the strange task …” “… of coming up with a new kind of welcome. Perhaps some of you had heard that we have a new Ambassador?” Polite laughs. “We’ve spent a good deal of time with them over the last few days …” “… got to know them, and they us.” “These are unusual times.” Hear hear, said RanDolph. “It’s a privilege to be here, at an event I hope you will indulge us …” “… if we describe as history. This is an historic moment.” “Ladies and gentlemen …” “… Hosts …” “… all our guests. It’s our very great pleasure to welcome to Embassytown …” “… Ambassador EzRa.”

As the applause died, JoaQuin turned to the Hosts who stood beside them, and said our new Ambassador’s name accurately, in Language. “,” they said. The Hosts craned their eye-corals.

“Thank you, Ambassador JoaQuin,” Ez said. He conferred quietly with Ra. “It’s a great pleasure to be here,” Ez continued. He said a few standard, gracious things. I was watching the other Ambassadors. Ra’s self-introduction was brief, little more than his own name.

“We want to stress what an honour this is for us,” Ez said. “Embassytown’s one of the most important outposts of Bremen, and a vibrant community in its own right. We’re more grateful than we can say for your wonderful welcome. We look forward to becoming a part of the Embassytown community, working together for its future, and working together for Bremen’s.” There was applause of course. Ez waited.

“We look forward to working with you,” Ra said. Some Staff and Ambassadors were trying to hide nervousness. Some, I thought, eagerness.

“We realise that you must have questions,” Ez said. “Please don’t be shy about them. We realise we’re an … anomaly, for now …” He smiled. “We’re happy to talk about it, though to be honest we don’t really know why or how we can do what we do, either. We’re a mystery to us as well as to you.” The laugh he waited for and got was brief. “Now we’d like to do something we’ve trained very long and hard to do. We are an Ambassador—I’m very proud to say that—and we have a job to do. What we would like to do is to greet our gracious Hosts.” This applause seemed genuine.

The vespcams swarmed and wallscreens showed images, from scores of angles, of Ez and Ra coming together, ushered by their new colleagues toward the Hosts. The Ariekei stood in a semicircle. I’ve no idea what their conception was of what was happening. If nothing else, they knew that this was an Ambassador and that it was called .

EzRa conferred together like any other Ambassador did, whispering, preparing their words. The Hosts craned their eyes. Every Terre in the room seemed to lean in, to hold her or his breath. With great theatre, EzRa turned and spoke Language.

Ez was the Cut, Ra the Turn. They spoke well, beautifully. I had heard enough of it to tell that. Their accent was good, their timing good. Their voices were well suited. They said to the Hosts that it was an honour to meet them. , they said. Good greetings.

That was the moment everything changed. EzRa looked at each other, smiled. Their first official pronouncement. If it hadn’t been an absurd faux pas I think we would all have clapped. I’m sure many people hadn’t really thought them capable.

We were busy listening to them speak, and gauging their abilities. We didn’t notice everything change. I don’t think any of us at that moment noticed the reactions of the Hosts.

PART TWO

FESTIVALS

Latterday, 4

We were all watching the new Ambassador.

Ez hunkered down into a slightly pugnacious pose. He opened and closed his fists. I could tell he enjoyed what he was doing. He looked up at the Hosts from below a gathered brow.

Ra watched them sidelong. He pulled himself up, so tall and straight that he seemed to teeter slightly. The two of them were so absurdly distinct it was like a joke that erred in overdoing it. I was reminded of Laurel and Hardy, of Merlo and Rattleshape, of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

When they were done speaking, a wave of something went through all of us in Diplomacy Hall so palpably it was as if it rippled the ivy. I turned to Ehrsul and raised my eyebrows. We all knew this had been momentous, but there were perhaps a full five seconds before any of us realised that anything bad had happened.

The Hosts were swaying as if they were at sea. One spasmed its giftwing and its fanwing, another kept them unnaturally still. One opened and closed its membranes several times in neurotic repetition.

Three were plugged into their zelles by flesh skeins that bled in chemicals or energy, and by I suppose feedback the untoward behaviour of the Hosts infected their battery-beasts. The little ambulatory generators staggered, emitted sounds unlike any I’d heard them make before.

In very slow and unnerving unison, the Ariekei emerged from their trance. Their eye-corals drooped downward, toward us, and at last focused. They straightened and unstiffened their legs, as if coming out of sleep.

EzRa were frowning. They whispered to each other, and spoke again.

Are the bodies and/or brains of our Hosts troubled by invading biological entities or an allergic reaction to an environmental factor? they said, I later learned. That is they said, Has something happened to make you suboptimal? They said, Are you alright?

Their words sounded as if Ez said some stuttering poem while Ra mimicked birds. As they spoke the Ariekei jerked again, again in that ugly simultaneity, the linked zelles snapping back with them. They were lost back to their glaze. This time one made a noise, a moan from its Cut mouth.

JoaQuin and MayBel conferred in agitation. MayBel approached the Ariekei. The Hosts came gradually again, very gradually, out of what had taken them. CalVin saw me. We stared at each other, across the room, for the first time in some time. I saw in their eyes nothing but fear.

Staff rallied, Ambassadors stepped in, bustled and led the Hosts away. As the Ariekei woke from whatever trance this was, they started loudly declaiming, talking across each other, loud and chaotically. They were asking for the new Ambassador. Where is ? they kept saying. Where is ? I understood enough Language to know that.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please,” one of JoaQuin said. Someone from Staff must have spoken to the musicians on duty, because their playing started again. I’d not even realised they had stopped. Waiters recirculated. I saw security officers going somewhere, Simmon among them, controlled but in obvious urgency.

“Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen,” JoaQuin said. “Our guests, the Hosts, have been …” JoaQuin paused and conferred. “There’s been a small misunderstanding …” “… absolutely nothing to be concerned about …” I saw LoGan, CharLott, LuCy, AnDrew crowding the Hosts away. “Nothing at all important and entirely our own fault …” The two of them laughed. “We’re rectifying things now.” “There’s absolutely no reason to concern yourselves!” “The party continues. Please join us in raising your glasses.”

Many locals were eager to be reassured. Newcomers and temporary guests didn’t know how concerned they should be. We raised our glasses.

“To the captain and crew of the immership Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Response.…” said JoaQuin, “… to our most welcome immigrants, new citizens …” “… and above all, to Ambassador EzRa. May they have a long and happy career here in Embassytown.” “To EzRa!”

We all said it. The recipients of our toast raised their own drinks in reciprocation. They looked at the door through which the Hosts had been taken. It was to the credit of Staff that the party didn’t die. Within ten minutes most people were behaving more or less as they had been before.

“What the fuck was that?” I said quietly to Gharda.

“No bloody idea,” she said.

I couldn’t see Scile. There were several Ambassadors still in the room, along with Staff. I approached EdGar, but to my shock they turned away from me. I said their name in such a way that they couldn’t pretend not to have heard, and they glanced and said, “Not now, Avice.”

“You don’t even know what I want,” I said.

“Really, Avice.” “Not now.” They interspersed their words with smiles of greeting to those who passed them.

The crowd parted a moment and as if by plan revealed Cal or Vin. He still stared right at me. I was so startled I stopped moving. I couldn’t see my watcher’s doppel. The party concealed him again.

Gharda reappeared, with the pilot on her arm. She saw me and hesitated, looked a query at me. I waved, by all means. It mattered not at all how much more travelled I was than my city’s rulers, how airily I’d given them knowledge, how eagerly they’d received it. As EdGar walked away, I was nothing. It was they and the other Ambassadors who would, in closed session, decide what had happened, and what would happen now. They made law.

Formerly, 3

A long time ago I performed a strange unpleasant ritual in the shell of a restaurant. For that I was, Ambassadors and Staff had occasionally told me, feted by the Ariekei in my absence. That had meant nothing until the moment in the hall, at the festival, after the lying, when the Hosts discovered who I was.

They spoke rapidly, craned their eye-corals. They spoke me every day, Scile told me afterward. That was what they said to CalVin. I do not know, one Host said to CalVin, about me, how I did without her, how I thought what I needed to think.

Her? This was the question that we called the Tallying Mystery: did the Hosts consider each Ambassador one mind, double-bodied people? And if so, did they think the rest of us half-things, irrelevances, machines? A city full of the Ambassadors’ marionettes? When they knew me as simile, they asked for me to come back, but I was never sure if I was guest, exhibit, or something else. When we went, the Hosts took care of us, whether or not they understood that we were people.

I accepted their invitations because Scile could always come with me. A present to him, for which he was effusive, though I think he wanted to talk, to debrief, after the events more than I would. We would be ushered to the Hosts’ halls. There were usually Ambassadors and viziers and others there too, and these glimpses of secrets that had gone on all my life, the toing and froing of Staff in the Host city, were almost as disturbing to me as anything else that happened. I’d keep spotting Ambassadors walking flesh corridors in conversation with Ariekei, places I couldn’t imagine any human having a purpose.

These events, to which they had no in, were titillations to most of my friends. “A festival? Of lies?” Gharda said at a party after the first one. “The Hosts asked for you?” They were all gathered around me demanding to know what the city was like, and I laughed because someone said That’s import! exactly as we had when we were children.

My occasional presence in the city was troubling, I could tell, to the Ambassadors. They didn’t like seeing me there. This was their mystery. Staff debriefed me exhaustively after each of these trips, asking what I’d seen, what I’d understood.

The second time I entered the city, into another hall with a crowd of Hosts, I was left near a collection of obscure objects and anaesthetised Ariekene animals, and with four other humans, enzymatic lights bowing in the curves of their aeoli helmets. Two were Ambassador LeNa, who ignored me. The other two were young men, commoners like me.

“Hello,” said one. He smiled enthusiastically and I did not smile back. “I’m Hasser: I’m an example. Davyn’s a topic. You’re Avice, aren’t you? You’re a simile.”

Neither this, nor any of the other times I went in, was an event the same as the first gathering I’d attended. They were more chaotic, and, I learned, less focused. There had for a while been a vogue among the Hosts for what were, more or less, conventions. Celebrations of Language, with broader remits than just the rare lies. They would gather as many of the necessary constructed facts as they could in one place, as many enLanguaged elements as possible—animate, inanimate, sentient and not—and come to look at us, use and theorise us, without consensus. We sat polite through wheezing, stuttering, sung arguments around and about us. I found it less compelling than the devoted lying I’d first seen.

I was lulled by the roar and whisper of the Cut and the Turn mouths, while Scile tried to translate. Hosts stamped back and forward, disagreeing in factions. Something like a polemic, I gathered, went on between those who thought me a useful figure of speech, and those who did not.

It was a crippled, strange debate, I think. There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was, they would have asserted, like. But those critics of course couldn’t say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.

“But …” said Scile. He was unhappy.

“They must be in the back of their minds, those thoughts,” I said. “Is that why they’re angry? They’ve been denied them.”

“Hold on,” he said. “One of them’s saying about you: ‘It’s a comparison, and … it is something new.’ I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“Alright, my love, just …”

“Hey,” Scile whispered. “They’re using the other figures of speech.” He indicated our Embassytown companions, at whom the Hosts stared. He turned his head in surprise. “If I understand them … that man Hasser—he lied to us. He’s not an example: he’s a simile, like you.”

Whatever the question marks over my efficacy, I must have had my uses: for the several weeks these events were in vogue, the Hosts kept bringing me back.

Something soured between CalVin and me. For weeks during our sex I’d teased them that I could tell the difference in the way they touched me: they probably knew there was a little truth to it. When we’d first got together I’d been immaturely excited that I was sleeping with an Ambassador. But that rather performed giddiness didn’t last long.

I remember the feel of them, the cool of their links in their necks, minimalist jewellery amplifying their thoughts into each other. I remember watching them touch each other—peculiar, unique erotics. Afterward, I might grin salaciously when I distinguished them, but it was an edgy game. “Cal,” I would say, pointing at one, then the other. “Vin. Cal … Vin.” They might smile, might look away. I could sometimes, especially in the mornings, see differences. The marks of nighttime—a face imprinted by a pillow, particular bags below eyes. CalVin never left long before ablutions, locking the door to the correction chamber and emerging with all those tiny differences effaced or copied.

They didn’t like that I was being asked back to the conferences and conventions. But Staff would hardly turn down Host requests like that. Once one of CalVin told me in sudden fury, apropos of nothing I’d noticed, that Ambassadors had no bloody power at all, that the other Staff and viziers and the rest made all the bloody decisions, that he and his doppel had less say than anyone.

I argued with them, now, sometimes. After one really unpleasant altercation I swear I did not start, Cal or Vin stayed for seconds in the doorway staring at me, with an expression I couldn’t read, while his doppel walked away. Perhaps I wouldn’t have liked it if they could immerse, I supposed. I doubted I would have cared, though.

“It’s not the same,” I said to the one still there. “You speak Language. I am it.”

There were Hosts who favoured my simile above all others, and came to every event at which I was present. They extolled my uses, over all the allegories or rhetorical devices embedded in varying ways in men and women and other things present. “You have fans,” Scile said. These were my months of simile fame.

I saw Hasser several other times; we would stand and wait while we were deployed in harsh arguments. There were Language dissidents, urging a reconception of what I and the other similes might have been. From the reactions of the other Hosts, this thought-experiment was in bad taste. After one such, I asked Scile if he’d heard the Hosts speak Hasser, and if so what he was about.

Scile understood Language as well as an Ambassador, but “I don’t know how you bloody things work,” he said. “I never see any relation between what you mean and what they’re talking about, what they compare you with and use you for. So are you asking what do they think with Hasser? I’ve no idea.”

“That isn’t what I mean.”

“You mean literally what does he mean?”

“Right. Like, foundation-fact, like I mean girl who ate … well, you know.”

Scile hesitated. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it was, is … what they said was it’s like the boy who was opened up and closed again.” We stared at each other.

“Oh God,” I said.

“Yes. I can’t be sure so don’t … but, yes.”

“Jesus.”

In the corvid, being hauled back to Embassytown, I said to Hasser, “Why didn’t you tell me you were a simile?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Overheard, then?” He smiled. “It’s complicated. It’s something I think about a lot, being simile. But I don’t know how you feel about it … For some of us, if you’re … If you want to talk about this stuff,” and he sounded guarded but excited, “there are a few of us who think it’s important.”

“Similes?” I said. “You, what, hang out?”

Well. They knew other tropes and Language moments too, of course, he explained. But it was certain of the similes in particular who had found a community with each other. I despised them instantly he told me.

“I don’t know how we missed you,” he said. “I know they say you, but how did the Hosts miss you for these events all this time? How did you miss us?”

“I suppose being Language was never the main thing in my life,” I said. I think I accidentally showed my contempt. If I’d not learned to immerse and hadn’t got into the out, I reminded myself, I might have spent my days in the bars and halls and drink houses where these similes gathered. It must be a strange kind of life and notoriety, but it was something. I wanted to apologise for showing my sneer. I asked him what it all meant to him. After an initial guardedness, he said, “To be part of it! Language.”

Latterday, 5

None of us with any nous believed the party was really back to normal. “Ehrsul.” I whispered to her and made motions, but when, winding her long chassis precisely she pathed her way to me, it was to tell me she couldn’t hack any coms to work out what was happening.

I found a couple of the last Ambassadors in the room, MagDa and EsMé. “What’s going on?” I said to them. “Hey. MagDa. Please.”

“We have to …” one of EsMé said. “It’s …” “Everything’s under control.”

“MagDa. What’s going on?”

Mag and Da and Es and Mé looked as if they were going to say something. EsMé had never liked me, had a common Ambassador opinion of the returned outgoer, immerser, floaker, and so on, but still, they hesitated.

To my great shock Scile appeared beside us. He met my eyes, either without emotion or hiding it. “MagDa,” he said. “You have to come and talk to Ra.”

They nodded and I lost that moment. As the five of them walked away, I grabbed Scile’s arm. I kept my face impassive, and he looked back at me similarly. It hardly surprised me that he was closer to whatever was happening than I. He’d been working with Staff, he’d been in cahoots with Ambassadors. They’d always been so focused on using Language they weren’t used to learning about it, and as things had shifted in Embassytown, and it had become useful to think about such questions, they had, I understood, been fascinated with his theories. His work had made him useful. He had certainly been to more Staff functions than I had.

“So?” I said. I was only slightly surprised at my brazen self. Floakers did what they had to. “What’s going on?”

“Avvy,” he said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Scile, do you know what’s happening?”

“No. I don’t. I’d a … I really don’t. This isn’t what I expected.” Near us two people touched wineglasses like little bells. The musicians were drunk now and the music was veering. This was the single chance many locals would have to meet the immerser crew, and they were taking advantage. Seeing pairs and little groups leave the party I remembered that borrowed sex appeal of immer. I’d benefited from it myself on my return: it had been a heady few weeks.

“I have to go,” Scile said. “They need me.”

Es took one of his arms, Mé the other. They surely knew relations were bad between Scile and me, and perhaps even why. I doubt they were sleeping with him. Scile’s assignations were brief and occasional. Though all Bremen marriages were legal in Embassytown, locals tended to invoke exclusive, property-based models. I was jealous of Scile, of course, but at what he’d become, and what secrets he knew.

It was half an hour to my flat. Ehrsul came with me. In a lot of countries I’ve been in the populace all have personal vehicles. All but the largest streets of Embassytown were too narrow, and often too steep, for that. There were altanimals and some biorigged carriages to take certain routes, which switched from wheels or treads to legs where necessary, but most people went on foot.

Embassytown was a small and crowded place, our population growth limited by the edge of the aeoli breath. It was surrounded by the Host city, except at the very northern point, where Ariekene plains started. Semilegal urban growth was tolerated, jury-rigged rooms sutured to walls, looming over alleys like eaves, thrown up on roofs, always ready to be abandoned. Most Staff tacitly approved of such enterprising space-maximisation. Here and there were half-trained biorigged bits and pieces, some backstreet-crossbred with Terretech and holding together through luck, tended aspects of domesticity.

Arced over Embassytown was the Embassy itself, edging up to those plains. At something over a hundred metres it was the tallest building we had. A fat pillar, studded with horizontal boughs and landing pads, to and from which, even so late, bioluminescent corvids moved. Like something melted, the Embassy spread out at its base and became part of the streets that surrounded it. Staff neighbourhoods were half-covered, as much the innards of the Embassy itself as alleyways. Ehrsul and I descended by panelled lift, through walkways, corridors that became things between corridors and streets, arcades half-open, with unglazed windows, and then into the streets proper, and the breeze.

“God, it’s nice to get outside,” I said.

“We’re not, not really,” Ehrsul said. “We’re all always in the aeoli breath.” A room of air.

It made me think about her, that she didn’t leave Embassytown, though she could have. She wasn’t programmed to be interested in the city, I supposed. I shied away from that. In my rooms I sipped more wine, and Ehrsul companionably made trid visions of a similar glass, made her trid head drink from it. She patched into my station but could find out nothing about the evening’s occurrences on the localnet.

“I’ll try again when I get home,” she said. “No offence but your machine … you’d have more luck banging rocks together.”

I’d been to her home several times. It was tiny, and sparse, but there were pictures on the walls, a kitchen, furniture for human and other guests (one beautiful, obscene-looking Shur’asi stool). Her flat and its tasteful accoutrements were perhaps for my and others’ benefits: her pictures, her coffee table, her imported rug elements of an operating system, designed to make her user-friendly. These ruminations felt disgraceful. I wondered about EzRa.

Formerly, 4

Hasser buzzed me. “How did you get my number?” I said.

“Please,” he said. He didn’t sound particularly intimidated, though I was deploying my best fuck-you immerser swagger. “It’s not hard to track you down. Come and have a drink.”

“Why would I come and have a drink?”

“Please,” he said. “There are people you should really meet.”

The similes met in an amiably collapsing part of Embassytown, near our young ruins. I took a long route, walking for most of the morning, past many ignored and homeless automa. I even passed the coin wall and as I always did glanced at the door.

There are slums on Charo City, and I’ve spent more time than I’d like in their environs. Many of the ports at which I’ve docked are in or by such areas: it’s as if slumism is an infection carried by ships. When in the course of Embassytown parties members of reformer factions started mouthing, I tended to interrupt them. “Slums?” I’d say. “Believe me, my friend, I’ve seen slums. You know where I’ve been? I know from slums. We don’t have slums.”

In Embassytown there were no rag-draped children playing with paper boats in stinking water, in potholes; no people selling themselves for food to immersers and people from the out, nor hawking bits of their DNA or flesh to bioccaneers; wattle-and-daub huts didn’t shake as ships rose and descended overhead, didn’t collapse every few landings. Our social graphs were pretty flat: differentials of money and power were minor. Excepting Staff, and Ambassadors.

The wallscreens and projectors in our unkempt areas were on forgotten loops, their cycles degraded. Some advertised discontinued products, or luxuries from the out of which I knew there had been none left for a long time. Here as elsewhere in Embassytown the walls were overgrown with ivy and altivy, and specked with a local moss-analogue, so the light from those advertisements and crude public art was dappled with leaf-shadows.

There were places where, pushed through the foliage, embedded in bricks and plastone, pipes siphoned information from or fed illicit and troublemaking opinions to the screens. I walked in the glimmer of hacked denunciations of Bremen, threats of violence to Wyatt and his small staff. A demagogic trid ghost muttered about freedoms, democracies and taxation. Even Wyatt would hardly have been very concerned about this halfhearted radical’s display, though I’m sure he would have excoriated the constabulary for failing to take such graffiti offline.

I was in a shopping street specialising in leather and altleather. I smelt tanning and guts by a shop where ripe purses were being harvested from a biorigged tree. The butchers cut them with skill, making a slit to which they would attach a clasp, scooping out innards and readying the skins for sealing. In the rear was a crop of immature umbrellas, silly luxuries weakly flexing their vespertilian canopies. The altleather goods were simple, mouthless, arseless things that couldn’t have lived: the viscera that slopped in the shop’s gutter were vague and meaningless.

At least a dozen similes were gathered in the wine-café called The Cravat, to where I’d been directed. Its trid sign stalked endlessly in front of it, a figure failing to do up its neckpiece. I stepped through it (an unexpected flourish of tridware making it look up as if startled before reverting to its loop) and inside.

“Avice!” Hasser was delighted. “Introductions … Darius, who wore tools instead of jewellery; Shanita, who was kept blind and awake for three nights; Valdik, who swims every week with fishes.” He went round the room like that. “This is Avice,” he said, “who ate what was given to her.”

Of course we were hardly all the similes the Ariekei spoke. Some were animal or inanimate: there was a house in Embassytown out of which, many years before, the Hosts had taken all the furniture, then put it back, to allow some figure of speech. The split stone, made so they could speak the thought, it’s like the stone that was split and put together again. Most, though, were Terre men and women: there was something in us that facilitated.

Many similes, of course, were uninterested in their status. There were, I gathered, one or two among Staff. Even Ambassadors. They never came.

“They don’t like being Language,” Hasser said. “It makes them feel vulnerable—they like speaking Language, not being it. Plus they’d have to hobnob with commoners.” He spoke with the complicated amalgam of respect and resentment I’d heard before and would again, many times.

We talked about Language, and what it meant to be what we were. They talked: mostly I listened. I tried to keep the irritations their blather raised to myself. I’d come, after all. A disproportionate number of the similes seemed, to varying degrees, to be independencers. They said this and that about Bremen’s benighted hand and ruthless agents. Having met Wyatt, this in particular made me snort.

“I don’t see any of you turning down anything from the miab,” I said.

“No,” someone answered, “but we should trade, instead of handing over bloody taxes and aid.”

Hasser gave me sotto voce information about my interlocutors as they spoke, like a vizier in the ears of an Ambassador. “She’s just bitter because she doesn’t get called very often. Her simile’s too recondite.” “He’s less a simile than an example, honestly. And he knows it.” When I went home I was peppery about them all. I told Scile how ridiculous a scene it was. But I went back. I’ve thought a lot about why I did. Which does not mean I could explain it.

On my second trip, Valdik, who every week swam with fishes, told the story of his similification. He was an ongoing: his status depended not on something that he had done or had done to him, but on something he had to continue to do. It’s like the man who swims with fishes every week, the Hosts might want to say, to make whatever obscure point it was, and to allow them that, it had to be true that he did. Hence his duty.

“There’s a marble bath in Staff quarters,” Valdik said. Glanced up at me, back down. “They shipped it years ago, all the way through the immer. They put little altfish in with me, which can take the chlorine. I swim every Overday.” I suspected he spent the eleven days between each such trip preparing for the next. I did not know what efforts were made to ensure such activities were ongoing, the tenses of the Hosts’ similes accurate. I wondered if that was part of the Ambassadors’ slight unease with us: the possibility of a simile strike.

When it was my turn, I told my new companions about the restaurant, and the things I ate, and it was unpleasant enough, what had happened, that I accrued some credibility. Some of them stared at me; one or two, like Valdik, were avoiding looking at me at all. “Welcome home,” said someone quietly. I hated that and stopped policing my expressions, made sure they could see that I hated it. And I hated that when he took his own turn, described terrible things done to enLanguage him, Hasser, who had been opened and closed again, modulated his voice and timed his delivery and turned it, true as it was, into a story.

Latterday, 6

A citizen who didn’t spend much time at the Embassy might not have seen that anything was wrong: the checkpoints were manned; Staff and Staff-apprentices were around; signs still appeared in trid and flatscreen glowing information. Disquiet, though, was palpable, since the party, to those who knew.

No ship had ever left with such an unfocused valedictory as our last arrival. Of course sufficient pomp had been attempted. Soon enough after the Arrival Ball that some were still cheerfully dishevelled, the immerser crew had been seen off on their boat by a gathering of Ambassadors, Staff and people like me, Embassytowners holding their breath until, left alone, they could deal with whatever it was that was happening. In fact, they, we, didn’t deal with it at all. There were those among the Staff, I picked up later, who had tried to insist that the ship not leave.

I, Avice Benner Cho, immerser, first a lover then an ex of CalVin (some Embassytowners probably thought it a lie, that, but it was part of me and was also true), advisor to Staff on out-business, had my entry to the state offices blocked by a nervous constable. In the end it didn’t take much. A little floaking—I think you’ve made a mistake, Officer, a moment’s But that’s precisely why I’m here, they wanted my help—and I was passed. I had no illusions about my real stock to insiders. But to have to go through that simply to get into the hallways?

Inside there wasn’t even a pretence at calm. I jostled past Staff whispering arguments with each other. I looked for EdGar, or someone I knew would talk to me. “What are you doing here?” said Ag or Nes of AgNes, her doppel shaking her head. They were rather grande dames, and paid no attention to my muttered response. “I’d get going, girl.” “You’ll only be …” “… in the way.” Others were less dismissive—RanDolph gave me smiles and mimed exhaustion, a high-ranking vizier I’d once got drunk with even winked at me—but AgNes were right, I was an obstruction.

In a top-floor teahouse, overlooking our roofscape and its segue into the outlines of the city, I found Simmon, from Security, and cornered him. After obligatory protestations that he knew nothing, that he couldn’t tell me anything, he said, “I’ve not seen Ambassador EzRa since the party. I don’t know where they’ve gone. According to the original schedule they were due to be part of a meet-and-greet half an hour ago, but they never turned up. Mind you they weren’t the only ones. Plans have mostly gone to shit. Where in hell are the Hosts?”

Good question. Discussions of major issues between Embassytown and the Hosts—mining rights, our farms, technology barter, Language celebrations—were only occasional, but every day, there were minutiae that had to be agreed. There were always a few Ariekei in the corridors, for one or other negotiation. The Embassy was toughly floored, to withstand their point-feet.

“They’re not here,” Simmon said. He massaged the odd flesh of his biorigged arm. “None of them. We’ve had generations to compromise with them on what constitutes an appointment, so we know fine bloody well that several were supposed to be here this morning, and would normally have been, and they’re not. They’re not returning any of our buzzes. They’re not communicating with us at all.”

“We must have offended them pretty badly,” I said at last.

“Looks like it,” he said.

“How, do you think?”

“Pharotekton bloody knows how. Or EzRa knows.” Neither of us said anything for a moment. “Do you know someone called Oratee?” he said. “Or Oratees?”

“No. Who’s that?” It hadn’t sounded like an Ambassador: a strange name with no ghost-stress halfway through it.

“I don’t know. I heard CalVin and HenRy talking about them, sounded as if they’d know what’s going on. I thought you might know them. You know everyone.” It was nice of him, but I didn’t have it in me to play that up. “AgNes and a couple of other Ambassadors blame Wyatt for this, you know.”

“For what?”

“For whatever. For whatever it is that happened. I heard them. ‘This is all down to him and Bremen,’ they were saying. ‘We always knew they were undermining us, well here we are …’ ” Simmon made his prosthetic hand move open-closed to show a talkative mouth.

“So they know what’s going on, then?” He shrugged.

“Don’t think so, but. You don’t have to understand something to blame someone for it,” he said. “They’re right, anyway. This has to be a … manoeuvre, no question. EzRa … some Bremen weapon.”

What if AgNes were right? If so, and I played the particular last contact-card I had, it would be, I supposed, a betrayal of Embassytown. CalVin and Scile came to my mind and I overcame any hesitation. I buzzed Wyatt. As I connected I tried to think strategically, to work out where and how he was professional, where likely to bend, trying to work out what to say that might actually gain me some insight, persuade him to divulge something. The payoff to all this skulduggery was sheer bathos.

“Avice,” Wyatt shouted when I got through. “Thank God you called. I can’t get anyone to pick up over there. For fuck’s sake, Avice, what’s going on?”

He was more cut off even than me. He and his few assistants had offices in the heart of the Embassy, of course, but some Staff blamed him, others wanted to keep him out of whatever was happening, and all agreed they should caucus without him. They managed to do so never quite breaching the law that placed him, their Bremen overseer, above them.

They had circulated, as they were obliged to, a list of all that day’s many meetings. Wyatt had sent officers to all those in main halls, and had gone himself to one titled “Emergency Organisation,” to discover that all these were sideshows, anxious extemporised discussions between midlevel Staff over issues such as stationery acquisition. The real debates, postmortems on the party, hypotheses about the Hosts’ silence, had happened already, during the Any Other Business sessions of meetings of the Public Works Committee.

“It’s a fucking outrage, Avice!” he said. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that has to stop, that is exactly the sort of thing we’ve been sent to put an end to. They have conspired to keep me out. I’m their bloody superior! Not to mention what they’re doing to EzRa—these men are their colleagues, and they’re ostracising them. It’s a disgrace.”

“Wyatt, wait. Where are EzRa?”

“Ra’s in his room, or he was when I buzzed him. Ez I don’t know. Your colleagues …”

“They’re not my …”

“Your colleagues are freezing them out. I’m sure they’d arrest them if they could. Ez’s not answering, and I can’t find him …” The notion of an Ambassador having separate rooms, doing different things, still reeled me.

“Do they know what’s going on?”

“Don’t you think they’d tell me?” he said. “It’s not everyone here who tries to cut me out, you realise, just your bloody Ambassadors. Whatever it is they’re hatching …”

“Wyatt, calm down. Whatever’s going on, you can see Staff aren’t in any more control than you.” He must have known the Embassy had had no contact of any kind from the city, since that night. “The Hosts aren’t saying anything. I think …” I said carefully. “I think EzRa … or we … must have accidentally done something that offended them … badly …”

“Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he’s on the grill. Do you ever think how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretend to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they’re really all about how ridiculous natives overreact.” He laughed and shook his head. “Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn’t lose our shit, did we? The Ariekei—and the Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Cymar and what-have-you, pretty much all the exots I’ve ever dealt with—are perfectly capable of understanding when an insult’s intended, and when it’s a misunderstanding. Behind every Ku and Lono story, there’s … pilfering and cannon-fire. Believe me,” he added wryly. “It’s my job.” He made thieving-fingers motions. It was because he would say things like that that I liked him.

“There’s always argy-bargy, Avice,” he said, and leaned toward the screen. “Job like mine. I’ve not shown bad form, have I?” He said this suddenly, almost plaintively. “But this … Avice, there are limits. JoaQuin and MayBel and that lot—they need to remember what I represent.”

Bremen was a power, so always at war, with other countries on Dagostin, and on other worlds. What if enemies sent battleships in our direction? Kicked Bremen in the colonies? What, were we going to raise our rifles, our biorigged cannons, aim at the skies? Any comeback for a little genocide like that, which they could offhandedly commit, would have to come from Bremen itself, if it calculated it worth it. Melees in the vacuum of sometimes-space, or terrible strange firefights in the immer. That threat, and Arieka’s isolation in rough immer—and, though it went unspoken, our lack of importance—were the deterrents against attacks at that level. But there were other factors in Bremen’s martial calculations.

The Ariekei were not pacifist. They sometimes conducted obscure internecine murders and feuds, I had been told; and whatever Wyatt said, whatever the reasons, there had been violent confrontations, deaths, between our species, in the early years of contact. Protocols between us were very firm, and for generations, there’d been no trouble in relations. So it felt absurd to imagine the Ariekei, the city, ever turning against Embassytown. But we were some thousands, and they were many many times that, and they had weapons.

Wyatt was more than a bureaucrat. He represented Bremen, officially our protector; and as such, he must be armed. His staff were suspiciously athletic for office workers. It was well-known that there were weapon caches in Embassytown, to which Wyatt alone had access. The hidden silos were rumoured to contain firepower of a different magnitude from our own paltry guns. There for our benefit, of course, the claim was. Bremen officials arrived with the keys deep-coded in their augmens. It was impolitic and a little frightening of Wyatt to state so blatantly, even to me, an outsider of sorts and a friend of his, of sorts, that his staff were soldiers, with access to arms, and he their CO.

It was true that he was patient. He ignored Embassytown’s minor-to-moderate embezzlement when the miabs came, and every few years when Bremen taxes were collected. He encouraged his officers to mix with Staff and commoners, and even sanctioned the occasional intermarriage. Like all colonial postings, his was a difficult job. With communication with his bosses so occasional, initiative and flexibility were vital. We’d had officious women and men in his post before, and it had made ugly politics. In return for his softly-softly stance Wyatt felt owed. That the Ambassadors were unfair.

I liked Wyatt but he was naïve. He was Bremen’s man, when the lights went out. I understood that and what it meant, even if he did not.

Formerly, 5

Hosts would sometimes bob into view, alone or in small groups, zelles at their feet, walking their slowed-down scuttle through our alleyways. Who can say what their errands were? Perhaps they were sightseeing, or taking what, according to odd topographies, were shortcuts, into our quarter and out again. Some came deep into the aeoli breath, right into Embassytown neighbourhoods, and of these some were looking for the similes. These Ariekei were fans.

Every few days one or two or a little conclave would arrive with dainty chitin steps. They would enter The Cravat, their fanwings twitching, wearing clothes for display—sashes fronded with fins and filigrees that each caught the wind with a particular sound, as distinct as garish colours.

“Our public demands us,” someone said the first time I saw such an approach. Despite the faux-weary joke anyone could tell that this audience meant a great deal to the similes. The one time I persuaded Ehrsul to come with me, ostensibly to store up anecdotes so we could later laugh at my new acquaintances, the arrival of some Hosts seemed to discombobulate her. She ignored my whispers about the Ariekei, did not speak much except in brief polite non sequiturs. I’d been with her in Hosts’ company before, of course, but never in so informal a setting, never according to their unknown whims, not terms requested by Embassytown panjandrums. She never came back.

The owners and regular clientele of The Cravat would courteously ignore the Hosts, which would murmur to each other. Their eye-corals would crane and the tines separate, looking us over as we looked back. Waiters and customers stepped smoothly around them. The Hosts would talk quietly as they examined us.

“Says it’s looking for the one who balanced metal,” someone would translate. “That’s you, Burnham. Stand up, man! Make yourself known.” “They’re talking about your clothes, Sasha.” “That one says I’m more useful than you are—says he speaks me all the time.” “That’s not what it says, you cheeky sod …” So on. When the Hosts gathered around me, sometimes I had to suppress a moment of memory of child-me in that restaurant.

I didn’t find it hard to recognise repeat visitors, by that configuration of eye-corals, those patterns on the fanwing. With the exhilaration of minor blasphemy we christened them according to these peculiarities: Stumpy, Croissant, Fiver. They, it seemed, recognised each of us as easily.

We learnt the favourite similes of many. One of my own regular articulators was a tall Host with a vivid black-and-red fanwing, just enough like a flamenco dress for us to call it Spanish Dancer.

“It does this brilliant thing,” Hasser said to me. He knew I was hardly fluent. “When it talks about you.” I could see him groping for nuances. “ ‘When we talk about talking,’ it says, ‘most of us are like the girl who ate what was given to her. But we might choose what we say with her.’ It’s virtuoso.” He shrugged at my expression and would have left it, but I made him explain.

In the main my simile was used to describe a kind of making do. Spanish Dancer and its friends, though, by some odd rhetoric, by emphasis on a certain syllable, spoke me rather to imply potential change. That was the kind of panache that could get Hosts ecstatic. I had no idea whether many of them had always been so fascinated by language, or whether that obsession resulted from their interactions with the Ambassadors, and with us strange Languageless things.

Scile always wanted details of what had happened, who had said what, which Hosts had been there. “It’s not fair,” I told him. “You won’t come with me, but you get annoyed if I can’t repeat every tedious thing anyone said?”

“I wouldn’t be welcome and you know it.” That was true. “Why do you keep going if it’s so dull?”

It was a reasonable question. The excitement with which the other similes reacted to the Host visitors, and the range, or its lack, of what they talked about when there were no Hosts there, irritated me, greatly, every time. I think I had, though, a sense that this was where things might occur, that this was important.

There was a Host who often accompanied Spanish Dancer. It was squatter than most, its legs gnarled, its underbelly more pendulous, as it approached old age. For some reason I forget we named it Beehive.

“I’ve seen it before,” said Shanita. It spoke incessantly, and we listened, but it seemed a mixture of half-sentences. We could make no sense of what it said. I remembered where I knew it from: my first-ever journey into the city. It had competed at that Festival of Lies. It had been unusually able to misdescribe that untruth-target object. It had called the thing some wrong colour.

“It’s a liar,” I said. I was clicking my fingers. “I’ve seen it before too.”

“Hm,” said Valdik. He looked rather suspicious. “What’s it saying now?” Beehive was circling, watching us, scratching at the air with its giftwing.

“ ‘Like this, like this,’ ” Hasser translated. He shook his head, I’ve no idea. “ ‘Like, they are, similar, different, not the same, the same.’ ”

The Cravat wasn’t the only place we met, but it was by far the most common venue. Occasionally we might get together in a restaurant near the shopping districts, or the canalside benches of another parlour, but only when planned in advance and only from some vague sense of propriety, of not being hidebound. The Cravat, though, was where the Hosts had come to know they might find us, and being so found was very much the point.

The similes thought of themselves as a salon of debate, but only a certain range of dissidence was permissible. Once a young man tried to engage us with arguments that turned from independence to seditionism, anti-Staffist stuff, and I had to intervene to save him from a beating.

I took him outside. “Go,” I told him. A crowd of the similes were gathered, jeering, shouting at him to come back and try impugning the Ambassadors one more time.

He said, “I thought they were supposed to be radicals.” He looked so forlorn I wanted to give him a hug.

“That lot? Depends who you ask,” I said. “Yeah, they’d be traitors according to Bremen. But they’re more loyal to Staff than the Staff are.”

Plebiscite politics were absurd in Embassytown. As if any of us could speak to Hosts! And for The Cravat crew, even ignoring the fact of Embassytown’s inevitable collapse in the event of their absence, without Ambassadors, who would speak these men and women so proud of being similes to the Hosts?

Latterday, 7

The Ariekei didn’t respond to any attempts at contact. In those incommunicado hours, I more than once considered buzzing CalVin, or Scile, to demand information: they would be more likely than anyone else I knew to have some. It wasn’t the confrontation that stopped me, but the conviction that I wouldn’t be able to shame or bully anything out of them.

It was spring in Embassytown and the chill was dissipating. From high in the Embassy I looked over the roofscape of the city, to animalships and blinking architecture. Something was changing. A colour or its lack, a motion, a palsy.

A corvid rose from an Embassy landing pad, moved through the sky to the city’s airspace, edged from place to place, hovering, looking for somewhere to land; defeated, it returned. The Ambassadors aboard must have sent messages down to the various housebodies they overflew, without response.

There were probably still plenty of Embassytowners who didn’t yet know anything was wrong. The official press were loyal or inefficient. But there had been many people at that party, and stories were spreading.

The sun still rose, and the shops sold things, and people went to work. It was a slow catastrophe.

I called the number Ehrsul had given me, which she had extracted from a newly and imperfectly upgraded net, which she had told me was Ez’s. He—or whomever it was I’d called—didn’t answer. I kept swearing, as quietly as I could make myself, and tried again, again without result.

Later I learnt that that day, in desperation, Ambassadors went into the city on foot. Pairs of desperate doppels accosted the Hosts they met, speaking Language at them through the transmitters of their aeoli helmets and receiving polite nonanswers, or incomprehension, or unhelpful intimations of disaster.

Someone came to my house. I opened the door and it was Ra, standing there on my threshold. I stared at him in silence for long seconds.

“You look surprised,” he said.

“Understatement,” I said. I stepped aside for him. Ra kept taking his buzzer out and making as if to switch it off, then leaving it on. “They trying to reach you?” I said.

“Only Wyatt,” he said.

“Really? No one else? No Ambassadors? You’re not being followed?”

“How are you?” he said. “I was thinking …” We sat for a long time on chairs facing each other. He looked over his shoulder, behind himself, more than once. There was nothing there but my wall.

“Where’s Ez?” I said.

He shrugged. “He’s gone out.”

“Shouldn’t you be together?” He shrugged again. “In the Embassy? Look, Ra, how did you even get out? I’d have thought they’d have you on bloody lockdown.” If it had been me in charge, I would have incarcerated EzRa, to control the situation, or contain it, whatever the situation was. Perhaps they had tried. But if Ra was telling the truth, both the new Ambassador had got away.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You know. Needs must. I just wanted to … Had to split.” I had to laugh a second at that. There had to be quite a story there.

“So,” I said eventually. “How do you like our little town?” He laughed in turn.

“Jesus,” he said. As if he’d seen something good and unexpected. Outside, gulls sounded. They veered, headed constantly for the sea they glimpsed kilometres away, were turned back constantly by sculpted winds and aeoli breath. It was very rare that any broke out into the proper local air, and died.

“You have to help me,” he said. “I need to know what’s going on.”

“Are you joking?” I said. “What do you think I know? Jesus, this is a comedy of errors. What do you think I’ve been trying to find out, for God’s sake? Why have you come to me?”

“I’ve spoken to everyone I could find who was at that party—”

“Didn’t try very hard, did you, if you only just got to me …”

“All the Staff, I mean, and other people from the Embassy. The higher-up ones wouldn’t say anything to me, and the rest … a couple of them told me to talk to you.”

“Well, I don’t know why. I thought you were in the middle of it all, I thought you’d …”

“Whoever up there does know something, they’re not telling me. Us. But these others, they just … They said you know people, Avice. Ambassadors. And that people tell you things.”

I shook my head. “That’s just bloody outsider-chic,” I exhaled. “You thought you could go a roundabout way, get something through me? They’re just saying that because I’m immerser. And because I was sleeping with CalVin, for a while. But not for months. Local months, not Bremen months. My own damn husband’s a foreigner and he knows more than I, and he won’t even talk to me.” I stared at him. “You seriously telling me you’ve got no idea what’s happening? Does Wyatt know you’re here?”

“No. He helped me slip away, but … And neither does Ez. It’s not their business.” He bit his lip. “Well, officially it is, I mean … I just wanted …” After a silence, Ra met my eye. He stood. “Look,” he said, all of a sudden calm. “I need to find out what’s going on. Wyatt is worse than useless. Ez’s trying to pull rank. We’ll see how far that gets him. And I hear you might know people who know things.” In that moment he seemed not like Ez’s luggage, but an officer and an agent of a colonial power.

“Tell me,” I said at last. “What you do know. What’s been going on. What you’ve heard, suspect, anything.”

The Hosts had come back. Two days of silence, and then they had been at the Embassy, a troupe of heavy presences swaying across a landing pod. “At least forty of them,” he said. “Christ knows how they fit into their vessel. They were asking for me and Ez.”

The way he told it, the Ariekei had barely responded to Ambassadors’ questions and greetings. They demanded, repeatedly and with strange rudeness, to speak to EzRa.

“I trained for this,” Ra said. “I’ve studied them, I’ve studied Language. You saw the first group meet us at the party? That wasn’t normal, was it? I knew it wasn’t. This was the same, only more. They were … agitated. Talking nonsense. I was there already, but then Ez came in and then they recognised us. Started saying: ‘Please, good evening Ambassador EzRa, please, please, yes.’ Like that.

“Some of the others—like your friends CalVin—tried to get in our way. Telling us no. We’d said too much.” He shook his head. “And the Hosts are edging closer and closer. We’ve got nowhere to go, and they’re huge. It’s feeling … So we just … raised our voices and spoke Language. Ez and I. We said good evening. Told them it was an honour. And when we did—”

When they spoke the same thing happened as had before, but this time to a larger little multitude. I might have been able to track down footage or trid of the occurrence—there must have been vespcams there—but Ra told me and I could easily imagine it. The crowd of Hosts stiffening; some staggering; maybe tumbling in carapace piles. Sounds, the double-calls of Ariekene distress, becoming something unfamiliar, counterpoints. Were they swooning? Their noises went up and down in complex relation to EzRa’s voice. “We tried to keep going,” Ra said. “To keep talking. But in the end Ez just petered out. So I did, too.” When they did, the Host in front rebudded open its eyes and craned them backward at its companions, without turning its body, and said to them: “I told you.”

The Ariekei had staggered in the wood-walled stateroom, with the concrete of Embassytown beyond, and the sky dusted with birds in their air-cage. The Ambassadors and Staff were left standing half to attention and bewildered.

We thought of Ariekei in terms of stuff from an antique world—we looked at our Hosts and saw insect-horse-coral-fan things. Those were chimeras of our own baggage. There they were, the Hosts, humming polyphonically in reveries that were utterly their own.

“They left. Some Ambassadors were trying to stop them but short of actually getting in their way, what could they do? They were shouting at them to stay, to talk. EdGar and LoGan were screaming, JoaQuin and AgNes were … trying to be more persuasive. But the Hosts just marched back out. Me and Ez were saying what should we do, and CalVin and ArnOld were saying we’d done quite enough.” He held his head in his hands. “Now not even MagDa’ll talk to us. I haven’t seen them for days. Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

“Of course,” I said. “Don’t be absurd.”

