Perdido Street Station

Chapter Forty-Six

The streetlights flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker. It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft, which bobbed on the cool swell.

It was one of many that littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water, the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

This one was half covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

Hidden in the shadow of the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was naked and quite still.

He had lain there for some time. Yagharek had come with him to the river’s edge. They had crept for more than an hour through the uneasily shifting city, through the familiar streets of Brock Marsh and up through Gidd, on under rail-lines and past militia towers, eventually reaching the southern fringes of Canker Wedge. Less than two miles from the centre of the city, but a different world. Low, quiet streets and modest housing, small apologetic parks, frumpy churches and halls, offices with false fronts and façades in a cacophony of muted styles.

Here there were avenues. They were nothing like the wide banyan-fringed thoroughfares of Aspic, or the Rue Conifer in Ketch Heath, magnificently lined with ancient pine trees. Still, in the outskirts of Canker Wedge were stunted oaks and darkwoods that hid the architecture’s failings. Isaac and Yagharek, his feet wrapped in bandages again, his head hidden in a newly stolen cloak, had been thankful for the cover of leafy darkness as they made for the river.

There were no great conglomerations of heavy industry along the Canker. The factories and workshops and warehouses and docks studded the sides of the slower Tar, and the Gross Tar which the conjoined rivers became. It was not until the last mile of its distinct existence, where it passed Brock Marsh and a thousand laboratory outflows, that the Canker became fouled and dubious.

In the north of the city, in Gidd and Rim, and here in Canker Wedge, residents might row the waters for pleasure, an unthinkable pastime further south. So it was that Isaac had made his way here, where the river traffic was quiet, to obey the Weaver’s instructions.

They had found a little alley between the backs of two rows of houses, a thin sliver of space that sloped down towards the eddying water. It had not been hard to find a deserted boat, though there were not a fraction as many as there were by the industrial riversides of the city.

Leaving Yagharek watching from beneath his ragged hood like some motionless tramp, Isaac had picked his way down to the edge of the river. There was a fringe of grass and a band of thick mud between him and the water, and he shucked his clothes as he went, collecting them under his arm. By the time he reached the Canker he was nude under the waning darkness.

Without hesitating, steeling himself, he had walked on into the water.

It had been a short, cold swim to the boat. He had enjoyed it, luxuriating in the feeling, the black river washing him clean of sewer-filth and days of grime. He had trailed his clothes behind him, willing the water to suffuse their fibres and clean them, too.

He had hauled himself over the side of the boat, his skin prickling as he dried. Yagharek was barely visible, motionless, watching. Isaac arranged his clothes around him and pulled the tarpaulin a little way over him, so that he lay covered by shadows.

He watched the light arrive in the east and shivered as breezes raised paths of goosefiesh on him.

“Here I am,” he murmured. “Naked as a dead man on the river’s dawn. As requested.”

He did not know if the Weaver’s dreamlike pronouncement, that it had hummed that ghastly night in the Glasshouse, had been any kind of invitation. But he thought that by responding to it he might make it one, changing the patterns of the worldweb, weaving it into a conjuncture that might, he hoped, please the Weaver.

He had to see the magnificent spider. He needed the Weaver’s help.

Halfway through the previous night, Isaac and his comrades had become aware that the night’s tension, the unsettled sick feeling in the air, the nightmares, had returned. The Weaver’s attack had failed, as it had predicted. The moths were still alive.

It had occurred to Isaac that his taste was known to them now, that they would recognize him as the destroyer of the egg-clutch. Perhaps he should have been petrified with fear, but he was not. The railside shack had been left alone.

Maybe they’re afraid of me, he thought.

He drifted on the river. An hour passed, and the sounds of the city waxed unseen around him.

The noise of bubbles disturbed him.

He leaned up gingerly on his elbow, his mind rapidly clicking back into focus. He peered over the edge of the boat.

Yagharek was still visible, his posture completely unchanged, on the riverbank. Now there were some few passers-by behind him, ignoring him as he sat there covered up and smelling of filth.

Close to the boat, a patch of bubbles and disturbed water boiled up from below, snapping at the surface and sending out a ring of ripples about three feet across. Isaac’s eyes widened momentarily as he realized that the circle of ripples was exactly circular, and contained, that as each ripple reached its edge, it flattened impossibly, leaving the water beyond it undisturbed.

Even as Isaac moved back slightly, a smooth black curve breached in the dark, disturbed water. The river fell away from the rising shape, splashing within the limits of the little circle. Isaac was staring into the Weaver’s face.

He snapped back, his heart beating aggressively. The Weaver stared up at him. Its head was angled so that only it emerged from the water, and not the looming body which rose higher when it stood. The Weaver was humming, speaking deep in Isaac’s skull.

…YOU PEACH YOU PLUMB THE ONE THE DEADNAKED AS WAS ASKED LITTLE FOURLIMBED WEAVER THAT YOU MIGHT BE…it Said in a continuous lilting monologue…RIVER AND DAWN IT DAWNS ON ME THE NEWS IS NUDES ABOB…The words ebbed until they could not be properly heard, and Isaac took the chance to speak.

“I’m glad to see you, Weaver,” he said. “I remembered our appointment.” He breathed deep. “I need to talk to you,” he said. The Weaver’s humming, crooning incantation resumed, and Isaac struggled to understand, to translate the beautiful babbling into sense, to answer, to make himself heard.

It was like a dialogue with the sleeping or the mad. It was difficult, exhausting. But it could be done.

Yagharek heard the subdued chattering of children walking to school. They walked some way behind him where a path cut through the grass of the bank.

His eyes flickered across the water where the trees and wide white streets of Flag Hill stretched back from the water, on a gentle incline. There, too, the river was fringed with rough grass, but there was no path and there were no children. Nothing but the quiet walled houses.

Yagharek pulled his knees slightly closer and wrapped his body in his rank cloak. Forty feet into the river, Isaac’s little vessel seemed unnaturally still. Isaac’s head had bobbed tentatively into view some minutes ago, and now it remained poking slightly over the lip of the old boat, facing away from Yagharek. It looked as if he was staring intently at some patch of water, some flotsam.

It must, Yagharek realized, be the Weaver, and he felt excitement move him.

Yagharek strained to hear, but the light wind brought nothing to him. He heard only the lapping of the river and the abrupt sounds of the children behind him. They were curt, and cried easily.

Time passed but the sun seemed frozen. The little stream of schoolboys did not ebb. Yagharek watched Isaac argue incomprehensibly with the unseen spider-presence below the surface of the river. Yagharek waited.

And then, some time after dawn but before seven o’clock, Isaac turned furtively in the boat, fumbled for his clothes and crawled like some slinking ungainly water-rat back into the Canker.

The anaemic morning light broke up on the river’s surface as Isaac tugged himself through the water, towards the bank. In the shallows he performed a grotesque aquatic dance to pull on his clothes, before hauling himself streaming and heavy up the mud and scrub of the bank.

He collapsed before Yagharek, wheezing.

The schoolboys tittered and whispered.

“I think…I think it’ll come,” said Isaac. “I think it understood.”

It was past eight when they got back to the railside hut. It was still and hot, thick with indolently drifting particles. The colours of the rubbish and the hot wood were bright where light breached the splintering walls.

Derkhan had still not returned. Pengefinchess slept in the corner, or pretended to.

Isaac gathered the vital tubes and valves, the engines and batteries and transformers, into a vile sack. He retrieved his notes, rifled through them briefly to check them, then stashed them back into his shirt. He scrawled a note for Derkhan and Pengefinchess. He and Yagharek checked and cleaned their weapons, counted their meagre store of ammunition. Then Isaac looked out of the ruined windows into the city which had woken around them.

They must be careful now. The sun had gained its strength, the light was full. Anyone might be militia, and every officer would have seen their heliotype. They drew their cloaks around them. Isaac hesitated, then borrowed Yagharek’s knife and shaved bloodily with it. The sharp blade skittered painfully on the nodules and bumps on his skin that were the reason he had first grown a beard. He was ruthless and quick, and soon stood before Yagharek with a pasty chin, inexpertly shorn of whiskers, bleeding and patched with copses of stubble.

He looked ghastly, but he looked different. Isaac dabbed at his bleeding skin as they set out into the morning.

By nine, after minutes of skulking, striding nonchalantly past shops and arguing pedestrians, finding backstreet routes wherever they existed, the companions were in the Griss Twist dump. The heat was unforgiving, and seemed greater in these canyons of discarded metal. Isaac’s chin stung and tingled.

They picked their way over the wasteground towards the heart of the maze, towards the Construct Council’s lair.

“Nothing.” Bentham Rudgutter clenched his fists on his desk.

“Two nights we’ve had the airships up and searching. Nothing at all. Another crop of bodies every morning, and not a godsdamn thing all night. Rescue dead, no sign of Grimnebulin, no sign of Blueday…” He raised bloodshot eyes and looked across the table at Stem-Fulcher, who sucked gently at the pungent smoke of her pipe. “This is not going well,” he concluded.

Stem-Fulcher nodded slowly. She considered.

“Two things,” she said slowly. “It’s clear that what we need is specially trained troops. I told you about Motley’s officers.” Rudgutter nodded. He rubbed and rubbed at his eyes. “We can easily match those. We could easily tell the punishment factories to run us off a squadron of specialist Remade, with mirrors and backwards weapons and all, but what we need is time. We need to train them up. That’s three, four months at the least. And while we’re biding our time the slake-moths are just going to keep picking off citizens. Getting stronger.

“So we have to think about strategies for keeping the city under control. A curfew, for example. We know the moths can get into houses, but there’s no doubt that most of the victims are picked off the streets.

“Then we need to dampen speculation in the press about what’s going on. Barbile wasn’t the only scientist working on that project. We need to be able to stamp out any dangerous kind of sedition, we need to detain all the other scientists involved.

“And with half the militia engaged in slake-moth duties, we can’t risk another dock strike, or anything similar. It could cripple us quickly. We owe it to the city to put an end to any unreasonable demands. Basically, Mayor, this is a crisis bigger than any since the Pirate Wars. I think it’s time to declare a state of emergency. We need extraordinary powers.

“We need martial law.”

Rudgutter pursed his lips mildly, and considered.

“Grimnebulin,” said the avatar. The Council itself remained hidden. It did not sit up. It was indistinguishable from the mountains of filth and garbage around it.

The cable that entered the avatar’s head emerged from the floor of metal shavings and stone debris. The avatar stank. His skin was patched with mould.

“Grimnebulin,” he repeated in his uncomfortable, wavering voice. “You did not return. The crisis engine you left with me is incomplete. Where are the Is that went with you to the Glasshouse? The slake-moths flew again last night. Did you fail?”

Isaac held his hands up to slow the questioning.

“Stop,” he said peremptorily. “I’ll explain.”

Isaac knew that it was misleading to think of the Construct Council having emotions. As he told the avatar the story of that appalling night in the cactus Glasshouse-that night of so-partial victory at such horrendous price-he knew that it was not anger or sadness that caused the man’s body to shake, his face to spasm in random grotesqueries.

The Construct Council had sentience, but no feelings. It was assimilating new data, that was all. It was calculating possibilities.

He told it that the monkey-constructs had been destroyed and the avatar’s body spasmed particularly sharply, as the information flooded back down the cable into the hidden analytical engines of the Council. Without those constructs, it could not download the experience. It relied on Isaac’s reports.

As once before, Isaac thought he glimpsed a human figure fleeting in the rubbish around him, but the apparition was gone in an instant.

Isaac told the Council of the Weaver’s intervention, and then, finally, began to explain his plan. The Council, of course, was quick to understand.

The avatar began to nod. Isaac thought he could feel infinitesimal movements in the ground under him, as the Council itself began to shift.

“Do you understand what I need from you?” said Isaac.

“Of course,” replied the Construct Council in the avatar’s reedy quaver. “And I will be linked directly to the crisis engine?”

“Yes,” said Isaac. “That’s how this is going to work. I forgot some of the components of the crisis engine when I left it with you, which is why it wasn’t complete. But that’s just as well, because when I saw them, they gave me the idea for all this. But listen: I need your help. If this is going to work we need the maths to be exact. I brought my analytical engine with me from the laboratory, but it’s hardly a top-notch model. You, Council, are a network of damn sophisticated calculating engines…right? I need you to do some sums for me. Work out some functions, print up some programme cards. And I need them perfect. To an infinitesimal degree of error. All right?”

“Show me,” said the avatar.

Isaac pulled out two sheets of paper. He walked over to the avatar, holding them out. In the dump’s smell of oil and chymical mould and warming metal, the organic stink of the avatar’s slowly collapsing body was shocking. Isaac creased his nose in disgust. But he steeled himself and stood beside the rotting, half-alive carcass and explained the functions he had outlined.

“This page here is several equations I can’t get the answers to. Can you read them? They’re to do with the mathematical modelling of mental activity. This second page is more tricky. This is the set of programme cards I need. I’ve tried to lay out each function as exactly as I can. So here for example…” Isaac’s stubby finger moved along a line of complicated logic symbols. “This is ‘find data from input one; now model data.’ Then here we have the same demand for input two…and this really complex one here: ‘compare prime data.’ Then over here are the constructive, remodelling functions.

“Is that all comprehensible?” he said, stepping back. “And can you do it?”

The avatar took the papers and scanned them carefully. The dead man’s eyes moved in a smooth left-right-left motion along the page. It was seamless until the avatar paused and shuddered as data welled along the cable to the Construct’s hidden brain.

There was a motionless moment, and then the avatar said: “This can all be done.”

Isaac nodded in curt triumph. “We need it…well…now. As soon as possible. I can wait. Can you do that?”

“I will try. And then as evening falls and the slake-moths return, you will turn on the power, and you will connect me. You will link me up to your crisis engine.”

Isaac nodded.

He fumbled in his pocket and drew out another piece of paper, which he handed to the avatar.

“That’s a list of everything we need,” he said. “It’s all bound to be in the dump somewhere, or it can be rigged up. Do you have some…uh…some little yous somewhere that can track this stuff down? Another couple of those helmets you got for us, the ones communicators use; a couple of batteries; a little generator; stuff like that. Again, we need that now. The main thing is we need cable. Thick conducting cable, stuff that can take elyctrical or thaumaturgic current. We need two and a half, three miles of the stuff. Not all in one, obviously…it can be in pieces, as long as they can be connected easily one to the next, but we need masses. We have to link you up with our…with our focus.” His voice quietened as he said this, and his face set. “The cable has to be ready this evening, by six o’clock I think.”

Isaac’s face was hard. He spoke in a monotone. He looked at the avatar carefully.

“There’s only four of us, and one of those we can’t rely on,” he went on. “Can you contact your…congregation?” The avatar nodded slowly, waiting for an explanation. “See, we need people to connect those cables across the city.” Isaac tugged the list out of the avatar’s hands and began to sketch on the back: a jagged sideways Y for the two rivers, little crosses for Griss Twist, The Crow, and scribbles delineating Brock Marsh and Spit Hearth in between. He linked the first two crosses with a quick slash of pencil. He looked up at the avatar. “You’re going to have to organize your congregation. Fast. We need them in place with the cable by six o’clock.”

“Why do you not perform the operation here?” asked the avatar. Isaac shook his head vaguely.

“It wouldn’t work. This is a backwater. We have to channel the power through the city’s focal point, where all the lines converge.

“We have to go to Perdido Street Station.”

Chapter Forty-Seven

Carrying a bloated sack of discarded technology between them, Isaac and Yagharek crept back through the quiet streets of Griss Twist, up the broken brick stairwell of the Sud Line. Like shambling city vagrants in clothes ill-suited to the sweltering air, they trudged a path through the skyline of New Crobuzon, back to their collapsing hideout by the railway line. They waited for a squealing onrush of train to pass, blowing energetically from its flared chimney, then picked their way through fences of wavering air poured upwards from the scalding iron tracks.

It was midday, and the air wrapped them like a heated poultice.

Isaac put down his end of the sack and tugged at the rickety door. It was pushed open from inside by Derkhan. She slipped through to stand in front of him, half closing the door behind her. Isaac glanced up and could see someone standing ill-at-ease in a dark corner.

“Found someone, ‘Zaac,” whispered Derkhan. Her voice was taut. Her eyes were bloodshot and nearly tearful in her dirty face. She pointed briefly back into the room. “We’ve been waiting.”

Isaac had to meet the Council; Yagharek would inspire awe and confusion but no confidence in those he approached; Pengefinchess would not go; so hours ago, it was Derkhan who had been forced out into the city on the grisly and monstrous errand. It had turned her into some bad spirit.

At first, when she left the hut and walked into the city, made her way quickly through the tarry darkness that filled the streets, she had cried in a drab fashion to ease the pressure of her tortured head. She had kept her shoulders skulking high, knowing that of the few figures she saw quickly pacing their way somewhere, a high proportion were likely to be militia. The heavy nightmare tension of the air drained her.

But then as the sun rose and the night sank slowly into the gutters, her way had become easier. She had moved more quickly, as if the very material of the darkness had resisted her.

Her task was no less horrendous, but urgency bleached her horror until it was an anaemic thing. She knew that she could not wait.

She had some way to go. She was making for the charity hospital of Syriac Well, through four or more miles of intricately twisting slum and collapsing architecture. She did not dare take a cab, in case it was driven by a militia spy, an agent out to catch perpetrators like her. So she paced as quickly as she dared in the shadow of the Sud Line. It raised itself higher and higher above the roofs as it passed further and further from the city’s heart. Yawning arches of dripping brick soared over the squat streets of Syriac.

At Syriac Rising Station, Derkhan had broken away from the tracks of the rails and borne off into the snarl of streets south of the undulating Gross Tar.

It had been easy to follow the noise of costermongers and stallholders to the squalor of Tincture Prom, the wide and dirty street that linked Syriac, Pelorus Fields and Syriac Well. It followed the course of the Gross Tar like an imprecise echo, changing its name as it went, becoming Wynion Way, then Silverback Street.

Derkhan had skirted its raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.

It was an old and sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement flounces: gods and daemons eyed each other across the tops of windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’ chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.

Once more a place of healing, they said.

Without funds or drugs, with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.

Derkhan had made her way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.

And there…there she had hunted.

She remembered stalking up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about her dying father who had gone missing-stomped off into the night to die-who she had heard might be here with these angels of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her father, she explained, was close to death.

The monk had pointed her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.

And Derkhan had passed through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient was dying and that no they were still not dead.

Derkhan looked down and flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription. Lungrot, she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. In in another hand: Laudanum unavailable.

In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went [oniBched] the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would have ended the pain, one way or another.

Derkhan began to do what she had come for.

She examined the patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had been highly aware of the criteria with which she gazed-of sound mind, and so ill they will not last the day-and she had felt sick to her stomach. The nun had seen her, had approached with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she sought.

Derkhan had ignored her and continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of an old man whose notes gave him a week to live. He slept with his mouth open, dribbling slightly and grimacing in his sleep.

There had been a ghastly moment of reflection when she had found herself applying [sained] and untenable ethics to the choice-Who here is a militia informer? she wanted to shout. Who here has raped? Who has [abused] a child? Who has tortured? She had closed down the [thoughts]. That could not be allowed, she had realized. That might drive her mad. This had to be exigency. This could not be a choice.

Derkhan had turned to the nun who followed her emitting a constant stream of blather it was no effort to ignore.

Derkhan remembered her own words as if they had never been real.

This man is dying, she had said. The nun’s noise had quieted, and she had nodded. Can he move? Derkhan had asked.

Slowly, the nun said.

Is he mad? Derkhan had asked. He was not.

I’m taking him, she had said. I need him.

The nun had begun to vent outrage and astonishment and Derkhan’s own carefully battened down emotions had broken free momentarily and tears had flooded her face with appalling speed, and she had felt as if she would howl in misery so she closed her eyes and hissed in wordless animal grief until the nun was silent. Derkhan had looked at her again and shut down her own tears.

Derkhan had pulled her gun from inside her cloak and held it at the nun’s belly. The nun looked down and mewed in surprise and fear. While the nun still gazed at the weapon in disbelief, with her left hand Derkhan had pulled out the pouch of money, the remnants of Isaac’s and Yagharek’s money. She had held it out until the nun saw it, and realized what was expected and held out her hand. Then Derkhan poured the notes and gold-dust and battered coins into it.

Take this, she had said, her voice trembling and careful. She pointed randomly about the ward at the moaning, tossing figures in the beds. Buy laudanum for him and calciach for her, Derkhan had said, cure him and send that one quietly to sleep; make one or two or three or four of them live, and make death easier for one or two or three or four or five or I don’t know, I don’t know. Take it, make things better for how many you can, but this one I must take. Wake him up and tell him he has to come with me. Tell him I can help him.

