Perdido Street Station

Chapter Eighteen

The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They murmured to each other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way. They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

“Bloody useless bloody thing,” they muttered in disgust. Halfhearted attempts were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by gods or nature or chance.

In the Canker Wedge zoo, animals shifted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of lustful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable behaviour.

Now, as light stayed longer every day, the bears and hyaenas and bony hippos, the lonely alopex and the apes, lay still-tensely, it seemed-for hours, watching the passers-by from their scrubbed-brick cells and their muddy trenches. They were waiting. For the southern rains that would never reach New Crobuzon, but were encoded in their bones, perhaps. And when the rains had not come, they might settle down and wait for the dry season that, similarly, did not afflict their new home. It must be a strange, anxious existence, the keepers mused over the roars of tired, disoriented beasts.

The nights had lost nearly two hours since winter, but they seemed to have squeezed even more essence into the shorter time. They seemed particularly intense, as more and more illicit activity strove to fit the hours from sundown to dawn. Every night the enormous old warehouse half a mile south of the zoo attracted streams of men and women. The occasional leonine roar might breach the thumping and the constant blare of the crotchety, wakeful city entering the old building, sounding above the throng. It would be ignored.

The bricks of the warehouse had once been red and were now black with grime, as smooth and meticulous as if they had been painted by hand. The original sign still read the length of the building: Cadnebar’s Soaps and Tallow. Cadnebar’s had gone bust in the slump of ‘57. The enormous machinery for melting and refining fat had been taken and sold as scrap. After two or three years of quiet mouldering, Cadnebar’s had been reborn as the glad’ circus.

Like mayors before him, Rudgutter liked to compare the civilization and splendour of the City-State Republic of New Crobuzon with the barbarian muck in which inhabitants of other lands were forced to crawl. Think of the other Rohagi countries, Rudgutter demanded in speeches and editorials. This was not Tesh, nor Troglodopolis, Vadaunk or High Cromlech. This was not a city ruled by witches; this was not a chthonic burrow; the seasons’ changes did not bring an onslaught of superstitious repression; New Crobuzon did not process its citizenry through zombie factories; its Parliament was not like Maru’ahm’s, a casino where laws were stakes in games of roulette.

And this was not, emphasized Rudgutter, Shankell, where people fought like animals for sport.

Except, of course, at Cadnebar’s.

Illegal it might have been, but no one remembered any militia raids of the establishment. Many sponsors of the top stables were Parliamentarians, industrialists and bankers, whose intercession doubtless kept official interest at a minimum. There were other fight-halls, of course, that doubled as cockfight and ratfight pits, where bear- or badger-baiting might go on at one end, snake-wrestling at another, with glad’-fighting in the middle. But Cadnebar’s was legendary.

Every night, the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals.

The sport at Cadnebar’s was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar’s Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant.

The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.

In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

Lin and Isaac snatched furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms.

Lin had stroked his arm, clearly grateful for his concern. But she would tell him nothing. She said she was working on a piece of which she was tentatively very proud. She had found a space that she could not and did not want to talk about, in which she was producing a large piece that he mustn’t ask her about. It was not as if she had disappeared from the world. Once a fortnight, perhaps, she was back in one of the Salacus Fields bars, laughing with her friends, if with a little less vigour than she had two months ago.

She teased Isaac about his anger at Lucky Gazid, who had vanished, with suspiciously good timing. Isaac had told Lin about his inadvertent sampling of dreamshit, and had raged around looking to punish Gazid. Isaac had described the extraordinary grub which seemed to thrive on the drug. Lin had not seen the creature, had not been back to Brock Marsh since that forlorn day the previous month, but even allowing for a degree of exaggeration on Isaac’s part, the creature sounded extraordinary.

Lin thought fondly of Isaac as she adeptly changed the subject. She asked him what nourishment he thought the caterpillar might gain from its peculiar food, and sat back as his face expanded with fascination and he would tell her enthusiastically that he did not know, but that these were a few of his ideas. She would ask him to try to explain to her about crisis energy, and whether he thought it would help Yagharek to fly, and he would talk animatedly, drawing her diagrams on slips of paper.

It was easy to work on him. Lin felt, sometimes, that Isaac knew he was being manipulated, that he felt guilty about the ease with which his worries for her were transformed. She sensed gratitude in his lurching changes of subject, along with contrition. He knew it was his role to be worried for her, given her melancholy, and he was, he truly was, but it was an effort, a duty, when most of his mind was crammed with crisis and grub food. She gave him permission not to worry, and he accepted it with thanks.

Lin wanted to displace Isaac’s concerns for her, for a time. She could not afford for him to be curious. The more he knew, the more she was in danger. She did not know what powers her employer might possess: she doubted he was capable of telepathy, but she was risking nothing. She wanted to finish her piece, to take the money and to get away from Bonetown.

Every day that she saw Mr. Motley, he pulled her-unwilling as she was-into his city. He talked idly of turf wars in Griss Twist and Badside, dropped hints of gangland massacres in the heart of The Crow. Ma Francine was extending her reach. She had taken possession of a huge part of the shazbah market west of The Crow, which Mr. Motley was prepared for. But now she was creeping into the east. Lin chewed and spat and moulded and tried not to hear the details, the nicknames of dead couriers, the safe-house addresses. Mr. Motley was implicating her. It must be deliberate.

The statue grew thighs and another leg, the beginnings of a waist (insofar as Mr. Motley had anything so identifiable). The colours were not naturalistic, but they were evocative and compelling, hypnotic. It was an astonishing piece, as befitted its subject.

Despite her attempts to insulate her mind, Mr. Motley’s blithe chat crept in, past her defences. She found herself musing on it. Horrified, she would pull her mind away, but it was an unsustainable attempt. Eventually she would find herself idly wondering who was more likely to win control of the very-tea clearing house in Chimer’s End. She became numb. It was another defence. She let her mind pick its way dully over the dangerous information. She tried to remain studiously ignorant of its import.

Lin found herself thinking more and more of Ma Francine.

Mr. Motley discussed her in carefree tones, but she came up again and again in his monologues, and Lin realized that he was a little concerned.

To her surprise, Lin began to root for Ma Francine.

She was not sure how it started. The first she was aware of it was when Mr. Motley had been talking with mock humour about a disastrous attack on two couriers the previous night, during which a huge quantity of some undisclosed substance, some raw material for the manufacture of something, had been snatched by khepri raiders from Ma Francine’s gang. Lin had realized that she was thinking a little mental cheer. She was astonished, her glandwork stopping for a moment as she thought through her own feelings.

She wanted Ma Francine to win.

There was no logic to it. As soon as she applied any rigorous thought to the situation she had no opinion at all. Intellectually speaking, the triumph of one drug-dealer and hoodlum over another was of no interest to her. But emotionally, she was beginning to see the unseen Ma Francine as her champion. She found herself booing silently when she heard Mr. Motley’s slyly smug assurance that he had a plan that would radically alter the shape of the marketplace.

What’s this? she thought wryly. After all these years, the stirrings of khepri consciousness?

She mocked herself, but there was some truth in the ironic thought. Maybe it would be the same for anyone who was opposing Motley, she thought. Lin was so fearful of reflecting on her relationship with Mr. Motley, so nervous of being anything more than an employee, that it had taken her a long time to realize that she hated him. My enemy’s enemy…she thought. But there was more to it than that. Lin realized that she felt solidarity with Ma Francine because she was khepri. But-and maybe this was at the heart of her feelings-Francine was not good khepri.

These thoughts pricked at Lin, discomforted her. For the first time in many years, they made her think of her relationship with the khepri community in other than a straightforward, righteous, confrontational way. And that made her think of her childhood.

After each day with Mr. Motley ended, Lin took to visiting Kinken. She would leave him and catch a cab from the edge of the Ribs. Across Danechi’s or Barguest Bridge, past the restaurants and offices and houses of Spit Hearth.

Sometimes she would stop at Spit Bazaar and take her time wandering through its subdued lights. She felt the linen dresses and coats hanging from the stalls, ignoring the passers-by staring rudely, wondering at the khepri shopping for human clothes. Lin would meander through the bazaar until she came to Sheck, dense and chaotic with intricate streets and sprawling brick apartment buildings.

This was not a slum. The buildings of Sheck were solid enough, and most kept the rain out. Compared to the mutant sprawl of Dog Fenn, the rotting brick mulch of Badside and Chimer’s End, the desperate shacks of Spatters, Sheck was a desirable place. A little crowded, of course, and not without drunkenness and poverty and thievery. But all things considered, there were many worse places to live. This was where the shopkeepers lived, the lower managers and better-paid factory workers that every day crowded Echomire and Kelltree docks, Gross Coil and Didacai Village, known universally as Smog Bend.

Lin was not made welcome. Sheck bordered Kinken, separated only by a couple of insignificant parks. The khepri were a constant reminder to Sheck that it did not have far to fall. Khepri filled Sheck’s streets during the day, making their way to The Crow to shop or take the train from Perdido Street Station. At night, though, it was a brave khepri who would walk streets made dangerous by pugnacious Three Quillers out to “keep their city clean.” Lin made sure she was through this zone by sundown. Because just beyond was Kinken, where she was safe.

Safe, but not happy.

Lin walked Kinken’s streets with a kind of nauseated excitement. For many years, her journeys to the area had been brief excursions to pick up colourberries and paste, perhaps the occasional khepri delicacy. Now her visits were jars to memories she had thought banished.

Houses oozed the white mucus of home-grubs. Some were completely coated in the thick stuff: it spread across roofs, linking different buildings into a lumpy, congealed totality. Lin could see in through windows and doors. The walls and floors that had been provided by human architects had been broken away in places, and the massive home-grubs allowed to burrow their blind way through the shell, oozing their phlegm-cement from their abdomens, their stubby little legs skittering as they ate their way through the ruined interiors of the buildings.

Occasionally Lin would see a live specimen taken from the farms by the river, going about its refitting of a building into the intricate twisting organic passageways preferred by most khepri tenants. The big, stupid beetles, larger than rhinos, responded to the tweaks and tugs of their keepers, blundering this way and that through the houses, recasting rooms in a quick-drying coating that softened edges and connected chambers, buildings and streets with what looked from the inside like giant worm-tracks.

Sometimes Lin would sit in one of Kinken’s tiny parks. She would be still among the slowly blossoming trees and watch her kind, all around her. She would stare high above the park, at the backs and sides of tall buildings. One time, she saw a young human girl lean out from a window high above, that was stuck almost at random at the top of a stained concrete wall at the back of the building. Lin saw the girl watching her khepri neighbours placidly, as her family’s washing fluttered and snapped in the brisk wind from a pole jutting beside her. A strange way of growing up, thought Lin, imagining the child surrounded by silent, insect-headed creatures, as strange as if Lin had been brought up among vodyanoi but that thought led her uncomfortably in the direction of her own childhood.

Of course, her journey to these despised streets was a walk back through the city of her memory. She knew that. She was steeling herself to think back.

Kinken had been Lin’s first refuge. In this strange time of isolation, when she cheered the efforts of khepri crime-queens and walked as an outcast in all the quadrants of the city-except, perhaps, Salacus Fields, where outcasts ruled-she realized that her feelings for Kinken were more ambivalent than she had so far allowed.

There had been khepri in New Crobuzon for nearly seven hundred years, since the Fervent Mantis crossed the Swollen Ocean and reached Bered Kai Nev, the eastern continent, the khepri home. A few merchants and travellers had returned on a one-way mission of edification. For centuries, the stock of this tiny group sustained itself in the city, became natives. There had been no separate neighbourhoods, no home-grubs, no ghettos. There were not enough khepri. Not until the Tragic Crossing.

It was a hundred years since the first refugee ships had crawled, barely afloat, into Iron Bay. Their enormous clockwork motors were rusted and broken, their sails ragged. They were charnel ships, packed with Bered Kai Nev khepri who were only just alive. Contagion was so merciless that ancient taboos against water-burial had been overthrown. So there were few corpses on board, but there were thousands of dying. The ships were like crowded antechambers to morgues.

The nature of the tragedy was a mystery to the New Crobuzon authorities, who had no consuls and little contact with any of the countries of Bered Kai Nev. The refugees would not speak of it, or if they did they were elliptical, or if they were graphic and explicit the language barrier blocked understanding. All that the humans knew was that something terrible had happened to the khepri of the eastern continent, some horrendous vortex that had sucked up millions, leaving only a tiny handful able to flee. The khepri had christened this nebulous apocalypse the Ravening.

There were twenty-five years between the arrival of the first ships and the last. Some slow, motorless vessels were said to be crewed entirely by khepri born at sea, all the original refugees having died during the interminable crossing. Their daughters did not know what it was they fled, only that their dying broodmas had all bade them go west, and never to turn the wheel. Stories of the khepri Mercy Ships-named for what they begged-reached New Crobuzon from other countries on the eastern coast of the Rohagi continent, from Gnurr Kett and the Jheshull Islands, from as far south as the Shards. The khepri diaspora had been chaotic and diverse and panicked.

In some lands the refugees were butchered in terrible pogroms. In others, like New Crobuzon, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by bigots and thugs.

Lin had not grown up in Kinken. She was born in the younger, poorer khepri ghetto of Creekside, a grubby stain in the northwest of the city. It was nearly impossible to understand the true history of Kinken and Creekside, because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had undertaken. The trauma of the Ravening was such that the first generation of refugees had deliberately forgotten ten thousand years of khepri history, announcing their arrival at New Crobuzon to be the beginning of a new cycle of years, the City Cycle. When the next generation had demanded their story from their broodmas, many had refused and many could not remember. Khepri history was obscured by the massive shadow of genocide.

So it was hard for Lin to penetrate the secrets of those first twenty years of the City Cycle. Kinken and Creekside were presented as fait accompli to her, and to her broodma, and the generation before that, and the generation before that.

Creekside had no Plaza of Statues. It had been a tumbledown slum for humans a hundred years ago, a rookery of found architecture, and the khepri home-grubs had done little more than encase the ruined houses with cement, petrifying them forever on the point of collapse. The denizens of Creekside were not artists or fruitbar owners, moiety chiefs or hive elders or shopkeepers. They were disreputable and hungry. They worked in the factories and in the sewers, sold themselves to whomever would buy. Their sisters in Kinken despised them.

In Creekside’s decrepit streets, strange and dangerous ideas blossomed. Small groups of radicals met in hidden halls. Messianic cults promised deliverance to the chosen.

Many of the original refugees had turned their backs on the gods of Bered Kai Nev, angry that they had not protected their disciples from the Ravening. But subsequent generations, not knowing the nature of the tragedy, offered their worship again. Over a hundred years, pantheon temples had been consecrated in old workshops and deserted dancehalls. But many Creeksiders, in their confusion and hunger, turned to dissident gods.

All the usual temples could be found in Creekside’s confines. Awesome Broodma was worshipped, and the Artspitter. Kindly Nurse presided over the shabby hospital, and the Tough Sisters defended the faithful. But in rude shacks that mouldered by the industrial canals, and in front rooms blocked by dark windows, prayers were raised to stranger gods. Priestesses dedicated themselves to the service of the Elyctric Devil or the Air Harvester. Furtive groups clambered to their roofs and sang hymns to the Wingsister, praying for flight. And some lonely, desperate souls-like Lin’s broodma-pledged their fealty to Insect Aspect.

Properly transliterated from Khepri into the New Crobuzon script, the chymico-audio-visual composite of description, devotion and awe that was the name of the god was rendered Insect/Aspect/ (male)/(singleminded). But the few humans that knew of him called him Insect Aspect, and that was how Lin had signed him to Isaac when she told him the story of her upbringing.

Since the age of six, when she had torn the chrysalis from what had been her baby headlarva and was suddenly a headscarab, when she had burst into consciousness with language and thought, her mother had taught her that she was fallen. The gloomy doctrine of Insect Aspect was that khepri women were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had consigned her daughters to lives encumbered with ridiculous, slow, floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile purity of God and male.

Lin’s broodma (who scorned a name as a decadent affectation) taught Lin and her broodsister that Insect Aspect was the lord of all creation, the all-powerful force that knew only hunger and thirst and rutting and satisfaction. He had shat out the universe after eating the void, in a mindless act of cosmic creation the purer and more brilliant for being devoid of motive or awareness. Lin and her broodsister were taught to worship Him with a terrified fervour, and to despise their self-awareness and their soft, chitinless bodies.

They were also taught to worship and serve their mindless brothers.

Thinking back now to that time, Lin no longer shuddered with revulsion. Sitting in those secluded Kinken parks, Lin carefully watched her past unfold in her mind, little by little, in a gradual act of reminiscence that took courage to pursue. She remembered how she had slowly come to realize that her life was not usual. On her rare shopping expeditions she would see with horror the casual contempt with which her khepri sisters treated male khepri, kicking and crushing the mindless two-foot insects. She remembered her tentative conversations with the other children, who taught her how her neighbours lived; her fear of using the language she knew instinctively, the language she carried in her blood, but that her broodma had taught her to loathe.

Lin remembered coming home to a house that swarmed with male khepri, that stank of rotting vegetables and fruit, littered as it was with organic rubbish for males to gorge on. She remembered being commanded to wash her innumerable brothers’ glistening carapaces, to pile up their dung before the household altar, to let them scuttle over her and explore her body as their dumb curiosity directed them. She remembered the night-time discussions with her broodsister, carried out in the tiny chymical wafts and gently rattling hisses that were khepri-whispers. As a result of these theological debates, her broodsister had turned the other way from her, had burrowed so deeply into her Insect Aspect faith that she outshone their mother in zealotry.

It had taken Lin until she was fifteen to challenge her broodma openly. She did so in terms that she now saw were naive and confused. Lin denounced her mother as a heretic, cursing her in the name of the mainstream pantheon. She fled the lunatic self-loathing of Insect Aspect worship, and the narrow streets of Creekside. She had run away to Kinken.

That was why, she reflected, for all her later disenchantment-her contempt, in fact, her hatred-there was a part of her that would always remember Kinken as a sanctuary. Now the smugness of the insular community nauseated her, but at the time of her escape she had been drunk on it. She had revelled in the arrogant denunciation of Creekside, had prayed to Awesome Broodma with a vehement delight. She had baptized herself with a khepri name and-which was vital in New Crobuzon-a human one. She had discovered that in Kinken, unlike Creekside, the hive and moiety system made for complex and useful nets of social connectivity. Her mother had never mentioned her birth or upbringing, so Lin had copied the allegiance of her first friend in Kinken, and told anyone who asked that she was Redwing Hive, Catskull Moiety.

Her friend introduced her to pleasuresex, taught her to delight in the sensuous body below her neck. This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her. Until then she had been subjected only to headsex at her mother’s behest, sitting still and uncomfortable while a male scrabbled and coupled excitedly with her headscarab, in mercifully unsuccessful attempts at procreation.

With time, Lin’s hatred of her broodma slowly cooled, becoming first contempt, then pity. Her disgust at the squalor of Creekside was joined with some kind of understanding. Then, her five-year love-affair with Kinken drew to an end. It started when she stood in the Plaza of Statues, and realized that they were mawkish and badly executed, embodying a culture that was blind to itself. She began to see Kinken as implicated in the subjugation of Creekside and the never-mentioned Kinken poor, saw a “community” at best callous and uncaring, at worst deliberately keeping Creekside down to maintain its superiority.

With its priestesses and its orgies and its cottage industries, its secret reliance on the wider economy of New Crobuzon-the vastness of which was usually depicted airily as a kind of adjunct to Kinken-Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.