“There was a lot of shouting.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

“CalVin and HenRy mentioned them,” I said. Simmon’s half-heard insight. “I think they might be who to find. I thought you might know …”

“You mean Oratees, or CalVin, or HenRy might be who to find?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “… Yes.” I shrugged, Yes, why not?

“I thought you could help,” he said. “People have a lot of faith in your abilities.”

“Did they tell you I can floak?” I said. “I wish I’d never told them that fucking word. They think I can do anything now. Except they don’t, really: they just want the opportunity to say ‘floak.’ ”

“They’re talking to the exots.” Ra said. “The Ambassadors have to let the Kedis and the others know something’s happening. They were obviously hoping they’d have things under control, but …” My doorbell sounded again. “Wait,” he said, but I was already up and out of the room.

I opened my door to constables and Security officers. Some were men younger than I, looking shy.

“Ms. Benner Cho?” one said. “Sorry to disturb you. I believe, uh, is Ra here?” He stumbled over the lack of honorific.

“Avice, where is he?”

I knew that voice. “MagDa?” I said. I’d not seen them behind the escort.

The Ambassador pushed their way to the front. “We need to talk to them.”

“Urgently.”

“Hello.” It was Ra, come up behind me. I didn’t turn.

“Ra.” I thought they’d be furious, but Mag and Da looked just relieved to see him. Emotional. “There you are.” “You have to come back.”

“You need protective custody, sir,” an officer said. MagDa seemed exasperated by that, in fact, but they didn’t interrupt. “For your safety. Until we’ve got things under control. Please come with us.”

Ra stood up tall. The officer met his eye. Ra nodded to me, after a moment, and let them take him. I nodded back. I was vaguely disappointed in him.

When they led him away they didn’t lock his hands together. They walked respectfully beside him, like what they said they were, a protective corps. It was a sort of courtesy, I suppose, though I don’t think anyone with a passing understanding of Embassytown politics wouldn’t have known he was more or less under arrest. I watched him go, to join Ez, and perhaps Wyatt, in what I was sure would be scrupulously well-kept rooms, locked and guarded from the outside.

Formerly, 6

In its religious laws Embassytown was a cutting from Bremen. There was no established church, but as with many smaller colonies, its founders had included a reasonable minority of faithful. The Church of God Pharotekton was as close as we came to an official congregation. It lighthouse towers jutted through Embassytown roofs, their beacons spinning, rotating spokes of light at night.

There were other congregations: tiny synagogues; temples; mosques; churches, mustering a few score regulars. A handful of ultra-orthodox in each tradition stood firm against ungodly innovations, attempting to maintain religious calendars based on Bremen’s thirty-seven-hour days, or according to insane nostalgia on the supposed days and seasons of Terre.

Like the Hosts, the Kedis of Embassytown had no gods: according to their professed faith the souls of their ancestors and of their unborn were united in a never-ending jealous war against them, the living, but they mostly displayed a far less bleak and embattled outlook than that theology would suggest. There were religious Shur’asi, but only dissidents: most were atheist, perhaps because apart from through accident, they didn’t die and were very rarely born.

Embassytowners were free not to believe. I wasn’t used to thinking about evil.

Beehive’s name was , we gleaned from its conversations with other Hosts. I told CalVin, mangling the name with my monovoice, saying the Cut and Turn one after the other. “Can you find out when it’s competing at another Festival of Lies?” I said. “It’s a loyal fan of mine, and I’d like to … return the favour.”

“You want to go …” “… to another festival?”

“Yeah. Me and another couple of the similes.” It had occurred as a whim, mere curiosity about my observer, but having thought of it I could not let the idea go. When I’d mooted it to Hasser and a couple of the others, they’d been enthusiastic. “Do you think we could do that? Think you could get us in again?” It had been a while since we’d been summoned to any Languagefests, and though I was alone among them in being more intrigued by the lying than by my own deployment, the other Cravateers would hardly say no to any entry.

CalVin did pursue this, though not with the best grace. I wondered at the time why they were indulging me at all. One or the other always behaved with surliness to me. The differences in their demeanours were tiny, but I was used to Ambassadors and could sense them. I thought that they were taking turns to be colder and warmer, in a variant of traditional police procedure.

In The Cravat, conversations between the Hosts illuminated disagreements. They had camps, constituted by theories and arcane politics. Some seemed to love us—of course I shouldn’t use that word—as spectacle. Some rated our various merits: we called them the critics. The man who swims with the fishes is simple, one said. The girl who ate what was given to her is like more things. Valdik laughed but wasn’t happy to hear that the trope of him was trite. Beehive, which I started to call “Surl Tesh-echer,” a failure closer to its name, was the guru of another group. Champion liar.

It had regular companions: Spanish Dancer; and one we called Spindle; and one Longjohn—it had a biorigged replacement hoof. Of what any of us understood it’s hard to approximate what they said in Anglo-Ubiq: think of people circling an exhibit in a gallery, staring at it, from time to time uttering a single word or short phrase, like “Incomplete,” or “Potential,” or “Intricacies of fact and uncertainties of expression,” and occasional longer opaque things.

“ ‘The birds circle like the girl who ate what was put in front of her,’ ” Hasser translated. “ ‘The birds are like the girl who ate what was put in front of her and are like the man who swims with fishes and are like the split stone …’ ”

The other Ariekei, those not of ’s party, loudly answered these garbled claims. They responded to the presence of and its companions with excitement or agitation. Contrariwise, , Spanish Dancer and the others didn’t acknowledge the critics at all, that I could tell. We called ’s group the Professors.

stretched the logic of analogy—the birds were not like me, having eaten the food given to me, as far as most of the other Ariekei could see. “They think it’s being disrespectful when it says they are,” Hasser said. He looked unhappy. The birds are like the girl who ate what she was given, one of the Professors said again. It stuttered as it spoke, it mangled its words, had to stop and start again and try again.

An early winter day I came to The Cravat—still attending, I noted wryly—dirty with leaf-muck and cold dust from Embassytown alleys. Valdik was the only other simile there. He was uncomfortable with me, less talkative even than usual. I wondered if perhaps he’d had some bad news about his outside life, of which I knew and wanted to know nothing. We sat in silence that was not companionable.

After one coffee I was ready to leave, when Shanita and Darius came in together. She was a taciturn simile I’d always sensed was a bit intimidated by me; he was frank and ingenuous, not very smart. They greeted me pleasantly enough.

“Why was Scile here?” Darius said as he sat. I was aware of Valdik sitting still and not reacting.

“Scile?” I said.

“He was here again, earlier,” Darius said. “A Host was here. Being really weird. Your husband, not the Host. He walked around putting little …” He fingered the air for the words. “Little nuts and bolts on all the tables. Wouldn’t tell me why.”

“Again? Here again?”

He had come once before when I was not there, it seemed, late at night, with three Hosts present. Darius hadn’t seen it but Hasser had, and told him. That time Scile had been strangely dressed, in clothes all one colour. Shanita nodded at the anecdote. Scile had, she said, while Valdik said nothing, laid down the same objects that first time, too.

“What’s that all about?” Darius said.

“I don’t know,” I said. I spoke carefully.

I suspected from his stillness that Valdik had an idea, in fact, as I did, what this might have been. That Scile, by these unnatural attention-getting rituals, was trying to stick in the mind. Trying to be good to think with, to be suggestive. To become a simile.

What the hell did he think he might mean? I thought, but corrected myself: that wouldn’t matter.

A corvid dropped us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in skin, alcoves full of house’s organs sutured in place.

The hall was full of the interplaited cadences of Language. I’d never seen so many young, just woken into their third instar and Language. They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to swaying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie.

Most of the competitors could only be silent, failing in their struggle to say something not true. I was with Hasser, Valdik and a few others chosen from among our regulars I don’t know how. We were chaperoned by ArnOld. They were there to perform and made it clear that they resented this babysitting duty. Hosts greeted them by their correct name: “.”

Scile was with me. He was talking, tentatively, with my simile companions. It had been a fair time since he’d seen Language in its home; it was for him I’d asked for this: he knew it, had been shy with gratitude. We were not nearly so close as we’d been at the time of our first festival, and I think the present surprised him. I hadn’t heard of any more efforts to enLanguage himself. I’d said nothing about any of them to him.

Before now the humans came. A Host, a lie-athlete, one of the Professors, I realised, was speaking.

Before the humans came we were … and it stalled. One of its companions continued. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. A sensation went through the audience. It was followed by another speaker: Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much …

I’d learnt enough to know this trick, a collaborative faux-mendacity: the last was repeating the previous sentence but dropping its voices to near nothing at the final clause. Of certain things was said, but so quietly the audience couldn’t hear it. It was showmanship, fakery, a crowd-pleaser, and the crowd were pleased.

ArnOld stiffened and said together: “.”

Beehive. It was swaying. Its giftwing circled, its fanwing stretched. It stepped up to the lying ground.

There were two main ways the few Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. One was to go slow. They would try to conceive the untrue clause—near-impossible, their minds reacting allergically to such a counterfactual even unspoken, conceived without signification. Having prepared it mentally, however successfully or un-, they would pretend-forget it to themselves. Speak each of its constituent words at a certain speed, at a beat, separated, apart enough in the mind of a speaker that each was a distinct concept, utterable with and as its own meaning; but just sufficiently fast and rhythmic that to listeners, they accreted into a ponderous but comprehensible, and untrue, sentence. The liars I had thus far seen with any success were slow-liars.

There was reputed to be another technique. It was the more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of noises before the untruth of their totality stole a speaker’s ability to think them.

opened its mouths.

Before the humans came, it said in ornery staccato, we didn’t speak.

There was a long quiet. And then a convulsion, a riot.

I wished very much that I had any understanding of Ariekene body language. might have been exuding triumph, patience, or nothing. It hadn’t whispered the second half of any truth; or trudged sound-by-metronome-sound through a constructed-unconstructed sentence. What had said was unquestionably a lie.

The audience reeled. I reeled.

The Hosts woke in their third instar suddenly fluent, Language a direct function of their consciousness. “Millions of years back there must have been some adaptive advantage to knowing that what was communicated was true,” Scile said to me, last time we’d hypothesised this history. “Selection for a mind that could only express that.”

“The evolution of trust …” I started to say.

“There’s no need for trust, this way,” he interrupted. Chance, struggle, failure, survival, a Darwinian chaos of instinctive grammar, the drives of a big-brained animal in a hard environment, the selection out of traits, had made a race of pure truth-tellers. “This language is miraculous,” Scile had said. I was somehow repulsed by it, in fact. It was astonishing, given what language needs to do, that the Ariekei had survived. That, I decided, was what Scile must have meant, so I agreed.

If evolution was morality they would be unable to hear lies, too, like two-thirds of the fabular monkeys, but it’s more random and beautiful, so that was only the case for those few who managed to speak them, of their own little untruths. Unbacked by signifieds, the lies of Language were just noises to their own liar. Biology’s lazy: if mouths speak truth, why should ears discriminate between it and its opposite? When what was spoken was, definitionally, what was? And by this hole in adaptation, though or because they were not built to say them, the Hosts could understand lies. And either believe them—belief being a meaningless given—or, where the falsity was ostentatious and the point, experience them as some giddying impossible, the said unthinkable.

It’s I who’s monomaniacal, here: it’s unfair to insinuate that all Hosts cared about was Language, but I can’t fail to do so. This is a true story I’m telling, but I am telling it, and that entails certain things. So: the Hosts cared about everything, but Language most of all.

Radical and cussed, got that lie out into the world, a vomit of phonemes, against its own mind.

The public were rapturous. We’d witnessed a rare performance. I was delighted. Ambassador ArnOld was astonished. Hasser was bemused. Valdik and Scile were aghast.

Latterday, 8

Kedis and Shur’asi were being escorted to the Embassy. The newscasts’ little vespcams saw them.

Midlevel Staff gathered troikas and quads from the Kedis community, a few Shur’asi think-captains. Vehicles arced over our roofs, antennas and the girders of our construction, over the white smoke from our chimneys. One shot recurred on the bulletins: a young Staff member swatting at the cam through which we saw. He must have been very tense to be so unprofessional.

The newscasts, voice and text, were flummoxed. Perhaps to most locals there’d been no sense of crisis until this ingathering of our exots. The pods that took them to the Ambassadorial explanations flocked with birds, and fist-sized cams that rose and fell among the birds.

Beyond Embassytown, the oddness of angles and movements that had touched the city seemed to be spreading.

I buzzed Ehrsul, RanDolph, Simmon, but could get through to no one. After a hesitation I tried Wyatt, but he didn’t answer either.

My handset still contained Hasser’s number, and Valdik’s, and several other similes’. It had been a long time. I considered calling one. What does it matter now? I thought, but I didn’t do it.

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one doing so, but I’d begun to prepare, for whatever it was. I was copying what data I thought precious, hiding treasured objects, packing essentials into a shoulder bag. I’d always been fascinated at how my body ran things sometimes. While I felt like I was agonising, my limbs did what was needed.

Night would come without my noticing, and the aeoli-breath was still cool. Then on this crucial change-moment I remember there were night-bird noises and the gibbering of local animals. It wasn’t yet so late there was no traffic. I wasn’t tired at all. It was hard to make sense of the shots from Embassytown that I was watching. The newsware was still processing. A human commentator said, “We’re not sure what … we … we’re seeing something from the city … ah … movement from …”

The figures in cam-view were Ariekei. The Ariekei were moving. On my screen and through my window, I saw corvids frantic in several directions in the air. I heard things. I was already leaning out of my house and I saw their source. The Hosts were coming out of their city into Embassytown.

I ran to the interzone between Embassytown and the city. Lights came on as people woke to the noise, but though I was joined by more and more blinking citizens I didn’t feel part of anything. I passed under light globes whispering where moths touched them. Below arches I’d known all my life, and, tasting the thinning air, I knew I was only a street or two from the edge of the city. I was in Beckon Street, which swept downhill out of our enclave.

It was an old part of Embassytown. There were plaster griffins at the edges of the eaves. Not far away, our architecture was overcome, the ivy that tugged it smothered by fronds of fleshmatter and Ariekene business. The biorigging probed plastone and brick in a rill of skin.

The Hosts filled the road, jostling each other with odd motion. A single Host had grace but en masse they were a herd, in slow stampede. I’d never seen so many. I could hear the slide of their armour, the tap-tapping of thousands of their feet. Zelles scuttled.

As they came into the human reach the streetlamps and the colours of our displays made them a psychedelia. Rumpled women and men in nightclothes lined the walkways, so the Ariekei entered Embassytown with us either side as if to greet them, as if this were a parade. Cameras darted overhead, little busybodies.

There were Hosts in all their sentient stages, from the newly conscious to those about to slip into mindlessness. Hundreds of fanwings fluttered, and I wanted to be above looking down at that, a camouflage of shuddering colours. They passed me; I followed them.

Many Terre watching could understand Language, but of course none of us could speak it. Some couldn’t restrain asking in Anglo-Ubiq: “What are you doing?” “Where are you going?” We trailed the Ariekei north, climbing the incline toward the Embassy, on the roadways and verges, crabgrass and our debris. Constables had arrived. They waved their arms as if moving us on, as if they were protecting our aging walls. They said things that had no meaning at all: “Come on now!” or “Move away there!”

Human children had come to stare. I saw them play Ambassador, dueting nonsense noises and nodding wisely as if the Ariekei were responding. The Hosts took us a coiled route, amassing onlookers, cats and altfoxes bolting before the aliens. We came past the ruins.

Several Ambassadors—RanDolph, MagDa, EdGar, I saw—emerged from the dark, constables and Staff around them. They shouted greetings, but the Hosts didn’t pause or acknowledge them.

The Ambassadors said, “!” Stop. Wait. Stop.

Friends, they shouted, tell us what we can do, why are you here? They retreated at the head of the Ariekene crowd, ignored. Someone had turned on the light of a church, as if it were Utuday, and its beam rotated overhead. The Hosts began to speak, to shout, each in their two voices. A cacophony at first, a mix of speech and sounds I think weren’t speech, and out of that came a chant. Several words I didn’t know, and one I did.

“ …  …  …”

The Ariekei spread out before the black stone steps of the Embassy. I walked among them. The Hosts let me in, moving to accommodate me, glancing with eye-corals. Their spiky fibrous limbs were a thicket, their unbending flanks like polished plastic. My littleness was hidden, and unobserved I watched the Ambassadors panicking. “,” the Hosts kept saying. The people of Embassytown were saying it as best they could, too—“EzRa …” An undeliberate chant of the same word in two languages, the name.

JoaQuin and MayBel debated in furious whispers. Behind JasMin and ArnOld and MagDa I saw CalVin. They looked stricken. Staff were bickering, too, and the constables around them looked close to panic, their carbines and geistguns dangerously at the ready.

A Host stepped forward. “,” it said: I am . One of those that had greeted EzRa, at the Arrival Ball.

Hello, said. We are here for . Bring . And on. JoaQuin tried to speak, and MayBel, and the Host paid no attention. Others joined in with it, its demand. They came slowly forward, and it was impossible not to have a sense of their bigness, the sway of their shell-hard limbs.

“… we have no choice!” I heard Joa or Quin, and I thought it was to MayBel but saw with shock that it was to Quin or Joa. The Ambassadors unhuddled, and stepping out from among them, coming forth as if in a conjuring trick, was EzRa.

Ez looked anxious; Ra was cardsharp blank. As their colleagues parted for them Ez gave them a look of hatred. At the top of the stairs EzRa looked down at the congregation.

The Ariekei spread the tines of their antlers of eyes wide to take in the two men.

“.”

spoke again. The Language-fluent among us meant what it said was quickly communicated.

EzRa, it said. Talk.

EzRa will speak to us or we will make it speak.

“You can’t do this,” someone from Staff or Ambassadorial ranks shouted, and someone else answered, “What can we do?” EzRa looked at each other and murmured a preparation. Ez sighed; Ra’s face remained set.

Friends, they said. Ez said “curish” and Ra “loah”—friends. There was a snap of Ariekei thoraxes and limbs.

Friends, we thank you for this visit, EzRa said, and the Ariekei reeled, buffeting me. Friends, we thank you for this greeting, EzRa said, and the ecstasy went on.

Ra continued to mutter for instants but Ez had gone silent, so Language decomposed. The Hosts hubbubbed. Some flailed their giftwings and wrapped themselves within them, some entwined them with others’.

shouted speak and spoke again. They said pleasantries, emptinesses, polite variants of Hello, hello.

The Ariekei concentrated, as if asleep or digesting. Around the plaza I saw hundreds of Embassytowners, and soundless hovering cams.

“You stupid, stupid bastards,” someone said on the Embassy steps. The words were as ignored as the ivy. Everyone was looking at the Hosts. They were coming back from whatever it was had happened to them.

Good, said one. It wasn’t . Good. It turned. did so, too. The Ariekei all turned back the way they had come.

“Wait! Wait!” It was MagDa. “Pharos!” “We have to …” One of them gestured to Ez and Ra: Don’t speak again. MagDa conferred and shouted in Language. We must speak, they said.

Whether out of pity, courtesy, curiosity or whatever, and other leaders, if that’s what they were, of the gathering craned their eye-corals, twisted them backward, looking behind them. I heard someone say, “Put it down, Officer. Christ, man …”

We have much to discuss, MagDa said. Please join us. May we ask you to enter?

Constables and SecStaff came through the crowd. “Go.” One stood before me. She held a stubby gun. She spoke to me rapidly, the same spiel she was giving everyone. “Please clear the streets. We’re trying to bring this under control. Please.”

Like everyone else, I obeyed my orders slowly. The Ariekei had arrived in strange coherence. Now most of them straggled away at random, leaving their scent and unique marks in the dirt. An urgent-faced boy in a constable’s uniform whispered to me to please fuck off right now, and I sped up a little. The Ambassadors were trying to usher a few Hosts, those who’d hesitated, into the Embassy. They didn’t seem to be succeeding.

PART THREE

LIKE AS NOT

Formerly, 7

After the festival, Scile disappeared. He wouldn’t answer my buzzes, or did so only with terse comments and promises to return. Wherever he was he might be blanking me, but he had conferred, I suspected, with unlikely people. I was with Valdik and Shanita a day after the festival when Valdik was buzzed; when he’d answered he shut up and glanced at me with wide-open eyes. I had been abruptly sure that Scile was on the line.

After a couple of days my husband came back to our rooms and we had the fight that had been simmering for a long time. As with most such, the specifics are uninteresting and largely beside the point. He was surly, and pissy, and made little quips about how I passed my time, barbs at least as anxious as they were nasty, not that I was in the mood to care about that. I’d had enough of his recent predilection for gnomic pronouncements, and his bad temper.

“Who do you think arranged that trip, Scile?” I shouted. He wouldn’t answer or look at me, and I didn’t put my hand on my hips or gesticulate, I folded my arms and leaned back and stared down my face at him like I had the first time I’d met him. “Some people might think thanks were in order, not days of this sulky shit. What makes you think you can behave like this? Where did you fucking go?”

He made some reference that made it clear he had been with Ambassadors. I stopped abruptly at that, halfway through a riposte. What in immer? I remember thinking. Who buggers off to high-level meetings when they’re having a hissy fit?

“Listen,” Scile said. I could see him deciding something, trying hard to calm our altercation. “Listen, will you please listen.” He waved a paper. “I know what it’s trying to do. Surl Tesh-echer. It practices, and it preaches, to its coterie. This is what it’s been saying.” He didn’t say how he’d got the transcript. “You, similes …” he said. “The Hosts aren’t like us, okay: it’s not exactly most of us who’d get excited to meet a … an adjectival phrase or a past participle or whatever. But it’s no surprise some of them would want to meet a simile. You help them think. Someone with reverence for language would love that.

“But who’d want to lie? A punk, is who. Avice, listen. There are fans, and there are liars. And only Surl Tesh-echer and its friends are both.” He smoothed out the paper. “Are you ready to listen to me? You think I’ve just been sitting in a cupboard for the good of my health? This is what it’s been saying.”

“ ‘Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.’ ” He glanced at me. “ ‘We didn’t walk on our wings. We didn’t walk. We didn’t swallow earth. We didn’t swallow.’ ” Scile was reading nervously, quickly.

“ ‘There’s a Terre who swims with fishes, one who wore no clothes, one who ate what was given her, one who walks backward. There’s a rock that was broken and cemented together. I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion. I’m like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I wasn’t not like the rock that was broken and cemented together.

“ ‘I do what I always do, I’m like the Terre who swims with fishes. I’m not unlike that Terre. I’m very like it.

“ ‘I’m not water. I’m not water. I’m water.’ ”

No translations I’d ever seen of Host pronouncements were properly comprehensible, but this read different. I realised a counterintuitive affinity. For all its strangeness it sounded a little, a tiny bit, more like, less unlike Anglo-Ubiq than most Language did. It didn’t have the usual precise and nuanced exactnesses.

“It’s not like most competitors, trying to force out a lie,” Scile said. “It’s more systematic. It’s training itself into untruth. It’s using these weird constructions so it can say something true, then interrupt itself, to lie.”

“It didn’t perform most of these,” I said.

“It’s been practicing,” he said. “We’ve always known the Hosts need you, right? You and the rest of you. Like the split rock, like they need those two poor cats they stitched into a bag. They need similes to say certain things, right? To think them. They need to make them in the world, so they can make the comparison.”

“Yes. But …” I looked at the paper. I read over it. was teaching itself to lie.

“ ‘I’m like the rock that was broken,’ ” Scile said, “then ‘not not it.’ It can’t quite do it, but it’s trying to go from ‘I’m like the rock’ to ‘I am the rock.’ See? Same comparative term, but different. Not a comparison anymore.”

He showed me old books in hard or virtua: Leezenberg, Lakoff, u-senHe, Ricoeur. I was used to his odd fascinations, they’d helped charm me ages ago. Now they and he made me uneasy.

“A simile,” he said, “is true because you say so. It’s a persuasion: this is like that. That’s not enough for it anymore. Similes aren’t enough.” He stared. “It wants to make you a kind of lie. To change everything.

“Simile spells an argument out: it’s ongoing, explicit, truth-making. You don’t need  … logos, they used to call it. Judgement. You don’t need to … to link incommensurables. Unlike if you claim: ‘This is that.’ When it patently is not. That’s what we do. That’s what we call ‘reason,’ that exchange, metaphor. That lying. The world becomes a lie. That’s what Surl Tesh-echer wants. To bring in a lie.” He spoke very calmly. “It wants to usher in evil.”

“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said to me at last, after I’d tried to explain to her. “I’m sorry but I’m not sure what you’re saying to me.” She did listen: I don’t want to give the impression that all she did was tell me not to tell her. Ehrsul listened but I’m not sure to what. I was hardly exact; I couldn’t be.

“I’m worried about Scile,” I said to CalVin. I tried them instead. “He’s gone a bit religious.”

“Pharotekton?” one of them said.

“No. Not church. But …” I’d gleaned more scraps of Scile’s emergent theology. I call it that though he was adamant it had nothing to do with God. “He wants to protect the Ariekei. From changing language.” I told CalVin about the temptation, what Scile thought planned. “He thinks a lot’s at stake,” I said.

I still love this man and I’m afraid of what’s happening, I was saying. Can you help me? I don’t understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, what’s making him afraid, how he’s able to make it even get to me. Something like that.

“Let me talk to him,” CalVin said. The one who hadn’t spoken looked with raised eyebrows at his doppel, then smiled and looked back at me.

Formerly, 8

CalVin, as they’d promised me, spent time with Scile. My husband’s research was intense, antisocial, his memos to himself were everywhere and mostly not comprehensible, his files scattered across our datspace. The truth is I was a little scared. I didn’t know how to react to what I saw in Scile now. The fervour had always been there, but though he tried to disguise it—after that one conversation he didn’t talk about his anxieties to me—I could see it was growing stronger.

That he tried to hide it confused me. I wondered if he thought his concerns were the only appropriate ones to the shifts in some Hosts’ practice, and if the lack of such anxiety from the rest of us was devastating. If he thought the whole world mad, forcing him into dissimulation. I went through those of his thesis notes, appointment diaries, textbook annotations I could access, as if looking for a master code. It gave me a better sense, if still partial and confused, of his theories.

“What do you think?” I asked CalVin. They looked put out by my uncharacteristic pleading. They told me there was no question that Scile was looking at things in an unusual way, and that his focus was, yes, rather intense. But overall, not to worry. What a useless injunction.

To my surprise Scile started coming to The Cravat with me. I’d thought we would do less, not more, in each other’s company. I didn’t tell him I knew he’d been previously on his own. I saw no evidence of more efforts to persuade the Hosts to speak him. Instead, he began to exercise a subtle pull on some of the similes. He took part in the discussions, would imply certain of his theories, especially those according to which similes represented the pinnacle and limit of Language. Communication making truth. Slightly to my surprise, no one made him, unsimile outsider, other than welcome. The opposite, really. Valdik wasn’t alone in listening. Valdik wasn’t an intelligent man and I was worried for him.

I mustn’t exaggerate. I think Scile seemed himself, only perhaps more focused than previously, more distracted. I no longer thought we could stay together, but I wanted to know that he was alright.

These were in other ways not bad times for me. We were between reliefs. It was always deep in those days that Embassytown became most vividly itself, neither waiting for something, nor celebrating something that had happened. We called these times the doldrums. Of course we knew the more conventional use of the term, but like a few other uncanny words, for us it meant itself and its own opposite. During those still, drab days, cut off on our immer outskirt, without contact, a long time after and before any miabs, we turned inward.

Fiestas and spectaculars, on the spareday at the end of each of our long months, our crooked alleys interwoven with ribbons and full of music. Children would dance wearing trid costumes, their integuments of light overlapping and crystalline. There were parties. Some formal; many not; some costume; a few naked.

This doldrums culture was part of our economy. After a visit, we had luxuries and new technology to invigorate our markets and production: when one was due there was a rash of spending and innovation, out of excitement and the knowledge that our commodities would soon change, that new-season goods would be in expensive vogue. Between, in the doldrums, things were static, not desperate but pinched, and these fetes were punctuations, and meant small runs on certain indulgences.

One night I was in bed with CalVin. One of them was asleep. The other was stroking my flank, whispering conversation. It was a rare thing, to be with one doppel only. I felt a strong urge to ask his name. I think now I know which it was. I was running my finger over the back of his neck, the link in him, beautifully rendered in the hollow below his skull’s overhang. I looked at its twin, on the sleeping half of the Ambassador.

“Should I be worried about Scile?” I said. The sleeper shifted and we were still a second.

“I don’t think so,” my companion whispered. “He’s onto something, you know.”

I didn’t understand. “I’m not worried that he’s wrong,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s … that …”

“But he’s not wrong. Or at least—he’s pointing out something.”

I sat up. “Are you saying—?” I stood and paced, and the sleeping doppel woke and looked at me mildly. Cal and Vin conferred in whispers, and it didn’t sound like simple agreement. “What are you saying?” I said.

“There are some persuasive elements to what he says.” It was the newly woken doppel who spoke.

“I can’t believe you’re telling me—”

“I’m not. I’m not telling you anything.” He spoke impassively. His doppel looked at him and then at me, uneasily. “You asked us to keep a watch on him, and we are, and we have. And we’re looking into some of the things he’s saying. An eccentric he may be, but Scile’s not stupid, and there’s no question that this Host …” He looked at his doppel and together they said: “.” The half of CalVin who had been talking continued: “… is definitely pursuing some odd strategies.”

I stood naked at the edge of the bed and watched them: one lying back and looking up at me, the other with his knees drawn.

I admit defeat. I’ve been trying to present these events with a structure. I simply don’t know how everything happened. Perhaps because I didn’t pay proper attention, perhaps because it wasn’t a narrative, but for whatever reasons, it doesn’t want to be what I want to make it.

In the streets of Embassytown, a congregation was forming. Valdik appeared to be at its centre. It was Valdik who expounded the theories, now. My husband was a canny man, even in his obsessions.

“Valdik Druman’s at the centre of it now?” CalVin said. “Valdik?

Really?”

“I know it sounds unlikely …” I said.

“Well, he’s an adult, he’s making his own choices.”

“It’s not that simple.” I knew CalVin were right and wrong at the same time.

Most Embassytowners did not know or care about any of these debates. Of those who did, most would consider them pretty unimportant, secure—and there was security in it—in the certainty that Hosts could not lie, whatever a few agitated similes insisted. For those who knew about the festivals, a few Hosts determined to push at the boundaries of Language was too obscure a phenomenon to be any kind of problem, let alone a moral one. That left only a tiny number of Embassytowners, disproportionately the credulous. But their number was growing.

Valdik speechified at The Cravat on the nature of the similes and the role of Language. His arguments were confused but passionate and affecting.

“There’s nothing like this anywhere,” Valdik said. “No other language anywhere in the universe. Where what’s said is truth. Can you imagine what it would be to lose that?”

“It isn’t fair what you’re doing to Valdik,” I told Scile, on one of his rare visits to what had been our home.

“He’s not a fucking child, Avice,” Scile said. He was collecting clothes and notes. He did not look at me as he rummaged. “He decides what he wants.”

Walking near the ruins I was handed a flyer on cheap nantech paper that flashed a trid as I unfolded it. It made me start: it was Valdik’s face, apple-sized, in my hand.

DRUMAN, it said, ON THE BATTLE AGAINST THE LIE. A time and place, not The Cravat but a little hall. With it brought to my attention, I noticed details of that and similar meetings guerrilla-coded into wallscreens, hacked nuisance trids. I went. I’d thought I’d find Scile, but no. I stayed at the back of the room.

Valdik wore a projector, and trids of him appeared throughout the temple, random and staticky. At the front of the room I saw Shanita, Darius, Hasser and other similes and tropes. Valdik preached. He was still a middling speaker. I don’t know how this mediocrity amassed a following—something about the doldrums. He expounded religiose foolishness—“two voices but one truth, because what is the truth but dual, bifurcated, not in conflict but two forms of one truth” and so forth.

The place wasn’t a quarter full. It contained indulgent friends, the curious, refugees from other cults. A convocation of the hopeless and bored. When I got home, Scile was speaking down the line. He smiled an unconvincing greeting at me as I came in, turned so that I couldn’t hear him nor see his mouth move. I wondered whether, if Valdik were removed from this self-appointed office, with what I was convinced was Scile’s instrument confiscated, his mania would dissipate.

“What should we do?” CalVin said. “These meetings aren’t illegal.”

“You can do anything you want.”

“Well …”

“We could have Druman taken for Administrative Detention …” “… but do you really want that?”

“Yes!” I said, but of course I didn’t, and of course they wouldn’t do it.

“Listen,” they said. “Don’t worry.” “We’ll watch Scile.” “We’ll keep him safe.” That they did, though neither in the way, nor from what, I’d assumed.

Formerly, 9

Someone released a viral ’ware into the vagrant automa of Embassytown that gave them Valdik’s mania. It made them preachers in his new church. Their eloquence depended on the sophistication of their processors: most were little more than ecstatics, but a few were sudden theologians. They ambled as they always had but now accosted us and exhorted us to defend prelapsarian language, Language, we poor sinners (the rhetoric was kitsch), doomed forever ourselves to speak with a deep structure of lie but at least granted service to the double-tongue of truth, and more like that.

Patches were programmed and released and did their job but the infection was tenacious, and for weeks these tramp priests proselytised, their catechisms changing as their ’ware degraded and threw up protestant, variant sects. “We are the stewards of the angels,” I was told by one machine that staggered like a supplicant. “We are the stewards of the speaking angels, of God’s language.” The virus shut down when its resultant theories strayed too far from emergent Drumanian orthodoxy.

I asked Ehrsul if she was concerned, if she’d felt the tickling of virtual germs. She dismissed the other automa as mental weaklings and told me that yes, though she’d felt it, she’d hardly been in danger herself. Of course Valdik and his radical similes were suspected, but no one could prove who had programmed it, and though it was a nuisance that was all it ultimately was. I knew Scile didn’t have the expertise to program, or I’d have thought it his doing.

When I went back to The Cravat, now, I did so for socially diagnostic reasons. Many previous regulars no longer drank there: alienated by Valdik’s vatic pronouncements, they set up refusenik simile salons. Others had taken their place. I went to hear Valdik speak, out of what I told myself was a pornography of doomed causes, and maybe to listen for grounds to demand some intervention. He hymned the Ambassadors (in his model, interceding hierophants); expressed gratitude at being simile, truths, Language in flesh.

was there, with Spanish Dancer and others, at the last of Valdik’s gatherings I went to. The Host had amassed more followers, too, so I thought it must be improving its technique, a better and better liar. They watched each other. Valdik glowered. I didn’t know if the Hosts felt his hostility. Hasser was there—one of the few who retained friends on both sides of the emergent simile split. He acknowledged me, his face displaying an emotion for which I’ve no name; it reminded me of my own. An unease, is as close as I can get to it.

“Aren’t you worried?” I asked Ehrsul.

“I told you,” she said, “I’m immune.”

“No I mean … what do you reckon? Do you ever think about it? I mean, does it ever make you feel anything one way or the other, that some of the Hosts are learning … well, can talk their way around truth, now?” She said nothing, so I said: “Can lie.”

We were in a bar in one of Embassytown’s shopping streets. Ehrsul in her minor notoriety was being glanced at by slightly moneyed youth. We spoke quietly under music and the clatter of glasses. Ehrsul did not answer me. “Something’s changing. Which may or may not be a good thing,” I said finally.

She looked at me with a projected face that, by design or a coincidence of ambiguous stimuli-responses in her ’ware, was inscrutable. She said nothing. I grew more and more uncomfortable in that enigmatic silence, until I talked about something else, to which she responded as normal, with all the exaggerated intimacies of our friendship.

It never meant that much to me one way or the other that I was simile; I didn’t care what Valdik preached. It’s Scile, I said to myself; but no, though I was worried for him that wasn’t all. I never really knew what else it was.

“So what’s being done?” I asked CalVin. Even the Ambassadors were concerned, now, I gathered. The new philosophy couldn’t have had more than a score or two of serious devotees, but fervour unnerved us in Embassytown. The Hosts must surely have picked up some atmosphere: I’d seen more Ariekei than usual in the aeolian breath of our quarter.

“We’re talking to the Hosts,” CalVin said. “We’re going to organise …” “… a festival.” “Here, in Embassytown.” “To stress that it’s theirs too, to speak in.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. I’d never heard of an Ariekene event in Embassytown. “But is that supposed to … What are you doing about Valdik?”

One of CalVin stared at me, the other looked away. I was angry and I tried to work out with whom. Scile was ensconced somewhere, with radical similes or the Staff, and would never respond to me now, and that seemed to concern no one. There I was, between cliques and secrets. I couldn’t tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

“It’s the doldrums, Avvy,” Ehrsul said to me later. “This is what happens. You’re talking as if it’s end-time. I think …” She paused. “You’re upset because of Scile. You care about him, and he’s gone from you.” She stumbled exactly like someone who thought would.

Ariekei representatives came in flyers, to plan this hybrid festival. I was often in the Embassy, floaking, and I came to know them all. One tall and thickset Ariekes had a mark on its fanwing like a bird in a canopy of leaf, so I called it Pear Tree.

“This is what we need,” CalVin said. “We’re all too tense.” “There’ll be a parade, and stalls and games for Terre …” “… and a Festival of Lies for the Hosts.”

“What about Valdik?” I said again. “And what about Scile?”

“Valdik’s nothing.” “Scile we’ve not seen for a couple of weeks.”

“So where is he …?”

“Don’t worry.” “It’ll be okay.” “Honestly, this event’ll put paid to a lot of these problems.”

I thought it was absolutely absurd. No one agreed with me. In all my life I’ve never felt so alone.

The festival was to take place in a piazza near the southern edge of Embassytown. It was christened the Licence Party: a pun on Lies and Sense, I was told. I never got what the “sense” referred to. Signs went up displaying that idiot name, and a necessary explanation.

Valdik lived in Embassytown’s east. There was a balcony in front of his door overlooking a leisure canal, and a garden full of flowers and birds, altbirds, local fauna.

“Avice,” he said, slowly, when he opened the door to me. If he was surprised he hid it.

“Valdik,” I said. “Can you help me? I need to find Scile.”

His relief was visible. “Is everything alright …?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “No. I just … I haven’t seen him for days …” My hesitation was real, though my main reason for being there was not Scile, but to assess Valdik and his theology. He let me in and I saw the trappings of his new beliefs. Papers everywhere, all the crazy cabbala and misplaced rigour of a sect.

“Me neither,” he said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I think he’s still with CalVin and the others.”

“They haven’t seen him for weeks,” I said.

“No, they were with him a few days ago.” That silenced me. “He was at The Cravat and they came for him,” Valdik said.

“When?” I said. “Who?”

“CalVin and some Staff.”

“CalVin?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.” Valdik didn’t sound like a prophet. I had to leave: I could hardly focus on his beliefs at that moment.

When finally CalVin next said they had time to see me, I was careful to be good company. We ate together. They spoke mostly about the Licence Party. One day, one night, half another day. CalVin emerged from their ablutions equalised. Their accrued blemishes were gone or replicated. I said nothing.

I watched them sleep, watched their skins take on differential marks from cotton and the unconscious motion of their hands. When one or other would half-wake, I would be waiting. I would try to murmur-talk to them: gauge what Cal or Vin said. It was strange, trying to do something I’d not known could even occur to me.

He on my left, I decided, at last, murmured my name with a care I recognised, smiled with something really warm. It was desperately hard to tell with only these night-fuddled moments. But he on my left, I decided at last, Cal or Vin, was the one who liked me more. I put my fingers to his lips, made him wake without sound. He opened his eyes.

“Cal,” I whispered. “Or Vin. Tell me. I know he won’t.” I indicated the sleeping other. “I know you’ve seen Scile. I know. Where is he? What’s happening?”

I saw my mistake. I saw it the instant I moved my hands.

“You,” he said, and though he was quiet I could hear his outrage. That I’d try to find out secrets, and that I’d do so by this blasphemy. My expression was frozen in misplaced intimacy. “How dare you …”

I cursed. He sat up. His doppel shifted.

“You have some bastard nerve, Avice,” the man I’d woken said. “How dare you. If we’ve seen Scile it’s not your business …”

“He’s my husband!”

“It’s not your business. We’re taking care of things. Like you begged us to. And you come here and treat us … like this … do this …?”

Beside us the newly woken doppel was rising. I looked at him and felt shame. How could I have mis-seen it? There it was, that thing I’d thought I detected in his brother.

“You thought he was me …?” he said. I saw hurt, and other emotions.

“How could you?” he said. His doppel added: “… do this?”

The raging one stood, sheets puddling on the floor. “Get out,” he said. “Leave. You are damned … fucking lucky we don’t pursue this.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” said the other quietly.

“This is over,” the standing one, Cal or Vin, said, and his doppel, the man I should have woken, looked up at him, looked at me, shook his head, turned away. I left the room having ruined my own plan.

On my way home, through the night, I cursed myself. I passed a little tour of Ariekei murmuring in Language as they looked like curators at our lamplit dwellings.

Formerly, 10

At various fairs and events in Embassytown, I’d been asked to tell stories of the immer. I’d shown trids and images of my hours in the out, supposedly for children, though there were always many adults in the audience. The immer was and is full of renegades and refugees. They emerge where they can and do what they can get away with. I’d tell the stories. I had transported most things to most places; jewellery; immer-miserable livestock; payloads of organic garbage to a trash planet-state run by pirates. I’d save the best for the end, a changing display of the pharos that marks the edge of the known always: here, right beside Arieka. I’d show it through various filters, culminating in the tropeware that made it a lighthouse, a beacon in murk.

“See? That’s what you see. That’s right here. Beyond us there’s nothing charted. We live at the end of the light.” I was amazed at how addictive the spook and thrill was. My presence wasn’t requested this time, for the Licence Party.

“What happened between you and CalVin?” Ehrsul asked me. I didn’t tell her, or anyone.

The microclimates over the city and those over Embassytown were rigged according to a complex algorithm I’d never bothered to decode. I was always vaguely charmed by planets in thrall to their tilt, with seasons that were more or less predictable. In Embassytown, I noticed particular weathers, of course, but didn’t ever expect them.

It grew warm. It was apparently time for us to have a summer.

I went to the Licence Party alone. When I realised that she was expecting us to go together I had to tell Ehrsul no. From her silence, I know I hurt her, or spurred the subroutine of her turingware that manifested as if that were so. But I couldn’t be there with anyone. I wasn’t punishing her—because this had not been Ehrsul’s only silence recently—but I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.

There were game rooms, food halls, massage houses, places for sex; and there were zones designed for our Hosts. They came in large numbers, informed by their networks, the techlike town criers that we had helped to automate. I’d never seen so many Hosts in Embassytown.

Fortune-tellers and performers were on the streets. Trid caricatures of passersby flashed in and out of existence. We came in through security: Terretech detectors of metals and energy flows, and biorigged proscenia that snuffled as we came through, tasting for the telltales of weapon compounds. There were constables in the crowd.

With night the humans and Kedis grew more drunk or drugged. Children ran on frenetic missions. Automa wandered in. I saw a pod of adolescent Shur’asi, a lone Pannegetch casting dice. The Hosts spectated as we played our shovepenny games. They looked with tourist fascination, listened to the songs our singers sang, titillated by our harmonics. I couldn’t find Scile.

I don’t think the Ariekei ever empathised with our predilection for symmetry and hinge-points: solstices, noon. But the Licence Party was ours as well as theirs, and the Festival of Lies started at midnight.

The marquee was the size of a cathedral: in places the biorigged skin hadn’t finished growing, and decorative gauze or plastic were woven over the holes. There was theatrical seating for Terre around the arena, and standing places for exots and for the Hosts. I saw people I knew. They shouted my name. I saw Hasser, and he raised his hand. He looked afraid. He was gone too fast for me to reach him. By the main performance space was a large group of Ambassadors. CalVin was there, and CharLott, JoaQuin and MagDa and JasMin and others, conferring with Staff. Ariekei were near them, one or two I recognised. Pear Tree, and others that perhaps I might call leaders. Beyond them performers waited, Host and Ariekei.

was there, with Spanish Dancer and the others of its entourage. It wasn’t hard to recognise.

There was a hush, whispered Terre excitement when the lights went down and a few coloured illuminations fired. In a strong, projected doubled voice, Ambassador CharLott stepped into the centre of the spectators, spoke Language. A translator shouted to us locals theatrically, “ ‘It’s raining in here,’ the Ambassador says! ‘It’s raining liquor on us!’ ”

It sounded as though they were trying to excite Embassytowners with these feeble falsities as if we were Host, and I thought it absurd. But, over the delighted noises of the Ariekei looking up to find the rain that wasn’t there, came the shrieks of Terre, my neighbours yelling delight at each new untruth from the Ambassador. As if none of them could lie.

I reached the front as CharLott came to the end of their set. Other Ambassadors performed. They were building an arc for the listeners, I realised. For us. Here were lies that were a comic interlude, here a ratcheting-up of tension, here a moving moment.

When after long heady minutes they were done, Hosts stepped up in their place. Each Ariekes spoke only one or two short lies. Most did it by verbal trickery like a whispered final clause. Each success was marked with Terre cheers and Ariekene approval. Many competitors stumbled and said something true. The Host audience responded with what could have been scorn or could have been pity.

I stand, I don’t stand.

This before me is not red.

stepped forward at last, for a scheduled confrontation. Opposite it was an Ambassador, LuCy, moving like pugilists, swinging their arms as if limbering. I realised I was surprised, that when I’d read about this contest, I had thought it would be CalVin representing Embassytown. Ambassador and Host squared. This was some blasphemy, I thought. Who could have allowed this? There was cheering, but I heard a man beside me, as if channelling my opinion, muttering, “This is not right.”

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said.

The MC was shouting the rules of the standoff. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things, said again, and shucked its wings. Whatever alien feelings it was feeling, they looked to us like bravado. The two women of the Ambassador and that intricate big beast the Ariekes stared at each other. The Ambassador opened their mouths. Before they spoke, said, Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much.

Ruckus. Before the humans came, the Host went on, and I knew what the lie would be, we didn’t speak.

It said it clearly. There was a moment, then the Ariekei stuttered in their ecstasy of reception. Even the Terre knew that we had heard something extraordinary. There was noise everywhere. Some shouted argument. I saw jostling in the crowd.

“Not true!” someone was shouting. “Not true!”

Men and women were got suddenly, violently, out of someone else’s way. They screamed and parted. I could see the man coming, and it was Valdik.