Derkhan’s pistol wavered, but she kept it trained vaguely on the other woman. She closed the nun’s fingers around the money and watched her eyes crease and widen in astonishment and incomprehension.

Deep inside her, in the place that still felt, that she could not quite close down, Derkhan had been aware of a plaintive defence, an argument of justification-See? she felt herself assert. We take him but all these others we save!

But there was no moral accounting that lessened the horror of what she was doing. She could only ignore that anxious discourse. She stared deep and fervent into the nun’s eyes. Derkhan closed her hand tight around the nun’s fingers.

Help them, she had hissed. This can help them. You can help them all except him or you can help none of them. Help them.

And after a long, long time of silence, of staring at Derkhan with troubled eyes, of looking at the grubby currency and at the gun and then at the dying patients on all sides, the nun put the money into her white overall with a shaking hand. And as she moved away to waken the patient, Derkhan watched her with a terrible, mean triumph.

See? Derkhan had thought, sick with self-loathing. It wasn’t just me! She chose to do it too!

His name was Andrej Shelbornek. He was sixty-five. His innards were being eaten by some virulent germ. He was quiet and very tired of worrying, and after two or three initial questions, he followed Derkhan without complaint.

She told him a little about the treatments they had in mind, the experimental techniques they wished to try on his brutalized body. He said nothing about this, about her filthy appearance, or anything else. He must know what’s going on! she had thought. He’s tired of living like this, he’s making it easy on me. This was rationalization of the lowest kind, and she would not entertain it.

It was swiftly clear that he could not walk the miles to Griss Fell. Derkhan had hesitated. She pulled a few torn notes from her pocket. She had no choice but to hail a cab. She was nervous. She had lowered her voice into an unrecognizable snarl as she gave directions, with her cloak hiding her face.

The two-wheeled cab was pulled by an ox, Remade into a biped to fit with ease into New Crobuzon’s twisted alleyways and narrow thoroughfares, to turn tight corners and retreat without stalling. It lolloped on its two back-curved legs in constant surprise at itself, with a stride that was uncomfortable and bizarre. Derkhan sat back and closed her eyes. When she looked up again, Andrej was asleep.

He did not speak, or frown or seem perturbed, until she had bade him climb the steep slope of earth and concrete shards beside the Sud Line. Then his face had creased and he had looked at her in confusion.

Derkhan had said something blithely about a secret experimental laboratory, a site above the city, with access to the trains. He had looked concerned, had shaken his head and looked around to escape. In the dark below the railway bridge, Derkhan had pulled out her flintlock. Although dying, he was still afraid of death, and she had forced him up the slope at gunpoint. He had begun to cry halfway up. Derkhan had watched him and nudged him with the pistol, had felt all her emotions from very far away. She kept distant from her own horror.

Inside the dusty shack, Derkhan waited silently with her gun on Andrej, until eventually they heard the shuffling sounds of Isaac and Yagharek returning. When Derkhan opened the door for them, Andrej began to wail and cry out for help. He was astonishingly loud for such a frail man. Isaac, who had been about to ask Derkhan what she had told Andrej, broke off speaking and rushed over to quieten the man.

There was a half-second, a tiny fraction of time, when Isaac opened his mouth, and it seemed that he would say something to assuage the old man’s fears, to assure him that he would be unharmed, that he was in safe hands, that there was a reason for his bizarre incarceration. Andrej’s shouts faltered for a moment as he stared at Isaac, eager to be reassured.

But Isaac was tired, and he could not think, and the lies that welled up made him feel as if he would vomit. The patter died away silently, and instead Isaac walked across to Andrej and overpowered the decrepit man with ease, stifling his nasal wails with strips of cloth. Isaac bound Andrej with coils of ancient rope and propped him as comfortably as possible against a wall. The dying man hummed and exhaled in snotty terror.

Isaac tried to meet his eye, to murmur some apology, to tell him how sorry he was, but Andrej could not hear him for fear. Isaac turned away, aghast, and Derkhan met his eye and grasped his hand quickly, thankful that someone finally shared her burden.

There was much to be done.

Isaac began his final calculations and preparations.

Andrej squealed through his gag and Isaac looked up at him despairingly.

In curt whispers and brusque expostulations, Isaac explained to Derkhan and Yagharek what he was doing.

He looked over the battered engines in the shack, his analytical machines. He pored over his notes, checking and rechecking his maths, cross-referring them with the sheets of figures the Council had given him. He drew out the core of his crisis engine, the enigmatic mechanism that he had neglected to leave with the Construct Council. It was an opaque box, a sealed motor of interwoven cables, elyctrostatic and thaumaturgic circuits.

He cleaned it slowly, examined its moving parts. Isaac readied himself and his equipment. When Pengefinchess returned from some unstated errand, Isaac looked up briefly. She spoke quietly, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. She gathered herself slowly to leave, checked through her equipment, oiling her bow to keep it safe under the water. She asked what had become of Shadrach’s pistol, and clucked regretfully when Isaac told her he did not know.

“A shame. It was a powerful piece,” she said abstractedly, looking out of the window and away. “Charmed. A puissant weapon.”

Isaac interrupted her. He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time, ignored Isaac’s pleading and demanded to know what in Hell he was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej’s snorts of fear and Isaac’s grim industry, and explained.

Then Derkhan asked Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them. She could only beg.

Isaac half listened, but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis mathematics.

Andrej whimpered unceasingly beside him.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Just before four o’clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.

“See you at the rendezvous,” she murmured.

“You know what you have to do?” Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the door.

He hesitated now, at the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with mucus.

They had to bring him, and he could not raise the alarm.

He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.

The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the “milk fights”: those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.

“He’s an old man!” hissed Isaac. “And he’s dying, he’s frail…Be gentle…”

Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.

There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac-horrified, guilty and debased-could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.

Yagharek’s right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.

Eventually he let Andrej slump.

“He will wake,” he said. “Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful-too much and we will starve his brain of blood.”

They wrapped Andrej’s motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.

They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.

At the door, they turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his eyebrows in a query-Will I see you again? he might have been asking, or Will you help us? Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.

Isaac turned away, set his lips.

He and Yagharek began the dangerous journey across the city.

They did not risk crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past. He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way onto the rails and were heading for disaster.

Interception was too dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej’s body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.

The heat was intense, but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the architecture its reality. The sun’s heat stifled sounds and bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized dream of heat.

With Andrej supported between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for Cockscomb Bridge.

They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible.

They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.

Yagharek kept one surreptitious hand clamped on a cluster of nerve and arterial tissue at the side of Andrej’s neck, ready to pinch hard if the old man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coarse babble of swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in part. He was also steeling himself.

“Come on, fucker,” he grunted, tense and quiet, “come on, come on. Fucker. Scum. Bastard.” He did not know who he was swearing at.

Isaac and Yagharek crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let them pass with only jeers behind them. They could not let the opprobrium grow and become confrontation.

If some bored toughs decided to kill time by harassing beggars, it would be catastrophic.

But they passed over Cockscomb Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and they felt safer again.

There were other beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands on him efficiently.

Here there were backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads and head down along overshadowed alleys. They passed under washing that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They passed piles of rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and ran away.

As always, they sought the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises sheltering from the heat.

Isaac and Yagharek ducked into a dirty cul-de-sac by the track’s concrete and brick foundations. They rested. Life rustled in the urban thicket above them.

Andrej was light, but he was beginning to weigh them down, his mass seeming to increase with every second. They stretched their aching arms and shoulders, drew deep breaths. A few feet away, the crowds emerging from the station thronged past the entrance to their little hideaway.

When they had rested and rearranged their burdens, they braced themselves and set out again, into the backstreets once more, walking in the shadow of the Sud Line, towards the city’s heart, the towers not yet visible over the surrounding miles of houses: the Spike and the turrets of Perdido Street Station.

Isaac began to talk. He told Yagharek what he thought would happen that night.

Derkhan made her way through the reclaimed filth of the Griss Twist dump towards the Construct Council.

Isaac had warned the great Constructed Intelligence that she would be coming. She knew she was expected. The idea made her uncomfortable.

As she approached the hollow that was the Council’s lair, she thought she heard a susurration of lowered voices. She stiffened instantly, and drew her pistol. She checked that it was loaded, and that the firing pan was full.

Derkhan picked up her feet, stalking with care, avoiding any sound. At the end of a channel of rubbish, she saw the opening-out of the hollow. Someone walked briefly past her field of view. She stole carefully closer.

Then another man walked past the end of the gorge of crushed garbage, and she saw that he was dressed in work overalls, and that he was staggering slightly under the weight of a burden. Slung over his broad shoulder was a massive coil of black-coated cable, entwining him vastly like some predatory constrictor.

She straightened up slightly. It was not the militia waiting for her. She walked on into the presence of the Construct Council.

She entered the hollow, glancing up nervously to ensure that there were no airships overhead. Then she turned to the scene before her, gasping at the scale of the gathering.

On all sides, engaged in all manner of opaque tasks, were nearly a hundred men and women. Mostly human, there were a handful of vodyanoi among them, and even two khepri. All were dressed in cheap and soiled clothes. And almost all were carrying or squatting before enormous coils of industrial cable.

It came in a variety of styles. Most was black, but there were brown and blue coatings as well, and red and grey. There were pairs of burly men staggering under loops nearly the thickness of a man’s thigh. Others carried skeins of wire no more than four inches in diameter.

The thin hubbub of speech died away quickly as Derkhan entered, and all the eyes in the place turned to her. The rubble crater was crammed with bodies. Derkhan swallowed and looked over them carefully. She saw the avatar stumbling towards her on halting, brittle legs.

“Derkhan Blueday,” he said quietly. “We are ready.”

Derkhan huddled for a short time with the avatar, checking carefully over a scribbled map.

The bloody concavity of the avatar’s open skull emitted an extraordinary reek. In the heat, his peculiar half-dead stench was utterly unbearable, and Derkhan held her breath as long as she could, gulping air when she had to through the sleeve of her filthy cloak.

While Derkhan and the Council conferred, the rest of the assembled kept a respectful distance.

“This is almost all of my bloodlife congregation,” said the avatar. “I sent out mobile Is with urgent messages, and the faithful have gathered, as you see.” He paused and clucked inhumanly. “We must proceed,” he said. “It is seventeen minutes past five o’clock.”

Derkhan looked up at the sky, which was deepening slowly, warning of dusk. She was sure that the clock the Council was checking, some timepiece buried deep in the bowels of the dump, was second-perfect. She nodded.

At a command from the avatar, the congregation began to stagger out of the dump, wobbling under their loads. Before they left, each turned to the place in the wall of the dump where the Construct Council was hidden. They paused a moment, then performed their devotional gesture with their hands, that vague suggestion of interlocking wheels, putting down their cable if necessary.

Derkhan watched them with foreboding.

“They’ll never make it,” she said. “They haven’t the strength.”

“Many have brought carts,” responded the avatar. “They will leave in shifts.”

“Carts…?” said Derkhan. “From where?”

“Some own them,” said the avatar. “Others have bought or rented them at my orders today. None were stolen. We cannot risk the attention and detection that might result.”

Derkhan looked away. The control that the Council wielded over his human followers disturbed her.

As the last stragglers left the dump, Derkhan and the avatar walked over to the immobile head of the Construct Council. The Council lay on its side and became strata of rubbish, invisible.

A short, thick coil of cable lay waiting beside it. Its end was ragged, the thick rubber carbonized and split for the last foot or so. Tangles of wires splayed out of the end, unpicked from their neat skeins and plaits.

There was one vodyanoi still in the junk-basin. Derkhan saw him standing some feet away, watching the avatar nervously. She beckoned him to come closer. He waddled towards them, now on all fours, now bipedally, his big webbed toes splayed to remain steady on the treacherous ground. His overalls were the light, waxed material the vodyanoi sometimes used: they repelled liquid, so did not become saturated or heavy when the vodyanoi swam. “Are you ready?” said Derkhan. The vodyanoi nodded quickly. Derkhan studied him, but she knew little about his people. She could see nothing about him which gave any clue as to why he devoted himself to this strange, demanding sect, worshipping this weird intelligence, the Construct Council. It was obvious to her that the Council treated its worshippers like pawns, that it drew no satisfaction or pleasure from their worship, only a degree of…usefulness.

She could not understand, not begin to understand, what release or service this heretical church offered its congregation.

“Help me lift this down to the river,” she said, and picked up one end of the thick cable. She was unsteady under its weight, and the vodyanoi picked its way quickly over to her, helped brace her.

The avatar was still. He watched as Derkhan and the vodyanoi made their way away from him, towards the idle, looming cranes which burst up to the north-west, from behind the low rise of garbage that surrounded the Construct Council.

The cable was massive. Derkhan had to stop several times and put the end down, then brace herself to continue. The vodyanoi moved stolidly beside her, stopping with her and waiting for her to carry on. Behind them, the squat pillar of coiled cable shrank slowly as it unwound.

Derkhan chose their passage, moving through the piles of murk towards the river like a prospector.

“D’you know what all this is about?” she asked the vodyanoi quickly, without looking up. He glanced at her sharply, then back up at the thin silhouette of the avatar, still visible against a background of rubbish. He shook his jowly head.

“No,” he said quickly. “Just heard that…that God-machine demanded our presence, ready for an evening’s work. Heard Its bidding when I got here.” He sounded quite normal. His tone was curt, but conversational. Not zealous. He sounded like a worker complaining philosophically about management’s demands for unpaid overtime.

But when Derkhan, wheezing with effort, began to ask more-“How often do you meet?”

“What other things does It bid you do?”-he looked at her with fear and suspicion, and his answers became monosyllabic, then nods, then quickly nothing at all.

Derkhan became silent again. She concentrated on hauling the great wire.

The dumps sprawled untidily to the very edge of the river. The river banks around Griss Twist were sheer walls of slimy brick that rose up from the dark water. When the river was swollen, perhaps only three feet of the decaying clay prevented a flood. At other times, there were as many as eight feet between the top of the river-wall and the choppy surface of the Tar.

Jutting directly from the splintered brick was a six-foot fence of iron links and wooden slats and concrete, built years ago to contain the dumps in their infancy. But now the weight of accumulated filth made the old wirelinks bow alarmingly over the water. With the decades, sections of the flimsy wall had burst and split from its concrete moorings, spewing rubbish into the river below. The fence had gone unrepaired, and in those places now it was only the solidity of the crushed rubbish itself which held the dump in place.

Blocks of compressed garbage regularly cascaded into the water in greasy landslides of slag.

The huge cranes which took cargo from the trash-barges had originally been separated from the garbage they unloaded by a few yards of no-man’s-land-flat scrub and baked earth-but that had rapidly disappeared as the rubbish encroached. Now the dump workers and crane operators had to hike across the scoriatic landscape to cranes that sprouted directly from the vulgar geology of the dump.

It was as if the trash was fertile, and that it bore great structures.

Derkhan and the vodyanoi turned corners in the muck until they could no longer see the Council’s hide. They left a trail of cable that became invisible the moment it touched the ground, transformed into one meaningless piece of litter in a whole vista of mechanical refuse.

The hillocks of garbage subsided as they approached the Tar. Ahead of them, the rusted fence rose four feet or so from the surface layer of detritus. Derkhan changed course fractionally, headed for a wide break in the wire, where the dump was open to the river.

Across the squalid water Derkhan could see New Crobuzon. For a moment, the lumpy spires of Perdido Street Station were just visible, perfectly framed in the fence’s hole, bulging distantly over the city. She could see the rail-lines pick their way between towers that stabbed randomly from the bedrock. Militia struts jutted ugly into the skyline.

Opposite her, Spit Hearth welled up fatly to the river’s edge. There was no unbroken promenade by the side of the Tar, only sections of streets that traced it for a short time, then private gardens, sheer warehouse walls and wasteground. There was no one to watch Derkhan’s preparations unfold.

A few feet from the edge, Derkhan dropped the end of the cable and moved cautiously towards the break in the fence. She felt with her feet, making sure the ground would not fall forward and pitch her into the filthy river seven or more feet below. She leaned out as far as she dared, and scanned the gently moving surface.

The sun was slowly approaching the rooftops to the west, and the dirty black of the river was varnished with reddening light.

“Penge!” Derkhan hissed. “You there?”

After a moment, there was a small splashing sound. One of the indistinct pieces of flotsam that littered the river bobbed suddenly closer. It moved against the current.

Slowly, Pengefinchess raised her head from the river. Derkhan smiled. She felt an odd, desperate relief.

“All right then,” said Pengefinchess. “Time for my last job.” Derkhan nodded with absurd gratitude. “She’s here to help,” Derkhan said to the other vodyanoi, who stared at Pengefinchess in alarmed suspicion. “This cable’s too big and heavy for you to manage yourself. If you get in, then I’ll feed it down to you both.”

It took a few seconds for him to decide the risks posed by the newcomer were less important than the job in hand. He glowered at Derkhan in nervous fear, and nodded. He padded quickly to the break in the link-fence, paused for a fraction of a second, then hopped elegantly up and plunged into the water. His dive was so controlled that there was only a tiny splash.

Pengefinchess eyed him suspiciously as he kicked closer to her. Derkhan looked quickly around, saw a cylindrical metal pipe thicker than her thigh. It was long and incredibly heavy, but working urgently, ignoring her tortured muscles, Derkhan hauled it inch by inch across the gap in the fence, wedging it across the tear. She held her arms out, wincing at the acid burn of her muscles. She stumbled back to the cable and tugged it to the edge of the water.

She began to feed it down over the top of the pipe towards the waiting vodyanoi, hauling it as hard as she could. She pulled more and more free from the coils hidden in the heart of the dump and sent the slack towards the water. Finally, Derkhan had lowered it enough for Pengefinchess to kick up, launch herself almost out of the water and grab hold of the dangling end. Her weight pulled several feet of cable down into the water. The edge of the dump listed alarmingly towards the river, but the cable slid across the smooth surface of the pipe, pulling it tight against the fence on either side and rolling smoothly across its top.

Pengefinchess reached up again and hauled, submerging and powering towards the bottom of the river. Kept free of the ensnaring hooks and edges of the inorganic topsoil, the cable came in great gouts, skimming roughly across the surface of the rubbish and plummeting into the water.

Derkhan watched its halting progress, sudden bursts of motion as the vodyanoi hidden at the bottom of the river jack-knifed their legs and swam hard. She smiled, a small and brief moment of triumph, and leaned exhausted against a broken concrete pillar.

There was nothing on the surface of the water to give any hint of the operation below. The great cable slipped in spurts into the water by the riverwall. It plunged absolutely precipitately into the darkness, hitting the surface at ninety degrees. The vodyanoi, Derkhan realized, must be tugging masses of slack into the water first, rather than pulling the end of the wire directly across the river and having it stretch out across the top of the water.

Eventually the cable was still. Derkhan watched quietly, waiting for some sign of the operation under way.

Minutes passed. Something emerged in the absolute centre of the river.

It was a vodyanoi, raising an arm in triumph or salute or signal. Derkhan waved back, squinted to see who it was, to work out if she was being given a message.

The river was very wide, and the figure was unclear. Then Derkhan saw that the arm carried a composite bow, and she realized that it was Pengefinchess. She saw then that the wave was one of curt farewell, and she responded more fulsomely, her brows furrowing.

It made very little sense, Derkhan realized, to have begged Pengefinchess to help at this last stage of the hunt. Undoubtedly it had made things easier, but they could have managed without her, with the help of more of the Council’s vodyanoi followers. And it made little sense to feel affected by her leaving, even if remotely; to wish Pengefinchess luck; to wave with feeling and feel a faint lack. The vodyanoi mercenary was taking her leave, was disappearing for more lucrative and safer contracts. Derkhan owed her nothing, least of all thanks or affection.

But circumstances had made them comrades, and Derkhan was sorry to see her go. She had been part, a small part, of this chaotic nightmare struggle, and Derkhan marked her passing.

The arm and bow disappeared. Pengefinchess submerged again.

Derkhan turned her back on the river and headed back into the Council’s labyrinth.

She followed the trail of decaying cable through the twists of the junkyard scenery, into the Council’s presence. The avatar stood waiting by the diminished coil of rubber-swathed wire.

“Is the crossing successful?” he asked as soon as he saw her. He stumbled forwards, the cable that burst from his brainpan rattling behind him. Derkhan nodded.

“We’ve got to get things ready here,” she said. “Where’s the output?”

The avatar turned and indicated for her to follow him. He stopped for a moment and picked up the other end of the cable. He staggered under its weight, but he did not complain or ask for help, and Derkhan did not volunteer.

