He’s lost control of it, he thought, remembering the mayor’s shouts from outside. It’s not doing what he wants.

He turned his attention back down to the letter in The Digest.

“This bit about tapestry-work…” Isaac mused, chewing his lips. “That’s the worldweb, isn’t it? So I think it’s saying it likes what we were…um…doing in the world. How we were ‘weaving.’ I think that’s why it got us out. And this later section…” His expression became more and more fearful as he read.

“Oh gods,” he breathed. “It’s like what happened to Barbile…” Derkhan’s mouth was set. She nodded reluctantly. “What was it she said? ‘It’s tasted me…’ The grub I had, I must’ve been tantalizing it with my mind all the time…It’s tasted me already…It must be hunting me…”

Derkhan stared at him.

“You won’t get it off your tail, Isaac,” she said quietly. “We’ll have to kill it.”

She had said we. He looked up at her gratefully.

“Before we formulate any plans,” she said, “there’s another thing. A mystery. Something I want explained.” She gestured at the other alcove across the dark room. Isaac peered curiously into the filthy obscurity. He could just make out a lumpy, motionless shape.

He knew what it was instantly. He remembered its extraordinary intervention in the warehouse. His breath sped up.

“It wouldn’t speak or write to anyone else,” Derkhan said.

“When we realized it was here with us, we tried to talk to it, we wanted to know what it had done, but it completely ignored us. I think it’s been waiting for you.”

Isaac slid over to the lip of the ledge.

“It’s shallow,” Derkhan said behind him. He slipped off into the cool watery muck of the sewers. It came up to his knees. He pushed through it unthinkingly, ignoring the thick stench he raised as it sluiced through his legs. He waded through the noisome excremental stew towards the other little shelf.

As he drew closer, the dull inhabitant of that unlit space whirred slightly and pushed its battered body as near upright as it could. It was crammed into the little space.

Isaac sat next to it, shook his fouled shoes as clean as he could. He turned to it with an intent, hungry expression.

“So,” he said. “Tell me what you know. Tell me why you warned me. Tell me what’s going on.”

The cleaning construct hissed.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Under a damp hollow of bricks by Trauka Station, Yagharek waited.

He gnawed a hunk of bread and meat that he had begged wordlessly from a butcher. He had not been unmasked. He had simply thrust his tremulous hand out from under his cloak and the food had been given to him. His head had remained hidden. He had shuffled away, his feet cramped and hidden by rags. His gait was of an old, tired man.

It was much easier to hide as a human than as an unwounded garuda.

He waited in the darkness where Lemuel had left him. From the shadows which hid him, he could watch the comings and goings at the church of the clock gods. It was an ugly little building, the façade of which was still painted with the advertising slogans of the furniture shop it had once been. Above the door was an intricate brass timepiece, each hour intertwined with the symbols of its associate god.

Yagharek knew the religion. It was strong among the humans of Shankell. He had visited its temples when his band had come to the city to trade, in the years before his crime.

The clock struck one, and Yagharek heard the ululating hymn to Sanshad, the sun god, come belting through the broken windows. It was sung with more gusto than in Shankell but considerably less finesse. It was less than three decades since the religion had crossed the Meagre Sea with any success. Obviously its subtleties had been lost in the water between Shankell and Myrshock.

Before he was conscious of it, his hunter’s ears had realized that one of the sets of footsteps approaching his hideaway was familiar. He finished his food quickly and waited.

Lemuel appeared framed in the entrance of the little cave. Passers-by came and went in the light spaces above his shoulders.

“Yag,” he whispered, gazing sightlessly into the grubby hole. The garuda shuffled forward into the light. Lemuel was carrying two bags stuffed with clothes and food. “Come on,” he whispered. “We should get back.”

They retraced their steps through the winding streets of Murkside. It was Skullday, a shopping day, and elsewhere in the city the crowds would be thick. But in Murkside the shops were mean and poor. Those locals for whom Skullday was a day off would make their way to Griss Fell or the Aspic Hole market. Lemuel and Yagharek were not watched by many.

Yagharek sped up, hobbling on bound feet with a weird, crippled gait to keep up with Lemuel. They made their way south-east, staying in the shadow of the raised railway lines, moving towards Syriac.

This is how I came to the city, thought Yagharek, tracking the great iron pathways of the trains.

They passed under the brick arches, retracing their way into a little enclosed space overlooked on three sides by featureless brick. Storm drains channelled down the walls, along concrete ruts and into a man-sized grille in the centre of the yard.

On the fourth side, the south-facing side, the courtyard looked out onto a drab alley. The land fell away before it. Syriac sat in a depression in the underlying clay. Yagharek looked out over a tumbledown roofscape of twisted roofs and mouldering slate, curlicues of brick and forgotten, warped weathervanes.

Lemuel glanced around to ensure their privacy, then tugged the grille free. Fingers of fell-gas curled out and tugged at them. The heat made the stink rich. Lemuel gave his bags to Yagharek and pulled a primed pistol from his belt. Yagharek looked at him from under the hood.

Lemuel turned with a hard smile and said: “I’ve been pulling in favours. Got us kitted out.” He waggled the gun to illustrate his point. He checked it, hefted it expertly. He pulled the oil-lamp from a bag, lit it and lifted it with his left hand.

“Stay behind me,” he said. “Keep your ears open. Move quietly. Watch your back.”

With that, Lemuel and Yagharek descended into the dirt and the dark.

There was an indeterminable time wading through the warm, rank darkness. The sounds of scuttling and swimming were all around them. Once they heard vicious laughter from a tunnel parallel to theirs. Twice Lemuel swung round, aiming the torch and his pistol at a patch of filth still rippling from where some unseen thing had been. He did not have to shoot. They were unmolested.

“You know how lucky we were?” said Lemuel conversationally. His voice bobbed slowly back to Yagharek on the foetid air. “I don’t know if it was deliberate, where the Weaver left us, but we’re in one of the safest places in the New Crobuzon sewers.” His voice stiffened now and then with effort or disgust. “Murkside’s such a backwater, you don’t have much food down here, you’ve got no thaumaturgic residues, there aren’t any massive old chambers to support a whole brood…It’s not very busy.”

He was silent for a moment, then continued.

“Brock Marsh sewers, for example. All the unstable runoff from all those labs and experiments, accumulating over the years…makes for a very unpredictable population of vermin. Rats the size of pigs, speaking in tongues. Blind pygmy crocodiles, whose great-great-great-grandparents escaped from the zoo. Crossbreeds of all sorts.

“Over in Gross Coil and Skulkford the city’s sitting on layers of older buildings. For hundreds of years they sunk into the mire, and they’d just build new ones on top of them. The pavement’s only been solid there for a hundred and fifty years. Over there, the sewers feed into old basements and bedrooms. The tunnels like this one lead into submerged streets. You can still see the road-names. Rotten houses under a brick sky. Straight up. The shit flows along channels and then through windows and doors.