When at last Susullil turned he spoke carefully to Judah, though they all understood some now. “He’s come from the forest town,” Judah said. “They want help. Something’s coming for them… wiping them out. Behellua told them about us, what we did for them. They think we’ve powers. They’re offering something. If we help them…” He listened again.

“If we help them their god will help us. Will give us what we need. They say their god’ll tell us the way to the Iron Council.”

Hiddentown was huts in a clearing. Cutter had visioned an arboreal metropolis, with raised walkways between boughs and children spiralling down vines from the leaf sky.

At the edges of the village were attempts at stockades. Hiddentowners in forest-coloured clothes stared at the travellers. Much of the village was tents tarred or painted with gutta-percha. There were some warped wood huts, damp fires, a midden pit. Most of the inhabitants were human, but several of the child-high insects scuttled through the mud trails.

They were making quarters of their own in the corners of the town. They were chitin gardeners. They herded millions of insects, arachnids and arthropods, nurturing them through quick generations till they had colossal numbers of pinhead-sized ants, foot-long millipedes, and crawling wasps of countless species. With strange techniques they turned their flocks into walls, pressing them gently together, merging them and smoothing them, squeezing the still-living, conjoined mass of chitin-stuff into a kind of plaster. They made bungalows and burrows of their living mortar, feeding it carefully, so the tiny lives that made it did not die, but wriggled, embedded and melted with others, become architecture, a ghetto of living houses.

The human Hiddentowners spoke Galaggi in various forms, and here and there Tesh, and made a mongrel language. The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.

Cutter supposed those refugees who could look after themselves would not waste time with this settlement. Hiddentown was a convocation of the hopeless. No wonder they were desperate. No wonder they were such simple meat-stuff for some beast.

Jabbered at and bowed to with cursory politesse, the travellers were hustled to a long-hut with a tower of stakes, a rude minaret in split wood. It was a church, symbols cut and stained in the walls. There were tables with blades of mirror on them, papyrus. A robe of fine black wool. The chief left them.

For some seconds there was silence. “What are we fucking doing here?” Cutter said.

There were echoes; shadows moved that should not have been there. Cutter saw Elsie shiver. They moved into a circle, back-to-back.

“There’s something,” Elsie whispered. “Something’s here…”

“I am here.” The voice was throaty and snarled. They dropped with bushrangers’ speed. They waited.

“What are you?” Judah said.

“I’m here.” It was accented, glutinous as if words were congealing in a throat. There was a movement they could not follow. “They brought you here for my blessing, I think. A minute. Yes, yes they did. And to tell you what to do. You’re here to hunt for them.”

Drogon pointed at the table. The woollen robe was gone.

“You speak our language,” said Cutter.

“I am a little god but still a god. You are champions. That’s the idea, you know. Did you reckon yourselves champions?” The voice seemed to bleed from the walls, seemed to be in several places.

“That’s what they have in mind, yes,” said Pomeroy. “What’s wrong with that?” He circled slowly, a pugnacious godless man in the presence of a god. Drogon was turning his head by little increments, his lips moving.

“Nowt,” the voice said. “At all. Only… a waste of your efforts, really. You, mmm, you, you have a little daughter, by a whore in a place called Tarmuth. You should go. This town’s doomed. Save them from this, there’ll be another thing to get them.”

Pomeroy’s mouth worked. Elsie watched him. She kept her face motionless.

“So why are you here?” said Cutter.

“Because this is my town I had them build for me. They want me. Mmm, you, you aren’t sure of your Caucus, are you, shopkeeper?”

Cutter was stricken. The others looked at him. Drogon’s head jerked forward. He made a motion like spitting. The disembodied voice gave a hard gasp. There was a commotion, something fell and there was puking, the substance of things jerked and then, shaking with effort, someone cowled rose from behind the table. A thin and jaundiced face, deep lines and shaven head, mouth adrip with vomit, staring in horror.

She or he stood for moments, quivering as if in ice, then retched and ran across the room to a pillar, behind it and out of sight. Cutter followed, and Pomeroy went the other way; but they came to each other and found nothing. The figure had disappeared.

The voice returned, angry and afraid.

“You never do that to me again, ” it said. Drogon was speaking secretly into Cutter’s ear.

“Found it. Guessed where it was and whispered to it. Ordered it. ‘Don’t read us,’ I said. ‘Show yourself,’ I told it.”

“Wait, whispersmith,” Cutter said. “Fucking god, eh?” he said to the room. “What’s your name? How do you speak our tongue? What are you?”

There was silence for seconds. Cutter wondered if the figure had slipped out under thaumaturgic caul. When the voice come back it sounded defeated, but Cutter was sure there was relief there too.

“I speak Ragamoll because I learned to read it, for all the hidden things in your books. I’m here because… like everyone else who’s here, I ran. I’m a refugee.

“Your militia are steering clear of Tesh, yet, but they’ve come up close to the Catoblepas Plain. They’ve attacked our towns and outposts. Tesh monasteries. I’m a monk. For the Moment of Lost Things. Moment of the Hidden.”

The militia had rampaged in the shadow of Tesh. The city had closed its doors and refilled the moatlands. The monastery was beyond, in the briarpits. It should have been safe.

When they realised a New Crobuzon slave squad of Remade assassins was coming, the monks had waited for Tesh to send protection. It had been days before they had realised that no one was coming; they’d been deserted. They panicked up desultory plans. They were a temple consecrated to the Manifold Horizon, with cadres of monks dedicated to its various Moments, and each of these Moments became a brigade.

Some fought; some went seeking holy death. The monks of Cadmer, Moment of Calculation, knew they could not win and waited in the briarpits to receive the bullets. The monks of Zaori, Moment of Magic Wine, drank themselves to visionary death before a militiaman could touch them. But the Moment of Doves sent its birds to destroy themselves in the militia’s wheels and stop their engines; the Moment of Desiccation turned militia blood to ash; Pharru and Tekke Shesim, the Moments of Forgotten Snow and of Memory, came together and made ice storms.

But the militia thaumaturges were expert, the slave-officers relentless, and in the end the monastery could not hold out. And when it fell, it was only the monks of Tekke Vogu, the Moment of the Hidden and Lost, who escaped.

Their neophytes were murdered, but the monks’ devotions hid them. They were lost to their attackers. They crept away-away from the burning ruins of their temple and from Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, which was closed to them, which had been ready to let them die. They had gone out into the land.

The monk told them everything. Was eager to, somehow, Cutter could tell. “We’re hidden. We know hidden things. They’re entrusted to us. We find lost things. I travel quick: I travel by hidden passages, lost ways. When I came here, I had them build this place. It’s easy to be a god here. Whoever comes I tell a little secret, something hidden. So they believe in me.”