With the thick insulated wire under his arm, the avatar approached the constellation of rubbish that Derkhan recognized as the Construct Council’s head (with a slight unsettling jolt, as at a child’s book of optical tricks, as if an ink drawing of a young woman’s face had suddenly become a crone’s). It still lolled sideways, without any sign of life.

The avatar reached up over the grille that doubled as the Council’s metal teeth. Behind one of the enormous lights Derkhan knew were its eyes, a tangled knot of wire and tubing and rubbish burst out of a casing, in which the stuttering valves of some vastly complex analytical engine were working.

It was the first sign that the great construct was conscious. Derkhan thought she saw light glimmer faintly, waxing and waning, in the Council’s huge eyes.

The avatar pulled the cable into position beside the analogue brain, one of the network that made up the Council’s peculiar inhuman consciousness. He untwisted several of the thick wires in the cable, and in the explosion of metal from the Council’s head.

Derkhan looked away, sickened, as the avatar placidly ignored the way the vicious metal tore jagged holes in his hands, and sluggish, greying blood oozed fitfully out and over his decaying skin.

He began to link the Council to the cable, twisting finger-thick wires together into a conducting whole, snapping connections into sockets that sputtered with obscure sparks, examining the seemingly meaningless buds of copper and silver and glass that flowered from the Construct Council’s brain and from the rubber sheathing of the cable, picking some, twisting and discarding others, plaiting the mechanism into impossibly complex configurations.

“The rest is easy,” he whispered. “Wire to wire, cable to cable, at every junction throughout the city, that is easy. This is the only taxing part, here at source, to connect up correctly, to channel the exudations, to mimic the operation of the communicators’ helmets for an alternative model of consciousness.”

Yet despite the difficulty, it was still light when the avatar looked up at her, wiped his lacerated hands against his thighs, and said that he had finished.

Derkhan watched the little flashes and sparks that burst ominously from the connection with awe. It was beautiful. It glittered like some mechanical jewel.

The Council’s head-vast and still immobile, like a sleeping daemon’s-was linked to the cable with a knot of connective tissue, an elyctro-mechanical, thaumaturgic scar. Derkhan marvelled. Eventually she looked up.

“Well then,” she said hesitantly, “I’d best go and tell Isaac that…that you’re ready.”

With great sweeps of dirty water, Pengefinchess and her companion kicked their way through the eddying darkness of the Tar.

They stayed low. The bottom was barely visible as uneven darkness two feet below them. The cable unwound slowly from the great pile they had left at the bottom of the river, by the edge of the wall.

It was heavy, and they lugged it sluggishly through the filthy river.

They were alone in this part of the water. There were no other vodyanoi: only a few hardy, stunted fishes that skimmed nervously away at their approach. As if, thought Pengefinchess, anything in the whole of Bus-Lag could induce me to eat them.

Minutes passed and their hidden passage continued. Pengefinchess did not think of Derkhan or of what would happen that night, did not consider the plan on which she had eavesdropped. She did not evaluate its probable success. It was none of her concern.

Shadrach and Tansell were dead, and it was time for her to move on.

In a vague way, she wished Derkhan and the others luck. They had been companions, though very briefly. And she understood, in a lax fashion, that there was a great deal at stake. New Crobuzon was a rich city, with a thousand potential patrons. She wanted it to remain healthy.

Ahead of her the slick darkness of the approaching riverwall welled up. Pengefinchess slowed. She hovered in the water and hauled in some slack on the cable, enough to raise it to the surface. Then she hesitated a moment and kicked up. She indicated the male vodyanoi should follow her and she swam up through gloom towards the fractured light that marked out the Tar’s surface, where a thousand rays of sun seeped in all directions through the little waves.

They broke the surface together, and kicked the last few feet into the shadow of the riverwall.

Rusting iron rings were driven into the bricks, creating a rough staircase up to the riverside walk above them. The sound of cabs and pedestrians sank down around them.

Pengefinchess adjusted her bow slightly, making it more comfortable. She looked at the surly male and spoke to him in Lubbock, the polysyllabic guttural language of most of the eastern vodyanoi. He spoke a city dialect, which had been bastardized with human Ragamoll, but they could still understand each other.

“Your companions know to find you here?” Pengefinchess enquired brusquely. He nodded (another human trait the city vodyanoi had adopted). “I am done,” she announced. “You must hold the cable alone. You can wait for them. I am leaving.” He looked at her, still surly, and nodded again, raised his hand in a choppy motion which might have been some kind of salute. Pengefinchess was amused. “Be fecund,” she said. It was a traditional farewell.

She sank under the surface of the Tar and powered herself away.

Pengefinchess swam east, following the course of the river. She was calm, but a rising excitement filled her up. She had no plans, no ties. She wondered, suddenly, what she would do.

The current took her towards Strack Island, where the Tar and Canker met in a confused current and became the Gross Tar. Pengefinchess knew that the submerged base of the Parliament’s island was patrolled by vodyanoi militia, and she kept her distance, branching away from the pull of the water and bearing sharply north-west, swimming upstream, transferring into the Canker.

The current was stronger than the Tar’s, and colder. She was exhilarated, briefly, until she entered a sluice of pollution.

It was the effluent from Brock Marsh, she knew, and she kicked quickly through the murk. Her undine familiar trembled against her skin as she approached certain random patches of water, and she would arc away and pick another route through the fouled river by the magicians’ quarter. She breathed the disgusting liquid shallowly, as if she might avoid contamination that way.

Eventually the water seemed to thin. A mile or so upstream from the rivers’ convergence, the Canker grew suddenly more clear and pure.

Pengefinchess felt something almost like quiet joy.

She began to feel other vodyanoi pass her in the current. She kicked low, here and there felt the gentle outflow of tunnels that led up to some wealthy vodyanoi’s house. These were not the absurd hovels of the Tar, of Lichford and Gross Coil: there, sticky, pitch-coated buildings of palpably human design had simply been built in the river itself, decades ago, to crumble in unsanitary fashion into the water. Those were the vodyanoi slums.

Here, on the other hand, the cold clear water that ran down from the mountains might lead through some carefully crafted passage below the surface into a riverside house all done in white marble. Its façade would be tastefully designed to fit in with the human homes on either side, but inside it would be a vodyanoi home: empty doorways connecting huge rooms above and below the water; canal passageways; sluices refreshing the water every day.

Pengefinchess swam on past the vodyanoi rich, staying low. As the centre of the city passed further away behind her, she grew happier, more relaxed. She felt her escape with great pleasure.

She spread her arms and sent a little mental message to her undine, and it burst away from her skin through the pores of the thin cotton shift she wore. After days of dryness and sewers and effluent, the elemental undulated away through the cleaner water, rolling with enjoyment, being free, a moving locus of quasi-living water in the great wash of the river.

Pengefinchess felt it swim ahead and followed it playfully, reaching out for it and closing her fingers through its substance. It squirmed happily.

I’ll go up-coast, Pengefinchess decided, round the edge of the mountains. Through the Bezhek Foothills, maybe, and the outskirts of Wormseye Scrub. I’ll head for the Cold Claw Sea. With the sudden decision, Derkhan and the others were transformed instantly in her mind, becoming history, becoming something over and done, something she might one day tell stories about.

She opened her enormous mouth, let the Canker gush through her. Pengefinchess swam on, through the suburbs, up and out of the city.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Men and women in grubby overalls spread out from the Griss Twist dump.

They went on foot and in carts, singly, in pairs, and in little gangs of four or five. They moved in dribs and drabs, at unobtrusive speeds. Those on foot carried great swathes of cable over their shoulders, or looped between them and a colleague. In the backs of the carts the men and women sat on enormous rocking twists of the frayed wire.

They went out into the city at irregular intervals, over two or more hours, spacing their departures according to a schedule worked out by the Construct Council. It was calculated to be random.

A small horse-drawn wagon containing four men set off, entering the flow of traffic over Cockscomb Bridge and winding up towards the centre of Spit Hearth. They made their way without urgency, turning onto the wide, banyan-lined Boulevard St. Dragonne. They swayed with a muted clacking along the wooden slats that paved the street: the legacy of the eccentric Mayor Waldemyr, who had objected to the cacophony of wheels on stone cobblestones past his window.

The driver waited for a break in the traffic, then turned to the left and into a small courtyard. The boulevard was invisible, but its sounds were still thick around them. The cab stopped by a high wall of rich red brick, from behind which rose an exquisite smell of honeysuckle. Ivy and passionflower sprouted in little bursts over the lip of the wall, bobbing above them in the breeze. It was the garden of the Vedneh Gehantock monastery, tended by the dissident cactacae and human monks of that floral godling.

The four men leapt down from the cart and began to unload tools and the bales of heavy cable. Pedestrians walked past them, watched them briefly and forgot them.

One man held the end of the cable high against the monastery wall. His workmate lifted a heavy iron bracket and a mallet, and with three quick strokes he had anchored the end of the cable into the wall, about seven feet above the ground. The two moved along, repeated the operation eight or so feet further to the west; and then again, moving along the wall at some speed.

Their movements were not furtive. They were functional and unpresuming. The hammering was just another noise in the montage of city sound.

The men disappeared around the corner of the square and moved off to the west. They dragged the huge bail of insulated wire with them. The other two men stayed put, waiting by the tethered end of the cable, its copper and alloy innards splaying like metallic petals.

The first pair took the cable along the twisting wall that dug inwards through Spit Hearth, around the backs of restaurants and the delivery entrances to clothing boutiques and carpenters’ workshops, towards the red-light zone and The Crow, the bustling nucleus of New Crobuzon.

They moved the cable up and down the height of the brick or concrete, winding it past stains in the wall’s structure, and joining twisting skeins of other pipes, gutterings and overflows, gas pipes, thaumaturgic conductors and rusting channels, circuits of obscure and forgotten purpose. The drab cable was invisible. It was one nerve fibre in the city’s ganglions, a thick cord among many.

Inevitably, they had to cross the street itself, as it peeled away, curving slowly eastwards. They lowered the cable to the ground, approaching a rut that linked the two sides of the pavement. It was a gutter, originally for shit and now for rainwater, a six-inch channel between the paving slabs that sluiced through grilles into the undercity at the furthest end.

They laid the cable in the groove, attaching it firmly. They crossed quickly, standing aside occasionally while traffic interrupted them in their work, but this was not a busy street, and they were able to lay the cable without extensive interruption.

Their behaviour still did not merit attention. Running their cable back up the wall opposite-this time the boundary of a school, from the window of which came forth didactic barks-the unremarkable pair passed another group of workmen. They were digging up the opposite corner of the street, replacing shattered flagstones, and they looked up at the newcomers and grunted some shorthand greeting, then ignored them.

As they approached the red-light zone, the Construct Council’s followers turned into a courtyard, trailing their heavy coil. On three sides, walls rose above them, five or more floors of filthy brick, stained and mossy, years of smog and rain etched across them. There were windows at untidy intervals, as if they had been spilt from the highest point to fall irregularly between the roof and the ground.

Cries and oaths were audible, and laughed conversations, and the clattering of kitchenware. A pretty young child of uncertain sex watched them from a third-floor window. The two men looked at each other nervously for a moment, and scanned the rest of the overlooking windows. The child’s was the only face: they were otherwise unobserved.

They dropped the loops of cable, and one looked up into the child’s eyes, winked impishly and grinned. The other man dropped to one knee and peered through the bars of the circular manhole in the courtyard floor.

From the darkness below a voice hailed him curtly. A filthy hand shot up towards the metal seal.

The first man tugged his companion’s leg and hissed at him-“They’re here…this is the right place!”-then grabbed the rough end of the cable and tried to thrust it between the bars in the sewer’s entrance. It was too thick. He cursed and fumbled in his toolbox for a hacksaw, began to work on the tough grille, wincing at the screech of metal.

“Hurry,” said the invisible figure below. “Something’s been following us.”

When the cutting was done, the man in the courtyard shoved the cable hard into the ragged hole. His companion glanced down at the unsettling scene. It looked like some grotesque inversion of birth.

The men below grabbed at the cable, hauled it into the darkness of the sewers. The yards of wire coiled in the still, close courtyard began to unwind into the city’s veins.

The child watched curiously as the two men waited, wiping their hands on their overalls. When the cable was pulled taut, when it disappeared sharply under the ground, pulled at a tight angle around the corner of the little cul-de-sac, then they sauntered quickly out of that shadowed hole.

As they turned the corner, one man looked up, winked again, then walked on and disappeared from the child’s view.

In the main street the two men separated without a word, walking away in different directions under the setting sun.

At the monastery, the two men waiting by the wall were looking up.

On the building across the street, a concrete edifice mottled with damp, three men had appeared over the crumbling edge of the roof. They were hauling their own cable with them, the last forty or so feet of a much longer roll that now snaked away behind them, tracking their rooftop journey from the southern corner of Spit Hearth.

The cable trail they left wound among the rooftop shacks of squatters. It joined the legions of pipes that made erratic paths among the pigeon hutches. The cable was squeezed around spires and tacked like some ugly parasite onto slates. It bowed slightly across streets, twenty, forty or more feet above the ground, next to the little bridges thrown up across the divides. Here and there, where the gap was six feet or less, the cable simply spanned the drop, where its bearers had leapt across.

The cable disappeared south-eastwards, plunging suddenly down and through a slimy storm-drain, into the sewers.

The men made their way to the fire-escape of their building, and began to descend. They hauled the thick cable down to the first floor, looked down over the monastery garden and the two men watching on the ground.

“Ready?” shouted one of the newcomers, and made a throwing motion in their direction. The pair looking up, nodded. The three on the fire-escape paused, and swung the remnants of the cable in time.

When they threw it, it wriggled in the air like some monstrous flying serpent, descending with a heavy smack into the arms of the man who ran to catch it. He yelped, but held it, kept the end high above his head and pulled it as tight as he could across the divide.

He held the heavy wire against the monastery wall, positioning himself so that the new length of cable would link up snugly with the piece already attached to the Vedneh Gehantock garden wall. His companion hammered it into place.

The black cable crossed the street above the pedestrians’ heads, descending at a steep angle.

The three on the iron fire-escape leaned over, watching the frantic engineering of their fellows. One of the men below them began to twist together the huge snarls of wire, connecting the conducting material. He worked quickly, until the two bare ends of fibrous metal were conjoined in an ugly, functional knot.

He opened his toolkit and brought forth two little bottles. He shook them both briefly, then opened the stopper on one and dripped it quickly across the thicket of wires. The viscous liquid seeped in, saturating the connection. The man repeated the operation with the second bottle. As the two liquids met there was an audible chymical reaction. He stood back, stretched his arm to continue pouring, closing his eyes as smoke began to billow out from the rapidly heating metal.

The two chymicals met and mixed and combusted, spewing out noxious fumes with a quick burst of heat intense enough to weld the wires into a sealed mesh.

When the heat had lessened, the two men began the final job, laying ragged strips of sacking across the new connection and cracking the seals on a tin of thick, bituminous paint, slathering it on thickly, covering the bare metal seal, insulating it.

The men on the fire-escape were satisfied. They turned and retraced their steps, returning to the roof, from where they dissipated into the city as quick and untraceable as smoke in a breeze.

All along a line between Griss Twist and The Crow, similar operations were taking place.

In the sewers, furtive men and women picked their way through the hiss and drip of the subterranean tunnels. Where possible, these large gangs were led by workers who knew a little of the undercity: sewage workers; engineers; thieves. They were all equipped with maps, torches, guns and strict instructions. Ten or more figures, several with lengths of heavy cable, would pick their way together along their allotted route. When one piece of slowly unrolling wire ran out, they would connect another and continue.

There were dangerous delays as parties lost each other, blundering towards lethal zones: ghul-nests and undergang lairs. But they corrected themselves and hissed for help, making their way back towards their comrades’ voices.

When they finally met the tail end of another team in some main node of tunnel, some medium hub of sewer, they connected the two huge ends of wire, welding them with chymicals or heat-torches or backyard thaumaturgy. Then the cable was attached to the enormous arterial clutches of pipes that travelled the lengths of the sewers.

Their job done, the company would scatter and disappear.

In unobtrusive places, with extended backstreets or great stretches of interlinked roofs, the cable would poke from underground and be taken by the crews working above the streets. They unrolled the cable over hillocks of rank sedge behind warehouses, up stairways of damp brick, over roofs and along chaotic streets, where their industry was invisible in its banality.

They met others, the cable lengths were sealed. The men and women dispersed.

Mindful of the likelihood that some crews-especially those in the undercity-would become lost and miss their rendezvous points, the Construct Council had stationed spare crews along the route. They waited in building sites and by the banks of canals with their serpentine load beside them, for word that some connection had not been made.

But the work seemed charmed. There were problems, lost moments, wasted time and brief panics, but no team disappeared or missed its meeting. The spare men remained idle.

A great sinuous circuit was constructed through the city. It wound through more than two miles of textures: its matt-black rubber skin slid under faecal slime; across moss and rotting paper; through scrubby undergrowth, patches of brick-strewn grassland, disturbing the trails of feral cats and street-children; plotting the ruts in the skin of architecture, littered with granulated clots of damp brickdust.

The cable was inexorable. It moved on, its path deviating briefly here and there with whiplash curves, scoring a path through the hot city. It was as determined as some spawning fish, fighting its way towards the enormous rising monolith at the centre of New Crobuzon.

The sun was sinking behind the foothills to the west, making them magnificent and portentous. But they could not challenge the chaotic majesty of Perdido Street Station.

Lights flickered on across its vast and untrustworthy topography, and it received the now-glowing trains into its bowels like offerings. The Spike skewered the clouds like a spear held ready, but it was nothing beside the station: a little concrete addendum to that great disreputable leviathan building, wallowing in fat satisfaction in the city-sea.

The cable wound towards it without pause, rising above and falling beneath New Crobuzon’s surface in waves.

The west-facing front of Perdido Street Station opened onto BilSantum Plaza. The plaza was thronging and beautiful, with carts and pedestrians circulating constantly around the parkland at its centre. In this lush green, jugglers and magicians and stall-holders kept up raucous chants and sales pitches. The citizenry were blithely careless of the monumental structure that dominated the sky. They only noticed its façade with offhand pleasure when the low sun’s rays struck it full on, and its patchwork of architecture glowed like a kaleidoscope: the stucco and painted wood were rose; the bricks went bloody; the iron girders were glossy with rich light. BilSantum Street swept under the huge raised arch that connected the main body of the station to the Spike. Perdido Street Station was not discrete. Its edges were permeable. Spines of low turrets swept off its back and into the city, becoming the roofs of rude and everyday houses. The concrete slabs that scaled it grew squat as they spread out, and were suddenly ugly canal walls. Where the five railway lines unrolled through great arches and passed along the roofs, the station’s bricks supported and surrounded them, cutting a path over the streets. The architecture oozed out of its bounds.

Perdido Street itself was a long, narrow passageway that jutted perpendicularly from BilSantum Street and wound sinuously east towards Gidd. No one knew why it had once been important enough to give the station its name. It was cobbled, and its houses were not squalid, though they were in ill-repair. It might once have described the station’s northern boundary, but it had long been overtaken. The storeys and rooms of the station had spread out and rapidly breached the little street.

They had leapt it effortlessly and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond, transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time.

Perdido Street was still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and out of shadow.

The tramp of heavy boots often sounded from above. The front of the station, and much of its roofscape, was guarded. Private security, foreign soldiers and the militia, some in uniform and some in disguise, patrolled the façade and the mountainous landscape of slate and clay, protecting the banks and stores, the embassies and the government offices that filled the various floors within. They would tread like explorers along carefully plotted routes through the spires and spiral iron staircases, past dormer windows and through hidden rooftop courtyards, journeying across the lower layers of the station roof, looking down over the plaza and the secret places and the enormous city.

But further to the east, towards the rear of the station, spotted with a hundred trade entrances and minor establishments, the security lapsed and became more haphazard. The towering construction was darker here. When the sun set, it cast its great shadow across a huge swathe of The Crow.

Some way out from the main mass of the building, between Perdido Street and Gidd Stations, the Dexter Line passed through a tangle of old offices that long ago had been ruined by a minor fire.

It had not damaged the structure, but it had been enough to bankrupt the company that had traded within. The charred rooms had long been empty of all but vagrants unperturbed by the smell of carbon, still tenacious after nearly a decade.

After more than two hours of torturously slow motion, Isaac and Yagharek had arrived at this burned shell, and collapsed thankfully within. They released Andrej, retied his hands and feet and gagged him before he woke. Then they ate what little food they had, and sat quietly, and waited.

