“What’s your name, monk?” Cutter said.

“Qurabin. Eighth-ring red monk of Tekke Vogu.”

“Is that a man’s name?” There was a laugh.

“Our names don’t discriminate. Are you asking am I a man?” The voice was suddenly very close. “I don’t know.”

Every monk of Tekke Vogu was enfolded within the Moment, but it was a bargain. They would learn the hidden, and how to find the lost. But Vogu’s sacrament was sold, not given. The price for the Moment’s protection was something made lost, something hidden from the devotee, given to Vogu.

“I know monks who don’t know their names. Who had them hidden. Who lost their eyes. Their homes, or families. Me-when I submitted to Vogu it was my sex went hidden. I remember my childhood, but not if I was a boy or a girl. When I piss I look down but it’s hidden from me. My sex is lost.” Qurabin spoke without rancour.

“So you want us to clear out this thing that’s attacking?” Cutter said.

“Not me,” said Qurabin. “ They want you, they want champions. There’s no point protecting this hovel.”

The party looked at each other.

“As gods go, you ain’t much by way of a protector, are you?” Elsie said.

“I didn’t say I was, did I? It’s them-they built the stupid town around me, and they keep wanting things from me. I didn’t ask this. Where was my protector? What Tesh did to me, I can do. Let the town burn.”

“That ain’t what you said before,” Cutter said, but Judah interrupted him.

“And who are you to say?”

He stepped forward and stared at the makeshift altar as if he could know that was where Qurabin hid. “Who are you to say?” His voice rose. “They come here, make what they can of this place, running from those who’d kill them because they live close to Tesh; they try to build something, and they make one mistake. To look for a god, and find one in you.

“They promised us help-promised us a guide. So tell us. We’ll find whatever it is and help them. And you can find us what we’re looking for.”

The forest wetness drip-dripped in the makeshift church.

“Tell us where it is. I don’t damn well believe you don’t care. You care. You want to tell us. You want to look after them. You know it. So tell. We got your offer. They need us to kill this thing, and then you give us what you promised.”

“I won’t take anything out of Vogu’s house for you -”

“I don’t want to hear about your damn piety, when you’ll take snippets out of your god’s house to impress the damn natives. Tell us where the beast is, and we’ll fix it, and then you tell us where the Iron Council is.”

“I don’t betray,” said Qurabin. “I buy. Everything I learn, I lose something. And it hurts. Vogu don’t give it up free. I unhid your man’s whore and daughter it stings, and I lose something. Lost and hidden by the Moment. I’m naked in front of you. I unhide this? Iron Council? It’ll cost me.”

There was silence and the dripping again.

“The beast,” Judah said. “Where is it?” There was long quiet.

“Wait,” said the voice, and again there was relief under the resentment. Tired of being a god, thought Cutter. He looked at Judah, who stood trembling and splendid. Qurabin was lost, Cutter saw. Broken. Eager for something, deserted and newly eager, before righteous Judah.

“I try,” said the voice, and gave a glottal retching. When Qurabin sounded again, it was with pain, in the voice of one used to pain.

“Damnfire. Damn. It’s unhidden. The beast.”

“What did you lose?” said Cutter.

“Someone’s name.” Someone who mattered, Cutter could hear.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was dawn when they reached the dank place. Mud and dangerous paths, and stripped white trees. The marsh sweated. Trees rustled but barely.

They came, the New Crobuzon outcasts, Susullil and Behellua, a tiny number of brave Hiddentown men. Qurabin was with them, unseen.

Cutter was eager for sound. He wanted to sing or laugh. The landscape ignored him and he felt offended. He tried to think himself a presence, and could only be conscious of the parings of New Crobuzon left behind him. He befouled where he was with where he had been.

Judah walked in front. An enormous golem walked with him. Eight feet tall, of wood, and what blades Hiddentown could spare. Judah had hammered it together with hinged joints, a crude swivel neck. He could have manifested something with a touch on a woodpile, but with only thaumaturgy holding it it would have drained him quicker or fallen apart.

Judah had played the wax cylinder again. Don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family, the voice said. He’s dead, Uzman’s dead. Cutter saw Judah’s sadness at the old message, and wondered what Uzman had been to him.

“D’you know why I became a golemist, Cutter? Years before the Construct War. There was no money in it when I started. It was the arcane end of golemetry that was a draw. Not even in matter. D’you know there’s such a thing as a sound golem? It’s hard, but you can make one. You’ve never seen a shadow golem, have you? This kind of golem-” He indicated the wood. “All this is really a by-product, for me. This isn’t what it’s all about.”

Perhaps. But still, the thing they had made was powerful and fine. It swung its head so the faint sun touched its cheap bead eyes. Rusted knives made its fingers.

“The beast’s close,” came Qurabin’s voice. There was pain in it: he had exchanged something for the knowledge.

Cutter prodded his toe at a lump of sickly colours, cussed in shock. It was animal remains. They came unstuck with an unrolling of stench. He tripped, and Pomeroy turned and was shouting as Elsie said something.

“Here!” Elsie said again. She stood over a body. Cutter saw the sheen of decomposition. Most of the chest was gone.

“Dear Jabber,” Cutter said. “We’re in its godsdamned parlour.”

“Quick!” said Judah. “Quick, here!” He was at the swamp’s edge, reaching out toward a young man who sat flecked with leeches. The boy was hideously thin. He did not look up, kept his eyes on the greying meat he gnawed.

Cutter broke off a cry. He saw an emaciated man, camouflaged by weeds and knubs of wood. The man was chewing. Beside him was a deep-jungle tapir. Its jaws moved.

“Judah,” Cutter said. “Judah, get back,” and Judah turned. There were bodies all around in the water, motionless but for chewing. Men and women, a shivering dog. Each was smeared with old matter around their mouths, and seemed to trail a vine.

Gases moiled, and what Cutter had thought a coagulate of muck began to rise. It blinked. What he had thought stones or holes were eyes. A tight studding of black eyes. It rose.

Those were not vines but the thing’s sucker-studded limbs. One stretched from each scrawny figure-each adult or child, each animal, tethered by the back of their necks. What they ate was rerouted into those grotesque intestinal leashes, passing peristaltically. They were made mindless conduits for food. And suspended at the centre of the arms, and shaggy with others whipping free, was the thing that ate through them.

Corpulent as an obese man, vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons.

The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders.

The Hiddentowners ran, pursued by ghosts of warm fog and by the creature’s arms. It gripped trees with its bird claws and scobs of flesh budded from it like snails’ eyes. Cutter’s repeater felt tiny. He ran toward Judah. The creature’s appendages seemed to fill the air. Cutter saw little eyes at one limb’s end, a flexing orifice, concentric rasp-teeth like a lamprey’s.