“Not true!” he said. He ran and shouted and brought a cudgel down on the ground, and I felt a spasming report. There was energy in his weapon. So much for security. He faced . Valdik shouted that it was not true. He raised his weapon. Eye-corals strained. People were running toward us. Valdik shouted, “Fucking snake!” watched him, its coral spreading wide as horns. I heard the bark of a weapon and Valdik went down, his club scorching the floor. Constables grabbed him. He was beaten down.

“He went for a Host?” people were gasping.

I could hear Valdik still shouting: “The devil! He’ll fucking destroy us! Don’t let it lie!”

None of the Ariekei made a sound. The officers hauled Valdik upright finally, blood-smeared and ragged, hardly conscious. They began to drag him, his feet scratching on the floor, out of the grounds. Tens of seconds had passed since his attack. In that whole hall, I think I was the only person watching CalVin and their silent colleagues, one of the very few not staring at the battered would-be assassin being taken away.

I saw Scile. He was with them, among the Ambassadors and Staff. That was it; that was where to look. They were looking not at Valdik but at , and beyond it at Pear Tree and its group of Ariekei. I was one of very few in that hall who saw what happened then.

Pear Tree moved. From behind it stepped Hasser. He walked quickly. Even was still looking at Valdik. No constables saw Hasser coming, or were there to intervene. They were busy suckers to the oldest feint. I moved.

One of ’s eyebuds glimpsed something and the whole coral arced backward, to stare. I saw Spanish Dancer, heard it calling, its giftwing moving in alien distress. Hasser aimed a biorigged thing. A ceramic carapace, a pistolgrip that gripped him back. He fired. No one was there to stop him.

He fired and the gun-animal opened its throat and howled. He blasted across the lying ground, spraying mud-coloured Host blood.

It broke apart as it flew. Hasser didn’t stop firing. The assault tore ’s giftwing from its body. Its legs dyingly scuttled, so insectile it was appalling. It gushed from everywhere.

Then Hasser was snatched out of my sight himself by a constable’s bullet. By the time screaming started again I was beside him. I trembled. I struggled for breath as if I were beyond the aeoli. Hasser stared without sight. I heard the rattle of scute from ’s posthumous fitting.

Spanish Dancer traced shapes with its wings. Its colours flushed. I’d never before seen Ariekene grief. I looked at Pear Tree, which looked down at me. I ignored the commotion and all the wails in the room, and watched Pear Tree, and CalVin, and Scile. I remember I moaned every time I exhaled. They were looking at Hasser’s body without expression. They must have seen me.

That is how the most virtuoso liar of the Ariekei was murdered.

The days after that were as you’d imagine. Chaos, fear, excitement. No Host had been harmed by an Embassytowner for hundreds of thousands of hours, for lifetimes. Suddenly we felt we existed on sufferance. Staff imposed a curfew, gave the constabulary and SecStaff extraordinary powers. In the out, I’d spent time in cities and colonies under dictatorships of various forms, and I knew that what we had was a quaint approximation of martial law; but for Embassytown it was unprecedented.

I had so much sadness in me. I cried, only when I was alone. I was so sorry for Hasser, silly secret zealot; and for Valdik who I still believe never knew he’d been a distraction, and whose loyalty to Scile was such that, after that night, he went to his execution denying that anyone else had had any hand in his plan.

So sorry for . I never knew what emotion would have been appropriate for an Ariekene loss, so I settled for sadness.

For a day I turned off my buzz and did not answer when anyone came to my door. The second day I kept the buzz off, but I did answer the knocking. It was an autom I’d never seen before, a whirring anthropoid outline. I blinked and wondered who’d sent this thing and then I saw its face. Its screen was cruder than any I’d seen her rendered on before, but it was Ehrsul.

“Avice,” she said. “Can I come in?”

“Ehrsul, why’d you load yourself into …?” I shook my head and stepped back for her to enter.

“The usual one doesn’t have these.” She swung the thing’s arms like deadweight ropes.

“Why do you need them?” I said. And Pharotekton bless her she grabbed hold of me, just as if I’d lost someone. She did not ask me anything. I hugged her right back, for a long time.

I went back once more to The Cravat. Set my expression, walked a floaker walk. None of the similes were there, nor, I think, did any ever come back. I let my show drop. But the owner, a man whose name I had never bothered to learn, referring to him only by the vernacular slang handle we’d granted him that I now cannot remember, hurried up to me in agitation, as if I could help him. He told me that Ariekei were still coming: Spanish Dancer; one we’d known as Baptist; others of the Professors. They’d been staring at where the similes used to sit.

“Surl Tesh-echer used to come here all the time,” I said. “Maybe they’re coming to be where their friend used to be.”

The owner was terrified the Hosts would commit reprisal for ’s death. Most people were. I was not. I’d seen Pear Tree step aside for Hasser and say something to him on his way. I’d seen CalVin and the others waiting for that. had been murdered but it also had been executed, publicly, by its peers. For heresy, had been sentenced to Death by Human.

Embassytown couldn’t know, and would not. The situation must be made to look to most people, and did, like a bloody mess, rather than the careful juridical moment it also was.

Ariekei traditioners had decided they could not tolerate , would not brook its experiments. A lie was a performance; a simile was rhetoric: their synthesis, though, the first step in their becoming quite another trope, was sedition. I would never assume I understood the motivations of any exot, and I had grown up knowing the thinking of the Hosts was beyond me. Whatever drove the Ariekene powers to their brutal decision might, might not, be comparable to the calculations that had also gone on behind Embassy doors. The Ariekene resistance to these innovations might have been ethical, or aesthetic, or random. It might have been religious or a game. Or instrumental, an expression of some cool, cynical calculation, a power-jostling among cliques.

I remembered Cal or Vin’s anxiety, when they’d told me that some of Scile’s ideas about made sense. The Ambassadors, as much as its Ariekene judges, had seen in it an approaching danger. I never thought CalVin saw whatever that coming badness was as my husband had: but where there’s commitment and dissent there might be change, and perhaps that was enough. There’d been a catastrophe on its way that, together, Ariekei and Terre had staved off. A problem they had solved.

Who could I tell? If I could prove anything, so what? Not everyone would think any of this the slightest crime. And what would I bring on myself? I’d no idea how many of the Ambassadors knew, or if they would disapprove if they did, or what they would do to me if I complained. I can’t have been the only one who worked out what had happened. There were enough snatches of information. But Staff asserted horror and shock and stressed to Embassytowners that they had apologised to our Hosts, and that Hasser and Valdik had both been brought to justice. They unleashed harsh policing against the remnants of the Druman cult.

Scile moved at last into the Embassy, became Staff. One day all his possessions were gone from my home. Among his flaws wasn’t cowardice. I think he was avoiding me; perhaps he wanted to spare me his rage.

I never stopped being appalled by the sentencing I’d seen. But months passed—and our months are long—and we were out of the doldrums, and Valdik and Hasser were long dead. I still wouldn’t speak to CalVin or Scile, but though I didn’t know which Staff and Ambassadors were complicit in what had happened I couldn’t spurn them all forever. I couldn’t live in Embassytown like that. It felt not like compromise but survival.

Even CalVin and I came wordlessly to a way of being in the same room, if we so found ourselves. We might, I eventually came to accept, one day even exchange brief cool words.

I remembered those elements in Scile, the little opacities that had always been present, that I’d always been intrigued by, that now seemed to have come to constitute all of him. I didn’t know what fears the rest of the complicit Staff had had of , but I thought they must have been political. I was never sure about Scile, though, for all that he was Staff too now, and had for a long time been of their party. For all his consummate manipulation of the credulous simile zealots. He worked as apparatchik, but I wondered if he really was a prophet.

Many months after those horrible events, the first crisis, as Embassytown geared into a different kind of time, as the arrival of the next ship grew closer, as the time I’ve called “formerly” ended, the Hosts apparently made Scile a simile. I heard that from Ehrsul.

She couldn’t find out exactly what he’d had to do. He was part of Language but I never heard him used: and in various I hoped untraceable eavesdropping ways I did try. By contrast the similes Hasser and Valdik, changed as they were by the events, were invigorated. It’s like the boy who was opened and closed again and is dead. It’s like the man who swam weekly with the fishes and is dead. The Ariekei found new uses for these new formulations.

Ehrsul was a good friend to me in what was a pretty bleak time, though I wouldn’t risk telling her everything that I knew had happened. I told myself that I was just waiting. I was immerser. When the relief came, I’d go into the out, away from this place. Then the miab arrived, with details of what would be arriving next, and news of our impossible Ambassador.

Wasn’t I going to stay to see what would happen? Everything after this was latterday, and it’s the only story remaining. Wasn’t I eager for Embassytown to change?

Later, the scale of the crisis that unfolded made this, retrospectively, a guilty memory, but when first I realised that things were not going quite to plan, the first time I met EzRa at the Arrival Ball, when I sensed that they were spreading some unexpected chaos in Embassytown, it had made me happy.

PART FOUR

ADDICT

9

People wandered through streets in a kind of utopian uncertainty, knowing that everything was different but unsure in what sort of place they lived now. Adults were talking and children playing games. “I’m minded to be careful,” I heard one man say, and I could have laughed in his face. Minded, are you? I could have said. Minded how? What will you do? How will you be careful?

We’d always lived in a ghetto, in a city that didn’t belong to us but to beings far more powerful and strange. We’d lived among gods—little tiny gods but gods compared to us, considering what was at their and our disposal—and ignored the fact. Now they’d changed, and we had no way to understand that, and all we could do was wait. Embassytowners’ foolish discussions were as meaningless right then as the sounds of birds.

Our news figures said things to me from screens and tridflats like: “The situation is being closely monitored.” We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after. I walked through the tiny Kedis district. The ruling troikas there had heard about the killing, knew enough Terre psychology that all our fears were rubbing off on them, and they were very anxious, too.

I couldn’t persuade Ehrsul to come to join me in the agitation and rush of Embassytown main, in the hilltop districts where people massed, following rumours that taught them nothing, staring, powerless spectators, into the city moving as opaquely as ever but differently opaque now. We could all see it. I went to her apartment. Ehrsul was subdued, but then we all were.

She spiked me a coffee with one of the edgers many of us were taking. She moved backward and forward on her treads. Her mechanisms were smooth, but inevitably with that repetition tiny infelicitous noises in the machine of her became audible, then irritations.

“Have you found anything out?” I said.

“About what’s going on? Nothing. Nothing.”

“What about on the …?”

“I said, nothing.” She made her face blink. “There’s all kinds of blather all over the nets, but if anyone out there understands what’s happened or knows what’s about to happen, they’re talking about it below what I can tap.”

“EzRa?”

“What about them? Do you think I’m just neglecting to tell you important bits? Christ.” I was embarrassed at her tone. “I don’t know where they are any more than you. I haven’t seen them since the party either.” I didn’t say that I’d seen Ra more recently. “Oh, there’s plenty of rumours: they’re in the out, they’re taking control, they’re preparing an invasion, they’re dead. Nothing I’d stake a rep on. If your channels to the Embassy haven’t netted anything, why would my pitiful little searchware?” We regarded each other.

“Alright,” I said slowly. “Come with me …”

“I’m not going anywhere, Avice,” she said, and her voice foreclosed argument. I was not, this one time, wholly disappointed at that.

I went to the coin wall. The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. But I knocked, and Bren answered.

I was looking down when he opened the door, to give myself a second. I raised my head to him. He looked much older to me, because his hair was grey. That was all, though: he was hardly collapsing. He recognised me. Before I met his eyes, I’m sure.

“Avice,” he said. “Benner. Cho.”

“Bren,” I said. We stared at each other, and eventually he made a sound between a sigh and a laugh, and I smiled if sadly and he stepped aside for me to enter the room I remembered so extraordinarily well, which hadn’t changed at all.

He brought me a drink and I joked about the cordial he’d given me the first time I was there. He remembered the chant we’d used when spinning coins, and recited it to me, imperfectly. He said something or other, something that meant you went into the out, you’re an immerser! A congratulations. I felt like thanking him. We sat looking at each other. He was still thin, wore what could have been the same smart clothes I remembered.

“So,” he said. “You’ve come here because the world’s ending.” A muted screen behind him played out the confusion of Embassytown.

“Is it?” I said.

“Oh I think so. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I think it’s the end of the world, yes.” He sat back. He looked comfortable. He drank and looked at me. “Yes I do. Everything you know’s finished. You know that, don’t you? Yes, I can see you do.” I saw his affection for me. “You impressed me,” he said. “Such an intense girl. I wanted to laugh. Even while you were looking after your poor friend. Who breathed Host air.”

“Yohn.”

“Anyway. Anyway.” He smiled. “It’s the end of the world and you’re here why? You think I can help?”

“I think you can tell me things.”

“Oh believe me,” he said, “no one in that castle wants me to know anything. They keep me as out of it as they can these days. I’m not saying I’ve no ins at all—there are those who keep an old man in gossip—but you probably know at least as much as me.”

“Who’s Oratees?” I said. He looked sharply up.

“Oratees?” he said. “It really is? Oh. Well. Christ Pharotekton,” he said. He smoothed down his shirt. “I did wonder. I thought maybe that must be it, but …” He shook his head. “But you doubt. You can hardly believe it, can you?

“Oratees isn’t a person,” Bren said. “They’re a thing. They’re junkies.”

“Everything that could happen has happened sometime,” he said. He leaned toward me. “Where are the failed Ambassadors, d’you think, Avice?” It was so shocking a question that I held my breath.

“If I put it to you outright, you wouldn’t imagine, would you, that every single one of the monozogs the Embassy raises is suited to Ambassadorial duties?” he said. “Of course not. Some doppels don’t take—don’t look enough like each other to be fixed, have quirks, can’t think enough alike, despite all the training. Whatever.

“You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. It’s not exactly a secret. It’s just not thought. You know that doppels retire, when the other dies.” He raised his hands, slightly, indicating himself. “You’ve never been in the Embassy crèche, have you? There are those who never get out of it in the first place. If you’ve been grown and raised and trained for one job, and you can’t do it, what’s the profit in letting you out? That could only cause trouble.”

Little rooms of rendered twins, mouldering. Slack and separate doppels gone bad, one whole, one like a melted image; or perhaps both wrong; or neither wrong in any physical way but with some bone-deep meanness; or just not able to do what they were born to.

“And if you’re already out,” Bren said, “by the time you realise you hate your job or your doppel, or whatever? Well. Well.” He spoke gently, breaking something to me. “When he died, my … it was an accident. It’s not as if we were old. People knew us … me. I was much too young to disappear. They tried to entice me to the rest home of course. But they couldn’t force me. So what if my neighbours don’t like me? So what if they see something crippled? No one likes a cleaved showing off their injury. We’re stumps.” He smiled. “That’s what we are.

“There are trainees who can never speak Language. I don’t know why. Just can’t speak in time no matter how they practice. That’s simple: you don’t let them go. But there are harder cases. They might look like any other pair. It’s happened before, to varying degrees. We had a colleague, when I was training. WilSon. Whatever joined-up mind it was behind their Language, for the Hosts to understand, it must have been a little out. A tiny bit. Nothing I could hear, but the Hosts … well.

“We were doing exams. We’d been tested by other Ambassadors and Staff, and in our last practical we had to speak to a Host. It was waiting. I don’t know what it thought it was doing, how they asked it to help. Hello, WilSon says, when it’s their turn.

“Straightaway we can see something’s wrong,” he said. “From how the Ariekes moves. Every time they talk to us, they taste our minds, and we’re alien. So it’s heady stuff. But if the two halves of an Ambassador aren’t … quite enmeshed enough? Not two random voices: close enough to speak Language and for them to get it. But wrong? Broken?” I said nothing.

“You know what Language is to them,” Bren said. “What they hear through the words. So, if they hear words they understand, they know are words, but it’s fractured? Ambassadors speak with empathic unity. That’s our job. What if that unity’s there and not-there?” He waited. “It’s impossible, is what. Right there in its form. And that is intoxicating. And they mainline it. It’s like a hallucination, a there-not-there. A contradiction that gets them high.

“Maybe not all of them. Every Host WilSon spoke to knew something was strange, and a few of them …” He shrugged. “Got drunk. On their words. Didn’t matter what WilSon said. Isn’t it a nice day; Please pass the tea; anything. The Hosts heard it and some of them got swoony and some of them wanted it again and again.

“Ambassadors are orators, and those to whom their oration happens are oratees. Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.”

Outside people ran through the streets in frightened carnival. There was the noise of fireworks. Bren refilled my glass.

“What happened to them?” I said.

“WilSon? They were quarantined, and they died.” He drank.

“Everyone respects me, but that can’t stop them hating me,” Bren said. “I understand that. They don’t like to see my wound.” He wrote his name in the air—his full name, seven letters: BrenDan. There’d been a time he was BrenDan, or more properly . Then his doppel had died, and he’d become BrenDan, . He couldn’t say his own name correctly.

BrenDan looked at me thoughtfully for a long time. He went to a desk. “Let me show you something.”

He threw me a shallow box. Inside were two links. His, and his doppel Dan’s. I examined the filigree circuits, the wires and contacts, the careful carved initials and silver leaves. Their clasps had been cut open. I looked at him and could see the tiny marks on his neck where his had been embedded.

“What are you thinking?” he said. “Are you thinking that I keep them so they’re close at hand? Are you thinking I hide them away, to try to forget them? Avice. If I’d thrown his away and kept mine, you’d think I was clinging to my dead identity, or resenting his death. If I threw them both away, you’d see me in denial. If I kept his but not mine you’d say I was refusing to let him go. There’s nothing I can do you won’t do that to. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it, it’s what we do. Whatever I do, it’ll be one story or another.”

(Later, the next but one time I was with him, because I did come back and after that he came to me, he said to me, “I look at that link and I hate him.” I said nothing. What could I say? We were sitting on the sofa in my rooms. They were nothing like as splendid as Bren’s. “I don’t know when it started,” he said. “For a long time I thought I hated him when he died, because he died, poor bastard. Now I think it might have started earlier. You mustn’t blame me.” He was suddenly plaintive. “I’m sure he hated me, too. It was neither of our faults.”)

“They must have suspected what would happen, you know,” Bren said. “The Ambassadors. It was always the oddballs who seemed to risk … unplaiting … just enough to make a few Ariekei oratees. Those were the ones they restrained. Other sorts of troublemakers went AWOL or native.”

“You think they knew?” I said. “And who went what?”

“They must have hoped EzRa were a drug,” he said. “So they’d affect one or two of the Hosts and not be usable. One in the eye for Bremen. They’ve all been very concerned about who was calling what shots, what agendas were being forced, since they heard EzRa were coming.”

“I know,” I said. “But Bremen must’ve known too, if this has happened before. Why would they send them …?”

“Known about oratees, you mean? Why would we tell Bremen about that? I don’t know what they had in mind, but this, letting EzRa speak, was the Embassy’s riposte, I think. Not that they expected this, though. Not like this. Language like this, right there but so impossible, so doping, that EzRa are infecting every, single, Host. All of which are spreading the word. All hooked on the new Ambassador.”

Our everyday pantheon gone needy, desperate for hits of Ez and Ra speaking together, fermenting Language into some indispensable brew of contradiction, insinuation and untethered meaning. We were quartered in an addict city. That procession I’d seen had been craving.

“What happens now?” I said. It was very quiet in the room. There were hundreds of thousands of Ariekei in the city. Maybe millions. I didn’t know. We knew hardly anything at all. Their heads were all made of Language. EzRa spoke it and changed it. Every Host, everywhere, would become hardwired with need, do anything, for the blatherings of a newly trained bureaucrat.

“Sweet Jesus Pharotekton Christ light our way,” I said.

“It is,” said Bren, “the end of the world.”

10

The Ariekei told us how it would be. I was ahead of this curve, but it didn’t take long for the rest of the Embassytowners to understand that the Hosts were junkies, though they may not have known how or why. I suspect there was a power struggle in the Embassy, that some would have tried, out of habit, without rationale, to wall up information. They didn’t win.

The streets of Embassytown were something between carnival and apocalypse: moods of ending; hysteria; happiness, or its giddy approximation. Constables apprehended people walking determinedly toward the edge of town, in biorigging that might let them breathe the city air.

“You’re going nowhere!” the officers said. “Get that off. People are dying …” Some would-be city voyagers must have got through. Embassytowners wanting something from the Hosts. Pointless—the Ariekei wouldn’t perceive them as people, but as the meat belongings of Ambassadors.

I was able to bluff my way back into the Embassy. Seeing the way the Ambassadors were scurrying I felt for a moment almost protective of them. They didn’t question me. Even JasMin seemed to have forgotten they disliked me. One of EdGar gave me a kiss, to my surprise. I couldn’t see his doppel. I saw the discomfort in Ed or Gar’s eyes, from stretching their link’s field.

“Where …?” I said.

“Coming, coming.” Being so separated must have made it hard to concentrate. We didn’t say much until his doppel turned a corridor corner and joined us.

“Have you been into the city?” I said. (“Of course.” “No one’ll talk to us.”) “D’you know what’s happening?” (“No.” “No.”) “Where’s EzRa? Where’s Wyatt?” (“Don’t know.” “Don’t care.”)

“You don’t know where EzRa are?” I said. “After they caused all this shit? So what, you’ve just left them to fucking conspire?”

“Conspire?” Ed and Gar laughed. “They won’t even talk to each other.”

An Ariekene ship-beast came toward us over their city, in which the outline of that obscure malaise was spreading, building to building. When the flyer touched down on the pad, we rigged up something like an official welcome. It’s perhaps tendentious to say “we,” but I made myself part of that community then, around the Staff and Ambassadors, and I think no one resented it.

Every Ambassador I could think of was there. The Ariekei entered the hall with gusts of aeoli breath, our wind, with the gilded curtains snapping like capes around them. They walked on the altwood floor with the sound of fingernails. Not a fraction so many as had come that last pilgrimage time, but this was a more formal group. JoaQuin and MayBel stepped forward, and others shuffled behind them. Our two sides watched each other. Eye-corals craned.

The Ariekei spoke so quickly only the most fluent listeners could follow. I turned to see how the crowd were taking all this, and with shock saw my husband. He stood in the doorway, and with him was the new Ambassador.

I was the first, but a few other people in the room started to notice them, and there were gasps. Ra, tall and looking very tired, stood in a pose midway between hopeful and resentful. Behind him, Ez looked at the floor. His bantam swagger was gone. His augmens were off.

Scile saw me. He met my eye, then looked around the room again. Standing where he stood, he could have been shoring EzRa up, could have been protecting them, could have been menacing them.

I recognised some of the visitors. On one fanwing I saw a moment of bird-shape in tree-shape. Pear Tree. I stared at it. The Hosts said EzRa’s name.

EzRa found a reserve of dignity, and met that attention. The Ariekei spoke in a confusion, one then another, squabbling even, until at last something like sense emerged. Someone began to translate what they said.

This is how it will be.

An unqualified future tense, rare in Language. This wasn’t an aspiration: the Hosts could only envisage that this was how it would be. They didn’t allow discussion: later we would make sense of it all. They didn’t raise details. They didn’t present requests or even demands, not really. They expressed need. All they could say, repeatedly, in various ways, was that they needed.

We will hear EzRa speak. This is how it will be. We will hear them speak. First now we will hear EzRa speak.

I could see some Staff making calculations, muttering: the best of them could strategise even during this. I admired that. They were working out what to do, what relations could remain and how others would be saved, how we could live, what we would make Embassytown be. They made me hope, and I’d not expected that.

The Hosts had a simple and single priority, it seemed. I was never a fool; I’d known there must be antagonisms, camps and struggles among them, before I ever saw that bloody result of one; and now a paradox, that that memory rose in me at that moment, when all that was evident was one implacable agenda. First we will hear EzRa speak.

Ez came forward, then, grudgingly, Ra. They looked at each other with very different emotions, those two unalike men. They whispered. They spoke Language together, and brought the Hosts to rapture.

11

As they unfolded those times seemed pure chaos, but by the prodigious efforts of the better Staff, a kind of life emerged. Even routines. It’s shocking how fast a whole city can be made to change.

Trade, all the moments and minutiae of exchange: knowledge, services, goods, promises and extras. Our culture. The way we lived. All of those things had to be fixed.

There was a dangerous excitement, an amoralism manifesting in small cruelties and mass indulgence, that some let take them, while others struggled to make things work. In the first weeks, if you came to the Embassy, it would probably be guarded, but perhaps not. Meeting rooms and galleries might be uncleaned, might contain detritus of parties. I didn’t find much pleasure in transgressions. I knew the vomited-up red wine wasn’t puked in ostentation, nor left to rot in libertine performance, but because those who partied had seen or heard about the Ariekene demand; couldn’t conceive of how we could keep going or what would happen if we failed to fulfill them; so didn’t know if they would live another week, and had never been so afraid.

Ehrsul did not answer my buzzes, and I was so overwhelmed I didn’t pursue it or visit her, as a good friend perhaps should have. EzRa was at some parties, I heard from others, then saw myself. After a short time it was only Ez who was there, at the millennial debauches. Ra did other things.

There were assignations and the collapses of relationships. There were many marriages. I had my own hurried liaisons. Really those first days are hard to talk about. The heroes who ensured that Embassytown wasn’t swept away by insistent addicted Hosts were the clerks, who set up structures while the rest of us failed not to fall apart. A little later I became something again, something important to Embassytown: just then I was not.

In those days Embassytown felt as small as it ever had to me. Not two days could pass without me meeting, at some gathering eager or desultory or both, people I’d avoided for thousands of hours. Burnham, a simile from back when, caught my eye from the other end of a crowd gathered because of a bullshit rumour that information was about to be imparted by the Embassy gates. He looked away as carefully as I did, as I had every time since Hasser’s and Valdik’s deaths, since way before this new cataclysm, that I’d bumped into him or Shanita or any of the dispersed Cravat crew.

I wandered Embassytown while civil servants took pills to stay awake and worked out plans to keep us alive. I bumped more than once into older friends: Gharda; Simmon, the guard. He had nothing to guard. He was terrified: his biorigged prosthesis seemed sick.

Staff too lowly had no idea what to do, and those too high were crippled by the loss of everything. So were all those Ambassadors who told people that it was the viziers’ faults, that they would never themselves have let things come to this, that it had always been Staff who were the real powers and who had let everyone down. No one listened to that fairytale anymore.

It was ignored people who’d done the same thing for years who changed themselves for the sake of Embassytown, and changed Embassytown. Our bureaucratic feudalism of expertise became a remorseless meritocracy. Even a few Ambassadors proved themselves. Rarely the ones I’d have guessed. That’s true but a trite observation.

One of the first of the new leadership’s achievements was the defeat of Wyatt’s insurgency. Simmon was key to that little war. He told me about it afterward, invigorated again. “You saw how suddenly all Wyatt’s lot got moving? They were opening the arsenals. I guess whatever’s going on triggered some bloody Bremen emergency protocol. That’s what all that chaos was, a few days ago.”

I’d not noticed whatever uprising of our overpower’s representatives he was talking about. There was plenty of chaos enough.

“We got wind of it—never mind how—and we were ready for them. But we had to take risks.” He was drawing the plan, the actions, in schema, with his hand in the air. “We could probably just have preempted them, you know? But that Bremen tech they’ve got—we reckoned it had to be pretty damn useful. So we waited and went in after they’d opened the silos. We had a few officers placed with them—it’s not as if we hadn’t been preparing for this before. We took them with only a few casualties, and we got the weapons. Although honestly, they’re not as useful as we’d hoped. Still.

“They didn’t put up much fight. It’s only Wyatt who was the problem. We’ve put him away. Incommunicado. There are bound to be Bremen agents still out there, and we have to make sure he can’t get codes or instructions or whatever to them.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t noticed the drama. Even ignorant of it as I’d been, I was galvanised, hearing of it.

Ra, the diffident half of our cataclysmic Ambassador, was allowed his solitude and whatever his little projects were; Ez was allowed his louche collapse. But they were on orders, and they were guarded. They had duties. They were what kept us alive.

“A city of brainwashed,” EdGar said to me. “Stronger than us, armed. We need them hospitable.”

There was no thinking or strategy from the Hosts in those first days. I who was so used to glossing all their strangeness with special pleading—it’s some Ariekene thing, we wouldn’t understand—was aghast to become convinced that they were not indulging any inhuman strategy, but mindless addict need. At first crowds of Ariekei were gathered permanently outside the Embassy. When they became agitated and their demands particularly insistent, every few hours, EzRa would be fetched, would appear at the entrance, and in flawless Language say something—anything at all—amplified to carry, to the crowd’s obvious stoned relief.

The second time EzRa said to them We are happy to see you and look forward to learning together, the oratees reacted without quite the degree of bliss they’d shown previously. The third time they were unhappy, until EzRa announced some new pointlessness about the colour of the buildings, the time of day or the weather. Then they were rapt again. “Fucking fantastic,” I said to someone. “They’re building up tolerance. Keep EzRa inventive.”

We watched trids and flats, news programs that after kilohours of trivialities now had to learn to report our own collapse. One channel sent an aeoli-wearing team with vespcams into the city. They were neither invited nor barred. Their reports were astonishing.

We were not used to seeing Ariekene streets, but there are new freedoms during a breakdown. The reporters edged into the city, past plaited ropes tethering gas-filled Host rooms, past buildings that shied away from them or rose on spindled limbs like witch-huts. Ariekei crossed our screens. They saw the reporters, stared and ran over sometimes like tottering horses. They asked questions in their double voices, but there were no Ambassadors to answer them. The reporters knew Language, translated for viewers.

“ ‘Where is EzRa?’ ” That was what the Hosts said.

The reporters weren’t the only Terre in the city. Their vespcams glimpsed men and women in Embassy suits moving among the skittish houses. They were routing cables and speakers—Terretech that looked jarring in that topography. They were extending a network of hailers and coms boxes. In return perhaps for our lives, the maintenance of our power, water, infrastructure, biorigging, they were getting ready to bring EzRa’s voice right into the city.

“We need EzRa now,” EdGar said. “They have to perform. That was our deal.”

“With them, or the Hosts?” I said.

“Yes. More EzRa, though. And that means we need Ez.”

He was drinking and drugging. More than once, he’d disappear at the times he was scheduled to speak Language to the Ariekei, leaving Ra speechless and waiting. I didn’t care if Ez killed himself, but that he’d take us with him if he did.

“They’re like normal Ambassadors in one way, right?” I said. “Recordings work? So build up a library of EzRa’s speeches, then let the fucker do what he wants. Let him drink himself dead.” They’d thought of that, but Ez would not comply. Even begged by Ra or threatened by Staff or guards, he would only speak with his Ambassador-colleague an hour or so at any one time. We could grab the odd snippet onto dat, but he was careful not to let them collect a store of EzRa’s Language.

“He knows he’d be redundant,” EdGar said. “This way we keep needing him.” Even in his decline and terror, Ez thought with ruthless strategy. I was impressed.

By vespcam, I saw the first times that EzRa’s voice was played into that strung-out city.

The buildings had been unhappy for days. They were rearing and breathing steam, purging themselves of the biorigged parasites they bred, that were Ariekene furniture. Look out from the Embassy, to where the city began, an organic vista like piled-up body parts, and the motion of the architecture was clear. The wrongness endemic.

The city twitched. It was infected. The Hosts had heard EzRa’s impossible voice, had taken energy from their zelles and let out waste, and in the exchange the chemistry of craving had been passed, and passed on again by the little beasts when they connected to buildings to power light and the business of life. Addiction had gone into the houses, which poor mindless things shook in endless withdrawal. The most afflicted sweated and bled. Their inhabitants rigged them crude ears, to hear EzRa speak, so the walls could get their fix.

EzRa spoke. They said anything in Language. Their amplified voice sounded through all the byways. Everywhere in the city Ariekei staggered and stopped. Their buildings staggered with them.

It disgusted me. My mouth twisted. Everything beyond Embassytown shuddered with relief. It moved through pipework, wires and tethers, to every corner of the grid, into the power stations stamping in a sudden wrong bliss. Withdrawal would start again within hours. By the edge of our zone we could feel it in the paving: a shaking as houses moved. We could track their biorhythms through our windows, could gauge how badly the drug of speech was needed.

In the past, each few months at harvest- or weaning-time, we’d send aeolied Ambassadors and barter-crews out to where Ariekene shepherds of the biorig flocks would explain different ’wares, these machines half-designed, half-born to chance, what each did and how. Now, the Ariekei neglected their out-of-city lands. Biorigging still entered the city, and we could see by the convulsions of the enormous throats that stretched kilometres to the foodgrounds that pabulum was still coming in, too. And that, with reverse peristalsis, addiction was being passed out.

“This world’s dying,” I said. “How can they let it go like this?”

We saw no attempts at self-treatment, no struggles. No Ariekene heroes. Ambassadors could converse with them in the hours after they’d had a hit of EzRa’s voice, when they seemed to humans lucid, but only to make the shortest of plans, for scant hours ahead.

“What do you think they should be doing?” MagDa was one of the few Ambassadors working to usher in change. I’d joined them. I was trying to be part of this new team. I knew MagDa and Simmon, scientists like Southel. Mostly though it was people new to me. “There’s no equilibrium possible.” “This is chance. A cosmic balls-up.” MagDa hadn’t equalised. I saw broken veins beneath the eyes of one and one only, and new lines beside the mouth of the other. “This is just a glitch between two evolutions,” they said. “How would they accommodate it?” “This doesn’t mean anything.” “They’ll listen themselves to death before they’ll try to change.”

The Hosts had always been incomprehensible. In that one sense, nothing had altered.

The upper floors of the Embassy had become a moral ruin. A little farther down, I saw Mag and Da cajole the Ariekei who came, force them to focus just long enough that we could be sure they’d understood our requests for materials and expertise. And in return, what was it MagDa offered?

Have it say about colour, I thought I heard one Host say.

It will, MagDa said. You will bring us the tool-animals before tomorrow and we will make sure it describes every colour of the walls.

“We keep going through colours for them,” Mag said to me.

“They’re loving it,” Da said. “But eventually …” “… the piquancy of it’s going to wear off.”

After this exchange I made new sense of EzRa’s little speeches to the city. Someone would generally translate. Some nodded to logic. Others were random sentences, or statements of preference or condition. I’m tired, subject-verb-object like children’s grammars. What I’d previously thought whims of subject I realised might be gifts for particular Ariekene listeners, in return for this or that favour. Economies and politics.

In the Embassy corridors, Ra, that impossible not-doppel, joined MagDa and me. Mag and Da kissed him. His presence meant we were approached by people desperate for some kind of intercession. He was as kind to them as he could be. I’d seen too many messiahs thrown up by Embassytown. “How long do we have to go on?” one distraught woman asked him.

“Until the relief,” he said. So many hundreds of thousands of hours, scratching out an interstitial living while the Hosts hankered for EzRa’s sounds.

“Then what?” the woman said. “Then what? Do we leave?”

No one answered. I saw MagDa’s faces. I thought of what life would be, for them, in the out.

Reliefs had arrived on catastrophised worlds before. No communications could warn; there’s no outracing an immer ship. No crew could know what they’d see when their doors opened. There were famous cases of trade vessels emerging from immer to find charnel grounds on once-established colonies. Or disease, or mass insanity. I wondered how it would be for our incoming captain to emerge in our orbit, as close as she or he dared to the Ariekene pharos. If we were lucky, that ship would find a populace desperate to become refugees.

MagDa in the out? CalVin? Or even Mag and Da and Cal and Vin? What would they do? And they were among the most collected of the Ambassadors. By then most others were falling, to various degrees, apart.

“They go into the city,” MagDa told me when we were alone. She was talking about Ambassadors. “Those of them who can still pull themselves together a bit.” “They go in, and find Hosts.” “Ones they’ve always worked with.” “Or they just … stand between buildings.” “And they just start to talk.” They shook their heads. “They go in groups of two or three or four Ambassadors and just …” “… they just … they try …” “… to make the Ariekei listen.” They looked at me. “We did it once, ourselves. Early on.”

But the Ariekei wouldn’t listen. They understood, and might even answer. But they would always go back to waiting for EzRa’s announcements. The vespcams got everywhere, wouldn’t let Ambassadors hide their breakdowns. I’d seen footage of JoaQuin howling, and speaking Language, and in their misery losing their rhythm with each other, so the Ariekes to which they desperately tried to talk didn’t understand them.

“Did you hear about MarSha?” MagDa said. I remember nothing about their voices that warned me that they were about to say anything shocking. “They killed themselves.”

I stopped in my work. I leaned on the table and looked at MagDa slowly. I couldn’t speak. I put my hand over my mouth. MagDa watched me. “There’ll be others,” they said quietly, at last. When the ship came, I thought, I could leave.

“Where’s Wyatt?” I asked Ra.

“Jail. Just up the corridor from Ez.”

“Still? Are they … debriefing him … or what?” Ra shrugged. “Where’s Scile?” I had not seen, nor heard from, nor heard of, my husband, since the start of this ruinous time.

“Don’t know,” Ra said. “You know I don’t really know him, right? There was always a crowd of Staff around us when we were talking … before. I don’t even know if I’d recognise him. I don’t even know who he is, let alone where he is.”

I descended, passed searchers looking through a room full of papers for useful things. We were doing a lot of scavenging. More floors down, and I heard someone call my name. I stopped. It was Cal, or Vin, in the entrance to a stairwell. He blocked my way and stared at me.

“I heard you were around here,” he said. He was alone. I frowned. His aloneness continued. He took my hands. It was months since we’d spoken. I kept looking around him and I kept frowning. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “Close, I’m sure. He’ll be here soon. I heard you were here.” This was the one I’d meant to wake. He stared with desperation that made me shudder. I looked down to avoid his eyes and saw something I could barely believe.

“You turned off your link,” I said. Its lights were off. I stared at it.

“I was looking for you, because …” He ran out of anything to say and his voice got to me. I touched his arm. He looked so suddenly needful at that that I couldn’t help pitying him.

“What’s been happening to you?” I said. Bad enough for me, but the Ambassadors had become abruptly nothing.

In the corridor behind him his doppel appeared. “You’re talking to her?” he said. He tried to grab his brother, who didn’t take his eyes from me but shook his doppel off. “Come on.”

They weren’t equalised. As with MagDa, I could see differences. They whispered an altercation and the newcomer backed away.

“Cal.” The first man, the half who had sought me out, said, looking at me. “Cal.” He pointed at his brother, at the other end of the corridor. He prodded his own chest with his thumb. “Vin.”

I knew his look of longing wasn’t, or wasn’t just, for me. I met it. Vin walked backward to join his brother, looking at me for several seconds before he turned.

12

I travelled into the city with MagDa and Staff, part of a group trying to keep a paralysed Embassytown alive. Aeolius on me exhaling air I could breathe, I walked at last into that geography. We couldn’t risk corvids: the systems in place to ensure safe landing were now too often not operated.

We couldn’t wait—our biorigged medical equipment, our food-tech, the living roots and pipes of our water system needed Ariekene attention. And I think there was also in us something that needed to keep checking, to try to test what was happening. Like mythical polar explorers, or the pioneers of homo diaspora, we trudged in formation, carrying trade goods.

The architecture quivered as we came and related to us as germs in a body. Ariekei saw us. They murmured, and MagDa spoke to them, and often they would respond in ways that suggested they hardly knew we were there. We were not relevant. We went past the speakers Staff had helped to place, and around each of them, though they were currently silent, were gatherings of Ariekei. These were the furthest gone: we were learning to distinguish degrees of addiction. They would wait there for more sound, whispering to each other and to the speakers, repeating whatever they had last heard EzRa speak.

Ra had to cajole and threaten Ez into their performances, now. One concession—because Ez was treated like a capricious child, with castor oil and sugar—was, within the limits of barter necessity, to let Ez decide what they would say. What we would hear translated into Language, then, were rambling discussions of Ez’s past. If EzRa spoke during one of our trips into the city we couldn’t escape listening to them. Christ knows what Ra thought as he spoke these platitudes that Ez wanted his audience to get drunk on.

 … I always felt different from the others around me, the Ariekei listeners would repeat. We would walk past a patchwork of Ez’s ego in scores of voices. She never understood me …, … so it was my turn …, … things would never be the same again.… It was almost unbearable to hear the Ariekei say these things. Ez, I realised, built up an arc over many days. These weren’t disparate anecdotes: it was an autobiography. And that, I heard in an Ariekene voice, was where the trouble really started, and what happened next you’ll have to wait to hear. Ez was ending each session on a cliff-hanger, as if that was what kept his listeners avid. They would have listened no less hard had he expounded details of import duties or bylaws on construction specifications or dreams or shopping lists.

We would make our way to some nursery for the processing of bioriggage, a cremator full of memory, a residence or leviathan hearth-lair or wherever, and when we found through the efforts of MagDa or another Ambassador the Host for which we were looking, there would follow careful discussion. It was a tortured business, negotiation with an exot addict. But we would generally achieve something. And in the company of a Host or with a cage full of the tool-parasites our maintenance needed, or with plans or the maps we were learning to use and draw, we would retrace our way. It was always a full day’s expedition. The city would react vividly to us, walls sweating, window-ventricles opening. The ears that each house had grown would flex with expectation.

That was another reason we preferred not to be outside when EzRa broadcast. I wasn’t alone in finding the gluttony of the architecture and its inhabitants, the frantic eavesdropping of the walls, horrible.

Order was tenuous and dangerous but there: this wasn’t the collapse it so might have been. The ship would come. Until then we lived on the brink. When we left, we would leave a world of desperate Ariekei crawling in withdrawal. I couldn’t think about that, or what would happen after that. It would be a long time until we had the luxury of guilt.

I met the same Ariekei more than once on our expeditions. Their nicknames were Scissors; RedRag; Skully. If EzRa’s broadcast sounded they would snap to as utterly as any other Ariekei. But other times they did their best with us: a cadre was emerging among the Hosts who were, perhaps, our counterparts; trying, from their side, to keep things going. Harder for them, given that they were afflicted.

In Embassytown we had countertendencies, now, to the drive toward collapse. Schools and crèches started running again. Though no one knew yet on quite what basis our economy worked anymore, shiftparents mostly kept care of their charges, and our hospitals and other institutions continued. Out of necessity our town didn’t fuss about the lines of profit or accounting that had previously driven its production and its distribution.

I mustn’t give the impression that it was healthy. Embassytown was violently dying. When we citynauts returned it was to streets that weren’t safe. Constables escorted us. We couldn’t punish those determined to party their way to the end of the world. Besides, all of us sometimes went to their convivials. (I wondered if I’d meet Scile at any: I never did.) The curfew was unforgiving, though. Constables even left some dead, their bodies censored by pixellation on our news channels. There were fights in Embassytown, and assaults, and murders. There were suicides.

There are fashions in suicide, and some of ours were dramatic and melancholy. More than one person took what was known as the Oates Road, strapping on a mask to breathe and simply walking out of Embassytown, and on, out of sight and into the city; even, some stories had it, out beyond it; to let what would, happen. But the most common choice for those oppressed to death by the new times was hanging. According to what protocols I’ve no idea, news editors decided that those mostly bloodless bodies could be shown without digital disguise. We grew used to shots of dangling dead.

The news didn’t report the suicides of Ambassadors.

MagDa showed me footage of the bodies of Hen and Ry, lying entangled on their bed, intertwined by the spasms caused by poison.

“Where are ShelBy?” I said. ShelBy and HenRy had been together.

“Gone,” MagDa said.

“They’ll turn up,” Mag said. Da said: “Dead.” “HenRy won’t be the last.” “They won’t be able to hide this sort of thing much longer.” “In fact, given the population size …” “… the rate’s higher than average.” “We’re killing ourselves more than others.”

“Well,” I said. All business. “I suppose it’s no wonder.”

“No, it’s not, is it?” MagDa said. “It really isn’t.” “Is it any wonder?”

We dragooned some of Embassytown’s transient machines, uploading what ’ware we could to make them less stupid. Still they were unfit for all but basic tasks.

Ehrsul would still not answer my buzzes, or, I learned, anyone’s. I realised how many days it was since I’d seen her, was ashamed and abruptly fearful. I went to her apartment. Alone: I wasn’t the only one from the new Staff who knew her, but if any of the worst outcomes I suddenly pictured were true, I could only bear to find out, to find her, on my own.

But she opened her door to my knocking almost immediately. “Ehrsul?” I said. “Ehrsul?”

She greeted me with her usual sardonic humour, as if her name hadn’t been a question. I could not understand. She asked me how I’d been, said something about her work. I let her blather awhile, getting me a drink. When I asked her what she’d been doing, where she’d been, why she hadn’t responded to my messages, she ignored me.

“What’s going on?” I said. I demanded to know what she made of our catastrophe. I asked, and her avatar-face simply froze, flickered, and came back, and she continued her meaningless tasks and directionless wit. She said nothing to my question at all.

“Come with me,” I said. I asked her to join MagDa and me. I asked her to come with me into the city. But whenever I mooted anything that would mean her leaving her room, the same stuttering fugue occurred. She would skip a moment, then continue as if I’d said nothing, and talk about something outdated or irrelevant.

“It’s either a fuckup of some kind or she’s doing it deliberately,” a harried Embassy ’waregener told me later, when I described it to her. You think? I was about to respond, but she clarified: it might be an autom equivalent of a child singing I can’t hear you, with fingers in its ears.

When I left Ehrsul’s, I saw a letter in front of her door, opened and discarded. She didn’t acknowledge it, even as I bent very slowly to pick it up, right in front of her, looking at her the whole time.

Dear Ehrsul, it read. I’m worried about you. Of course what’s going on’s got us all terrified, but I’m concerned … and so on. Ehrsul waited while I read. What must my expression have been? I was holding my breath, certainly. Her avatar stuttered in and out of focus until I was done.

I didn’t recognise the name at the letter’s end. I saw from the way it fluttered, minutely, when I bent to put it back on the floor, that my fingers were shaking. How many best friends had she collected? Maybe I was her uptown version, linked to Staff. Perhaps each of us had a niche. Perhaps all of us had been afraid for her.

Thinking about her made me think also of CalVin, of whatever pointless actions they were performing, and of Scile, from whom I had still heard nothing. I buzzed Bren, repeatedly, but to my infuriation and concern he didn’t answer. I went back to his house but no one came to the door.

I don’t think I’d understood what Ra dealt with until I was on Ez duty. We could of course have simply held a gun to Ez’s head, but when we threatened too hard, he threatened us back, and his behaviour was so unpredictable we had to take seriously the possibility that he’d refuse to speak, and damn us all, out of spite. So instead we chaperoned him everywhere, at once jailers, companions and foils. That way when it was time for him to perform, he could make our lives hard, and we could let him kick us around, until, sulkily, he acquiesced.

