Her testimony ends. It demands response, like some ritual liturgy.

She ignores Isaac, cosseted in agony. She looks to Derkhan and to me.

We fail her.

Derkhan shakes her head, wordless and sad.

I try. I open my beak and the story of my crime and my punishment and my exile wells up in my throat. It almost emerges, it almost bursts through the crack.

But I batten it down. It is not connected. It is not for tonight.

Pengefinchess’s history is one of selfishness and plunder, yet it is made by the telling into a valedictory for dead comrades. My history of selfishness and exile resists transmutation. It cannot but be a base story of base things. I am silent.

But then, as we prepare to give up on words and let what happen will, Isaac raises his sluggish head and speaks.

First he demands food and water that we do not have. Slowly his eyes narrow and he begins to talk like a sentient creature. In a remote misery, he describes the deaths he has seen.

He tells us about the Weaver, the dancing mad god, and its fight with the moths, the eggs that burnt, the weird sing-song declamations of our unlikely and untrustworthy champion. In cold and clear words Isaac tells us what he thinks the Construct Council is become, and what it wants and what it might be (and Pengefinchess gulps deep in her throat in her astonishment, her protuberant eyes bulging more as she learns what has happened to the constructs in the city’s dump).

And the more he talks the more he talks. He talks of plans. His voice hardens. Something has come to an end in him, some waiting, some soft patience that died with Lin and now is buried, and I feel myself become stone as I hear him. He inspires me to rigour and purpose.

He talks of betrayals and counter-betrayals, of mathematics and lies and thaumaturgy, dreams and winged things. He expounds theories. He talks to me of flight, something I had half forgotten I might ever have, which I want again, as he mentions it, I want with all of me.

As the sun crawls like a sweating man to the apex of the sky, we remnants, we dregs, examine our weapons and our collected debris, our notes and our stories.

With reserves we did not know we could summon, with an astonishment I feel as if through a veil, we make plans. I coil my whip around my hand tight and sharpen my blade. Derkhan cleans her guns, and murmurs to Isaac. Pengefinchess sits back and shakes her head. She will go, she warns us. There is nothing that might incite her to stay. She will sleep a little, then bid us farewell, she says.

Isaac shrugs. He pulls compact valved engines from where he has stashed them in the piled-up rubbish of the shed. He pulls sheafs and sheafs of notes, sweat-stained, smeared, barely legible, from inside his shirt.

We begin to work, Isaac more fervently than any of us, scribbling frantically.

He looks up after hours of muttered oaths and hissing breakthroughs. We cannot do this, he says. We would need a focus.

And then another hour or two hours pass and he looks up again.

We have to do this, he says, and still, we need a focus.

He tells us what we must do.

There is silence, and then we debate. Quickly. Anxiously. We raise candidates and discard them. Our criteria are confused-do we choose the doomed or the loathed? The decrepit or the vile? Do we judge?

Our morality becomes rushed and furtive.

But the day is more than half gone, and we must choose.

Her face set hard but breaking with misery, Derkhan readies herself. She is charged with the vile task.

She takes what money we have, including the last nuggets of my gold. She cleans some of the undercity’s filth from her, changing her accidental disguise, becoming only a low vagabond, then sets out to hunt for what we need.

Outside it begins to darken, and still Isaac works. Tiny confined figures and equations fill every space, every tiny part of white space, on his few sheets of paper.

The thick sun illumines the smears of cloud from below. The sky grows drab with dusk.

None of us fear the night’s crop of dreams.

Part Seven. Crisis

Chapter Forty-Six

The streetlights flickered off all over the city, and the sun came up over the Canker. It picked out the shape of a tiny barge, little more than a raft, which bobbed on the cool swell.

It was one of many that littered the twin rivers of New Crobuzon. Left to rot into the water, the carcasses of old boats floated randomly with the current, tugging half-heartedly at forgotten moorings. There were many of these vessels in the heart of New Crobuzon, and the mudlarks dared each other to swim out to them, or to clamber along the old ropes that tethered them pointlessly. Some they avoided, whispering that they were the homes of monsters, the lairs of the drowned who would not accept that they were dead, even as they rotted.

This one was half covered with ancient stiffened fabric that stank of oil and rot and grease. The boat’s old wood skin seeped with the river water.

Hidden in the shadow of the tarpaulin, Isaac lay looking at the quickly moving clouds. He was naked and quite still.

He had lain there for some time. Yagharek had come with him to the river’s edge. They had crept for more than an hour through the uneasily shifting city, through the familiar streets of Brock Marsh and up through Gidd, on under rail-lines and past militia towers, eventually reaching the southern fringes of Canker Wedge. Less than two miles from the centre of the city, but a different world. Low, quiet streets and modest housing, small apologetic parks, frumpy churches and halls, offices with false fronts and façades in a cacophony of muted styles.

Here there were avenues. They were nothing like the wide banyan-fringed thoroughfares of Aspic, or the Rue Conifer in Ketch Heath, magnificently lined with ancient pine trees. Still, in the outskirts of Canker Wedge were stunted oaks and darkwoods that hid the architecture’s failings. Isaac and Yagharek, his feet wrapped in bandages again, his head hidden in a newly stolen cloak, had been thankful for the cover of leafy darkness as they made for the river.

There were no great conglomerations of heavy industry along the Canker. The factories and workshops and warehouses and docks studded the sides of the slower Tar, and the Gross Tar which the conjoined rivers became. It was not until the last mile of its distinct existence, where it passed Brock Marsh and a thousand laboratory outflows, that the Canker became fouled and dubious.

In the north of the city, in Gidd and Rim, and here in Canker Wedge, residents might row the waters for pleasure, an unthinkable pastime further south. So it was that Isaac had made his way here, where the river traffic was quiet, to obey the Weaver’s instructions.

They had found a little alley between the backs of two rows of houses, a thin sliver of space that sloped down towards the eddying water. It had not been hard to find a deserted boat, though there were not a fraction as many as there were by the industrial riversides of the city.

Leaving Yagharek watching from beneath his ragged hood like some motionless tramp, Isaac had picked his way down to the edge of the river. There was a fringe of grass and a band of thick mud between him and the water, and he shucked his clothes as he went, collecting them under his arm. By the time he reached the Canker he was nude under the waning darkness.