Lin realized, to her revolted anger, that Kinken was more dishonest than Creekside. But this realization brought with it no nostalgia for her miserable childhood. She would not return to Creekside. And if, now, she was turning her back on Kinken as once she had turned it on Insect Aspect, there was nowhere to go but out.

So Lin taught herself signing, and left.

Lin was never so foolish as to think she could stop being defined by being khepri, as far as the city was concerned. Nor did she want to. But for herself, she stopped trying to be khepri, as she had once stopped trying to be insect. That was why she was bewildered by her feelings about Ma Francine. It was not only that Ma Francine was opposing to Mr. Motley, Lin realized. There was something about a khepri doing that, effortlessly stealing territory from this vile man, that stirred Lin.

Lin could not, even to herself, pretend to understand. She would sit, for a long time, in the shadow of banyans or oaks or pear trees, in the Kinken she had despised for years, surrounded by sisters to whom she was an outsider. She did not want to return to the “khepri way” any more than to the Insect Aspect. She did not understand the strength she drew from Kinken.

Chapter Nineteen

The construct that had swept David’s and Lublamai’s floor for years seemed finally to be giving up the ghost. It wheezed and spun as it scrubbed. It became fixated with arbitrary patches of floor, polished them as if they were jewels. Some mornings it took nearly an hour to warm up. It was becoming caught in programme loops, causing it to endlessly repeat tiny pieces of behaviour.

Isaac learnt to ignore its repetitive, neurotic whines. He worked with both hands at once. With his left, he scribbled down his notions in diagrammatic form. With his right he fed equations into the innards of his little calculating engine through its stiff keys, slotted punctured cards into its programme slot, fumbling them in and out at speed. He solved the same problems with different programmes, comparing answers, typing out the sheets of numbers.

The innumerable books on flight that had filled Isaac’s bookshelves had been replaced, with Teafortwo’s help, by an equally large number of tomes on unified field theory, and on the arcane sub-field of crisis mathematics.

After only two weeks of research, something extraordinary happened in Isaac’s mind. The reconceptualization came to him so simply that he did not at first realize the scale of his insight. It seemed a thoughtful moment like many others, in the course of a whole internal scientific dialogue. A sense of genius did not descend on Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin in a cold shock of brilliant light. Instead, as he gnawed the top of a pencil one day, there was a moment of vaguely verbalized thought along the lines of or wait a minute maybe you could do it like this…

It took an hour and a half for Isaac to realize that what he had thought might be a useful mental model was vastly more exciting. He set out in a systematic attempt to prove himself wrong. He constructed scenario after mathematical scenario with which he tried to rubbish his tentatively scrawled sets of equations. His attempts at destruction failed. His equations held firm.

It took Isaac two days before he began to believe that he had solved a fundamental problem of crisis theory. He enjoyed moments of euphoria, many more of cautious nervousness. He pored over his textbooks at a crushingly slow pace, searching to make sure he had not ignored some obvious error, had not replicated some long-disproved theorem.

Still, his equations held. In terror of hubris, Isaac sought any alternative than to believe what was looking more and more like the truth: that he had solved the problem of mathematic representation, quantification, of crisis energy.

He knew that he should immediately converse with colleagues, publish his findings as “work in progress” in The Review of Philosophical Physics and Thaumaturgy, or the Unified Field. But he was so intimidated by what he had discovered that he avoided that route. He wanted to be sure, he told himself. He had to take a few more days, a few more weeks, maybe a month or two…then he would publish. He did not tell Lublamai or David, or Lin, which was more extraordinary. Isaac was a garrulous man, prone to spouting any old tosh, scientific, social or obscene, which came to his mind. His secretiveness was profoundly out of character. He knew himself well enough to recognize this, and to realize what it meant: he was deeply disturbed, and deeply, deeply excited by what he had found.

Isaac thought back on the process of discovery, of formulation. He realized that his advances, his incredible leaps of theory in the last month, which eclipsed his previous five years’ work, were all in response to immediate, practical concerns. He had reached an impasse in his studies of crisis theory until Yagharek had commissioned him. Isaac did not know why it was so, but he realized that it was with applications in mind that his most abstract theories were advancing. Accordingly, he decided not to immerse himself totally in abstruse theory. He would continue to focus on the problem of Yagharek’s flight.

He would not let himself think about the ramifications of his research, not at this stage. Everything he uncovered, every advance, every idea he had, he would quietly plough back into his applied studies. He tried to see everything as a means to get Yagharek back in the air. It was difficult-perverse, even-constantly trying to contain and circumscribe his work. He saw the situation as one of working behind his own back, or more exactly, as trying to do research out of the corner of his eye. Yet, incredible as it seemed, with the discipline that was forced on him, Isaac progressed theoretically at a rate he could never have dreamed of six months before.

It was an extraordinary, circuitous route to scientific revolution, he thought sometimes, chiding himself quickly for his direct gaze at the theory. Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There’s a garuda to get airborne. But he could not stop his heart from thumping with excitement, the occasional almost hysterical grin from racing across his face. Some days he sought Lin out and, if she was not working at her secret piece in her secret location, he would try to seduce her in her flat with a tender, excited fervour that delighted her, for all that she was obviously tired. At other times he spent days in only his own company, immersing himself in science.

Isaac applied his extraordinary insights and began tentatively to design a machine to solve Yagharek’s problem. The same drawing began to appear more and more in his work. At first it was a doodle, a few loosely connecting lines covered in arrows and question marks. Within days it was appearing more solid. Its lines were drawn in ruled ink. Its curves were measured and careful. It was on its way to becoming a blueprint.

Yagharek sometimes came back to Isaac’s laboratory, always when the two of them were alone. Isaac would hear the door creak open at night, turn to see the impassive, dignified garuda still steeped in visible misery.

Isaac found that trying to explain his work to Yagharek helped him. Not the big theoretical stuff, of course, but the applied science which furthered the half-hidden theory. Isaac spent days with a thousand ideas and potential projects swilling violently in his head, and to pare that down, to explain in non-technical language the various techniques he thought might enable him to tap crisis energy forced him to evaluate his trajectories, discard some, focus on others.

He began to rely on Yagharek’s interest. If too many days passed without the garuda appearing, Isaac became distracted. He spent those hours watching the enormous caterpillar.

The creature had gorged itself on dreamshit for nearly a fortnight, growing and growing. When it had reached three feet in length, Isaac had nervously stopped feeding it. Its cage was getting much too small. That would have to be the full extent of its size. It had spent the next day or two wandering around hopefully in its little space, waving its nose in the air. Since then it seemed to have resigned itself to the fact that it would get no more food. Its original desperate hunger had subsided.

It was not moving very much, just shifting around now and then, undulating once or twice the width of the cage, stretching as if yawning. For the most part it just sat and pulsed slightly in and out, with breath or heartbeat or what, Isaac did not know. It looked healthy enough. It looked as if it was waiting.

Sometimes, as he had dropped the gobs of dreamshit into the caterpillar’s eager mandibles, Isaac had found himself reflecting on his own experience with the drug with a faint, querulous longing. This was not the delusion of nostalgia. Isaac vividly remembered the sense of being awash in filth; of being sullied at the most profound level; the nauseating, disorientating sickness; the panicked confusion of losing himself in a welter of emotion, and losing the confusion, and mistaking it for another mind’s invading fears…And yet, despite the vehemence of those recollections, he found himself eyeing his caterpillar’s breakfasts with a speculative air-perhaps even a hungry one.

Isaac was very disturbed by these feelings. He had always been unashamedly cowardly when it came to drugs. As a student, there had been plenty of loose, smelly fogweed cigarillos, of course, and the inane giggles that went with that. But Isaac had never had the stomach for anything stronger. These inchoate rumblings of a new appetite did nothing to allay his fears. He did not know how addictive dreamshit was, if at all, but he sternly refused to give in to those faint stirrings of curiosity.

The dreamshit was for his caterpillar, and for it alone.

Isaac channelled his curiosity from sensual into intellectual currents. He knew only two chymists personally, both unutterable prudes with whom he would no more raise the question of illegal drugs than he would dance naked down the middle of Tervisadd Way. Instead, he raised the subject of dreamshit in the louche taverns of Salacus Fields. Several of his acquaintances turned out to have sampled the drug, and a few were regular users.

Dreamshit did not seem to differ in effect between the races. No one knew where the drug came from, but all who admitted to taking it sang paeans of praise to its extraordinary effects. The only thing they all agreed on was that dreamshit was expensive, and getting more so. Not that this put them off their habits. The artists in particular spoke in quasi-mystical terms of communing with other minds. Isaac scoffed at this, claiming (without acknowledging his own limited experience) that the drug was no more than a powerful oneirogen, that stimulated the dream-centres of the brain as very-tea stimulated the visual and olfactory cortexes.

He did not believe it himself. He was not surprised at the vehement opposition to his theory.

“I don’t know how, ‘Zaac,” Thighs Growing had hissed at him reverentially, “but it lets you share dreams…” At this, the other users crammed into a little booth in The Clock and Cockerel had nodded in time, comically. Isaac affected a sceptical face, to maintain his role of killjoy. Actually, of course, he agreed. He intended to find out more about the extraordinary substance-Lemuel Pigeon would be the person to ask, or Lucky Gazid, if he ever reappeared-but the pace of his work in crisis theory overtook him. His attitude to the dreamshit he had shoved into the grub’s cage remained one of curiosity, nervousness and ignorance.

Isaac was staring uneasily at the vast creature one warm day in late Melluary. It was, he decided, more than prodigious. It was more than a very big caterpillar. It was definitely a monster. He resented it for being so damn interesting. Otherwise he could have just forgotten about it.

The door below him was pushed open, and Yagharek appeared in the shafts of early sun. It was rare, very rare for the garuda to come before nightfall. Isaac started and leapt to his feet, beckoning his client up the stairs.

“Yag, old son! Long time no see! I was drifting. I need you to tether me. Get on up here.”

Yagharek mounted the stairs wordlessly.

“How do you know when Lub and David are going to be out, eh?” asked Isaac. “You keep watch, or something creepy, right? Damn, Yag, you’ve got to stop skulking around like a fucking mugger.”

“I would talk to you, Grimnebulin.” Yagharek’s voice was oddly tentative.

“Fire away, old son.” Isaac sat and watched him. He knew by now that Yagharek would not sit.

Yagharek took off his cloak and wing-frame and turned to Isaac with folded arms. Isaac understood this to be as close as Yagharek would ever get to expressing trust, standing with his deformity in full view, making no effort to cover himself. Isaac supposed he should feel flattered.

Yagharek was eyeing him sideways.

“There are people in the night-city where I live, Grimnebulin, from many kinds of lives. It is not all flotsam that hide themselves.”

“I never presumed it was…” Isaac began, but Yagharek twitched his head impatiently, and Isaac was silent.

“Many nights I spend in silence and alone, but there are other times I talk to those with minds still sharp under a patina of alcohol and loneliness and drugs.” Isaac wanted to say, “I’ve said we could work out a place for you to stay,” but he stopped himself. Isaac wanted to see where this was heading. “There is a man, an educated, drunken man. I am not sure he believes me real. He may think me a recurring hallucination.” Yagharek breathed deeply. “I spoke to him about your theories, your crisis, and I was excited.

And the man said to me…the man said to me ‘Why not go all the way? Why not use the Torque?’ ”

There was a very long silence. Isaac shook his head in exasperation and disgust.

“I am here to put the question to you, Grimnebulin,” Yagharek continued. “Why do we not use the Torque? You are trying to create a science from scratch, Grimnebulin, but Torquic energy exists, techniques to tap it are known…I ask as an ignorant, Grimnebulin. Why do you not use the Torque?”

Isaac sighed very deeply and kneaded his face. Part of him was angry, but mostly he was just anxious, desperate to put a stop to this talk immediately. He turned to the garuda, and held up his hand.

“Yagharek…” he began, and at that moment, there was a bang on the door.

“Hello?” a cheerful voice yelled. Yagharek stiffened. Isaac leapt to his feet. The timing was extraordinary.

“Who is it?” yelled Isaac, bounding down the stairs.

A man poked his face round the door. He looked amiable, almost absurdly so.

“Hullo there, squire. I’ve come about the construct.”

Isaac shook his head. He had no idea what the man was talking about. He glanced up behind him, but Yagharek was invisible. He had stepped out of sight away from the edge of the platform. The man in the doorway handed Isaac a card.

nathaniel orriaben’s

construct repairs and replacements

quality amp; care at reasonable rates.

“Gent came in yesterday. Name of…Serachin?” suggested the man, reading from a sheet. “Told us his cleaning model…um…EKB4c was playing up. Thought it might have a virus and whatnot. I was due tomorrow, but I’ve just come back from another job local and I thought I’d chance that someone was in.” The man smiled brightly. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his oily coveralls.

“Right,” said Isaac. “Um…Look. Not the best time…”

“Righto! Your decision, obviously. Only…” The man looked around him before he went on, as if he was about to share a secret. Reassured that no one would hear him who should not, he went on, confidentially. “Thing is, squire, I may not be able to do the appointment tomorrow as originally planned…” The face he offered was cod-apology of the most exaggerated kind. “I can happily do my thing over in the corner, won’t make a sound. Take me about an hour if I can do it here, otherwise it’s a job for the repair shop. I’ll know which in five minutes. Otherwise I shan’t be able to do it for a week, I think.”

“Oh, arse. Right…Look, I’m in a meeting upstairs, and it’s absolutely vital that you don’t interrupt us. Seriously. Is that going to be all right?”

“Oh, absolutely. I’m just going to take the screwdriver to the old cleaner and then give you a little yell when I know what the score is, all right?”

“Right. So I can just leave you to it?”

“Perfecto.” The man was already heading towards the cleaning construct, carrying a toolcase. Lublamai had turned the cleaner on that morning, and punched in instructions for it to wash his study area, but it had been a forlorn hope. The construct had puttered in circles for twenty minutes, then stopped, leaning against the wall. It was still there, three hours later, emitting unhappy little clicks, its three attachment-limbs spasming.

The repairman strode over to the thing, muttering and clucking like a concerned parent. He felt the construct’s limbs, flipped a fob-watch out of his pocket and timed the twitching. He scribbled something in a little notebook. He swivelled the cleaning construct to face him, and gazed into one of its glass irises. He moved his pencil slowly from one side to another, watching the tracking of the sensory engine.

Isaac was half watching the repairman, but his attention kept flickering back upstairs to where Yagharek waited. This business with the Torque, Isaac thought nervously. It can’t wait.

“So you all right there?” Isaac shouted nervously at the repairman.

The man was opening his case and taking out a large screwdriver. He looked up at Isaac.

“No problem, guv,” he said, and waved his screwdriver cheerfully. He looked back at the construct and shut it off at the switch behind the neck. Its anguished creaks died in a grateful whisper. He began to unscrew the panel behind the thing’s “head,” a roughcast chunk of grey metal at the top of its cylindrical body.

“Right then,” said Isaac, and jogged back up the stairs.

Yagharek was standing by Isaac’s desk, well out of sight of the floor below. He looked up as Isaac returned.

“It’s nothing,” said Isaac quietly. “Someone to fix our construct, which has gone belly-up. I’m just wondering if we’re going to be heard…”

Yagharek opened his mouth to reply, and a thin, discordant whistling sounded up from the floor below. Yagharek’s mouth hung open for a moment, stupidly.

“Looks like we needn’t have worried,” Isaac said, and grinned. He’s doing that deliberately! he thought. So’s to let me know he’s not listening. Polite of him. Isaac inclined his head in unseen thanks to the repairman.

Then his mind returned to the business in hand, to Yagharek’s tentative suggestion, and his smile vanished. He sat heavily on his bed, ran his hands through his thick hair and stared up at Yagharek.

“You never sit, Yag, do you?” he said quietly. “Now why’s that?”

He drummed his fingers against the side of his head and thought. Eventually he spoke.

“Yag, old son…You’ve already impressed me as to your…amazing library, right? I want to throw two names out there, see what they mean to you. What do you know about Suroch, or the Cacotopic Stain?”

There was a long silence. Yagharek was looking slightly up, through the window.

“The Cacotopic Stain I know, of course. That is always what one hears when the Torque is discussed. Perhaps it is a bogeyman.” Isaac could not distinguish moods in Yagharek’s voice, but his words were defensive. “Perhaps we should overcome our fear. And Suroch…I have read your histories, Grimnebulin. War is always…a vile time…”

As Yagharek spoke, Isaac stood and walked to his chaotic bookshelves, flicking through the stacked volumes. He returned with a slim, hardbacked folio book. He opened it in front of Yagharek.

“This,” he said heavily, “is a collection of heliotypes taken nearly a hundred years ago. It was these helios, in large part, that put a stop to Torque experiments in New Crobuzon.”

Yagharek reached out slowly and turned the pages. He did not speak.

“This was supposed to be a secret research mission, to see the effects of the war a hundred years on,” continued Isaac. “Little group of militia, couple of scientists and a heliotypist went upcoast in a spy-dirigible, took some prints from the air. Then some of them were lowered into the remains of Suroch to take some up-close shots.

“Sacramundi, the heliotypist, was so…appalled…he printed five hundred copies of his report at his own expense. Distributed it to bookshops gratis. Bypassed the mayor and Parliament, laid it out in front of the people…Mayor Turgisadi was screaming mad, but there was nothing he could do.

“There was demonstrations, then the Sacramundi Riots of ‘89. Pretty much forgotten now, but it damn-near brought the government down. A couple of the big concerns putting money into the Torque programme-Penton’s, that still owns the Arrowhead Mines, that was the biggest-anyway, they got scared and pulled out, and the thing collapsed.

“This, Yag my son,” Isaac indicated the book, “is why we ain’t using Torque.”

Yagharek slowly turned the pages. Sepia images of ruin passed before them.

“Ah…” Isaac brought his finger down on a drab panorama of what looked like crushed glass and charcoal. The heliotype was taken from very low in the air. A few of the larger shards that littered the enormous, perfectly circular plain were visible, suggesting that the desiccated debris was the remains of once-extraordinary twisted objects.

“Now this is what’s left of the heart of the city. That’s where they dropped the colourbomb in 1545. That’s what they said put an end to the Pirate Wars, but to be honest with you, Yag, they’d been over for a year before that, since New Crobuzon bombarded Suroch with Torque bombs. See, they dropped the colourbombs twelve months later to try to hide what they’d done…only one went into the sea and two didn’t work, so with only one left, they only cleared the central square mile or so of Suroch. These bits you can see…” He indicated low rubble at the edge of the circular plain. “From thereon out the ruins are still standing. That’s where you can see the Torque.”

He indicated that Yagharek should turn the page. Yagharek did so, and something clucked deep in his throat. Isaac supposed it was the garuda equivalent of a sudden intake of breath. Isaac looked briefly at the picture, then looked up, not too quickly, at Yagharek’s face.

“Those things in the background like melting statues used to be houses,” he said levelly. “The thing you’re looking at, as far as they could work out, is descended from the domestic goat. Apparently they used to keep them as pets in Suroch. This could be second, tenth, twentieth generation post-Torque, obviously. We don’t know how long they live.”

Yagharek stared at the dead thing in the heliotype.

“They had to shoot it, he explains in the text,” Isaac went on. “It killed two of the militia. They had a go at an autopsy, but those horns in its stomach weren’t dead, even though the rest of it was. They fought back, nearly killed the biologist. Do you see the carapace? Weird splicing going on there.” Yagharek nodded slowly.