Security was always in at least twos. I asked to join Simmon. When I met him he gripped my right hand in greeting with his left. I stared. The right arm he’d worn for years, an Ariekene biorigged contrivance of imprecise colour and texture but exactly mimicking Terre morphology, was gone. The sleeve of his jacket was neatly pinned.

“It was addicted,” he said. “When I was charging it it must’ve …” He had used a zelle, like the Hosts and their city. “It was sort of spasming. It tried to grow ears,” he said. “I cut it off. It was still trying to listen, even lying there on the floor.”

Ez was in EzRa’s Embassy chambers. He was drunk and wheedling, excoriating Ra for cowardice and conspiracy, calling MagDa filthy names. Nasty but no nastier than many arguments I’d heard. Ra was what surprised me. He stood differently than I’d seen him do before. He whom we often mocked for his taciturnity spat back epithets.

“Make sure he’s ready to speak when he gets back,” Ra said to us. Ez gesticulated an obscenity at him.

“Can I at least go to a party? Or will you bastards try to keep me even from that?” Ez moaned as we followed him to the venue in the Embassy’s lower floors. We stood watch, policed the drink he took, though we’d never seen excess seem to alter his abilities to speak Language. We watched him fuck and argue. The glints on his link puttered frantically, hunting for and not finding its pair, striving to boost a connection Ez was avoiding.

I could say it was depressing, that party, like a walk through purgatory, we at the end of the world rutting into oblivion and drugging ourselves idiot to autogenerated rhythms and a hammer of lights through smoke. Perhaps to those participating it was joyful. It didn’t hold Ez’s interest. I was as impassive as a soldier.

Ez took us to what had been an office equipment warehouse in the middle floors of the Embassy and was now an ersatz bar. He drank until I intervened, which made him delighted because then he could denounce me. The only people in this peculiar thrown-together place were ex-Staff and one or two Ambassadors. They showed no concern that he was risking our world with every glass.

“Your friends,” I whispered, and shook my head. He met my eyes quite unmoved by the disgust.

Embassytowners had taken over the lower floors of the Embassy, looking for safety. Those levels had become back-alleys. Men and women, nurseries and shiftparents reconfigured cupboards and spilled out of meeting rooms, turning architecture inside out. We went walking through these night streets made of corridors, where lights not broken had been reprogrammed into diurnal rhythms and house-numbers were chalked on inside doors by which people leaned and talked while children played games past their bedtime. Embassytown had come inside.

Sotted and maudlin, Ez began to badmouth Ra. “That lanky shit,” he muttered as we followed him through semiautonomous zones policed by their own incompetent constables. “Coattailing me, then coming the big I-am.” Ra was the only person in Embassytown who shared Ez’s colloquialisms and accent. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Easy for him to play the nice boy when, with … he can …” Cheap lamps flickered above us, new stars. “I shouldn’t …” Ez said. “I’m tired, and I want to stop this … and I want Ra to leave me alone.”

I said, “Ez, I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Please stop calling me that! Fucking stupid, stupid … It’s …”

I knew his former name. He was the man who had been Joel Rukowsi. I looked at him in the rubbish-specked hall. I wouldn’t call him Rukowsi, or Joel, and when I repeated his name Ez he slumped and accepted it.

Simmon and I rescued him from the fights he provoked. When it was time eventually for him and Ra to perform their dawn chorus, the first speech of the day, he insulted us as we led him back up through the changed building, through new fiefdoms, embryonic slums, where new ways of living were incubating. At the chamber I reached for the door, and Ez halted me with a touch and without speaking asked me for a moment. That was the only time that night I felt anything from him other than scorn. He closed his eyes. He sighed and his face went back to drunk and ornery.

“Come on then, you bastard,” he shouted, and shoved open the door. Ra and MagDa were waiting. They disentangled while Ez mocked them.

We watched EzRa fight. When Ez made some prurient cruel comment about MagDa, Ra shouted at him.

“What do you think you are?” Ez laughed back. “What do you think this is? ‘You leave her out of this!’? Are you serious?” Even I had to bite back a bit of laughter at that unexpected imitation, and Ra seemed a little shamefaced.

“Here,” said Ez later, as sound engineers and bioriggers prepared him for broadcast. Ra read the paper Ez handed him.

“Not going to go over that stuff from yesterday?” Ra said. His voice was suddenly and surprisingly neutral.

“No,” said Ez. “I want to keep on. I think I left it at a good moment, let’s keep things going.” They don’t care! I wanted to shout. You could describe the fucking carpet, the effect would be the same.

Ra asked questions about cadence and timing, wrote notes in the margin. Ez had no copy: he’d memorised what he wanted to say. When they spoke I wasn’t looking at them but over the city, and it twitched as the first hit of Language came, as EzRa continued with their stories of Ez’s youth.

13

Cynically, who were we? Not many, a gathering of no ones, floakers, dissident Staff, a handful of precious Ambassadors. But our numbers were growing, and our edicts weren’t completely ignored. Embassytowners had begun to do as we suggested, asked, or ordered.

We—MagDa above all—worked hard at our few Ariekei contacts. We worked hard full stop, too hard for me to feel just then whatever it was I ultimately probably would, from Ez’s abuse, from reading Ehrsul’s letter. MagDa even persuaded some of the most contained and coherent Ariekei into the corridors of the Embassy, not simply on eager pilgrimage to EzRa, but on new business. She might reward them with a snip of unheard recording of EzRa, one of our rare stolen buggings.

“Some of them know this is a problem,” said Mag. “The Ariekei. You can tell.”

“Some of them,” said Da. “… there’s some kind of debate, some kind of …” “Some of them want to be cured.”

Like fucking fungus, rumours spread. Our cams still gusted through the city. Some were intercepted by the antibodies the houses secreted, which came up like segmented predators. But when their investigations left them satisfied that the cams were no threat, they left them unmolested. The footage taught us more about our Hosts’ city than we had ever known: too late. And every little half-seen movement, everything we saw out there the what-and-where of which we couldn’t identify or clarify, gave traction to stories about missing secrets, fifth columns, Staff self-exiled, old grudges.

In the farmlands, huge flocks of biorigging spawned in irregular harvests. Foods and tech came from those stretches by biotic ways. Addiction was chemical: there was a slow stream of it from the city to the kraals and the rural Ariekei. They began to neglect their charges and come to the city, for the sound they suddenly needed without ever having heard. Their deserted manors grew sick, wheezing and hungry. Herds of rigged equipment, medical tech and building tools, girdered and rhino-sized spinners of protein and polymer foundations, went feral.

When their shepherds reached the city there was no one to meet them. The country Ariekei saw their worst-afflicted compatriots lying by speakers and starving to death, waiting for the next sentence. Their bodies lay unhonoured. If the buildings around them were still healthy enough their dog-sized animalculae would break the corpses down: if not, the slower processes of internal rot would smear them gradually into the road.

Fights were common. Withdrawal and Ariekene need meant aggression. The afflicted would tear into things on sudden searches for EzRa’s Language. A less affected Ariekes, usually from the country, might frill its fanwing in formal pugnacity, but the more addicted had no time for traditional displays and would simply hurl themselves hooves and giftwings at their startled opponents. Once I saw footage of EzRa’s broadcast start in the middle of such a battle. The combatants slumped against each other immediately and coiled together as if in affection, still bleeding their blood.

“Things are getting worse again,” Da said. We were going to infect the entire planet.

“That’s not the only thing we have to contend with.” It was Bren.

He stood in the doorway. A suspiciously perfect pose, all framed. “Hello Avice Benner Cho,” he said.

I rose. I shook my head at him. “You prodigal bastard,” I said.

“Prodigal?” he said.

“Where have you been?”

“Prodigal extravagant?” he said. “Or penitent?” A little cautiously, he smiled at me. I didn’t quite smile at him for a minute, but then, fuck it, yes I did.

“How did you get in here?” someone said, so newly promoted by circumstance that they added “Who are you?” to hisses of embarrassment. Ra shook Bren’s hand and tried to welcome him. Bren waved him away.

“It’s not just these Ariekene refugees we have to contend with,” Bren said. “Though they’ll certainly complicate matters.” He spoke with monotone authority. “There are other things.”

Of course he couldn’t speak Language since his doppel had died, but there were some Ariekei—you might sentimentally and misleadingly call them old friends—that came to his house and told him things.

“Do you think none of them want this to change?” Bren said.

“No, we know,” Mag said, but he continued.

“You think there are no Hosts who are horrified? They’re thinking through a fug, true, but some of them are still thinking. You know what they call EzRa? The god-drug.”

After a silence I said carefully, “That is a kenning.”

“No,” Bren said. He glanced around the room, gauging who knew that old term for the compound trope. “It’s not like a bone-house, Avice.” He thumped his chest, his bone-house. “It’s more straightforward. It’s just truth.”

“Huh,” someone said shakily, “that’s religion for you …”

“No it is not,” Bren said. “Gods are gods and drugs are drugs but here, here, there’s a city not only of the addicted but of … a sort of faithful.”

“They don’t have gods,” I said. “How …?”

He interrupted me. “They’ve known about them ever since we got here and told them what they are and what they do. They couldn’t talk about voidcraft or trousers either, before we arrived, but they find ways now. And there are some Hosts who’ll do anything to stop this. That might not be much yet, maybe, until they can get themselves free enough to try to free themselves more. But if they do, well. They’ll end it however they can. You should think of all the ways a few determined Ariekei might try to … liberate … afflicted compatriots.”

He joined me again, in private, that night, in my rooms. He asked me where was my friend Ehrsul and I told him that I didn’t know. That was almost all I said that night. Bren himself didn’t have much to say, but he had come, and we sat together while he said it.

I left the city. Three times.

Seeing those immigrant Ariekei from the outlands gave us ideas. There were some that hadn’t yet left their homesteads but had started to yearn for EzRa’s pronouncements. We went to them.

Our craft had ventricles through which I could put my head and look down as we flew. It exuded air in its belly-bridge, pressurised enough that the bad atmosphere couldn’t push in. I took breaths, then put my head out to watch the ground.

A kilometre below, the demesnes of the Host city. Plateaus and cultivation and simple massive rocks, fractured, their fractures filled with black weedstuff. Meadows crossed with tracks and punctuated by habitations. More grown architecture: rooms suspended by gas-sacs watched us as we flew, with simple eyes.

Leaving Embassytown and then the city felt as dramatic as entering immer. It might have been beautiful. Swaying through fields, even now during the breakdown, farms ambled hugely after their keepers if they still had them, or alone. Symbionts cleaned their pelts. The farms would birth components or biomachines in wet cauls.

Orchards of lichen were crisscrossed with the gut-pipework that spanned out from the city, still looked after in places by tenacious Host tenders. A long way off were steppes where herds of semiwild factories ran, which twice each long year Ariekene scientist-gauchos would corral. We hoped to find a few of these cowboy bioriggers left, to trade their creatures’ offspring.

There was I; Henrych, who had been a stallholder and now had joined the new committees; Sarah, with just enough knowledge of science to be useful; BenTham the Ambassador. The Ambassador were unkempt, bewildered and resentful. Unlike several of their fellows, though, they had still enough decorum to ensure that they were exactly equally dishevelled.

We landed and from the hillside came the distress call of grass, as our vehicles began to graze. In our aeoli masks we gathered equipment, made camp, called in to Embassytown, established a timetable. Checked once more over the orders and the wish list. “I don’t think this tribe exchanges many reactor pups,” I said, down the line to home. “Talk to KelSey. They’re with the wetland cultivators, aren’t they? That’s where they’ll get them, along with some incinerators.” So on. We divided hunting duties between the various crews beyond the city.

Our spancarts were skittish, their foreparts stretched in rippling caterpillar motion. We stacked them full of datchips, all soundfiles. Some were stolen, some made with Ez’s grudging consent, when this system had been formulated and mooted to them.

I was almost certainly not as calm as this telling would imply. I’d been looking down onto the surface of the country I was born in, grew up in, returned to, that was my home, and that, that view beyond Embassytown, had been impossible for me till then. So there was that, and there was what I was doing, and the stakes of it. I was looking into a season and a surface without cognates. I’d been into the out, but in homily fashion, my own planet was the most alien place I’d seen.

Things like crossbred anemones and moths froze as we passed, waved sensory limbs behind us. Our cart rutted toward settlements and animals like rags of paper flew in the hot sky. The farmstead at the end of knotted man-thick tributaries of the pipework was as restless as most architecture. A squirming tower laid young machinery in eggs. The paper-shred birds picked parasites from it. Its keepers started when they saw us, then galloped for our company. The farm lowed.

So far out, the addiction seemed weaker or different. BenTham could communicate our desires and understand theirs. They knew that we might have something they could hear, and they clamoured for that, unsatisfied by the degraded remnants of fix that back-washed down the arteries from the city whenever EzRa spoke, or what they half-heard from the nearest speakers, kilometres away, or what previous barterers had offered.

We showed our wares, voilà, like a peddler in the hills in old books. I played a datchip, and from it in Language EzRa said When my father died I was sad but there was a freedom in it too. The Hosts reared and said something. “They’ve got this one,” BenTham said. They’d played it many times, and it had no more effect: they at last heard it for its content, and they didn’t care about Ez’s father.

We offered other bits from his history, clichés of diplomacy, idle thoughts, weather reports. We gave them for free We are very happy about the increased opportunities for technical assistance, and tempted them with the first few phonemes of I broke my leg when I fell out of a tree.

“They’re asking if we have the one about unacceptable levels of wastage in the refinement industry,” Ben or Tham said. “They heard about it from neighbours.”

Husbanding carefully, we gave them enough to buy the biorigging we needed, and some expertise, some explanations. Doing so we spread the addiction, too: we knew that. We brought out pure product, EzRa speech, and these as-yet only half-affected outlanders would succumb.

I made a similar journey twice more after that first time. Soon afterward, another of our buoyant dirigible beasts didn’t return.

When at last our cams found it they reeled back to us footage and trid of it dead and strewn in burnt-out flesh and a slick of guts across the countryside. There drowned in it and shattered, all dead, were our people. Ambassador; navigator; technician; Staff.

I’d known Ambassador LeNa slightly, one of the crewmembers well. I held my mouth closed with my hands as we watched. We were all affected. We fetched back the bodies and honoured them as well as we could with new ceremonies. Our crews searched the mouldering wreckage.

“The ship wasn’t sick, I don’t think,” our investigator told us in committee. “I don’t know what happened.”

In Embassytown we did our best to stand in the way of warlordism, but we small band of ersatz organisers could only slow a degeneration toward that kind of rule. More Ambassadors were joining us, terrified into organisation, inspired by MagDa. Others of course remained useless. Two more killed themselves. Some deactivated their links.

Ez seemed … not calmer perhaps, but more broken, I thought, when I chaperoned him again. Delivering him finally to Ra, though, they argued even more viciously than before. “I can make things bad for you,” Ez kept shouting. “There are things I could say.”

When we went into the city, we had to pass the corpses of houses and Hosts. The death breakdown of biorigging designed and bred to be immortal contaminated the air with unexpected fumes. We heard more Ariekei fighting around speakers. Some of their dead died from the violence of the desperate; some, those without enough of the new sustenance they needed, just died; and in some places there were more organised brutalities, cadres exerting new kinds of control. The living grabbed what datchips we gave them: these were rewards for these new tough local organisers, in crude concert with which we were just managing to maintain a tenuous system.

One evening as we returned to Embassytown, I lagged behind my colleagues, shaking the mulch of rotting bridges from my boots. I looked back into the Ariekene city, and I saw two human women looking at me.

They were only there a second. They stood one to either side of an alley mouth, metres away, looking at me gravely, and then they were gone. I couldn’t have described them well, probably not even recognised them again, but I knew that they had had the same face.

It was only later, when things went wrong all over again and these new routines were made bullshit, that I realised I’d come to expect us to muddle through until the ship came and flew us all away.

One scheduled evening we could find neither Ez nor Ra at the time of their broadcast. Neither would answer our buzzes. That was like Ez, but it wasn’t like Ra.

Ez was in none of his preferred places. We searched the dangerous corridors of the Embassy: no one had seen him. We tried to buzz Mag or Da, who were often with Ra, but they wouldn’t answer either.

We found the four of them in MagDa’s new rooms, high in the Embassy. There were several of us, constables and new Staff like me. When we turned onto a last stretch of hallway we saw a figure huddled by the apartment door. We levelled our gun-things but she didn’t move.

It was Da. As I approached I thought she was dead. But then she looked up at us, with despair.

Into the rooms and to a dreadful scene. Still as a diorama. Mag on the bed, in the same precise pose as Da outside, the wall between them. She looked up at us too, and back at the dead man on the bed with her. It was Ra, quite ruined with blood. A handle emerged from his chest, like a lever.

Ez sat a way off, rubbing his head and face, smearing blood on himself, blubbing. “… I really didn’t, it wasn’t, oh, God, it was, look, I, I’m so, it …” he said, and so on. When he saw us, among other emotions I swear I saw shame broader than for one dead man: he knew what he’d done to all of us. My hand kept twitching as if I’d take the thing out of Ra.

Later we found out that at first the argument had been, ostensibly, about MagDa. That was the marshalling of unconvincing, rote things to express other deeper terrors and resentments. The surface specifics didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about whatever they shouted as they fumbled and implements turned deadly.

We weren’t very used to murder. It wasn’t me who closed Ra’s eyes but it was me who held Mag’s hand and led her away. There wasn’t much time to just grieve: the ramifications of the situation were obvious. I was already thinking of the tiny stock we had of EzRa prerecorded on datchip.

When I returned the others were hauling Ez away and taking Da to join her doppel. I secured the scene. I was alone for some minutes with Ra’s corpse.

“Did you have to?” I said. I think I whispered out loud. I was trying hard to keep myself together and I succeeded. “Couldn’t you have backed down?” I put my hand on Ra’s face. I looked at him and shook my head and knew that Embassytown and I and all the Embassytowners would die.

PART FIVE

NOTES

14

We hid the death for days. We were miserable with secrecy. There’d be panic when Embassytown knew. I couldn’t convince myself panic in three days’ time would be much worse than panic now: still we hid it, like a reflex.

We had only a few recordings of EzRa. Ez had been careful. Once we risked repeating a speech that the Ariekei had heard before, but the footage we saw of consternation, the fights we spurred among outraged listeners, frightened us. We didn’t try that again. We had perhaps twenty days of broadcasts. When we played them to the city we kept them as brief as we dared.

New hierarchies were asserting among the Hosts, from what we could tell. We didn’t understand them.

After the murder, MagDa equalised again, for the first time in days. They entered the committee room where we were meeting smart and unsmiling and precisely identical. I couldn’t tell if it was a good or a bad reaction. In any case it didn’t last.

They accepted some condolences. They’d lost no authority, remained our de facto leader, listening, debating, and offering their thoughts and almost-orders. Obeying MagDa, and out of some prurience, I became Ez’s keeper.

He wanted to talk. He maundered through self-justification, self-disgust, anger, regret. I’d sit in the room where he was held and listen. At first I tried to glean the specifics of what had happened. “What was it?” I asked MagDa once. They looked weary. One of them shook her head and the other said, “That’s really not the point.” This outcome had been waiting for a long time.

Plenty among us advocated simply ending Ez. I and others argued against it. MagDa took our side, which was what settled it. They calculated that an excess of mercy, ultimately, would work for them better than vengefulness. Even at that time when none of us really believed we had a future, MagDa were planning for it.

I pitied Ez, though I despised him too, of course. I felt that as shocking an act as he’d committed should change someone; that he should emerge either better or fully a monster. That he could kill someone and remain the pathetic figure he was previously shocked me. He was idiotic with resentment. He responded to all my questions with a child’s churlishness. He wanted to continue telling me his life, as he had the Hosts, with Ra, in Language. He picked up where they had left off.

He didn’t come clean about much. He didn’t tell us whatever his original task had been, that I was sure he’d had, his—and Ra’s—intended role to undermine Embassytown’s power. His motivations for this secrecy were obscure: motivations are.

I don’t know how the news of Ra’s death—that he had, I suppose, technically, become Ra—got out, but word of his death, and therefore that of EzRa, did spread. A guard; a rogue vespcam; an Ambassador; a doppel saying it to a momentary partner, just because it was something that could be said. The knowledge just seemed to well up in Embassytown. On the fourth day after Ra’s death I woke to church bells. Sects were calling their faithful. Soon, I knew, the mere knowledge that there was nothing we Staff could do wouldn’t stop the crowds from marching on us to demand we did anything. Embassytown would fall, perhaps even before the craving Ariekei came for us. In the time that was my own, for various reasons, foremost among them a sudden urgency, a sense that he might understand all this from his weird perspective, might help me or want help, I started hunting again for Scile.

After what CalVin had done with Scile’s collaboration, I’d tried to avoid finding out which other Ambassadors were complicit in ’s execution. I couldn’t face thinking about it. Cowardice or pragmatism, I don’t know. In these later days that ignorance was a relief: it was hard enough to live in Embassytown right then without relating to my new colleagues with that murder in mind. I did at last meet CalVin, at a gathering of Ambassadors, both those on MagDa’s committee and those too dissolute or afraid to be. I went straight to them. “Where is he?” I asked Vin. “Scile.” This time I didn’t mistake him for his doppel. Neither of them answered me.

Bren buzzed me. “People are being attacked. In Carib Alley.”

A corvid took constables, MagDa and me to the flashpoint in Embassytown’s outskirts. Bren was there already, on the ground, waving us down, torch in his hand: it was night. Down a small street Ariekei were clamouring outside a block. A small group of Terre were inside. They hadn’t joined the exodus from this area. “Idiots,” someone said.

The Ariekei were hurling things: rubbish, rock, glass. They each gripped the door in turn, frustrated by its mechanism. They were shouting in Language. EzRa’s voice. Where is it? “This lot are the weakest,” Bren said. “They’re too far gone to be satisfied with what we give them now.” We were increasingly parsimonious with the recorded god-drug. “They know there are Terre here, must think they’re holding EzRa’s voice, on datchip or something. Don’t look like that. This isn’t about logic. They’re desperate.”

Vespcams gathered. We watched their feeds. What do you feel, witnessing the end? In my case it wasn’t despair but disbelief and shock, endlessly. There, stepped into red mud by the hooves of the Ariekei, was a Terre body. A pulped man. I wasn’t the only one who cried out at that sight.

The cams darted closer. One was slapped from the air by an irate giftwing. Constables touched their weapons, but would we attack the Ariekei? We couldn’t retaliate. We didn’t know what that would invoke.

Officers reached the rear of the buildings, made surreptitious entrances, got the terrified inhabitants away. We watched in split visuals: them with their charges; the Hosts clamouring as they attacked the house. There was more motion. Ariekei newcomers were approaching.

“There,” said Bren. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw.

There were four or five new arrivals. I thought they were coming to join the attack on the house, but to my great shock they shoved in a wedge into the crowd of Ariekei with their giftwings whipping. They reared and slammed hooves into their fellows, shattering carapaces. The fight was fast and brutal.

Ariekene blood sprayed, and there were the calls of Hosts in pain. “Look.” I pointed. The cameras flitted and gave me another moment’s view of some of the new attackers. “Do you see?” They were without fanwings. They had only stumps, flesh rags. Bren hissed.

The traumatised human inhabitants made it to our flyer, joined us watching that new fight. The attackers killed one of the other Ariekei. Seeing it die made me think of Beehive. The Host lay there red with hoofprints in familiar gore: its attacker had slipped in what remained of the Terre man.

“So … we have Ariekene protectors, now?” I said.

“No,” Bren said. “That’s not what you just saw.”

We moved the last people from the edges of Embassytown, into blocks we could guard with constables and rapidly inducted militia. Some holdouts we forced to leave. Ariekei gathered at the ends of streets and watched their human neighbours go. We timed a broadcast of EzRa to coincide with our evacuation: the double-voice called and the Ariekei reeled and stampeded to the speakers and left us alone.

Between the ruining city and the centre of Embassytown was a deserted zone: our buildings, our houses without men and women in them, valuables taken and only the shoddy and dispensable left behind. I helped supervise the exodus. Afterwards, in the thin air at the edge of the aeoli breath, I walked through half-empty rooms.

Power was still connected. In some places screens and flats had been left on, and newscasters talked to me, describing the very removals that had left them alone, interviewing Mag and Da, who nodded sternly and insisted that this was necessary, temporarily. I sat in empty homes and watched my friends dissemble. I picked up books and trinkets and put them down again.

Ehrsul’s rooms were in this zone. I stood outside them, and after a long time I buzzed her. I rang her doorbell. It was the first time I’d tried her in a long time. She didn’t answer.

The Ariekei began to move into the emptied streets. A vanguard of their most desperate. With their pining battery-animals, and followed by slow carrion-eaters they would have bothered to kill as pests before, the Hosts searched the houses, too. They pressed with incomprehension and care at computers, their random ministrations running no-longer-relevant programs, cleaning rooms, working out finances, playing games, organising the minutiae of those missing. The Ariekei found no Language to listen to. The absence of their drug didn’t wean them of it: there was no cold turkey for them; EzRa’s speech had insinuated too deep into them for that. Instead, more of the weakest of them just began to die. Among the Terre, Ambassador SidNey committed suicide.

“Avice.” Bren buzzed me. “Can you come to my house?”

He was waiting for me. Two women were with him. They were older than I but not old. One was by the window, one by Bren’s chair. They watched me as I entered. No one spoke.

They were identical. They were doppels. I could discern no differences. They weren’t just doppels, they were equalised. I was looking at an Ambassador, an Ambassador I did not recognise. And that, I knew, wasn’t possible.

“Yes,” Bren said to me. He laughed minutely at my face. “I need to talk to you,” he said. “I need you to keep quiet about something. Well, about …”

One of the women came toward me. She held out her hand.

“Avice Benner Cho,” she said.

“Obviously this is a shock,” her doppel said.

“Oh no,” I said finally. “A shock? Please.”

“Avice.” Bren said. “Avice, this is Yl.” I learnt the spelling later. It sounded like ill. “And this is Sib.”

Their faces exactly those of each other, heavy and shrewd, but they wore different clothes. Yl was in red, Sib in grey. I shook my head. They both wore little aeoli, unhooked and resting in our Embassytown air.

“I saw you.” I remembered. “Once, in …” I pointed at the city.

“Probably,” said Sib.

“I don’t remember,” said Yl.

“Avice,” Bren said. “YlSib are here to … They’re how I know what’s going on.”

YlSib—what an ugly name. I knew as he said it that they’d once been Ambassador SibYl, and that this recomposition was part of their rebellion. “YlSib live in the city,” Bren said gently. Of course they did. He’d hinted to me of such hidden. I realised he was saying my name.

“Avice. Avice.”

“Why me, Bren?” I said. I said it quietly enough that it was as if intimate, though Yl and Sib could hear me. “Why am I here? Where’s MagDa, where are the others?”

“No,” he said. He and Sib and Yl glanced at each other. “Too much bad blood. History. YlSib and that lot were on opposite sides for a long time. Some things don’t change. But you’re different. And I need your help.”

I was staring into something opened up. Fractures, renegades, guerrilla Ambassadors, unquiet cleaved. What the hell else was out there? Who? Scile? Shiftfather Christmas? Back came stupid tales, now not so stupid. I remembered unanswered questions, I wondered who’d gone from Embassytown, who’d turned their backs on it, over years, and I wondered why.

“Embassytown’s dying,” Yl said. She gestured at the window, and Sib at the soundless wallscreen. The worst, most Language-starved Ariekei were coming. They shambled in unnatural bursts like toys. Troops of the collapsing, falling apart variously, claiming our streets without intent, with only oratees’ despair, but killing as they came, us and each other. We could no longer walk the outermost of our streets: there were too many attacks, too much Ariekene rage.

Cams showed those in their dotage instar wandering with pendulous food-bellies, some stumbling by their random ways into Embassytown. No Ariekei tended them. It was shocking. There were rumours that in periods between EzRa-word highs some Ariekei were eating these unstruggling elders, as evolution intended but their culture had abjured.

Even as things fell apart I was desperate to ask YlSib where they’d been, what had happened, what they’d done since they absconded, years ago. They’d lived so close, maybe in some biorigged dwelling that sweated air at them inside. Did they consult? Had they worked for the Ariekei? Were they independent? Trading in information, go-betweens in informal economies of which I’d never known a thing? There was no way, I thought, such a hinterland could have been sustained without the patronage of some in Embassytown.

“You said they weren’t helping us,” I said. “Those mad Ariekei that came and attacked the others.”

Bren said, “They weren’t.”

YlSib said, “Factions are emerging.” “Some Ariekei can’t even think anymore.” “They’re dying.” “Those are the ones tearing up the outskirts.” “Then there are some trying to keep some kind of order. Live in new ways.” “Manage their addiction.” “They’re trying all kinds of methods. Desperate stuff.” “Repeating phrases they’ve heard EzRa say, to see if they can give each other fixes.” “Trying to take control of neighbourhoods.” “Trying to ration out the broadcasts.” “Organise different listening shifts for different groups, to keep things more …” “… organised.” “And then there are dissidents who want to change everything.”

“We have sects,” Bren said. “So do they, now. Not ones that worship a god, though. Ones that hate it.”

“They know the world’s ending,” said YlSib. “And some of them want to bring in a new one.” “They despise the other Ariekei.” “That’s what you saw.” “Their word for the addicts was …” They said a word together, in Language. “They used to call them that,” Sib or Yl said, “although they can’t anymore.” “It means ‘weak.’ ” “ ‘Sick.’ ” “It means ‘languid.’ ” “Lotus-eaters.” “They’re going to start a new order.”

“How …?” I remembered the stubbed and ruined fanwings. They can’t call them that anymore, because they can’t hear, or speak, they’ve no Language. “Oh, I …” I said. “Oh, God. They did it to themselves.”

“To escape temptation,” Bren said. “It’s a vicious cure but it’s a cure. Without hearing, their bodies stop needing the drug. And now, the only thing they hate worse than their afflicted brethren is the affliction.”

“Or, to put it another way, us,” said YlSib.

“If they’d seen you …” “… they’d have killed you faster than they did their own.”

“There’s not many of them,” Bren said. “Yet. But without EzRa to speak, without the drug, they’re the only Ariekei with a plan.”

“The only Ariekei,” Sib said. “We’ve got one too, though.” “We have,” said Yl, “a plan.”

15

In the out, I’d learnt that our Embassy isn’t a huge building. In countries on many planets I’d seen much larger: taller, aided by gravity-cranes; more sprawling. But it was large enough. I was only slightly surprised to discover that there were whole corridors, whole floors that by convoluted design I’d not only never been into but had never even suspected were there.

“You know what to do,” YlSib had said to us. “You need a replacement.” “Open the damn infirmary.”

That was the basis of their idea, the plan that Bren relayed to MagDa’s committee, as if it were his own. I wasn’t clear on why he’d introduced me to YlSib, but he was right to trust me. Close to the top of the Embassy, in a set of infolding rooms and halls, was the separated-off zone. I followed those who knew the way.

The Ambassadors and Staff of the committee looked horrified at Bren’s suggestion. He insisted, with references incomprehensible to those of the committee ignorant of the infirmary he mentioned. I pretended to be one of them.

“There could be others in there we can use,” Bren said.

“And how are we supposed to know?” said Da.

“Well, that’s a difficulty,” he’d said. “We’re going to have to have a test subject.”

Only streets away, the anarchy of desperate Ariekei grew worse, and more of our houses fell. Embassytowners still foolishly near the city would turn corners into those ravenous things, who rushed at them and in Language begged them to speak, to sound like EzRa sounded. When they didn’t, the Ariekei took hold of them and opened them up. Perhaps in rage, perhaps in some hope that the wanted sound would emerge from the holes they made.

I couldn’t believe what we were planning. We’d gone by foot into the city, in a snatch squad. Smoke and birds circled above us. Micropolitics were everything in Embassytown by then, groups of men and women enforcing their wills in territories of two or three streets, armed with wrenches, or pistols or pistol-beasts crudely rigged, that they shouldn’t have had to use, that clenched them too tight, drew blood from the weapon hand.

“Where’s EzRa then, you fuckers?” they shouted when they saw us. “Going to fix everything, are you?” Some of those posses shouted that they would attack the Hosts. If they did they might take down one or two of the weakest, but against those aggressive self-mutilated they’d have no chance.

Into the ring of Embassytown we had lost, where the Ariekei had been followed by pet weeds. They were already shaggy or crustlike over what had recently been our architecture. The air here was tainted by theirs.

We kept our weapons up. Ariekei saw us, and now it was they who shouted, came forward, ran away. EzRa, EzRa, the voice, where is the voice?

“Don’t kill unless you really have to,” said Da. We found a lone Ariekes, turning, pining for words.

Come with us, MagDa said.

EzRa, the Ariekes said.

Come with us, MagDa said, and you will hear EzRa.

We buzzed a corvid. It was antique, metal and silicon and polymers: entirely Terretech. We were chary of using our more sophisticated machines now: they were built with a compromise of our traditions and local biorigging, and as addiction spread, they might be tainted. For all we knew they might gush that need if we flew them, in their exhaust, perhaps in the tone of their drone.

The Ariekes who came with us was called . It was confused and overcome by need for the god-drug’s voice. It was physically starving, too, though it didn’t seem to know it. We gave it food. It followed us because we made promises about EzRa. We took it with us to that infirmary. I wasn’t the only ex-commoner on the committee who hadn’t known the wing existed. By a series of counterintuitive corridor turns and staircases we arrived at a heavy door. There was even a guard. Security, in this time when all officers were needed.

“Got your message, Ambassador,” he said to MagDa. “I’m still not sure I can … I …” He looked at us. He saw the cowed Ariekes with us.

“We’re in martial times, Officer,” MagDa said. “You don’t really think …” “… that the old laws apply.” “Let us in.”

Inside, uniformed staff met us and made us welcome. Their anxiety was palpable but muted compared to everyone else’s. There was a pretend normality in those secret halls: it was the only place I’d been for weeks where rhythms didn’t seem utterly sideswiped by the crisis.

Carers went with drugs and charts in and out of rooms. I got the sense that this crew would continue with these day-to-day activities until word-starved Ariekei broke through their doors and killed them. I suppose there were other institutions in Embassytown where the dynamic of the quotidian sustained—some hospitals, perhaps some schools, perhaps houses where shiftparents most deeply loved the children. Whenever any society dies there must be heroes whose fightback is to not change.

The infirmary was infirmary and asylum and jail for failed Ambassadors. “As if it would work every time you tried to make two people into one,” Bren whispered to me, in scorn.

Ambassadors were bred in waves: we passed rooms of men and women all the same generation. First through the corridor of the middle-aged, incarcerated failures more than half a megahour old, staring at the cams and at the one-way glass that kept us invisible. I saw doppels in separated chambers, unlinked I suppose or linked loosely enough that the wall between them caused no discomfort. Looking into room after room I saw faces twice, twice, twice.

Some cells were empty and windowless and spare, some opulent with fabrics, looking out over Embassytown and the city. There were inmates secured or limited by electronic tags, even straps. Mostly the infirm, as one of the doctors who guided us called them, said nothing, but one of those buckled in constraints screamed inventive filth at us. How she knew we were passing beyond the opaque glass I don’t know. We saw her mouth move, and the doctor pressed a button that for a few seconds let us hear her. I disliked him for it a great deal.

Everything was clean. There were flowers. Wherever possible over double-rooms was the printed name of those inside, with honorific: Ambassador HerOt, Ambassador JusTin, Ambassador DagNey.

Some had simply never had the empathy they’d needed, to pretend to share a mind, had only ever been two people who looked the same, despite training, drugs, the link and coercions. Many were insane to different degrees. Even if they had facility with Language, they’d been left unstable, resentful, melancholic. Dangerous. There were those who’d been made mad through cleavage. Who hadn’t, as Bren had, been able to survive the death of a doppel. They were broken half-people.

There was a huge variety of the failed. Many more than there were Ambassadors. I was horrified at these numbers. I never knew, I told myself. We were too civilised to end them: hence this polite prison where we waited for them to die. I knew enough Terre history to assume that some of these failed must be counted so because of political refusals. I was reading every nameplate we passed, and I realised it was for names I recognised, like DalTon—those of dissidents of whom only bad citizens like me spoke. No sign.

Past an extreme section, men and women older than my shiftparents baying like animals and those talking with careful civility on coms to their carers, or to no one. “Christ,” I said, “Christ Pharotekton.”

In its withdrawal, unthinkingly defecated. It realised what it had done and said something in shame: the action was as taboo for the Hosts as for us.

I think the doctors deliberately took us a long way to our destination, a room where we could hold our auditions. So we were voyeurs on chamber after chamber. We passed walls painted in brighter colours, where screens were uploaded with playware, and God help me the aesthetics were so incongruous that it took me seconds to understand. This was where they brought Ambassador-young, some just 50 kilohours old. I didn’t look through the windows in those doors, and I’m glad I didn’t see the unfixable children.

In a large room, we asked to pay attention. One by one the doctors brought in what they thought the most likely candidates, all of them under guard.

Those who’d never mastered Language were no good to us, nor those too unstable. But some pairs held almost all their lives had been incarcerated for nothing but that there was something lacking when they spoke Language, a component we couldn’t detect. Many of them retained a startling degree of sanity. Those were the people we tried.

An aging duo stood before us, men without any easy Ambassador arrogance. Instead they seemed inadequate to the courtesy we gave them. They were named XerXes. The Ariekes entranced them: they’d seen no Hosts for years. “They could once speak Language,” a doctor told us, “then suddenly they stopped being able to. We don’t know why.”

XerXes had a polite and uninquisitive affect. “Do you remember Language, Ambassador XerXes?” Da said.

“What a question!” “What a question!” XerXes said. “We’re an Ambassador.” “We’re an Ambassador.”

“Would you greet our guest for us?”

They looked out of the window. Sectors of the city were listless and discoloured in withdrawal, overrun by wens.

“Greet them?” said XerXes. “Greet them?”

They muttered together. They prepared, lengthily, whispering, nodding. We got impatient. They spoke. Classic words, that even I knew well.

“,” they said. It’s pleasing to greet you and have you here.

The Ariekes snapped its eye-coral up. I thought, because I wanted to, that it was like the motion Ariekei made when they heard EzRa speak. peered slowly around the room.

It was just looking because there had been a new noise in the room. It might have reacted the same had I dropped a glass. It lost interest. XerXes spoke again, something like, Would you speak now to me? The Ariekes ignored them and XerXes spoke again and their voice fell apart, degraded, the Cut and Turn each saying half of a different entreaty. It wasn’t pleasant.

I don’t quite believe there was no Language in it. I think there was something, a remnant, in what the Ariekes heard. I’ve thought back to what I saw, to the way it moved, and I don’t believe in fact it was exactly as it would have been to random noise. It made no difference, wasn’t enough, but there was, I think, in XerXes and I don’t know how many others, the ghost of Language.

Ambassador XerXes were taken back to their rooms. They went tamely. One looked at us with I swear apology as he shuffled to his imprisonment.

Others: older first; younger; then, appallingly, two sets of adolescents desperate to please us. Some were equalised and dressed the same; some were not. A pair about my age, FeyRis, attempted cold defiance, but still tried desperately to speak Language when we asked them to. stared at them and recognised something, but not enough. FeyRis were the first of our candidates to curse us as they were taken—dragged—away.

I stared at MagDa. I liked them, I admired them. They’d known about this.

We met seventeen Ambassadors. Twelve sounded to me as if they were speaking Language. Nine seemed to have some kind of an effect on the Ariekes. Three times I wondered if we had found what YlSib had hoped we might, what we were looking for, to take EzRa’s place and keep Embassytown alive. But whatever they had wasn’t enough.

If EzRa’s Language was a drug, I thought, perhaps some other Ambassador’s, one day, would be a poison. We played one of the last datchips. It slumped and shuddered at EzRa’s meanderings about the biggest tree Ez had ever climbed. There was nothing in the infirmary that could help us.

“You can’t replicate that,” a doctor said. “These …” She indicated the imprisoned mistakes beyond our room. “They have imperfections. That’s not what there was in EzRa. Two random people should not be able to speak Language. You won’t find anything like that. It wasn’t just unlikely that we’d find EzRa the first time: it was impossible. How do you propose to find it again?”

No wonder EzRa couldn’t survive. The universe had had to correct itself. We sat in committee. “We have to close this place,” I said.

“Not now, Avice,” MagDa said.

“It’s monstrous.”

“Not now, Christ!” “There’s not going to be anything to close …” “… or any of us to close it, if we don’t bloody think.”

So, silence. Once every minute or so, someone around the table would look as if he or she was about to say something, but none of us had anything. Someone was sniffing as if they might cry.

MagDa whispered to each other. “Get what researchers you can in here,” they said at last. “Riggers, bios, medics, linguists …” “Anyone you can think of.” “This Ariekes.” “.” They looked at each other. “Do what you have to.” “Test it.” “Take it apart.”

They waited for dissent. There was none.

“Take it apart and see if you can find out what’s happening.” “Inside. In its bone-house.” They glanced at Bren and me. “When it hears EzRa.” “See if you can find out anything.” “Maybe we can synth it that way.”

Like that, by that leadership, we would murder a Host. Not even in self-defence but calculation. Embassytown became something new. I was in awe of Mag and Da for their bravery. It was a dreadful act. MagDa had known it had to come from them.

I don’t think any of us thought we’d discover in the Ariekes’s innards any secrets to its addiction, but we’d try. And, too, we were all going to die soon, and it was time for new paradigms, and MagDa gave us one. They took it on themselves to tell us what it meant to be at war. They gave us a dirty hope. It was one of the most selfless things I’ve ever seen.

16

The vivisection on the addict in the infirmary told us nothing.

Within days Embassytown knew that the committee had tried to stave off what was coming, to create a new EzRa, and had failed. Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

Mag and Da had us go to war. Too late, those of us not despairing put up barricades. We’d surrendered the edges of Embassytown. Now some streets in, we hauled out the contents of deserted houses, broke them up and threw them across our streets. Earthmovers cut trenches and piled up the ruins of our roads and the Ariekene earth below them into sloped revetments. We hardened them with plastone and concrete, stationed shooters to protect the remains of our town in the city, from Ariekei in need.

Buildings became gun-towers. We’d always had a few weapons, to which we added those taken from the Bremen caches, and engineers and riggers made new ordnance. We checked all our technology for biorigged components, destroyed it at any sign of addiction. We burned the tainted, squealing machines in autos-da-fé of heretic technology.

All this was too late, we knew. Ambassador EdGar hanged themselves. EdGar had been on the committee. Their suicides shocked us all over again. Ambassadors were suicide pioneers, and other Embassytowners copied them.

Men and women would suit up by the barriers at our borders, aeoli breathing into them, holding knives, clubs, guns they had made or bred. They’d trudge over our fortifications and into territory that had recently just been the street, was now badlands. They left us, swivelling at side streets, weapons out in manoeuvres copied from the forays of our constables and the Charo City-set policing dramas imported in the miabs. Sometimes, at the limits of our vision, the Ariekei would wait for them, by sickly indigenous buildings.

We didn’t try to stop these one-way explorers. I doubt they thought they would escape Embassytown’s fate by walking into bad air, into an exot city gone bad. I think they just wanted to do something. We called them the morituri. After the first few, little crowds began to come, to cheer them as they went.

The Ariekei were horrifying now. All were sick, and starving. They were thin, or strangely distended by hunger-gases; their eyes were unfamiliar colours; they jerked, or dragged limbs that didn’t behave. Their fanwings quivered. Some still tried to work with us. They strived against their addiction. They gathered at the base of the barriers, ostentatiously not attempting to breach them, to prove goodwill. They would call us. We would fetch MagDa or RanDolph or another Ambassador on the committee, and they would attempt to parley.

Sometimes the Hosts left us energy, fuel, miraculously untainted biorigging. We gave them the food or medicines they were no longer able to make. We promised them EzRa’s voice, which was all they begged for. Whatever inklings they had about how lies worked, about the nature of our promise, they showed no suspicion. They waited hopelessly. Often they dispersed only when driven away by their less-controlled siblings.

The most desperate oratees, incapable of planning, would come full tilt at the barricades, leap far and fast up them, grabbing with giftwings, shouting in Language. We repelled them. We killed them when we had to. I’ve seen Ariekei shot, blown apart by explosives, burnt by the caustic sputum of biorigging, cut with blades. When anyone killed their first Ariekes, a life of conditioned respect would break: gunners would weep. The second time not.

Animals infiltrated the lost streets. Altbrocks, foxes, monkeys moving curiously down wheel-ruts. Truncators climbed drainpipes and worried at loosening windows. Once in a while some depressive guard would shoot one and the beasts would scatter, but it quickly became bad luck to kill a Terre beast. It became instead a sport to take out the fluttering, tottering, strangely walking Ariekene animals that also came. No one was sure whether truncs, neither Terre nor indigene, were targets or not, and they were left alone.

We avoided thinking about our inadequate stocks of food, of energy, of the stuff we needed. A narrative went up with our walls of torn-up rubbish, of last stands and resistance, the onslaught of hordes. It helped. In the evenings, people gathered in the little neighbourhoods left to us. I was surprised at what gave us comfort. Artists plumbed our archives, digital archaeology, back millions of hours, to the antediasporan age. They pulled up corroded ancient fictions to screen.

“These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,” one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly sick figures. Colour came back, and protagonists were in an edifice full of products, and sicker enemies than before relentlessly came for them. We read the story as ours, of course.

We knew the Ariekei would breach our defences. They entered the houses that edged our zone, found their ways to rear and side doors, large windows, to holes. Some came out of the front doors into our streets and tore apart what they found. Those with remnants of memory tried to get to the Embassy. They came at night. They were like monsters in the dark, like figures from children’s books.

There were other dangers: there were human bandits. A rumour circulated that one group of criminals included Kedis and Shur’asi, as well as Terre. There was no evidence. Still, when, by what was certainly human action, a Shur’asi was found dead by our main barricade, the excuse was whispered that it had been part of that predatory gang. They only died by violence or mishap, and for that race the death—every Shur’asi death—was an abomination as epic as the Fall.

Not all the Ariekene corpses we cleared were killed by us, nor by the random brutality of other afflicted Hosts. Some were destroyed with what seemed a more deliberate alien savagery.

“That’s those we saw,” Bren told me. “Without their fanwings. We’re worrying about the addicts, but we need to think about them, too.”

“Where are YlSib?” I said.

“They’re not lunatics, you know,” he said. “There are ways of being in the city. Yl, Sib … and others. You know ambassading doesn’t always take.”

“That place has to close, Bren. Christ. Those people can’t be kept like that.”

“I know.”

I stayed the night with him, for the second time. We said even less than we had the first time, but that was really alright, as alright as it got that night. “Do you think there are languages made up of three voices?” I asked him at one point.

