The sinistral of each pair picked up the relevant straps and attached itself tightly to their dextrier. Each sinistral host wound the straps between its legs and around its waist and shoulders, ensnared their dextrier and locked themselves to their partners’ backs, facing behind them. Peering into their mirror-helms, they saw behind their own backs, over their dextriers’ shoulders and out in front.

Rescue waited while an unseen sinistral attached the dog uncomfortably to his back. Its legs were splayed absurdly, but the animal’s handlinger parasite ignored its host’s pain. It moved its head expertly, checked that it could see over Rescue’s shoulder. It yelped in a controlled, canine gasp.

“Everyone remember Rudgutter’s code,” shouted Rescue, “case of emergency after? Then hunt.”

The dextriers flexed hidden organs at the base of their vivid, humanoid thumbs. There was a quick sough of air. The five ungainly pairs of host-and-handlingers soared straight up and out, away from each other at speed, disappearing towards Ludmead and Mog Hill, Syriac and Flyside and Sheck, swallowed up by the impure, streetlamp-stained night sky, the blind bearing the afraid.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It was only a short, covert journey from the hut on the railway-side to the Griss Twist dumps. Isaac and Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek drifted seemingly at random through a parallel map of the city. They made their way through backstreets. They flinched uneasily as they felt the smothering nightmares descend on the city.

At a quarter to ten, they were outside number two dump.

The Griss Twist dumps interspersed the deserted remnants of factories. Here and there one still operated, at half- or a quarter-capacity, chucking out its noxious fumes by day and succumbing slowly to the ambient decay by night. The factories were hemmed in and laid siege to by the dumps.

Dump Two was surrounded by unconvincing barbed wire, rusted through, broken and torn, deep in the coil of Griss Twist, surrounded on three sides by the sinuous Tar. It was the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral. A landscape not urban, not created by design or chance, an agglutination of waste remains left to rot, that had subsided and settled into random formations of rust, filth, metal, debris and moulding cloth, scintillas of mirror and china like scree, arcs from splintered wheels, the skittering waste-energy of half-broken engines and machines.

The four renegades punctured the fence with ease. Warily, they traced the tracks carved by the rubbish workers. Cartwheels had carved ruts in the fine rubble that was the dump’s topsoil. Weeds proved their tenacity by spewing from every little clutch of nutrient, no matter how vile.

Like explorers in some antique land they wound their way, dwarfed by the stray sculptures of muck and entropy that surrounded them like canyon walls.

Rats and other vermin made little sounds.

Isaac and the others walked slowly through the warm night, through the stinking air of the industrial dump.

“What are we looking for?” hissed Derkhan.

“I don’t know,” said Isaac. “The damned construct said we’d find our way where we had to go. Fucking had it with enigmas.”

Some late-waking seagull sounded in the air above them. They all started at the sound. The sky was not safe, after all.

Their feet dragged them. It was like the tide, a slow movement, without any conscious direction, which pulled them inexorably in one direction. They found their way to the heart of the rubbish maze.

They turned a corner of the ruinous trashscape and found themselves in a hollow. Like a clearing in the woods, an open space forty feet across. Around its edges were strewn huge piles of half-ruined machinery, the remnants of all manner of engines, massive pieces that looked like working printing presses, down to minuscule and fine pieces of precision engineering.

The four companions stood in the centre of the space. They waited, uneasy.

Just behind the north-western edge of the mountains of waste, huge steam-cranes lolled like great marsh lizards. The river welled thickly just beyond them, out of sight.

For a minute, there was no movement.

“What’s the time?” whispered Isaac. Lemuel and Derkhan looked at their watches.

“Nearly eleven,” said Lemuel.

They looked up again, and still nothing moved.

Overhead, a gibbous moon meandered through the clouds. Its was the only light in the dump, a wan, flattening luminescence that bled the depth from the world.

Isaac looked down and was about to speak, when a sound issued from one of the innumerable trenches that sliced through the towering reef of rubbish. It was an industrial sound, a clanking, siphoning wheeze like some enormous insect. The four waiting figures watched the end of the tunnel, a confused sense of foreboding building in them.

A large construct stamped out into the empty space. It was a model designed for labour, heavy jobs. It stomped past them on swinging tripedal legs, kicking stray stones and gobbets of metal out of its way. Lemuel, who was nearly in its path, moved back warily, but the construct paid him no heed at all. It continued walking until it was near the edge of the oval of empty space, then stopped and stared at the northern wall.

It was still.

As Lemuel turned to Isaac and Derkhan, there was another noise. He swivelled quickly, to see another, much smaller construct, this one a cleaning model driven by khepri-designed metaclock-work. It cruised on its little caterpillar treads, stationing itself a little way from its much bigger sibling.

Now, the sounds of constructs were coming from all around the canyons of garbage.

“Look,” hissed Derkhan, and pointed to the east. From one of the smaller caverns in the muck, two humans were emerging. At first Isaac thought he must be mistaken, and that they must be lithe constructs, but there could be no doubt that they were flesh and bone. They scrambled over the crushed detritus that littered the earth.

They paid the waiting renegades no heed at all.

Isaac frowned.

“Hey,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. One of the two men who had entered the clearing shot him a wrathful glance and shook his head, then looked away. Chastened and astonished, Isaac was silent.

More and more constructs were arriving in the open space. Massive military models, tiny medical assistants, automatic road-drills and household assistants, chrome and steel, iron and brass and copper and glass and wood, steam-powered and elyctrical and clockwork, thaumaturgy-driven and oil-burning engined.

Here and there among them darted more humans-even, Isaac thought, a vodyanoi, quickly lost in the darkness and moving shadows. The humans congregated in a tight knot by the side of what was almost an amphitheatre.

Isaac, Derkhan, Lemuel and Yagharek were completely ignored. They moved together instinctively, unsettled by the bizarre silence. Their attempts to communicate with their fellow organic creatures met either contemptuous silence or irritated shushings.

For ten minutes, constructs and humans dripped steadily into the hollow at the heart of Dump Two. Then the flow stopped, quite suddenly, and there was silence.

“D’you think these constructs are sentient?” whispered Lemuel.

“I’d say so,” said Isaac quietly. “I’m sure it’ll become clear.”

Barges in the river beyond sounded their klaxons, warned each other out of the way. Unnoticed as it came, the terrible weight of nightmares had settled again on New Crobuzon, crushing the minds of the sleeping citizenry under a mass of portent and alien symbols.

Isaac could feel the awful dreams oppressing him, pushing in on his skull. He was aware of them suddenly, waiting in the silence in the city dump.