They were shuffling their way along the little stub of the street, towards the glass dome, down through deserted floors in an interstitial burrow. Isaac shivered for a moment in the dark. He was sweating from heat and from fear. He was terribly frightened. He had seen the slake-moths. He had seen them feed. He knew what might be before them in the depths of this wedge of rubble.

After a short time of crawling Isaac felt a moment’s drag on him, then a release. He had reached the full extent of his piping, and Yagharek had let it go to drag behind him.

Isaac did not speak. He could hear Shadrach behind him, breathing deeply and grunting. The two men could not move more than five feet apart, because the wires connected their helmets to a single motor.

Isaac threw up his face and swung it around him, desperately searching for light.

The monkey-constructs swung their way up. Every few moments, one would momentarily turn on the lights in its eyes, and for a minuscule fraction of a second, Isaac would see a stark crawl-way of littered brick and the metal gleam of the constructs’ bodies. Then the lights would go out. Isaac would try to negotiate by the ghost image that slowly ebbed from his eyes.

In the absolute dark, it was easy to sense the slightest glimmer. Isaac knew that he was crawling towards a source of light when he looked up and saw the grey outline of the tunnel ahead. Something pressed Isaac’s chest. He started massively, then recognized the pewter fingers and dark bulk of a construct. Isaac hissed to Shadrach to stop.

The construct gesticulated to Isaac with exaggerated jerky gestures. It pointed forward, towards its two fellows that hovered at the edge of the visible shaft, where the tunnel turned a sharp corner upwards.

Isaac indicated that Shadrach should wait. Then he crept forward at an almost motionless pace. Glacial dread was beginning to creep through his system, from the stomach out. He breathed deep and slow. He shifted his feet slowly, inching along, until he felt his skin prickle as it emerged into a shaft of faint light.

The tunnel ended in a wall of brick five feet high, on three sides of him. A wall rose behind him, above the tunnel mouth. Isaac looked up and saw a ceiling way above him. A pestilential stench began to dribble into the hole. Isaac screwed up his face.

He was crouching in a hole, by the wall, embedded in the cement floor of a room. He could see nothing of the chamber above and beyond him. But he could hear faint sounds. A slight rustle, like wind against discarded paper. The softest sound of liquid adhesion, like fingers sticky with glue meeting and parting.

Isaac swallowed three times and whispered to himself, gearing himself up to bravery, forcing himself on. He turned his back on the bricks before him, on the room beyond them. He saw Shadrach watching him on all fours, his face set. Isaac looked intently into his mirrors. He tugged briefly at the pipe attached to the top of his helmet, that twisted its way backwards into the tunnel and disappeared below Shadrach’s body into the depths, diverting his telltale thoughts.

Then Isaac began to stand, very slowly. He stared with violent fervour into the mirrors, as if trying to prove himself to some testing god-See! I’m not looking behind me, you damn well see if I do! The top of Isaac’s head breached the lip of the hole, and more light fell across him. The foul smell grew stronger still.

His terror was very strong. His sweat was no longer warm.

Isaac tilted his head and stood a little taller, until he saw the room itself in the sepia light that fought its way through one filthy, tiny window.

It was a long, thin room. Eight or so feet wide, and about twenty feet long. Dusty and long-deserted, with no visible entrance or exit, no hatches or doors.

Isaac did not breathe. At the furthest end of the room, sitting and seeming to stare directly at him, the lattice of its complex killing arms and limbs moving in baffling antiphase, its wings half-open in languorous threat, was a slake-moth.

It took a moment for Isaac to realize that he had not moaned. It took another few seconds of staring into the vile thing’s twitching antennaed sockets to realize that it had not sensed him. The moth shifted and turned a little, moving until it was three-quarters on to him.

Absolutely silently, Isaac exhaled. He twitched his head fractionally, to see the rest of the room.

When he saw its contents, he had to fight all over again not to make a sound.

Lying at irregular intervals the whole length of the floor, the room was littered with the dead.

That, Isaac realized, was the source of that unspeakable stench. He turned his head and put his hand over his mouth as he saw that near him lay a decomposing cactacae child, its rotting flesh falling from fibrous hardwood bones. A little way away was the stinking carcass of a human, and beyond that Isaac saw another, fresher human corpse, and a bloated vodyanoi. Most of the bodies were cactus.

Some, he saw with misery and without surprise, were still breathing. They lay discarded: husks; empty bottles. They would drool and piss and shit their last imbecilic days or hours out in this stifling hole, until they died of hunger and thirst and rotted as mindlessly as they had lived at the end.

They could not be in paradise or Hell, thought Isaac despondently. Their spirits could not roam in spectral form. They had been metabolized. They had been drunk and shat out, converted by vile oneirochymical processes and become fuel for a slake-moth flight.

Isaac saw that in one of its crooked hands, the moth was dragging the body of a cactus elder, sash still dangling portentous and absurd about its shoulders. The moth was sluggish. It raised its arm indolently and let the mindless cactus man fall heavily across the mortar floor.

Then the slake-moth moved a little and reached underneath it with its hind legs. It shuffled forward a little, its heavy, uncanny body slipping across the dusty floor. From below its abdomen, the slake-moth pulled out a great, soft globe. It was about three feet across, and as Isaac squinted into his mirror to see it more clearly, he thought he recognized the thick, mucal texture and drab chocolate colour of dreamshit.

His eyes widened.

The slake-moth measured the thing with its back legs, spreading them to encompass the fat globule of slake-moth milk. That’s got to be worth fucking thousands…Isaac thought. No, cut it to make it palatable, there’s probably millions of guineas there! No wonder everyone’s trying to get these damn things back…

Then, as Isaac watched, a piece of the slake-moth’s abdomen unfolded. A long organic syringe emerged, a tapering segmented extrusion that bent backwards from the slake-moth’s tail on some chitinous hinge. It was nearly as long as Isaac’s arm. As he watched, his mouth slack with revulsion and horror, the slake-moth prodded it against the ball of raw dreamshit, paused a moment, then plunged it deep into the centre of the sticky mass.

Under the armour that had unfolded, where the soft part of the underbelly was visible, from where the long probe had emerged, Isaac saw the abdomen of the slake-moth convulse peristaltically, squirting some unseen thing the length of the bony shaft into the depths of the dreamshit.

Isaac knew what he was seeing. The dreamshit was a food source, to give starving hatchlings reserves of energy. The protruding jag of flesh was an ovipositor.

The slake-moth was laying its eggs.

Isaac slipped back below the surface of the wall. He was hyperventilating. Urgently, he beckoned Shadrach.