“Turn the page, Yag. This next one, no one has the slightest idea what it used to be. Might have been spontaneously generated in the Torque explosion. But I think those gears there are descended from train engines.” He tapped the pages gently. “The…uh…best is yet to come. You haven’t seen the cockroach-tree, or the herds of what may once have been human.”

Yagharek was meticulous. He turned every single page. He saw furtive shots that had been stolen from behind walls, and vertiginous views from the air. A slow kaleidoscope of mutation and violence, petty wars fought between unfathomable monstrosities over no-man’s-lands of shifting slag and nightmare architecture.

“There were twenty militia, Sacramundi the heliotypist and three research scientists, plus a couple of engineers who stayed in the airship the whole time. Seven militia, Sacramundi and one chymist came out of Suroch. Some were Torque-wounded. By the time they got back to New Crobuzon one militiaman had died. Another had barbed tentacles where his eyes should be, and pieces of the scientist’s body were disappearing every night. No blood, no pain, just…smooth holes in her abdomen or arm or whatever. She killed herself.”

Isaac remembered first hearing the story told as an anecdote by an unorthodox history professor. Isaac had chased it up, following a trail of footnotes and old newspapers. The history had been forgotten, transmuted into emotional blackmail for children-“Be good or I’ll send you to Suroch where the monsters are!” It took a year and a half before Isaac saw a copy of Sacramundi’s report, and another three before he could match the price asked for it.

He thought he recognized some of the thoughts flickering almost invisibly under Yagharek’s impassive skin. They were the ideas every unorthodox undergraduate had at some time entertained.

“Yag,” Isaac said softly, “we ain’t going to use the Torque. You might be thinking ‘You still use hammers and some people are murdered with them.’ Right? Eh? ‘Rivers can flood and kill thousands or they can drive water turbines.’ Yes? Trust me…speaking as one who used to think the Torque was terribly exciting…it’s not a tool. It’s not a hammer, it’s not like water. It’s…the Torque is rogue power. We’re not talking crisis energy here, right? Get that right out of your head. Crisis is the energy underpinning the whole of physics. Torque’s not about physics. It’s not about anything. It’s…it’s an entirely pathological force. We don’t know where it comes from, why it appears, where it goes. All bets are off. No rules apply. You can’t tap it-well, you can try, but you’ve seen the results-you can’t play with it, you can’t trust it, you can’t understand it, you sure as godsdamn-fuck can’t control it.”

Isaac shook his head in irritation. “Oh sure, there’ve been experiments and whatnot, they reckon they’ve got techniques to shield from some effects, heighten others, and some of them might even work a little bit. But there’s never been a Torque experiment that didn’t end in…well, in tears, at the very least. As far as I’m concerned there’s only one kind of experiment we should be doing with Torque, and that’s how to avoid it. Either stop it in its tracks, or run like Libintos with the drakows on his tail.

“Five hundred years ago, a while after the Cacotopic Stain opened, there was a mild Torque storm that swept down from somewhere at sea, in the north-east. It hit New Crobuzon for a while.” Isaac shook his head slowly. “Nothing in the league of Suroch, obviously, but still enough for an epidemic of monstrous births and some very strange tricks of cartography. All the affected buildings were pulled down sharpish. Very sensible in my view. That’s when they drew up plans for the cloudtower-didn’t want to leave the weather to chance. But that’s broke now, and we’re fucked if we get any more random Torque currents. Fortunately, they seem to be getting rarer and rarer over the centuries. They sort of peaked around the 1200s.”

Isaac waved his hands at Yagharek, warming to his task of denunciation and explanation.

“You know, Yag, when they realized something was up down south in the scrubland-and it didn’t take them long to clock it was a massive Torque-rift-there was a lot of crap talked about what to call it, and the arguments still haven’t died, half a fucking millennium on. Someone named it the Cacotopic Stain, and the moniker stuck. I remember being told in college that it was a terrible populist description, because Cacotopos-Bad Place, basically-was moralizing, that the Torque was neither good nor bad, so on. Thing is…obviously, that’s right at one level, right? Torque’s not evil…it’s mindless, it’s motiveless. That’s what I reckon anyway-others disagree.

“But even if that’s true, seems to me that western Ragamoll is precisely a Cacotopos. That’s a vast stretch of land which is totally beyond our power. There’s no thaumaturgy we can learn, no techniques to perfect, which’ll let us do anything with that place. We’ve just got to stay the fuck out and hope it eventually ebbs away. It’s a huge fucking badland crawling with Inchmen-which admittedly live outside Torque-zones, as well, but seem particularly happy there-and other things I wouldn’t even bother trying to describe. So you’ve got a force that makes a total mockery of our sentience. That’s ‘bad’ as far as I’m concerned. It could be the fucking definition of the word. See, Yag…it pains me to say this, it really does, I mean I’m a fucking rationalist…but the Torque is unknowable!”

With a huge gush of relief, Isaac saw that Yagharek was nodding. Isaac nodded too, fervently.

“Partly selfish, all this, you understand,” Isaac said, with sudden grim humour. “I mean, I don’t want to be arsing around with experiments and end up turning into some…I don’t know, some revolting thing. Just too bloody risky. We’ll stick to crisis, all right? On which topic, I’ve got some stuff to show you.”

Isaac gently took Sacramundi’s report from Yagharek’s hands and returned it to the shelves. He opened a desk drawer and brought out his tentative blueprint.

He placed it in front of Yagharek, then hesitated and drew away slightly.

“Yag, old son,” he said. “I really have to know…is that behind us, now? Are you…satisfied? Convinced? If you’re going to fuck about with Torque, for Jabber’s sake tell me now and I’ll bid you goodbye…and my condolences.”

He studied Yagharek’s face with troubled eyes.

“I have heard what you say, Grimnebulin,” said the garuda, after a pause. “I…respect you.” Isaac smiled humourlessly. “I accept what you say.”

Isaac began to grin, and would have responded, except that Yagharek was looking out of the window with a melancholy stillness. His mouth was open for a long time before he spoke.

“We know of the Torque, we garuda.” He paused lengthily between sentences. “It has visited the Cymek. We call it rebekh-lajhnar-h’k” The word was spat out with a harsh cadence like angry birdsong. Yagharek looked Isaac in the eye. “Rebekh-sackmai is Death: ‘the force that ends.’ Rebekh-kavt is Birth: ‘the force that begins.’ They were the First Twins, born to the worldwomb after union with her own dream. But there was a…a sickness…a tumour-” he paused to savour the correct word as it occurred to him “-in the earthbelly with them. Rebekh-lajhnar-h’k tore its way out of the worldwomb just behind them, or perhaps at the same time, or perhaps just before. It is the…” He thought hard for a translation. “The cancer-sibling. Its name means: ‘the force that cannot be trusted.’ ”

Yagharek did not tell the folk story in any incantatory, shamanic tones, but in the deadpan of a xenthropologist. He opened his beak wide, closed it abruptly, then opened it again.

“I am an outcast, a renegade,” Yagharek continued. “It is…no surprise…if I turn my back on my traditions, perhaps…But I must learn when to turn to face them again. Lajhni is ‘to trust,’ and ‘to bind firm.’ The Torque cannot be trusted, and nor can it be bound. It is uncontainable. I have known that since I first knew the stories. But in my…I…I am eager, Grimnebulin. Perhaps I turn too quickly to things from which I would once have recoiled. It is…hard…being between worlds…being of no world. But you have made me remember what I have always known. As if you were an elder of my band.” There was one last, long pause. “Thank you.”

Isaac nodded slowly.

“Not at all…I’m…mighty relieved to hear all that, Yag. More than I can say. Let’s…say no more about it.” He cleared his throat and prodded the diagram. “I’ve some fascinating stuff to show you, old son.”

In the dusty light under Isaac’s walkway, the repairman from Orriaben’s constructs teased the innards of the broken cleaning machine with screwdriver and solder. He kept up a mindless jaunty whistling, a trick that took no thought at all.

The sound of the consultation above reached him as the faintest bass murmur, interspersed with an occasional cracked utterance. He looked up in surprise, briefly, at this latter voice, but quickly returned to the matter in hand.

A brief examination of the mechanisms of the construct’s internal analytical engine confirmed the basic diagnosis. Apart from the usual age-related problems of cracked joints, rust and worn bristles-all of which the repairman quickly patched up-the construct had contracted some kind of virus. A programme card incorrectly punched or a slipped gear deep within the steam-driven intelligence engine had led to a set of instructions feeding back into themselves in an infinite loop. Activities the construct should have been able to carry out as a reflex, it had started to pore over, to attempt to extract more information or more complete orders. Seized by paradoxical instructions or a surfeit of data, the cleaning construct was paralysed.

The engineer glanced up at the wooden floor above him. He was ignored.

He felt his heart judder with excitement. Viruses came in a variety of forms. Some simply closed down the workings of the machine. Others led the mechanisms to perform bizarre and pointless tasks, the result of a newly programmed outlook on everyday information. And others, of which this was a perfect, a beautiful specimen, paralysed constructs by making them recursively examine their basic behavioural programmes.

They were bedeviled by reflection. The seeds of self-consciousness.

The repairman reached into his case and brought out a set of programme cards, fanned them expertly. He whispered a prayer.

His fingers working at astonishing speed, the man loosened various valves and dials in the construct’s core. He levered open the protective covering on the programme input slot. He checked that there was enough pressure in the generator to power the receiving mechanism of the metal brain. The programmes would load into the memory, to be actualized throughout the construct’s processors when it was switched on. Quickly, he slid first one card, then another and another into the opening. He felt the ratcheting spring-loaded teeth rotate their way along the stiff board, slotting into the little holes that translated into instructions or information. He paused between each card to make sure that the data loaded correctly.

He shuffled his little deck like a cardsharp. He sensed the minuscule jerks of the analytical engine through the fingertips of his left hand. He felt for faulty input, for broken teeth or stiff, unoiled moving parts that would corrupt or block his programmes. There were none. The man could not forebear from hissing triumphantly. The construct’s virus was entirely the result of information-feedback, and not any kind of hardware failure. That meant that the cards with which the man was plying the engine would all be read, their instructions and information loaded into the sophisticated steam-engine brain.

When he had pushed each carefully selected programme card into the input slot, each in considered order, he punched a brief sequence of buttons on the numbered keys wired up to the cleaning machine’s analytical engine.

The man closed the lid on the engine and resealed the construct’s body. He replaced the twisted screws which held the hatch in place. He rested his hands on the construct’s lifeless body for a moment. He heaved it upright, stood it on its treads. He gathered his tools.

The man stepped back into the center of the room.

“Um…‘Scuse me, squire,” he yelled.

There was a moment of silence, then Isaac’s voice boomed out.

“Yes?”

“I’m all done. Problems should be over. Just tell Mr. Serachin to load up the boiler with a bit of juice, then switch the old thing back on. Lovely models, the ekbs.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they are,” came the response. Isaac appeared at the railing. “Is there anything else I need to know?” he asked impatiently.

“No, guv, that’s about it. We’ll invoice Mr. Serachin within the week. Cheerio, then.”

“Right, bye. Thanks very much.”

“Don’t mention it, sir,” the man began, but Isaac had already turned and walked back out of sight.

The repairman walked slowly to the door. He held it open and looked back at where the construct lay face down in the shadows of the big room. The man’s eyes flickered momentarily upstairs to check that Isaac was gone, then he moved his hands to trace out some symbol like interlocking circles.

“Virus be done,” he whispered, before walking out into the warm noon.

Chapter Twenty

“What am I looking at?” asked Yagharek. As he held the diagram he cocked his head in a shockingly avian motion.

Isaac took the sheet of paper from him and turned it the right way up.

“This, old son, is a crisis conductor,” Isaac said grandly. “Or at least, a prototype of one. A fucking triumph of applied crisis physico-philosophy.”

“What is it? What does it do?”

“Well, look. You put whatever it is you want…tapped, in here.” He indicated a scrawl representing a belljar. “Then…well, the science is complicated, but the gist of it…let’s see.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “This boiler’s kept very hot, and it powers a set of interlocking engines here. Now, this one’s loaded up with sensory equipment that can detect various types of energy fields-heat, elyctrostatic, potential, thaumaturgic emissions-and represents them in mathematical form. Now, if I’m right about the unified field, which I am, then all these energy forms are various manifestations of crisis energy. So the job of this analytical engine here is to calculate what kind of crisis energy field is present given the various other fields present.” Isaac scratched his head.

“It’s fucking complicated crisis maths, old son. That’s going to be the hardest part, I reckon. The idea is to have a programme that can say ‘well, there’s so much potential energy, so much thaumaturgic, and whatnot, that means the underlying crisis situation must be such-and-such.’ It’s going to try to translate the…uh…mundane, into the crisis form. Then-and this is another sticking point-the given effect that you’re after also has to be translated into mathematical form, into some crisis equation, which is fed into this computational engine here. Then what you’re doing is using this, which is powered by a combination of steam or chymistry and thaumaturgy. It’s the crux of the thing, a converter to tap the crisis energy and manifest it in its raw form. You then channel that into the object.” Isaac was becoming more and more excited as he talked about the project. He could not help himself: for a moment, his elation at the massive potential for his research, the sheer scale of what he was doing, defeated his resolve to see only the immediate project.

“The thing is, what we should be able to do is change the form of the object into one where the tapping of its crisis field actually increases its crisis state. In other words, the crisis field grows by virtue of being siphoned off.” Isaac beamed at Yagharek, his mouth open. “D’you see what I’m talking about? Perpetual fucking motion! If we can stabilize the process, you’ve just got an endless feedback loop, which means a permanent font of energy!” He calmed in the face of Yagharek’s impassive frown. Isaac grinned. His resolve to focus on applied theory was made easy, even pressing, by Yagharek’s single-minded obsession with the commission in hand.

“Don’t worry, Yag. You’ll get what you’re after. As far as you’re concerned, what this means-if I can make it work-is that I can turn you into a walking, flying dynamo. The more you fly, the more crisis energy you manifest, the more you can fly. Tired wings are a problem you won’t face no more.”

There was a troubled silence at that. To Isaac’s relief, Yagharek did not seem to have noticed the unfortunate double-meaning. The garuda was stroking the paper with wonder and hunger: Yagharek murmured something in his own tongue, a soft, guttural croon.

Eventually he looked up.

“When will you build this thing, Grimnebulin?” he asked.

“Well, I need to actually knock together a working model to test it, refine the maths and whatnot. I reckon it’ll take me a week or so to put something together. But that’s early days, remember. Very early days.” Yagharek nodded quickly, waved away the caution. “You sure you don’t want to kip here? Are you still going to wander round like a ghul and spring on me when I least suspect it?” asked Isaac ironically.

Yagharek nodded.

“Please tell me as soon as your theories advance, Grimnebulin,” he asked. Isaac laughed at the polite bathos of the request.

“Certainly will, old son, you have my word. As soon as the old theories advance, you get to know.”

Yagharek turned stiffly and walked towards the stairs. As he turned to say goodbye, he caught sight of something. He was still for a minute, then walked over to the far end of the walkway’s east-facing side. He indicated the cage containing the colossal grub.

“Grimnebulin,” he said. “What does your caterpillar do?”

“I know, I know, it’s grown like fuck, hasn’t it?” said Isaac, strolling over. “Tremendous little bugger, eh?”

Yagharek pointed at the cage and looked up questioningly.

“Yes,” he said. “But what does it do?”

Isaac frowned and peered into the wooden box. He had moved it so that it faced away from the windows, which meant that its interior was shadowed and unclear. He squinted and peered into the darkness.

The massive creature had crawled to the furthest corner of the cage and had somehow managed to climb the rough wood. Then, with some organic adhesive it exuded from its arse, it had suspended itself from the top of the box. It hung there, pendulous and heavy, swaying and rippling slightly, like a stocking full of mud.

Isaac hissed, his tongue jutting from between his lips.

The caterpillar had tightened its stubby legs, curling them in tight towards its underbelly. As Isaac and Yagharek watched, it jack-knifed at its centre and seemed to kiss its own tail end, slowly relaxing until it hung deadweight again. It repeated the process.

Isaac pointed into the dimness.

“Look,” he said. “It’s smearing something all over itself.”

Where the caterpillar’s mouth touched flesh, it left infinitely thin glistening filaments, which stretched out taut as it moved its mouth away, adhering where they touched its body again. The hairs at the creature’s hind end were flattened against its body, and they looked wet. The enormous grub was slowly smothering itself in translucent silk, from the bottom up.

Isaac straightened up, slowly. He caught Yagharek’s eye.

“Well…” he said. “Better late than never. Finally, what I bought it for in the first place. The thing’s pupating.”

After a while, Yagharek nodded slowly.

“It will soon be able to fly,” he said quietly.

“Not necessarily, old son. Not everything with a chrysalis gets wings.”

“You do not know what it will be?”

“That, Yag, is the only reason I’ve still got the damn thing. Wretched curiosity. Won’t let me go.” Isaac smiled. The truth was he felt a certain nervousness, seeing the bizarre thing finally perform the action he had been waiting for since he had first seen it. He watched it cover itself in a strange, fastidious inversion of cleanliness. It was quick. The bright, mottled colours of its pelt went misty with the first layer of fibres, then quickly disappeared from view.

Yagharek’s interest in the creature was short-lived. He replaced the wooden framework which hid his deformity onto his shoulders, and covered it with his cloak.

“I will take my leave, Grimnebulin,” he said. Isaac looked up from where the caterpillar held his attention.

“Right! Righto, Yag. I’ll get a move on with the…uh…engine. I know by now not to ask when I’ll see you, right? You’ll drop in when the time’s right.” He shook his head.

Yagharek was already at the bottom of the stairs. He turned once, briefly, and saluted Isaac, and then he left.

Isaac waved back. He was lost in thought, his hand remaining in the air for several seconds after Yagharek had gone. Eventually, he closed it with a soft clap and turned back to the caterpillar’s cage.

Its coat of wet threads was drying fast. The tail end was already stiff and immobile. It constrained the grub’s undulations, forcing it to perform more and more claustrophobic acrobatics in its attempt to cover itself. Isaac pulled his chair over in front of the cage to watch its efforts. He took notes.

A part of him told him that he was being intellectually dissolute, that he should compose himself and focus on the matter in hand. But it was a small part, and it whispered to him without confidence. Almost dutifully. There was, after all, nothing that was going to stop Isaac from taking the opportunity to watch this extraordinary phenomenon. He settled into his chair comfortably, pulled over a magnifying lens.

It took a little over two hours for the caterpillar to cover itself completely in a moist chrysalis. The most complicated manoeuvre was at the head itself. The grub had to spit itself a kind of collar, then allow it to dry a little before bunching itself up within its swaddling, making itself shorter and fatter for a few moments while it wove a lid, closing itself in. It pushed against it slowly, ensuring its strength, then exuded more of the cement-filaments until its head was completely covered, invisible.

For a few minutes the organic shroud quivered, expanding and contracting in response to the movements within. The white covering became brittle as he watched, changed colour to a drab nacre. It pendulumed very gently as minute air currents disturbed it, but its substance had hardened, and the motion of the grub within could no longer be discerned.

Isaac sat back and scrawled on the paper. Yagharek was almost certainly right about the thing having wings, he thought. The gently moving organic sac was like a textbook drawing of a butterfly or moth chrysalis, only vastly bigger.

Outside the light became thicker as the shadows lengthened.

The suspended cocoon had been motionless for more than half an hour when the door opened, startling Isaac to his feet.