Although the sky was light, their shelter was in the darkness shed by the station. In a little over an hour twilight would come, with night just behind it.

They talked quietly. Andrej woke and began to make his noises again, casting piteous looks around the room, begging for freedom, but Isaac looked at him with eyes too exhausted and miserable for guilt.

At seven o’clock there was a fumbling noise at the heat-blistered door. It was instantly audible above the rattling street sounds of The Crow. Isaac drew his flintlock and motioned Yagharek to silence.

It was Derkhan, exhausted and very dirty, her face smeared with dust and grease. She held her breath as she passed through the door and closed it behind her, releasing a sobbing exhalation as she slumped against it. She moved over and gripped Isaac’s hand, then Yagharek’s. They murmured greetings.

“I think there’s someone watching this place,” Derkhan said urgently. “He’s standing under the tobacconist’s awning opposite, in a green cloak. Can’t see his face.”

Isaac and Yagharek tensed. The garuda slid under the boarded-up window and raised his avian eye quietly to a knothole. He scanned the street across from the ruin.

“There is no one there,” he said flatly. Derkhan came over and stared through the hole.

“Maybe he wasn’t doing anything,” she said eventually. “But I’d feel safer a floor or two up, in case we hear someone come in.”

It was much easier to move, now that Isaac could force the crying Andrej at gunpoint without fear of being seen. They made their way up the stairs, leaving footprints in the charcoal surface.

On the top floor the window frames were empty of glass or wood, and they could look out across the short trek of slates at the staggered monolith of the station. They waited while the sky grew darker. Eventually, in the dim flicker of the orange gasjets, Yagharek clambered from the window and dropped lightly onto the moss-cushioned wall beyond. He stalked the five feet to the unbroken spine of roofs that connected the clutch of buildings to the Dexter Line and to Perdido Street Station. It sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters of light like an earthbound constellation.

Yagharek was a dim figure in the skyline. He scanned the landscape of chimneys and slanting clay. He was not watched. He turned towards the dark window, indicated the others to follow him.

Andrej was old and stiff, and found it hard to walk along the narrow walkways they forged. He could not jump the five-foot drops that were necessary. Isaac and Derkhan helped him, supporting him or holding him fast with a gentle, macabre assistance, while the other trained their flintlock at his brain.

They had untied his limbs so he could walk and climb, but they had left the gag in place to stifle his wails and sobs.

Andrej stumbled confused and miserable like some soul in the outlands of Hell, shuffling nearer and nearer his ineluctable end with agonizing steps.

The four of them walked across the roofworld parallel to the Dexter Line. They were passed in both directions by spitting iron trains, wailing and venting great coughs of sooty smoke into the dwindling light. They trooped slowly onwards, towards the station ahead.

It was not long before the nature of their terrain changed. The sharp-angled slates gave way as the mass of architecture rose around them. They had to use their hands. They made their way through little byways of concrete, surrounded by windowed walls; they ducked under huge portholes and had to scale short ladders that wound between stubby towers. Hidden machinery made the brickwork hum. They were no longer looking ahead to the roof of Perdido Street Station, but up. They had passed some nebulous boundary point where the terraced streets ended and the foothills of the station began.

They tried to avoid climbing, creeping around the edges of promontories of brick like jutting teeth and through accidental passageways. Isaac began to look around, nervous and fitful. The pavement was invisible behind a low rise of rooftops and chimney-pipes to their right.

“Keep quiet and careful,” he whispered. “There might be guards.”

From the north-east, a gouged curve in the station’s sprawling silhouette was a street approaching them, half covered by the building. Isaac pointed at it.

“There,” he whispered. “Perdido Street.”

He traced its line with his hand. A short way ahead it intersected with the Cephalic Way, along the length of which they were walking.

“Where they meet,” he whispered. “That’s our pick-up point. Yag…would you go?”

The garuda sped away, making towards the back of a tall building a few yards ahead, where rust-fouled guttering made a slanting ladder to the ground.

Isaac and Derkhan plodded slowly onwards, pushing Andrej gently forward with their guns. When they reached the intersection of the two streets they sat heavily and waited.

Isaac looked up at the sky, where only the high clouds still caught the sun. He looked down, watching Andrej’s misery and imploring gaze creasing his old face. From all around the city the night sounds were beginning.

“There’s no nightmares yet,” murmured Isaac. He looked up at Derkhan, held out his hand as if feeling for rain. “Can’t feel anything. They can’t be abroad yet.”

“Maybe they’re licking their wounds,” she said cheerlessly. “Maybe they won’t come and this-” her eyes flicked up towards Andrej momentarily,”-this’ll all be useless.”

“They’ll come,” said Isaac. “I promise you that.” He would not talk of things going wrong. He would not admit the possibility.

They were silent for a while. Isaac and Derkhan realized simultaneously that they were both watching Andrej. He breathed slowly, his eyes flickering this way and that, his fear become a paralysing backdrop. We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn’t scream…but then he might speak…He left the gag in place.

There was a scraping sound near them. With calm speed, Isaac and Derkhan raised their pistols. Yagharek’s feathered head emerged from behind the clay, and they lowered their hands. The garuda hauled himself towards them over the cracked extrusion of roof. Draped over his shoulder was a great coil of cable.

Isaac stood to catch him as he staggered towards them.

“You got it!” he hissed. “They were waiting!”

“They were becoming angry,” said Yagharek. “They had come up from the sewers an hour or more ago: they were fearful that we had been captured or killed. This is the last of the wire.” He dropped the loops to the ground before them. The cable was thinner than many of the other sections, about four inches in cross-section, coated with thin rubber. There were perhaps sixty feet of wire remaining, sprawled in tight spirals by their ankles.

Isaac knelt to examine it. Derkhan, her pistol still trained on the cowering Andrej, squinted at the cable.

“Is it connected?” she asked. “Is it working?”

“I don’t know,” breathed Isaac. “We won’t be able to tell till I link it up, make it a circuit.” He hauled the cable up, swung it over his shoulder. “There’s not as much as I’d hoped,” he said. “We’re not going to get very close to the centre of Perdido Street Station.” He looked around and pursed his lips. It doesn’t matter, he thought. Picking the station was just something to tell the Council, to get out of the dump and away from it before…betrayal. But he found himself wishing that they could plant themselves at the core of the station, as if there was in fact some power inhering in its bricks.

He pointed a little way away to the south-east, up a little slope of steep-sided, flat-topped rooflets. They extended like an exaggerated slate stairwell, overlooked by an enormous flat wall of stained concrete. The little rise of roof hillocks ended about forty feet above them, in what Isaac hoped was a flattened plateau. The huge L-shaped concrete wall continued into the air above it for nearly sixty feet, containing it on two sides.

“There,” said Isaac slowly. “That’s where we’ll go.”

Chapter Fifty

Halfway up the stepped roofs, Isaac and his companions disturbed someone.

There was a sudden raucous drunken noise. Isaac and Derkhan flurried for their pistols in anxious motion. It was a ragged drunk who leapt up in a shockingly inhuman motion and disappeared at speed down the slope. Strips of torn clothes fluttered behind him.

After that Isaac began to see the denizens of the station’s roof-scape. Little fires sputtered in secret courtyards, tended by dark and hungry figures. Sleeping men curled in the corners beside old spires. It was an alternative, an attenuated society. Little vagrant hilltribes foraging. A quite different ecology.

Way above the heads of the roof-people, bloated airships ploughed across the sky. Noisy predators. Grubby specks of light and dark, moving edgily in the night’s cloud.

To Isaac’s relief, the plateau at the top of the hill of layered slate was flat, and about fifteen feet square. Large enough. He wagged his gun, indicating that Andrej should sit, which the old man did, collapsing slowly and precipitously into the far corner. He huddled in on himself, hugging his knees.

“Yag,” said Isaac. “Keep watch, mate.” Yagharek dropped the final twist of the cable he had hauled up, and stood sentry at the edge of the little open space, looking down across the gradient of the massive roof. Isaac staggered under the full weight of the sack. He put it down and began to unpack the equipment.

Three mirrored helmets, one of which he put on. Derkhan took the others, gave one to Yagharek. Four analytical engines the size of large typewriters. Two large chymico-thaumaturgical batteries. Another battery, this one metaclockwork, a khepri design.

Several connecting cables. Two large communicators’ helmets, of the type used by the Construct Council on Isaac to trap the first slake-moth. Torches. Black powder and ammunition. A sheaf of programme cards. A clutch of transformers and thaumaturgic converters. Copper and pewter circuits of quite opaque purpose. Small motors and dynamos.

Everything was battered. Dented, cracked and filthy. It was a sad pile. It looked like nothing at all. Rubbish.

Isaac squatted beside it and began to prepare.

His head wobbled under the weight of his helmet. He connected two of the calculating engines, linking them into a powerful network. Then he began a much harder job, connecting the rest of the various oddments into a coherent circuit.

The motors were clipped to wires, and they to the larger of the analytical engines. The other engine he tinkered with internally, checking subtle adjustments. He had changed its circuitry. The valves within were no longer simply binary switches. They were attuned specifically and carefully to the unclear and the questionable; the grey areas of crisis mathematics.

He snapped small plugs into receivers and wired up the crisis engine to the dynamos and transformers that converted one uncanny form of energy into another. A discombobulated circuit spread out across the flat little roofspace.

The last thing he pulled from the sack and connected to the sprawling machinery was a crudely welded box of black tin, about the size of a shoe. He picked up the end of the cable-the enormous work of guerrilla engineering that stretched more than two miles to the huge hidden intelligence of the Griss Twist dump. Isaac deftly unwound the splayed wires and connected them to the black box. He looked up at Derkhan, who was watching him, her gun trained on Andrej.

“That’s a breaker,” he said, “a circuit-valve. One-way flow only. I’m cutting the Council off from this lot.” He patted the various pieces of the crisis engine. Derkhan nodded slowly. The sky had grown nearly completely dark. Isaac looked up at her and set his lips.

“We can’t let that fucking thing get access to the crisis engine. We have to stay away from it,” he explained as he connected the disparate components of his machine. “You remember what it told us-the avatar was some corpse pulled out of the river. Bullshit! That body’s alive…mindless, sure, but the heart’s beating and the lungs breathe air. The Construct Council had to take that man’s mind out of his body while he was alive. That was the whole point. Otherwise it would just rot.

“I don’t know…maybe it was one of that crazy congregation sacrificing himself, maybe it was voluntary. But maybe not. Whichever, the Council don’t care about killing off humans or any others, if it’s…useful. It’s got no empathy, no morals,” Isaac continued, pushing hard at a resistant piece of metal. “It’s just a…a calculating intelligence. Cost and benefit. It’s trying to…maximize itself. It’ll do whatever it has to-it’ll lie to us, it’ll kill-to increase its own power.”

Isaac stopped for a moment and looked up at Derkhan.

“And you know,” he said softly, “that’s why it wants the crisis engine. It kept demanding it. Made me think. That’s what this is for.” He patted the circuit-valve. “If I connected the Council direct, it might be able to get feedback from the crisis engine, get control of it. It doesn’t know I’m using this, that’s why it was so keen on being connected. It doesn’t know how to build its own engine: you can bet Jabber’s arse that’s why it’s so interested in us.

“Dee, Yag, d’you know what this engine can do? I mean, this is a prototype…but if it works like it should, if you got inside this, saw the blueprint, built it more solidly, ironed out the problems…d’you know what this can do?

“Anything.” He was silent for a while, his hands working, connecting his wires. “There’s crisis everywhere, and if the engine can detect the field, tap it, channel it…it can do anything. I’m hamstrung because of all the maths. You’ve got to express in mathematical terms what you want the engine to do. That’s what the programme cards are for. But the Council’s whole damn brain expresses things mathematically. If that bastard links up to the crisis engine, its followers won’t be crazy any more.

“Because you know they call it the God-machine…? Well…they’ll be right.”

All three of them were quiet. Andrej rolled his eyes from side to side, not comprehending a single word.

Isaac worked silently. He tried to imagine a city in the thrall of the Construct Council. He thought of it linked up to the little crisis engine, building more and more of the engines on an ever-increasing scale, connecting them up to its own fabric, powering them with its own thaumaturgical and elyctrochymical and steampower. Monstrous valves hammering in the depths of the dump, making the fabric of reality bend and bleed with the ease of a Weaver’s spinnerets, all doing the bidding of that vast, cold intelligence, pure conscious calculation, as capricious as a baby.

He fingered the circuit-valve, shaking it gently, praying that its mechanisms were sound.

Isaac sighed and brought out the thick sheaf of programme cards the Council had printed. Each was labelled in the Council’s tottering typewritten script. Isaac looked up quizzically.

“It’s not yet ten, is it?” he said. Derkhan shook her head. “There’s still nothing in the air, is there? The moths aren’t out yet. Let’s be ready by the time they fly.”

He looked down and pulled the lever on the two chymical batteries. The reagents within mixed. The sound of effervescence was dimly audible, and there was a sudden chorus of chattering valves and barking outputs as current was released. The machinery on the roofscape snapped into life.

The crisis engine whirred.

“It’s just calculating,” said Isaac nervously, as Derkhan and Yagharek glanced at him. “It’s not yet processing. I’m giving it instructions.”

Isaac began to feed the programme cards carefully into the various analytical engines before him. Most went to the crisis engine itself, but some to the subsidiary calculating circuits connected by little loops of cable. Isaac checked each card, comparing it with his notes, scribbling quick calculations before feeding it into any of the inputs.

The engines clattered as their fine ratcheting teeth slid over the cards, snapping into carefully cut holes, instructions and orders and information downloading into their analogue brains. Isaac was slow, waiting until he felt the click that signalled successful processing before removing each card and slotting in the next.

He kept notes, scrawling impenetrable messages to himself on ragged ends of paper. He breathed quickly.

Rain began to fall, quite suddenly. It was sluggish, huge drops falling indolently and breaking open, as thick and warm as pus. The night was close, and the glutinous rainclouds made it more so. Isaac worked fast, his fingers feeling suddenly idiotic, too large.

There was a slow sense of dragging, a weightiness that pulled at the spirit and began to saturate the bones. A sense of the uncanny, of the fearful and hidden, that rolled up as if from within, a billowing ink-cloud from the depths of the mind.

“Isaac,” said Derkhan, her voice cracking, “you have to hurry. It’s starting.”

A swarm of nightmare feelings pattered down among them with the rain.

“They’re up and out,” said Derkhan with terror. “They’re hunting. They’re abroad. Hurry, you have to hurry…”

Isaac nodded without speaking and continued with what he was doing, shaking his head as if that might disperse the cloying fear that had settled on him. Where’s the fucking Weaver? he thought.

“Someone watches us from below,” said Yagharek suddenly, “some tramp who did not run. He does not move.”

Isaac glanced up again, then returned his attention to his work.

“Take my gun there,” he hissed. “If he comes up towards us, warn him off with a shot. Hopefully he’ll keep his distance.” Still his hands rushed to twist, to connect, to programme. He punched numbered keypads and wrestled roughcut cards into slots. “Nearly there,” he murmured, “nearly there.”

The sense of nocturnal pressure, of drifting in sour dreams, increased.

“Isaac…” hissed Derkhan. Andrej had fallen into a kind of terrified, exhausted half-sleep, and he began to moan and thrash, his eyes opening and shutting with bleary vagueness.

“Done!” spat Isaac, and stepped back.

There was a silent moment. Isaac’s triumph dissipated quickly.

“We need the Weaver!” he said. “It’s supposed to…it said it would be here! We can’t do anything without it…”

They could do nothing except wait.

The stench of twisted dream-imagery grew and grew, and brief screams sounded from random points across the city, as sleeping sufferers called out their fear or defiance. The rain fell thicker, until the concrete underfoot was slick. Isaac laid the greasy sack ineffectually across various sections of the crisis circuit, moving it in agitation, trying to protect his machine from the water.

Yagharek watched the glistening roofscape. When his head became too full of fearful dreams and he grew afraid of what he might see, he turned on his heel and watched through the mirrors on his helmet. He kept watch on the dim, immobile figure below.

Isaac and Derkhan dragged Andrej a little closer to the circuit (again with that ghastly gentleness, as if concerned for his well-being). Under Derkhan’s gun, Isaac retied the old man’s hands and legs, and fastened one of the communicator helmets tight to his head. He did not look at Andrej’s face.

The helmet had been adjusted. As well as its flared output on the top, it had three input jacks. One connected it to the second helmet. Another was connected by several skeins of wires to the calculating brains and generators of the crisis engine.

Isaac wiped the third connection briefly free of filthy rainwater, and plugged into it the thick wire extending from the black circuit-breaker, attached to which was the massive cable extending all the way to the Construct Council, south of the river. Current could flow from the Council’s analytical brain, through the one-way switch, into Andrej’s helmet.

“That’s it, that’s it,” said Isaac tensely. “Now we just need the fucking Weaver…”

It was another half an hour of rain and burgeoning nightmares before the dimensions of the roofspace rippled and shucked wildly, and the Weaver’s crooning monologue could be heard.

…AS THEE AND ME CONCURRED THE FAT FUNNELSPACE THE CLOT AT CITYWEB CENTRE SEES US CONFLAB…came the unearthly voice in all of their skulls, and the great spider stepped out lightly from the kink in the air and danced towards them, its shining body dwarfing them.

Isaac gave a barking breath, a sharp moan of relief. His mind juddered with the awe and terror the Weaver induced.

“Weaver!” he shouted. “Help us now!” He held out the other communicating helmet to the extraordinary presence.

Andrej had looked up and was shying away in a paroxysm of terror. His eyes bulged with the pressure of his blood and he began to retch behind his mask. He wriggled as fast as he could towards the edge of the roof, a terrible inhuman fear jack-knifing his body away.

Derkhan caught him and held him fast. He ignored her gun, his eyes empty of everything but the vast spider that loomed over him, peering down with slow portentous movements. Derkhan could hold him easily. His decaying muscles flexed and twisted ineffectually. She dragged him back and held him.

Isaac did not look at them. He held out the helmet to the Weaver beseechingly.

“We need you to put this on,” he said. “Put this on now! We can take them all. You said you’d help us…to repair the web…please.”

The rain sputtered against the Weaver’s hard shell. Every second or so, one or two random drops would sizzle violently and evaporate as they struck it. The Weaver kept talking, as it always did, an inaudible murmur that Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could not understand.

It reached out with its smooth, human hands, and placed the helmet on its segmented head.

Isaac closed his eyes in brief exhausted relief, then opened them again.

“Keep it on!” he hissed. “Fasten it!”

With fingers that moved as elegantly as a master tailor’s, the spider did so.

…WILL YOU TICKLE AND TRICK…it gibbered…AS THINK-LINGS TRICKLE THROUGH SLOSHING METAL AND MIX IN MIRE MY IRE MY MIRROR MYRIAD BURSTING BUBBLES OF BRAINWAVEFORMS AND WEAVING PLANS ON ON AND ONWARD MY MASTER CRAFTY CRAFTSMAN… and as the Weaver continued to croon with incomprehensible and dreamlike proclamations, Isaac saw the last fastening snap tight under its terrifying jaw, and he snapped on the switches that opened the circuit-valves on Andrej’s helmet, and he pulled the succession of levers that geared up the full processing power of the analytical calculators and the crisis engine, and he stepped back.

Extraordinary currents surged through the machinery assembled before them.

There was a very still moment, when even the rain seemed to pause.

Sparks of various and extraordinary colours sputtered from connections.

A massive arc of power suddenly snapped Andrej’s body absolutely rigid. An unstable corona briefly surrounded him. His face was glazed with astonishment and pain.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek watched him, paralysed.

As the batteries sent great gobs of charged particles racing through the intricate circuit, flows of power and processed orders interacted in complex feedback loops, an infinitely fast drama unravelling on a femtoscopic scale.

The communicator helmet began its task, sucking up the exudations of Andrej’s mind and amplifying them in a stream of thaumaturgons and waveforms. They raced at the speed of light through the circuitry and headed towards the inverted funnel that would blare them silently into the aether.

But they were diverted.

They were processed, read, mathematized by the ordered drumming of tiny valves and switches.

An infinitely small moment later, two more streams of energy burst into the circuitry. First came the emissions from the Weaver, streaming through the helmet it wore. A tiny fraction of a second later, the current from the Construct Council came sparking through the rough cable from the Griss Twist dump, slamming up and down through the streets, through the circuit-valves in a great slew of power and into the circuitry through Andrej’s helmet.

Isaac had seen how the slake-moths slavered and rolled their tongues indiscriminately across the Weaver’s body. He had seen how they had been giddy, but not sated.