“It’s a big out,” he said. “Sure. And four, and five.”

I said, “And places where exots speak Anglo in ways that mess up human heads.”

We stood naked by his window, his arm over my shoulder and mine around his waist, and listened to fires, shouts, shattering.

Bren got a buzz early the next morning. He would not say from whom, to my anger. He raced us to the border. A tide of Ariekei were coming. They galloped at the barricades in a wave, an invasion organised with last gasps of sentience. I very much stress that I wish to hear the voice of EzRa please, the Ariekei shouted as they came to kill us. Is there a possibility that we could hear EzRa speak?

The guards were calling for backup. MagDa, our comrades and Staff came. With animal-guns fast-bred without ears, with rapidly machinofactured bullets, with hurled clubs and polymer crossbows firing quarrels made of reclaimed stair-rods, we staved the Hosts off. Ariekei burst, screaming their polite requests, we most sincerely ask. Zelles scuttled up our barriers and we shot them too. Kedis were with us. There were Shur’asi playing out electrified wires. I saw Simmon firing expertly with what had once been his off arm.

With only the tiniest organising the Ariekei would have taken us, but they were drugless and incompetent. They had to clamber over hillocks of their dead. Scavengers came: wild house antibodies. Our own birds tasted the air over the carnage and arced away again. My eyes were watering from acrid Ariekene innards. There was a commotion from side streets. Something was slamming into the Hosts. I shouted for Bren’s attention. It was a mass of those other, self-mutilated Ariekei. They’d come hidden among the others, a fifth column. Bren watched them without expression, while the rest of us gaped, as they dispersed our junkie attackers brutally.

“Bren was the first here,” Da said quietly to me. She looked over to where Mag spoke to him. “With you. He knew this would happen, didn’t he? How?”

I shook my head. “He knows people.”

“Do you?”

I wasn’t going to mention YlSib. Da was no fool: it wouldn’t have surprised me if she was aware of everything, including relevant names. “Come on,” I said.

“What do you know, Avice?”

I didn’t answer but I met her eye, to make sure I didn’t seem embarrassed or ashamed; so if she could tell I was holding back, she knew it was because I was trying to show respect for something. I was buzzed right then, from an ID I didn’t recognise, sound only, no trid or flat. The voice was muffled beyond recognition.

“Say that again,” I shouted. “Who is this? Say that again.”

Whoever it was did and that time I heard. I held my breath and hoped I was wrong and put it to speaker, so Mag and Da and Bren could hear. But I was right. The words came one more time, much clearer.

“CalVin’s dead.”

All we found in their rooms was the detritus of drink and of sex. There was no answer on CalVin’s buzz. We went to clubs they’d been known to visit, where to my disgust a last fervent few were still trying to blot out the end of the world. They told us CalVin hadn’t been there for days. The last time, they’d been accompanied by some uninterested man.

Down to other bars, and nothing and still nothing. I knew abruptly who had been with CalVin. We took a route to where I’d once lived, where Scile had once lived, and to which now that I’d gone, he’d returned. My key still worked. Scile’s stuff was everywhere, the flat was all his now, but he was absent. There was a note from him, to me, on the bed that had once been ours. It had been opened already. I unfolded it just enough to read the line This is to say goodbye, and stopped.

CalVin were in another room. The message had been wrong: CalVin wasn’t dead. Vin was dead. He dangled. Cal was watching him move pendulum-precise. I saw another note, on another mattress.

Cal looked at me. God knows what he saw in my face right then. “I didn’t feel it,” he said. “I didn’t know. I …” He touched his neck, his link. “It was … but we turned it on again. I should have known. I didn’t know. How could … I didn’t know.”

He sounded bestial with loss. “How?” he shouted. “Who is this?” He threw out his hands at his dead doppel, his brother, impossibly alone dead.

PART SIX

NEW KINGS

17

I held Scile’s letter for hours, and I don’t think I even knew it. It was I who ended up alone with Cal, after we’d taken him to the Embassy and given him drugs to calm him.

“Did you cut him down?” he said.

“We took care of him,” I said.

“Why are you here?” he said to me as others came and went.

“MagDa’ll be here in a minute,” I said, “they’re just organising some—”

“I didn’t mean …” He didn’t speak for seconds. “I wasn’t complaining, Avice. Vin’s gone … Why are you here with me?” Even now it was hard to acknowledge something we’d known for months, the fact of disparity. After a long time I just shrugged.

“I just didn’t know.” He spoke with wonder. “I had to … we separate sometimes now, we have to, a little bit. And … I was just … He and Scile were working, I thought, and …”

He put his own note, from his doppel, on the bed. He let me pick it up. People brought food and murmured in sympathy: CalVin had collapsed fast into selfishness, as others fought to fix the world, but Cal, and CalVin, had been central enough beforetimes to retain something. CalVin had been a leading Ambassador. Tipped to head the Embassy when JoaQuin retired. For many of the committee, their failure hadn’t been a failing but a sickness, and this was its dreadful result. I unfolded Vin’s message.

I’m not like you. Forgive me.

Tell her something from me.

Please forgive me. I’m not so strong. I’ve had enough.

Perhaps I’d expected or hoped for something like that second line.

“You see my orders,” Cal said. “So what shall I tell you?” And though he tried to make it unpleasant, I couldn’t bear the break in his voice. I looked at the other paper, Scile’s letter. “I think it was … Vin found that just before …” Cal said. I hadn’t heard MagDa and Bren come in. I realised they were there when Cal said something like, “Avice Benner Cho and I are just comparing our valedictories.”

Dearest Avice, I read.

Dearest Avice,

This is to say goodbye. I am walking. Out. I hope you can forgive me for this but I cannot stay, I will not do life here anymore—

And then I stopped, refolded the thing. Even Cal looked at me with a bit of sympathy.

“He was something, once,” I said. “I won’t indulge this.” This isn’t the man I married, I could have said, and I shocked them by laughing coldly. I pictured the visionary enthusiast I’d loved traipsing through Embassytown to find a place to end himself. I wondered when we would find him.

MagDa took the note from me. Da read it, handed it to Mag.

“You should read this,” Da said.

“I’m not going to read it,” I said.

“It explains things. His … theories …”

“Jesus fucking Christ Pharotekton, MagDa, I’m not going to read it.” I stared them down. “He took the Oates Road. He’s gone. I don’t care about his fucking theologies. I can tell you what it says. Language is the language of God. The Ariekei are angels. Scile’s their messenger, maybe. And now it’s the fall. Our lies corrupt them?”

Bren’s expression was fixed. MagDa shifted and couldn’t deny the accuracy of what I said.

“You think you’re the only one suffering?” they said. “Get over yourself and do it now, Avice.” “It was when he read this”—Mag or Da shook Scile’s letter—“that Vin did himself in, do you realise that?”

“What were they doing?” I said. “What was Vin thinking? So does Scile say what …?” I regretted asking.

“Just that he can’t bear it here anymore,” Bren said. “So he’s gone. And the reasons why. The ones you said.”

The fanwingless, self-mutilated Ariekei were murdering more of their neighbours. Bren sent vespcams searching. He followed vague directions I was sure came from YlSib and other contacts. We saw the deafened Ariekei’s raids, had camswarms enter the corpses of houses and the holes where dwellings had uprooted or sublimed. I didn’t know what we were searching for. He’d given us no idea of which direction he’d walked away to die, and I repeatedly imagined the lenses finding Scile’s body. They did not.

Where there was the new breed without their fanwings, they were bunkered down in ruins, touching each other’s skins, and pointing. If they caught our cams they destroyed them. They hunted the oratees.

There were Ariekei not so far gone as the addict-living-dead, nor so enraged as the marauders: in biorigging nurseries or their skeletons, they talked frantically in Language so fast Bren found it hard to follow. “I’ve not heard talk like that,” he said. “Things are changing.”

They were trying to live. They shouted for EzRa’s voice, and built encampments around the speakers that had been silent for days, now. They cleaned them like totems. They tended what few young survived, and protected the postsentient oldsters, also addicted, though they didn’t know it. We saw a standoff between a tiny group of these at least residually civilised, and the walking ruins, who looked at the mindless elders and made mouth-moves of hunger.

On my own I watched other things. Grubbing through bordercam footage from the night we found Vin—no one knew I was doing it—I found at last a few seconds of my husband, on his walk, out of Embassytown. One more change of shot after abrupt change, and I was watching him descending one of our lower barricades.

He glanced up at what must have been another cam, the stream from which I couldn’t find, so I never saw his expression full-on. I could tell it was Scile, though. He went, not walking slowly nor with obvious depression. He walked into the dangerous street like someone exploring, in those seconds I saw, before the signal stuttered, and there was just the street and he was gone.

During the weeks of his incarceration, Wyatt, Bremen’s redundant man, had repeatedly demanded to talk to us. At first, in a nebulous sense of due process, the committee had agreed. All he’d done was shout in panicked bullying, denounced us. We stopped coming.

Some people speculated that he had managed to send an emergency flare to Bremen: even if he had, and even if it was well programmed, it would be months before it reached them, and months again until they sent any response through the immer. Too late for us to be saved, even as mutineers.

I didn’t think much about it when MagDa first told me Wyatt was demanding to see us again. We’d been keeping him in solitary, in case of those imagined other Bremen agents in Embassytown to whom he might give orders. “He’s finally heard about Ra,” Mag said. “He knows he’s dead.” Incommunicado or not, I was surprised it had taken so long for word to get to him. “You should hear this, actually.” We watched the feed from Wyatt’s cell.

“Listen to me!” He addressed the cameras carefully. “I can stop this. Listen! How long has Ra been dead, you idiots? How can I help if you won’t tell me what’s happening? Bring me to Ez. You want to rule, you can rule, be a republic, I don’t care, I don’t give a shit. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, but if you want there to be an Embassytown at all then for God’s sake let me out of here. I can stop this. You have to take me to Ez.”

We’d seen him wheedling, and blustering, but this was new.

At our perimeter, oratees and their Ariekei enemies came at us incessantly. At the start of what looked like our last defence campaign, MagDa, Bren, the best of the committee and I went to see Wyatt.

Embassytown Jail was still staffed by a few guards who, out of helplessness as much as duty, didn’t disappear. Wyatt had refused to explain anything to us until we took him with us—under guard—to see Ez. We watched the half-Ambassador in his cell, in a dirty prison uniform. “What did you think?” Wyatt muttered. He was speaking to us while he stared at Ez. “How did you think that worked?” he said. He nodded and added, “Hello, Avice.”

“Wyatt,” I said. I didn’t know why he singled me out.

“Two strangers, two friends, just so bloody happened to get a score like that on the Stadt Empathy test? Christ Uploaded, are you stupid?” He shook his head and held up his hands in apology—he wasn’t trying to fight. “Listen. This didn’t just happen: this was done. Understand?” He pointed at Ez. “Scan that bastard’s head.”

His insinuation was that whatever he wanted to explain might change things, might give us a fingerhold of hope. If that was true, Ez must have known it too, but had done and said nothing. He’d pissed away even his own hope.

“Scan it,” Wyatt said. “You’ll see. He was made.” Made by Bremen. “My eyes only,” Wyatt said. “You might still be able to get the orders off my datspace, if you haven’t destroyed it. ‘Ez.’ Operative Joel Rukowsi. I’ll give you the passes.”

Rukowsi had had a certain facility, a predisposition for mental connection unachievable for most of us: but it was generalised, not directed. He wasn’t a twin: he had no close friends with whom he’d achieved any particular intuitive bond. They didn’t have language to give his talent an accurate name, so they misrepresented it calling it empathy. It wasn’t that he felt as others felt, though: his ability manifested in nasty parlour tricks.

He’d been an interrogator. Virtuoso—knowing when a subject would break, what to press for, what to promise, whether they were lying, how to make them stop lying. He was recruited young, and they’d honed his strange skills, with exercises, ways of focusing, and with more invasive methods, too. They’d left him different.

Some among our little group were murmuring, interrupting Wyatt. I clicked my fingers to shut them up. “What?” I said. I waved my hand at Wyatt, Go on. “They made him … what …? A mind reader?” Ez sat beyond our sound with his head down still. I wished the guards would hit him.

“Of course not,” Wyatt said. “Telepathy’s impossible. But with the right drugs, and implants and receivers, you can get brains into a certain phase. Enough. With a sensitive like him—” I sneered at that and Wyatt waited. “You know what I mean. There’s not many of them, but someone like him, when they’ve worked on him, and get him to train with someone else with the right hardware plugged in …” He tapped his head. “ ‘Ez’ there can make himself read like that person.” He waved his hand sine-wave style. “Same output. It’s related to linktech but it’s much stronger, works on heads bugger-all like each other, so long as one of them’s … Well, a quote sensitive unquote.

“At first they were thinking about totally other stuff, undercovers, for id-readers, get agents out of scans—mimic brainwaves and whatnot. Then something occurred to them. You know,” he continued slowly, “supposedly they once tried growing their own doppels? Back in Charo City? When the colony started.” He shook his head. “Didn’t go so well. Story goes they sink years into it, without any Ariekei to listen to to keep the skills up, with no sense of Embassytown on the ground—miabs being even less frequent then—and end up with … well, pairs of people who are dysfunctional in Bremen.” He indicated twoness with his hands. “And everywhere. Hardly reliable.

“But then here’s Rukowsi. The thinking was it might be a way to solve an old problem.”

The mystery of what it was the Hosts discerned in our Ambassadors’ voices remained unsolved: all that Charo City had ascertained was that after implants, augmens, chemicals and hundreds of hours of training, Joel Rukowsi and his fellow agent, linguist Coley Wren, codename Ra, had been able to score astonishingly on the Stadt scale.

No one had known whether it would sound like Language to the Ariekei—but Stadt was the only test anyone had for that, and the operatives looked, at least, to have passed. If in fact it hadn’t worked, if it had failed in the ways the paymasters had imagined it might possibly fail, if EzRa had spoken and elicited polite incomprehension, then nothing would have been lost. Two career agents would have a long and dull assignment, until the next Bremen-bound ship. But what if they succeeded?

“None of you lot are fools,” Wyatt said. “Why would you think we are? You think we didn’t get all your provocations, your fake meetings, your secret agendas, your disobedience, your tax-skimming, your doctoring of biorigging, keeping the best, or making it so no one but Embassytowners can make it work? You think that’s been invisible? For Christ’s sake, we’ve known for hundreds of thousands of hours that you’ve been building to independence.”

The silence after he said that would have meant a declaration of war, shortly before. In these new times it was only a silence. What he said felt not like a revelation but like something impolite. Wyatt rubbed his eyes.

“It’s just history,” he said. “It’s adolescence. All colonies do it. We can set our fucking clocks by you. This is my fifth stationing. Before this, I was in Chao Polis, on Dracosi, on Berit Blue. Does that mean anything to you? Christ, do you people not read? Don’t you upload the dat that comes in the miabs? I’m a specialist. They send me in where outposts are spoiling for a fight.”

“You quash secession,” said Bren.

“God, no,” Wyatt said. “You may be the mysterious old man here, but I’m from the out, and you can’t hide your ignorance from me. Berit Blue did secede, with only the tiniest war.” He held thumb and forefinger minutely apart to show how small the war had been. “Dracosi’s independence was totally peaceful. Chao Polis is midway through thrashing out a plan with us for regional autonomy. How crude do you think we are, Bren? They are free … and they’re ours.” He let that sit.

“But there are exceptions. You’re too far from Bremen, too hard to reach, for easy management. And you’re not ready. You weren’t going to be getting independence soon. It’s the fault of Language: that’s what’s confused you. You think you’re aristocracy. You thought, I should say. And that this colony was your estate. And you had a kind of point: unlike every other aristocracy I’ve ever seen you really are indispensable. Were. So you’ve been choosing your successors since forever. Congratulations: you invented hereditary power.

“But every one of you, every Ambassador and every vizier, every member of Staff in Embassytown, is a Bremen employee. ‘Ambassadors’: get it? Who do you think you speak for? We can hire, and we can fire. And we can replace.”

EzRa had been a test. An operation to strip our Ambassadors of power and hobble self-government. Their success would have changed everything. In two, three ship-shifts, the social system of this outpost would have been overthrown. If those other than our Ambassadors could speak Language, apparatchiks, career diplomats and loyalists could be sent to Embassytown for a few local years, and soon we’d rely on Bremen for survival. Our Ambassadors would die slowly half by half, doppel by doppel, and be mourned but not replaced. The crèche would close. The infirmary would empty as death took the failed, and there would be no others.

It would have been a bloodless, elegant, slow assertion of Bremen control. How could we have asked for independence when our contact with the Hosts who sustained us relied on Bremen staff? All Embassytown had had was its monopoly on Language, and with EzRa, Bremen had tried to break that.

A world-destroying mistake. Not a stupid one: only the very worst luck. A quirk of psyche and phonetics. It made sense that they would try. It would have been an elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counterrevolution through language pedagogy and bureaucracy.

“Biorigging’s … good,” MagDa said. “It’s invaluable.” “And, minerals and stuff from here’s useful, too. And a few other things.” “But still.” “Come on.” “Why all this?” We’re a backwater, they were saying. There was no false pride or denial. Most of us had wondered at some time why Embassytown wasn’t just allowed to die.

“I’d have thought it would make sense to some of you,” Wyatt said. “That you’d realise exactly what’s going on.” And he looked up, straight at me.

I stood and folded my arms. I looked down my face at him. Everyone turned their gaze to me. At last I said, “Immer.”

I’d been to towns in hollowed rocks and a planet threaded with linear cities like a filigree net, to dry places with unbreathable air, ports, and places about which I could say nothing. Some were independent. Many belonged, free or not, to Bremen. “They never let a colony collapse,” I said. We’d all heard it. “Never.” No matter if the cost of transportation outweighed the prices of trinkets and expertise shipped back, they wouldn’t let this town go, so long as we were theirs.

My companions were nodding slowly. Wyatt was not.

“Jesus, Avice,” he said. “What do you sound like? ‘It is a foundation of our government …’ ” There was a strange glee in him, a functionary’s dissidence, giving the lie to lines he’d spoken many times. “You know how many colonies have been cut off? You’ve seen the charts, the gravestone symbols in the immer.” I knew the stories of planets studded with human and human/exot ruins, where high-rises sank into alien muck. Found landscapes deserted by design, failure, and in one or two instances, mystery. They were an immerser cliché. I felt reproached by all that empty architecture: that, knowing of it, I could still have repeated my government’s lines.

“If it were in Bremen’s interests,” Wyatt said, “we’d let you go, and send me to oversee it. We didn’t go to this effort because we ‘leave no colony behind.’” He looked at me expectantly again. Have another go.

I thought of the charts. I looked up, as if through the ceiling, at Wreck. I knew more about the immer than anyone else there, including him. I remembered conversations, the shy enthusiasms of a helmsman unaware he hinted at any secrets.

“We’re on the edge,” I said to my colleagues. “Of the immer. They’re exploring. Embassytown was going to be a way station.”

“All the biorigging and so on,” Wyatt said. “It’s nice.” He shrugged. “Nice to have. But Avice Benner Cho’s right. You’ve had more attention than a little place like this deserves.”

None of us looked at Mag or Da. We all knew now what several of us had suspected before, that their lover Ra had been an agent, had betrayed them, and us. It was no surprise he’d had an agenda, but that it was something so inimical to Embassytown shocked me. And that Ra, in the days of crisis when everything had changed, had not said. Though, I didn’t know what MagDa knew.

I missed the immer. The way the mess and mass of it gushed by ships on their way to impossibly far parts of the everyday universe, immersed in that infinitely older unplace. I imagined being an explorer on pioneering ships built for ruggedness, buffeted by currents through dangerous parts, through schools of immer-stuff sharks, repelling random or deliberate attack. I didn’t believe in the nobility of the explorer, but the thought, the project, compelled me.

“They’d have to build fuelling stations,” I said slowly. “And it’s a hard place to emerge: they’d have to put more markers in place.” Buoys that jutted half in immer, half in the quotidian void, with lights and immer-analogues of lights to guide incomers. The night over Embassytown was to have glimmered with more than just Wreck. It would have been strung with little colours. And while ships stored up on fuel, supplies, chemicals for life systems, and uploaded the newest dat and immerware, Embassytown would be where crews waited and played. “They want to make us a port town,” I said.

Wyatt said, “Last port before the dark.”

Embassytown might come to be a kilometres-wide sprawl of bordellos, drink, and all the other vices of travellers. I’d been to many such places in the out. Then we might have had our own street children, harvesting food and mutating the rubbish on town dumps. It wouldn’t be inevitable. There are ways of providing port services without the collapse of all the civic. I had been to more salubrious stopover cities. But it would have been a struggle.

To control a source of beautiful half-living technology, of curios, of precious metals in near-unique molecular configurations might have been desirable. To control the last outpost, a jumping-off to an expanding frontier, was nonnegotiable.

“What’s out there?” I said. Wyatt shook his head.

“I don’t know. You’d know better than me, immerser, and you don’t know at all. But something. There’s always something.” There was always something in the immer. “Why’s there a pharos here?” he said. “You don’t put a lighthouse where no one’s going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go. There are reasons to be careful in this quadrant, but there are reasons to come—to pass through, en route somewhere else.”

“They’ll come,” MagDa said. “Bremen.” “To see how they’re doing.” “Ez and Ra, I mean. To check on them.” They looked at each other. “We might not have so long to wait.” “As we’d thought.”

“More than five bloody days is too long, now,” someone said. “We’re at the end.”

“Yes but …”

“What if we—”

Wyatt was a clever man who had misplayed his hand, and was trying to salvage something: his life, at least. He’d told us everything, and not out of despair as it might seem, but as a gamble, a strategy. We looked at the glass that separated us from Ez. Ez raised his eyes to ours, to all of ours, as if he knew we stared.

18

Groups of Ariekei were on their rooftops, between dead buildings, roaming in armed gangs: all strategies to protect themselves from the mutilated rampagers. Ariekei dead were everywhere, and here and there the remnants of Kedis, and Shur’asi, and Terre, dragged by Ariekene murderers for reasons beyond our reason. Packs of zelles wandered, hungry for food and EzRa’s speech, deserted by their erstwhile owners and gone incompetently feral.

It wasn’t a city anymore, it was a collection of broken places separated by war without politics or acquisition, so not war at all really but something more pathological. In each holdout, a few Ariekei tried to be the things they remembered. But they could concentrate only for hours at a time, before the equivalents of delirium tremens overtook them. Their companions would whisper words they’d heard EzRa say to whichever of their company was succumbing, trying to imitate the Ambassador’s timbre. They were just words, just clauses. Sometimes those convulsing would return to half-mindfulness: enough to remember that something needed rebuilding.

Between those remnant settlements were the truly mindless that didn’t even know that they shook when they did, and only hunted for food and for the voice of EzRa, and were hunted by each other. The self-mutilated, though, were suddenly rarer. I wondered if they were dying.

In places we had to haul our barriers back, abandon sections of Embassytown to the oratees. At the same time, there was an unexpected exodus of Hosts—we still called them that, sometimes, in unpleasant humour—from the city. Ariekei in small but growing numbers found the mouths and orifices where industrial guts linked the city to the meadows of biorigging and wild country. They followed them out.

“Do they think they’ll find EzRa out there?” We didn’t know where they were going, or why. I thought perhaps they simply couldn’t bear to live anymore in a slaughterhouse of architecture, amid what had been their compatriots. Perhaps their need for quiet deaths was stronger than their need for EzRa’s voice. I tried not to experience too much relief, or even hope, at that notion, at the possibility that more would leave; but, cautiously, I felt some.

We exhumed Ra. I didn’t see it.

We thanked Christ that he’d not been cremated or rendered biomass. It was MagDa who’d saved his body: he’d had no faith, but his family’s listed tradition was Unitarian Shalomic, which abjured those usual local methods, and in an effort at respect MagDa had had him interred in a small graveyard for those of such heresies.

We waited like parents-to-be while doctors worked with the schematics Wyatt provided. They removed from Ra’s dead head the implant, the hidden booster of his ordinary-seeming link. It was the size of my thumb, sheathed in organics, though it was all Terretech. It made me wonder if, had the Bremeni designers used Ariekene biorigging, the implants themselves would have become infected like the Hosts, and the thing that let Ez and Ra be EzRa would have become hooked on their voice. What theology that would have been, a god self-worshipping, a drug addicted to itself.

The committee dragooned scientists from wherever they still worked: the stumps of hospitals; rogue-ministering in the streets; of course from the infirmary. We begged and forced others to start work again. Southel, our scientific overseer, organised the researches. They moved fast.

I believe Joel Rukowsi, Ez, thought himself a consummate gameplayer. He thought how broken he looked was a front, I think. We asked him why he’d said nothing about his hidden, embedded technology, why he’d have gone to his death with the rest of us rather than do something that might keep us all alive. He implied some hidden agenda but I don’t think he had an answer. He was just eaten by his own secrets.

He didn’t understand the mechanisms, could only truculently describe how it had worked for him. He looked at the insert we had dug out of Ra, warm in my hand.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said. “I just knew … how he was feeling, what to say. I don’t know if it was that thing made it easier, or what.”

The researchers had teased apart the filigrees that enmeshed it into Ra’s mind with disentangler techzymes. Its nanotendrils dangled from it like thin hair, twitched in my hand in vain search for neuro-matter. It mimicked the theta, beta, alpha, delta and other waves detected from its companion piece in Joel Rukowsi, coordinated the two feeds into impossible phase. Whatever the brain-states, the output would seem shared.

“It’s an amp, too,” Southel told us. “A stimulant. Pumps the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Emp centres.” She took the thing away and learnt it, tried to uncover what it was and did, to take it apart and build another. MagDa spent hours with her, focused her energies on the project.

“They’re up to something,” Bren said to me. “MagDa. You can see they’ve had an idea.”

Ez never said he’d help us, but we didn’t give him any choice, and his only resistance lay in sulking. He would obey us.

“Will you do it?” I said to Bren that night. I spoke quietly. He looked away. It was at these times that I felt we could speak, when he was naked and I watched the night lights of the city now made carnival with biofires glaze him through his windows, his aging athlete’s body.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m too old, too stuck. I don’t even think I could. I know there aren’t many choices. I wouldn’t be any good at it: I’d say the wrong thing the wrong way. Whoever does this needs very very much to want to live, and I don’t, enough. Don’t be offended. I’ve no death wish but nor do I have the necessary … verve.

“Yes, I know. Ez is Cut, it has to be a Turn-speaker. Well, we can always go to the Ambassadors and find someone desperate enough to cut themselves off from their doppel. That might not be so hard now. I’ll lay you money …” He laughed at that, at how silly money had become. “I’ll bet there are some new cleaved for us to pick from. And some’ll be Turn. But you know, anyway, who we’re going to choose.” He turned to me. “It has to be Cal.”

Neither of us spoke. I didn’t even look at him.

“What do we know about Ez and Ra? They weren’t doppels. But maybe what they did share was important. Hate. We’re not training a new Ambassador, we’re distilling a drug. We have to replicate every ingredient we know about. We need the Turn to hate the Cut. A voice tearing itself apart. Alright, Ez came and ruined the world. So, sure, why wouldn’t the Ambassadors hate him? Why wouldn’t I?” He smiled at me, beautifully. “But I’m tired of this place and I don’t hate Joel Rukowsi enough, Avice. We need someone who does. Cal hasn’t just lost his world, he lost his doppel. He hates Ez enough. Me, I’d be weak tea. My question is, do you think Cal knows he’ll do it, yet?”

Probably, I thought. He must know what his duty would be: to become symbiont with the man who had destroyed his history, future and brother.

Before he went into surgery the committee gathered for what we all knew was a valedictory-in-case. Cal was like some foul-tempered birthday boy. He sought me out.

“Here,” he said. He was right up in my face, and I stepped back and tried to say something neutral, but he was shoving something at me. “You should … have this,” he said. Sometimes you could hear him pause like that, waiting for Vin to finish a clause. He gave me the letter Vin had left. “You’ve read it,” he said. “You know what you meant to him. This is yours, not mine.” Sort of to punish him for various things I didn’t shrink back but actually took it.

“What the hell were you doing with Scile, all that time?” I said.

“You’re asking about this now?”

“Not back then,” I said, coldly. Folded my arms. “Not at the Festival of Lies. I know perfectly well what you did then, Cal.”

“You … have no idea …” he said slowly, “why we did what we … had to—”

“Oh Pharotekton spare me,” I interrupted in a rush. “Because I think I have in fact a pretty solid fucking idea why—if you don’t know what’s happening to Language how do you know what’ll happen to Ambassadors, huh?—but in point of fact even if that’s not your whole story I do not care. I don’t mean then, I mean now. Since all this started. Surl Tesh-echer’s long gone, but you were spending time with Scile since EzRa arrived. And everything went … What’ve you been doing? You and, and Vin?”

“Scile’s always full of plans,” he said. “We did a lot of planning. He and I. Vin … got something else out of it, I think.” He regarded me. It was when he’d read Scile’s note that Vin had taken his own life. Irrespective of what Scile was in himself, what he wanted, Vin had found a community with him—of some grief or loss or something. A fraternity of those who’d once loved me, or still did? My stomach pitched.

While Cal was under anaesthetic, Ez began to panic and insist that he wouldn’t do anything, that he wouldn’t help us, that he couldn’t, that it wouldn’t work. I heard from one of the guards how MagDa had arrived in the middle of his little meltdown. Mag had stood by the door while Da walked over to where Ez was sitting, and leaned over and punched him in the face. Her knuckles split.

She’d said “Hold him,” to the guards, and brought her bust-up fist down on him again. He’d shouted and wriggled, his head cracking side to side. Joel had stared up at Mag and Da in the utterest astonishment, bloodily whooping with pain. Mag had said to him in a quite flat and calm voice, “In fact you will speak Language with Cal. You’ll learn how, and you’ll do it fast. And you won’t disobey me or any other Staff or committee members again.”

I wasn’t there but that’s how I was told it happened.

19

The strategyless onslaughts on our barricades continued. Our new town edges smelled bad, of Ariekene death. Our bricks rubbled around Host corpses. Our biorigged weapons were hungry and dying. Our Terretech ones were failing. Within days we’d be fighting hand-to-giftwing.

It was the usual siege-stuff that would finish us: the ending of resources. No food came through the dedicated loops of colon that linked Embassytown to our subcontracted farms, now, and our stores were hardly infinite. We had no power from the Ariekene plants, and our own backups would fail.

I’d never been able to convince myself that there was no harm to it, but I couldn’t stop nostalgia then. Just then, looking down streets with angles not as we’d have built them, which terminated or twisted in ways that still seemed almost playfully alien, toying with our teleologies, there was no way I couldn’t remember when I’d stared down them in my early life and systematically populated that out-of-sight city with every kind of child’s impossibility and story. From there followed a quick run-through of everything. Learning, sex, friends, work. I’d never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn’t see how that wasn’t cowardice, but not only did I not regret the out, but nor, suddenly, did I the return. Nor even Scile. When I unhitched my attention and let it wander down out-of-reach streets—which have been clocked before as yantras for reminiscence—it wasn’t that I thought well of my husband; it was that in those moments I remembered what of him I’d loved.

I was spare with all that, rationed it. We tended our aeoli. The poor things had been relocated, their fleshly tethers cut and cauterised, with as little trauma as possible, but they were suffering. We had no Terretech that could replace them, and our air-gardeners frantically protected the biomes of them and their companion things, which shaped currents, sustained our rough air dome. They strived to keep them safe, unhearing, charged by unaddictable technologies, as protected as possible from cross-contamination, but despite all efforts we knew we might not be able to keep our breath-machines from addiction or sickness, and no Host savants would help us now.

As the aeoli wheezed, so would we, and the Ariekei would breach our defences and walk in. When they’d finished with us we would lie with the dead’s traditional lassitude, and the Ariekei would prod us and ask us forlornly to speak like EzRa. Either they would all die, then, or new generations would be born and start their culture again. They would perhaps construct rituals around our and their parents’ bones.

These were the bad dreams we were having. It was into this landscape that god-drug EzCal arrived.

I’d left Bren and MagDa and others to the task of bullying and nurturing our last hope. I’d preferred to oversee other duties, the movement of supplies and weaponry. Despite knowing that Cal was waking, that he was being reintroduced to Ez, that they were making their first attempts, that they were sitting the Stadt test, that the results were being calculated, I didn’t ask what was happening. I even avoided Bren.

Rumours spread that something was being made, that an autom had been perfected that could speak Language, that the Ambassadors and their friends were preparing a miab, would risk immer, to escape. We didn’t leak the truth because it seemed too tentative. When EzCal did emerge into our newly nightmared town, I realised another reason we had said nothing: for the performance of it. A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

I couldn’t avoid picking up information: when Cal was woken, when he was healed. Though I avoided what details I could, I knew before he and Ez emerged into the Embassy square that they would do so, and I was there ready. Everyone in Embassytown seemed to be there, in fact. There were even Kedis and Shur’asi. I saw Wyatt, flanked by security, to both guard and secure him. There were automa too, turingware struggling, so some of them expressed inappropriate bonhomie. I couldn’t see Ehrsul. It was only with my disappointment that I realised I’d been looking.

We were close enough to the borders of our shrunken town to hear the gusting of Ariekene attacks on the barriers, and the missiles and energies of repulses. Officers kept Embassytowners back from the Embassy’s entrance. It struck me that I must have chosen to cut myself off from what had been happening in the hospital so that I could experience this as nearly as possible a member of the crowd. I looked up at the other committee members, who were parting, and stepping forward was Cal, with Ez behind him.

“EzCal,” one of the official escort shouted, and Christ help me someone in the crowd took it up and it became, briefly, a chant.

Cal looked like something horrific, made worse in the moving glare of lights. His head was shaved, his scalp the palest part of his pale skin, the link on his neck shining. I think he was kept alert by some concoction of drugs: he moved in little insect bursts. His skull was crossed with dark sutures: big physical stitches, a crude technique, supposedly dictated by dwindling supplies of nanzymatic healers, but one that so exaggerated the spectacle I wondered how medically necessary it had really been. He stared into the crowd. He stared right at me, though I’m certain he didn’t see me.

Joel Rukowsi was Ez again. Physically he was unmarked, but of the two he seemed the less alive. Cal spoke to him harshly. I couldn’t hear the words. It was Ez who was the empathic, the receiver, who had to make this work.

“So I lost everything,” Cal said into the crowd at last. Amplifiers carried his voice and everyone was quiet. “I lost it all and I went down, into that lost place, and then when I realised that Embassytown needed me, I came back. When I realised it needed us …” And he paused and I didn’t breathe, but Ez stepped forward and said in a voice that was, unlike his face, strong, “… we came back.”

Applause. Ez looked down again. Cal licked his lips. Even the local birds all seemed to be in the plaza, watching.

“We came,” Cal said, “and let me show you …” and after another heart-stopping pause Ez muttered, “… what we’ll do.”

They looked at each other, and I could suddenly see an echo of what must have been hours of preparation. They watched each other’s eyes and something happened. I imagined the pulses of the implants, hot-synching them, pumping out into the universe the lie that they were the same.

Ez the Cut-speaker and Cal the Turn counted each other in and opened their mouths and spoke Language.

When we heard them, even we, humans, let out gasps.

“.”

I went away a time and now I’ve returned.

The city woke. Even its dead parts shuddered. We all bloomed like flowers, too.

Through the wires below our streets, past the barracks and barricades, at the speed of electricity under brick and tarmacked roads empty of Terre and picked through now by Ariekei suddenly still, into the kilometres of rotting architecture, the house-beasts waiting for death, up and through the speakers. From scores of loudhailers came the voice of the new god-drug, of , and the city came out of hermetic miserable withdrawal into a new high.

Thousands of eye-corals craned; fanwings that had been slack suddenly flapped rigid and strained to capture vibrations; mouths opened. Flights of collapsed chitin stairs raised in tentative display, suddenly stronger with the onrush of chemical fix that came with that new voice. I went away a time and now I’ve returned, and we heard the creak of reinflating skin, of flesh responding, metabolisms far faster than ours sucking on the junk energy it drew from the dissonance of EzCal’s Language. All the way to the horizon, the city, its zelles and its inhabitants, rose and found themselves wherever in their walking death they’d stumbled.

Ariekene towers and gas-raised dwellings woke over the edges of Embassytown, looked down at us, opened their ears and listened. The addicted city came out of its coma of need. Our guards and gunners shouted. They didn’t know what they were seeing. Their quarries, the oratees, were suddenly still and listening.

There was to be nothing more about Joel Rukowsi’s life, it was clear. This was Cal’s script, not Ez’s. In several different ways, varying the shape of the sentences so the Language wouldn’t lose its efficacy, he and Ez repeated that EzCal had come to speak. Embassytowners were crying. We knew we might live.

We would have to reestablish ways of communicating our needs to the Ariekei, and working out what we offered. Somewhere in that city now trying to rouse itself there must be those Hosts with which we had established understandings, which might now be able to take some kind of control again, with which we could deal. It wouldn’t be a healthy polity. A few in control of their addiction would rule over those not, compradors at our behest: a narcocracy of language. We’d have to be careful pushers of our product.

Bren was on the stairs, and I waved, pushed through the crowd to him. We kissed, believing we wouldn’t die. EzCal were silent. Elsewhere, out of my sight, hundreds of thousands of Ariekei stared at each other, high but coming lucid for the first time in a long time.

“Hosts!” we heard from the barriers. There were only a few minutes before they began to gather, to clear away their dead.

For one moment, simultaneously in every quarter, every Ariekes listening and their revivifying rooms stiffened again, in an aftershock of feeling. I saw it on the cam, later. It happened when, without looking at each other, according to I don’t know what impulse, Cal and Ez leaned forward and with flawless timing, spoke the staccato Cut-and-Turn Language word that meant yes.

PART SEVEN

THE LANGUAGELESS

20

I was a trader again. I went with others in corvids to the country. Business. Now in this reign of EzCal, god-drug II, we could leave again.

MayBel was our speaker on this trip. They could say that name: .

In the weeks since I’d flown out last, the landscape had raggedly changed. By the jut of rocks there were skeletons, where biorigging had come to die. The meadows were torn up by the tracks of stampeding machines, the new routes of refugees into the city in search of the god-drug voice, and later refugees out, in that exodus we still didn’t understand. The city had been depleted, by more than the numbers of dead.

We came down where there were farmlands worked, newly, differently from before. A society was starting. It wasn’t strong. The farmers were addicts again, of a new drug, but it was better than being the mindless starvelings they had been. We had no choice but to be dealers.

We went with our datchips beyond the reach of the speakers. We found Ariekei who still thought EzRa was the ruler and voice of Embassytown, and had unaccountably been silent these past days. Despite MayBel’s articulacy it wasn’t clear they understood what had changed, until with eager giftwing fingers, they played the files, and heard the voice of EzCal.

I want more of the other one, a farmer said. It tried to remember the way we used to trade, the haggling Terre had taught the Ariekei when our predecessors first arrived. Clumsily it offered us more of the medical rigging it had grown if we would give it another of EzRa’s chips. We explained that we had none. Another, though, preferred the newcomer. It indicated several of its chewing beasts, which would defecate fuel and components: it would give us more than ever before, if we would give it more of this new EzCal.

Were those Ariekei who preferred EzCal more measured? Was there a calm, a focus to them, contrasting with a febrile air to those who still hankered for EzRa? Certainly, after ecstasy and before withdrawal, the composure between the Ariekei’s necessary fixes seemed easier for us than they had been before. This EzCal version of Language left the Ariekei clearer-headed, a little more like the Hosts we had grown up with.

We tried to intervene, to shape what structures were emerging. We tried to reestablish conduits for our necessaries. I imagined Scile dead in all the landscapes I passed—in the city, huddled where his aeoli had failed; in the first downs beyond.

We overflew desolate remnants of farms, vats dedicated by old agreements to the production of our foods: nutrient-rich pabulum; crops in Terre-air bubbles; food animals and sheets of meatcloth. Fallen and falling, there were parts though that were restorable. Our crews did what they could, coaxed airglands to fill chambers, restarted traumatised birth-pens. We found local Ariekene keepers, and with snips of EzCal’s speechifying we restored them to mindfulness and gave them delight, coaxed them back to the farmsteads to help us. They cured the buildings, fixed the cityward flow of what we needed. Cells of food jostled like corpuscles on their way to Embassytown.

With those peristalses of imports, we might have more or less ignored the city, now that its inhabitants weren’t attacking us anymore. We could have just broadcast the god-drug’s announcements to its convalescing boroughs to make its inhabitants pliant. We didn’t, of course. Most of us felt concern, even responsibility, for the biopolis. Nonetheless, we weren’t expecting what turned out to be the vigorous interventions of EzCal. Really, of Cal. Cal, and with him the other half of the god-drug, didn’t merely broadcast or make careful forays into the streets, to find a new Ariekei government: EzCal paraded.

The committee could have tried to stop them. Ez was our prisoner. When sometimes he tried—always obviously—to make his own plans, to turn a situation to an advantage, he was cack-handed. At first, mostly, he did as we told him; then he did what Cal told him. Cal disturbed me: his fever of importance. What we said was he was ours, that we decided what he did, and Ez with him, and it was true for a few days, until he’d remembered the minutiae of ruling.

“No, let’s not go slowly,” he said to us after that—to me, in fact, after I’d said that the city was still dangerous, and that with the systems we’d put in place we maybe didn’t need to deal too closely with it yet. “Oh yes we do,” he said.

EzCal’s recitations were quite different from EzRa’s. Cal put a transmitter in front of the Embassy, where he could be seen when he Languaged. He would turn up early for the broadcasts and wait, arms folded or on his hips, looking at the square, and to our surprise, it wasn’t only him who did so: Ez would be there, too. He barely spoke except during these performances, in Language, and if he did, his mumbles and monosyllables made you think he was barely with you. But he never made Cal wait.

Cal wouldn’t look at Ez except as he had to. It was easy to see he hated him. He found a way, though, to make himself into this new thing, using Ez as a tool.

All you who listen to me, said. It was the third Utuday in the third monthling of October. I didn’t look at the feeds but I know what I’d have seen if I had: clutches of Ariekei throughout the city ringing the speakers and clinging to each other. I wasn’t aware I was listening to EzCal’s words until I reacted with shock to a promise I’d not known I was translating.

I will come and walk among you tomorrow, EzCal said. I swear I heard noises from the city when they did. Faintly, over the membranous walls. That reaction was a revolution of a kind. I’d never seen any Ariekes understand or pay attention to the specifics of what EzRa had said—their voice had been nothing but intoxicant. Where listeners had liked one banal or idiotic phrase over another, it was as abstract and meaningless a preference as that for a favourite colour. This was not the same. Some in the city, even tripping on EzCal’s voice, had understood the content of those words. I wished Bren had been there with me when that happened.

“What in hell are you doing?” I went and said to Cal. At first he didn’t seem to notice me. Then his expression went from bewilderment to irritation to uninterest in less than a second. He walked away, and Ez followed him, and Ez’s guards followed them both.

Like the king in a story, EzCal climbed up the barricades and down again into what had been our streets, and into a mass of hundreds of waiting Ariekei. They were motionless and silent. They moved out of EzCal’s way with little hoof-steps.

EzCal’s retinue of nervous men and women scrambled down the plastone-set rubbish and rubble behind them. No path was cleared for us; we had to weave very tentatively between the Hosts. There were plenty of us, viziers insisting that they were indispensable, I, MagDa and others from the committee after them and trying to issue orders or just watching, collating. I had a sense I couldn’t quite articulate that of course Cal, EzCal, had known that their words wouldn’t only fulfill and fuel Ariekei cravings, but would communicate specifics.

The effortlessness of it. EzRa’s audience had fugued as much at agricultural reports as at the narratives Ez had seemed or pretended to think caught them up. Now the stories Ez told had real audiences, but they weren’t his stories anymore. The Ariekei kept their fanwings flared, listening hard. Cal walked as if he and Ez would keep on to the edge of historic Embassytown and into the city. They had no aeoli, so this was pure theatre. Ez kept up with him.

Listeners, EzCal said. They were amplified by tiny point-microphones on their clothes. Cal hadn’t been looking at Ez, I’d have put money on it, but they spoke together. EzCal waited so long I might have expected the hold of their voice on the assembled to ebb. It had only been a single word, not even a clause, with the grammar that seemed particularly succulent to the Ariekei. But they waited.

Listeners, EzCal said. Do you understand me?

The Ariekei told them yes.

Raise your giftwings, EzCal said, and the Ariekei did. Shake them, they said, and again, immediately, the Ariekei did.

I’d never seen anything like this. None of the watching Terre looked anything but stunned. If Ez was excited or surprised he showed no sign of it at all. He just looked out at all these addict-obedient. Raise your giftwings to listen, EzCal said. Listen.

They said the city was ill, that it must be healed, that there was very much to do, that there were plenty of hearers in the city who were still dangerous or endangered, or both, but that things would be better now. To the Ariekei, these political platitudes, in this voice, might be revelations. They listened, and they were transported.

I didn’t see any pleasure in Cal’s expression. The grim strain of his face, the muscles clenching—it looked to me as if he had no choice but to do and be this, now. Listen, EzCal said, and the Ariekei listened harder. The walls strained. The windows sighed.

When they regrew the city the Ariekei changed it. In this rebooted version the houses segmented into smaller dwellings and were interspersed with pillars like sweating trees. Of course there were still towers, still factories and hangars for the nurturing of young and of biorigging, to process the new chemicals the Ariekei and their buildings emitted when they listened to EzCal. But the housescape we overlooked took on a more higgledy-piggledy aspect. The streets seemed steeper than they had been, and more various: the chitin gables, the conquistador-helmet curves newly intricate.

The old halls were still there, and that architecture revived enough by EzCal’s voice to fail to die, but not quite to rise. The tracts of decayed city between new village-like neighbourhoods were dangerous. The prowling grounds of animals and of Ariekei so far gone they’d never fully woken. They would crowd isolated loudhailers during announcements and gain enough from EzCal’s voice to give them aggressive need, but not enough to give them mind.

“We’ll clear them out, when we can,” Cal said. In the meantime the city was scattered fiefdoms, with each of which we tried to establish protocols. I found out something of their specifics—“that one’s run by a little coalition of the not-very dependent; that one’s too risky to go into right now; the Ariekes running that place there, around the minaret, it was a functionary before the fall”—from Bren. Bren learnt them from YlSib.

“MagDa won’t push you on it,” Bren said to me. “But …” Bren saw the expression on my face. “You can see what’s going on,” he said finally. “They’re not running things now, they’re not in a position to close the infirmary …”

“You think they would if they could?”