“Anyone up there?” yelled David.

Isaac leaned over the railings and greeted him.

“Some chap came and dealt with the construct, David. Said you just had to stoke it up a bit and switch it on, said it should work.”

“Good stuff. I’m sick of the rubbish. We get all yours, as well. Would that be deliberate?” David grinned.

“Why no,” replied Isaac, ostentatiously shovelling dust and crumbs through the gaps in the railings with his foot. David laughed and wandered out of his sight. Isaac heard a metallic thud as David gave the construct an affectionate clout.

“I am also to tell you that your cleaner is a ‘lovely old thing,’ ” said Isaac formally. They both laughed. Isaac came and sat halfway down the stairs. He saw David shovelling some pellets of concentrated coke into the construct’s little boiler, an efficient triple-exchange model. David slammed shut and bolted the hatch. He reached up to the top of the construct’s head and pulled the little lever into an on position.

There was a hiss and a little whine as steam was pushed through thin pipes, slowly powering up the construct’s analytical engine. The cleaner jerked spastically and settled back against the wall.

“That should warm up in a little while,” said David with satisfaction, shoving his hands in his pockets. “What have you been up to, ‘Zaac?”

“Come up here,” answered Isaac. “I want to show you something.”

When David saw the suspended cocoon he laughed briefly, and put his hands on his hips.

“Jabber!” he said. “It’s enormous! When that thing hatches I’m running for cover…”

“Yeah, well, that’s partly why I’m showing you. Just to say keep your eyes out for it opening. You can help me pin it inside a case.” The two men grinned.

From below came a series of bangs, like water fighting its way through obstreperous plumbing. There was a faint hiss of pistons. Isaac and David stared at each other, nonplussed for a moment.

“Sounds like the cleaner’s gearing up to some serious action,” said David.

In the short, stubby byways of copper and brass that were the construct’s brain, a welter of new data and instructions clattered violently. Transmitted by pistons and screws and innumerable valves, the grots and gobs of intelligence bottlenecked in the limited space. Infinitesimal jolts of energy burst through tiny, finely engineered steamhammers. In the centre of the brain was a box crammed with rank upon rank of minuscule on-off switches that puttered up and down at great and increasing speed. Each switch was a steam-powered synapse, pushing buttons and pulling levers in intensely complicated combinations.

The construct jerked.

Deep in the construct’s intelligence engine circulated the peculiar solipsistic loop of data that constituted the virus, born where a minute flywheel had skittered momentarily. As the steam coursed through the brainpan with increasing speed and power, the virus’s useless set of queries went round and round in an autistic circuit, opening and shutting the same valves, switching the same switches in the same order.

But this time the virus was nurtured. Fed. The programmes that the repairman had loaded into the construct’s analytical engine sent extraordinary instructions coursing throughout the crafted tubework cerebellum. The valves flapped and the switches buzzed in staccato tremors, all seemingly too fast to be anything but random motion. And yet in those abrupt sequences of numerical code, the rude little virus was mutated and evolved.

Encoded information welled up within those limited hissing neurones, fed into the recursive idiocy of the virus and spun out from it skeins of new data. The virus flowered. The moronic motor of its basic, mute circuit sped up, flung blossoms of newborn viral code spiralling away from it with a kind of binary centrifugal force, into every part of the processor.

Each of these subsidiary viral circuits repeated the process until instructions and data and self-generated programmes were flooding every pathway of that limited calculating engine.

The construct stood in the corner, shaking and whirring very slightly.

In what had been an insignificant corner of its valved mind, the original virus, the original combination of rogue data and meaningless reference that had affected the construct’s ability to sweep floors, still revolved. It was the same, but transformed. No longer a destructive end, it had become a means, a generator, a motive power.

Soon, very soon, the central processing engine of the construct’s brain was whirring and clicking at full capacity. Ingenious mechanisms kicked in at the behest of the new programmes buzzing through the analogue valves. Sections of analytical capacity normally given over to movement and backup and support functions were folded in on themselves, doubling their capacity as the same binary function was invested with double meanings. The flood of alien data was diverted, but not slowed. Astounding articles of programme design increased the efficiency and processing power of the very valves and switches that were conducting them.

David and Isaac talked upstairs and grimaced or grinned at the sounds the hapless construct could not help but make.

The flow of data continued, transferred first from the repairman’s voluminous set of programme cards and stored in the gently humming, clicking memory box, now converted into instructions in an active processor. On and on came the flow, a relentless wash of abstract instructions, nothing more than combinations of yes/no or on/off, but in such quantity, such complexity, that they approximated concepts.

And eventually, at a certain point, the quantity became quality. Something changed in the construct’s brain.

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam.

One moment it was a calculating machine.

The next, it thought.

With a strange, calculating alien consciousness, the construct reflected on its own reflection.

It felt no surprise. No joy. No anger, no existential horror.

Only curiosity.

Bundles of data that had waited, circulating unexamined in the box of valves, became suddenly relevant, interacting with this extraordinary new mode of calculation, this autotelic processing.

What had been incomprehensible to a cleaning construct made sudden sense. The data was advice. Promises. The data was a welcome. The data was a warning.

The construct was still for a long time, emitting little murmurs of steam.

Isaac leaned far over the railing, until they creaked unnervingly. He pushed over until his head was upside-down and he could see the construct beneath his and David’s feet. Isaac watched its uncertain juddering starts and frowned.

As he opened his mouth to say something, the construct pushed itself up into an active posture. It extended its suction tube and began, tentatively at first, to clear the floor of dust. As Isaac watched, the construct extended a rotating brush behind it and began to scrub the boards. Isaac watched it for any signs of faltering, but its pace increased with almost palpable confidence. Isaac’s face lightened as he watched the construct perform its first successful cleaning job for weeks.

“That’s better!” Isaac announced over his shoulder to David. “Damn thing can clean again. Back to normal!”

Chapter Twenty-One

In the huge, crisp cocoon, extraordinary processes began.

The caterpillar’s swathed flesh began to break down. Legs and eyes and bristles and body-segments lost their integrity. The tubular body became fluid.

The thing drew on the stored energy it had drawn from the dreamshit and powered its transformation. It self-organized. Its mutating form bubbled and welled up into strange dimensional rifts, oozing like oily sludge over the brim of the world into other planes and back again. It folded in on itself, shaping itself out of the protean sludge of its own base matter.

It was unstable.

It was alive, and then there was a time between forms when it was neither alive nor dead, but saturated with power.

And then it was alive again. But different.

Spirals of biochymical slop snapped into sudden shapes. Nerves that had unwound and dissolved suddenly spun back into skeins of sensory tissue. Features dissolved and reknitted in strange new constellations.

The thing flexed in inchoate agony and a rudimentary, but growing, hunger.

Nothing was visible from the outside. The violent process of destruction and creation was a metaphysical drama played out without an audience. It was hidden behind an opaque curtain of brittle silk, a husk that hid the changing with a brute, instinctual modesty. After the slow, chaotic collapse of form, there was a brief moment when the thing in the cocoon was poised in a liminal state.

And then, in response to unthinkable tides of flesh, it began to construct itself anew. Faster and faster.

Isaac spent many hours watching the chrysalis, but he could only imagine the struggle of autopoiesis within. What he saw was a solid thing, a strange fruit hanging by an insubstantial thread in the musty darkness of a large hutch. He was perturbed by the cocoon, imagining all manner of gigantic moths or butterflies emerging. The cocoon did not change. Once or twice he prodded it gingerly, and set it rocking gently and heavily for a few seconds. That was all.

Isaac watched and wondered about the cocoon when he was not working on his engine. It was that that took most of his time.

Piles of copper and glass began to take shape on Isaac’s desk and floor. He spent his days soldering and hammering, attaching steam-pistons and thaumaturgic engines to the nascent engine. His evenings he spent in pubs, in discussion with Gedrecsechet, the Palgolak Librarian, or David or Lublamai, or ex-colleagues from the university. He spoke carefully, not giving away too much, but with passion and fascination, drawing out discussions on maths and energy and crisis and engineering.

He did not stray from Brock Marsh. He had warned his friends in Salacus Fields that he would be out of touch, and those relationships were fluid anyway, relaxed, superficial. The only person he missed was Lin. Her work was keeping her at least as busy as him, and as the momentum of his research picked up, it was increasingly difficult to find times when they could meet.

Instead, Isaac sat up in bed and wrote her letters. He asked her about her sculpture, and he told her that he missed her. Every other morning or so he would stamp and post these letters in the box at the end of his street.

She wrote back to him. Isaac used her letters to tease himself. He would not let himself read them until he had finished his day’s work. Then he would sit and drink tea or chocolate in his window, sending his shadow out over the Canker and the darkening city, and read her letters. He was surprised at the sentimental warmth these moments made him feel. There was a degree of maudlin relish in the moods, but just as much affection, a real connection, a lack he felt when Lin was not there.

Within a week he had built a prototype of the crisis engine, a banging, spitting circuit of pipes and wire that did nothing more than produce noise in great gobbets and barks. He took it apart and rebuilt it. A little over three weeks later another untidy conglomerate of mechanical parts sprawled before the window, where the cages of winged things had gained their freedom. It was uncontained, a vague grouping of separate motors and dynamos and converters spread across the floor, connected by rough-and-ready engineering.

Isaac wanted to wait for Yagharek, but the garuda could not be contacted, living as he was like a vagrant. Isaac believed it to be Yagharek’s weird, inverted clutching at dignity. Living on the street he was beholden to none. The pilgrimage he had made across the continent would not end with him gratefully relinquishing his responsibility, his self-control. Yagharek was a deracinated outsider in New Crobuzon. He would not rely on, or be thankful to, others.

Isaac imagined him moving from place to place, sleeping on bare floors in deserted buildings, or curled up on roofs, huddled by steam-vents for heat. It might be an hour before he came to visit, or it might be weeks. It only took half a day of waiting before Isaac decided to test his creation in Yagharek’s absence.

In the belljar where the wires and tubes and flexing cables converged, Isaac had placed a piece of cheese. It sat there, drying slowly, while he hammered at the keys of his calculator. He was trying to mathematize the forces and vectors involved. He stopped often to take notes.

Below him, he heard the sniffling of Sincerity the badger, and Lublamai’s clucking response, the humming progress of the cleaning construct. Isaac was able to ignore them all, zone them out, focus on the numbers.

He felt a little uncomfortable, unwilling to pursue his work with Lublamai in the room. Isaac was still pursuing his unusual policy of silence. Perhaps I’m just developing a taste for the theatrical, he thought, and grinned. When he had solved his equations as best he could, he dawdled, willing Lublamai to leave. Isaac peered under the walkway at where Lublamai scrawled diagrams on graph paper. He did not look as if he were about to go. Isaac grew tired of waiting.

He picked his way through the miasma of metal and glass that littered his floor and squatted gently with the information-input of the crisis engine on his left. The circuit of machinery and tubes described a meandering circle around the room, culminating in the cheese-filled belljar by his right hand.

Isaac held a flexing metal tube in one hand, its end connected to his laboratory boiler by the far wall. He was nervous, and excited. As quietly as he could, he connected the tube to the power-input valve on the crisis engine. He released the catch and felt the steam begin to fill the motor. There was a hissing hum and a clattering. Isaac knelt over and copied his mathematical formulae on the input keys. He slotted four programme cards quickly into the unit, felt the little wheels slide and bite, saw the dust rise as the engine’s vibrations increased.

He murmured to himself and watched intently.

Isaac felt as if he could sense the power and data passing through the synapses to the various nodes of the dismembered crisis engine. He felt as if the steam was pushing through his own veins, turning his heart into a hammering piston. He flicked three large switches on the unit, heard the whole construction warming up.

The air hummed.

For sluggish seconds, nothing happened. Then, in the dirty belljar, the clump of cheese began to shudder.

Isaac watched it and wanted to shout with triumph. He twisted a dial one hundred and eighty degrees and the thing moved a little more.

Let’s bring on a crisis, Isaac thought, and pulled the lever that made the circuit complete, that brought the glass jar under the attention of the sensory machines.

Isaac had adapted the belljar, cutting away its top and replacing it with a plunger. He reached for this now and began to press it, so that its abrasive bottom moved slowly towards the cheese. The cheese was under threat. If the plunger completed its motion the cheese would be completely crushed.

As Isaac pressed with his right hand, with his left he adjusted knobs and dials in response to juddering pressure gauges. He watched their needles plunge and leap and adjusted the thaumaturgic current in response.

“Come on, you little fucker,” he whispered. “Look out, eh? Can’t you feel it? Crisis coming for you…”

The plunger edged sadistically closer and closer to the cheese. The pressure in the pipes was growing dangerously high. Isaac hissed in frustration. He slowed the pace with which he threatened the cheese, moving the plunger inexorably down. If the crisis engine failed and the cheese did not show the effects he had tried to programme, Isaac would still crush it. The crisis was all about potentiality. If he had no genuine intention to crush the cheese, it would not be in crisis. You could not trick an ontological field.

Then, as the whine from steam and singing pistons became uncomfortable, and the edges of the plunger’s shadow sharpened as it bore down on the base of the belljar, the cheese exploded. There was a loud semi-liquid smack, as the nugget of cheese blew up with speed and violence, spattering the inside of the belljar with crumbs and oil.

Lublamai yelled up, asking what in Jabber’s name was that, but Isaac was not listening. He sat gawping at the destroyed cheese like a fool, his mouth slack. Then he laughed with incredulity and joy.

“Isaac? What the fuck you up to?” yelled Lublamai.

“Nothing, nothing! Sorry to bother you…Just some work…Going pretty well, actually…” Isaac’s reply was interrupted as he broke off to smile.

He turned off the crisis engine quickly and lifted the belljar. He ran his fingers over the smeared, half-melted mess inside. Incredible! he thought.

He had attempted to programme the cheese to hover an inch or two above the floor. So from that point of view, he supposed this was a failure. But he had not expected anything to happen! Certainly, he had got the maths wrong, misprogramming the cards. It was obvious that specifying the effects he was aiming for would be extremely hard. Probably the tapping process itself was appallingly crude, leaving all sorts of room for errors and imperfections in the process. And he hadn’t even tried to create the kind of permanent feedback loop that he was eventually aiming for.

But, but…he had tapped crisis energy.

This was totally unprecedented. For the first time, Isaac truly believed that his ideas would work. From now on, the job was one of refinement. A lot of problems, of course, but problems of a different and much lesser order. The basic conundrum, the central problem of all of crisis theory, had been solved.

Isaac gathered his notes, leafed through them reverentially. He could not believe what he had done. Immediately, more plans came to him. Next time, he thought, I’ll use a piece of vodyanoi watercraeft. Something already held together by crisis energy. That should make life a whole lot more interesting, maybe we can start getting that loop going…Isaac was giddy. He slapped his forehead and grinned.

I’m going out, Isaac thought suddenly. I’m going to…to get drunk. I’m going to find Lin. I’m going to have a night off. I’ve just solved one of the intractable damn problems in one of the most controversial paradigms of science and I deserve a drink…He smiled at his mental outburst, then grew serious. He realized that he had decided to tell Lin about the crisis engine. I can’t think about it on my own any more, he thought.

He checked that he had his keys and his wallet in his pockets. He stretched and shook himself, then descended to the ground floor. Lublamai turned at the sound of his feet.

“I’m off, Lub,” said Isaac.

“You calling it a day, Isaac? It’s only three.”

“Listen, old son, I’ve clocked up a few extra hours,” Isaac grinned back. “I’m having a half-day. Anyone asks, I’ll see ‘em tomorrow.”

“Righto,” said Lublamai, returning to his work with a wave. “Have a good one.”

Isaac grunted goodbye.

He stopped in the middle of Paddler Way and sighed, purely for the pleasured the air. The little street was not busy, but neither was it deserted. Isaac saluted one or two of his neighbours, then turned and strode off towards Petty Coil. It was a gorgeous day, and he had decided to walk to Salacus Fields.

The warm air seeped in through door and windows and cracks in the warehouse walls. Once, Lublamai stopped working to adjust his clothing. Sincerity was tussling playfully with a beetle. The construct had finished cleaning some time ago, and now stood gently ticking in the far corner, one of its optical lenses seemingly fixed on Lublamai.

A little while after Isaac left, Lublamai rose and, leaning out of the open window by his desk, he tied a red scarf to a bolt in the brick. He made a list of shopping that he needed, should Teafortwo come by. Then he returned to work.

By five o’clock the sun was still high, but it was curving towards earth. The light was thickening fast, becoming tawny.

Deep within the pendulous chrysalis the pupating lifeform could sense the lateness of the day. It shivered and flexed its nearly finished flesh. In its ichor and the byways of its body, a final set of chymical reactions began.

At half past six, an ungainly thud outside the window interrupted Lublamai, who looked out to see Teafortwo in the little alley outside, rubbing his head with his prehensile foot. The wyrman looked up at Lublamai and let out a yell of greeting.

“Guvnor Lublub! Doing me rounds, saw your red flapper…”

“Evening, Teafortwo,” said Lublamai. “Fancy coming in?” He stood back from the window and let the wyrman in. Teafortwo flopped to the floor in a heavy, flapping motion. His russet skin was beautiful in the shards of late light that caught it. He grinned up at Lublamai with his cheerful, hideous face.

“What’s the plan, boss?” shouted Teafortwo. Before Lublamai could answer, Teafortwo looked over at where Sincerity was eyeing him dubiously. He spread his wings, stuck out his tongue and leered at her. She scampered off in disgust.

Teafortwo laughed uproariously and burped.

Lublamai smiled indulgently. Before Teafortwo had a chance to get more sidetracked, he tugged him over to the desk where his shopping list waited. He gave Teafortwo a slab of chocolate to keep his attention on the job in hand.

As Teafortwo and Lublamai bickered over how many groceries the wyrman could carry in the air, something above them stirred.

In the rapidly darkening shadows of the cage in Isaac’s raised laboratory, the cocoon was oscillating under a force that was not a wind. Movement within the tight, organic package was sending it in a quick, hypnotic motion. It spun, then faltered, bucked slightly. There was an infinitesimal ripping noise, much too low for Lublamai or Teafortwo to hear.

A moist, sculpted black claw split the fibres of the cocoon. It slid slowly upwards, ripping the stiff material as effortlessly as an assassin’s knife. A welter of utterly alien senses spilt like invisible guts from the ragged hole. Disorienting gusts of feeling rolled briefly around the room, making Sincerity growl, and Lublamai and Teafortwo look up nervously for a moment.

Intricate hands emerged from the darkness and held the edges of the rent. They pushed silently, forcing the thing apart and open. There was the softest of thumps as a trembling body slid from the cocoon, as wet and slippery as a newborn.

For a minute it huddled on the wood, weak and bewildered, in the same hunched pose it had maintained within the chrysalis. Slowly, it pushed outwards, luxuriating in the sudden space. When it encountered the wire mesh of the hutch it tore it effortlessly from the door and crawled into the larger space of the room.

It discovered itself. It learnt its shape.

It learnt that it had needs.

Lublamai and Teafortwo looked up at the screech and discordant plucking of torn wire. The sound seemed to start above them and wash throughout the room. They looked at each other, then up again.

“Wassat, guvnor…?” said Teafortwo.

Lublamai walked away from the desk. He glanced up at Isaac’s balcony, turned slowly, took in the whole of the ground floor. There was silence. Lublamai stood still, frowning, gazing at the front door. Had the sound come from outside? he wondered.