The Weaver’s whole body emanated mental waves, he had realized, but they were not like those of other sentient races. The slake-moths lapped eagerly, and drew taste…but no sustenance.

The Weaver thought in a continuous, incomprehensible, rolling stream of awareness. There were no layers to the Weaver’s mind, there was no ego to control the lower functions, no animal cortex to keep the mind grounded. For the Weaver, there were no dreams at night, no hidden messages from the secret corners of the mind, no mental clearout of accrued garbage bespeaking an orderly consciousness. For the Weaver, dreams and consciousness were one. The Weaver dreamed of being conscious and its consciousness was its dream, in an endless unfathomable stew of image and desire and cognition and emotion.

For the slake-moths, it was like the froth on effervescent liquor. It was intoxicating and delightful, but without organizing principle, without substratum. Without substance. These were not dreams that could sustain them.

The extraordinary squall and gust of the Weaver’s consciousness blew down the wires into the sophisticated engines.

Just behind it came the particle torrent from the Construct Council’s brain.

In extreme contrast to the anarchic viral flurry that had spawned it, the Construct Council thought with chill exactitude. Concepts were reduced to a multiplicity of on-off switches, a soulless solipsism that processed information without the complication of arcane desires or passion. A will to existence and aggrandizement, shorn of all psychology, a mind contemplative and infinitely, incidentally cruel.

To the slake-moths it was invisible, thought without subconscious. It was meat stripped of all taste or smell, empty thought-calories inconceivable as nutrition. Like ashes.

The Council’s mind poured into the machine-and there was a moment of fraught activity as commands were sent down the copper connections from the dump, as the Council sought to suck back information and control of the engine. But the circuit-breaker was solid. The flow of particles was one way.

It was assimilated, passing through the analytical engine.

A set of parameters was reached. Complex instructions pattered through the valves.

Within a seventh of a second, a rapid sequence of processing activity had begun.

The machine examined the form of the first input x, Andrej’s mental signature.

Two subsidiary orders rattled down pipes and wiring simultaneously. Model form of input y one said, and the engines mapped the extraordinary mental current from the Weaver; Model form of input z, and they did the same job on the Construct Council’s vast and powerful brainwaves. The analytical engines factored out the scale of the output and concentrated on the paradigms, the shapes.

The two lines of programming coalesced again into a tertiary order: Duplicate waveform of input x with inputs y and z.

The commands were extraordinarily complex. They relied on the advanced calculating machines the Construct Council had provided, and the intricacy of its programme cards.

The mathematico-analytical maps of mentality-even simplified and imperfect, flawed as they inevitably were-became templates. The three were compared.

Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s, any sane vodyanoi’s or khepri’s or cactacae’s or other sentient being’s, was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.

Andrej’s mind was not like the cold ratiocination of the Council, nor the poetic dream-consciousness of the Weaver.

x, recorded the engines, was unlike y and unlike z.

But with underlying structure and subconscious flow, with calculating rationality and impulsive fancy, self-maximizing analysis and emotional charge, x, the analytical engines calculated, was equal to y plus z.

The thaumaturgo-psychic motors followed orders. They combined y and z. They created a duplicate waveform to that of x and routed it through the output on Andrej’s helmet.

The flows of charged particles pouring into the helmet from the Council and the Weaver were added together into a single vast slew. The Weaver’s dreams, the Council’s calculations, were blended to mimic subconscious and conscious, the working human mind. The new ingredients were more powerful than Andrej’s feeble emanations by a factor of enormous magnitude. The vastness of this power was unabated as the new, huge current surged towards the flared trumpet pointing up into the sky.

A little more than one-third of a second had passed since the circuit had snapped into life. As the enormous combined flow of y + z dashed towards the outflow, a new set of conditions was fulfilled. The crisis engine itself chattered into life.

It used the unstable categories of crisis maths, as much a persuasive vision as objective categorization. Its deductive method was holistic, totalizing and inconstant.

As the exudations of the Council and the Weaver took the place of Andrej’s outflow, the crisis engine was fed the same information as the original processors. It rapidly evaluated the calculations that had been performed and examined the new flow. In its astonishingly complex tubular intelligence, a massive anomaly became evident. Something the strictly arithmetic functions of the other engines could never have uncovered.

The form of the dataflows under analysis was not just the sum of their constituent parts.

y and z were unified, bounded wholes. And most crucially, so was x, Andrej’s mind, the reference point for the whole model. It was integral to the form of each that they were totalities.

The layers of consciousness within x were dependent on each other, interlocking gears of a motor of self-sustaining consciousness. What was arithmetically discernible as rationalism plus dreams was really a whole, whose constituent parts could not be disentangled.

y and z were not half-complete models of x. They were qualitatively different.

The engine applied rigorous crisis logic to the original operation. A mathematical command had created a perfect arithmetic analogue of a source code from disparate material, and that analogue was simultaneously identical to and radically divergent from the original it mimicked.

Three-fifths of a second after the circuit had snapped into life, the crisis engine arrived at two simultaneous conclusions: x-y+z; and x^y+z.

The operation that had been carried out was profoundly unstable. It was paradoxical, unsustainable, the application of logic tearing itself apart.

The process was, from absolute first principles of analysis, modelling and conversion, utterly riddled with crisis.

A massive wellspring of crisis energy was instantly uncovered. The realization of crisis freed it up to be tapped: metaphasic pistons squeezed and convulsed, sending controlled spurts of the volatile energy shooting through amplifiers and transformers. Subsidiary circuits rocked and juddered. The crisis motor began to whirl like a dynamo, crackling with power and sending out complex charges of quasivoltage.

The final command rang in binary form through the crisis engine’s innards. Channel energy, it said, and amplify output.

Just less than one second since the power had coursed through the wires and mechanisms, the impossible, paradoxical flow of cobbled-together consciousness, the combined flow of Weaver and Council, welled up and burst massively out of Andrej’s conducting helmet.

His own rerouted emanations wobbled in a loop of referential feedback, constantly being checked and compared to the y+z flow by the analogue and the crisis engines. Without outlet, it began to leak out, snapping in peculiar little arcs of thaumaturgic plasma. It dribbled invisibly over Andrej’s contorting face, mixing with the gobbing overflow from the Weaver/Council emission.

The main aggregate of that enormous and unstable created consciousness burst in huge gouts from the helmet’s flanges. A growing column of mental waves and particles burst out over the station, towering into the air. It was invisible, but Isaac and Derkhan and Yagharek could feel it, a prickling of the skin, sixth and seventh senses ringing dully like psychic tinnitus.

Andrej twitched and convulsed with the power of the processes rocking him. His mouth worked. Derkhan looked away in guilty disgust.

The Weaver danced back and forth on its stiletto feet, yammering quietly and tapping its helmet.

“Bait…” called Yagharek harshly and stepped back from the flow of energy.

“It’s hardly started,” yelled Isaac over the thudding of rain.

The crisis engine was humming and heating up, tapping enormous and growing resources. It sent waves of transforming current through thickly insulated cables, towards Andrej, who rolled and jack-knifed in spastic terror and pain.

The engine took the energy siphoned from the unstable situation and channelled it, obeying its instructions, pouring it in transformative form towards the Weaver/Council flow. Boosting it. Increasing its pitch and range and power. And increasing it again.

A feedback loop began. The artificial flow was made stronger; and like an enormous fortified tower on crumbling foundations, the increase of its mass made it more precarious. Its paradoxical ontology grew more unstable as the flow became stronger. Its crisis grew more acute. The engine’s transformative power grew exponentially; it bolstered the mental flow more; the crisis deepened again…

The prickling of Isaac’s skin grew worse. A note seemed to sound in his skull, a whine that increased in pitch as if something nearby spun faster and faster, out of control. He winced.

…GOOD GRIEF AND GRACE THE SPILLING SLOSH GROWS MINDFUL BUT MIND IT IS NO MIND…the Weaver continued to murmur…ONE AND ONE INTO ONE WON’T GO BUT IT IS ONE AND TWO AT ONCE WILL WE WON HOW WIN HOW WONDERFUL…

As Andrej rolled like a victim of torture under the dark rain, the power that poured through his head and into the sky grew more and more intense, increasing at a frightening, geometric rate. It was invisible but sensible: Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek backed away from the squirming figure as far as the little space would allow. Their pores opened and closed, their hair or feathers crawled violently across their skin.

Still the crisis loop continued and the emanation increased, until it could almost be seen, a shimmering pillar of disturbed aether two hundred feet high, the light from stars and aerostats bending uncertainly around and through it as it towered like an unseen inferno over the city.

Isaac felt as if his gums were rotting, as if his teeth were trying to escape his jaw.

The Weaver danced on in delight.

An enormous beacon was scorched into the aether. A huge and rapidly growing column of energy, a pretend consciousness, the map of a counterfeit mind that swelled and fattened in a fearful curve of growth, impossible and vastly there, the portent of a nonexistent god.

Across New Crobuzon, more than nine hundred of the city’s best communicators and thaumaturges paused and looked suddenly in the direction of The Crow, their faces twisted with confusion and nebulous alarm. The most sensitive held their heads and moaned with inexplicable pain.

Two hundred and seven began to jabber in nonsense combinations of numerological code and lush poetry. One hundred and fifty-five suffered massive nosebleeds, two of them ultimately un-staunchable and fatal.

Eleven, who worked for the government, scrabbled from their workshop at the top of the Spike and ran, with handkerchiefs and tissues ineffectually stopping the bloody slick from their noses and ears, towards Eliza Stem-Fulcher’s office.

“Perdido Street Station!” was all they could say. They gabbled it like idiots for some minutes, to the home secretary and the mayor who was with her, shaking them with frustration, their lips twitching for other sounds, blood spattering their bosses’ immaculate tailoring.

“Perdido Street Station!”

Way out above the wide empty streets of Chnum; swooping slowly past the curve of temple towers in Tar Wedge; skirting the river above Howl Barrow and soaring widespread over the pauper slum of Stoneshell, intricate bodies moved.

With sluggish strokes and drooling tongues, the slake-moths sought prey.

They were hungry, eager to gorge themselves and ready their bodies and breed again. They must hunt.

But in four sudden, identical and simultaneous movements-separated by miles, in different quadrants of the city-the four slake-moths snapped their heads up as they flew.

They beat their complex wings and slowed, until they were almost still in the air. Four slobbering tongues lolled and lapped at the air.

In the distance, over the skyline that glimmered with grots of filthy light, on the outskirts of the central mass of building, a column was rising from the earth. Even as they licked and taste-smelled it, it grew and grew, and their wings beat back frantically as the wafts of flavour came over them, and the incredible succulent stench of the thing boiled and eddied in the aether.

The other smells and tastes of the city dissipated into nothing. With an amazing speed, the extraordinary flavour-trail doubled its intensity, suffusing the slake-moths, making them mad.

One by one they emitted a chittering of astounded, delighted greed, a single-minded hunger.

From all the way across the city, from the four compass points, they converged in a frenzy of flapping, four starving exultant powerful bodies, descending to feed.

There was a tiny putter of lights on a little console. Isaac edged closer, keeping his body low, as if he could duck under the beacon of energy pouring from Andrej’s skull. The old man lolled and twitched on the ground.

Isaac was careful not to look at Andrej’s sprawling form. He peered at the console, making sense of the little play of diodes.

“I think it’s the Construct Council,” he said over the drab rainfall sound. “It’s sending instructions to get round the firewall, but I don’t think it’ll be able to. This is too simple for it,” he said, and patted the circuit-valve. “There’s nothing for it to get control of.” Isaac visualized a struggle in the femtoscopic byways of wiring.

He looked up.

The Weaver was ignoring him and them all, drumming its little fingers against the slick concrete in complicated rhythms. Its low voice was impenetrable.

Derkhan was staring in exhausted disgust at Andrej. Her head jerked gently back and forward as if she was rocked by waves. Her mouth moved. She spoke in silent tongues. Don’t die, thought Isaac fervently, staring at the ruined old man, seeing his face contort as bizarre feedback rocked him, you can’t die yet, you have to hold on.

Yagharek was standing. He pointed up, suddenly, into a far quadrant of the sky.

“They have changed course,” he said harshly. Isaac looked up and saw what Yagharek was indicating.

Far away, halfway to the edge of the city, three of the drifting dirigibles had turned purposefully. They were hardly visible to human eyes, darker blots against the night sky, picked out with navigation lights. But it was clear that their fitful, random motion had changed; that they were powering ponderously towards Perdido Street Station, converging.

“They’re on to us,” said Isaac. He did not feel fearful, only tense and weirdly sad. “They’re coming. Godspit and shit! We’ve got about ten, fifteen minutes before they get here. We just have to hope the moths are quicker.”

“No. No.” Yagharek was shaking his head with quick violence. His head was cocked. His arms moved quickly, motioning them all to silence. Isaac and Derkhan froze. The Weaver continued its insane monologue, but it was subdued and hushed. Isaac prayed that it would not become bored and disappear. The apparatus, the constructed mind, the crisis would all collapse.

The air around them all was welting, splitting like troubled skin, as the force of that unthinkable and burgeoning blast of power continued to grow.

Yagharek was listening intently through the rain.

“People are approaching,” he said urgently, “across the roof.” With practised movements, he plucked his whip from his belt. His long knife seemed to dance into his left hand and pose, glinting in the refracted sodium lights. He had become a warrior and a hunter again.

Isaac stood and drew his flintlock. He checked hurriedly that it was clean and he filled the pan with powder, trying to shield it from the rain. He felt for his little pouch of bullets and his powder horn. His heart, he realized, was beating only very slightly faster.

He saw Derkhan readying herself. She drew her two pistols and checked them, her eyes cold.

On the roof’s plateau, forty feet below, a little troop of dark-uniformed figures had appeared. They ran nervously between the outcroppings of architecture, their pikes and rifles rattling. There were perhaps twelve of them, their faces invisible behind their sheer reflective helmets, their segmented armour flapping against them, subtle insignia displaying rank. They spread out, came at the gradient of roofs from different angles.

“Oh dear Jabber,” swallowed Isaac. “We’re fucked.”

Five minutes, he thought in despair. That’s all we need. The fucking moths won’t resist this, they’re coming here already, couldn’t you have taken a little longer?

The dirigibles still prowled closer and closer, sluggish and ineluctable.

The militia had reached the outer edges of the tumbling slate hill. They began to climb, keeping low, ducking behind chimney stacks and dormer windows. Isaac stepped back from the edge, keeping them out of sight.

The Weaver was tracing its index finger through the water on the roof, leaving a trail of scorched dry stone, drawing patterns and pictures of flowers, whispering to itself. Andrej’s body spasmed as the current rocked him. His eyes wavered unnervingly.

“Fuck!” shouted Isaac, in despair and rage.

“Shut up and fight,” hissed Derkhan. She lay down and peered carefully over the edge of the roof. The highly trained militia were frighteningly close. She aimed and fired with her left hand.

There was a snapping explosion that seemed muffled by the rain. The closest officer, who had scaled nearly halfway up the slope, staggered back as the ball struck his armoured breast and ricocheted into the darkness. He teetered momentarily on the edge of his little roof-step, managed to right himself. As he relaxed and stepped forward, Derkhan fired her other gun.

The officer’s faceplate shattered in an explosion of bloody mirror. A cloud of flesh burst from the back of his skull. His face was momentarily visible, a shocked gaze embedded with slivers of reflecting glass, blooming with blood from a hole below his right eye. He seemed to leap out backwards like a champion diver, sailing elegantly twenty feet to crack loudly against the base of the roof.

Derkhan bellowed with triumph, her cry becoming words. “Die, you swine!” she screamed. She ducked back out of sight as a rapid battery of shots smacked into the brick and stone above and below her.

Isaac dropped onto all fours beside her, staring at her. It was impossible to say, in the rain, but he thought she was sobbing angrily. She rolled back from the edge of the roof and began to reload her pistols. She caught Isaac’s eye.

“Do something!” she screamed at him.

Yagharek was standing, hanging back from the edge, grabbing glimpses every few seconds, waiting until the men were in reach of his whip. Isaac rolled forward, peered over the rim of the little platform. The men were drawing nearer, moving more carefully now, hiding at each level, staying out of sight, but still moving terribly fast.

Isaac aimed and fired. His bullet burst dramatically against slate, showering the lead militiaman with particles.

“Godsdamnit!” he hissed and ducked back to refill his gun.

A cold certainty of defeat was settling within him. There were too many men, coming too quickly. As soon as the militia reached the top, Isaac would have no defence. If the Weaver came to their aid they would lose their bait, and the slake-moths would escape. They might take one, two or three of the officers with them, but they could not escape.

Andrej was jerking up and down, arcing his back and straining against his bonds. The nerves between Isaac’s eyes were singing as the blast of energy continued to scald the aether. The airships were pulling near. Isaac screwed up his face, looked back over the edge of the plateau. On the broken plain of the roof below, drunkards and vagrants were rousing themselves and scurrying away like terrified animals.

Yagharek screeched like a crow and pointed with his knife.

Behind the militia, on the flattened roofscape they had left behind, a cloaked figure slipped out of some shadow, appearing like an eidolon, manifesting as if from nothing.

There was a flurry of bottle-green from its coiling cloak.

Something spat intense fire and noise from the figure’s outstretched hand, three, four, five times. Halfway up the slope, Isaac saw a militiaman bow away from the roof, collapsing in an ugly organic cascade down the length of the clay. As he fell, two more of the men staggered and collapsed. One was dead, blood pooling below his sprawled body and diluting in the rain. The other slid a little way and emitted a horrendous shriek from behind his mask, clutching at his bleeding ribs.

Isaac gazed in shock.

“Who the fuck is that?” he shouted. “What the fuck is going on?” Below him, their shadowed benefactor had ducked into a puddle of darkness. He seemed to be fumbling with his gun.

Below them, the militia had frozen. Orders were shouted in impenetrable shorthand. It was clear that they were confused and afraid.

Derkhan was staring into the darkness with a look of astonished hope.

“Gods bless you,” she screamed down the slate, into the night. She fired again with her left hand, but the bullet passed loudly and harmlessly into brick.

Thirty feet below them, the injured man still screamed. He fumbled ineffectually to undo his mask.

The unit split. One man ducked beneath outcroppings of brick and raised his rifle, aiming into the darkness where the newcomer hid. Several of the remaining men began to descend towards their new attacker. The others began to climb again, at redoubled speed.

As the two little groups moved up and down across the slippery roofscape, the dark figure stepped out again and fired with extraordinary rapidity. He’s got some kind of repeating pistol, thought Isaac with astonishment, and then started as two more officers reared up from the roof a little way below him and fell, twisting and screaming, to bounce brutally down the incline.

Isaac realized that the man below them was not firing at the militia who had turned and were approaching him, but was concentrating on protecting the little platform, picking off the closest officers with superb marksmanship. He had left himself vulnerable to a massed attack.

All across the roof the militia froze at the volley of bullets. But as Isaac looked down he saw that the second group of officers had descended to the base of the roof and were running in clumsily furtive formation at the shady assassin.

Ten feet below Isaac, the militia were closing in. He fired again, knocking the wind from one man, but failing to penetrate his armour. Derkhan shot, and below them, the poised marksman screeched an oath and dropped his rifle, which slid noisily away.

Isaac filled his gun with desperate haste. He glanced over at his machinery, saw that Andrej was curled under the wall. He was shuddering, with spittle fouling his face. Isaac’s head throbbed in time to some weird beat from the growing blaze of mental waves. He looked up at the sky. Come on, he thought, come on, come on. He looked down again as he reloaded, trying to find the mysterious newcomer.

He almost cried out in fear for their half-hidden protector, as four burly and heavily armed militia jogged towards the pitch-shade where he had hidden.

Something emerged from the darkness at speed, leaping from shadow to shadow, drawing the militia’s fire with extraordinary ease. A pathetic spatter of shots sounded, and the four men’s rifles were empty. As they dropped to one knee and began to reload, the cloaked figure emerged from the sheltering gloom and stood a few paces before them.

Isaac saw him from slightly behind, illuminated in the sudden cold light from some phlogistic lamp. His face was turned away, towards the militia. His cloak was patched and shabby. Isaac could just see a stubby little gun in his left hand. As the impassive glass masks glimmered in the light and the four officers seemed to falter into momentary stillness, something extended from the man’s right hand. Isaac could not see it well, squinted carefully until the man moved slightly and raised his arm, uncovering the toothed thing as the sleeve of the cloth fell away.

A massive serrated blade, slowly opening and shutting like wicked scissors. Gnarled chitin jutting ungainly from the man’s elbow, recurved razor tip gleaming at the end of the trapping jaw.

The man’s right arm had been replaced, Remade, with a vast mantis claw.

