It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its innards effaced it. Jacobs fought free of its shade hands. He bared dark-stained teeth. The haints swarmed. Jacobs was cobwebbed with darkness the golem had left; it was choking him. He retched up a gout of empty shadows. They spilled on the ground and crept away to their natural place below blockages of light. The darkness golem fell, and Judah fell with it, and while he lay flattened and unconscious for a second the golem disappeared.
Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spinning uncoloured shapes around her-a bowl, a bone, a scrap of cotton. Her face greyed instantly, choked off sudden, her eyes gone bloodshot but the blood without colour. She did not fall. With a care as if she were going to bed, she settled herself to the floor, lay down and died.
The haints were maelstroming so fast they lost visible integrity, seemed to melt to a kind of swirling oil. Spiral Jacobs drew another shape and everything convulsed. Ori was shuddering from the wall where he was embedded, making little sounds.
Judah woke. Spiral Jacobs moved his hands. There were no haints now; instead the air was a dilute milk of their residue tracked through with vapour trails. Jacobs was shaking with effort, hauling something out of nothing, vividly trembling. As if from behind a rock, from underwater, a presence began to insinuate.
It was very small, or very big and very far away, and then it was perhaps much bigger than Cutter had thought or much closer, and moving very slowly or tremendously fast over a huge distance. He could not make out its parameters. He could see nothing. He heard it. He could see nothing. The thing made sound. The thing Spiral Jacobs was bringing, the murderspirit, the citykiller, he heard it howl. It came round and round like a rising vine, growing or rising up as if uncoiling from a well. It made a metal howl.
Cutter saw the lights of the city change below them. As the unseen palpable thing approached, the buildings glowered. New Crobuzon’s architecture glared. The streetlamps and the lights of industry became the glints in eyes.
The beast was manifesting in New Crobuzon itself. It was pushing itself into New Crobuzon’s skin. Or was it waking what had been there always? Cutter could tell the thing was nearing them because the wall, the concrete beside them, did not change but looked to him suddenly like the flank of an animal tensed to attack. The Tesh thing was making the city itself a predator, rousing the hunt instincts of the metropolis.
How big, how big, when does it reach the top? Cutter thought. He felt a sleepiness, a bled-out emergent death.
“I know your gods,” Qurabin said. The thing kept coming. The buildings tensed. Spiral Jacobs looked suddenly afraid.
Qurabin was only a voice, moving through the empty space. The monk sounded hysterical, aggressive, eager to fight. Qurabin taunted Spiral Jacobs. Had she or he still known Tesh, Cutter was certain that was what he would have heard, that glottal and interruptive language. Ragamoll was all that was left to Qurabin.
“Jinxing… it’s easy to intimidate them as don’t know what it is, yes? But what if you face one as does, eh? Another Teshi? Who can find out Teshi secrets? Your secrets?”
Spiral Jacobs shouted something.
“I don’t understand you no more, mate,” Qurabin said, but Cutter was sure the ambassador had said traitor.
“Know who I am?” Qurabin said.
“Aye, I know who y’are,” shouted Jacobs, and he pushed out his hands sending a swirl of the buttery haint-stuff at where the voice came from, but the whirling air met no resistance. “You’re a Momentist blatherer.”
Judah was trying to stand, was burrowing his hands in dirt that shook with the incoming spirit-thing. He was trying to raise a golem, any golem, something.
“It’s coming,” Cutter shouted. It was coming out of its burrow into the real, it was unfolding into more and more impossible conjunctions. The dimensions of the bricks and the edges of the walls strained as it came close. Architecture stirred.
“Your godlings and demiurgii all live in the Moments, Teshman. And my Moment knows.” Qurabin’s voice was tremendous, louder than the oncoming of the murder-thing. Spiral Jacobs spat and his spit sent a cuffing wave through the milk-white disturbance. Qurabin roared, and began to shout.
“Tekke Vogu,” the monk said, “please tell me-” and the voice disappeared as Qurabin slipped into whatever place it was where the Moment lived and listened.
Nothing moved; the oncoming spirit seemed poised. And then Qurabin sounded again with a gasp, a terrible pain, because these were huge secrets to uncover. What it cost, Cutter could not imagine, but the monk learnt something. As the twitching filigree of the Phasma Urbomach unrolled into regular space, making the bricks, the spires and weathervanes and night-slates of New Crobuzon terrible teeth and claws, waking the surrounds so that Cutter gasped in terror, Qurabin let loose hidden knowledge and the thing was snatched back down toward the nothing it had come from. It strained to emerge.
Judah sent a grass-and-earth golem stumbling toward Jacobs, but it was shuddered to dust before it got close. He reached out, tried to make a golem in the air, but whiteness clogged him.
Spiral Jacobs cursed in Tesh, and Qurabin screamed and the spirit began to crawl back again, but with a last plea, a last hollering for knowledge, Qurabin made the dire and mass-murderous visitant begin to slide away. As Spiral Jacobs cursed the thinning air that very air disgorged a figure. Blood-faced and exhausted, Qurabin the monk smiled through wounds, without language, only barking a seal’s gasps, without eyes, Cutter saw. These were the cost of all the secrets that had saved them. Qurabin reached out and gripped Jacobs the ambassador and whispered what must be the last word left to the renegade Tesh, stepped back into a true secret, a hidden place, into the domain of Tekke Vogu. The air winked behind them, and they, and in a swallowing of space the Urbomach, were gone.
Only the opalescence in the air was left. It began to thicken, moving and congealing like eggwhite in hot water, into a stinking solidity. It inspissated, fell in clots, mucal rain, and the sky and air was empty.
A silence gathered, then ebbed, and Cutter heard the shoot-sounds of the war again. He rolled in the debris, saw Judah gather himself all groggy and sodden with the smell of haint-dissolution. Saw Ori, unmoving, tethered somehow to brick, bleeding. The body of Elsie, a greyed nothing. Saw nothing in the air. Cutter saw that Qurabin, Spiral Jacobs and his city-killing thing were gone.