The heavy weapon smashed into Tansell’s left shoulder. Instantly, at the touch of his skin, it conducted the null-charge that sizzled through Tansell’s body. Tansell’s attacker spasmed mightily and was knocked back by the force of the current, spraying sap from his shattered arm; but the momentum of his massive blow sent the cleaver slicing and cutting through layers of fat and blood and bone, gashing Tansell open from his shoulder down to below his sternum, a huge rend in his flesh a foot and a half long. The cleaver remained embedded above his stomach, quivering.

Tansell called out once like an astonished dog. The dark null-charge fizzled out through the huge wound, which began to spew blood in a vast gouting torrent. Tansell fell to his knees, and onto the ground. The cactacae surged around him, kicking and striking out at the quickly dying man.

Isaac let out an anguished cry and reached the top of the wall. He gesticulated to Lemuel. He looked down into the dark yard. Derkhan and Pengefinchess had opened the way to the undercity.

The cactus people had not given up. Some not stamping on Tansell’s corpse were still running forward, waving their weapons at Isaac and Lemuel. As Lemuel reached the wall a rivebow sounded hard. There was a meaty thwack. Lemuel screamed and fell.

A massive serrated chakri was embedded deep in his back, in the spine just above his buttocks. Its silver edges poked out of the wound, which oozed blood copiously.

Lemuel looked up into Isaac’s face and screamed piteously. His legs shuddered. He flailed with his hands, sending brickdust up around him.

“Oh Jabber Isaac help me please!” he screamed. “My legs…Oh Jabber, oh gods…” He coughed up a great welling gob of blood which rolled horribly down his chin.

Isaac was transfixed with horror. He stared down at Lemuel, whose eyes were awash with terror and agony. He looked up briefly, and saw the cactacae bearing down on the crippled man, whooping in triumph. They were barely thirty feet away. As he watched, one saw Isaac watching and raised her rivebow, taking careful aim at his head.

Isaac ducked down, scrambled half down off the wall into the little yard. The open manhole wafted up noisome stenches from below.

Lemuel stared at him in disbelief.

“Help me!” he shrieked. “Jabber, fuck, no, oh Jabber no…Don’t go! Help me!”

He swung his arms like a child in a tantrum, the cactus people descending on him, his nails breaking and his fingers scraping raw as he tried frantically to claw his way up the wall pulling his useless legs behind him. Isaac stared at him in mortification, knowing that there was nothing at all he could do, that there was no time to go down for him, that the cactus people were almost on him, that his wounds would kill him even if Isaac could pull him across the wall, and knowing that even so, Lemuel’s last thoughts as he looked up were of Isaac’s betrayal.

From behind the mouldering concrete of the wall, Isaac heard Lemuel’s screams as the cactacae reached him.

“He’s nothing to do with it!” he shouted out in a rage of grief. Pengefinchess, her face set, dropped out of sight into the sewer that toiled below. “He’s nothing to do with it at all!” screamed Isaac, desperate for Lemuel’s wails to stop. Derkhan followed the vodyanoi, her face white, her ruined ear-hole bleeding. “Let him go you fucks, you shits, you stupid cactus bastards!” Isaac shrieked over Lemuel’s cacophony. Yagharek descended to his shoulders and gripped Isaac’s ankle fiercely, gesticulating at him to come, his inhuman beak clattering as he snapped in agitation. “He was helping you…” shouted Isaac with exhausted horror.

As Yagharek disappeared, Isaac gripped the edge of the manhole and lowered himself in. He squeezed his tight fat bulk past the metal lips and scrabbled with the lid, preparing to replace it as he dropped out of sight.

Lemuel continued to shout, in pain and fear, from over the wall. The brutal sounds of the terrified, triumphant cactacae punishing the intruder went on and on.

It’ll stop, thought Isaac desperately as he descended. They’re frightened and confused, they don’t know what’s going on. They’ll put a chakri or a knife or a bullet in his head any moment, finish this, put an end to this. They’ve no reason to keep him alive, he thought, they’ll kill him because they think he’s with the moths, they’ll do their bit to cleanse the dome, they’ll finish this, they’re panicking, they’re not torturers, he thought, they just want to stop the horror…They’ll end this any second, he thought in misery. This will stop now.

Yet the sound of Lemuel’s screams continued as he disappeared into the stinking darkness, and as he pulled the metal seal over his head. And even then they filtered tinny and absurd through the lid, even as Isaac fell into the stream of warm, faecal water, and staggered along the tunnels following the other survivors. He thought he could hear them even as he crawled through the dripping, trickling, reverberating water-sounds, underneath the liquid rush, along ancient channels like rutted veins, away from the Glasshouse, in a confused, random flight towards the relative safety of the mammoth night-city.

It was a long time before they were silent.

The night is unthinkable. We can only run. We make animal sounds as we rush to escape what we have seen. Dread and revulsion and alien emotions cling to us and cloy our movements. We cannot clean them off.

We scrabble our wounded way up and out from the undercity and reach the railside hovel. We shiver even in the awful heat, nodding mutely to the clattering trains that shake our walls. We stare warily at each other.

Except Isaac, who looks at nothing.

Do I sleep? Does anyone sleep? There are moments when the numbness overwhelms me and clogs up my head so that I cannot see or think. Perhaps these fugues, these broken zombie moments, are sleep. Sleep for the new city. Perhaps that is all we can hope for any more.

No one speaks, for a long, long time.

Pengefinchess the vodyanoi is the first to speak.

She begins quietly, murmuring things hardly recognizable as words. But she is addressing us. She sits, her back against the wall, her fat thighs splayed. The idiot undine winds around her body, washing her clothes, keeping her wet.

She tells us about Shadrach and Tansell. The three had met in some ill-defined episode she glosses over, some mercenary escapade in Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. They had run together for seven years.

The window of our shack is fringed with ragged stubs of glass. At dawn, they snag ineffectually at the sunlight. Under a sharp rafter of the insect-fouled light, Pengefinchess talks in a gentle monotone of her times with her dead companions: poaching in the Wormseye Scrub; thievery in Neovadan; tombrobbing in the Ragamoll forest and steppe.

They had never been three equally united, she says, without spite or rancour. Always she, then Tansell and Shadrach together, who found in each other something, some calm passionate connection she could not and did not want to touch.

Tansell was mad with grief at the end, she says, unthinking, exploding, a mindless eruption of thaumaturgic misery. But had he been clear in his brain, she says, he would have done no different.

So she is on her own again.