A movement was reflected in the mirror beside the door.

A dark thing rose from the floor at the top of the stairs.

Lublamai spoke, emitted some tremulous noise of disbelief, of fear, of confusion, but it dissipated soundlessly after the briefest moment. He stared with an open mouth at the reflection.

The thing unfolded. The sense was of a blossoming. An expansion after being enclosed, like a man or woman standing and spreading their arms wide after huddling foetally, but multiplied and made vast. As if the thing’s indistinct limbs could bend a thousand times, so that it unhinged like a paper sculpture, standing and spreading arms or legs or tentacles or tails that opened and opened. The thing that had huddled like a dog stood and opened itself, and it was nearly the size of a man.

Teafortwo screeched something. Lublamai opened his mouth wider and tried to move. He could not see its shape. Only its dark, glistening skin and hands that clutched like a child’s. Cold shadows. Eyes that were not eyes. Organic folds and jags and twists like rats’ tails that shuddered and twitched as if newly dead. And those finger-long shards of colourless bone that shone white and parted and dripped and that were teeth…

As Teafortwo tried to bolt past Lublamai and Lublamai tried to open his mouth to scream, his eyes still fixed to the creature in the mirror, his feet skittering on the flagstones, the thing at the top of the stairs opened its wings.

Four rustling concertinas of dark matter flickered outwards on the creature’s back, and outwards again and again, slotting into position, fanning and expanding in vast folds of thick mottled flesh, expanding to an impossible size: an explosion of organic patterns, a flag unfurling, clenched fists opening.

The thing made its body thin and spread those colossal wings, massive flat folds of stiff skin that seemed to fill the hall. They were irregular, chaotic in shape, random fluid whorls; but mirror-perfect left and right, like spilt ink or paint patterns on folded paper.

And on those great flat planes were dark stains, rude patterns that seemed to flicker as Lublamai watched and Teafortwo fumbled with the door, wailing. The colours were midnight, sepulchral, black-blue, black-brown, black-red. And then the patterns did flicker, the shadow-shapes moved like amoeba in a magnifying lens or oil on water, the patterns left and right still matching, moving in time, hypnotic and heavy, faster. Lublamai’s face creased. His back itched maniacally with the thought that the thing was behind him. Lublamai spun to face it, gazed directly into the mutating colours, the dusky vivid show…

…and Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symmetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below.

Teafortwo howled. He turned to see the thing that was now descending the stairs, those wings still unfurled. Then the patterns on the wings caught him and he stared, his mouth open.

The dark designs on those wings moved beguilingly.

Lublamai and Teafortwo stood still and silent, agog, slack-jawed and shivering, gazing at the magnificent wings.

The creature tasted the air.

It looked briefly at Teafortwo, and opened its mouth, but the pickings were meagre. It turned its head and faced Lublamai, keeping those wings spread and enthralling. It moaned with hunger in a soundless timbre that made Sincerity, already sick with fear, cry out. She huddled closer into the shadow of the motionless construct, propped against the wall in the corner of the room, weird shadows twitching in its lenses. The air hummed with the taste of Lublamai. The creature salivated and its wings flickered into a frenzy, and Lublamai’s taste grew stronger and stronger until the thing’s monstrous tongue emerged and it moved forward, flicking Teafortwo effortlessly out of its way.

The winged creature took Lublamai in its hungry embrace.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Sunset bled into the canals and the converging rivers of New Crobuzon. They ran thick and gory with light. Shifts changed and working days ended. Retinues of exhausted smelters and foundry workers, clerks and bakers and coke-loaders, trudged from factory and office to the stations. The platforms were full of tired, boisterous argument, cigarillos and booze. Steam cranes in Kelltree worked into the night, hauling exotic cargoes from foreign ships. From the river and the great docks, striking vodyanoi stevedores yelled insults at the human crews on the jetties. The sky above the city was smeared with cloud. The air was warm, and smelt alternately lush and foul, as trees fruited and factory waste coagulated in thickening flows.

Teafortwo bolted from the warehouse on Paddler Way like cannonshot. He tore into the sky from the broken window trailing blood and tears, blubbering and sniffling like a baby, flying in a ragged spiral towards Pincod and Abrogate Green.

Minutes passed before another, darker form followed him into the skies.

The intricate hatchling thing flexed itself through an upper window and launched into the gloaming. Its movements on the ground were tentative, every motion seemed to be experimental. In the air it soared. There was no hesitation, only a glorying in the motion.

The irregular wings clapped together and swept apart in huge, soundless gusts that scooped away great swathes of air. The creature spun, beating its wings languorously, its body careering across the sky with the chaotic graceless speed of a butterfly. It sent eddies of wind and sweat and aphysical exudations in its wake.

The creature was still drying.

It exalted. It licked the cooling air.

The city festered like mould below it. A palimpsest of sense-impressions washed over the flying thing. Sounds and smells and lights that filtered into its obscure mind in a synaesthetic wash, an alien perception.

New Crobuzon steamed with the rich taste-scent of prey.

The thing had fed, was sated, but the glut of food confused it, gloriously, and it slobbered and gnashed its huge teeth in a frenzy.

It dived. Its wings fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below it. It knew in its hunter’s heart to avoid the great scabs of light clotted at irregular spaces around the city, to seek out the darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prostitute and her client fucked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were brief. They ceased quickly as the creature’s wings spread.

The thing fell on them with eager greed.

Afterwards it flew again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily, fascinated at the rattling passage of the trains that expanded outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station and blasted outwards into the sky. A massive, invisible flavour trail.

The few night-birds swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way towards the city’s dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions, shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting, but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft, the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city. It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to its new territory.

It noted the paths of the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city’s different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering passage of different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one more thing. Others of its kind.

It was social. When it was born for the second time it was with a hunger for company. Its tongue unrolled and it tasted the gritty air for anything that was like itself.

The thing shuddered.

Faintly, so faintly, it could sense something in the east. It could taste frustration. Its wings trembled in empathy.

It arced around and beat its way back in the direction from which it had come. It bore a little north this time, passing over the parks and elegant old buildings of Gidd and Ludmead. The splintering enormities of the Ribs splayed extraordinarily to the south, and the flying thing felt a queasiness, an anxiety, at the awareness of those looming bones. The power that drooled upward from them was not at all to its liking. But its unease battled with its deeply encoded sympathy for its own kind, whose taste grew stronger, much stronger, in the shadow of the great skeleton.

The thing descended tentatively. It approached circuitously, from the north and the east. It flew low and tight, below the skyrail that extended northwards from the militia tower of Mog Hill to that in Chnum. It shadowed an eastbound train on the Dexter Line, gliding in its filthy thermals. Then it swung in a long arc around the Mog Hill tower and over the northern fringe of Echomire’s industrial zone. The thing swept in towards Bonetown’s raised railway, cringing at the influence of the Ribs, but dragged on towards the taste of its fellows.

It flitted from roof to roof, its tongue dangling obscenely as it traced them. Sometimes the downdraft from its wings would make a passer-by look up, as hats and paper bowled down the deserted streets. If they saw the dark shape that loomed momentarily over them and then was gone, they shivered and hurried on, or furrowed their brows and denied what they had seen.

The winged thing let its tongue dangle as it slowly beat the air. It used it as a bloodhound would its nose. It passed over the undulating roofscape that seemed buckled by the Ribs. It licked its way along a faint trail.

Then it crossed the aura of a large, bituminous building in a deserted street, and its long tongue spasmed like a whip. It sped up, arced up and back down in an elegant loop towards the tarred roof. There at the far corner, below that ceiling through which the sensations of its kind leaked like brine through a sponge…

It scrambled over the slates flexing its peculiar limbs. Solicitous feelings were oozing from it, and there was a befuddled moment of confusion as its captive kin reacted to its presence. Then their nebulous misery became impassioned: pleas and joy and demands for freedom, and among that, cold and exact instructions on what to do.

The creature found its way to the edge of the roof and descended in a motion halfway between flying and climbing, until it clung to the outer edge of a sealed window forty feet above the pavement. The glass was painted opaque. It vibrated minutely in eldritch dimensions, buffeted by the emanations from within.

The thing on the window-sill scrabbled with its fingers for a moment, then tore away the frame with a quick motion, leaving an ugly wound where the window had been. It dropped the already breaking glass with a catastrophic noise and stepped into the dark attic.

The room was very large and bare. A great glutinous wash of welcome and warning came from across the rubbish-strewn floor.

Opposite the newcomer were four of its kind. It was dwarfed by them, the magnificent economy of their limbs made its own look stunted, runtlike. They were shackled to the wall with enormous bands of metal around their midriffs and several of their limbs. Each had its wings fully extended, flat against the wall: each set was as unique and random as the newcomer’s. Below each of their hindquarters was a bucket.

A moment of tugging made it clear to the new arrival that those bands could not be shifted. One of those pinned to the wall hissed at the frustrated creature, imperiously bade it pay attention. It communicated in a psychic twittering.

The free, newly lowly thing backed away as instructed, and waited.

In the simple sonar plane, shouts and yells were sounding from the street below where the window had smashed. There was a confused rumbling from within the building below. From the corridor beyond the door came the sound of running. Chaotic snatches of conversation found their way through the wood.

“…inside…”

“…get in?”

“…mirrors, don’t…”

The creature backed away further from its tethered kin and moved into the shadows at the far side of the room, beyond the door. It folded its wings and waited.

Bolts on the other side of the door were thrown. There was a moment of hesitation, then the door flew open and four armed men burst in in quick succession. They all faced away from the trapped creatures. Two carried heavy flintlocks, primed and held ready. Two were Remade. In their left hands they held pistols, but from their right shoulders jutted huge metal barrels, splayed at the end like blunderbusses. These were fixed into position pointing directly behind each Remade. They hefted these carefully, and stared into mirrors suspended from a metal helmet before their eyes.

The two with conventional rifles also wore the mirror-helmets, but they were staring past the mirrors into the darkness straight ahead of them.

“Four moths, and all clear!” shouted one of the Remade with the strange backpointing rifle-arm, still gazing into his mirror.

“There’s nothing here…” answered one of the men looking forward into the darkness by the ruined window-hole, and as he spoke the intruding thing stepped out of the shadows and spread its incredible wings.

Both those whose eyes faced forwards looked aghast and opened their mouth to scream.

“Oh, Jabber fuck no…” one managed, and then both were silent as the patterns on the creature’s wings began to swarm like a pitiless dun kaleidoscope.

“What the fuck…?” began one of the Remade, and flickered his eyes briefly in front of him. His face collapsed in horror, but his moan died very fast as he caught sight of the creature’s wings.

The final Remade yelled his comrades’ names, and whimpered as he heard them drop their guns. He could see the faintest shape out of the corner of his eye. The creature before him could sense his terror. It stalked towards him, emitting little reassuring murmurs in an emotive vector. A phrase circled imbecilically in the man’s mind: There’s one in front of me there’s one in front of me…

The Remade tried to move forward, his eyes fixed on his mirrors, but the creature before him moved easily into his field of vision. What had been in the corner of the man’s eye became an inescapable, shifting field, and the man succumbed, dropping his eyes to those violently changing wings, and his jaw opened and shuddered tremulously. He dropped his gun-arm.

With a twitch of a skein of flesh, the free creature closed the door. It stood before the four men in thrall, and slobber drooled from its jaws. A snapped demand from its trapped kin interrupted its hunger and humbled it. It reached out and turned each of the men to face the four trapped moths.

There was a tiny moment when each man was no longer facing those wings, when his mind clutched at freedom for a moment, but then the awesome spectacle of four sets of those scudding patterns violently wrested control of his mind and he was lost.

Behind them now, the intruder pushed each man in turn towards one of the huge pinioned things, which reached out eagerly with the short limbs left free to them to grip their prey.

The creatures fed.

One of them fumbled for the keys at the belt of its meal, tore them from the man’s clothes. When it had finished its meal, it reached up with careful movements and pushed the key delicately into the lock of the bolt restraining it.

It took four attempts-fingers clutching the unfamiliar key, twisting it from an awkward angle-but the creature freed itself. It turned to each of its fellows and repeated the slow process, until all the captives were liberated.

One by one they stumbled across the room to the ragged window-hole. They paused and braced their atrophied muscles against the brick, spread those astonishing wings wide and launched themselves out and away from the sickly dry aether that seemed to seep from the Ribs. The last to leave was the newcomer.

It dragged itself after its comrades: even exhausted and brutalized, they flew faster than it could manage. They were waiting in a circle hundreds of feet above, extending their awarenesses, adrift in the senses and impressions that welled up from all around.

When their humble liberator reached them, they moved apart a little to let it in. They flew together, sharing in what they felt, licking the air lasciviously.

They drifted as the first to fly had done, north towards Perdido Street Station. They rotated slowly, five like the five railway lines of the city, buoyed by the massive profane urban presence below them, a fecund crawling place such as none of their kind had ever experienced before. They rocked above it, wings snapping, buffeted by wind, tingling with the sounds and energy of the growling city.

Everywhere they were, every part of the city, every dark bridge, every five-hundred-year-old mansion, every twisting bazaar, every grotesque concrete warehouse and tower and houseboat and squalid slum and manicured park, thronged with food.

It was a jungle without predators. A hunting ground.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Something was blocking the door into Isaac’s warehouse. He swore mildly, pushing against the obstruction.

It was early afternoon of the day after his success, which he already conceived of as his “cheese moment.” When he had reached Lin’s rooms the previous evening, he had been delighted to find her in. She had been tired but as happy as him. They had gone to bed for three hours, then stumbled out to The Clock and Cockerel.

It had been an unnervingly perfect night. Everyone Isaac could have wanted to see had been abroad in Salacus Fields, and all had stopped at the C amp; C for lobster or whiskey or chocolate laced with quinner. There were new additions to the clique, including Maybet Sunder, who had been forgiven for winning the Shintacost Prize. In return she was gracious about the arch comments Derkhan had made in print and others in person.

Lin had relaxed in the company of her friends, although her melancholia seemed to ebb rather than dissipate. Isaac had had one of his hissed political arguments with Derkhan, who had slipped him the latest issue of Double-R. The gathered friends had argued and eaten and thrown food at each other until two in the morning, when Isaac and Lin had returned to bed and warm, entwined sleep.

Over breakfast he had told her about his triumph with the crisis engine. She had not really understood the scale of the achievement, but that was understandable. She had realized that he was excited as almost never before, and had done her best to enthuse sufficiently. For Isaac’s part, it had made the difference he had suspected it would, simply communicating the bare bones of the project in the most unscientific way. He felt more grounded, less as if he were living some preposterous dream. He had learnt of potential problems during his explanation, and had come away eager to rectify them.

Isaac and Lin had parted with deep affection, and with a mutual promise not to let so long go by without each other again.

And now Isaac could not get into his workshop.

“Lub! David! What the arse you up to?” he yelled, and shoved at the door again.

As he pushed, the door opened a tiny way and he could see a sliver of the sunlit interior. He could see the edge of whatever was blocking the door.

It was a hand.

Isaac’s heart skittered.

“Oh Jabber!” he heard himself shout as he leant with all his weight on the door. It opened before his mass.

Lublamai was sprawled prone across the doorway. As Isaac knelt by his friend’s head, he heard Sincerity sniffling some way away, between the treads of the construct. She was cowed.

Isaac turned Lublamai over and let out a juddering sigh of relief when he felt that his friend was warm, heard him breathing.

“Wake up, Lub!” he yelled.

Lublamai’s eyes were already open. Isaac started back from that impassive gaze.

“Lub…?” he whispered.

Drool had collected below Lublamai’s face, had blazed trails across his dusty skin. He lay completely limp, utterly motionless. Isaac felt his friend’s neck. The pulse was quite steady. Lublamai was taking in deep breaths, pausing a moment, then releasing. He sounded as if he were sleeping.

But Isaac flinched in horror before that imbecilic vacant glare. He waved his hand before Lublamai’s eyes, eliciting no response. Isaac slapped Lublamai’s face, softly, then hard twice. Isaac realized that he was shouting Lublamai’s name.

Lublamai’s head rocked back and forth like a sack full of stones.

Isaac closed his hand and felt something clammy. Lublamai’s hand was thinly coated in a clear, sticky liquid. He sniffed his hand and recoiled from the faint scent of lemons and rot. It made him feel momentarily light-headed.

Isaac fingered Lublamai’s face and saw that the skin around his mouth and nose was slippery and tacky with the slop, that what he had thought Lublamai’s saliva was mostly that thin slime.

No yells, no slaps, no pleas would make Lublamai wake.

When Isaac finally looked up and around the room, he saw the window by Lublamai’s desk was open, the glass broken and the wooden shutters splintered. He stood and ran over to the knocking window frame, but there was nothing to see inside or out.

Even as Isaac ran from corner to corner under his own raised laboratory, darting between Lublamai’s corner and David’s, whispering idiotic reassurances to the terrified Sincerity, looking for signs of intruders, he realized that a terrible idea had occurred to him some time ago, and had been squatting balefully in the back of his mind. He faltered to a stop. Slowly, he raised his eyes and looked up in cold horror at the underside of the walkway boards.

Fearful calm settled on him like snow. He felt his feet lift, trudging inexorably towards the wooden stairs. He turned his head as he walked, saw Sincerity sniffing gradually closer to Lublamai, her courage slowly returning now that she was not alone.

Everything Isaac saw seemed slowed. He walked as if through freezing water.

Stair by stair he ascended. He felt no surprise and only a very dull foreboding as he saw pools of weird spittle on each stair, saw the fresh scrapings left by some sharp-clawed newcomer. He heard his own heart pulsing with what seemed tranquillity, and he wondered if he was numb to shock.

But when he reached the top and turned to see the hutch thrown on its side, its thick wire mesh burst from within, little fingers of metal exploding away from the central hole, and when he saw the chrysalis split and empty and saw the trail of dark juices dribbling from within its husk, Isaac heard himself cry out aghast and felt his body shudder into immobility as an icy tide of goose-flesh swept him up. Horror billowed up within him and around him like ink in water.

“Oh dear gods…” he whispered through dry and quivering lips. “Oh Jabber…what have I done?”

The New Crobuzon militia did not like to be seen. They emerged in their dark uniforms at night, to perform duties such as fishing the dead from the river. Their airships and pods meandered and buzzed over the city with opaque ends. Their towers were sealed.

The militia, New Crobuzon’s military defence and its internal correction agents, only appeared in their uniforms, the infamous full-face masks and dark armour, the shields and flintlocks, when they were acting as guards at some sensitive locus, or at times of great emergency. They wore their colours openly during the Pirate Wars and the Sacramundi Riots, when enemies attacked the city’s order from without or within.

For their day-to-day duties they relied on their reputation and on their vast network of informers-rewards for information were generous-and plain-clothed officers. When the militia struck, it was the man drinking cassis in the cafe, the old woman weighed down with bags, the clerk in stiff collar and polished shoes who suddenly reached over their heads and pulled hoods from invisible folds in the cloth, who slipped enormous flintlocks from hidden holsters and poured into criminal dens. When a cutpurse ran from a shouting victim, it might be a portly man with a bushy moustache (palpably false, everyone would reflect afterwards, why had they not noticed that before?) who would grab the offender in a punishing necklock and disappear with him or her into the crowd, or a militia tower.

And afterwards, no witness could say for sure what those agents had looked like in their civilian guise. And no one would ever see the clerk or the portly man or any of them again, in that part of the city.

It was policing by decentralized fear.