At the same instant, Isaac and Derkhan gasped and shouted his name: “Jack Half-a-Prayer!”

Half-a-Prayer, the Escapee, the fReemade Boss, the Man-’tis, stepped up lightly towards the four militia.

They fumbled with their guns, jabbed out with the glinting bayonets.

Half-a-Prayer sidestepped them with balletic speed and snapped his Remade limb shut, then backed easily away. One of the officers fell, blood bursting from his lacerated neck and welling up behind his mask.

Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone again, was stalking half in, half out of sight.

Isaac’s attention was diverted as an officer appeared over the brim of a window five feet below him. He fired too quickly and missed, but something snaked out above him and smacked violently against the man’s helmet. The officer reeled and fell back, gathering himself from another attack. Yagharek quickly gathered up his heavy whip, ready to strike again.

“Come on, come on!” screamed Isaac to the sky.

The airships were fat and looming now, descending, ready to pounce. Half-a-Prayer danced rings around his attackers, leaping in to maim and then dissolving into the dark. Derkhan was crying out, a little defiant shout every time she shot. Yagharek stood poised, his whip and dagger trembling in his hands. The militia were encroaching, but slowly, cowed and fearful, waiting for relief and back-up.

The Weaver’s monologue grew slowly louder, from a whispering in the back of the skull into a voice that crept forward through flesh and bone, filling the brain.

…IS IT IS IT THOSE NAUGHTY MAULERS THOSE TIRESOME PATTERNVAMPIRS THAT BLEED WEBSCAPE DRY IT IS THEY THEY COME THEY WHISTLE FOR THIS TORRENT THIS CORNUCOPIC SLEW OF FOOD THAT IS NOT TAKE CARE AND WHISPER WATCH…it Said…RICH BREWS SIT UNEASY ON THE PALATE…

Isaac looked up with a soundless shout. He heard a fluttering, a buffet of disordered air. The raw emblazoning, the blast of invented brainwaves that made his spine tremble inside him continued unabated as a sound approached, oscillating frantically between materia and aether.

A glinting carapace dipped through thermals: weaving patterns of dark colour shot violently through the sky on two reflected pairs of shapeshifting wings. Convoluted limbs and spiny organic jags trembled in anticipation.

Famished and trembling, the first slake-moth came in.

The heavy segmented body came spiralling down, sliding tightly around the column of burning aether as if on a funfair ride. The moth’s tongue lapped avidly around it: it was immersed in intoxicating brain-liquor.

As Isaac stared into the sky exultantly, he saw another shape flit closer, and another, black on black. One of the moths ducked in a sharp arc directly below a fat and sluggish airship, careering towards the storm of mindwaves that sent ripples through the fabric of the city.

The force of militia arrayed on the roof chose that moment to renew their attack, and the sulphurous snap of Derkhan’s pistols woke Isaac to the danger. He looked round to see Yagharek crouched in a feral pose, his bullwhip unrolling like some half-trained mamba towards the officer whose head had appeared over the rim of the plateau. It constricted around his neck and Yagharek pulled hard, slamming the man’s forehead against the wet slates.

He snapped his whip free as the choking officer fell clattering away.

Isaac fumbled with his cumbersome pistol. He leaned over and saw that two of the officers who had turned on Jack Half-a-Prayer were down and dying, blood spewing languidly from enormous rents in their flesh. A third was stumbling away, holding his gashed thigh. Half-a-Prayer and the fourth man were gone.

All over the low hill of roofs, the calls of the militia sounded, half routed, terrified and confused. Urged on by their lieutenant they drew steadily closer.

“Keep them away,” shouted Isaac. “The moths are coming!”

The three slake-moths came down in a long interweaving helix, eddying below and above each other, rotating in descending order around the massive stele of energy that yawned vastly from Andrej’s helmet. On the ground below them the Weaver danced a subdued little jig, but the slake-moths did not see it. They noticed nothing except Andrej’s spasming form, the source, the wellspring of the enormous sweet bounty that gushed precipitously up and into the air. They were frenzied.

Watertowers and brick turrets rose up around them like reaching hands as one by one they breached the skyline and descended into the city’s gaslight nimbus.

Faint waves of anxiety gusted through them as they plunged. There was something fractionally wrong with the flavour that surrounded them-but it was so strong, so unbelievably powerful, and they were so drunk on it, unsteady on their wings and shaking with greedy delight, that they could not stop their vertiginous approach.

Isaac heard Derkhan shout a foul oath. Yagharek had leapt across the roof to her and flailed expertly with his whip, sending her attacker spinning. Isaac turned and fired at the falling figure, heard him grunt with pain as the bullet tore open the muscle of his shoulder.

The airships were almost overhead now. Derkhan was sitting back from the brink a little, blinking rapidly, her eyes fouled with clods of brickdust from where a bullet had shattered the wall beside her.

There were about five militia left on the roofs, and they were still coming, slow and stealthy.

A final insectile shadow swooped towards the roof from the south-east of the city. It looped in a long S-curve under the Spit Hearth skyrail and shot up again, riding the updrafts in the hot night, coming in towards the station.

“They’re all here,” whispered Isaac.

As he refilled his gun, spilling powder inexpertly about him, he looked up. His eyes widened: the first moth approached. It was a hundred feet above him and then sixty, then suddenly twenty and ten. He stared at it in awe. It seemed to move with no pace at all as time stretched out thin and very slow. Isaac saw the clutching half-simian paws and jagged tail, the enormous mouth and chattering teeth, eyesockets with their clumsy antennae stubs like fumbling maggots, a hundred extrusions of flesh that whiplashed and unfolded and pointed and snapped shut in a hundred mysterious motions…and the wings, those prodigious, untrustworthy, constantly altering wings, tides of weird colour drenching them and retreating like sudden squalls.

He watched the moth directly, ignoring the mirrors before his eyes. It had no time for him. It ignored him.

He was frozen for a long moment, in a terror of memories.

The slake-moth swept past him and a great backwash of air sent his hair and coat flailing.

The clutching multilimbed creature reached out, unrolled its enormous tongue, spat and chittered in obscene hunger. It landed on Andrej like some nightmare spirit, clutched him and sought desperately to drink.

As its tongue slid rapidly in and out of Andrej’s orifices, coating him in that thick citric saliva, another moth careened in on a trough of air, crashing into the first moth and fighting it for position on Andrej’s body.

The old man was twitching as his muscles fought to make sense of the slew of absurd stimuli engulfing them. The torrent of Weaver/Council brainwaves blasted up and out of his skull.

The engine lying on the roofspace rattled. It grew dangerously hot as its pistons fought to retain control of the enormous wash of crisis energy. Rain spat and evaporated as it hit it.

As the third moth came in to land, the struggle to feed at the mouth of the font, at the pseudo-mind pouring from Andrej’s skull, continued. In an irritated convulsive motion, the first moth slapped the second a few feet away, where it licked eagerly at the back of Andrej’s head.

The first moth plunged its tongue into Andrej’s slavering mouth, then removed it with a sickening plop and sought another outflow. It found the little trumpet on Andrej’s helmet, from which the whole bursting wash of ever-increasing output poured. The moth slid its tongue into the opening and around dimensional corners into and out of the aether, rolling the sinuous organ around the multifarious planes of the flow.

It squealed in delight.

Its skull vibrated in its flesh. Gouts of the intense artificial mind-waves spurted down its throat and dripped invisibly from its mouth, a burning jet of intense, sweet thought-calories that poured and poured into the moth’s belly, more powerful, more concentrated than its day-to-day feed by a vast and increasing factor, an uncontrollable torrent of energy that raged through the slake-moth’s gullet and filled its stomach in seconds.

The moth could not break free. It locked in, gorged and fixated. It could sense danger, but it could not care, could not think of anything apart from the entrancing, inebriating flow of food that held it, that focused it. It was fixed with the mindless intent of a night insect battering itself against cracked glass to find a way in to a deadly flame.

The slake-moth immolated itself, immersed itself in the torrential blasts of power.

Its stomach swelled and chitin creaked. The massive wash of mental emanations overwhelmed it. The huge and skulking creature jerked once; its belly and skull burst with wet, explosive sounds.

Instantly it snapped back, dying quickly in two sprays of ichor and ragged skin, entrails and brainstuff bursting in curves from its massive injuries, oozing with undigested, indigestible mind-liquor. It slumped dead across Andrej’s insensible form, twitching with spastic motion, dripping and broken.

Isaac bellowed with delight, a massive shout of astonished triumph. Andrej was briefly forgotten.

Derkhan and Yagharek turned quickly and stared at the dead moth.

“Yes!” shouted Derkhan exultantly, and Yagharek emitted the wordless ululating cry of a successful hunter. Below them, the militia paused. They could not see what had happened, and they were unnerved by the sudden shouts of triumph.

The second moth was scrambling over the body of its fallen sibling, licking and sucking. The crisis engine still sounded; Andrej still crawled in agony in the rain, unaware of what was happening. The slake-moth scrabbled for the continuing flow of bait.

The third moth arrived, sending rainwater spraying in the downdrafts from its ferociously beating wings. It paused for a fraction of a second, tasting the dead moth in the air, but the stench of those astonishing Weaver/Council waves were irresistible. It crawled through the sticky slick of the fallen moth’s bowels.

The other moth was quicker. It found the outflow pipe of the helmet and thrust its mouth into the funnel, its tongue anchoring it like some vampiric umbilical cord.

It gulped and sucked, hungry and exhilarated, drunk, burnt up with its desires.

It was captivated. It could not resist when the power of the food began to burn a hole in its stomach wall. It whined and puked, metadimensional globules of brainpattern travelling back up its gullet and meeting the torrent that it still sucked like nectar, converging in its throat and suffocating it, until the soft skin of its throat distended and split.

It began to bleed and die from the ragged tracheotomy, still drinking from the helmet and hastening its own death. The swell of energy was too much: it destroyed the moth as quickly and completely as its own unadulterated milk would a human. The slake-moth’s mind burst flatly like a great blood-blister.

It fell back, its tongue retracting sluggishly like old elastic.

Isaac roared again as the third moth kicked away the twitching corpse of its sisterbrother and fed.

The militia were breaching the last rise of rooftop before the plateau. Yagharek moved in a lethal dance, suddenly murderous. His whip slashed; officers stumbled and fell away, ducked out of sight, moved warily behind the chimneys.

Derkhan fired again, into the face of a militiaman who rose before her, but the main wad of powder in the shaft of her pistol did not properly ignite. She cursed and held the gun away from her at arm’s length, trying to keep it trained on the officer. He moved forward and the powder finally exploded, sending a ball over his head. He ducked and slipped to one foot on the frictionless roofspace.

Isaac pointed his gun and fired as the man fought to stand, sending a bullet into the back of his skull. The man jerked and his head battered against the ground. Isaac reached for his powder horn, then slid back. There was no time to reload, he realized. The last clutch of officers was vaulting towards him. They had been waiting for him to fire.

“Get back, Dee!” he yelled, and moved away from the edge.

Yagharek knocked one man down with a whipstrike at his legs, but he had to withdraw as the officers approached. Derkhan, Yagharek and Isaac moved back from the brink and looked desperately around for weapons.

Isaac stumbled on the segmented limb of a fallen moth. Behind him, the third moth was emitting little cries of greed as it drank. They fused into a single wail, an extended animal sound of delight or misery.

Isaac turned at the sound of the bleating and was caught in a moist detonation of flesh. Shredded innards slopped noisily over the roof, rendering it treacherous.

The third moth had succumbed.

Isaac stared at the dark, lolling shape, hard and variegated, as big as a bear. It was spreadeagled in a radial burst of limbs and bodyparts, dripping from its emptied-out thorax. The Weaver bent forward like a child and prodded the splayed exoskeleton with a tentative finger.

Andrej still moved, though his scissoring kicks were fitful. The moths had not drunk him, but the massive wash of artificial thoughts that bubbled up from the helmet. His mind still worked, bewildered and fearful and locked in the terrible feedback loop of the crisis engine. He was slowing down, his body collapsing under the extraordinary strain. His mouth worked in exaggerated yawns to clear itself of the thick, rotten-smelling saliva.

Directly above him, the final moth had spiralled into the fountain of energy from his helmet. Its wings were still, angled to control its fall, as it dropped like some murderous weapon out of the sky towards the tangled carnage. It bore down on the source of the feast, a clutch of arms and hands and hooks extended in frantic predation.

The militia lieutenant rose a foot or so over the grooved guttering at the edge of the plateau. He faltered and shouted something at his men-”…ing Weaver!”-then fired wildly at Isaac. Isaac leapt sideways, grunted in quick triumph when he realized that he was uninjured. He grabbed a spanner from the pile of tools by his foot and hurled it at the mirrored helmet.

Something rocked unsteadily in the air around Isaac. His gut tensed and fluttered. He looked around wildly.

Derkhan was moving backwards from the edge of the roof, her face creased with inarticulate horror. She was staring around her in inchoate fear. Yagharek was holding his left hand to his head, the long knife dangling uncertainly from his fingers. His right hand, his whip, was motionless.

The Weaver looked up and muttered.

There was a small round hole in Andrej’s chest where the officer’s bullet had caught him. Blood was welling out of it in lazy pulses, dribbling across his belly and saturating his filthy clothes. His face was white, his eyes closed.

Isaac shouted and rushed to him, held the old man’s hand.

The pattern of Andrej’s brainwaves faltered. The engines combining the Weaver’s and the Council’s exudations skittered uncertainly as their template, their reference, suddenly ebbed.

Andrej was tenacious. He was an old man whose body was collapsing under the oppressive weight of a rotting, wasting disease, whose mind was stiff with coagulated dream-emissions. But even with a bullet lodged under his heart and his lung haemorrhaging, it took him nearly ten seconds to die.

Isaac held Andrej as he breathed bloodily. The bulky helmet lolled absurdly on his head. Isaac clenched his teeth as the old man died. At the very end, in what might have been a twitch of dying nerves, Andrej tensed and clutched Isaac, hugging him back in what Isaac desperately wanted to be forgiveness.

I had to I’m sorry I’m sorry, he thought giddily.

Behind Isaac the Weaver still drew patterns in the spilt juices of the slake-moths. Yagharek and Derkhan were calling to Isaac, screaming at him, as the militia came over the edge of the roof.

One of the dirigibles had lowered itself now until it hung sixty or seventy feet over the flattened roofscape below. It loomed like a bloated shark. A tangle of ropes was spilling untidily through the darkness towards the great expanse of clay.

Andrej’s brain went out like a broken lamp.

A confused tangle of information weltered through the analytical engines.

Without Andrej’s mind as referent, the combination of the Weaver’s and the Construct Council’s waves became suddenly random, their proportions skewing and rolling unsteadily. They no longer modelled anything: they were just an untidy slosh of oscillating particles and waves.

The crisis was gone. The thickening mixture of mindwaves was no more than the sum of its parts, and it had stopped trying to be. The paradox, the tension, disappeared. The vast field of crisis energy evaporated.

The burning gears and motors of the crisis engine stuttered to an abrupt stop.

With a crushing implosive collapse, the enormous wash of mental energy was snuffed instantly out.

Isaac, Derkhan, Yagharek and the militia for thirty feet around let out cries of pain. They felt as if they had walked from bright sunlight into a darkness so sudden and total it hurt them. They ached drably behind their eyes.

Isaac let Andrej’s body fall slowly to the wet ground.

In the wet heat a little way above the station, the last slake-moth eddied in confusion. It beat its wings in complex four-way patterns, sent coils of air in all directions. It hovered.

The rich trough of food, that unthinkable gush, was gone. The frenzy that had overtaken the moth, the terrible, uncompromising hunger, had gone.

It licked out and its antennae trembled. There were a handful of minds below it, but before it could attack the moth sensed the chaotic bubbling consciousness of the Weaver, and it remembered its agonizing battles and it screeched in fear and rage, stretching its neck back and baring its monstrous teeth.

And then the unmistakable taste of its own kind wafted up to it. It spun in shock as it tasted one, two, three dead siblings, all its siblings, every one of them, insides out, dead and crushed, spent.

The slake-moth was mad with grief. It keened in ultra-high frequencies and spun acrobatically, sending out little calls of sociality, echo-locating for other moths, fumbling through unclear layers of perception with its antennae and clutching empathically for any trace of an answer.

It was quite alone.

It rolled away from the roof of Perdido Street Station, away from that charnel-ground where its brothersisters lay burst, away from the memory of that impossible flavour, veering in terror away from The Crow and the Weaver’s claws and the fat dirigibles that stalked it, out of the shadow of the Spike towards the junction of the rivers.

The slake-moth fled in misery, searching for a place to rest.

Chapter Fifty-One

As the battered militia gathered themselves and began to peer, once more, over the edge of the roof at Isaac’s and Derkhan’s and Yagharek’s feet. They were wary now.

Three rapid bullets came flying down at them. One sent an officer flying without a word into the dark air beside the roof, to shatter a window four floors below with his weight. The other two buried themselves deep in the fabric of the bricks and stones, sending out wicked sprays of chips.

Isaac looked up. A dim figure was leaning out from a ledge twenty feet above them.

“It’s Half-a-Prayer again!” shouted Isaac. “How did he get there? What’s he doing?”

“Come on,” said Derkhan brusquely. “We have to go.”

The militia were still cowering just below them. Whenever an officer straightened up carefully and looked over the edge, Half-a-Prayer would send another bullet straight at him. He kept them caged in. One or two of them shot at him, but they were desultory, demoralized efforts.

Just beyond the rise of roofs and windows, unclear shapes were descending smoothly from the dirigible, sliding onto the slick surface below. They dangled loosely as they slipped through the air, attached by some hook on their armour. The ropes that held them uncoiled on smooth motors.

“He’s buying us some time, gods know why,” hissed Derkhan, stumbling over to Isaac and clutching at him. “He’s going to run out of bullets soon. These sods-” she waved vaguely at the half-hidden militia below them “-these are just the local flatfoots on roof-duty. Those bastards coming from the airships are going to be hardcore troops. We have to go.”

Isaac looked down and faltered towards the edge, but there were cowering militia visible on all sides. Bullets smacked down around Isaac as he moved. He yelled in fear, then realized that Half-a-Prayer was trying to clear the path before him.

It was no good, though. The militia were hunkering down and waiting.

“Fuck damn,” spat Isaac. He bent down and pulled a plug from Andrej’s helmet, disconnecting the Construct Council, which was still concertedly attempting to bypass the circuit-valve and gain control of the crisis engine. Isaac yanked the wire free, sending a damaging spasm of feedback and rerouted energy bolting down the line into the Council’s brain.

“Get this shit!” he hissed at Yagharek, and pointed at the engines that littered the roof, fouled with ichor and acid rain. The garuda dropped to one knee and scooped up the sack. “Weaver!” said Isaac urgently, and stumbled over to the enormous figure.

He kept looking back, over his shoulder, fearful of seeing some gung-ho militiaman reaching up to take a potshot. Over the rain, the sound of metallic crunching steps drew nearer on the roof below them in a pounding jog.

“Weaver!” Isaac clapped his hands in front of the extraordinary spider. The Weaver’s multifarious eyes slid up to meet him. The Weaver still wore the helmet that linked it to Andrej’s corpse. It was rubbing its hands in slake-moth viscera. Isaac looked down briefly at the pile of huge corpses. Their wings had faded to a pale, drab dun, without pattern or variation.

“Weaver, we need to go,” he whispered. The Weaver interrupted him.

…I TIRE AND GROW OLD AND COLD GRIMY LITTLING…the Weaver said quietly…YOU WORK WITH FINESSE I GRANT AND GIVE YOU BUT THIS SIPHONING OF PHANTASMS FROM MY SOLE SOUL LEAVES ME MELANCHOLIC SEE PATTERNS INHERE EVEN IN THESE THE VORACIOUS ONES PERHAPS I JUDGE QUICK AND SLICK TASTES FALTER AND ALTER AND I AM UNSURE…It raised 3 handful of glistening guts to Isaac’s eyes and began to pull them gently apart.

“Believe me, Weaver,” said Isaac urgently, “this was the right thing, we saved the city for you to…to judge, to weave…now that we’ve done this. But we need to go now, we need you to help us. Please…get us away from here…”

“Isaac,” hissed Derkhan, “I don’t know who these swine are that are coming but…but they’re not militia.”

Isaac stole a glance out over the roofs. His eyes widened incredulously.

Stomping purposefully towards them was a battery of extraordinary metal soldiers. The light slid from them, illuminating their edges in cold flashes. They were sculpted in astonishing and frightening detail. Their arms and legs swung with great bursts of hydraulic power, pistons hissing as they stormed closer. Little glimmers of reflected light came from somewhere a little behind their heads.