“I don’t know and just now I don’t care. Cal certainly won’t. You saw what happened when EzCal spoke. If MagDa needs to know anything you know, please tell them. We need them clued in. They’re smart, they must know the sort of source you’re getting information from, but they won’t ask. They have plans, I’m sure. They’ve been spending time in Southel’s lab. Have you seen them talking to her?”

It wasn’t as part of an official group, committee business, that I went back into the city when I did. I went with Bren, to meet his friends again: YlSib, that secret rogue Ambassador.

Our air-shaping was weak enough now that we had to wear aeoli within what had recently been Embassytown streets. So far as we could Bren and I were careful to avoid vespcams, though I knew if we were seen we’d only be a rumour among many. We stationed ourselves in the ruins. From a balcony in an apartment where children had lived (I trod over the debris of toys) we saw EzCal go again among crowds of Ariekei that listened and obeyed their instructions.

“Next time they’re going to head into the city,” said Sib. I hadn’t heard YlSib enter. “So …” Sib pointed out of the window at EzCal. “Language works differently with this one.”

“We should have called them OgMa, not EzCal,” Bren said. We looked at him for an explanation. “A god,” he said, “who did sort of the same thing.”

YlSib wore biorigged pistols. Bren and I had cruder weapons. YlSib moved with vastly more facility than the halting citynauts with whom I’d made earlier forays. They didn’t hesitate on the way to the edge where brickwork in ruins became biology. The air changed on our way. The way the currents went over me wasn’t like the wind in Embassytown. We were in a place full of new sounds. Small fauna claimed areas. Ariekei in the streets didn’t stop for us, though some raised eye-corals and stared. There were pools overhung by bladderwrackish polyps that dripped reactions into the liquid. I wondered if they were foundations, deliberate town-planning.

I looked down an avenue of marrowy trees to Embassytown. An Ariekes near us startled me, asked repeatedly in Language what we were doing. I raised my weapon but YlSib were speaking. I’m , they said. These are—and then they said something that wasn’t our names. They are coming with me. I’m going home. , YlSib said, and they put stress in their formulation by making it a personal. I, homegoer, was what they said, so I wondered if going home was a powerful thing to the Ariekei too.

“They know us,” said Yl. “These days some are too gone to remember, but if we meet any who can speak, we should be alright.” “Although,” Sib said, “I guess there might be new allegiances. Some of them might have …” “… reasons to not let us pass.”

In fact some Language we heard on that journey made little sense. Phrases spoken by wrecks of speakers out of nostalgia for meaning. YlSib led us finally to a shredded clearing. I gasped. There was a man waiting for us. He leaned below a column of metal that recurved over his head very like a streetlamp. He looked transplanted from an old flat image of a Terre town.

They nodded, muttered to Yl and Sib and Bren. They made sure I couldn’t hear them. The man reminded me of no one. He was nondescript and dark-skinned, in old clothes, an aeoli of a kind I didn’t recognise breathing into him. There was nothing I could have said about him. He left with YlSib and Bren came back to me.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said. “Is he cleaved?”

“No,” said Bren. He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Maybe his brother’s dead by now, but I don’t think so. They just didn’t like each other very much.” Of course I knew this counterworld of exiles existed now, of misbehaving cleaved, Staff unstaffed, bad Ambassadors; but to see its doings astounded me. How had they kept going during the days of collapse, before god-drug II?

“Do you speak to any of the similes still?” Bren said.

“Jesus,” I said. “Why? Not really. I saw Darius at a bar, ages ago. We were both embarrassed. I mean Embassytown’s too small for me not to run into them sometimes, but it’s not as if we talk.”

“Do you know what they’re doing?”

“I don’t think there’s a ‘they,’ Bren. It’s all … disbanded. After what happened. Maybe some of them still meet … But that scene was ruined ages ago. After Hasser. Can you imagine now? No one cares about them anymore, including their speakers. Language …” I laughed. “It isn’t what it used to be.”

YlSib returned, scraping decaying city-stuff off their clothes. “That’s true,” Bren said. “But it’s not true that no one cares anymore. You don’t know where we’re going: your company’s been requested.”

“What?” I had not thought that this infiltration was about me, that I was a task to be fulfilled. YlSib led me to a basement-analogue and ushered me into the biolit presence of Ariekei. “Avice Benner Cho,” YlSib said. They spoke my names perfectly simultaneously, at the same pitch, so though it was two voices it sounded to me like one.

The room smelt of Ariekei. There were several. They were making noises, speech and mutterings of thought. One approached me out of the half-dark and spoke a greeting. YlSib told me its name. I looked at its fanwing.

“Christ,” I said. “We’ve met.”

It had been a close companion of Surl Tesh-echer, , the best liar in Ariekei history. It was the Ariekes I’d once called Spanish Dancer. “Does it remember …?”

“Of course it remembers, Avice,” Bren said. “Why do you think you’re here?”

Bren and YlSib gave to the gathered Ariekei a clutch of datchips. They took them quickly, their limbs and digits betraying agitation. “Do EzCal know you’re recording them?” I said.

“I hope not,” Bren said. “You’ve seen? They’re trying to do what Ez did when he was part of EzRa—make sure we can’t build up a stock of recordings to make them redundant.”

“But you have.”

“These are just their public recitations,” he said. “They can’t stop people tapping those, and why would they? They think because it’s been said, because it’s out there, the Hosts’ve heard it, and it’s lost its thing.”

I looked one by one around the other Ariekei there. There were other patterns on other fanwings I thought I had seen before. “Some of these were in Surl Tesh-echer’s group as well,” I said. I looked at Bren. “They were its friends.”

“Yes,” Bren said.

“What they can do is lie,” Bren said. “Not that any of them’s anything like as virtuoso as Surl Tesh-echer was. It was …” He shrugged. “A harbinger. On the edge of something.”

“Your husband was right,” YlSib said. “To stop it. In his terms he was right. It was changing everything.” There was a silence. “This lot have had to carry on without it, since. It’s slow.” “They do what they can.”

Every Ariekes took a datchip, each to a different part of the room. Each in similar elegant motion draped its fanwing over it. Their membranes spread. They withdrew, hunched into sculptures, made the room a drug-house. With the volume very low, they ran the sounds. Responded instantly as I watched, trembling, judders of bio-ecstasy. I could see lights of speakers through taut fanwing skin, hear the muffled chirruping of audio: the soul of EzCal, or its spurious fabricated semblance.

“How the hell can those recordings still work?” I whispered. “They’ve already been heard.”

“Not by them,” Bren said. “They wait. Bloody willpower. They fold up their wings when they know EzCal’s going to speak. They were already doing it with EzRa. They make themselves hold out. They’re trying to go longer and longer without.”

It was hard to imagine that the shuddering figures represented a resistance to the reign of god-drug. Still. “They can take these now because they didn’t take them before,” Yl said.

One by slow one the Ariekei rose. They looked at me. A strange reminiscence. We seemed to pick up where we’d left off. Spanish Dancer came up to me: its companions circled me. They said the succession of sounds in Language that were me. I had not heard myself spoken for a long time.

They said me first as a fact. There was a girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. Then they began to deploy me as a simile. We now, Spanish Dancer said, when we take what is given in god-drug’s voice, we are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her. The others responded.

“Surl tesh-echer was more than just the best liar, you know,” Bren said. “It was sort of a vanguard. It was never just about performing lies. Why would they be so interested in you, if that was all, Avice? How do lying and similes intersect?”

What other things in this world, one of the Ariekei was saying, are like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her?

“It’s been hard,” Bren said. “They were all scattered by the war.” The war of not-enough drug. The war of Ez killed Ra. The war of the walking dead. “Now they’ve tracked each other down, they’re going to keep going. They didn’t worship Surl tesh-echer. But it was sort of a figurehead.”

“Prophet,” Yl or Sib said.

“Why can’t you tell MagDa, and even Cal …” I said, then trailed off because of course the group in this room was a conspiracy. Striving to limit the power of the god-drug. Cal would try to sabotage it. I wished I didn’t believe that. Bren nodded, watching me think.

“Yeah,” said Bren. “Now, MagDa are different. But there’s only so much they’ll risk. They want to get out, now, and they can only see one way to do it, and that’s hanging on. They won’t risk anything else. They might even scupper it.”

“Scupper what? What are you trying to do?”

“Not me,” Bren said.

“All of you. You, you,” I said to YlSib, “these Hosts. What are you plural trying to do?”

“MagDa’s way won’t work,” Bren said. “Just to stave things off. That’s why they won’t take on Cal. It’s not enough to try to keep everything going until the ship gets here. We have to change things.” While he spoke, the Ariekei moved around me like flotsam in a current, and they said the phrase I was and tried to make it into new things, to think of new things they could insist that it, I, my past, was like.

“EzCal’s not the only one we have to be careful of,” Bren said. “You have to keep this quiet.” I remembered the parting of Ariekei when Hasser had come and killed .

“You’re worried about other Ariekei,” I said.

“These speakers were dangerous before,” Bren said. “Scile was right about them, and so were their …” He shrugged and shook his head so I would know whatever phrase he used was inexact. “Ruling clique. And I don’t know where they are now, yet, but I bet EzCal have an idea. Or Cal does. They’ve done business before. Why do you think he’s so keen to get into the city?”

I’d thought Cal’s eagerness was newly visionary fervour. But back then, there in the Festival of Lies, Cal, and Pear Tree, looking at me. “Jesus Pharos.” Scile had watched too. A conspirator then, Scile would approve of EzCal now. Their priorities, like CalVin’s before them, were power and survival; Scile’s were always the city and its stasis. Those had overlapped once, but history had left Scile behind. Hence his hopeless walk.

“Cal might already have found his friends again,” Bren said. “This lot …” He indicated the room. “They were a threat once. You saw. Now …” He laughed. “Well, everything’s changed. But they might still be a threat. Different: but maybe even more. Cal might not know this group still exists. If he ever knew. But the Ariekei he worked with before do. So if he finds them, this lot here had better keep very quiet. So we have to, too.”

“How are they a threat?” I said. “I never understood. Why are they doing this? Whatever it is they’re doing.”

Bren struggled. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t know how to say.”

“You don’t know,” I said. He bobbed his head in a half-yes-half-no.

“How’s your Language, Avice?” said one of YlSib. They spoke to Spanish Dancer and it answered. I could follow some, and when I shook my head Yl or Sib would translate a few clauses.

It’s not good that we are this. We wish to be other than this. We’re like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given her because we imbibe what is given to us by EzCal. There was a long silence. We want instead to be like the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her in that we want to be … and then there was silence again, and Spanish Dancer shook its limbs.

“It tried to use your simile twice, contradictorily,” Sib said. “But it couldn’t quite manage.”

Now, Spanish Dancer went on, it’s worse. We didn’t expect this. It was a bad thing when we were made intoxicated and helpless by the god-drug’s words, lost ourselves, but now it’s different and worse. Now when the god-drug speaks we obey. Yes, it said that with modulations that meant nothing to me, but no matter how alien the Ariekene mental map, sense of self, I thought that must be truly terrible. I’d seen the crowds respond instantly to EzCal’s instructions, choiceless about it. We want to decide what to hear, how to live, what to say, what to speak, how to mean, what to obey. We want Language to put to our use.

They resented their new druggy craving and their newer inability to disobey. This conclave could hardly be unique in that. But it dovetailed with what they had always wanted to achieve: their longtime striving for lies, to make Language mean how they wanted. That older desire seemed to make them execrate their new condition even more than other conscious Ariekei.

“We promised to bring you here,” Bren said. “Said it like a Host.” He smiled at the child’s oath. “They were adamant they had to see you. I better get you back before you’re missed, then YlSib have to go on. Other drops. These people aren’t the only ones trying to find a different way.”

What a dangerous circuit, through rebel cells in the collapsed, regrowing city. I’d always stressed, as I’d had it stressed to me, how incommensurable Terre and Ariekene thinking were. But I thought about who it was had told me that, those many times. Staff, and Ambassadors with a monopoly on comprehension. It was giddying to feel suddenly that I was allowed and able to make any sense of Ariekene actions. What I saw there was dissent, and I understood it.

I saw only these liars, these fervent attempters to change their speech. Bren and YlSib might go from them to others trying to eradicate all their cravings and live Languageless; from there perhaps to those fighting to disobey EzCal’s casual orders; then to others who were maybe searching for chemical cures. I wasn’t even really participant on this trip, the first visit, though I was present and Bren trusted me. He hadn’t brought me out of camaraderie—I was there because I was a simile, and these dissidents wanted me for strategic purposes, as another group might request a piece of ’ware, or a chemical, or explosives.

Embassytown in its crisis was throwing up fervour. Give me three days, I thought, and I’d find people who believed that EzCal, or Ez, or Cal, was the messiah, or the devil, or both; that the Ambassadors were angels; or devils; that the Ariekei were; that the only hope was to leave the planet as fast as we could; that we must never leave. So with the Ariekei, I thought, and felt hopeful and depressed at once. Language was incapable of formulating the uncertainties of monsters and gods common elsewhere, and I was abruptly convinced that these gatherings were the Ariekene cargo cults. Was I at a Ghost Dance? Bren and YlSib were patronising the far-fetched, millennial and desperate.

I watched Spanish Dancer struggle to express me, to make me mean things I’d never meant before, try to force similes into new shapes. We are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her because we … because like her we are … we are hurt … It circled me and stared at me, and tried to say ways it was like me.

“Why won’t MagDa’s plan work?” I said. “I know, I know, but … just say to me once why we can’t just keep going until the ship.”

Bren, Sib and Yl looked at each other, to see who would speak. “You’ve seen how EzCal’s acting.” It was Sib. “You think it’s safe for us to carry on like this?”

“And, among other things,” Bren said, sounding, if I’m honest, disappointed, “even if it did work, you saw what happened to the Ariekei when EzRa ended, without their … dose. So what about when the relief gets here? When we leave?” He indicated Spanish Dancer. “What happens then, to them?”

21

Another of our flyers disappeared. It had been doing rounds of farmsteads close to the city, as per EzCal’s orders, asking for—insisting on—what we needed: it wouldn’t be hard for us to dismantle the speakers if what we required wasn’t forthcoming, and the Ariekene farmers knew that. The coms broke off and weren’t reestablished. We released vespcams.

Squads were subduing the last independent zones on isolated floors of the Embassy, where squatter-chiefs and their groups had refused amnesty. I was out at a barricade, a mass of broken furniture, odds and sods of houses, unneeded machines; but coagulated here, unusually, not with plastone but a quick-setting polymer, a resin poured all over and set hard as brick and glass-clear. The detritus was visible, like rubbish floating in water, frozen in a moment. We weren’t at war anymore, and machines were cutting a V-trench walkway through the barrier, an excised wedge with perfect flat faces through the tough transparency and the crap within. The pass’s edges were randomly punctuated with sectioned debris.

I was with Simmon. We were watching the gusting staticky visions of vespcams on his handscreen. “What’s that?” I said. It was the lost corvid. It was dead. The ground around it was scorched. There were heaps that might be human bodies.

We came fast and armed over the wild, over paths made by Ariekei and their animals and zelles, perhaps by wild outsider humans, exiles from Embassytown, in outland farms. We hadn’t established contact with all of them. I was surprised by a brief and strong sense of loss for floaking, of all things. I tried to tell myself that this, what I was doing, was heir to that tough going-with-the-flow, but I was hardly taken in.

The airship was spread across the ground. We descended into a terrible aftermath. Eventually we went to work. The closest thing we had to a specialist took samples from what might be bite-marks or burn-marks on all the corpses. They were everywhere.

“Oh God,” said our investigator. There was Lo, of Ambassador LoGan. His chest was caved and cauterised. “That’s not a crash injury. That’s not a crash injury.”

Vizier Jaques was there, and the edge of his wound, his missing arm, was neither shorn clear nor burned, but a rip from which he’d bled out. He’d died in excruciation, it looked like, scrabbling for his flung-away limb. The microbes the group had brought inside them had started the job of decay, and the Ariekene landscape in which they worked made for chemical oddness, so the rot wasn’t like rot in Embassytown.

Everyone was dead. The expedition had included a rare Kedis functionary. A mature hermale I hadn’t known. “Oh Jesus, it’s Gorrin,” someone said. “The Kedis are going to be …”

We went slowly from body to body, putting off each as long as we could. The wind was cold as we picked through the remnants of our friends. We tried to gather them: some fell apart; others we wrapped to take home.

“Look.” We were trying to reconstruct what had happened, following the scraped earth, reading it, it and the dead become hieroglyphs. “This was brought down.” A hot toothed missile had burst into the flyer’s side.

“There are no predators like that …” someone started to say.

“But it came down slow enough for them to get out.” That was I. “They came out and then they were … they were hit outside.”

We found remnants of biorigging eggs, from a recent barter trip, smears of yolk and foetal machines. The crew had been returning. The aeoli we wore made our own voices loud in our ears, as if each of us were alone. Carrying our dead we flew with carronades ready, looking for the ranch where our compatriots had been. It was announced by smoke. Outlying dwellings were ruined, the nurseries mostly gone. There was one hutch that seemed still just alive, and in distress, but we had no idea how to provide it a coup de grâce, and could only try to ignore its pain.

There were no Ariekene dead. The kraal was empty. Dust-coloured animals ran away, and our arrival sent up rag-paper scavengers, flocks that moved like thinking smoke.

Someone fired and we all dived for the floor shouting. The gun howled: it was of one of Embassytown’s treasures, an old bansheetech gun cobbled into a form humans could use. The officer had shot it at nothing—a movement, a scuttling of tiny fauna. Ariekene young had been abandoned, and floated in a broth of dead. There were bodies of their elders. Hoofprints were everywhere. We set cams to follow what we thought might be trails.

Body-thick arteries emerged from the farm, entangled in the earth and the tube that went over the rockscape toward the city. The pipeline was burst. The matter of it was spewed by a sabotage blast, the ground a quag of dirt and amniotic fluids.

“What’s this?”

In a hollow were organic discards. Frameworks like splayed fish ribs; skin in webbing between tines; a nest of intricate bones. These were remnants of fanwings. We gathered the little trophies. Behind us we heard the distress call of a last building left alive.

We’d put speakers in the farms with which we’d made contact, and the ongoing supplies of EzCal’s voice should have guaranteed us what we needed, but we’d had trouble before. Now we knew why. We sent crews and cams along the supply pipes, and found other ruptures. We lost another flight, and then the officers we sent to find it.

EzCal went to the centre of the city to broadcast. Their journey there from Embassytown was as extreme in its pomp as we could do, then. There was pressure on those of us in the committee, still ostensibly Ez and Cal’s organisers, Ez’s jailers, indeed, to attend and wear smart clothes. Wyatt came with us. His reward for birthing EzCal was that he was freed, kept under watch but made committee. He was expert in crisis politics, and he wasn’t a Bremen agent anymore, or not just then. Whatever happened later we’d deal with later.

“If he could get away with a goddamn canopy, he would,” I said quietly to MagDa. The god-drug walked in the city, Ez looking down and unsmiling, Cal, his head still shaved in the style he now maintained, his stitches gone but new tattoos mimicking them on his scarred scalp, looking up, occasionally glancing at Ez with energy and hate. “They’d have us carrying them on our fucking shoulders.”

MagDa didn’t smile. We were in the middle of that daily promenade from Embassytown, behind EzCal, surrounded by Ariekei who followed their instructions and shouted sort-of cheers. Mag and Da were stricken. Wait, I wanted to say to them. It’s alright. There are others. There are people and Ariekei looking for ways out. I wouldn’t betray Bren, and I knew he was right: there was too much risk that MagDa might be unnerved by these plans.

“I don’t know …” said MagDa to me. “I don’t even know what we’ll do.” “When the ship comes.”

“We have to guard our resources,” Cal said, after their performance, looking at footage of ruined farms. EzCal insisted that the rations of Embassytowners be reduced. They ordered squads of constables to the nearest plantations, and to those that provided our most needed pabulum. The attacks were becoming more frequent. Each group of officers that went out was accompanied, as they had to be for communication with those they were sent to protect, by an Ambassador.

“It’ll be fine,” PorSha said to me, preparing. “It’s not the first time.” “We’re used to it.” “We had to go out to haggle, before, didn’t we?” “Out of the city.” “It’s the same.”

It wasn’t the same. Before, with Embassytown and the world collapsing, they, and all the better Ambassadors, had kept us alive with their desultory trades. This time they followed orders. I had originally thought that Cal would do as little as he could when he became part of god-drug II. I was used to being wrong.

EzCal did find Pear Tree, the erstwhile leader of that once-powerful Ariekene faction. Perhaps Cal had his own investigators. Not all the city-dwelling Embassytowner exiles would share Yl and Sib’s perspective: they might have enemies, of whom some were perhaps agents for EzCal.

What had happened was that during one of their speakings in the city plaza EzCal had been suddenly in the middle of a small group of Ariekei retracting and extruding their eyes and staring. EzCal hadn’t been afraid. One of the group had been Pear Tree.

It accompanied EzCal on their following performance, walking with them all the way from a meeting in Embassytown. There were other Ariekei with them, some closer to EzCal than any humans, Staff, committee or Ambassador. My memory was unreliable, but watching the trids—I played hookey from my accompanying duties—I suspected at least two others might have been among those that had stood aside to let Hasser murder . I held my breath: I was on a side in a secret war.

That time, EzCal didn’t speak for a while. They rationed their words. When they did, they announced that —Pear Tree—was chief of this township. That this area was chosen from all the scattered remnant parts of the city, to be EzCal’s node, and that its regent there was . EzCal couldn’t speak except as the god-drug, and the words they said were always compulsions. This wasn’t like a momentary order to raise giftwings: it was a ruling, and when EzCal finished speaking, the Ariekei who had heard them remained ruled by . The Ariekei were very quiet, and then did not complain.

For all I knew might already have been head of whatever clutch of streets it frequented. EzCal might have changed nothing—except that by saying it, they changed it. There was now a collaboration, an allegiance, between Embassytown and this new heart of the city. I had just seen the tasks of Bren, YlSib and their comrades, get harder.

I think I had been avoiding thinking about what Cal, EzCal, really was, and were. Whether it was design, buffoonery or luck that underlay our new politics, I was not safe.

Ariekei from the new township EzCal had inaugurated left the city with PorSha, KelSey and the constables. These were now joint operations. KelSey came back, but PorSha did not.

We had receivers and cams around all the farm grounds. They flagged us when anything beyond their expectation-algorithms occurred, which is how it was that all of us in the committee were buzzed instantly, and the footage relayed direct to our rooms, at the next attack.

Corvids headed out. They wouldn’t arrive in time, but we had to act, even pointlessly. I was with Bren. We scrolled as fast as we could back and forth through chaotic images. Scenes of tending, of interaction with farmhands. PorSha, a pair of tall diffident women, communicating necessities to the Ariekei. Convulsions as the tube passed goods that would be shat out in Embassytown. Snatches of conversation in Anglo-Ubiq. The time-counter skipped. This datspace was fritzing. “We need Ehrsul,” Bren said. “Do you ever …?” I shook my head. A constable was standing with mud across her. She stared anxiously not at us but over our shoulders, attempting to report.

“Sergeant Tracer at …” she said. There were violent noises. She watched something offscreen. “Under attack,” she said. “Groups of … hundreds, fucking hundreds …”

Her transmission ended, the picture spasmed and was replaced by a view rapidly diminishing as the cam flew up. Tracer was lying on her back, among human dead. She tugged off her aeoli mask, an unthinking spasm of dying fingers. Images strobed. A great company of Ariekei, moving quite unlike the farmhands. They galloped, they swung giftwings, they trailed blood, liquid drizzled from weapons, a spray of dust. None of them spoke—they shouted wordlessly, voicing only attack-meanings, without Language.

They beheaded a minor Staff-man I’d once known a bit. I held my mouth closed. One kicked him down, gripped him with its giftwing, another swung a blade worked out of some coralline stuff. They had biorigged weapons they turned on the farm walls. One Ariekes shot our women and men with a carbine, wielding the Terre weapon with surprising precision. We saw them murder Terre without weapons at all, send jags of their own bone into human innards, or yank masks away, suffocating our people in alien wind.

Bren sped up the footage. He brought us up to live shots. Carnage was ongoing. The officers were vastly outnumbered. They were trying to reach the corvid, and were taken down. PorSha was shouting Language to the attackers. Wait, wait, no more of these actions, they said. Please, we ask you not to do this—We lost that cam, and when it came back PorSha were dead. Bren cursed.

All the speakers we had placed in the farmland started suddenly to shout, in EzCal’s voice. The god-drug had found each other, here in Embassytown, and were yelling down the line. Stop! they said, and things stilled. I leaned toward the crude picture. The carnage, all the motionless Ariekei.

“Jesus,” I said at the numbers. I held up my hands. Bren said, “What are they doing?”

Stand still, the god-drug shouted across the kilometres. Come forward, stand in front of the dead Ambassador.

For seconds there was no motion. Then an Ariekes stepped out of the crowd, took careful hoof-steps into the cam’s view. The others watched it. Its back, its extended fanwing, stretched open, listening to the voice from the speaker, turning into and out of the light as it listened to EzCal’s voice.

There were no other fanwings in the crowd of killers.

“That’s a farmer,” it said. “It’s not one of them.”

A large Ariekes slapped two of its companions with its giftwing and pointed at the enthralled oncomer. It arced its back to display a wound. EzCal continued to speak.

“They saw the buildings hearing, and that one,” I said. “That’s why they stopped. Not because they had to.”

One by one at first, then countless at a time, the murder-squad of Ariekei arched their backs. I saw the quivering of scores of fanwing stubs. I heard Bren whisper, “God.” The Ariekei displayed their wounds. Some made wordless sounds I’m certain were of triumph.

“They know we can see them,” I said.

Following speechless giftwing-jabbed instructions from their larger comrade, self-mutilated Ariekei stood either side of the entranced farmhand, and held it. It didn’t even notice. Stop what you are doing, release your grips, we heard EzCal say. Their Language petered out. The farmer raised and opened its giftwing repeatedly, obeying the instruction not intended for it. Those it was intended for ignored it, did not hear it, kept hold of their quarry.

The big Ariekes tugged the biorigging-farmer’s fanwing. I winced. It twisted. Its victim screamed doubly and tried and failed to get away. Its tormentor’s giftwing moved like a human hand up-rooting a plant. The fanwing wrenched free: roots of gristle and muscle parted and with a burst of blood came finally away, pulling fibres out of the quivering back, trailing them.

Fanwings are at least as sensitive as human eyes. The traumatised Ariekes opened its mouths and fell, stupefied with pain. It was dragged away. The deafener held up its grotesque dripping bouquet. It made a loud wordless noise. Triumph or rage.

EzCal were speaking again, I realised. They issued orders and were ignored.

22

That was the start of open war. We called it the First Farm Massacre though it was the only one that we knew of—a horrible perspicacity. It took us days to understand what was coming.

That final mutilation, by one Ariekes of another, was a recruitment. If the victim survived the shock and pain, it was made another soldier, on the enemy side. “How does it receive orders?” I said, but no one could answer me. Perhaps there were no orders, only rage stripped of language. Can they think? If they can’t speak, can they think? Language for Ariekei was speech and thought at once. Wasn’t it?

We didn’t know whether to roll back our presence from the outlying farms or bolster it, so we tried both. More visceral pipelines blew. The pictures were the same in different settings: in a copse of trees like organs; in a dustbowl; in scree; each time a burst of flesh and a litter of ruined cargo. Our stores depleted.

Infrastructure wasn’t the only thing attacked. After the Farm Massacre the fanwingless swept into an encampment defended by other, hearing, Ariekei: this became the Cliff-Edge Incident. We had troops there with them equipped with rare out-tech, and they were able to shoot several of the attackers. But half our officers were killed by the time the marauders suddenly left, galvanised by some signal we couldn’t understand. Perhaps by an empathy to tides we couldn’t sense, like birds circling and become one organism.

We didn’t become inured to the footage. EzCal called the committee together, and brought , Pear Tree, with them. EzCal told us they were making changes in the way the city was administered, as if that might help. Cal talked about making allegiances against “bandits.” I tried to listen, to understand the shape of politics now. From Bren’s scorn I knew that where there wasn’t anarchy or secret renegacy in the city, there were strange comprador authorities like that of .

We had to witness absurd joint patrols. Under EzCal’s orders, our constables policed outlands beyond the city accompanied by Ariekei dragooned into militia. An Ambassador had to be present, of course, to transmit instructions, on what EzCal stressed was god-drug authority. They took weapon training: career bureaucrats attempted to transform themselves.

The missions disaggregated, failed, as orders relayed by disorientated Ambassadors were interpreted differently by Ariekei and Terre. The Ariekei were not even resentful, so far as I could see—and I knew now that there was such a thing as Ariekene resentment—only bewildered. The first three such patrols achieved nothing and the fourth was attacked. When we reached the site the rescue squad found our Terre people dead and their Ariekei colleagues mostly gone, inducted no doubt by brute surgery into the rebels. The joint patrols were ended.

“What if they don’t want to fight? Even after they’ve had their fanwing taken? Or what if they want to fight the ones that took their fanwing?” I, traitor, was at the secret liars’ club in the city, again, so Spanish Dancer’s comrades could consider me. They contemplated urgently. As urgently as Bren had brought me back through the city. Spanish Dancer itself wasn’t there.

“A fanwing isn’t just an ear,” Yl said. She and Sib looked at me. “It hears, yes.” “It’s the mind’s main doorway.” “More important than sight.” “Their physiology’s nothing like ours.” “If they’ve got no fanwing, they hear no sounds at all.” “And with no sound, they can’t hear their own speech.” “Which means an Ariekes can’t speak.” “So it can’t speak Language.”

Perhaps there was no sense of truth left for them, or thought. Those rebels must be a fractured community, without speech, if they were a community at all. Language, for the Ariekei, was truth: without it, what were they? An unsociety of psychopaths.

“So even if they didn’t want to be part of the rebellion,” I said, “with their fanwings taken, they’re …”

“Insane.” “Or something like it.” “Maybe some don’t take part.” “Maybe they drift. Get lost.” “Maybe they die.” “But they’re not what they were.” “It’s no surprise that most of them join.” “… The bandits.” YlSib smiled without humour at EzCal’s absurd terminology.

“They can’t all have been press-ganged,” I said. The key cadre of that army was surely those that had deafened themselves. That despairing, literally maddening act of revolt had perhaps been performed independently, risen up in hundreds of Ariekei; perhaps a gathering had agreed together, and in a mass act of self-inflicted agony, between EzRa’s meaningless pronouncements—because we realised these dissidents had been attacking us, if in more disorganised fashion, before the reign of god-drug II—had made themselves an organising core. There might be a room somewhere littered with rotting fanwings, the birthplace of this millennial mass.

Each trapped in itself. God knew how many of them, a strike-force of the lonely and lost. How did they move together? How did they coordinate their assaults? I thought again that they must be gusted by instinct and some deep-grammar of chaos: they could not plan. Maybe each strike wasn’t a careful raid but just a sharp edge of the random. I remembered, though, what had looked like interactions among the self-deafened during the First Farm Massacre, and was perturbed.

“They’ve started coming into the city in squads,” Sib said. It wasn’t a city, just tribes of junkies and thralls where a city had been. “What they used to do was kill the other Ariekei.” “If you’ve broken free from something like god-drug …” “… maybe they thought those who didn’t were disgusting.” But they weren’t killing them now: they were recruiting. YlSib made simultaneous plucking motions, twisting imagined fanwings from their anchorings.

I shuddered and turned it into a headshake, and told them I wanted to see Spanish Dancer, as if it was a friend. I wanted to understand it, to make sense of its strategy for emancipation. YlSib were pleased. They took me to the grotto under eaves fringed like fingers where the Ariekes lived. For quite a long time, we all sat silently.

A hamlet of houses in the suburbs, gently regrowing, were taken suddenly down with biorigged weapons of serious power, crossbred from existing strains. Informer Ariekei working with the god-drug told us that something terrible was coming.

All who live in the city and all who live in Embassytown must stand against these attackers, EzCal said, with beside them. No matter how assiduously the compelled Ariekei tried to obey them, those words were too nebulous to mean much. EzCal never spoke an intoxicating order making all Ariekei obey : they must have been afraid of unintended consequence.

I wanted to return, as often and for as long as I could, to the liars in the city straining to meet ’s challenge. I was trying to learn how to get there—the route and strategies for the route—but still could only go when YlSib and Bren came with me. After that dramatic attack on the remains of the city, Spanish Dancer and the other gathered Ariekei were distressed (I recognised it). One of their number had left them.

YlSib listened. “They argued with it.” “It told them …” “It said it was ashamed.” Bad enough when the first god-drug had pushed them into trips: so much worse now they could see their tripping selves made to obey. “It … oh.” “It plucked itself.”

“No,” I said.

It wasn’t just, I thought, the loss of their—what, friend?—to self-savagery, of mind as well as body, so it could not hear nor speak again, that must hurt them. They wanted to be a hope, against the revolutionary suicide of those that tore out their social mind with their fanwings, became nihilist revenge. Were there ranks among the Languageless? Were those that made themselves an aristocracy above those attack-recruited? I looked at Spanish Dancer’s many dark-point eyes, which had seen its companion tear its fanwing like trash, after their years of work, their project that had started long before this end of the world.

By our barricade gates, in rump street-markets, quickly tolerated, an economy of recycled necessities, people began to talk again about the relief. When it would come, where we would go, and what life would be like for Embassytowners exiled to Bremen.

Our now wild cameras inhabited the plains. Many broke down or their signals degraded. But some still got footage to us.

Some were a long way into country not punctuated even by farms, beyond the transport ducts. I heard rumours of certain footage before I saw it. I scorned the idea that it existed but was being kept from me—wasn’t I committee? But though it failed, I discovered that there had been an effort to do just that. I shouldn’t have been shocked. An internal split, a craven and conniving column reporting direct to the god-drug. There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex. There was no way they could contain these files: a day after the first stories about them started circulating, the rest of us got to see them.

A group of us uploaded them to committee datspace. Bren was agitated. I was taken aback by his impatience, that he so obviously had no idea if the whispers about what we were to see were true. I was so used to him knowing things he didn’t tell me. I teased him about it, in a rather brittle manner. We watched the cam’s memories. Plenty of kilometres away but hardly in another country. The viewpoint swept through narrows: I swayed to avoid overhangs the recorder had ducked days before. Some fool at the back said something like “Why are we watching this?”

Through a nook in rock the cam went to a valley of pumice-coloured earth, burred birdlike suddenly tree-then tower-high over the slope, focused where a river had been. We gasped. Someone swore.

There was an army. It marched in our direction. There were not hundreds of Ariekei but thousands, thousands.

I heard myself say Jesus, Jesus Christ. We knew now why the city seemed depleted. Pharotekton, I said.

The microphones were crappy but we heard the noise of the march, the percussion of hard feet walking not in time. The amputee Ariekei shouted. They must not even know, not even hear their own constant catcalls. Machines among them walked at the wordless correction of keepers. The Ariekei carried weapons. This was the only army on this world and it was marching on us.

The cam went close, and we saw thousands of stumps of thousands of fanwings. Every Ariekes there was a soldier, not obeying orders but trapped beyond society in soundless solipsism, unable to talk, hear, think, but still moving together in that mystery fashion, sharing purpose without speaking it. They couldn’t have a unified intent but we knew they did, and what it was, and that we were it.

23

As well as the Languageless and the SM, for self-mutilated, at first we called the incoming army the Deaf. Embassytown’s human deaf objected hard to that; they were right and we were ashamed. Then someone named the attackers according to an antique language. It meant that same word, deaf, but rendered the Surdae any insult seemed diluted; particularly because, fast bastardised or misunderstood, the term became the Surd and then misprisioned into the Absurd. Hosts, coming to kill us for sins we’d committed, if at all, without intent.

Above all it was their discipline that was absurd, impossible, the way without words groups would peel off from the main slow body, coordinated into snatch squads that tore through strange country and took apart our rangers, or recruited new Ariekei troops by ripping their flesh. Eventually and abruptly transmissions to us ended, cams batted out of the air by breakdown, wind or the sudden irritation of the enemy. We sent more of course. Plans began.

As our spies gusted out to search, we were breaching old agreements and habits of isolation. The cams showed us the coast, the gently toxic sea. We had a country, on which the city sat, in which was Embassytown. We weren’t used to seeing that. I’d used cartographic ’ware in the immer but not these charts. We had a continent. It would have been hard for me to trace the outlines of Embassytown, harder to draw the city, and I wouldn’t even have recognised the shape of the landmass on which we were such a tiny point. Now we needed them it wasn’t hard to break those taboos and pull up maps. They’d never been forbidden, as I’d seen in the out in some unsubtle theocracies: only inappropriate, and old politenesses were dead. Our cams uploaded directions so we could trace the Absurd.

Their few, their first, the pioneers had also learnt the specific violence to make unspeaking comrades of their victims. How had it been? They had spread out of the depleting city, claiming farmers, on past any urban gutwork into the wandergrounds of nomads, claiming the nomads, the gatherer-hunters of unneeded or escaped technology, building. Someone might one day write the history of that trek, the recruiting crusade.

There were more than all those stolen and violently cured rural addicts. I imagined these crazy crazying figures emerging from wilderness like prophets; those distant Ariekei already alarmed or enraged at what they heard of their cousins in the city reduced to zombie-ecstatics or the craven desperate, might, even if far-off enough to have avoided the affliction, not have needed coercion to join the Absurd. Perhaps there’d been a while before the army went in with regular, remorseless violence, and instead there’d been debates about endeafening among the not-yet-recruited, in some settlements. Articulate, last-ever uses of speech to argue for its eradication.

I made Bren come with me into the city. It was easy to leave, though our borders were supposed to be controlled. Routes in and out weren’t hard to learn.

“They’ll be here within two weeks,” I said. He nodded.

“You see they’re all in prime instar?” Bren said. “They’re not protecting the old or looking after the young.”

The young, though, might soon enough be grateful to them. Even uncared for, a few in each Ariekene litter must survive, and when they emerged to their adult form, woke into Language, they would find a city purged of us. Without god-drug. The Absurd would martyr themselves to that future. They’d put themselves beyond the reach of any compromise or agreement.

We stuck to the safer sub-regions of the city. I found my way—my own, this time, leading Bren—to where Spanish Dancer and its friends practiced lying, and I tried to help them find new ways to speak me.

“We’re forming an army,” Cal said. We were as disdainful as we could be at that. Gather many of you in the square and be ready to fight, EzCal broadcast to the Ariekei. They told them to put forward soldiers. They demanded volunteers. was the biggest aggregate of units with a name, and meant anything more than the largest exact number for which terminology existed, , 3072. translated usually as “countless.” EzCal were demanding as large a force as the Ariekei could give.

Cal waved his hand. Beside him, Ez was like a ventriloquist’s doll, existing only when he spoke, or was spoken through. Wyatt watched Ez like an anxious relative. I wondered how many Ariekene soldiers the god-drug would get, and whether the process of building that force would be violent. The natives in all the little villages left in the city, islands between zones of the deadly mindless, would try to obey, in various ways. They knew the Absurd were coming. The locals ruled or “ruled” or whatever by , those over which EzCal had given aegis, would surely provide most of the soldiers.

“… one main force of Ariekei to guard the city, stationed at all the weak points we have, and there’ll be a couple of … well, of special squads prepared,” Cal said, at the committee meeting. I couldn’t listen to this, these desperations disguised as strategy. I couldn’t look at anyone else in the room. There was nothing we had that could hold off the oncoming army. When we were dismissed I got my stuff together slowly, and after a moment realised it was only I, Ez and Cal left in the room. I don’t know how that happened. I wouldn’t rush. I couldn’t look at them. I was their enemy, and I had secrets that were mutinous.

Cal slouched, looking tired. He looked shrunken, far off by the wall. A moment’s illusion and the chair seemed to dwarf him like a throne would a boy-king. Ez stood like a surly courtier. They must be waiting to practice their necessary proclamations.

“Do you miss my brother, Avice?” Cal said.

“Do I …? Vin? I … Yes.” It was some way true. “Sometimes I do. Do you?”

Cal watched me from under his brow.

“Yes. I was angry with him. Before he died.” He paused. “I was angry with him before that, then worse after. Of course. But I miss him.”

I tried to work out if I could glean any advantage on any axis by keeping him talking, but I could think of nothing to say. “Please,” he said angrily, not to me. Ez looked up.

“I’ll …” Ez said, and walked out. It was the first word I’d heard him say for himself, for many days. Cal didn’t watch him go.

“Vin missed you,” he said.

“Did he?”

Whatever had happened to Cal, whatever he’d become, I was sure that he saw me as I saw him through a window of memories that included mornings, evenings together, nudity, of fucking, sometimes beautifully. What could I do but remember the last looks Vin had given me? I’d seen that need that could perhaps have been given another name, and that perhaps Cal resented. Because he thought his brother’s affections were a zero-sum, and that I’d stolen from him? Because he didn’t have it to give himself?

I, to my utmost shock, choked and had to close my eyes. A great big diffuse grief, not just for Vin, but some for him. I thought about the months I’d spent as CalVin’s lover. I tried to recall a time when both of them had moved with me at once. I could not. Had they both touched me at once, ever, or had it always been one, then some languid time later, as I’d imagined, assumed, the other? I looked at Cal. Had he merely tolerated his doppel’s desires, all that time?

I thought, Have you and I even been together?

“Waking without him. I don’t get used to it.” He spoke rapidly. “I’m not supposed to. Truth is there are times it’s not bad. The silence isn’t always unwelcome.” I looked away from his awful smile.

“Truth is, Avice, I can’t tell you if I miss him. That’s not true, I can tell you and I do, but it isn’t as clean a feeling as that. To have to say everything, like I do—or did … Well, it’s bad and it’s good and it’s bad. I’ve been to the retirement homes where cleaved are. Normal ones, not like Bren, making trouble. I don’t know, is that me now?”

He jerked his head at the door through which Ez had left. “That bastard, eh? It can be ugly how things go. I was going to say … I don’t know what I was going to say. I’m doing what I have to.”

“What is it you’re doing, Cal? Why d’you have to?” I said that though I’d not intended to respond, or involve myself in whatever this was. “We tried this once before, Cal; you made armies and it was a disaster …”

“Avice, please.” He shook his head, and hesitated, as if he was trying very hard to think how to communicate something. “It was joint patrols that didn’t work. You’ll see what we do now. This is different. Anyway, what would you rather? We can’t just leave them to come in … And haven’t you seen?” He gesticulated again after Ez. “I can make them do anything I want.”

“Well …”

“Well, anyway that’s not really the point. I do, we do want protections around the city, we need it, but that’s not the real point. The real point is the squads that go out. I’ve been thinking a lot.” He waved a hand at his throat, his voice. “About this. I’ve been thinking how to use it. I know why the first patrols went wrong: we just ordered them to patrol. That was much too vague. Tasks, though, that’s different. Specifics. With beginnings and endings.”

“What tasks are you going to set them, EzCal?” I said. The slip, calling Cal that, wasn’t deliberate.

“You’ll see. And you’ll be impressed, I think. I’m not operating like you think I am. I know what you think I am, Avice.”

I walked away. It was just unbearable.

I didn’t watch Cal, with Ez, inspect his Ariekene troops—what a pantomime. I heard he made MagDa his assistant, had them talk for him. EzCal couldn’t do it: it would have created a comedy of overwhelmed squaddies mindlessly attempting to obey every word, whether it was an order or not.

There were, in fact, —some thousands. An unprecedented gathering. Through MagDa, Cal organised them into ranks, and squadrons into units, each with its own commander. There wasn’t as much of the chaos as I’d expected, when our new defenders went to their outposts.

They weren’t enough. The Absurd army outnumbered them by several times. I didn’t yet understand—had ignored him telling me—that this warcraft and panicked pomp was a minor part of Cal’s intentions. I didn’t even notice that MagDa were gone for two days, alongside others, part of a squad I imagine EzCal gave some carefully chosen name. While they were, without knowing they were, I went again with YlSib to Spanish Dancer, as the army of Absurd approached. I’d had enough of inevitability. In the city, outside Embassytown, it felt, even illusorily, as if more than one outcome was possible.

EzCal summoned us to a lecture hall. I went to that meeting, as I did to all of them, feeling like a spy. Not wholly misleading. The committee was depleted. In steeply banking rows of chairs we looked down at EzCal in the centre. I sat by Southel and Simmon. MagDa was with EzCal, their faces scuffed with injuries. By them was , and there were other Hosts in corners.

“We’d like to start with a silence,” Cal said, “for officers Bayley and Kotus, who gave their lives on this mission, for the sake of Embassytown.” We waited. “Let’s make sure it wasn’t in vain. Bring them in.”

There was a commotion. We gasped and swore and drew back. What the guards entered and brought before us were enemies. Two deafened Absurd. They were held in cuffs. They eyed us, their eyes in polyp motion. Their legs and giftwings shook in constraints. They tested their tethers with cunning.

We watched them. Cal circled the captives, pointing out the injuries of the wilderness, the flanges of the ripped-out fanwing. He pointed at each thing he described with a long thin stick. He was like a picture of an ancient lecturer, in some pre-diaspora centre of learning. The attackers made noises as he rounded them. Calls that sounded like halloos, like calls to gods. and the other Ariekei in the room watched them and kept up their own constant movement, twitches in a disgust-echo of the prisoners’ strainings.

Our people had tracked a group of Absurd broken off from the main oncoming army to raid an isolated settlement. There’d been a fight. There’d been deaths on both sides. At last, Cal said, after unprecedented cooperation between the Terre and our Ariekene allies we’d subdued and taken these Absurd alive.

“We need to understand them,” Cal said. “So we can defeat them.”

We were here to take notes, to learn Languageless behaviour. By experiments before cams in sealed rooms; by interactions between the Absurd and our allies, that would not be interactions but actions from and its coterie, and ignored by the Absurd; or if responded to in such ways that they were not discernible to us as reactions at all.

The solipsism of those that had torn out their own fanwings seemed impenetrable. Perhaps some on the committee believed Cal’s assertion that we were preparing to defeat them, but seeing him cajole —speaking through MagDa again to avoid the tedium of repeatedly enthralling the Ariekes ally—to speak to the Absurd, which they pointlessly attempted, making MagDa try it too, I think there must have been many who knew, as I did then, that his hope was to negotiate.

But they were thousands who’d closed all windows in and out of themselves, cut off Language, become monads full of murder. No knowledge we had could make much difference. With the scrags of Wyatt’s arsenal and EzCal’s Ariekene force we might kill some, but the city was still shrinking, inhabitants dying, self-mutilating, running to nearby settlements where speakers would broadcast the god-drug voice. There were more Absurd than Ariekei that would fight by us.