It had been four in the morning when the prostitute and her client had been found in Brock Marsh. The two men walking the dark alleys with their hands in their pockets and their heads jaunty had paused, seeing the crumpled shape in the dim gaslight. Their demeanour had changed. They had looked about them, then trotted into the cul-de-sac.

They found the stupefied pair lying across each other, their eyes glazed and vacant, their breath ragged and smelling of cloying citrus. The man’s trousers and pants were dropped around his ankles, exposing his shrivelled penis. The woman’s clothes-her skirt complete with the surreptitious slit many prostitutes used to finish their work quickly-were intact. When the newcomers had failed to wake them, one man had remained with the mute bodies and the other had run off into the darkness. Both men had pulled dark hoods over their heads.

Some while later a black carriage had pulled up, drawn by two enormous horses, Remade with horns and fangs that glinted with slaver. A small corps of uniformed militia had leapt to the ground and, without words, had pulled the comatose victims into the darkness of the cab, which had sped off towards the Spike that towered over the centre of the city.

The two men remained behind. They waited until the carriage had disappeared over the cobbles of the labyrinthine quarter. Then they looked about them carefully, taking stock of the sparse harvest of lights that glinted from the backs of buildings and outhouses, from behind crumbling walls and through the thin fingers of fruit trees in gardens. Satisfied that they were unobserved, they slipped off their hoods and thrust their hands back into their pockets. They melted suddenly into a different character, laughing quietly with each other and chatting urbanely as, innocuous again, they resumed their graveyard-shift patrol.

In the catacombs under the Spike, the limp pair of foundlings were prodded and slapped, shouted at and cajoled. By early morning they had been examined by a militia scientist, who scribbled a preliminary report.

Heads were scratched in perplexity.

The scientist’s report, along with condensed information on all other unusual or serious crimes, was sent up the length of the Spike, stopping at the highest floor but one. The reports were couriered briskly the length of a twisting, windowless corridor, towards the offices of the home secretary. They arrived on time, by half past nine.

At twelve minutes past ten, a speaking tube began to bang peremptorily in the cavernous pod-station that took up the whole floor at the very top of the Spike. The young sergeant on duty was on the other side of the room, fixing a cracked light on the front of a pod that hung, like tens of others, from an intricate cat’s cradle of skyrails which looped and criss-crossed each other below the high ceiling. The tangled rails allowed the pods to be moved around each other, positioned on one or other of the seven radial skyrails that exploded out through the enormous open holes spaced evenly around the outside wall. The tracks took off above the colossal face of New Crobuzon.

From where he stood, the sergeant could see the skyrail enter the militia tower in Sheck a mile to the south-west, and emerge beyond it. He saw a pod leave the tower, way over the shambolic housing, virtually at his own eye-level, and shoot off away from him towards the Tar, which trickled sinuous and untrustworthy to the south.

He looked up as the banging continued, and, realizing which tube demanded attention, he swore and rushed across the room. His furs flapped. Even in summer, it was cold so high above the city, in an open room that functioned as a giant wind tunnel. He pulled the plug from the speaking tube and barked into the brass.

“Yes, Home Secretary?”

The voice that emerged was small and distorted by its journey through the twisting metal.

“Get my pod ready immediately. I’m going to Strack Island.”

The doors to the Lemquist Room, the mayor’s office in Parliament, were huge and bound in bands of ancient iron. There were two militia stationed outside the Lemquist Room at all times, but one of the usual perks of a posting in the corridors of power was denied them: no gossip, no secrets, no sounds of any kind filtered to their ears through the enormous doors.

Behind the metal-girdled entrance, the room itself was immensely tall, panelled in darkwood of such exquisite quality it was almost black. Portraits of previous mayors circled the room, from the ceiling thirty feet above, spiralling slowly down to within six feet of the floor. There was an enormous window that looked out directly at Perdido Street Station and the Spike, and a variety of speaking tubes, calculating engines and telescopic periscopes stashed in niches around the room, in obscure and oddly threatening poses.

Bentham Rudgutter sat behind his desk with an air of utter command. None who had seen him in this room had been able to deny the extraordinary surety of absolute power he exuded. He was the centre of gravity here. He knew it at a deep level, and so did his guests. His great height and muscular corpulence doubtless added to the sense, but there was far more to his presence.

Opposite him sat Montjohn Rescue, his vizier, wrapped as always in a thick scarf and leaning over to point out something on a paper the two men were studying.

“Two days,” said Rescue in a strange, unmodulated voice, quite different from the one he used for oratory.

“And what?” said Rudgutter, stroking his immaculate goatee.

“The strike goes up. Currently, you know, it’s delaying loading and unloading by between fifty and seventy per cent. But we’ve got intelligence that in two days the vodyanoi strikers plan to paralyse the river. They’re going to work overnight, starting at the bottom, working their way up. A little to the east of Barley Bridge. Massive exercise in watercraeft. They’re going to dig a trench of air across the water, the whole depth of the river. They’ll have to shore it up continuously, recraefting the walls constantly so they don’t collapse, but they’ve got enough members to do that in shifts. There’s no ship that can jump that gap, Mayor. They’ll totally cut off New Crobuzon from river trade, in both directions.”

Rudgutter mused and pursed his lips.

“We can’t allow that,” he said reasonably. “What about the human dockers?”

“My second point, Mayor,” continued Rescue. “Worrying. The initial hostility seems to be waning. There’s a growing minority who seem to be ready to throw in their lot with the vodyanoi.”

“Oh, no no no no,” said Rudgutter, shaking his head like a teacher correcting a normally reliable student.

“Quite. Obviously our agents are stronger in the human camp than the xenian, and the mainstream are still antagonistic or undecided about the strike, but there seems to be a caucus, a conspiracy, if you will…secret meetings with strikers and the like.”

Rudgutter spread his enormous fingers and looked closely at the grain of the desk between them.

“Any of your people there?” he asked quietly. Rescue fingered his scarf.

“One with the humans,” he answered. “It is difficult to remain hidden on the vodyanoi, who usually wear no clothes in the water.” Rudgutter nodded.

The two men were silent, pondering.

“We’ve tried working from the inside,” said Rudgutter eventually. “This is far the most serious strike to threaten the city for…over a century. Much as I’m loath to, it seems we may have to make an example…” Rescue nodded solemnly.

One of the speaking tubes on the mayor’s desk thumped. He raised his eyebrows as he unplugged it.

“Davinia?” he answered. His voice was a masterpiece of insinuation. In one word he told his secretary that he was surprised to have her interrupt him against his instructions, but that his trust in her was great, and he was quite sure she had an excellent reason for disobeying, which she had better tell him immediately.

The hollow, echoing voice from the tube barked out tiny little sounds.

“Well!” exclaimed the mayor mildly. “Of course, of course.” He replugged the tube and eyed Rescue. “What timing,” he said. “It’s the home secretary.”

The enormous doors opened briefly and slightly, and the home secretary entered, nodding in greeting.

“Eliza,” said Rudgutter. “Please join us.” He gesticulated at a chair by Rescue’s.

Eliza Stem-Fulcher strode over to the desk. It was impossible to tell her age. Her face was virtually unlined, its strong features suggesting that she was probably somewhere in her thirties. Her hair, though, was white, with only the faintest peppering of dark strands to suggest that it had once been another colour. She wore a dark civilian trouser suit, cleverly chosen in cut and colour to be strongly suggestive of a militia uniform. She drew gently on a long-stemmed white clay pipe, the bowl at least a foot and a half from her mouth. Her tobacco was spiced.

“Mayor. Deputy.” She sat and pulled a folder from under her arm. “Forgive me interrupting unannounced, Mayor Rudgutter, but I thought you should see this immediately. You too, Rescue. I’m glad you’re here. It looks as if we may have…something of a crisis on our hands.”

“We were saying much the same thing, Eliza,” said the mayor. “We’re talking about the dock strike?”

Stem-Fulcher glanced up at him as she drew some papers from the folder.

“No, Mr. Mayor. Something altogether different.” Her voice was resonant and hard.

She threw a crime report onto the desk. Rudgutter put it sideways between himself and Rescue, and both twisted their heads to read it together. After a minute Rudgutter looked up.

“Two people in some sort of coma. Odd circumstances. I presume you are showing me more than this?”

Stem-Fulcher handed him another paper. Again, he and Rescue read together. This time, the reaction was almost immediate. Rescue hissed and bit the inside of his cheek, chewing with concentration. At almost the same time, Rudgutter gave a little sigh of comprehension, a tremulous little exhalation.

The home secretary watched them impassively.

“Obviously, our mole in Motley’s offices doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s totally confused. But the snatches of conversation she’s noted down…see this? ‘The moss are out…?’ I think we can all agree that she misheard that, and I think we can all agree on what was really said.”

Rudgutter and Rescue read and reread the report wordlessly.

“I’ve brought the scientific report we commissioned at the very start of the SM project, the feasibility study.” Stem-Fulcher was speaking quickly, without emotion. She dropped the report flat on the desk. “I’ve drawn your attention to a few particularly relevant phrases.”

Rudgutter opened the bound report. Some words and sentences were circled in red. The mayor scanned them quickly extreme danger…in case of escape…no natural predators

…utterly catastrophic…

…breed…

Chapter Twenty-Four

Mayor Rudgutter reached out and unplugged his speaking tube again.

“Davinia,” he said. “Cancel all appointments and meetings for today…no, for the next two days. Apologies wherever necessary. No disturbances unless Perdido Street Station explodes, or something of that magnitude. Understood?”

He replaced the plug and glared at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue.

“What by damn, what in Jabber’s name, what the godshit was Motley playing at? I thought the man was supposed to be a professional…”

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

“This was something that came up when we were arranging the transfer deal,” she said. “We checked his record of activity-much of it against us, it has to be pointed out-and gauged him to be at least as capable as ourselves of ensuring security. He’s no fool.”

“Do we know who’s done this?” asked Rescue. Stem-Fulcher shrugged.

“Could be a rival, Francine or Judix or someone. If so, they’ve bitten off a godsdamned sight more than they can chew…”

“Right.” Rudgutter interrupted her with a peremptory tone. Stem-Fulcher and Rescue turned to him and waited. He clenched his fists together, put his elbows on the table and closed his eyes, concentrating so hard that his face seemed ready to splinter.

“Right,” he repeated, and opened his eyes. “First thing we have to do is verify that we are faced with the situation that we think we’re faced with. That might seem obvious, but we have to be a hundred per cent sure. Second thing is come out with some kind of strategy for containing the situation quickly and quietly.

“Now, for the second objective, we all know we can’t rely on human militia or Remade-or xenians come to that. Same basic psychic type. We’re all food. I’m sure we all remember our initial attack-defence tests…” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher nodded quickly. Rudgutter continued. “Right. Zombies might be a possibility, but this is not Cromlech: we don’t have the facilities to create them in the numbers or quality that we need. So. It seems to me that the first objective can’t satisfactorily be dealt with if we’re relying on our regular intelligence operations. We have to have access to different information. So for two reasons, we have to elicit assistance from agents better able to deal with the situation-different psychic models from our own are vital. Now, it seems to me there are two possible such agents, and that we have little choice but to approach at least one of them.”

He was silent, taking in Stem-Fulcher and Rescue with his eyes, one by one. He waited for dissent. There was none.

“Are we agreed?” he asked quietly.

“We’re talking about the ambassador, aren’t we?” said Stem-Fulcher. “And what else…you don’t mean the Weaver?” Her eyes furrowed in dismay.

“Well, hopefully it won’t come to that,” said Rudgutter reassuringly. “But yes, those are the two…ah…agents I can think of. In that order.”

“Agreed,” said Stem-Fulcher quickly. “As long as it’s in that order. The Weaver…Jabber! Let’s talk to the ambassador.”

“Montjohn?” Rudgutter turned to his deputy.

Rescue nodded slowly, fingering his scarf.

“The ambassador,” he said slowly. “And I hope that will be all we need.”

“As do we all, Deputy Mayor,” said Rudgutter. “As do we all.”

Between the eleventh and fourteenth floors of the Mandragorae Wing of Perdido Street Station, above one of the less popular commercial concourses that specialized in old fabrics and foreign batiks, below a series of long-deserted turrets, was the Diplomatic Zone.

Many of the embassies in New Crobuzon were elsewhere, of course: baroque buildings in Nigh Sump or East Gidd or Flag Hill. But several were there in the station: enough to give those floors their name and let them keep it.

The Mandragorae Wing was almost a self-contained keep. Its corridors described a huge concrete rectangle around a central space, at the bottom of which was an unkempt garden, overgrown with darkwood trees and exotic woodland flowers. Children scampered along the paths and played in this sheltered park while their parents shopped or travelled or worked. The walls rose enormously around them, making the copse seem like moss at the bottom of a well.

From the corridors on the upper floors sprouted sets of interconnected rooms. Many had been ministerial offices at one time. For a short while, each had been the headquarters of some small company or other. Then they had been empty for many years, until the mould and rot had been swept away and ambassadors had moved in. That was a little more than two centuries previously, when a communal understanding had swept the various governments of Rohagi that from now on diplomacy would be greatly preferable to war.

There had been embassies in New Crobuzon far longer. But after the carnage in Suroch put a bloody end to what were called the Pirate Wars or the Slow War or the False War, the number of countries and city-states seeking negotiated resolutions to disputes had multiplied enormously. Emissaries had arrived from across the continent and beyond. The deserted floors of the Mandragorae Wing had been overrun by the newcomers, and by older consulates relocating to tap the new welter of diplomatic business.

Even to leave the lifts or stairs on the floors of the Zone, a gamut of security checks had to be run. The passages were cold and quiet, broken by a few doors and insufficiently lit by desultory gas-jets. Rudgutter and Rescue and Stem-Fulcher walked the deserted corridors of the twelfth floor. They were accompanied by a short, wiry man with thick glasses who scurried along behind them, never keeping up, lugging a large suitcase.

“Eliza, Montjohn,” said Mayor Rudgutter as they walked, “this is Brother Sanchem Vansetty, one of our most able karcists.” Rescue and Stem-Fulcher nodded greetings. Vansetty ignored them.

Not every room in the Diplomatic Zone was occupied. But some of the doors had brass plates proclaiming them the sovereign territory of one country or other-Tesh, or Khadoh, or Gharcheltist-behind which were huge suites extending onto several floors: self-contained houses in the tower. Some of the rooms were thousands of miles from their capitals. Some of them were empty. By Tesh tradition, for example, the ambassador lived as a vagrant in New Crobuzon, communicating by mail for official business. Rudgutter would never meet him. Other embassies were deserted due to lack of funds or interest.

But much of the business conducted here was immensely important. The suites containing the embassies of Myrshock and Vadaunk had been extended some years ago, due to the expansion of paperwork and office space that commercial relations necessitated. The extra rooms jutted like ugly tumours from the interior walls of the eleventh floor, bulging precariously over the garden.

The mayor and his companions walked past a door marked The Cray Commonwealth of Salkrikaltor. The corridor shook with the pound and whirr of huge, hidden machinery. Those were the enormous steam-pumps that worked for hours every day, sucking fresh brine fifteen miles from Iron Bay for the cray ambassador and sluicing his used, dirty water into the river.

The passageway was confusing. It seemed to go on too long when looked at from one angle, and to be all but stubby from another. Here and there short tributaries branched from it, leading to other, smaller embassies or store cupboards or boarded-up windows. At the end of the main corridor, beyond the cray embassy, Rudgutter led the way down one of these little passages. It extended a short way, twisting, its ceiling lowering dramatically as some stairs above descended across its path, and terminated in a small unmarked door.

Rudgutter looked behind him, ensuring that his companions and he were not watched. Only a short distance of passageway was visible, and they were quite alone.

Vansetty was pulling chalk and pastels of various colours from his pockets. He pulled what looked like a watch from his fob pocket and opened it. Its face was divided into innumerable complicated sections. It had seven hands of various lengths.

“Got to take account of the variables, Mayor,” Vansetty murmured, studying the thing’s intricate working. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Rudgutter or anyone else. “Outlook for today’s pretty grotty…High-pressure front moving in the aether. Could push powerstorms anywhere from the abyss through null-space up. Fucking poxy outlook on the borderlands as well. Hmmm…” Vansetty scrawled some calculations on the back of a notebook. “Right,” he snapped, and looked up at the three ministers.

He began to scribble intricate, stylized markings on thick pieces of paper, tearing out each one as it was finished and handing it to Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter, Rescue, and finally for himself.

“Whack those over your hearts,” he said cursorily, stuffing his into his shirt. “Symbol facing out.”

He opened his battered suitcase and brought out a set of bulky ceramic diodes. He stood at the centre of the group and handed one to each of his companions-“Left hand and don’t drop it…”-then wound copper wire around them tightly and attached it to a handheld clockwork motor he pulled from his case. He took readings from his peculiar gauge, adjusted dials and nodules on the motor.

“Righto, everyone, brace yourselves,” he said, and flipped the switch that released the clockwork engine.

Little arcs of energy sputtered into multicoloured existence along the wires and between the grubby diodes. The four of them were enclosed in a little triangle of current. All their hair stood visibly on end. Rudgutter swore under his breath.

“Got about half an hour before that runs out,” said Vansetty quickly. “Best be quick, eh?”

Rudgutter reached out with his right hand and opened the door. The four of them shuffled forward, maintaining their positions relative to each other, keeping the triangle in place around them. Stem-Fulcher pushed the door closed again behind them.

They were in an absolutely dark room. They could see only by the faint ambient glow of the lines of power, until Vansetty hung the clockwork motor around his neck on a strap and lit a candle. In its inadequate light they saw that the room was perhaps twelve feet by ten, dusty and absolutely empty apart from an old desk and chair by the far wall, a gently humming boiler by the door. There were no windows, no shelves, nothing else at all. The air was very close.

From his bag Vansetty extracted an unusual hand-held machine. Its twists of wire and metal, its knots of multicoloured glass were intricate and lovingly crafted. Its use was quite opaque. Vansetty leaned briefly out of the circle and plugged an input valve into the boiler beside the door. He pulled a lever on the top of the little machine, which began to hum and blink with lights.

“ ‘Course, in your old days, before I came into the profession, you had to use a live offering,” he explained as he unwound a tight coil of wire from the underside of the machine. “But we’re not savages, are we? Science is a wonderful thing. This little darling-” he patted the machine proudly “-is an amplifier. Increases the output from that engine by a factor of two hundred, two hundred and ten, and transforms it into an aetherial energy form. Bleed that through the wires so…” Vansetty slung the uncoiled wire into the far corner of the tiny room, behind the desk. “And there you go! The victimless sacrifice!”

He grinned with triumph, then turned his attention to the dials and knobs of the little engine, and began to twist and prod them with intense attention. “No more learning stupid languages, neither,” he muttered quietly. “Invocation’s automatic now and all. We’re not actually going anywhere, you understand?” He spoke louder, suddenly. “We ain’t abyssonauts, and we ain’t playing with nearly enough power to do an actual transplantropic leap. All we’re doing is peering through a little window, letting the Hellkin come to us. But the dimensionality of this room is going to be just a damn touch unstable for a while, so stick within the protection and don’t muck about. Got it?”

Vansetty’s fingers skittered over the box. For two or three minutes, nothing happened. There was nothing but the heat and pounding from the boiler, the drumming and whining of the little machine in Vansetty’s hands. Beneath it all, Rudgutter’s foot tapped impatiently.

And then the little room began to grow perceptibly warmer.

There was a deep, subsonic tremor. An insinuation of russet light and oily smoke. Sound became muted and then suddenly sharp.

