I feel as if I walk these streets for the last time.

Am I to die?

There are two possibilities.

I will help Grimnebulin and we will defeat these moths, these horrific night-creatures, these soul-drinkers, and he will create of me a battery. He will reward me; he will charge me up like a phlogistic cell and I will fly. As I think it I am climbing. I reach higher and higher on these girder-steps, climbing the city like a ladder to gaze at its tawdry, teeming night. I feel the flabby stubs of my wing muscles try to flap with a pathetic rudimentary motion. I will not rise on tides of air pushed down by feathers, but I will flex my mind like a wing and soar on channels of power, transformative energy, thaumaturgic flow, the binding and exploding force that inheres, that Grimnebulin calls crisis.

I will be a marvel.

Or I will fail and die. I will fall and be skewered on harsh metal, or my dreams will be sucked from my mind and fed to some hatchling devil.

Will I feel it? Will I live on in the milk? Will I know that I am being drunk?

The sun is creeping into view. I am tiring.

I know that I should have stayed. If I am to be anything real, something more than the mute, imbecilic presence I have so far been, I should stay and intervene and plan and prepare and nod at their suggestions, supplement them with my own. I am, I was, a hunter. I can stalk the monsters, the horrendous beasts.

But I could not. I tried to say my sorries, to let Grimnebulin-even Blueday-know that I am one with them, that I am part of the gang. The crew. The posse. The moth-hunters. But it rang hollow in my skull.

I will look and find myself, and then I will know if I can tell them that. And if not, what I can say instead.

I will arm myself. I will bring weapons. I will find a knife, a whip like that I used to wield. Even if I find myself an outsider, I will not let them die unaided. I will sell our lives dear to the thirsting things.

I hear sad music. There is a moment of uncanny quiet, when the trains and the barges pass away from me in my eyrie, and the grinding of their engines ebbs away and the dawn is momentarily uncovered.

Someone at the river’s edge, in some garret, is playing the fiddle. It is a haunting strain, a tremulous dirge of semitones and counterpoints over a broken rhythm. These do not sound like local harmonies.

I recognize the sound. I have heard it before. On the boat that took me across the Meagre Sea, and before that in Shankell.

There is no escaping my southern past, it seems.

It is the dawn greeting of the fisherwomen of Perrick Nigh and the Mandrake Islands, way to the south. My unseen accompanist is welcoming the sun.

The few New Crobuzon Perrickish live mostly in Echomire, yet here she is, three miles upstream as the river twists, waking the great Day fisher with her exquisite playing.

She plays to me for a few more moments, before the noise of the morning takes her sound away, and I am left clinging to the bridge, listening to the boom of klaxons and the whistle from the trains.

That sound from far away continues, but I cannot hear it. The noises of New Crobuzon fill my ears. I will follow them, welcome them. I will let them surround me. I will dive into the hot, city life. Under arch and over stone, through the sparse bone forest of the Ribs, into the brick burrows of Badside and Dog Fenn, through the booming industry of Gross Coil. Like Lemuel sniffing for contacts I will retrace all the steps I have made. And here and there, I hope, among the spires and the crammed architecture, I will touch the immigrants, the refugees, the outsiders who remake New Crobuzon every day. This place with bastard culture. This mongrel city.

I will hear the sounds of Perrick violining or the Gnurr Kett funeral dirge or a Chet stone-riddle, or I will smell the goat porridge they eat in Neovadan or see a doorway painted with the symbols of a Cobsea printer-captain…A long, long way from their homes. Homeless. Home.

All around me will be New Crobuzon, seeping in through my skin.

When I return to Griss Twist, my companions will be waiting, and we will liberate this hijacked city. Thanklessly and unseen.

Part Six. The Glasshouse

Chapter Forty-Two

The streets of Riverskin inclined gently upwards towards the Glasshouse. The houses were old and tall, with rotting wooden frames and walls of damp plaster. Every rain saturated and blistered them, sent slates cascading from the steep roofs as rusted nails dissolved. Riverskin seemed to sweat, gently, in the slow heat.

The southern half of Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of the city’s small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bek-man Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs.

But northern Riverskin was very different. It was quieter, more sullen. It was the preserve of the cactacae.

Large as the Glasshouse was, it could not possibly contain all the cactacae of the city, not even those who kept faith with tradition. At least two-thirds of New Crobuzon’s cactus people lived outside its protective glass. They packed the Riverskin slums, and a few other quarters in places like Syriac and Abrogate Green. But Riverskin was the centre of their city, and there they mixed in equal numbers with human locals. They were the cactus underclass, who entered the Glasshouse to shop and worship, but were forced to live in the infidel city.

Some rebelled. Angry cactacae youths vowed never to enter the Glasshouse which had betrayed them. They referred to it ironically by an older, obsolete name: the Nursery. They scarred themselves and fought in brutal, pointless and exciting gangfights. Sometimes they terrorized the neighbourhood, mugging and stealing from the humans and cactacae elders who shared their streets.

Outside, in Riverskin, the cactus people were surly and quiet. They worked for their human or vodyanoi bosses without demur or enthusiasm. They did not communicate with their workmates of other races in anything more than curt grunts. Their behaviour inside the walls of the Glasshouse was never seen.

The Glasshouse itself was a huge, flattened dome. On the ground, its diameter was more than a quarter of a mile. At its peak, it was eighty yards high. Its base was angled to sit tight on the listing streets of Riverskin.

The framework was wrought in black iron, a great thick skeleton decorated with occasional curlicues and flourishes. It bulged out over the Riverskin houses, visible from a long way off on the top of its low hill. Emerging in two concentric circles from its skin were colossal girdered arms, nearly the size of the Ribs, suspending the dome and taking its weight on great cords of twisted metal.