“Who the fuck are those bastards?” said Isaac in a strangled voice.

The Weaver interrupted him. Its voice was suddenly loud again, purposeful.

…BY GOODNESS ME YOU CONVINCE…it Said…LOOK AT THE INTRICATE SKEINS AND THREADLINES WE CORRECT WHERE THE DEADLINGS REAVED WE CAN RESHUFFLE AND SPIN AND FIX IT UP NICE…The Weaver bobbed excitedly up and down and stared at the dark sky. It plucked the helmet from its head in a smooth motion and threw it casually out into the night. Isaac did not hear it land…IT RUNS AND HIDES ITS HIDE…it said…IT IS ROOTING FOR A NEST POOR FRIGHTENED MONSTER WE MUST CRUSH IT LIKE ITS BROTHERS BEFORE IT GNAWS HOLES IN THE SKY AND THE CITY-WIDE COLOURFLOW COME AND LET US SLIDE DOWN LONG FISSURES IN THE WORLDWEB WHERE THE RENDER RUNS AND FIND ITS LAIR…

It staggered forward, always seeming to teeter on the edge of collapse. It opened its arms to Isaac like a loving parent, swept him quickly and effortlessly up. Isaac grimaced in fear as he was taken into its weird, cool embrace. Don’t cut me, he thought fervently, don’t slice me up!

The militia peered furtive and aghast over the roof at the sight.

The enormous, towering spider stalked edgily this way and that, Isaac tucked lolling like some absurd, vast baby under its arm.

It moved with sure, fleeting motions across the sodden tar and clay. It could not be followed. It moved in and out of conventional space with motions too fast to see.

It stood before Yagharek. The garuda swung the sack of mechanical components that he had hastily gathered over onto his back. Yagharek delivered himself thankfully to the dancing mad god, throwing up his arms and clutching at the smooth waist between the Weaver’s head and abdomen…GRAB TIGHT LITTLE ONE WE MUST FIND A WAY AWAY…sang the Weaver.

The weird metallic troops were approaching the little elevation of flat land, their mechanical anatomy hissing with efficient energy. They swept past the lower militia, terrified junior officers who gazed up in astonishment at the human faces peering intently from the back of the iron warriors’ heads.

Derkhan looked round at the encroaching figures, then swallowed and walked quickly over to the Weaver, which stood with humanoid arms wide. Isaac and Yagharek were perched on its weapon arms, their legs scrabbling for purchase across its broad back.

“Don’t hurt me again,” whispered Derkhan, her hand flickering over the scabbed wound on the side of her face. She holstered her guns and raced across into the Weaver’s terrifying, cradling arms.

The second dirigible arrived at the roof of Perdido Street Station and threw out ropes for its troops to descend. Motley’s Remade squadron had reached the top of the rise of architecture and was vaulting over without pause. The militia gazed up at them, cowed. They did not understand what they were seeing.

The Remade breached the low rise of bricks without hesitation, only faltering when they saw the Weaver’s huge and skulking form scampering to and fro across the bricks, three figures jouncing like dolls on its back.

Motley’s troops stepped back towards the edge slowly, rain varnishing their impassive steel faces. Their heavy feet crushed the remnants of the engines that still lay split across the roof.

As they watched, the Weaver reached down and grasped hold of a quailing militiaman, who wailed in terror as he was dragged up by his head. The man flailed, but the Weaver pushed his arms away and cuddled him like a baby.

…OFF AND ON TO GO HUNTING WE WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE…whispered the Weaver to all present. It walked sideways off the edge of the roof, seemingly unencumbered, and disappeared.

For two or three seconds, only the rain sounded fitful and depressing on the roof. Then Half-a-Prayer let off a last volley of shots from above, sending the assembled men and Remade scattering. When they emerged carefully, there were no more attacks. Jack Half-a-Prayer had gone.

The Weaver and its companions had left no trail, and no trace.

The slake-moth tore through currents of air. It was frantic and afraid.

It sounded every so often, letting out a cry in a variety of sonic registers, but it was unanswered. It was miserable and confused.

And yet beneath it all, its infernal hunger was growing again. It was not free of its appetite.

Below it the Canker flowed through the city, its barges and pleasure boats little grubs of dirty light on the blackness. The slake-moth slowed and spiralled.

A line of filthy smoke was drawn slowly across the face of New Crobuzon, marking it like a stub of pencil, as a late train went east on the Dexter Line, through Gidd and Barguest Bridge, on over the water towards Lud Fallow and Sedim Junction.

The moth swept on over Ludmead, ducking low above the roofs of the university faculty, alighting briefly on the roof of the Magpie Cathedral in Saltbur, flitting away in a pang of hunger and lonely fear. It could not rest. It could not channel its rapacity to feed.

As it flew, the slake-moth recognized the configuration of light and darkness below it. It felt a sudden pull.

Behind the railway lines, rising from the shabby and decrepit architecture of Bonetown, the Ribs rose out into the night air in a colossal sweep and curve of ivory. They made memories eddy in the slake-moth’s head. It recalled the dubious influence of those old bones that had made Bonetown a fearful place, somewhere to be escaped, where air currents were unpredictable and noxious tides could pollute the aether. Distant images of days clamped still, being milked lasciviously, its glands sucked clean, a hazy sense of a suckling grub at its teat, but nothing being there…memories caught it up.

The moth was utterly cowed. It sought relief. It hankered for a nest, somewhere to lie still, recuperate. Somewhere familiar, where it could tend itself and be tended. In its misery, it remembered its captivity in a selective, twisted light. It had been fed and cleaned by careful tenders there in Bonetown. It had been a sanctuary.

Frightened and hungry and eager for relief, it conquered its fear of the Bonetown Ribs.

It set off southwards, licking its way through half-forgotten routes in the air, skirting the blistered bones, seeking out a dark building in a little alley, a bitumened terrace of unclear purpose, from where it had crawled weeks ago.

The slake-moth wheeled nervously over the dangerous city and headed for home.

Isaac felt as if he had been asleep for several days, and he stretched luxuriously, feeling his body slide uncomfortably forward and back.

He heard an appalling scream.

Isaac froze as memories came back to him in torrents, let him know how he had come to be there, held tight in the Weaver’s arms (he jerked and spasmed as he recalled it all).

The Weaver was stepping lightly over the worldweb, scuttling across metareal filaments connecting every moment to every other.

Isaac remembered the vertiginous pitch of his soul when he had seen the worldweb. He remembered a nausea that had wracked his existential being at the sight of that impossible vista. He struggled not to open his eyes.

He could hear the jabbering of Yagharek and Derkhan’s whispered curses. They came to him not as sounds but as intimations, floating fragments of silk that slipped into his skull and became clear to him. There was another voice, a jagged cacophony of bright fabric shrieking in terror.

He wondered who that might be.

The Weaver moved quickly across pitching threads alongside the damage and potentiality of damage that the slake-moth had wreaked, and might again. The Weaver disappeared into a hole, a dim funnel of connections that wound through the material of that complex dimension and emerged again into the city.

Isaac felt air against his cheek, wood below him. He woke and opened his eyes.

His head hurt. He looked up. His neck wobbled as he adjusted to the weight of his helmet, still perched tight on his head, its mirrors miraculously unbroken.

He was lying in a shaft of moonlight in some dusty little attic. Sounds filtered into the space through the wooden floors and walls.

Derkhan and Yagharek were raising themselves slowly and carefully onto their elbows, shaking their heads. As Isaac watched, Derkhan reached up quickly and gently felt the sides of her head. Her remaining ear-and his, he quickly ascertained-was untouched.

The Weaver loomed in the corner of the room. It stepped forward slightly, and behind it, Isaac saw a militiaman. The officer seemed paralysed. He sat with his back against the wall, shaking quietly, his smooth faceplate skewwhiff and falling from his head. His rifle lay across his lap. Isaac’s eyes widened when he saw it.

It was glass. A perfect and useless model of a flintlock rifle rendered in glass.

…THIS WOULD BE HOMESTEAD FOR THE FLEETING WINGED ONE…crooned the Weaver. It sounded subdued again, as if its energy had ebbed from it during the journey through the planes of the web…SEE MY LOOKING-GLASS MAN MY PLAYMATE MY FRIENDLING…it whispered…HE AND ME SHALL WHILE TIME AWAY THIS IS THE RESTING PLACE OF THE VAMPIR MOTH THIS IS WHERE IT FOLDS ITS WINGS AND HIDES TO EAT AGAIN I WILL PLAY TIC-TAC-TOE AND BOXES WITH MY GLASS-GUNNER…

It stepped back into the corner of the room and set itself down suddenly with a jerk of its legs. One of its knife-hands flashed like elyctricity, moving with extraordinary speed, scoring a three-by-three grid onto the boards before the comatose officer’s lap.

The Weaver etched a cross into a corner square, then sat back and waited, whispering to itself.

Isaac, Derkhan and Yagharek shuffled into the centre of the room.

“I thought it was going to get us away,” mumbled Isaac. “It’s followed the fucking moth…It’s here, somewhere…”

“We have to take it,” whispered Derkhan, her face set. “We’ve almost got them all. Let’s finish it.”

“With what?” hissed Isaac. “We’ve got our fucking helmets and that’s it. We’ve not got any weapons to face the likes of that thing…we don’t even know where we damn-well are…”

“We have to get the Weaver to help us,” said Derkhan.

But their attempts were quite fruitless. The gigantic spider ignored them utterly, wittering quietly to itself and waiting intently, as if waiting for the frozen militia officer to complete his move in tic-tac-toe. Isaac and the others entreated with the Weaver, begged it to help them, but they seemed suddenly invisible to it. They turned away in frustration.

“We have to go out there,” said Derkhan suddenly. Isaac met her eyes. Slowly, he nodded. He strode across to the window and peered out.

“I can’t tell where we are,” he said eventually. “It’s just streets.” He moved his head exaggeratedly from side to side, seeking some landmark. He re-entered the room eventually, shaking his head. “You’re right, Dee,” he said. “Maybe we’ll…find something…maybe we can get out of here.”

Yagharek moved without sound, stalking from the little room into a dimly lit corridor. He looked up and down its length, carefully.

The wall to his left slanted steeply in with the roof. To his right, the narrow passage was broken with two doors, before it curved away to the right and disappeared in shadows.

Yagharek kept crouched down. He beckoned slowly behind him, without looking, and Derkhan and Isaac emerged slowly. They carried their guns loaded with the last of their powder, damp and unreliable, aiming vaguely into the darkness.

They waited while Yagharek crept slowly on, then followed him in faltering, pugnacious steps.

Yagharek stopped by the first door and flattened his feathered head against it. He waited a moment, then pushed it open slowly, slowly. Derkhan and Isaac crept over, peered into an unlit storeroom.

“Is there anything in there we can use?” hissed Isaac, but the shelves were empty of everything except dry and dusty bottles, ancient decaying brushes.

When Yagharek reached the second door, he repeated the operation, waving at Isaac and Derkhan to be still and listening intently through the thin wood. This time he was still for much longer. The door was bolted several times, and Yagharek fumbled with all the simple slide-locks. There was a fat padlock, but it was resting open across one of the bolts, as if it had been left for a moment. Yagharek pushed slowly at the door. He poked his head through the resulting gap and stood like that, perched half in, half out of the room for a disconcertingly long time.

When he withdrew, he turned.

“Isaac,” he said quietly. “You must come.”

Isaac frowned and stepped forward, his heart beating hard in his chest.

What is it? he thought. What’s going on? (And even as he thought that a voice in the deepest part of his mind told him what was waiting for him, and he only half heard it, would not listen for fear that it was wrong.)

He pushed past Yagharek and walked hesitantly into the room.

It was a large, rectangular attic space, lit by three oil-lamps and the thin wisps of gaslight that found their way up from the street and through the grubby, sealed window. The floor was littered with a tangle of metal and discarded rubbish. The room stank.

Isaac was only fleetingly conscious of any of this.

In a dim corner, turned away from the door, kneeling up and chewing dutifully with her back and head and gland attached to an extraordinary twisted sculpture, was Lin.

Isaac cried out.

It was an animal wail, and it grew and grew in strength until Yagharek hissed at him, unheeded.

Lin turned with a start at the sound. She trembled when she saw him.

He stumbled over to her, weeping at the sight of her, at her russet skin and flexing headscarab; and as he approached he cried out again, this time in anguish, as he saw what had been done to her.

Her body was bruised and covered with burns and scratches, welts that hinted at vicious acts and brutalizations. She had been beaten across her back, through her ragged shift. Her breasts were criss-crossed with thin scars. She was bruised heavily around her belly and thighs.

But it was her head, the twitching headbody, that almost made him fall.

Her wings had been taken: he knew that, from the envelope, but to see them, to see the tiny ragged stubs flit in agitation…Her carapace had been snapped and bent backwards in places, uncovering the tender flesh beneath, which was scabbed and broken. One of her compound eyes was crumpled and sightless. The middle headleg on her right and the hind one on her left had been torn from their sockets.

Isaac fell forward and held her, closing her into him. She was so thin…so tiny and ragged and broken, she was trembling as she touched him, her whole body tense as if she could not believe he were real, as if he might be taken away as some new torture.

Isaac clutched her and cried. He held her carefully, feeling her thin bones beneath her skin.

“I would have come,” he moaned in abject misery and joy. “I would’ve come, I thought you were dead…”

She pushed him back just a little, until she had space for her hands to move.

Wanted you, love you, she signed chaotically, help me save me take me away, couldn’t he couldn’t let me die till had finished this…

For the first time, Isaac looked up at the extraordinary sculpture that rose above and behind her, onto which she was spreading khepri-spit. It was an incredible multicoloured thing, a horrific kaleidoscopic figure of composite nightmares, limbs and eyes and legs sprouting in weird combinations. It was almost finished, with only a smooth framework where what looked like a head must be, and an empty clutch of air that suggested a shoulder.

Isaac gasped at it, looked back at her.

Lemuel had been right. There was, strategically, no reason at all for Motley to keep Lin alive. He would not have done so for any other captive. But his vanity, his mystical self-aggrandizement and philosophical dreamings were stimulated by Lin’s extraordinary work. Lemuel could not have known that.

Motley could not bear for the sculpture to remain unfinished.

Derkhan and Yagharek entered. When she saw Lin, Derkhan cried out as Isaac had done. She ran across the room to where Isaac and Lin embraced and put her own arms around the two of them, crying and smiling.

Yagharek paced uneasily towards them.

Isaac was murmuring to Lin, telling her over and over how sorry he was, that he thought she was dead, that he would have come.

Kept me working, beating and…and torturing, taunting me, Lin signed, giddy and exhausted with emotion.

Yagharek was about to speak, but he snapped his head suddenly around.

The tramp of hurried feet was audible in the corridor outside.

Isaac stood, supporting Lin as he came, keeping her enfolded in his embrace. Derkhan moved away from the two of them. She drew her pistols and turned to face the door. Yagharek flattened himself against the wall in the shadow of the sculpture, his whip coiled and ready.

The door burst open and hammered against the wall, sprang back.

Motley stood before them.

He was silhouetted. Isaac saw a twisted outline against the black-painted walls of the corridor. A garden of multifarious limbs, a walking patchwork of organic forms. Isaac’s mouth dropped open in amazement. He realized as he watched the shuffling goat- and bird- and dog-footed creature, as he saw the clutching tentacles and knots of tissue, the composite bones and inverted skin, that Lin’s piece was taken, without fancy, from life.

At the sight of him, Lin went limp with fear and the memory of pain. Isaac felt rage begin to engulf him.

Motley stepped back slightly and turned to face the way he had come.

“Security!” shouted Motley from some unclear mouth. “Get here now!” He stepped back into the room.

“Grimnebulin,” he said. His voice was quick and tense. “You came. Didn’t you get my message? Bit remiss, aren’t you?” Motley stepped into the room and the faint light.

Derkhan fired twice. Her bullets tore through Motley’s armoured skin and patches of fur. He staggered back on multiple legs with a bellow of pain. His cry became a vicious laugh.

“Far too many internal organs to hurt me, you useless slut,” he shouted. Derkhan spat with fury and edged closer to the wall.

Isaac stared at Motley, saw teeth gnashing in a multitude of mouths. The floor shook as people pounded along the corridor outside, racing towards the room.

Men appeared in the doorway behind Motley, waved weapons, waited uncertainly. For a moment Isaac’s stomach pitched: the men had no faces, only smooth skin stretched tight over their skulls. What kind of fucking Remades are these? he thought giddily. Then he caught sight of the mirrors extending backwards from the helmets.

His eyes widened as he realized that these were shaven-headed Remade with their heads turned one hundred and eighty degrees, specially and perfectly adapted to dealing with the slake-moths. They waited now for their boss’s orders, their muscular bodies facing Isaac, their heads turned permanently away.

One of Motley’s limbs-an ugly, segmented and suckered thing-shot out to indicate Lin.

“Finish your godsdamned job, you bugger bitch, or you know what you’ll get!” he shouted, and hobbled towards Lin and Isaac.

With an utterly bestial roar, Isaac pushed Lin to one side. A spray of chymical anguish burst from her. Her hands twisted as she begged him to stay with her, but he was launching himself at Motley in an agony of guilt and fury.

Motley shouted wordlessly, meeting Isaac’s challenge.

There was a sudden loud concussion. An explosion of glass scintillas sprayed across the room, leaving blood and curses.

Isaac froze in the centre of the room. Motley was frozen before him. The ranks of security were fumbling with their weapons, shouting orders at each other. Isaac looked up, into the mirrors before his eyes.

The last slake-moth stood behind him. It was framed in the ragged stubs of the window. Glass still dripped around it like viscous liquid.

Isaac gasped.

It was a huge, a terrifying presence. It stood, half crouched, a little way forward from the wall and the window-hole, various savage limbs clutching the floor. It was massive as a gorilla, a body of terrible solidity and intricate violence.

Its unthinkable wings were wide open. Patterns burst across them like negative fireworks.

Motley had been facing the great beast: his mind was captured. He gazed at the wings with an array of unblinking eyes. Behind him his troops were shouting in agitation, levelling weapons.

Yagharek and Derkhan had been standing with their backs to the wall. Isaac saw them in his mirrors behind the thing. The patterned sides of its wings were hidden from them: they were still with shock, but not in thrall.

Between the slake-moth and Isaac, sprawled on the boards where she had fallen in the ragged cascade of glass, was Lin.

“Lin!” shouted Isaac desperately. “Don’t turn round! Don’t look behind you! Come to me!”

Lin froze at his panicked tone. She saw him reach backwards in an appallingly clumsy gesture, step hesitatingly towards her without turning round.

She crawled slowly, very slowly, towards him.

Behind her, she heard a low, animal noise.

The slake-moth stood, pugnacious and uneasy. It could taste minds all around, moving on all sides, threatening and fearing it.

It was unsettled and nervous, still traumatized by the slaughter of its siblings. One of its spiny tentacles lashed the ground like a tail.

Before it, one mind was captive. But the moth’s wings were spread out wide and yet it had captured only one…? It was confused. It faced the main mass of its enemies, it batted its wings at them hypnotically, trying to pull them under and send their dreams bubbling to the surface.

They remained resistant.

The slake-moth grew panicked.

The security behind Motley shifted in frustration. They tried to push past their boss, but he had frozen at the threshold to the room. His enormous body seemed fixed, his various legs planted hard on the ground. He gazed at the slake-moth wings in an intense trance.

There were five Remade behind him. They were poised. They were equipped specifically to defend against slake-moths, in case of escapes. In addition to small arms, three wielded flamethrowers; one a spray of femtocorrosive acid; one an elyctro-thaumaturgic barb-gun. They could see their quarry. But they could not get past their boss.

Motley’s men tried to aim their weapons around him, but his towering bulk occluded their line of fire. They shouted to each other and tried to devise strategies, but they could not. They gazed into their mirrors, watched the huge, predatory moth under Motley’s arms and limbs, through gaps in his outline. They were cowed by the monstrous sight.

Isaac stretched his arm back, reached for Derkhan.

“Come here, Lin,” he hissed, “and don’t look behind you.”

It was like some terrifying children’s game.

Yagharek and Derkhan shifted quietly, moving towards each other behind the moth. It chittered and looked up at their motion, but it remained more wary of the mass of figures before it, and it did not turn round.

Lin slid fitfully along the floor towards Isaac’s back, his clutching arms. A little way from him, she hesitated. She saw Motley, transfixed as if amazed, gazing past Isaac and over her, captivated by…something.

She did not know what was happening, what was behind her.

She knew nothing about the moths.