There was a disorientating moment of tugging, and a red marbling of light flickered onto every surface, moving constantly as if through bloody water.

Something fluttered. Rudgutter looked up, his eyes smarting in air that seemed suddenly clotted and very dry.

A heavy man in an immaculate dark suit had appeared behind the desk.

He leaned forward slowly, his elbows resting on the papers that suddenly littered the desk. He waited.

Vansetty peered over Rescue’s shoulder and jerked his thumb at the apparition.

“His Infernal Excellency,” he declared, “the ambassador of Hell.”

“Mayor Rudgutter,” the daemon said, in a pleasant, low voice. “How nice to see you again. I was just doing some paperwork.” The humans looked up with a flicker of unease.

The ambassador had an echo: half a second after he spoke his words were repeated in the appalling shriek of one undergoing torture. The screamed words were not loud. They were audible just beyond the walls of the room, as if they had soared up through miles of unearthly heat from some trench in Hell’s floor.

“What can I do for you?” he continued (What can I do for you? came the soulless howl of misery). “Still trying to find out if you’ll be joining us when you pass on?” The ambassador smiled slightly.

Rudgutter smiled back and shook his head.

“You know my views on that, ambassador,” he replied levelly. “I’ll not be drawn, I’m afraid. You can’t provoke me into existential fear, you know.” He gave a polite little laugh, to which the ambassador responded in kind. As did his horrendous echo. “My soul, if such exists, is my own. It is not yours to punish or covet. The universe is a much more capricious place than that…I asked you before, what do you suppose happens to daemons when you die? As we both know you can.”

The ambassador bowed his head in polite demur.

“You’re such a modernist, Mayor Rudgutter,” he said. “I won’t argue with you. Please remember my offer stands.”

Rudgutter waved his hands impatiently. He was composed. He did not flinch at the pitiable screams which shadowed the ambassador’s words. And he did not allow himself to experience any disquiet when, as he stared at the ambassador, the image of the man in the chair flickered for a tiny sliver of a second, to be replaced by…something else.

He had experienced this before. Whenever Rudgutter blinked, for that infinitesimal moment, he saw the room and its occupant in very different forms. Through his eyelids, Rudgutter saw the inside of a slatted cage; iron bars moving like snakes; arcs of unthinkable force, a jagged, rippling maelstrom of heat. Where the ambassador sat, Rudgutter caught glimpses of a monstrous form. A hyaena’s head stared at him, tongue lolling. Breasts with gnashing teeth. Hooves and claws.

The stale air in the room would not allow him to keep his eyes open: he had to blink. He ignored the brief visions. He treated the ambassador with wary respect. Such was also the dsemon’s attitude to him.

“Ambassador, I’m here for two reasons. One is to extend to your master, Its Diabolic Majesty, the Czar of Hell, the respectful greetings of New Crobuzon’s citizens. In their ignorance.” The ambassador nodded graciously in response. “The other is to ask your advice.”

“It is always our great pleasure to aid our neighbours, Mayor Rudgutter. Especially those such as yourself, with whom Its Majesty has such good relations.” The ambassador rubbed its chin absently, waiting.

“Twenty minutes, Mayor,” hissed Vansetty into Rudgutter’s ear.

Rudgutter pressed his hands together as if in prayer, and looked at the ambassador thoughtfully. He felt little gusts of force.

“You see, ambassador, we have something of a problem. We have reason to believe that there has been a…an escape, shall we say. Something that we are very concerned to recapture. We’d like to ask your help, if we may.”

“What are we talking about, Mayor Rudgutter? True Answers?” asked the ambassador. “Usual terms?”

“True Answers…and perhaps more. We’ll see.”

“Payment now, or later?”

“Ambassador,” said Rudgutter politely. “Your memory momentarily falters. I am in credit two questions.”

The ambassador stared at him a moment and laughed. “So you are, Mayor Rudgutter. My deepest apologies. Proceed.”

“Are there any unusual rules of the moment, ambassador?” asked Rudgutter pointedly. The daemon shook his head (great hyaena tongue briefly slavering from side to side) and smiled.

“It is Melluary, Mayor Rudgutter,” it explained simply. “Usual rules in Melluary. Seven words, inverted.”

Rudgutter nodded. He composed himself, concentrating hard. Got to get the damn words right. Bloody infantile bloody game, he thought fleetingly. Then he spoke quickly and levelly, gazing calmly into the ambassador’s eyes.

“Correct escaped what’s of assessment our is?”

“Yes,” replied the daemon instantly.

Rudgutter turned briefly, gazed meaningfully at Stem-Fulcher and Rescue. They were nodding, their faces set and grim.

The mayor turned back to the daemon ambassador. They stared at each other without speaking for a moment.

“Fifteen minutes,” hissed Vansetty.

“Some of my more…fusty colleagues would look very askance at me allowing you to count ‘what’s’ as one word, you know,” said the ambassador. “But I’m a liberal.” He smiled. “Do you wish to ask your final question?”

“I don’t think so, ambassador. I’ll save that for another time. I have a proposition.”

“Go on, Mayor Rudgutter.”

“Well, you know the manner of thing that has escaped, and you can understand our concern to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.” The ambassador nodded. “You can also understand that it will be difficult for us to proceed, and that time is of the essence…I propose that we hire some of your…ah…troops, to help us round up our escapees.”

“No,” said the ambassador simply. Rudgutter blinked.

“We haven’t even discussed terms yet, ambassador. I assure you I can make a very generous offer…”

“I’m afraid it is out of the question. None of my kind are available.” The ambassador stared impassively at Rudgutter.

The mayor thought for a moment. If the ambassador was bargaining, he was doing so in a way he had never done before. Rudgutter forgot himself, closed his eyes to think, snapping them immediately open as he saw that monstrous vista, caught a glimmer of the ambassador’s other form. He tried again.

“I could even go up to…let’s say…”

“Mayor Rudgutter, you don’t understand,” said the ambassador. Its voice was impassive, but it seemed agitated. “I don’t care how many units of merchandise you can offer, or in what condition. We are not available for this job. It is not suitable.”

There was a long silence. Rudgutter gazed with incredulity at the daemon opposite him. It was beginning to dawn on him what was happening. In the bleeding rays of light, he saw the ambassador open a drawer and bring out a sheaf of papers.

“If you are finished, Mayor Rudgutter,” he continued smoothly, “I have work to do.”

Rudgutter waited until the miserable, pitiless resonance of work to do to do to do had died down outside. The echo made his stomach pitch.

“Oh, yes, yes, ambassador,” he said. “So sorry to have kept you. We’ll speak again soon, I hope.”

The ambassador inclined its head in a polite nod, then drew out a pen from its inner pocket and began to mark the papers. Behind Rudgutter, Vansetty twiddled at nobs and depressed various buttons, and the wooden floor began to tremble as if in some aetherquake. A hum built up around the cramped humans, wobbling in their little energy field. The foul air vibrated up and down their bodies.

The ambassador bulged and split and disappeared in an instant, like a heliotype in a fire. The moiling carmine light bubbled and evaporated, as if it seeped out through a thousand cracks in the dusty office walls. The darkness of the room closed in around them like a trap. Vansetty’s tiny candle guttered and went out.

Checking that they were unobserved, Vansetty, Rudgutter, Stem-Fulcher and Rescue stumbled from the room. The air felt deliciously chill. They spent a minute wiping sweat from their faces, rearranging the clothes that had been buffeted by winds from other planes.

Rudgutter was shaking his head in rueful astonishment.

His ministers composed themselves and turned to him.

“I’ve met with the ambassador perhaps a dozen times over the past ten years,” said Rudgutter, “and I’ve never seen it behave like that. Damn that air!” he added, rubbing his eyes.

The four walked back along the little corridor, turned onto the main passageway and began to retrace their steps towards the lift.

“Behave like what?” asked Stem-Fulcher. “I’ve only ever dealt with it once before. Not used to it.”

Rudgutter mused as he walked, tugging thoughtfully at his lower lip and his beard. His eyes were very bloodshot. He did not answer Stem-Fulcher for some seconds.

“There are two things to be said: one daemonological, one practical and immediate.” Rudgutter spoke in a level, exact tone, demanding the attention of his ministers. Vansetty was wandering quickly ahead, his job done. “The first might give a certain insight into the Hellkin psyche, behaviour, whatnot. You both heard the echo, I presume? I thought he did that to intimidate me, for a while. Well, bear in mind the immense distance that sound had to travel. I know,” he said quickly, holding up his hands, “that it’s not literally sound, nor literally distance, but they are extraplanar analogues and most analogous rules hold in some more or less mutated way. So bear in mind how far it had to travel, from the base of the Pit to that chamber. The fact is, it takes a little while to get there…That ‘echo,’ I believe, was actually spoken first. The…eloquent words we heard from the ambassador’s mouth…those were the real echoes. Those were the twisted reflections.”

Stem-Fulcher and Rescue were silent. They thought of the screams, the tortured, maniacal tone they had heard outside, the idiot ruined gibbering that seemed to make a mockery of the ambassador’s devilish refinement…

They reflected that that might be the more genuine voice.

“I’m wondering if we were wrong to think of them having a different psychic model. Maybe they’re comprehensible. Maybe they think like us. And the second thing, bearing in mind that possibility, and bearing in mind what the ‘echo’ might tell us about the daemoniac state of mind, is that at the end there, when I was trying to cut a deal, the ambassador was scared…That’s why he wouldn’t come to our aid. That’s why we’re on our own. Because the daemons are afraid of what we’re hunting.”

Rudgutter stopped and turned to his aides. The three gazed at each other. Stem-Fulcher’s face twisted for a fragment of a second, and was then composed. Rescue was as impassive as a statue, but he plucked fitfully at his scarf. Rudgutter nodded as they pondered.

There was a minute of silence.

“So…” Rudgutter said briskly, clasping his hands. “The Weaver it is.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

That night, in the swollen dark hours after a brief spew of rain had hosed the city down with dirty water, the door to Isaac’s warehouse was pushed open. The street was empty. There were minutes of stillness. Night-birds and bats were all that moved. Gaslight guttered.

The construct rolled jerkily out into the deep night. Its valves and pistons were swathed in rags and snatches of blankets, muffling the distinctive sound of its passage. It moved forward quickly, turning inexactly and trundling as fast as its ageing treads would move.

It tremored through the backstreets, passed snoring drunks still sodden and insensate. The sallow gasjets reflected secretively in its battered metal hide.

The construct made its swift, precarious way under the sky-rails. Inconstant streaks of cirrus hid the lurking airships. The construct bore down like a diviner on the Tar, the river caught in an intricate whiplash shape on the timeless rocks beneath the city.

And hours after it had disappeared over Sheer Bridge into the southern city, when the dark sky became stained by dawn, the construct came reeling back to Brock Marsh. Its timing was fortuitous. It re-entered and locked the door only a little while before Isaac returned from his frantic night-long search for David, and Lin, and Yagharek and Lemuel Pigeon, and anyone who could help him.

Lublamai was lying on a couch that Isaac had rigged up on a couple of chairs. When Isaac came into the warehouse he came straight over to his still friend, whispered to him hopelessly, but there was no change. Lublamai did not sleep or wake. He gazed.

It was not long before David came hurrying back to the laboratory. He had trawled his way to one of his usual haunts to be greeted by a hurried and garbled version of one of the innumerable messages Isaac had left for him throughout New Crobuzon.

He sat as silently as Isaac, gazing at his mindless friend.

“I can’t believe I let you do it,” he said numbly.

“Oh Jabber and fuck, David, d’you think I’m not going over and over it…I let the damn thing out…”

“We all should’ve known better,” snapped David.

There was a long silence between them.

“Did you get a doctor?” said David.

“First thing I did. Phorgit, from across the road, I’ve dealt with him before. I cleaned up Lub a bit, wiped some of that crap off his face…Phorgit didn’t know what to make of it. Plugged in gods knows how many bits of equipment, took I don’t fucking remember how many readings…boils down to ‘haven’t got a clue.’ ‘Keep him warm and feed him, but then again you might want to keep him cold and not give him anything to eat…’ I might get one of the guys I know at the uni to take a skedge at him, but it’s a forlorn fucking hope…”

“What did the thing do to him?”

“Well, quite, David. Quite. That’s the fucking question, isn’t it?”

There was a tentative rattling at the broken window. Isaac and David looked up to see Teafortwo poking his ugly head forlornly in.

“Oh, shit,” said Isaac in exasperation. “Look, Teafortwo, now’s not really the best time, capiche? Maybe we can chat later.”

“Just looking in, boss…” Teafortwo spoke in a cowed voice utterly unlike his usual exuberant squawk. “Wanna know how the Lublub’s doing.”

“What?” said Isaac sharply, standing. “What about him?”

Teafortwo shied away miserably and wailed.

“Not me, squire, not my fault…just wondering if he’s better after the big monsterfucker ate his face…”

“Teafortwo, were you here?”

The wyrman nodded morosely and shifted a little nearer, balancing in the centre of the window frame.

“What happened? We’re not angry with you, Teafortwo…we just want to know what it was you saw…”

Teafortwo sniffed and waved its head miserably. He pouted like a child, screwed up his face and blurted out a great gob of words.

“Big fucker comes downstairs flapping big horrible wings make your bonce woozy snapping big teeth and…and…all over claws and big fucking stinky tongue…and I…Mr. Lublub’s gawping in the looking-glass and then he turns to face it and goes…dopey…and I saw…me head went funny and when I woke up the thing’s stuck its tongue right in…in…Mr. Lub’s gob and slurpslurp noises going off in me head and I…I buggered off, I couldn’t do nothing, I swear…I’m scared…” Teafortwo began to cry like a two-year-old, dribbling snot and tears down his face.

When Lemuel Pigeon arrived, Teafortwo was still sobbing. No amount of cajoling or threatening or bribes could calm the wyrman down. Eventually he went to sleep, curled up in a quilt ruined with his mucus, exactly like an exhausted human baby.

“I’m here on false pretences, Isaac. The message I got was that it’d be worth my while to drop over to your gaff.” Lemuel looked at Isaac with a speculative air.

“Godsdammit, Lemuel, you fucking spiv,” exploded Isaac. “Is that what’s bothering you? Jabber and fuck, I’ll make sure you get yours, all right? Is that better? Now fucking listen to me…Someone has been attacked by something that hatched out of one of the grubs you obtained for me, and we need to stop the thing before it does someone else, and we need to know about it, so we need to track down whatever cove it was got it in the first place, and we need to do it sharpish. Are you with me, old son?”

Lemuel was quite unintimidated by this outburst.

“Look, you can’t damn well blame me…” he began, before Isaac interrupted with a howl of irritation.

“Devil’s Tail, Lemuel, no one’s blaming you, you cretin! Quite the opposite! What I’m saying is that you are by far too good a businessman not to keep careful records, and I need you to check ‘em out. We both know everything goes through you…you’ve got to get me the name of whoever originally got the big fat caterpillar. The enormous one with really weird colours. You know?”

“Vaguely remember it, yes.”

“Well, that is good.” Isaac calmed a little. He ran his hands over his face and sighed enormously. “Lemuel, I need your help,” he said simply. “I’ll pay you…But I’m also begging. I really need you to help me here. Look.” He opened his eyes and glared at Lemuel. “The damn thing may have keeled over and died, right? Maybe it’s like a mayfly: one glorious day. Maybe Lub’ll wake up tomorrow happy as a sandboy. But maybe not. Now, I want to know: one-” he counted off on fat fingers “-how to snap Lublamai out of this; two, what this damn thing is-the one description we have is a little garbled.” He glanced at the wyrman sleeping in the corner. “And three, how we catch the fucker.”

Lemuel stared at him, his face immobile. Slowly and ostentatiously, he pulled a snuff-box from his pocket and took a sniff. Isaac’s fists clenched and unclenched.

“Fine, ‘Zaac,” Lemuel said quietly, replacing his little jewelled box. He nodded slowly. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll be in touch. But I’m not a charity, Isaac, I’m a businessman and you’re a customer. I get something for this. I’ll bill you, all right?”

Isaac nodded wearily. There was no rancour in Lemuel’s voice, no viciousness, no spite. He was simply stating the truth that underlay his bonhomie. Isaac knew that if it paid better not to uncover the purveyor of the peculiar grub, Lemuel would simply do that.

“Mayor.” Eliza Stem-Fulcher swaggered into the Lemquist Room. Rudgutter looked up at her questioningly. She threw a thin newspaper onto the table before him. “We’ve got a lead.”

Teafortwo left quickly when he woke, with David and Isaac trying to reassure him that no one held him responsible. By the evening, a horrible kind of drab calm had arrived at the warehouse on Paddler Way.

David was spooning a thick compote of fruit puree into Lublamai’s mouth, massaging it down his throat. Isaac was pacing listlessly across the floor. He was hoping that Lin would return home, find the note he had pinned on her door last night and come to him. If it had not been in his writing, he reflected, she would have thought it was a bad joke. To have Isaac invite her to his laboratory-house was unprecedented. But he needed to see her, and he was worried that if he left, he would miss some vital change in Lublamai, or some nugget of indispensable information.

The door was pushed open. Isaac and David looked up sharply.

It was Yagharek.

Isaac was momentarily amazed. This was the first time Yagharek had appeared while David (and Lublamai, of course, although it hardly counted) were in the room. David gazed at the garuda huddling under the dirty blanket, the sweep of the false wings.

“Yag, old son,” said Isaac heavily. “Come in, meet David…We’ve had a bit of a disaster…” He trudged heavily towards the door.

Yagharek waited for him, hovering half in, half out of the entrance. He said nothing until Isaac was close enough to hear him whisper, a strange thin noise like a bird being strangled.

“I would not have come, Grimnebulin. I do not wish to be seen…”

Isaac lost patience quickly. He opened his mouth to speak but Yagharek continued.

“I have…heard things. I have sensed…there is a pall over this house. Neither you, nor either of your friends, has left this room all day.”

Isaac gave a short laugh.

“You’ve been waiting, haven’t you? Waiting till it was all clear, right? So you could maintain your precious anonymity…” He tensed, made an effort to calm himself. “Look, Yag, we’ve had something of a disaster and I really don’t have time or inclination to…to pussyfoot about you. I’m afraid our project’s on hold for a while…”

Yagharek sucked in his breath and cried out, faintly.

“You cannot,” he screeched quietly. “You cannot desert me…”

“Damn!” Isaac reached out and pulled Yagharek in through the door. “Now look!” He marched over to where Lublamai breathed raggedly and gazed and dribbled. He pushed Yagharek before him. He shoved hard, but not with violent pressure. Garuda were wiry and tight-muscled, stronger than they looked, but with their hollow bones and pared-down flesh they were not a match for a big man. But that was not the main reason why Isaac was holding back from exerting himself. The mood between him and Yagharek was testy, not poisonous. Isaac sensed that Yagharek half wanted to see the reason for the sudden tension in the warehouse, even if it meant breaking his ban on being seen by others.

Isaac pointed at Lublamai. David stared vaguely up at the garuda. Yagharek completely ignored him.

“The fucking caterpillar I showed you,” said Isaac, “turned into something that did this to my friend. Ever seen anything like that?”

Yagharek shook his head slowly.

“So you see,” said Isaac heavily, “I’m afraid that until I sort out what in the name of Jabber’s arse I’ve let loose over the city, and until I’ve brought Lublamai back from wherever he is, I’m afraid that the problems of flight and crisis engines, exciting as they are, are on something of a low burn for me.”