MagDa spoke in Language; then one or other would say, “They can’t even fucking hear us,” while the Absurd snarled.

“So show them,” Cal said. “Make them understand.” And this exchange would continue and mutate, upsetting and pointless. The whole Ariekes would repeat its words: MagDa and the other Ambassadors would make gestures with their hands. Our enemies came closer. The Languageless pulled against their bonds. They watched their interlocutors, ignoring overtures and focusing on actions. I saw sudden shared moments of attention, responding to idiosyncrasies of ’s motion invisible to me.

The Absurd glared at each other. They made noises without knowing it. They got each other’s attention with spread-out eye-tines, made motions to indicate things to notice. To the extent that they could they moved, taking up positions while Cal and EzCal flashed up images on screens, played vibrations to them through the floor. They walked, triangulated, parted.

I didn’t say anything fast enough, but when they suddenly tried to attack an Ariekes guard I realised I’d known it was about to happen. They were subdued before they could use their own strapped bodies as ungainly bludgeons, but the synchronicity of their movements astounded me. It sent me back to my husband’s books.

“How do you say ‘that’ in Language?” I asked Bren. “Like that one.” I pointed. “Which glass do you want? That one.”

“It would depend.” He looked at the glass by his counter. “Talking about that one, I might say …”

“No I don’t mean any specific one, but in general, that one.” Pointing. “Or that one.” Moving my hand. “Thatness.”

“There’s nothing.”

“No?”

“Of course not.”

“Thought so. So how would I distinguish that glass and that one and that one?” I tallied them with my finger.

“You’d say ‘the glass in front of the apple and the glass with a flaw in its base and the glass with a residue of wine left in it.’ You know this. What are you asking? They taught you these basics, didn’t they?”

“They did,” I said. I was quiet a while. “Years ago.” I spoke in years again, not kilohours. “But if you were translating an Ariekes saying, ‘The glass with the apple and the one with the wine,’ to me, you’d probably just say, ‘That glass and that one.’ Sometimes translation stops you understanding. I’m not fluent. Maybe that’s helping me right now.”

“Translation always stops you understanding,” he said. “What is it you’re thinking?”

“How many days before they get here?” I said. “Can you get hold of YlSib? And others? Any you can?” He narrowed his eyes but nodded. “We need to go. Get YlSib or whoever to contact Spanish Dancer and the others. I’ll—” I stopped. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know whether … Maybe I can tell Cal.”

“Tell me,” Bren said. “I thought you’d despaired.”

“I did too.”

“What, then? Tell me.”

I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you.

Bren nodded, and listened to what I can’t call a plan—it was hunch and hope—and when I was done he said, “No, we can’t tell Cal.” He touched me under the chin, and put his arms around me, and for a moment I let him take my weight and it was lovely. “Of course we can’t.”

“But we’re trying to fix things,” I said. “You know EzCal aren’t stupid …”

“It’s not about whether they’re stupid,” he said. “It’s about who they are, and what they represent. Maybe Cal would see reason. Maybe. But I don’t think so, do you? Want to risk it, really?”

“If we go, he’ll find out.”

“Yes. And see you as an enemy. And he’ll be right. Don’t think he—they—won’t find time to try to stop us.”

“Alright then,” I said. “I’ll be an enemy.”

He smiled at me. “What else are we going to do, Avice?”

We turned arm-in-arm to look at the screen on which the captive Languageless tried to shuffle, alone in their room, watched by cams. It was a quiet moment for our banishing, as we got ready to exile ourselves. We saw the two Ariekei our rulers held moving not quite like two things unconnected, but according to something else; not a plan but a knowledge of each other; a community.

24

I was still of some cultural interest. So was BrenDan, the free cleaved, troublemaker, licensed dissident. If we disappeared together people would notice. And we might already be watched. That was why the next time, the last time, I went into the city alone.

While the committee fretted and Cal took what power we’d had, Embassytown streets got on with things. Walking through my shrunken town with my aeoli and supplies, I was surprised to pass more than one outdoor party. Some shiftparents of the playing children saw me watching and caught my eye, and even the poignancy of that, of knowing together that this was a last game to keep those children occupied, didn’t detract from a moment’s pleasure.

There were constables on the streets but not much for them to do except wait for the war: they didn’t police with fervour. They didn’t clear out the proselytisers, the, I don’t know, Shakers, Quakers, Makers, Takers, each with their own theology damning or rescuing us. They weren’t treated, even the most brimstone of them, as threats or pests, but as performers. People teased them, while they remained doggedly devout.

I wanted to stop, to ask someone to join me at a café where they were giving away free drinks or accepting the little IOUs we proffered in polite charade. The usual lament: I may be some time. The wistfulness of we who are about to leave. I got out of Embassytown close to where Yohn and Simmon and the others and I had held our breath and where I’d touched a tether. I exited through the corridors of a border house, alone.

On my chart were marked various colonies of city Ariekei, each annotated, the latest information Bren could gather. 1: Heartland. . Loyal. To my left. 2: Status uncertain. 3: contributed to troop but dispute with . 4: communalistic? 5, and on. I knew the displayed boundaries were all porous. As the Absurd approached, those little polities got more insular, their between-fix politics and cultures more divergent, the streets that separated them much worse. I wasn’t at all safe.

The first few hundred metres altbrocks had ambled, I’d heard bird wings and been with insects. Now I was in the territories of local fauna, with at least two names: our vernacular; their markers in Language. I stood still for a dog-sized thing we called a brown-gun, which the Ariekei termed or depending on a taxonomic distinction we never understood. It crossed my path with urchin frog-tongue gait. Overhead passed the scraps and biorigged machines, wild, or carrying Ariekei.

I could navigate immer but this geography nearly defeated me. It was dangerous in no-person’s-lands, and it would be more so at the settlements, where I’d be threatened not by the random rages of the mindless but by the guarding of borders. With this new tribalism inhabitants of different areas sometimes fought. More than once I had had to hunker beyond a house-bone or a trash-pile, watching such violence.

My breath was short with fear. Around a convolute, half-hearing the diaphragmatic burr of this neighbourhood, I stopped abruptly. There were two men in front of me.

They saw me and raised rifles. I couldn’t see their faces through the visors of their aeoli. The incongruity of Terre figures right there stopped me for a dangerous moment but I moved, just before they fired, and bullets thumped into the ventricle or alley where I’d been. I ran. I heard them behind me. I shoved under underhangs, lost myself. I grit my teeth, my heart slamming.

I wasn’t panicked. My thoughts were precise. I turned fast at another noise. Someone human was reaching for me from a doorway like gills. I staggered back but he put his finger to his mask, in a shhh face, and beckoned. I went to him and he pulled me into a chamber. We sat, listening. I stared at him, but he wasn’t memorable in any way. I scanned him like I might decode him.

“Are you alright?” he whispered.

“Yes.” I started to say Who are you? or Who were they? but he shook his head. He listened again.

“Come with me,” he said at last. I tried to ask again who he was, but he still didn’t answer. He didn’t owe me any explanation, I supposed, after all. I let him lead me, creeping.

At the end of a long detour, Yl and Sib were waiting. They greeted him tersely. The three of them confabulated too quietly for me to hear. The man turned and raised his hand to me briefly as he left.

“His name’s Shonas,” Sib said. “He was a vizier once. He’s been in the city for about eight years.” We headed cautiously back toward my original intended route.

“Why’s he here?” I said. “And who shot at me?” A lintel arced to let us in.

“He came here after a breakdown between him and an Ambassador,” YlSib said. “It was a bit of a scandal. He disappeared. You were in immer probably. In the out.” “You wouldn’t remember.” As if. “The other two were DalTon.”

I don’t remember being surprised. Those dashing dissidents, I’d assumed dead, cleaved, or incarcerated in that terrible infirmary. “They went away.” “They went weird.” “Shonas came into the city to stop them, and …” “… Well. He’s on our side.” “Against Ambassador DalTon.” “We hadn’t heard from those bastards for a long time until all this started, don’t know what they’ve been working on.” “They’re pigs in shit, now.” “They must love all this.” “They got wind of your plan.”

A parallel economy of narratives, counterfights and revenge. “How do they know what I’ve got planned?” I said.

“Word gets out.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Come on. Stories get out.” “They might not know anything except you’re coming to the city. Which would mean you have a plan.” “Which whatever it is they’re against.”

“Are they working with Cal? With EzCal?”

“What? Because they tried to stop you?” YlSib glanced at me. “Just because Cal would try to stop you too?” “It’s hardly the same thing.” “DalTon have their own reasons for everything.”

“Which are?” I said.

“Oh there are so many reasons out there,” YlSib said, exhaustedly. “Who can keep track of them all?” “Pick one.” “They aren’t your friend.” “Won’t that do?”

“No.”

“They’re tired of all of it.” “And you’re not.” “And you’re trying.” “How’s that?”

Dal and Ton, nihilist since the crisis and before. It was a vindication that they thought me worth attacking. Ask Cal if he’d rather Embassytown be destroyed or survive without him, he’d claim the latter and mean it: but he’d go to his grave, and all our graves, to stop me, when he knew my plan, because it would undermine him. DalTon wanted to stop me because I wanted to save the world. I’m sure it made much more and coherent sense to them, with their long, furious self-exile. There were kilohours of story there I’d never know. DalTon were against me, Cal was against me, DalTon were against Cal, Shonas was against DalTon, Shonas was for me but not against Cal, and so on. I never, in Embassytown, the immer or the out, had the constitution for intrigue. Floaking, I’d hoped, was a way around it. But politics finds you.

“How many are there?” I said. “Outcasts. In the city.”

Yl and Sib said nothing. My plans to save Embassytown were briefly part of what happened to DalTon and Shonas, and the drama of the revenge of the ex-Ambassador and their one-time vizier had happened to me. I was grateful to Shonas for my life.

“It’s on its way,” YlSib told me. “What do you call it? Spanish Dancer.”

“I know, it’s rude of me,” I said. “I’ll stop using that name.”

“Why?” “It doesn’t care and neither do we.”

The room was small. Windowless of course, illuminated by fronds that glowed.

“There’s power,” I said.

“No.” “The light’s emitted by a necrophage in the walls.”

“Come on,” I said. The building was dying and we were lit by that. I could only laugh.

I asked again, but YlSib wouldn’t tell me what had sent them hundreds of thousands of hours ago out of Embassytown, to live behind aeoli masks in that exile microculture. We waited. “More city-Hosts are leaving,” YlSib said. “And plenty of them are going to join the Absurd.” “There won’t be many left to guard, even if they’re prepared to.”

“They won’t have any choice. EzCal’ll order them to.”

“What’s your plan?” “What is it you want to do?”

“You know what,” I said. “Bren told you.” The truth was I didn’t know how to explain it. When Spanish Dancer arrived, I said, “Look. I’ll show you.”

I remembered the way the captive Languageless had moved. The Absurd were closing in and there was no point waiting for Bren. With YlSib’s help, their careful translation, very slowly at first, we started. I, against every inclination I’d had for many years, had no choice but to take control.

I don’t think urgency is a bacillus that can cross exotypes, but it was as if the Ariekei understood that something in me had changed. They and I fervently engaged. I remembered them in The Cravat, fascinated in me and all the other similes.

“You want to lie,” I said to Spanish Dancer. I spoke quickly. “Show me what you can do. How close are you? Let’s start again.” I spent hours listening to it and its group perform their little untruths, through YlSib’s translations. I made notes and strained to remember how had done what it had done. That seemed to me the key.

I’d talked about it with Bren. Often had wordplayed, eroding qualifying clauses until what was left was a sudden surprising lie. But that method, however well done, was a sideshow. ’s theoretical focus had been on me.

It had seen us—us similes made of Terre, not merely us similes—as key to some more fundamental and enabling not-truth. Its signature mendacity, spoken with dandy élan though only a word-trick, hinted at that shift born of contact. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much. Before the humans came we didn’t speak.

Through a dissembling made of omitted clauses it laid out its manifesto. Before the humans came we didn’t speak: so we will, can, must speak through them. It made that falsity a true aspiration. , insisting on a certain might-be, changed what was. It had learnt to lie to insist on a truth.

“So,” I said to Spanish Dancer, and the companions that had joined it. “Let’s follow Surl Tesh-echer.” YlSib translated. The Ariekei reacted. “It pointed where to go. You know me. I’m the girl hurt in darkness who ate what was given to her. Tell me what I’m like, and we’ll get to what I am.”

I gave them their nicknames. Spanish Dancer, Toweller, Baptist, Duck. I’d say their names and point and even smile—you never know, you don’t know what they have or haven’t clocked. Their battery-beasts skipped about as we worked. All these Ariekei could lie, a bit. They were followers of the greatest liar in their history. I helped them leave things out, whisper clauses, with wilful misde-scriptions.

Before the humans came. I had YlSib repeat ’s claim. The Ariekei failed: the lie code-jammed their minds. “What colour?” I’d say, holding up rags or plastic. They would bud and unbud their eyes.

After hours their attention went. Duck was shuddering, Toweller was humming and emitting piping sounds. I understood. We had no datchips. The Ariekei had to go to the street to wait for the loudspeakers. Inside, we couldn’t hear the broadcast but we felt the house quiver. Yl and Sib and I looked at each other, and I think we were all imagining our students stampeding to the nearest voice-point, perhaps fighting off the mindless, perhaps beating each other in their need, as EzCal spoke.

“How come you’re behind this?” I said to YlSib. “I mean, if it works, it changes things for you …”

“What do we lose?” “An expertise?” “And what’s gained? By everyone?” “What’s our expertise done for us?” They looked down again. Bren had told me he’d hated his doppel, with a quiet hate. The sight of YlSib’s exhaustion, how they didn’t look at each other, made me wonder if that was the condition of all Ambassadors.

When the Ariekei returned they were calm again. Continue, one said. I nodded exaggeratedly and said “Yes.” I said it again, slowly. What I was trying for was a break, a rupture, a move from before to after. A tipping point that, like all such, could only be a mystery.

“What am I like? What’s like me?” YlSib rendered my question and the answers.

“You’re the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate what was given to her.” “The scavengers that come to our houses’ latrines to feed are like the girl eating what was given to her.”

“Charming.” I willed them to strive for poetry. Closed my eyes. They asserted similarities. I didn’t let them stop. After quite a time their suggestions grew more interesting. They overreached: the conversation was full with stillborn similes.

“The rocks are like the girl who was hurt in the dark because …”

“The dead are like the girl who …”

“Young are like the girl who was hurt in the dark and ate …”

Finally and suddenly, Spanish Dancer spoke. “We’re trying to change things and it’s been a long time and through our patience knowing it’ll end we’re like the girl who ate what was given to her,” YlSib translated. “Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl, eating not what she wanted but what was given to her.”

I opened my mouth. The tall Ariekes leaned over me, multiply unblinking. “Oh, my God, it knows,” I said. “What I’m trying to do. Did you hear?”

“Yes.” “Yes.”

“It made me two different, contradictory things. Compared them to me.”

“Yes.” They were more cautious than me, but I smiled till they couldn’t not smile back.

We broke off late, when the Ariekei grew so needy for the god-drug voice they couldn’t work anymore, withdrew into shaking confusion. I slept uncovered on the slightly giving floor, until Yl or Sib shook me awake and gave me some inadequate breakfast. I could tell by the translucence of the tower-skin that it was day again. My pupils were there, better: EzCal had given their morning broadcast.

YlSib told me EzCal had discovered I was gone. They were searching for me. Squads were in the city. “You aren’t just out alone anymore,” they said. “You’re on the run.” “You’re hiding.” They didn’t have to say One of us.

All day we worked at the inadequate similes of the Ariekei. It got me exhausted and impatient. As it grew dark I heard the moist opening of the room, and Bren came in. I took hold of him passionately, and he kissed me but held me back. I broke off when I saw what followed him. He had with him one of the Absurd.

“It’s been a bastard journey.” He laughed very shortly.

The thing was weak. Bren had it at the end of a rigid prod and shackles that coursed constantly with current. Otherwise it would easily have overcome him. The Languageless thing was wounded from that constant burning. Its giftwing was strapped to it, its legs were hobbled. I’d known this was the plan, but I couldn’t believe Bren had succeeded.

“Christ,” I said. “How did you do it? Oh, Jesus, look at it. This is horrible. You look like a torturer.”

“Yes, it really is,” he said.

Spanish Dancer and the other Ariekei surrounded it. It strained and failed to reach for them. They tottered back, came forward, morbidly curious, it looked like.

“How is it in Embassytown?” I said.

“They’re afraid,” he said. “They probably think you and I are working for the enemy. Or they’re saying they do.”

“The Absurd?” I said. “That’s …”

“Absurd, yes.”

“It’s crazy.”

“You know how they are,” he said. People would say it even as they knew it made little sense. They were right to be afraid. The Absurd were coming.

“How did you get it?”

“In all the ways you can imagine,” Bren said. “False papers, bribery, misdirection, intimidation. Creeping at midnight. Violence.

All that.”

“Now we can actually test things,” I said.

Bren took datchips from his bag. “Here,” he said. “This lot can have a bit of control over themselves. So you’re not totally beholden to the broadcasts. We can get them out of here.”

“Why exactly do you want them to lie?” Yl or Sib said. I stared at them. They hadn’t understood at all. They’d thrown their lot in with a plan just because it was a plan.

“It’s what the lying means,” Bren said to them. “Why do you think we’re leaving the city?” They shrugged.

“It’s about how symbols work for them,” I said. “I never thought we could shift that. But you know what made me change my mind? That there are already Ariekei who’ve done it.” I pointed at the captive. “They’ve managed to do what Surl Tesh-echer and Spanish Dancer and this lot have wanted to do for years. They’ve got new minds. And they’re using them to kill us.”

It was the freakish precision with which the Absurd coordinated attacks that had started me thinking. They were communicating: there was no other explanation for such efficient murder. Languageless, they still needed and made community, though they might not have known that’s what they were doing: each probably believed itself trapped in vengeful solitude even as the violence they committed together disproved it.

I’d seen them gesticulate. Their commandos or commanders indicating with their giftwings. The Absurd had invented pointing. With the point they’d conceived a that. They’d given the jag of the body, the outthrust limb, power to refer. That that was the key. From it had followed other soundless words.

That. That? No, not that: that.

Each word of Language meant just what it meant. Polysemy or ambiguity were impossible and with them most tropes that made other languages languages at all. But thatness faces every way: it’s flexible because it’s empty, a universal equivalent. That always means and not that other, too. In their lonely silent way, the Absurd had made a semiotic revolution, and a new language.

It was base and present tense. But its initial single word was actually two: that and not-that. And from that tiny and primal vocabulary, the motor of that antithesis spun out other concepts: me, you, others.

The code they’d created was quite unlike the precise mapping they’d grown up knowing. But it was Language that was the anomaly: this new crude thing of flailing fingers and murderous stamping was closer by far to what we spoke, was at last cousin-tongue to those of sentients across the immer.

“We could never learn to speak Language,” I said. “We only ever pretended. Instead the Absurd have learnt to speak like us. The Ariekei in this room want to lie. That means thinking of the world differently. Not referring: signifying. I thought that was impossible. But look.” I pointed at the thing that wanted to kill me. “That’s what they’ve done. Every time they point, they signify. So far the price is way too high. But now we know Ariekei can do it. And teaching this lot that without taking their wings means teaching them to lie.

“Similes start … transgressions. Because we can refer to anything. Even though in Language, everything’s literal. Everything is what it is, but still, I can be like the dead and the living and the stars and a desk and fish and anything. Surl Tesh-echer knew that was Language straining to … bust out of itself. To signify.” That’s why it had, with so strange a strategy, come at lying through us. I hadn’t brought Scile’s books with me but I’d gone over them many times, learnt from and argued with them, and I knew what I needed to. “I had to be hurt and fed to be speakable, because it had to be true. But what they say with me … That’s true because they make it.

“Similes are a way out. A route from reference to signifying. Just a route, though. But we can push them down it, even that last step, all the way.” It became clearer to me as I spoke. “To where the literal becomes …” I stopped. “Something else. If similes do their job well enough, they turn into something else. We tell the truth best by becoming lies.”

Not paradoxes, I wanted to say; these weren’t paradoxes, they weren’t nonsense. “I don’t want to be a simile anymore,” I said. “I want to be a metaphor.”

PART EIGHT

THE PARLEY

25

We heard strange sounds, and saw vessels rising, heading out of Embassytown and the city. Most were corvids crossbred of biorigging and bloodless tech. There were spiny church-sized hulks among them, older than Embassytown.

“I can’t believe they got those things up,” I said.

“They’re not as fierce as they look,” Bren said. “They were survey ships once. It’s all theatre. Even with the, whisper it, Bremen arsenal, we don’t have a hope.”

Bren had once, with his doppel, been party to hidden arrangements. They’d debriefed spies and double- and triple-agents. “Wyatt was clever,” he said. “He did exactly the right amount and kind of not talking about what he had access to to make it scary. But it was nothing.”

The fleet lumbered away on their doomed sorties. Taking off my aeoli in the sealed air-breathing room, seeing the Ariekei wait for me, I was exhausted, and had to close my eyes.

Our own flight from the city was complicated: between four Terre and the Ariekei we were able to push and pull our Absurd prisoner with us, but not easily. It had berserker strength. We had to administer charges to it often, and tug it hurting from the punishment.

“Let’s leave it,” said Yl.

“Can’t,” said Bren. He was the most assiduous of us in trying to communicate with it, whenever we stopped. He got nowhere. It hardly looked at him, focused its enraged attention on the addicted Ariekei.

“They’re going into battle,” Bren said, indicating the sky. “It’s pointless but I respect them for it a bit. EzCal are going to fight.” Efforts at negotiation were stillborn and the Absurd came closer. Refugee Terre from arable outposts were trekking to Embassytown. The journey overwhelmed many of them, and left their bodies to degrade from within in suits and biorigging, into mulch that wouldn’t fertilise this soil. “EzCal are wondering if they can just fight their way out of all this.” As if pugnacity could outweigh the simplicity of numbers.

“I’ll give them this,” Bren said. “EzCal will be on the field. It was Ez who insisted. The bloody convivials are over. Back home it’s … bad.” I’d left only a few tens of hours ago, but now it was the day after the parties. Poor Embassytown.

We took evasive ways but there were too many of us to be really secretive. We relied on the chaos that Embassytown and the city were accelerating in each other. We crawled through tunnels between bones, and waited and shocked our captive into stupor when we saw patrols of Ariekei, humans, or both, clearing the streets, shooting the mindless.

It was difficult, peering across skin plateaus to where constables of our race and Ariekei enforced a brutal order. YlSib had repeatedly to whisper You must be quiet to Spanish Dancer and its companions. I made frantic arm movements to hush them, which of course they didn’t understand. More flyers went over our heads. We hid from regiments on the way to the front.

I kept up efforts to teach. We tried to shield our Ariekene companions from the sounds of the speakers when EzCal’s (now prerecorded) utterings began—we holed up and they listened instead to the datchips we’d brought, dosing themselves in small triumph, defeating the tyranny of god-drug’s rhythms while their fellow-citizens stampeded for the voice. I don’t know how they kept track of which chip each of them had heard and was therefore spent to them.

Our prisoner could see what they were doing, as they hunched, fanwings spread. I imagine that it looked with disgust. Certainly it strained in its shackles.

We quickly had our catechism. I drew it from what Spanish Dancer had said. I whispered it in Anglo-Ubiq; YlSib spoke it in Language. Bren, I saw, mouthed the simile of me that he’d first spoken a long time ago.

“You’re trying to change things,” I said. YlSib repeated in Language. “You want change like the girl who ate what was given her. So you’re like me. Those who aren’t trying to change anything are like the girl who didn’t eat what she wanted but what was given to her: they’re like me. You’re like that girl who ate. You are the girl who ate. You’re like the girl. You are the girl. And so are the others, who aren’t like you.”

The first time YlSib moved from you are like to you are the Ariekei started very visibly. That succulently strange lie you are, born out of the truth, you are like, that they’d already asserted. And its contradiction, too, their enemies as like me as they were. We showed them how their own arguments came close to making liars of them.

Addicted vehicles galloped by us into the wilderness. In the morning YlSib took us to a transporter. It was blunt and ugly but full of breathable air. We rode an unseen pillow of vented particles following the tracks of the Embassytown-and-city troops.

In empty suburbs were scattered gangs of zelles, their Ariekei dead, looking forlornly for things to power. Bren drove our mongrel conveyance. It was nowhere near as fast as the military craft that had gone out, but it exceeded our walking pace, punted on its way by swinging side-limbs like gondoliers’ poles. Through hollowed-out window-eyes I watched the city recede. At first there were outskirt dwellings and warehouses descending into muck, but they ended and the sky came down to meet us.

We raised dust. Spined bushes shuffled out of our way, so paths opened for us in the fields, stretching for many metres ahead then began to fracture, to branch off in the possible directions we might take. The Ariekene battery-beasts moved around my legs. Behind us the shrubs crawled back to their previous positions. The city was a line of towers, rotund halls like unplanted bulbs. It receded.

I looked at it a long time. I shielded my eyes as if that made for magic binoculars, but I couldn’t see through it to the smoke or Terre towerblocks of Embassytown. I wondered if there were travellers among the Ariekei, and where if anywhere were other cities from which and to where they might go. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know.

The zelles grew restive before their owners: they were less able to fight their addiction. Over the hours, the Ariekei huddled as low as their intricate bulks allowed against the pipes and lights in the vehicle. One by one they enfolded their fanwings over datchips.

You are like the girl, you are the girl. They are like the girl, they are the girl.

“,” YlSib said to them: Repeat it.

We are like the girl, the Ariekei said. You are the girl, YlSib said, and the Ariekei scuttled, an excitement that pleased me. They couldn’t do it but understood, in some alien abstract, what they were trying to do. The girl … some said, and some  … we … or  … us … or  … it’s like … Poor YlSib, poor Spanish. I was relentless.

“What’s that?” I’d seen something scatter a trail kilometres behind us. There was another motion mark, to the west, and soon overhead was another tiny gusting machine. A very few other transports followed us, got closer and visible. A many-wheeled cart on liquid suspension; a truck all Terretech but for biorigged weapons; one-person centaurs, headless equine frames at the front of each of which sat an aeolied woman or man. A glider climbed thermals. Bren stopped us. YlSib got out as the exodus approached.

Other vehicles slowed too. Other drivers and pilots peered out of their windows. Behind me, hidden in our machine, the Absurd hissed, unhearing its own self. The escapees were like YlSib: city exiles. Runaway Staff, I imagined, as well as those not fleeing such grandiose pasts. The glider landed and Shonas leaned out. I wondered where DalTon were. The city-dwellers were wary, but they mostly knew each other, greeted each other and swapped brief information about the Absurd, and the Embassytown and city forces.

When we drove on again, we did so together in a little entourage. The glider overhead signalled to us with its wings and wing-lights. “Tell Spanish to come here,” I said to YlSib. “Tell it what I say.” I pointed out of the chariot’s eyes. Spanish Dancer didn’t look in the direction of my gesture. “Look out and upward at the machine above us,” I, then YlSib, said. Sometimes when I spoke for the Ariekei, I unthinkingly mimicked the precision of Language as translated into Anglo-Ubiq. “The vessel overhead, the colours on its wings, the way they move—it’s telling us things. It’s talking to us.”

Spanish Dancer looked with some of its eyes at the plane, with some of them at YlSib, and with one at me. I stared at that eye. Yl-Sib’ve told you, but do you know it’s me speaking? I thought.

“It doesn’t understand,” Yl or Sib said. “It can tell I’m not lying, I think, but it can tell that the plane’s not talking to us either.”

“But it is,” I said.

When dawn came we veered, to avoid EzCal’s force, to bypass the camp.

“Come on, come on,” Bren said to himself. We were desperate to reach the Absurd before the combined troops did. “They’re in no hurry,” said Bren. “We’ll overtake them. They don’t want to fight anyway—they’re going to try to negotiate.”

“The problem is,” I said, “they can’t.”

I could still see the glider. The other craft were behind, close enough for us to wave at their drivers. By midmorning gas-trees filled the plateau ahead, a canopy of thousands of house-size flesh-bags bobbing in breezes, straining at the ground. One by one the other craft peeled away from behind us. “Hey,” I said.

“They can’t come through here,” Bren said. Only the three centaurs were with us now. YlSib looked nervously at each other.

“Bren,” said one. “They’re little, we’re not.” “We can’t go through here either.” “Not secretly.” “We’ll leave tracks …”

“Have you not been listening?” he said. He yanked at the controls and if anything accelerated. “We don’t have any time. We have to get there fast. So please get to work. You should be teaching. Because it isn’t enough for us to get there: we have a job to do when we do.”

But it was impossible to concentrate as we approached the forest. Some of the trees moved weakly out of our way, hauled by roots, but most were too slow. I braced. The carriage’s jutting legs scythed through rope trunks. In our passing trees soared straight up, dangling their broken tethers. We left a line of them accelerating skyward as we cut into the woodland. Through the rear windows I saw the centaurs carrying their riders over the coiled stumps we left behind. There wasn’t much debris: it had flown away.

“Beyond this forest and then a few kilometres,” Bren said, voice shaking with our motion. “That’s where the armies are.”

Bloated treetops buffeted each other above. There were darks and shadows of layered variety around us, in which, I abruptly thought, there might be anything: Ariekene ruins, such impossible things. In our wake was a wedge of sky into which the dislodged trees rose in strict formation until they reached wind and scattered. It was because of that gap in the forest that I saw the plane twisting in dogfight turns.

“Something’s happening,” I said. We craned to see it curve up and the weapons below its nose flare, against another, attacking flyer.

“Fucking Pharotekton damn,” Bren said.

We couldn’t hide. Wherever we veered we’d announce our route in soaring trees, so we did nothing but try to increase our speed, the centaur-riders jabbing rifles behind us. Detonations sounded and from the tops of explosion clouds bobbed trees and their ragged remains tugging tails of smoke-matter and vegetation.

Shonas, in his glider, fired. For a moment I thought we were being chased down by his enemy DalTon, that I was collateral in someone else’s drama, but the attacker flew jackknifes no human could have piloted. EzCal had ordered an Ariekene vessel to take us, to stop us reaching the army they must realise was our destination.

The centaurs scattered into bladdery undergrowth. I heard YlSib jabbering Language. They were telling Spanish Dancer what was happening.

“Maybe I can …” Bren said, and I wondered what plan he had. The glider caromed across our field of vision into the ground, burst in a splash of rising trees. Yl and Sib howled to see Shonas’s death.

I hadn’t believed, not really, that EzCal would spare a craft for this, for us, now. I screamed and the ground under us burst.

I woke to noise. I coughed and cried out and looked into the many eyes of an Ariekes. Above it I saw our ripped-up chassis letting the sky and swaying vegetation through. Beside me was the motionless face of another Ariekes, dead. I thought for moments I was dying. I pulled my aeoli mask up, as the living Ariekes tugged me with its giftwing and pulled me from the overturned vehicle, through a big rip.

It wasn’t many seconds since we’d been wrecked, I realised. I stumbled and leaned on Spanish Dancer. We were in a crater, edged by vegetation stretching up on frayed stems.

There was more than one Ariekene dead. The living were hauling out of the hollow, dragging Bren and Yl and Sib with them. The Absurd stumbled disoriented, and one of the wounded Ariekei shoved it, sent it towards us, jabbed its giftwing in our direction. We heard a gasp, and up from the forest at the edges of our brutal clearing went another tree, this one dangling a tangled man, one of the centaur outriders, whose mount had thrown him. He clung, but he was tiny-high very fast, and whatever had snared him gave and he abruptly fell, without a cry I could hear as the plant kept rising. We didn’t see him land but he couldn’t have lived.

I stumbled over wrecked biorigging. By the time the murderous flyer was back above the bombsite it would have seen no life. We watched it from our hide a few metres of forest in. It circled several times and headed out, toward the Languageless army.

26

“We have to walk,” Bren said. “A couple of days, maybe. We have to get through the forest.” The Embassytown army were ahead, but we knew they would delay engaging, and we still hoped to reach the attackers before them. Everything, though, depended on whether we could teach the Ariekei what we had to. Every couple of hours we stopped on our limping, blistered way, and repeated a lesson or tried a new one. Neither the Ariekei nor their batteries seemed to tire. I don’t know if or how they mourned their companions. Even our captive tramped before us stolidly, seemingly subdued by the environs or the attack or something.

Bren guided us with some handheld tech. I was conscious of the forest’s darkness, coloured by the bruisey flora. The wood was full of noises. Things of radial and spiral form moved around us. We bewildered the animals—we didn’t read as predators to the prey nor vice versa, and they were neither afraid of nor threatening to us. They watched us quizzically, those with eyes. Once one of the Ariekei said something dangerous was near us. A , big as a room, opening and closing its teeth. It would surely have attacked the Ariekei had they been alone, but its confusion at the sight of us aliens, uncoded in its instinct, stilled it, so we saved them.

They’d rescued a clutch of the datchips, but not all. They would have to husband them. One by one, as they had to, the Ariekei took themselves into the privacy of the wood and listened hard to EzCal’s voice, catching us up, a little high but clearer-headed.

We kept on into the evening, and the forest got sparse, until it was tree-flecked grassland under the glimmer of Wreck. We granted ourselves a little sleep: mostly, though, my priority was to teach.

You are like the girl, you are the girl.

“Sweet Jesus,” I said. “Just fucking say it.” Their urgency, in fact, I’m as certain as I can be, was at least as great as mine.

“YlSib,” I said. “Ask them this. Do they know who I am?” Language. The Ariekei murmured. She’s the girl who was … I interrupted. “Really know, I mean. Do they know what a girl is? They know I’m a simile, but do they know that the girl is me? What do they think you are, YlSib? How many?”

“You know what she’s asking,” Bren said. “Tallying Mystery.” Did the Ariekei think an Ambassador one person or two? Staff had always told us it was a pointless, untranslatable, impolite question.

“I’m sorry but I need them to understand that you’re two people because I need them to understand that I’m one. That these bloody squawks I make are language. That I’m talking to them.” The Ariekei watched one meat-presence emitting noises more quickly and loudly than usual to the others.

After a silence Bren said, “It’s never been something Ambassadors have been exactly keen to make clear.”

“Make it clear,” I said. “Ambassadors don’t get to be the only real people anymore.”

I don’t believe we could have overturned generations of Ariekene thinking, even with so avant-garde a group as this, had they not known somewhere, to some degree, that each of us was a thinking thing. Spanish and its comrades responded at first as if of course, so what; then slowly as YlSib pressed the point many times, with growing fascination, confusion, or what might be anger or fear. At last I saw what I hoped was a fitting sense of revelation.

She is speaking, YlSib said to them. The girl who ate what was given to her. Like I speak to you.

“Yes,” I said, as the Ariekei stared. “Yes.”

Language was the unit of Ariekene thought and truth: asserting my sentience in it YlSib made a powerful claim. They told them that I was speaking, and Language insisted then that there must be other kinds of language than Language.

“Make them say it,” I said. “That what I’m doing is speaking.”

Spanish Dancer said it. The human in blue is speaking. The others listened. They struggled, but one by one managed to repeat it.

“They believe it,” I said. This was where it began to change.

“Translate,” I said to YlSib. “You know me,” I said to the Ariekei. “I’m the girl who ate, etcetera. I’m like you, and you’re like me, and I’m like you. I am you.” One of them shouted. Something was happening. It spread among them. Spanish Dancer stared at me.

“Avice,” said Bren in warning.

“Tell them what I say,” I said. I looked at Spanish. I met its almost-eyes as urgently as if I were talking to a human. “Tell it. I waited for things to be better, Spanish, so I’m like you. I am you. I took what was given to me, so I’m like the others. I am them.” I shone a torch on myself. “I glow in the night, I’m like the moon. I am the moon.” I lay down. “They know how we sleep, yeah? I’m so tired I lie as still as the dead, I’m like the dead. I’m so tired I am dead. See?”

The Ariekei were staggering. Their fanwings flared, folded and opened. They reached for me with their giftwings, making Bren gasp, but they didn’t touch me. They said words and noises.

“What’s happening?” Yl or Sib said.

“Don’t stop translating,” I said. “Don’t you dare.” The Ariekei sounded together, a moment’s horrible choir. They retracted their eyes. “Don’t stop. I’m the girl who ate blah blah. What have you said with me all this time? Everything you said’s like me is me. You’ve already done it. It’s all just things in terms of other things.” I stood before Spanish Dancer. “Tell it its name. Say: There were humans a long time ago who wore clothes that were black and red like your markings. Spanish dancers.” I heard YlSib neologise “.” “I can’t speak your name in Language, so I gave you a new one. Spanish Dancer. You’re like, you are a Spanish dancer.”

One by quick one the Ariekei shouted, then went silent. Their eyes stayed in. They swayed. No one spoke for a long time.

“What’ve you done?” whispered Sib. “You’ve driven them mad.”

“Good,” I said. “We’re insane, to them: we tell the truth with lies.”

Like sped-up film of plants in the sun, Spanish’s coral at last budded. It started to speak and said two trickles of gibberish. It stopped and waited and started again. Yl and Sib and Bren translated but I didn’t need them. Spanish Dancer spoke slowly, as if it was listening hard to everything it said.

You are the girl who ate. I’m . I’m like you and I am you. Someone human gasped. Spanish craned its eye-coral and stared at its own fanwing. Two eyes came back to look at me. I have markings. I’m a Spanish dancer. I didn’t take my eyes off it. I’m like you, waiting for change. The Spanish dancer is the girl who was hurt in darkness.

“Yes,” I whispered, and YlSib said “,” Yes.

Other Ariekei were speaking. We are the girl who was hurt.

We were like the girl …

We are the girl …

“Tell them their names,” I said. “You move like a Terre bird: you’re Duck. You drip liquid from your Cut-mouth, so you’re Baptist. Explain that, YlSib, can you? Tell them, tell them the city’s a heart …”

I’m like the liquid-dripping man, I am him …

With the boisterous astonishment of revelation they pressed the similes by which I’d named them on until they were lies, telling a truth they’d never been able to before. They spoke metaphors.

“God,” Yl said.

“Jesus Christ Pharotekton,” said Bren.

“God,” said Sib.

The Ariekei spoke to each other. You’re the Spanish dancer. I could have wept.

“Jesus Christ, Avice, you did it.” Bren hugged me for a long time. YlSib hugged me. I held on to them all. “You did it.” We listened to the Ariekene new speakers call each other things in unprecedented formulations.

There were two poor bewildered remnants that could not, no matter what I said, that stared at their companions uncomprehending. But the others spoke in new ways. I’m not as I’ve ever been, Spanish Dancer told us.

Much later, when we’d been hours in our camp, I took a datchip, slowly, mindful of how long it had been since a fix, and played it. It was EzCal saying something about the shape of their clothes. Those two still unchanged, Dub and Rooftop I’d called them, which hadn’t shifted with the others, responded with the usual addict fervour to the sounds.

None of the others did. I looked at the Ariekei and they at us. They took slow steps, at last, in all directions. I don’t feel … one said. I am, I am not …

“Play another,” Bren said. EzCal spoke thinly to us about some other nonsense. The Ariekei looked at each other. I am not … another said.

I picked up another and made EzCal mutter the importance of maintaining medical supplies, and still only those two reacted. The others listened with nothing more than curiosity. I tried more, and while Dub and Rooftop stiffened the altered Ariekei made querying noises at EzCal’s ridiculous expositions.

“What happened?” YlSib stuttered. “Something’s happened to them.”

Yes. Something in the new language. New thinking. They were signifying now—there, elision, slippage between word and referent, with which they could play. They had room to think new conceptions.

I threw the chips to them, laughing, and they began to go through them. Our clearing was filled with overlapping voices of Ez and Cal.

“We changed Language,” I said. A sudden change—it couldn’t undo. “There’s nothing to … intoxicate them.” There only ever had been because it was impossible, a single split thinkingness of the world: embedded contradiction. If language, thought and word were separated, as they just had been, there was no succulence, no titillating impossible. No mystery. Where Language had been there was only language: signifying sound, to do things with and to.

The Ariekei sifted the datchips, listening with disbelief at how they heard what they heard. That’s what I think. Spanish Dancer remained bent, but its eyes looked up at me. Perhaps it knew now, in ways it could not have done before, that what it heard from me were words. It listened.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and Spanish Dancer cooed and, harmonising with itself, said: “.”

27

One by one as the night went on the Ariekei withdrew, and one by one they began to make terrible sounds. I fretted about the noise, but what could we do? Spanish Dancer, Baptist, Duck, Toweller, all but Dub and Rooftop, which looked on without a scrap of comprehension, went through what sounded agonies. They didn’t all call out or scream, but all of them in different ways seemed as if they were dying.

YlSib was alarmed, but neither Bren nor I were surprised by what we heard: the noise of old ways coming off in scabs. Pangs of something finishing, and of birth. Everything changes now: I thought that very explicitly, each word. I thought: Now they’re seeing things.

In the beginning was each word of Language, sound isomorphic with some Real: not a thought, not really, only self-expressed worldness, speaking itself through the Ariekei. Language had always been redundant: it had only ever been the world. Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.

“Shouldn’t we …?” Yl said, and had nothing with which to finish it.

The said was now not-as-it-is. What they spoke now weren’t things or moments anymore but the thoughts of them, pointings-at; meaning no longer a flat facet of essence; signs ripped from what they signed. It took the lie to do that. With that spiral of assertion-abnegation came quiddities, and the Ariekei became themselves. They were worldsick, as meanings yawed. Anything was anything, now. Their minds were sudden merchants: metaphor, like money, equalised the incommensurable. They could be mythologers now: they’d never had monsters, but now the world was all chimeras, each metaphor a splicing. The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.

No wonder it made them sick. They were like new vampires, retaining memories while they sloughed off lives. They’d never be cured. They went quiet one by one, and not because their crisis ended. They were in a new world. It was the world we live in.

“You have to show the others,” I said to Spanish Dancer. Rudely interrupted its birth. It deserved a different passage but we had no time. It listened in its queasy awe and newness. “The deaf ones. You can talk to them. They think they’re beyond language at all, but you, you can show them what they’ve done.” Language was never possible. We never spoke in one voice.

In the sun, we saw figures kilometres off. Humans rattling slowly towards us. Small ships went overhead, heading back toward the city. “Look,” Bren said. “That one’s wounded.”

As we got closer we could see that there weren’t many Terre, maybe thirty or forty, hauling equipment or urging on slapdash-looking biorigging, rocking in cars. We saw them see us, and for a moment they seemed to be preparing weapons. Then they calmed.

“They must have seen this lot first,” Bren said of the Ariekei with us. “Thought it was an attack. But with us here they think we’re an Embassytown squad. They’re plantation staff.” Wilderness dwellers who had only now cleared their homesteads and outland farm-factories. They’d been in the path of the Languageless army and lost their nerve as the Absurd came at their lands killing all the humans they met and tearing their houses to the ground, murdering or recruiting the country Ariekei alongside which the Terre had lived.

More boats went overhead. They would probably not look long enough to see the Ariekei in our party, or that we were heading in the wrong direction. In fact they wouldn’t notice us at all: they were busy returning to the city. Several of the vessels, I could see, were bleeding.

Spanish Dancer whispered, called the humans things it couldn’t have called them before. It was paying close attention, as it had for hours, to our captive.

We avoided the refugees. “Depending how fast the Absurd are going,” Bren said, “we’ll reach them tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day—what is that, Muhamday, Ioday?” None of us had any idea.

“What about the Embassytowners?”

“We’ve avoided them. I think we went past them. They’ll still be stationed. Especially—” He pointed at the sky. “You saw the boats. The scouts’ve been wounded. EzCal knows they can’t win. They’ll have Ariekei and Terre at the front trying to negotiate.”

“Yeah, they’re not going to succeed, though,” Yl said.

“They won’t,” Bren said. “How can they? They don’t think the same at all.”

“Spanish understands what we have to do,” I said. “Have you seen how it’s being with the captive? It knows they are thinking the same, now. That they’re both thinking.”

It was a very new ecosystem to us, there with the sparse trees, where we watched Spanish and the other Ariekei work. Here the key predator was not the , with its big, nearly immobile body and limbs that could reach fast and far through trees, but fast that hunted by night. Vaguely related to the Ariekei themselves, the rear two limbs of the bipedal were ferocious weapons, as, of a more manipulable kind, was the arm that corresponded to the giftwing. fanwings were immobile. They peered through the dark with eyes attuned to motion. They were social hunters. They worked in concert to corral the dog-sized prey-animals of the plain.

We were too large for them to come for us, but they still watched. Flying things skittered at our torches: burrowing eaters of phosphorescent rot, used to honing in on glowing ground, emerged and gnawed confused at the pooled light.

We didn’t take the leash off our prisoner—we didn’t trust it or know how to decide if it became trustable. But we’d been treating it with less fear for days, and did so with even less now. The new ex-Host liars regarded it, and whispered to each other in words they’d used countless times, that now did very different things. By early morning something was changing. The Ariekei were circling the captive. It wasn’t gasping or lunging at them, or at me, or Bren or YlSib: it was watching us, and watching the other Ariekei.

28

Spanish Dancer and our captive circled. The others ringed them. Every few seconds one of the two would shove out its giftwing like a knife-fighter looking for an opening. It would sketch out some outline in the air: there would be a pause and the other would follow suit. Spanish’s fanwing frilled open and shut. The Languageless’s stub trembled.

The gesticulations were information, motion telegrams. Talking. They didn’t understand each other but they knew there was something to understand. And that was liberation. When they did make communication—something ridiculous, Spanish throwing a pulpy bud then pointing into the muttering wildlife where it lay, and the Absurd picking it up—their euphoria, even alien, was palpable.

Signifying, Spanish could speak through gesture now. For our captive that no longer had a name, perhaps the strangeness was greater. It had thought that without words, it had no language. Its comrades communicated with each other, never knowing they did, not across the chasm with untorn Ariekei; and mostly what they expressed to each other was the very hopelessness that made them believe they were incommunicado.

But in the panic of the attack and our escape, it had understood shove-and-point instructions to flee. It had watched Bren, YlSib and me speak and listen to each other with gestures for stress and clarity. The rest of the Absurd army never had to reflect on these behaviours. Spanish had learnt it could speak without speaking: the Absurd had learnt that it could speak, and listen.

“They were yanking it around,” Bren said. “It was impossible for it not to know what they meant: they were shoving it and pointing the same way. They made it obey them. Maybe you need violence for language to take.”

