“This one’s been dead a while,” he said, and accepted the letter.

His eyes widened as he read.

“Motley?” he breathed. “Lin’s been dealing with Motley?”

“Who is he?” shouted Isaac. “Where is the fucking piece of scum…?”

Lemuel looked up at Isaac, his face open and aghast. Pity glimmered in his eyes as he saw Isaac’s tear-stained, snotty rage.

“Oh Jabber…Mr. Motley is the kingpin, Isaac,” he said simply. He is the man. He runs the eastern city. He runs it. He’s the outlaw boss.”

“I’ll fucking kill the fucker, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him…” Isaac raged.

Lemuel watched him uneasily. You won’t, ‘Zaac, he thought. You really won’t.

“Lin…wouldn’t tell me who she’d been working for,” said Isaac, his voice calming slowly.

“I’m not surprised,” said Lemuel. “Most people haven’t heard of him. Rumours, maybe…Nothing more.”

Isaac stood suddenly. He dragged his sleeve across his face, sniffed hard and cleared his nose.

“Right, we have to get her,” he said. “We have to find her. Let’s think. Think. This…Motley thinks I’ve been ripping him off, which I haven’t. Now, how can I get him to back down…?”

“ ‘Zaac, ‘Zaac…” Lemuel was frozen. He swallowed and looked away, then walked slowly towards Isaac, holding his hands up wide, begging him to calm down. Derkhan looked at him, and there it was again, that pity: hard and brusque, but undoubtedly there. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. His eyes were hard, but his mouth worked silently as he groped for words.

“ ‘Zaac, I’ve dealt with Motley. I’ve never met the guy, but I know him. I know his work. I know how to deal with him, I know what to expect. I’ve seen this before, this exact kind of scenario…Isaac…” He swallowed and continued. “Lin’s dead.”

“No, she is not,” shouted Isaac, clenching his hands and flailing them around his head.

But Lemuel caught hold of his wrists, not hard or pugnaciously, but intensely, making him listen and understand. Isaac was still for a moment, his face wary and wrathful.

“She’s dead, Isaac,” said Lemuel softly. “I’m sorry, mate. I really am. I’m sorry, but she’s gone.” He moved back. Isaac stood, stricken, shaking his head. His mouth opened as if he was trying to cry out. Lemuel was shaking his head slowly. He looked away from Isaac and spoke slowly and quietly, as if to himself.

“Why would he keep her alive?” he said. “It just…It just doesn’t make sense…She’s a…an added complication, that’s all. Something…something it’s easier to dispense with. He’s done what he needed to do,” he said, louder suddenly, raising his hand to gesticulate at Isaac. “He’s got you coming to him. He’s got revenge and he’s got you doing his bidding. He just wants you there… doesn’t matter how he gets it. And if he keeps her alive, there’s a tiny chance that she’d be trouble. But if he…dangles her like bait, you’ll come for her no matter what. Don’t matter if she’s alive.” He shook his head in sorrow. “There’s nothing in it for him not to kill her…She’s dead, Isaac. She’s dead.” Isaac’s eyes were glazing, and Lemuel spoke quickly. “And I’ll tell you this: the best way of getting your revenge is to keep those moths out of Motley’s hands. He won’t kill ‘em, you know. He’ll keep them alive, so’s to get more dreamshit out of them.”

Isaac was stamping around the room now, shouting denials, now in anger, now misery, now rage, now disbelief. He rushed at Lemuel, began to beg with him incoherently, tried to convince him that he must be mistaken. Lemuel could not watch Isaac’s supplication. He closed his eyes and spoke over the desperate babble.

“If you go to him, ‘Zaac, Lin won’t be any less dead. And you’ll be considerably more so.”

Isaac’s noises dried. There was a long, quiet moment, while Isaac stood and his hands shook. He looked over at Lucky Gazid’s corpse, at Yagharek standing silent and hooded in the corner of the room, at Derkhan hovering near him, her own eyes filling, at Lemuel, watching him nervously.

Isaac cried in earnest.

Isaac and Derkhan sat, arms draped over each other, sniffling and weeping.

Lemuel stalked over to Gazid’s stinking cadaver. He knelt before it, holding his mouth and nose with his left hand. With his right he broke the seal of scabbing blood that glued Gazid’s jacket closed, and rummaged inside its pockets. He fumbled, looking for money or information. There was nothing.

He straightened up, looked around the room. He was thinking strategically. He sought anything that might be useful, any weapons, anything to bargain with, anything he could use to spy.

There was nothing at all. Lin’s room was almost bare.

His head ached with the weight of disturbed sleep. He could [feel] the mass of New Crobuzon’s dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.

Eventually, he had taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed, gestured briefly at Yagharek.

“We have to go,” he said.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Throughout the next hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced choler.

Rumours swept the underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.

There was no word from the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The internal war of succession had doubtless begun.

More comatose, imbecile bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their faces.

The plague of mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken. Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.

In St. Jabber’s Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be struck down.

In East Gidd, a still more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half hidden in the bushes that surrounded the Gidd Library. One, a young streetwalker, was dead-genuinely dead, having bled dry from tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite gone.

Some spread the word that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease, these daemons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could defeat them?

There was confusion and misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages, made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.