Inky gusts of flame uncoiled and rolled over the nude man’s skin, darking him and sending his fat spitting, and the sinistral screamed in its host’s voice and psychically in its own, making receptives for a half mile wince. It dropped and burnt up, fire-ruined.
The militia motorguns opened and the air became a shredder. The Collectivists dropped behind stone as the dextrier flew unconcerned through the firing, its body jerking, protecting its hand-body with the contingent flesh it borrowed.
On the roofs at the north end of the bridge a thaumaturge rose, a Brock Marsh rebel come to defend the Collective. His body was aglow with corposant. It flared without sound in cobalt, and he barked and a gob of the colour sputtered, flew with butterfly flight to the frontmost militia gun, and it arced and took over the cannoneers who staggered and pulled their masks from faces gone bleached and blind.
The men and the gun brittled, cracks spread across them, and one by one gun and men shattered. The ground where they had been was dusted with shards of them, quite dry.
Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spinning as it did, heavy black boots flailing. It flew into a column of Collectivists with a kind of angry playfulness, smashing them and spitting fire in an incandescent spiral, leaving brutalised dead and dying and fire-stained walls.
“Fall back! Now!”
The Glasshouse Gunners emerged on the streeted bridge and started to retreat, firing rivebows into the militia, who were no longer waiting, were beginning to advance dragging carronade with them. Their motorguns started again. The handlinger and the Collectivist thaumaturge faced each other. The man raised his fists to send out a bolt; the handlinger sent him burning out of the air.
“Get the fuck back now!” The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gunners turned and in a sudden rage stormed them. The ranks of huge thorned fighters were tremendous. The militia faltered.
The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gunners’ random line was enfiladed and, even armoured in crude-cast metal, the motorgun bullets tore at them.
The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gunners was a Remade human. He wore a mottlesome thing on his foot. His cactus comrades turned to him, and he spat fire across their faces. They had killed the host but not the handlinger. It had crept onto him.
A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.
But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shunn-cavalry riding their bipeds into Creekside, a Mamluk regiment of loyal Remade fighting in Echomire while the Collectivists screamed and called them traitors).
It’s time. A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming: Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.
There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar, the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.
None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.
They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark water came enemy shapes. Betrayal, someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.
A rump escaped. Their information came through: We can’t explode the fucking bridge.
Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing-their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.
“It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got ways in. ”
And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.
As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and anything went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.
They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).
In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fenn, the Collective’s heart, it had to be defended.
In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fenn Collectivists could not go, their sister chapters were in trouble. Something was being prepared in Tar and Canker Wedge, surely an attack on Smog Bend. Break it, with its machinofacture and its organised workers, and that chapter of the Collective was gone.
Howl Barrow was easy. “We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses,” one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.
The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gunners, and were camped on the south bank of the River Tar. They were poised to push east into the heartlands of the Dog Fenn chapter, the stronghold of the New Crobuzon Collective. There was a sense that no Collectivist would voice, that this was the start of the end.