“Bren,” I said. “That’s crap. We were all running the same way. We were all trying to get out. We had the same intentions. That’s how it knew what we were doing.”

He shook his head. Formally, he said, “Language is the continuation of coercion by other means.”

“Bullshit. It’s cooperation.” Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren’t as contradictory as they sounded.

“Look,” I said. Pointed above the horizon. There was smoke, stains in the sky.

“It can’t be,” Bren said, as if to himself, as we moved as fast as we could. “They were going to wait.” He said it more than once. When specks appeared far off on the lichened downs, we pretended that there were many things they might be, until we came too close to deny that they were bodies.

We looked down an incline to the aftermath of war. Thousands of metres of remains. I was breathing very hard, through my aeoli, in horror. At this distance the specificities of carnage were hard to gauge. I was trying to estimate Terre versus Absurd, but the death was too tangled. In any case, many of the Ariekene corpses I saw must be EzCal’s forces, like the humans with which they lay.

We led our not-quite-captive. It was in its collar but we hadn’t shocked it for kilometres. Spanish Dancer drummed its hoofs. It looked at me and opened its mouths. It pointed at the ruination. It opened and closed its mouths and said to me: “.”

“Yes.”

“.”

“Yes. Too late.” We had not taught it that.

“.”

Strung out, artificially, druggedly alert, there was an unpleasant drag to my senses, as if things I saw or heard left residue when I turned from them. My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead. Everywhere were men and women burst open. There were Ariekei dead with fanwings and without, strewn together. Innards evolved on opposite ends of space alloyed in compound decay. There were corpse-fires and rubbish.

Wrecks. The aftermath was scored by lines of char culminated in craters, where fliers had come down. Bren sifted through junk, hands wrapped in rags. I copied him. It wasn’t quite so hard as I’d expected.

This had all happened perhaps two days before. These scenes made me careful and cold. I didn’t look too close at the faces of the scores of Embassytowner dead. I was too certain I’d see one I knew. Picking through remnants between those smoke pillars I tried to learn the history of the fight. There were many more Embassytown-and-city dead than Absurd. Fighters lay midaction, in mouldering stasis, hands and giftwings and weapons still on each other. We read these corpse dioramas for the stories of their creation.

“They have corvids,” I said. Strategising without speech, the Absurd were driving biorigged weapons. “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus, it’s an army, I mean it’s an army.”

Shockingly few combatants were left alive. A few mortally wounded Ariekei cycled their legs in the air, craning eyes. One cried out in Language, telling us that it was wounded. Spanish Dancer touched its giftwing. The Absurd moribund were dying with too much focus to notice us. On some I saw the bleed from fanwings newly excised—there were new recruits to that force even among the dying.

Pinioned under Ariekene dead was a woman still just alive, her broken aeoli wheezing oxygen into her. She looked at Bren and me as we tried to calm her and ask her, “What happened here?” But she only stared, terrified or air-starved out of speech. At last we laid her back down and gave her water. We couldn’t move her; her aeoli was dying. We found two others alive: one man couldn’t be woken; the other was conscious only of his impending death. All we got from him was that the Absurd had come.

Bren indicated ripped uniforms. “These are specialists.” He pointed at runnels out of the battlefield. “This wasn’t … These were outriders, this was a guard group, around something, that came in first.”

“The negotiators,” I said. He nodded slowly at me.

“Of course, yes. The negotiators. This was supposed to be a bloody parley. They gave it a try. My God.” He looked at the remnants around us. “The Languageless didn’t even slow.”

“And now they’re heading for the rest.” For the main mass of the Terre-Ariekei army.

We had to double back. We took an abandoned vehicle, cleaned the mess of war out of it. We sped along the cut through the marks of thousands of hooves. I was pressed against the Ariekei. Spanish and Baptist were crowding around the Absurd. They were sketching marks in the air, and the captive, if I could still describe it so, was doing the same.

It wasn’t long before we saw a line of figures. Bren stiffened. I knew how weak our plan was, but we had no choice. “It’s alright,” I said. “They’re Terre.”

A big, dirty derelict band, dressed like penitents, a trudging little town. There were children among them. They looked at us through their masks. They were as intense as monks, too. Some backed away, muttered among themselves. A few temporary leaders came closer, and a few soldiers, refugee from that ruination, in scorched uniforms.

The Ariekei stayed back. They kept the self-deafened close, disguised its injury. The humans told us they’d run from the depredations of the Absurd, from pioneer homesteads and biorigging farms. This was everyone running: they’d found each other. Been joined by the AWOL and soldiers from defeated units. They were behind their attackers now, were following them to the city, like those prey-fish that seek safety in their predator’s wake. They had no plans, only the vague sense that this might keep them alive a few days longer. Their passage in the tracks of the enemy was a despairing homage to their own defeat.

A militia-man told us, “We were with Ariekei. Leaders. The most eloquent, I suppose. There to communicate. We were there to protect them, the negotiators, give them space, time, when they were trying to get through to …” The soldiers had been instructed to do whatever was necessary while the Ariekene speakers struggled to make the Absurd understand them. “They were trying to talk to them.”

“How?” I said.

“No how.” I thought he’d said know-how and didn’t understand.

“There was no how,” he said. “We wondered. We could see the Absurd coming; they had fliers and weapons and vehicles, and there were thousands of them. We wondered what it was the Ariekei were planning. What they’d cooked up. It was only, Jesus … They got ready by listening to EzCal on datchip. A couple of us in the unit understand Language …” He paused at that inadvertent present tense. “… They told me what EzCal was saying, in the recordings. ‘You must make them understand.’ Again and again. In all different ways. ‘You must speak to them so they understand you.’ ” The man shook his head. “That’s what they got high on. When the Absurd came, they shouted at them through loudspeakers.”

“But they’re deaf,” I said. He shrugged. The wind sent his greasy hair rippling from under his battered helmet.

“We sent some of them out to meet … the enemy … close. Their plan must have been … Well, the Absurd just came through them. To us.” There’d been no plan at all. I looked at Bren. There’d been no secret strategy: only the knowledge of what had to happen, with no idea how.

“They tried to do it by fiat,” Bren said. The god-drug had hoped their ineluctable instructions would carry this. What despairing deity.

“Jesus,” I said. “Do you think they thought it would work?” There were a lot of dead back there. “Where are the rest of your army?” I said. “EzCal’s army?”

The man shook his head. “Most of them … us … never wanted to fight,” he said. “They wanted to beg. But they can’t even. Beg. Can’t make them hear. They’re retreating back to the city. Getting behind the blockades.” He shook his head slowly. “Those won’t stop them,” he said. There was nothing between the Absurd army and the city, and Embassytown.

The refugees watched us go. Told us it was in the wrong direction and shrugged when we ignored them. They gestured goodbye and good luck with a kind of dead politeness, a strange courtesy. At the edges of the mass, those most monkish ones watched us with hostility I’m certain most of them couldn’t have explained.

We travelled in their hoof-churnings, and stalked the Absurd from just beyond their sight. From thickets, from behind rises. It rained. We sprayed muck. It didn’t seem to get very dark that night; it was as if the stars and Wreck were shining unnaturally, so I could lean against Spanish Dancer and watch it sketch hand signs with the Ariekes that was no longer a prisoner, and I could see the grey landscape.

When dawn came, there were a few cams around us, gadding spastically. Intel-gatherers for the army, still transmitting. Our sound and motion attracted them, and they paced with us in a flitting corona. I looked straight into the lens of one, through the air to someone watching in Embassytown.

We could hear the Absurd, now. They were just one segment of landscape over. The cams swarmed suddenly away, over flora and geography. A corvid flew close overhead on some frantic wartime job, and we had to hope it had not seen us, that we wouldn’t be eradicated, so close.

There were no secret ways we could ensure a smaller group of Absurd would find us, no ways we could split one section of their expedition from the others. Each Languageless thought itself alone, though we knew that wasn’t true. The closest this huge vengeful mass would have to generals would be its unspeaking vanguard. We passed their flank, hidden by landscape, and made our way to a place they’d find us.

Finally, stinking in our suits, we left the vehicle. I was strongly conscious of what a scene we must have been. Four Terre. Me at the front. Behind me Bren, tense and ready. The marks of the journey had made YlSib easy to tell apart. They stood beside each other, each with a weapon poised.

The Ariekei. Ranged in a curve around us, as if they made up our group’s fanwing. Spanish Dancer was closest to me, and watched me with several of its eyes.

At the centre of the group stood the untethered Languageless. The thing that was no longer our enemy looked from one to another of its Ariekene companions. It made a motion with its giftwing. One by one most of the other Ariekei responded in a similar way. It made me a bit breathless to see.

There were two that didn’t. Dub and Rooftop watched the motions of their companions. Nothing they could understand was occurring.

Spanish Dancer said to me: “.” I stared awhile, and at last nodded. “You will,” I said. “We will. They will.”

“,” it said. Two noises came out of it that meant nothing to me. It said something rapidly in Language, and its companions, and Yl and Sib and Bren looked up sharply. tried again. “,” it said to me. I was silent. What could I say?

The first of the Absurd came. Fliers squalled over the country, must have seen us, but perhaps decided that we were too nothing to be blown away. A loose, fast-moving posse of tireless Absurd became visible, moving toward us. We braced. Someone said something about the plan.

Those at the front of the army, the groups a kilometre or so ahead of the main force, saw us. They stampeded up the scree and at us, pointing giftwings, directing segments of their own crowd, which peeled off into wedge-shapes, flanked us, in the unsaid strategy they thought merely rage. I could hear their hoofbeats. Then I could see the shades of their skins, the craned forks of their eyes, the flanges of their fanwing stubs, as they raised weapons.

“Now,” someone said, and I truly couldn’t say if it was me.

Spanish said something too quiet for me to quite hear, that I don’t think was in Language. It walked forward with the other leaders of its revolutionary group and the Absurd came with them. It went farther, stepped out and raised its giftwing and the stalk of its fanwing, so its injury was plain. It waved them like standards. It announced its status—I’m one of you—and urged its comrades to stop, gestured to all the incomers, wait, wait, wait, wait.

The Absurd army didn’t slow at all. I felt sick. “Courage,” Bren said, in French. I did not smile. The inchoate motion language fanwingless spoke was camouflaged by shared purpose. From their untidy ranks came a shot.

“Jesus,” I said. Spanish Dancer, , spoke with its voice and hands as its once-fellows approached to murder or brutalise it. I wondered what would happen to it if it were deafened now, now that Language was different for it. Spanish’s and the Absurd’s motions registered to the enemy as little as windblown plants.

They’re not ignoring, I thought. They don’t know. They didn’t know that these minds weren’t like the others they’d finished or changed, how could they? I dug among our packs.

“Show your fanwings!” I shouted to Spanish. “Show them you can hear!” YlSib began to translate, but Spanish was already unfurling, and the others were copying it, except for Dub and Rooftop, who did so only when Spanish told them to in Language. Another missile came close. “Tell Dub and Rooftop to get in front,” I said.

I made a datchip play, and the thin voice of EzCal exhorted us to something or other. But every one of the Ariekei had already heard that speech so did not react to it, and I cursed and threw it away.

“Oh,” said Bren. He understood. I fumbled again while the Absurd came close enough that I could hear their murder-croons. I spilled a handful of chips and finally got another to sound. EzCal said, We are going to tell you what it is that you must do.…

We Terre heard it as sound. Spanish Dancer and the others heard it too, now, as sound: they just cocked their fanwings quizzically. But Dub and Rooftop were still addicts. They snapped upright, shuddered so elementally it was as if gravity took them toward the source of the voice. They glazed.

“Yes,” said Bren.

I played another. Dub and Rooftop were swaying, recovering from EzCal’s first words; jerked giddily, they were caught up again. Rooftop shouted at what was, I realised, EzCal’s descriptions of trees.

Our self-defeaned Ariekes kept waving at the others, and Spanish and the others mimicked it, their own fanwings opening and closing, and in the middle of them all Dub and Rooftop lost themselves. I kept the sound going. “,” said Spanish, and I could think how horrible the sight of that powerless staggering must be to it, reminding it what it had been, making it watch its friends suffering in compulsion, but I wouldn’t cease.

As the first of the Absurd crested our rise and came toward us, weapons up, first one, then more, then many, hesitated. I pressed another chip and heard Bren say yes.

Every army has one soldier at its very front. A big Ariekes, its Cut- and Turn-mouths open as if it were howling, picking its feet high as it came for us. I was holding out a datchip as if it might stop it. Its eyes spread in all directions, one for each of us, watching Spanish, and the Ariekes that had been our captive jerking its arms as the Absurd did to each other, and Dub and Rooftop stumbling. If I was thinking anything I was praying. It was very close.

Abruptly the soldier stopped. It lowered its sputtering mace. It involuted its eyes, opened them again and watched us. I was still playing EzCal’s voice. It wasn’t the only motionless one, now. As if I were merciless, I made Dub and Rooftop dance their addiction. The Absurd gripped each other, gestured or stood still, watching.

“Don’t stop,” said Bren.

“,” said Spanish, and Bren said again, “Don’t.”

“What …?” said Sib.

“What is it?” said Yl.

The army of hopeless and enraged had been driven to murder by their memories of addiction, and the sight of their compatriots made craven to the words of an interloper species. That degradation was the horizon of their despair. I’d made them see the motions of their ex-selves hearing their god-drug—there was no mistaking that tarantella—but that other Ariekei had fanwings unfurled, could hear, but were unaffected.

There wasn’t supposed to be such a thing as uncertainty in the minds of the Absurd. Its sudden arrival arrested them. Our excaptive waved its giftwing and its stump. Stop, it was saying, and many in the army that faced us knew that it was saying so, and were stunned to know that they knew it.

Poor Rooftop, I thought, poor Dub. Ariekene dust coiled around me and I blinked. Thank God they never learnt to lie. We’d needed real addicts, to prove that the others were free, and the rage of the Absurd therefore misdirected. I kept Dub and Rooftop moving. I made them sick on god-drug. Spanish Dancer watched them, fanned its fanwing. I was shouting.

Information moved desperately slowly among the Absurd—even their quickest thinkers still had only a tenuous understanding that they could transmit information. What they said to each other at first with their waving and upheld limbs was simple: Don’t attack. Following that: Something is happening.

The information was discombobulated with distance, moving backward through the rank. At the front, gestures got close to: They can hear but are not addicted. Farther back, ranks of the Absurd told those behind them simply: Stop.

“,” said Spanish. Our Deaf went to the front of the army, and Spanish went with it. With the Absurd generals watching, the two of them—ostentatiously, in wing signs and sigils scraped in the earth, ideograms that startled me—started to talk.

There were many many hours, two days and nights of frustration and silences, while the army waited. Hesitated. Individuals kept coming up from the ranks to see what was happening. Every one that did was astonished: unaddicted Ariekei; Terre waiting respectfully; the process of slow dawning between hearing and Absurd, as we still questionably called them; scrawls in dirt.

Those with a little knowledge became agents of patience among the others. We could see their influence, by whatever gestural persuasions, when, toward the end of the second day, human refugees approached from the army’s flank, easily killable, but the fanwingless didn’t assault them.

The Terre must have realised that the Absurd had stopped, wondered at the strange calm and come to find its source, and the Languageless had let them. The refugees set up camp a way away from us, and watched.

It took a time before the boundary of comprehension between Absurd and ’s group, the New Hearing, was more fully breached, but nothing like so long as I’d once have expected. We weren’t teaching the deafened to communicate: we were showing them they already could, and did. It wasn’t incremental but revelatory; and revelations, though hard-won, are viral.

“We need EzCal here,” I said.

“They won’t come if they know what’s happened,” Bren said. “If they know that they’ve lost.”

Even if it means the end of the war? But I knew he was right. “Well, then we can’t tell them the truth. We see any vespcams we smash them. They can’t know what’s happened.”

Toweller and Baptist understood the mission we gave them. They wouldn’t have done a few days before. They returned to the city in a flier with the Absurd.

“They know what they have to do?” I said to Spanish Dancer.

“.” They’d sneak back in the wounded ship, take on the roles of loyal addict-soldiers, bringing news of a breakthrough. They’d tell EzCal that the Absurd had stopped, were just waiting, and that the god-drug and their entourage must come. It couldn’t occur to EzCal that they were being lied to. That was what we were relying on. How could it? They would, after all, hear it from Ariekei, in what they would think was Language. Say it like a Host.

“They know what to do when EzCal speaks to them?”

“.” They knew to seem as if it swept them over.

“They know to ask for them to speak, if too long goes by without?”

“.” They knew to mimic the addiction. They knew what they had to do.

The two different tribes of post-Language Ariekei shared symbols. The human refugees made no attempt to come closer. “Did we do it?” I said.

Surrounded by semiosis, Dub at last juddered and abruptly achieved change and withdrawal, apropos of nothing I saw, gasping and speaking newly. Its companions watched its unexpected transcendence or fall. Rooftop, though, couldn’t reach it. It dosed itself with the last of the datchips. It was the only addict left among us.

I don’t know what the parameters of friendship were among the Ariekei, but I think that they must all have been sad. And Rooftop, as its name was, must have been lonely. It watched the scratch-and-gesture conversations around it, and I thought that being surrounded by the changed must be, for it, like a mild hell. You did save us, I thought at it. Without you we’d have died. As if that could comfort it.

Every day Spanish told me of the progress. When I consider what it was that actually happened, what the Absurd and the New Hearing achieved, it took no time at all. I don’t know how many days of camping among these silent discussions it had been when I realised that there were cams watching us, eddying nervously in the wind. But I knew we were past ready.

“Jesus,” I said, and pointed them out to Bren. “Christ Pharotekton.” I stood below the cams, gesturing at them like newly expressive Ariekei, beckoning them.

They were scouts from a school around EzCal’s ship. It couldn’t be far: they’d come following the directions and promises of Toweller and Baptist. Some vespcams seemed to want to shy away; others focused on us. It was too late for the god-drug to turn back now, block transmissions, pretend ignorance, even if they understood what they were seeing. The feeds from those little lenses were being watched not only in the oncoming ship, but by thousands of Embassytowners.

“Listen,” I shouted, and was aware of many Ariekene eyes on me. The lenses scudded, anxious midges, came a little lower. “Listen to me,” I said and grit my teeth in the wind. “Listen to me.”

“They must’ve been wondering what the delay was,” Bren said. “What was keeping the Absurd. How long have they been waiting? Hiding, waiting to die, wondering what’s the holdup.”

“Listen,” I said. “Get them here. Get EzCal here now.” I pointed at Spanish Dancer, at the fanwingless to which it spoke, and first Spanish, then one by one all the hundreds of Absurd, pointed at me. The cams buzzed, changing positions, and I kept my eyes on one fixed point, as if the little swarm were one entity into whose eye I stared. “Get them here now. EzCal … Can you see me, EzCal?” I jabbed my hand. “Cal, get here now and bring your fucking sidekick with you.

“You get to live, so spread the word. Embassytown, can you hear me? You get to live. But you better get here and find out what you have to do, EzCal. Because there are some conditions.”

29

I’ll give EzCal this. When they didn’t speak, when they stood to look out over the ridge down kilometres of country and the camp-town of the Absurd, they looked epic. They didn’t deserve it.

They’d come to affect baroque: perhaps it was a comfort to some Embassytowners. There were trims of glitter on Cal’s clothes, a crest on his aeoli mask. Even Ez wore purple.

In silence their failings were transmuted, or camouflaged at least. Cal’s sneer passed for regal: Ez’s sulking a thoughtful reserve. They had a small entourage: people who had recently been my colleagues. Some greeted me and Bren when their flier landed. Simmon shook my hand. Southel had come, and MagDa. I couldn’t describe their expressions. Wyatt was with them, still guarded, it seemed, but consulted, great operator, prisoner-vizier. He didn’t meet my eye. Baptist and Toweller stepped down, back from Embassytown, greeted their companions. Greeted me. The Embassytowners watched them, in what must have been great shock. This journey hadn’t turned out as expected.

The officers who’d come had weapons. I know that if the situation had been a little different, EzCal might have tried to have them kill us, as they’d tried to kill us when we travelled. Now, though, the remnants of the Staff in their pointless retinue and the officers and even JasMin, who were there, wouldn’t let them. By now everyone in Embassytown had seen the incoming army, and my transmission, and everyone knew that we had stopped them. All Cal had for a last few hours was the pretence that he ruled.

Those Terre refugees had come closer day on day: they were mingling with us now, though mostly all they did was watch our interactions with the Absurd. Ez looked into the sky, and back across the distance toward Embassytown.

Much later I’d hear stories of his actions during my travels: how he’d contrived to test Cal’s patience; the plans for what could only be considered a coup, which Cal had crushed more in contempt than anger. Ez eyed us. I could see him calculating. Jesus, do you never stop? I thought. I didn’t give a shit about his story. To Embassytown and the Languageless, Ez and Cal’s squabbles were vastly less important than that they were EzCal.

I stood with delegates from the Absurd army, twenty or thirty thrown up from the ranks. “So it’s you I’m talking to, is it, Avice Benner Cho?” Cal said coolly. “You speak for …” He indicated the fanwingless closest to me, our erstwhile captive.

“Theuth,” I said. “It goes by Theuth.”

“What do you mean ‘it goes by Theuth,’ ” he said. “It doesn’t go by anything.…”

“We call it Theuth,” I said. “So that’s what it goes by. I’ll show you how to write that down. Or better, Theuth will.”

Bad enough to be defeated, isn’t it? Even now you’d try to take us out, Cal: me, Bren, the rest of us. Because the way we saved Embassytown means the end of your reign, as it has, look, ended; and even though your whole damn prefecture was a function of despair and collapse, you’d rather lose it on your terms than be saved on ours. That was what I wanted to say.

There were Absurd with Theuth and Spanish, those most adept at the generation of the ideogrammatic script they were inventing, the most intuitive at the reading and performing of gestures. It wasn’t a stable group. Even a few brave Ariekene addicts had arrived, too, come all the way from the city subsisting on pilfered datchips, to see the historic agreement, the change. Rooftop was there, playing its own sound files to itself in sadness. Human runaways squatted on overlooking ledges coloured with Ariekene mottled moulds, and watched the negotiations. They came and went as they wanted.

Cal, perhaps Ez too, tried to depict what was happening as protracted discussion. Really it was just a slow process of explaining facts, and receiving orders, in a nascent script. What took days was making sure the Absurd understood, and understanding what they wanted us to do about it.

You’ve no authority, I could have said to Cal. This is a surrender. You’d love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts. But you’re just here because I told the Absurd you were the one they’d have to tell what to do. And the humans watching, the refugees scowling under their cowls, are going to remember how it’s obvious that you don’t know what’s happening. You’re doing a lot of hanging around during this particular change of epoch, because you’re only a detail.

Cams went everywhere. There were a proliferation of independent home-rigged kits, or those hijacked or gone rogue and uploading their feeds to whatever frequencies they could. Embassytown was watching on the other side of all the lenses.

At night the Ariekei surrounded my party. We asked them to: I still wasn’t certain EzCal wouldn’t attempt revenge.

“What’s going to happen?” MagDa said. They looked at me with wariness and respect.

“It’ll be different,” I said, “but we will be here. Now they know they can be cured it changes everything. How is it in the city? And in Embassytown?”

Panic and expectancy. Among the Ariekei it was still mostly confusion. There was fighting between factions—they’d seemed united under EzCal’s proxy , and obeyed EzCal’s orders, but now they fought for reasons difficult to make sense of.

“We’ll—they’ll—do everything they can to spread this,” I said. “No more fixes necessary. We’re trying to work together. Theuth mostly speaks for the Languageless now. Spanish is talking to us—to YlSib, obviously, but it can even …” MagDa hadn’t seen Spanish and me in the evenings: talking, haltingly. “But I have to tell you something,” I said to her quietly. “I’ve heard how people are describing what this is, and it’s wrong. There is no cure. Spanish and the others … they might not be addicted anymore but they’re not cured: they’re changed. That’s what this is. I know it might sound the same, but do you understand that they can’t speak Language anymore, MagDa? Any more than you ever could.”

It was a morning, very cloudless. In the lower lands around me, among the filamented undergrowth of the planet, I knew there were agents of script, disseminating the new skill, the concept of it, among the Absurd. Already there were deviant forms from those first suggested, dissident renditions of ideograms, specialist vocabulary created by the semiogenesis of scuff-and-point.

It wouldn’t be long before some Ariekene reader reproduced the ground-scratch writing in stain, on something they could hand over, rather than trying to remember and replicate it. Maybe we’d show them how. I imagined a pen held in a giftwing.

The leading cadre of the Absurd stood still. The Embassytown entourage were as smart as they could manage in these circumstances. Various of the human refugees were watching. Theuth and Spanish stood close to me, looking at the cams.

Spanish attracted my attention with its giftwing. “.” It spoke to me softly. I hesitated and it spoke again. “.”

EzCal faced me. They looked like kings again. Ez’s face was blank: Cal’s was swollen with anger.

“Listen. Do you understand?” All the Embassytowners could hear me easily, but it was EzCal I was speaking to. “Do you understand how it’s going to be?

“The Absurd are coming back to the city, and so are we. We’ll set things up together. They’ll have some ideas. I tell you, if I were Kora-Saygiss, your little quisling, I’d be careful. It was smart of you not to let it come. We’ll work out the details. We’ll be there, in Embassytown.”

Until the relief. Everything’s different, forever, I thought. I glanced at my notes. “They were going to kill us because we were the source of god-drugs. They knew it was too late for them, they were lost, but they were going to make a totally new start for those after them if they got rid of the problem. Us. You understand how selfless they were? It wouldn’t help them. It was for their kids. This generation would either be deafened, dead or dying in withdrawal.

“But now they know the addicted can be cured.” I ignored MagDa’s stares and pointed at Spanish: it pointed back at me. “And if they can be cured then we’re an irrelevance. That is why we get to live. See? But they have to be cured. That’s the condition. Otherwise we’re still a sickness. And it takes time to cure oratees.” I gestured at Rooftop, still untouched by metaphor. Everyone looked at it. It looked back. “And there’s plenty of them. So your job is to keep them going in the meantime, EzCal, till they don’t need you anymore. Without you to tide them, the addicted’ll start to die. Too quick to be cured, or even deafened. So you have to keep them alive.”

“,” Spanish said. There were gasps from all the humans, who’d never heard it speak its doubled Anglo-Ubiq. Spanish was explaining again why the Absurd would have killed us all and mutilated their compatriots, and why they would now let us live. The Ariekei loved the Ariekei. That verb of ours was the only one that came close. It wasn’t flawless, but that’s in the way of translation. It was as much a truth as a lie. The New Hearing and the Absurd loved the addicted, and would cure them one of the two ways out, induct them into one group or the other.

“None of you have been ambassadors for a long time,” I said. “Who’ve you been speaking for but yourselves? And now you’re not a god or a fix or a functionary, EzCal—you’re a factory. The Ariekei have a need: you fulfill it. And believe me, the content’ll be policed.” Ez’s face didn’t move. Cal’s twisted. No chance to issue orders that could, literally, not be disobeyed. “The city’ll be full of Absurd. So if you try to stir things, put instructions in what you say, even restart the war, they’ll stop you. If we’re too much trouble to bother with, we’re gone. They don’t want to take the fanwings of all the addicted, deafen every single adult Ariekei in their cycle, now there’s another way: but they will if they think they have to. Do you see?”

There’s nothing else for you to do, I thought. You have no choice. Those officers, the ones you brought with you, will hold weapons to your heads and demand you speak Language if necessary. And I’ll be with them. Spanish and the Absurd would spread the two cures. Recourse to the knife wasn’t the existential catastrophe it had been for all those here, who’d thought it ended thought. It would never be relished, but for those who couldn’t get clean, it might be considered.

Every day, out of love for their afflicted fellows, the Ariekei would make EzCal speak. We were a temporary necessity. Cal looked so stricken I almost felt pity. It won’t be so bad. There were many ways we might live, until the ship came.

“Do you understand?” I said, to Cal, to EzCal, and to everyone listening, on the plateau and in Embassytown. I loved the sound of my voice that day. “You see why we’re even alive? You have a job to do.”

“,” Spanish Dancer said. Somewhere there was a series of human gasps, and I heard someone say, “No.”

Spanish spread its eye-coral. Ez looked up, Cal turned.

A figure came at us from higher on the hill. A dark-cloaked man. He was followed by a few frantic refugees, shouting. His cape gusted. Curious Absurd parted for him, watching what he was doing, and I shouted no but of course they didn’t hear. I gesticulated for them to close ranks, but they were new to Terre gestures, and I didn’t have time to make them understand.

The man pulled out a weapon. Through his stained old aeoli I could see it was Scile.

My husband aimed a fat pistol at me. We were all too slow to stop him.

Even as he came I stared and as I tried to think how to stop what he was going to do, somewhere below that I was working out where he’d gone, and how, and why, and what he was doing now. I stared at the nasty pouting mouth of the gun.

He changed his aim as he came, pointing at Bren and Spanish Dancer. I tried to push the Ariekes away, but Scile wasn’t aiming at it now but at Ez, and then at Cal, and Cal began to turn his eyes to me. Scile fired. Calls and screaming started in Terre and Ariekene voices, as in a plume of blood where energy took and opened him, Cal fell away, staring at me, and died.

PART NINE

THE RELIEF

30

This is what said.

It was in a plaza in the city, a big square made bigger by cajoling the buildings. I remember it very well. Bren stood by me and whispered a translation but I could make almost perfect sense of it all.

I remember the weather, the houses, the air and the crowd of Ariekei. Thousands, addicts jostling to the edges of the opening. Some must have expected EzCal, wanted their god-drug fix. This is what Spanish Dancer said.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. We were grown into Language. After history we made city and machines and gave them names. We didn’t speak so much of certain things. Language spoke us. The words that wanted to be city and machines had us speak them so they could be.

When the humans came they had no names, and we made new words so they would have places in the world. They didn’t do as other things do. We spoke them into Language. Language took them in.

We were like hunters. We were like plants eating light. The humans made their town in our town like a star in a circle. They made their place like a filament in a flower. We spoke the name of their place, but we know it had another name, sitting in the city like an organ in a body, like a tongue in a mouth.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak so much because we were like this one, who years ago was the girl who was hurt in darkness and ate what was given to her. We were like her. You decide why we were like her and why we were not like her. Why she’s like herself or is not. We’ve been like all things; we left the city during the drugtime and speak more now.

Before the humans came we didn’t speak. We’ve been like countless things, we’ve been like all things, we’ve been like the animals over Embassytown in the direction of which I raise my giftwing, which is a speaking you’ll come to understand. We didn’t speak, we were mute, we only dropped the stones we mentioned out of our mouths, opened our mouths and had the birds we described fly out, we were vectors, we were the birds eating in mindlessness, we were the girl in darkness, only knowing it when we weren’t anymore.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You’ve never spoken before. You will. You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

You have never spoken before.

That was what Spanish Dancer said to its gathered people. It said more. It was much less clumsy with them than I’d been when I changed it: it understood much better the psyches it wanted to alter, and its words were surgery.

At first those in the square listened, not knowing what for. As its words grew more outlandish and impossible, there were brayings of consternation. They were raucous, as they would be at any virtuoso lies, then something much more. There was a hysteria of admiration and concern.

As Spanish spoke, Ariekei shouted in more than astonishment. These were the sounds of crisis. I remembered them from when I’d taught Spanish Dancer to lie. I was hearing minds reconfigured. Deaths: old thoughts dying. I saw the upthrown giftwings and fanwings of ecstasy, ecstasy in an old sense, not without pain and terror, of visions, and then the silence of the adult Ariekei new-born.

There were only a few that first time. Most who listened were left terrified perhaps, tremulous, having glimpsed something. When at last they calmed, some eventually clamoured for EzCal again, their need making them forgetful.

But there were others who tipped over, became new things, learnt language, at what Spanish Dancer said. I understood almost every word it spoke.

Sometimes when Spanish Dancer is talking to me in my own language, it doesn’t say but , or . I think it knows that pleases me. A present for me.

31

Poor Scile.

How do I tell this?

Most mornings I go to Lilypad Hill. The adjutants and I discuss plans. “Anything yet?” I say, and every morning so far they’ve checked the readings and shaken their heads, “Not yet,” and I’ve said, “Well, soon. Be ready.”

Can I say Poor Scile, after everything? I can. His actions disgust me—there are dead friends who’d be alive if it weren’t for him—but could you not feel pity to see him?

He’s in the jail we made from the infirmary. His neighbours are those failed Ambassadors still too broken to walk out of the doors when we opened them. Scile knows he’s alive because, criminal as he is, he didn’t do anything so very bad, so unforgivable as to warrant execution. We’ve decided we don’t have the death penalty just for murder.

I go to see him sometimes. People understand. It’s pity, concern, curiosity and the ghost of affection. He can’t believe what’s happened. He can’t believe he so failed.

It was pandemonium when he killed Cal. I’m surprised he wasn’t shot in turn, that we were able to take him alive.

“You will not do this,” he said. Cal still twitched on the ground. Scile swung his gun at Spanish Dancer. “They will not be like you.” We stopped him before he fired again. Spanish smacked his pistol away. Grabbed Scile’s shirt and said to him “?” Scile put his hands over his ears and called Spanish Dancer a devil.

It hadn’t been a suicide walk but a pilgrimage. He’d gone to find the Absurd army, to walk behind them a witness and apostle while they—what, cleaning fire, holy avengers who’d rather cut themselves than be tainted by lies?—purged the ruined Ariekei, got the world ready again, a nursery, for unborn pure-Languaged young.

It had been a brutal hope but it had been hope. I’m sure Scile heard when EzCal was born, no matter where he was. I don’t know how word could have reached him but word does. He must have known EzCal and their oratees couldn’t withstand the Absurd. But he didn’t reckon with me and Bren and Spanish Dancer. The horror he must have felt to see us and what we did, from the camps, beside the army. He was patient, waiting until the god-drug arrived before doing his holy work.

He sacrificed himself, he must have thought, for the Absurd. Perhaps he had in mind the child Ariekei that would one day walk through empty Embassytown, think of explanations for its ruins, and say them in Language. Scile was ready for us all to die.

He wasn’t quite wrong: there had been a fall. The Ariekei are different now. It’s true that now they speak lies.

Poor Scile, I’ll say it again. He must think he’s fallen among Lucifers.

Recently a miab incame to Lilypad Hill. We were no longer the people to whom it had been sent. I think that’s why I felt what I can only call naughtiness, opening it. I felt what only I would recognise as the faintest immerdamp around it. Like bad children we pulled out treats. Wine; foods; medicine; luxuries: there were no surprises. We opened our orders, and Wyatt’s sealed instructions too. He didn’t try to stop us. They were no surprise either.

The New Ariekei can speak to automa, and can understand them.

“I don’t want to go in,” I said.

“It’s fine, it’s just …” Bren nodded.

He and Spanish Dancer took longer than I expected. I waited in the street, watched hoardings move. The products they advertise aren’t sold anymore.

They rejoined me. “She’s there,” Bren said.

“And?”

“.”

“And …?” I said. “Did she speak to you?” I said to Spanish. It and Bren looked at each other.

“.”

I looked up at her building. There must be cams at points; there are cams everywhere, and my friend had always been part of her surroundings. I didn’t wave.

“Ehrsul I know that you can understand the words I’m saying, Spanish said,” Bren said. “In Anglo. And she doesn’t even look back. She goes: ‘No, you can’t speak to me; Ariekei can’t understand me.’ ‘Avice would like to know how you are,’ it says. ‘What you’ve been doing.’ She says, ‘Avice! How is she? And you can’t speak to me. You don’t understand me, and you can’t speak anything but Language.’ ”

We passed an avenue of outdated trids, a grassroots market, while I said nothing, and Bren did not insist. In the command economy of our reconstruction, our basics are provided, but extras, luxuries, throw up such barter. They make me think of markets in other cities, on other places.

The blockades have been taken down. Some city-dwellers say that as they can breathe our air but we can’t breathe theirs, the Embassytown atmosphere should be extended over the whole city. Where there are new additions being grown, Ariekene buildings are subtly unclassic. Here a spire; an angled window; a familiar kind of buttress: our Terre topography’s become fashionable.

can’t be found; and DalTon can’t be found: or no one who knows where they are, human or indigenous, will say. Of course their disappearances made me suspect club justice. But I’m in informing networks as good as any, and if something like that has happened, it’s been very quiet. Which is no way to encourager les autre. I think probably either that they were some of the many killed and effaced by the war, or that one is or both are hiding—it’s not as if you can’t still do that in the city—waiting for whatever. I suppose we’ll have to be vigilant.

DalTon’s one thing, as far as I’m concerned. As for , though, I don’t think revenge of lynch or any other kind is what most New Ariekei want, if they even say they lived under . No Ariekei I know have been able to answer my questions, about what it was like, about whether they remember how they thought, before. About Language. Spanish Dancer’s first speech, about that change, was as much inflection as exposition. I don’t say they don’t remember; I say that they can’t tell me how it was if they do.

No one knows why some Ariekei are immune to metaphor. No attention from Spanish or its growing number of deputies, its proselytisers, altering their listeners with careful, infectious, ostentatiously lie-filled sermons, works on all of them. Each meeting there are successes: Ariekei staggering out of Language, into language and semes. Others come close, to go next time or the next. And there are those who refuse to; and those that, like Rooftop, sick with purity, just can’t. They still can’t speak to me, only to Ambassadors. They only understand a dying Language. Now we have the drugs, the voices, to keep them alive, and no more gods.

EzSey, I heard one oratee tell YlSib, was its favourite, because the tremor occasioned by their voice was … and there, vocabulary, mine and its, failed us. Others prefer EzLott, or EzBel, according to the high they give.

Scile was usually a better thinker than his last murder would imply. He knew how we’d created EzCal: he should have thought we could just do it again. We unhooked the mechanisms from inside Cal’s head, and they were safe, but even had they not been, we never faced another end.

“I’ve got something,” MagDa had said. “Southel’s been putting together a few prototypes for weeks.” “Boosters.” “We’ve had volunteers. We’re ready to go.”

While we’d pursued ours, that had been their secret plan. A stockpile, against Cal and EzCal, whose power lay in their uniqueness. MagDa’s and my and Bren’s treacheries dovetailed. Scile had brought no narrative to a conclusion. He killed Cal and very little changed.

At first it was the cleaved Turn who volunteered, shaved their heads and had sockets implanted, tried out boosters like clawed tiaras, hooked into links and let gun-prodded Ez, Rukowsi, read them, and speak with them. Lott was the first to take on the role while her doppel, Char, was still alive.

Some are afraid to, but many Ambassadors have powered down their own links. They don’t equalise. They don’t speak Language much anymore. There’s not much call. I don’t think they all dislike each other. Bren says he disagrees, but I tell him he can’t think beyond his own history, which is understandable.

We keep Joel Rukowsi safe because we need him and his freakish empathic head, but even that I think will change. We’ll find others like him. In the meantime we work him hard, and stockpile hours of drugtalk. We can afford to be generous to the exodusers.

It’s two cities now—one of the addicts, one of all the others—that intersect politely. The Absurd and the New have much more in common than either do with the oratees. Hearing’s nothing: the Absurd and the New think the same.

Spanish exchanges politenesses with Ariekei at every corner, with the Terre, with the fanwingless too, by the touchpads they carry, our Terretech contribution. I’m learning to read and write their evolving scrawl, like a young Ariekes. As soon as they awake into their third instar, now, like some rough ritual they’re hard-trained out of their instincts. They have only a few liminal days of pure Language, when word is referent and lies are uncanny, between animal instar and consciousness. Afterward, the young New Ariekei know their city wasn’t always this way but can’t imagine it other.

Of those that can’t unlearn Language, some are deafening themselves, knowing it’ll cure them, that it’s not the cutting-out of speech and mind they might once have thought. Others, like Rooftop, are preparing to leave. We’ll never visit their autarchic communities. They won’t be linked by pipework to the city. We’ll hand over many many datchips, enough to last a long time. The exiles will live out their addiction and raise a new brood, never let them hear the chips, until their children speak Language too, but unafflicted and free. Humans—vectors of addiction—will be banned and taboo: the city, where they speak differently now, they’ll explain, will be taboo. For the next little future, it’s not humans but the New Ariekei that’ll ambassador between the city and the settlements.

I know how it’ll go, though. A New Ariekes will come to trade: they’ll speak to it, Language to language, and they’ll think they do, but they won’t understand each other. Some of the young’ll be intrigued by this odd stranger, and a few adventurous Language-speaking young will make their way to the city gates. That’ll be the story. Doubtless there’ll still be addicts here—outcasts, holy fools or whatever their status then—and the newcomers will hear the drugtalks broadcast for them, and instantly be addicted too.

The ship’s crew will have weapons, of course: Bremen weapons, more advanced than ours. But we’re very many and they’ll be few. Besides, we mean them no harm. We’ll have an honour guard.

“Welcome, Captain,” I’ll say as the doors open onto Ariekene soil. “Please come with us.” They’ll be guests as much as prisoners.

That’s tendentious. They’ll be prisoners, but we’ll treat them well.

According to Wyatt’s instructions, our next relief is due to deliver to Embassytown several new Ambassadors of EzRa’s kind. They’ve improved their empathic techniques. EzRa was the test: next was supposed to come Bremen’s coup.

Too late. We got our coup in first. Instead, the new Ambassadors will have a job pushing product to addicts.

“,” Spanish Dancer will say. It’ll gesture politely with its giftwing to the armed Embassytowners waiting. “.”

The New Ariekei were astounded to learn that Terre have more than one language. I uploaded French. “I, je. I am, je suis,” I said. Spanish Dancer was delighted. It said to me, “.”

That’s not its only innovation. They don’t speak Anglo-Ubiq here, but Anglo-Ariekei. I’m a student of this new language. It has its nuances. When I asked Spanish if it regretted learning to lie, it paused and said, “.” A performance perhaps, but I envy that precision.

I wonder if Spanish Dancer ever mourns itself. If it lets me read what it’s writing, which I’m almost certain is the story of the war, I might find out.

It did tell me another story. When Baptist and Toweller returned to Embassytown, pretending to be oratees, to persuade EzCal into the wilderness where we were waiting, the god-drug wouldn’t see them. EzCal told them instead to relay their message through one of their regular Ariekene entourage, which saw and recognised them as followers of the controversial .

It knew something was wrong: it could have given them up. Baptist and Toweller, in an instant and bravura moment of decision, admitted to their contact the true situation: that new, better times were coming, for all of them, if EzCal could be enticed out.

Knowing that like their prophet they might be liars, it still decided to believe them. Given hope for the first time in a long time, that functionary went and told EzCal exactly what Baptist and Toweller had been about to. But they were New and it wasn’t. It knew the truth, and it had never lied before. It had had to dissemble, in Language, managing with Herculean effort and luck to get out words that sounded like grunts to itself. That was the real hero of the war, Spanish Dancer told me, that nameless Ariekes, telling the only lie of its life.

It wouldn’t be that hard for Bremen to destroy us. But I think we can make it worth their while not to. War across immer isn’t cheap. We have to make sure we’re useful. We know what our use can be. Look at us here, on the dark edge of the immer!

There will be the port they wanted. Within a local decade. We’ll be the last outpost. That was always our intended role, only now we know it, and while it won’t be quite what our metropole had in mind, we can run ourselves.

Welcome to Embassytown, the frontier. I know how fast the stories’ll come. I’m an immerser: I’ve heard them. Just beyond our planet’s shores will be, people will say, El Dorado immer lands; deserted ships long lost; Earth; God. Alright then.

I know what chancers’ll come, what pirates. I know the likelihood that Embassytown will become slum: but we’ll moulder and die or be eradicated by Bremen shivabomb if we have no use. Scile in his visionary stupidity, trying to save the Ariekei, would have damned them: if they killed us, when the relief came it wouldn’t forbear genociding them in return. I remember Scile’s not from a colony when he fails to think of such things.

So we’re to be ravaged by speculation and thrill-seekers. We’ll be the wilds. I’ve been to deadwood planets and pioneer towns: even those way stations have their good things. We’ll open up the sky. We’ll have knowledge to sell. Uniquely detailed maps. Immer byways only locals like us can find. We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.

We’ll soon have one immership in our little navy, and at least one captain. When the next Bremen delegation comes to see what to make of us, we’ll have something to offer.

Immersion’s never safe. This far out, at this edge, we’re back to the dangerous glory days of homo diaspora. I don’t have any hesitation. I’ve gone out, I’ve come back, and it’s time to go again, in directions and for distances no immerser has gone. In kilohours, I might be meeting an exot I’m the first Terre ever to see, working tongueware, trying to make a greeting. I might find anything.

I’ve been studying navigation and immerology, techniques that I, the floaker, had always avoided. “You’ve never floaked in your life,” Bren told me, brusquely, when I said that to him. I’ve started to dream of how Embassytown will look, from the ship. That’s why I’m at Lilypad Hill every day. Because I can’t wait.

“Good morning, Captain. You’ll come with us.” And I and my crew will take the skiff to orbit, to the ship.

“Ready,” I’ll say, and set the helm beyond void cognita. I’ll push the levers that set us out. Or perhaps the gracious thing will be to allow my first lieutenant to do it. We don’t know how the passage will affect such crew: I’ve warned them that. They’re still insistent.

So perhaps it’ll be Lieutenant Spanish Dancer who’ll instigate that indescribable motion from everyday space through the always. We’ll immerse, into the immer, and into the out.

It would be foolish to pretend we know what’ll happen. We’ll have to see how Embassytown gets shaped.

By Embassytown I mean the city. Even the New Ariekei have started to call the city by that name. they say, or , or .

If you’ve enjoyed reading this novel by award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville, look for his latest-a novel for readers of all ages, a gripping and brilliantly imagined take on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which confirms his status as "the most original and talented voice to appear in several years" (Science Fiction Chronicle)

RAILSEA

On board the moletrain Medes Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one’s death and the other’s glory. But no matter how spectacular it is, traveling the endless rails of the railsea, Sham can’t shake the sense that there is more to life-even if his captain can think only of the hunt for the ivory-coloured mole she’s been chasing since it took her arm all those years ago. When they come across a wrecked train it’s a welcome distraction, but the impossible salvage Sham finds in the derelict leads to considerably more than he’d bargained for. Soon he’s hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters, and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham’s life that’s about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea.

Published by Del Rey

Summer 2012

Available wherever books are sold

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHINA MIÉVILLE is the author of several books, including Perdido Street Station, The City & The City, and Kraken. His works have won the Hugo, the British Science Fiction Award (twice), the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times), and the World Fantasy Award. He lives and works in London.