Isaac saw her hesitate, and began to howl at her not to stop.

Lin was an artist. She created with her touch and taste, making tactile objects. Visible objects. Sculpture to be fondled and seen.

She was fascinated by colour and light and shadow, by the interplay of shapes and lines, negative and positive spaces.

She had been locked in the attic for a long time.

In her position, some would have sabotaged the vast sculpture of Motley. The commission had become a sentence, after all. But Lin did not destroy it or skimp in her work. She poured everything she could, all her pent-up creative energy into that one monolithic and terrible piece. As Motley had known she would.

It had been her only escape. Her only means of expression. Starved of all the light and colour and shapeliness of the world, she had focused in her fear and pain and become obsessed. Creating a presence herself, the better to beguile her.

And now something extraordinary had entered her attic world.

She knew nothing of the slake-moths. The command don’t look behind you was familiar from fables, made sense only as a moralistic injuncture, some heavy-handed lesson. Isaac must mean be quick or don’t doubt me, something like that. His command made sense only as an emotional exhortation.

Lin was an artist. Savaged and tortured, confused by imprisonment and pain and degradation, Lin grasped only that something extraordinary, some utterly affecting sight had risen up behind her. And hungry for any kind of wonder after the weeks of pain in the shadow of those drab, colourless and shapeless walls, she paused, then quickly glanced behind her.

Isaac and Derkhan screamed in terrible disbelief; Yagharek called out with shock like some livid crow.

With her one good eye, Lin took in the extraordinary sweep of the slake-moth’s shape with awe; and then she caught sight of the gusting colours on the wings, and her mandibles clattered briefly and she was silent. Enthralled.

She squatted on the floor, her head twisted over her left shoulder, gazing stupidly at the great beast, at the rush of colours. Motley and she stared at the slake-moth’s wings, their minds overflowing.

Isaac howled and stumbled backwards, reaching out desperately.

The slake-moth reached out with a slithering clutch of tentacles and pulled Lin towards it. Its vast and dripping mouth slid open like a doorway into some stygian place. Rank citric spittle drooled across Lin’s face.

As Isaac grabbed backwards for her hand, staring intently into his mirrors, the slake-moth’s tongue lurched out of its stinking throat and lapped at her headscarab briefly. Isaac shouted again and again, but he could not stop it.

The long tongue, slippery with saliva, inveigled its way past Lin’s slack mouthparts and plunged into her head.

At the sound of Isaac’s appalled yells, two of the Remade trapped behind Motley’s enormous bulk reached over and fired erratically with their flintlocks. One missed completely, the other clipped the slake-moth’s thorax, eliciting a brief dollop of liquid and an irritated hiss, but no more. It was not the right weapon.

The two who had fired shouted at their fellows, and the small squadron began to shove at Motley’s bulk, in careful, timed thrusts.

Isaac was clutching for Lin’s hand.

The slake-moth’s throat swelled and shrank, its gristly throat swallowing in great swigs.

Yagharek reached down and grabbed the oil-lamp that stood by the foot of the sculpture. He hefted it briefly in his left hand, raised his whip in his right.

“Grab her, Isaac,” he called.

As the slake-moth clutched her thin body to its thorax, Isaac felt his fingers close around Lin’s wrist. He clenched hard, tried to pull her free. He wept and swore.

Yagharek hurled the lit oil-lamp against the back of the slake-moth’s head. The glass broke open and a little spray of incandescent oil spattered over the smooth skin. A burst of blue flame crawled across the dome of the skull.

The slake-moth squealed. A flurry of limbs whipped up to batter out the little fire as the slake-moth jerked its head back momentarily in pain. Instantly, Yagharek snapped his whip with a savage stroke. It smacked loud and dramatic against the dark skin. Coils of the thick leather wound almost instantly around the slake-moth’s neck.

Yagharek pulled hard and fast, with all his wiry strength. He drew the whip absolutely tight and braced himself.

The small fire kept stinging, burning tenaciously. The whip cut off the slake-moth’s throat. It could not swallow or breathe.

Its head lurched on its long neck. It emitted strangulated little cries. Its tongue swelled and it lashed it out of Lin’s mouth. The spurts of consciousness it had tried to drink clogged up in its throat. The moth clawed at the whip, frantic and terrified. It flailed and shook and spun.

Isaac hung on to Lin’s shrunken wrist, tugging at her as the moth twirled in a hideous dance. Its twitching limbs flew away from her, clutching vainly at the thong that choked it. Isaac pulled her clear, dropped to the floor and scrabbled away from the rampaging creature.

As it turned in its panic, its wings folded and it turned away from the door. Instantly, its hold on Motley was broken. Motley’s composite body stumbled forward and collapsed on the floor as his mind crawled back together. His men pushed over him, picking their way past a tangle of his legs into the room.

In a hideous drumming of feet the slake-moth spun. The whip was wrenched from Yagharek’s hands, tearing his skin. He staggered back, towards Derkhan, out of range of the slake-moth’s razored, spinning limbs.

Motley was standing. He stamped quickly away from the beast, passing back into the corridor.

“Kill the damn thing!” he shrieked.

The moth danced in a frenzy into the centre of the room. The five Remade stood in a little clutch around the door. They aimed through their mirrors.

Three jets of burning gas burst from the flamethrowers, scorching the vast creature’s skin. It tried to shriek as its wings and chitin roared and split and crisped, but the whip prevented it. A great gob of acid sprayed the twisting moth square in the face. It denatured the proteins and compounds of its hide in seconds, melting the moth’s exoskeleton.

The acid and the flame ate swiftly through the whip. Its remnants flew away from the spinning moth, which could finally breathe, and scream.

It shrieked in agony as fresh gouts of fire and acid caught it. It hurled itself blindly in the direction of its attackers.

Bolts of dark energy from the fifth man’s gun burst into it, dissipating across its surface area, numbing and scorching it without heat. It screeched again, but hurtled on, a sightless storm of flame, spitting acid and flailing ragged bone.

The five Remade moved back as it stumbled madly for them, following Motley into the corridor. The intense moving pyre slammed into the walls, igniting them, fumbling for the doorway.

From the little hallway, the sounds of fire, spewing acid and quarrels of elyctro-thaumaturgy continued.

For long seconds, Derkhan and Yagharek and Isaac stared up dumbfounded at the doorway. The moth still shrieked just out of sight, the corridor beyond was radiant with flickering light and heat.

Then Isaac blinked and stared down at Lin, who slumped in his embrace.

He hissed at her, shook her.

“Lin,” he whispered. “Lin…We’re leaving.”

Yagharek strode quickly over to the window and peered out over the street five floors below. Next to the window, a little jutting column of brick extended out from the wall, becoming a chimney. A drainpipe snaked up beside it. He stood quickly on the window-sill and reached up for the guttering, tugged it quickly. It was solid.

“Isaac, bring her here,” said Derkhan urgently. Isaac lifted Lin up, biting his lip at how light she was. He walked quickly with her to the window. As he watched her, his face suddenly broke into an incredulous, an ecstatic smile. He began to weep.

From the passage outside, the slake-moth keened weakly.

“Dee, look!” he hissed. Lin’s hands were fluttering erratically in front of her as he cradled her. “She’s signing. She’s going to be all right!”

Derkhan peered over, reading her words. Isaac watched, shook his head.

“She’s not conscious, it’s just random words, but, Dee, it’s words…We were in time…”

Derkhan smiled in delight. She kissed Isaac hard on the cheek, stroked Lin’s broken headscarab gently.

“Get her out of here,” she said quietly. Isaac peered out of the window, where Yagharek had wedged himself into a corner of architecture, on a little extrusion of brick a few feet away.

“Give her to me, and follow,” said Yagharek, jerking his head up above him. At the eastern end the long sloped roof of Motley’s terrace joined with the next street, which jutted perpendicularly south in a descending row of houses. The roofscape of Bonetown stretched out above and all around them; a raised landscape; linked islands of slate over the dangerous streets, extending for miles in the darkness, sweeping away from the Ribs to Mog Hill and beyond.

Even then, devoured alive by tides of fire and acid, stunned with bolts of obscure energy, the last slake-moth might have survived.

It was a creature of astonishing endurance. It could heal itself at frightening speeds.

If it had been in the open air, it could have leapt up and spread those terribly wounded wings and disappeared from the earth. It might have forced itself up, ignoring the pain, ignoring the scorched flakes of skin and chitin that would flutter around it filthily. It could have rolled into the wet clouds to douse the flames, wash itself free of acid.

If its family had survived, if it had been confident that it could return to its siblings, that they would hunt together again, it might not have panicked. If it had not witnessed a carnage of its kind, an impossible blast of poisonous vapour that enticed its brothersisters in and burst them, the moth would not have been insane with fear and anger, and it might not have become frenzied and lashed out, trapping itself further.

But it was alone. Trapped under brick, in a claustrophobic warren that constricted it, flattened its wings, left it nowhere to go. Assailed on all sides by murderous, endless pain. The fire came and came again too fast for it to heal.

It staggered the length of the corridor in Motley’s headquarters, a white-hot ball, reaching out to the last with ragged claws and spines, trying to hunt. It fell just before the top of the stairs.

Motley and the Remade looked on in awe from halfway down, praying that it lay still, that it did not crawl over the lip of the stairway and tumble flaming onto them.

It did not. It was still while it died.

When they were sure the slake-moth was dead, Motley sent men and women up and down the stairs in quick columns, carrying sodden towels and blankets to control the blaze it had left in its wake.

It took twenty minutes before the fire was subdued. The beams and boards of the attic were split and smoke-fouled. Massive footprints of charred wood and blistered paint stretched the length of the passage. The smouldering body of the moth rested on the top of the stairs, an unrecognizable pile of flesh and tissue, twisted by heat into an even more exotic shape than it had had in life.

“Grimnebulin and his bastard friends’ll be gone,” said Motley. “Find them. Find where they went. Track them down. Trace them. Tonight. Now.”

It was easy to see how they had escaped, out of the window and onto the roof. From there, though, they could have gone in almost any direction. Motley’s men shifted, looking uneasily at each other.

“Move, you Remade scum,” raged Motley. “Find them now, track them down and bring them to me.”

Terrified gangs of Remade, of humans, of cactacae and vodyanoi set out from Motley’s terrace-den, off into the city. They made pointless plans, compared notes, frantically raced down to Sunter, to Echomire and Ludmead, to Kelltree and Mog Hill, all the way to Badside, over the river to Brock Marsh, to West Gidd and Griss Fell and Murkside and Saltpetre.

They might have walked past Isaac and his companions a thousand times.

There was an infinity of holes in New Crobuzon. There were far more hiding places than there were people to hide. Motley’s troops never had a chance.

On nights like that one, when rain and streetlamp light made all the lines and edges of the city complex-a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers-it was an endless, recursive, secretive place.

Motley’s men made their way home empty-handed and afraid.

Motley raged and raged at the unfinished statue that taunted him, perfect and incomplete. His men searched the building, in case some clue had been missed.

In the last room on the attic corridor, they found a militiaman sitting with his back to the wall, comatose and alone. A bizarre, beautiful glass flintlock lay across his lap. A game of tic-tac-toe was scratched into the wood by his feet.

Crosses had won, in three moves.

We run and hide like hunted vermin, but it is with relief and joy.

We know that we have won.

Isaac carries Lin in his arms, sometimes hauling her over his shoulder apologetically when the way is tough. We race away. We run as if we are spirits. Weary and exhilarated. The shabby geography in the east of the city cannot restrain us. We clamber over low fences and into narrow swathes of backyards, rude gardens of mutant apple trees and wretched brambles, dubious compost, mud and broken toys.

Sometimes a shade will pass across Derkhan’s face and she will murmur something. She thinks of Andrej; but it is hard that night to retain guilt, even when it is deserved. There is a sombre moment, but under that spew of warm rain, above the city lights that bloom promiscuous as weeds, it is hard not to catch each other’s eyes and smile or caw softly in astonishment.

The moths are gone.

There have been terrible, terrible costs. There has been Hell to pay. But tonight as we settle in a rooftop shack in Pincod, beyond the reach of the skyrails, a little way north of the railway and the squalor of Dark Water Station, we are triumphant.

In the morning, the newspapers are full of dire warnings. The Quarrell and The Messenger both hint that severe measures are to come.

Derkhan sleeps for hours, then sits alone, her sadness and her guilt finally given space to flower. Lin moves fitfully, in and out of consciousness. Isaac dozes and eats the food we have stolen. He cradles Lin constantly. He talks of Jack Half-a-Prayer in wondering tones.

He sifts through the battered and broken components of the crisis engine, tuts and purses his lips. He tells me he can get it working again, no problem.

At that I come alive with longing. A final freedom. I want if badly. Flight.

He reads the pilfered papers over my shoulder.

In the climate of crisis, the militia are to be given extraordinary powers, we read. They may revert to open, uniformed patrols. Civilian rights may be curtailed. Martial law is mooted.

But throughout that blustery day, the shit, the filthy discharge, the dream-poison of the slake-moths is sinking slowly through the aether and on into the earth. I fancy I can feel it as I lie under these dilapidated planks; it subsides gently around me, denatured by the daylight. It drifts like polluted snow through the planes that entangle the city, on through layers of materia, leeching out of our dimension and away.

And when the night comes, the nightmares have gone.

It is as if some gentle sob, some mass exhalation of relief and languor sweeps the city. A wave of calm gusts in from the nightside, from the west, from Gallmarch and Smog Bend to Gross Coil, to Sheck and Brock Marsh, Ludmead and MogHill and Abrogate Green.

The city is cleansed in a tide of sleep. On piles of piss-damp straw in Creekside and the slums, on bloated featherbeds in Chnum, huddled together and alone, the citizens of New Crobuzon sleep soundly.

The city moves without pause, of course, and there is no let-up for the nightcrews in the docks, or the battering of metal as late shifts enter mills and foundries. Brazen sounds puncture the night, sounds like war. Watchmen still guard the forecourts of factories. Whores seek business wherever they can find it. There are still crimes. Violence does not dissipate.

But the sleepers and the waking are not taunted by phantoms. Their terrors are their own.

Like some unthinkable torpid giant, New Crobuzon shifts easily in its dreams.

I had forgotten the pleasure of such a night.

When I wake to the sun, my head is clear. I do not ache.

We have been freed.

This time the stories are all of the end of the “Midsummer Nightmare,” or the “Sleeping Sickness,” or the “Dream Curse,” or whatever other name the particular newspaper had coined.

We read them and laugh, Derkhan and Isaac and I. Delight is palpable everywhere. The city is returned. Transformed.

We wait for Lin to wake, to come to her senses.

But she does not.

That first day, she slept. Her body began to reknit itself. She clutched Isaac tight and refused to wake. Free, and free to sleep without fear.

But now she has woken and sat up sluggishly. Her headlegs judder a little. Her mandibles work: she is hungry, and we find fruit in our stolen hoard, give her breakfast.

She looks unsteadily from me to Derkhan to Isaac as she eats. He grips her thighs, whispers to her, too low for me to hear. She jerks her head away like a baby. She moves with a spastic, palsied quivering.

She raises her hands and signs for him.

He watches her eagerly, his face creasing in incredulous despair at her fumbling, ugly manipulations.

Derkhan s eyes widen as she reads the words.

Isaac shakes his head, can hardly speak.

Morning…food…warming, he falters, insect…journey…happy.

She cannot feed herself. Her outer jaws spasm and split the fruit in two, or relax suddenly and let it fall. She shakes with frustration, rocks her head, releases a cloud of spray that Isaac says are khepri tears.

He comforts her, holds the apple before her, helping her to bite, wiping her when she drips juice and residue across herself. Afraid, she signs, as Isaac hesitantly translates. Mind tiring spilling loose, art Motley! She shakes suddenly, peering around her in terror. Isaac shushes her, comforts her. Derkhan watches in misery. Alone, Lin signs desperately, and spews out a chymical message that is opaque to us all. Monster warm Remade…She looks around. Apple, she signs. Apple.

Isaac lifts it to her mouth and lets her feed. She jigs like a toddler.

When the evening comes and she falls asleep once more, quickly and deeply, Isaac and Derkhan confer, and Isaac begins to rage and shout, and to cry.

She’ll recover, he shouts, as Lin shifts in her sleep, she’s half-dead with fucking tiredness, she’s had the shit beaten out of her, it’s no wonder, no wonder she’s confused…

But she does not recover, as he knows she will not.

We ripped her from the moth half drunk. Half her mind, half her dreams had been sucked into the gullet of the vampir beast. It is gone, burnt up by stomach juices and then by Motley’s men.

Lin wakes happy, talks animated gibberish with her hands, flails to stand and cannot, falls and weeps or laughs chymically, chatters with her mandibles, fouls herself like a baby.

Lin toddles across our roof with her half-mind. Helpless. Ruined. A weird patchwork of childish laughter and adult dreams, her speech extraordinary and incomprehensible, complex and violent and infantile.

Isaac is broken.

We move roofs, made uneasy by noises from below. Lin has a tantrum on our journey, made mad by our inability to understand her bizarre stream of words. She drums her heels on the pavement, slaps Isaac with weak strokes. She signs vile insults, tries to kick us away. We control her, hold her tight, bundle her away.

We move by night. We are fearful of the militia and of Motley’s men. We watch out for constructs which might report to the Council. We watch carefully for sudden movements and suspicious glances. We cannot trust our neighbours. We must live in a hinterland of half darkness, isolated and solipsistic. We steal what we need, or buy from tiny late-night grocers miles from where we are settled. Every askance look, every gaze, every shout, sudden flurry of hooves or boots, every bang or hiss of a constructs pistons is a moment of fear.

We are the most wanted in New Crobuzon. An honour, a dubious honour.

Lin wants colourberries.

Isaac interprets her motions thus. The faltering charade of chewing, the pulsing of her gland (an unsettling sexual sight).

Derkhan agrees to go. She loves Lin, too.

They spend hours on Derkhan’s disguise, with water and butter and soot, ragged clothes from all over, foodstuffs and the remnants of dyes. She emerges with sleek black hair that shines like coal-crystals and a puckered scar across her forehead. She holds herself hunched and scowls.

When she leaves, Isaac and I spend the hours waiting fearfully. We are almost totally silent.

Lin continues her idiot monologue, and Isaac tries to answer with his own hands, caressing her and signing slowly as if she were a child. But she is not: she is half an adult, and his manner enrages her. She tries to stalk away and falls, her limbs disobedient. She is terrified of her own body. Isaac helps her, sits her up and feeds her, massages her tense, bruised shoulders.

Derkhan returns to our muttered relief with slabs of paste and a large handful of variegated berries. Their tones are lush and vivid.

I thought the damn Council had us, she says. I thought some construct was after me. I had to wind through Kinken to get away.

None of us know if she was really being tracked.

Lin is excited. Her antennae and her headlegs quiver. She tries to chew a finger of the white paste, but she trembles and spills it and cannot control herself. Isaac is gentle with her. He pushes the paste slowly into her mouth, unobtrusive, as if she ate for herself.

It takes some minutes for the headscarab to digest the paste and direct it towards the khepri’s gland. As we wait, Isaac shakes a few colourberries at Lin, waiting until her twitches decide him that she wants a particular bunch, which he feeds to her gently and carefully.

We are silent. Lin swallows and chews carefully. We watch her.

Minutes pass and then her gland distends. We rock forward, eager to see what she will make.

She opens her gland-lips and pushes out a pellet of moist khepri-spit. She moves her arms in excitement as it oozes shapeless and sopping from her, dropping heavy to the floor like a white turd.

A thin drool of coloured spittle from the berries streams out after it, spattering and staining the mess.

Derkhan looks away. Isaac cries as I have never seen a human do.

Outside our foul shanty the city squats fatly in its freedom, brazen again and fearless. It ignores us. It is an ingrate. The days are cooler this week, a brief ebbing of the relentless summer. Gusts blow in from the coast, from the Gross Tar estuary and Iron Bay. Clutches of ships arrive every day. They queue in the river to the east, waiting to load and unload. Merchant ships from Kohnid and Tesh; explorers from the Firewater Straits; floating factories from Myrshock; privateers from Figh Vadiso, respectable and law-abiding so far from the open sea. Clouds scurry like bees before the sun. The city is raucous. It has forgotten. It has some vague notion that once its sleep was troubled: nothing more.

I can see the sky. There are slats of light between the rough boards that surround us. I would like very much to be away from this now. I can imagine the sensation of wind, the sudden heaviness of air below me. I would like to look down on this building and this street. I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore.

Lin signs. Sticky fearful, whispers Isaac snottily, watching her hands. Piss and mother, food wings happy. Afraid. Afraid.