“You will let slip my shame…” hissed Yagharek quickly. Isaac interrupted him.

“David knows about your so-called shame, Yag!” he shouted. “And don’t look at me like that, that’s how I work, this is my colleague, that’s how come I’ve made fucking progress in your case…”

David was looking sharply at Isaac.

“What?” he hissed. “Crisis engines…?”

Isaac shook his head irritatedly, as if a mosquito was in his ear.

“Making headway in crisis physics, that’s all. Tell you later.”

David nodded slowly, accepting that now was not the time to discuss this, but his bulging eyes betrayed his amazement. That’s all? they said.

Yagharek seemed to be twitching with nervousness, with a great bulge of misery that washed up through him.

“I…I need your help…” he began.

“Yeah, as does Lublamai here,” shouted Isaac, “and I’m afraid that counts for a damn sight more…” Then he softened slowly. “I’m not dropping you, Yag. I’ve no intention of doing that. But the thing is, I can’t carry on just now.” Isaac thought for a moment. “If you want to get this done as quick as possible, you could help…Don’t just fucking disappear. Stay the fuck here and help us sort this out. That way, we can get back, sharpish, to your problem.”

David looked askance at Isaac. Now his eyes said, Do you know what you’re doing? Seeing that, Isaac blustered, and rallied.

“You can sleep here, you can eat here…David won’t care, he doesn’t even live here, I’m the only one that does. Then when we hear anything, we can…well, we can maybe think of some use for you. If you know what I mean. You can help, Yagharek. That’d be damn useful. The quicker this gets sorted, the quicker we’re back on your programme. Understand?”

Yagharek was subdued. It took some minutes before he would speak, and then all he would do was nod and briefly say that yes, he would stay at the warehouse. It was clear that all he could think of was the research into flight. Isaac was exasperated, but forgiving. The excision, the punishment that had befallen Yagharek, had settled on his soul like lead chains. He was selfish, utterly, but he had some reason.

David fell asleep, exhausted and miserable. He slept in his chair that night. Isaac took over caring for Lublamai. The food had passed through him, and the first noisome duty was to clean up his shit.

Isaac bundled up the fouled clothes and shoved them into one of the warehouse’s boilers. He thought of Lin. He hoped she came to him soon.

He realized he was pining.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Things stirred in the night.

In the morning, in the small hours and again when the sun had risen, more idiot bodies were found. This time there were five. Two vagrants who hid under the bridges of Gross Coil. A baker walking home from work in Nigh Sump. A doctor in Vaudois Hill. A barge-woman out beyond Raven’s gate. A spattering of attacks that disfigured the city without pattern. North; east; west; south. There were no safe boroughs.

Lin slept badly. She had been touched by Isaac’s note, to think of him crossing the city just to plant a piece of paper on her door, but she had also been concerned. There was a hysterical tone to the short paragraph, and the plea to come to the laboratory was so utterly out of character that it frightened her.

Nevertheless, she would have come immediately had she not returned to Aspic Hole late, too late to travel. She had not been working. The previous morning she had woken to find a note thrust under her door.

Pressing business necessitates the postponement of appointments until further notice. You will be contacted when resumption of duties is possible.

M.

Lin had pocketed the curt note and wandered to Kinken. She had resumed her melancholy contemplations. And then, with a curious sense of amazement, as if she was watching a performance of her own life and was surprised at the turn of events, she had walked north-west out of Kinken to Skulkford, and boarded the railway. She had taken the two stops north on the Sink Line, to be swallowed by the vast tarry maw of Perdido Street Station. There in the confusion and hissing steam of the enormous central concourse, where the five lines met like an enormous iron and wood star, she had changed trains for the Verso Line.

There had been a five-minute wait while the boiler was stoked in the cavern at the centre of the station. Enough time for Lin to look at herself in incredulity, to ask herself what in the name of Awesome Broodma she was doing. And perhaps in the name of other gods.

But she had not answered, had sat still while the train waited, then moved slowly, picking up speed and rattling in a regular rhythm, squeezing from one of the station’s pores. It wound to the north of the Spike, under two sets of skyrails, looking out over Cadnebar’s squat, barbarous circus. The prosperity and majesty of The Crow-the Senned Gallery, the Fuchsia House, Gargoyle Park-was riddled with squalor. Lin gazed into steaming rubbish tips as The Crow segued into Rim, saw the wide streets and stuccoed houses of that prosperous neighbourhood wind carefully past hidden, crumbling blocks where she knew the rats were running.

The train passed through Rim Station and plunged on over the fat grey ooze of the Tar, crossing the river barely fifteen feet to the north of Hadrach Bridge, until it picked its way distastefully over the ruinous roofscape of Creekside.

She had left the train at Low Falling Mud, at the western edge of the slum ghetto. It had not taken long to tread the rotting streets, past grey buildings that bulged unnaturally with sweating damp, past kin who eyed her and tasted her in the air and moved away, because her uptown perfume and strange clothes marked her out as one who had escaped. It had not taken her long to find her way back to her broodma’s house.

Lin had not come too close, had not wanted her taste to filter through the shattered windows and alert her broodma or her sister to her presence. In the growing heat, her scent was like a badge for other khepri, that she could not remove.

The sun had moved and heated the air and clouds, and still Lin had stood, some little way from her old home. It was unchanged. From within, from cracks in the walls and door, she could hear the skittering, the organic pistoning of little male khepri legs.

No one had emerged.

Passers-by had ejected chymical disgust at her, for coming back to crow, for spying on some unsuspecting household, but she had ignored them all.

If she entered and her broodma was there, she thought, they would both be angry, and miserable, and they would argue, pointlessly, as if the years had not gone by.

If her sister was there and told her their broodma had died, and Lin had let her go without a word of anger or forgiveness, she would be alone. Her heart might burst.

If there was no sign…if the floors crawled only with males, living like the vermin they were, no longer pampered princes without brains but bugs that stank and ate carrion, if her broodma and her sister had gone…then Lin would be standing pointlessly in a deserted house. Her homecoming would be ridiculous.

An hour or more had passed, and Lin had turned her back on the putrefying building. With her headlegs waving and her head-scarab flexing in agitation, in confusion and loneliness, she made her way back to the station.

She had grappled fiercely with her melancholy, stopping in The Crow and spending some of Motley’s enormous payments on books and rare foods. She had entered an exclusive women’s boutique, provoking the sharp tongue of the manageress until Lin had fanned her guineas and pointed imperiously at two dresses. She had taken her time in being measured, insisting each piece fit her as sensuously as it would the human women for whom its designer had intended it.

She had bought both pieces, all without a word from the manageress, whose nose wrinkled as she took a khepri’s money.

Lin had walked the streets of Salacus Fields wearing one of her purchases, an exquisite fitted piece in cloudy blue that darkened her russet skin. She could not tell if she felt worse or better than before.

She wore the dress again the next morning as she crossed the city to find Isaac.

That morning by Kelltree Docks, dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of craefted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.

They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feet across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercraeft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.

In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.

As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. fair wages now! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.

On either side of the gorge in the river, small boats rowed carefully to the edge of the water: The sailors within leaned out as far as they could and gauged the distance across the furrow. They shook their heads in exasperation. The vodyanoi jeered and cheered.

The channel had been dug a little to the south of Barley Bridge, at the very edge of the docklands. There were ships waiting to enter and ships waiting to leave. A mile or so downstream, in the insalubrious waters between Badside and Dog Fenn, merchant ships reined in their nervous seawyrms and let the boilers run low. In the other direction, by the jetties and landing bays, in Kelltree’s fat canals beside the drydocks, the captains of vessels from as far as Khadoh gazed impatiently at the vodyanoi pickets that thronged the banks and worried about getting home.

By mid-morning the human wharfmen had arrived to get about the task of unloading and loading. They quickly discovered that their presence was more or less superfluous. Once the remaining work was done preparing those ships still at anchor in Kelltree itself-at most another two days’ work-they were stuck.

The small group who had been in discussion with the striking vodyanoi had come prepared. At ten in the morning about twenty men suddenly streamed out of their yards, climbing the fences around the docks, and jogging to the waterfront by the vodyanoi pickets, who cheered them on with something like hysteria. The men pulled out their own signs: human and vodyanoi against the bosses!

They joined in the noisy chanting.

Over the next two hours, the mood hardened. A core of humans set up a counter-demonstration inside the dockland’s low walls. They screamed abuse at the vodyanoi, calling them frogs and toads. They jeered at the striking humans, denounced them as race-traitors. They warned that the vodyanoi would ruin the dock, making human wages plummet. One or two of them carried Three Quills literature.

Between them and the equally strident human strikers was a great mass of confused, vacillating dockers. They wandered back and forth, swearing and baffled. They listened to the shouted arguments from both sides.

The numbers began to grow.

On either bank of the river, in Kelltree itself and on the south bank of Syriac Well, crowds were gathering to watch the confrontation. A few men and women ran among them, moving too fast to be identified, handing out leaflets with the Runagate Rampant banner at the top. They demanded in closely printed text that the human dockers join the vodyanoi, that it was the only way the demands would be won. The papers could be seen circulating among the human dockers, handed out by person or persons unseen.

As the day wore on, and the air heated, more and more dockers began to drift over the wall to join the demonstration beside the vodyanoi. The counter-demonstration also grew, sometimes rapidly; but over the space of the hours, it was the strikers that increased most visibly.

There was a tense uncertainty in the air. The crowd was becoming more vocal, yelling at both sides to do something. There was a rumour that the chairman of the dock authority was coming to speak, another that Rudgutter himself would put in an appearance.

All the time, the vodyanoi in the canyon of air carved into the river busied themselves shoring up the shimmering waterwalls. Occasionally fish blundered through the flat edges and fell to the ground, flapping, or half-sunk rubbish eddied gently into the sudden chasm. The vodyanoi threw everything back. They worked in shifts, swimming up through the water to watercraeft the upper reaches of the riverwalls. They shouted encouragement at the human strikers from the riverbed, among the ruined metal and thick sludge that was the Gross Tar’s floor.

At half past three, with the sun blazing hot through ineffectual clouds, two airships were seen approaching the docks, from the north and the south.

There was excitement among the crowds, and the word quickly spread through the assembled that the mayor was coming. Then a third and fourth airship were noticed, cruising ineluctably over the city towards Kelltree.

The shadow of unease passed over the riverbanks.

Some of the crowd dispersed quietly. The strikers redoubled their chants.

By five to four, the airships hovered over the docks in an airborne X, a massive threatening mark of censure. A mile or so to the east, another solitary dirigible hung over Dog Fenn, on the other side of the river’s ponderous kink. The vodyanoi and the humans and the gathered crowds shaded their eyes with their hands and stared up at the impassive shapes, bullet-bodies like hunting squid.

The airships began to sink earthwards. They approached at some speed, the details of their design and the sense of mass of their inflated bodies quite suddenly discernible.

Just before four o’clock, strange organic shapes floated up from behind the surrounding roofs, emerging from sliding doors at the top of the Kelltree and Syriac militia struts, smaller towers not connected to the skyrail network.

The eddying, weightless objects bobbed gently in the breeze and began to drift almost aimlessly towards the wharfs. The sky was suddenly full of the things. They were big and soft-bodied, each a mass of twisted, bloated tissue coated with intricate flaps and curves of skin, craters and strange, dripping orifices. The central sac was about ten feet in diameter. Each of the creatures had a human rider, visible in a harness sutured to the corpulent body. Below each such body was a thicket of dangling tentacles, ribbons of blistered flesh that stretched the forty or so feet to the ground.

The creatures’ pinky-purple flesh throbbed regularly like beating hearts.

The extraordinary things bore down on the gathered crowd. There was a full ten seconds when those who saw them were too aghast to speak, or to believe what they saw. Then the shouts started: “Men-o’-war!”

As the panic began, some nearby clock struck the hour and several things happened at once.

Throughout the gathered crowd, in the anti-strike demonstration and even here and there among the striking dockworkers themselves, clumps of men-and some women-suddenly reached over their heads and in violent, quick motions tugged on dark hoods. They were fashioned without visible eye- or mouth-holes; dark crumpled blanks.

From the underbelly of each of the airships-looming absurdly close now-spilt clutches of ropes that jounced and whip-lashed as they fell. They fell through the yards and yards of air, their ends coiling slightly on the pavement. They contained the gathering, the pickets and demonstrations and surrounding crowds within four pillars of suspended rope, two on either side of the river. Dark figures slid expertly, at breakneck speed, the length of the cords. They came in a constant quick drip. They looked like glutinous clots dribbling down the entrails of the disembowelled airships.

There were wails from the crowd, which fractured in terror. Its organic cohesion broke. The people fled in all directions, trampling the fallen, grabbing children and lovers and stumbling on cobbles and broken flagstones. They tried to disperse down the side streets that spread like a network of cracks out from the river-banks. But they ran into the paths of the men-o’-war that bobbed sedately along the alleys’ routes.

Uniformed militia were suddenly converging on the picket from every side street. There were shrieks of terror as mounted officers appeared on monstrous bipedal shunn, their hooks reaching out, their blunt eyeless heads swaying as they felt their way with echoes.

The air brimmed with sudden short screams of pain. People blundered in stumbling gangs around corners into men-o’-war tentacles and shrieked as the nerve-agent which riddled the dangling fronds oozed through their clothes and over their bare skin. There were a few breaths of juddering agony, then a cold numbness and paralysis.

The man-o’-war pilots tugged at the nodules and subcutaneous synapses that controlled the creatures’ movements, coursing deceptively fast over the roofs of the hovels and the dockside warehouses, trailing their steeds’ venomous appendages into the channels between architecture. Behind them were trails of spasming bodies, eyes glazed and mouths frothing in dumb pain. Here and there, a few in the crowd-the old, the frail, the allergic and the unlucky-reacted to the stings with massive biological violence. Their hearts stopped.

The militia’s dark suits were interwoven with fibres from man-o’-war hide. The tendrils could not penetrate them.

Ranks of militia charged the open spaces where the pickets were congregated. Men and vodyanoi wielded placards like badly designed clubs. Within the disorderly mass were brutal skirmishes, as militia agents swung spiked truncheons and whips coated with man-o’-war stings. Twenty feet from the front line of the confused and angry demonstrators, the first wave of uniformed militia dropped to their knees and raised their mirrored shields. From behind them came the gibbering of a shunn, then quick arcs of billowing smoke as their fellows hurled gas grenades over into the demonstration. The militia moved inexorably into the clouds, breathing through their filter-masks.

A splinter group of officers peeled off from the main wedge formation and bore down on the river. They threw tube after hissing tube of billowing gas into the vodyanoi’s watercraeft ditch. The croaks and screeches of burning lungs and skin filled the hole. The carefully maintained walls began to split and dribble as more and more strikers hurled themselves through into the river to escape the vicious fumes.

Three militiamen knelt at the very edge of the river. They were surrounded by a thicket of their colleagues, a protective skin. Quickly, the three at the centre pulled target-rifles from their backs. Each man had two, loaded and primed with powder, one of which they set beside them. Moving very fast, they sighted along the shafts into the miasma of grey smoke. An officer in the peculiar silver epaulettes of a captain-thaumaturge stood behind them, muttering quickly and inaudibly, his voice muffled. He touched each marksman’s temples, then jerked his hands away.

Behind their masks, the men’s eyes watered and cleared, suddenly seeing registers of light and radiation that rendered the smoke virtually invisible.

Each man knew the bodyshape and movement patterns of his target perfectly. The sharpshooters tracked quickly through the fog of gas and saw their targets conferring with wet rags clamped to their mouths and noses. There was a rapid crackle, three shots in a quick tempo.

Two of the vodyanoi fell. The third looked round in panic, seeing nothing but the swirl of that vicious gas. He raced to the water walling him in, scooped a handful from it and began to croon to it, moving his hand in fast and esoteric passes. One of the riverside marksmen dropped his rifle quickly and picked up his second weapon. The target was a shaman, he realized, and if given time he might invoke an undine. That would make things vastly more complicated. The officer raised the gun to his shoulder, aimed and fired in one brisk movement. The hammer with its clamped shard of flint slid down the serrated edge of the pan cover and snapped, sparking, into the pan.

The bullet burst through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths, and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the quag.

The watercraeft walls of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political papers and the bodies.

As the militia put down the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airship as from its kin.

The crowds in Dog Fenn were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

The costermongers on Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by one the five airships sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

They slipped below the silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned and fled.

The militia troops stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into the swirling, bloody air. The butchers and slaughterers turned dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they ran.

The militia tore down the swinging, dripping carcasses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex’s bedroom might have been gauze.

Once inside the troops moved to either side of the wardrobe, leaving one man to unstrap a huge sledgehammer from his back. He swung it at the old wood, dissolving the wardrobe in three huge strokes, uncovering a hole in the wall that emitted the chugging of a steam engine and fitful oil-lamp light.

Two of the officers disappeared into the secret room. There was a muffled shout and the sound of repeated hammering thuds. Benjamin Flex came flying through the crumbling hole, his body twisting, beads of blood hitting his grimy walls in radial patterns. He hit the floor head first and shrieked, tried to scrabble away, swearing incoherently. Another officer reached down and lifted him by the shirt with steam-enhanced strength, shoving him against a wall.

Ben gibbered and tried to spit, staring at the impassive blue-masked face, intricate smoked goggles and gasmask and spiked helmet like the face of some insectile daemon.

The voice that emerged from the hissing mouthparts was monotonous, but quite clear.

“Benjamin Flex, please give your verbal or written assent to accompany myself and other officers of the New Crobuzon militia to a place of our choosing for the purposes of interview and intelligence gathering.” The militiaman slammed Ben against the wall, hard, eliciting an explosive burst of breath and an unintelligible bark. “Assent so noticed in presence of myself and two witnesses,” the officer responded. “Aye?”

Two of the militiamen behind the officer nodded in unison and responded: “Aye.”

The officer cuffed Ben with a punishing backhand blow that dazed him and burst his lip. His eyes wavered drunkenly and he dribbled blood. The hugely armoured man swung Ben up over his shoulder and stomped from the room.

The constables who had entered the little print-room waited for the rest of the squad to follow the officer back out into the corridor. Then, in perfect time, they each pulled a large iron canister from their belts and pushed the plungers that set in motion a violent chymical reaction. They threw the cylinders into the cramped room where the construct still cranked the printing press handle in an endless, mindless circuit.

The militiamen ran like ponderous bipedal rhinos down the corridor after their officer. The acid and powder in the pipebombs mixed and fizzed, flared violently, ignited the tightly packed gunpowder. There were two sudden detonations that sent the damp walls of the building shuddering.

The corridor jacked under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from the doorway, with hot ink and ripped snatches of pipe. Twists of metal and glass burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain. Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. we say, said one, and betrayal! another. Here and there the banner title was visible, Runagate Rampant. Here it was torn and burning, only a fragment visible.

Run…

One by one the militia attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks, setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into the belly of their airship. The officer holding Ben clutched him tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra man.

As a weak fire played desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was the head of Ben’s construct, its upper right arm still attached.

The thing’s arm twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by flexing and unflexing its jaw.

Within half a minute the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its glass eyes vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.

A shadow passed over the dead thing, as the airship, full now with all its troops, cruised slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms of the Spike.

At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.

But this is not my land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city, all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate, my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.

I have been duped. When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the Cymek’s constant summer (where “my sand” or “your water” are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all. It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.

I am stumbling. I must not fall.

I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.