“A shame. It was a powerful piece,” she said abstractedly, looking out of the window and away. “Charmed. A puissant weapon.”

Isaac interrupted her. He and Derkhan implored her to help once more before she left. She turned and stared at Andrej, seemed to see him for the first time, ignored Isaac’s pleading and demanded to know what in Hell he was doing. Derkhan drew her away from Andrej’s snorts of fear and Isaac’s grim industry, and explained.

Then Derkhan asked Pengefinchess again if she would perform one last task to help them. She could only beg.

Isaac half listened, but he shut his ears quickly to the hissed imploring. He worked instead on the task in hand, the complicated job of crisis mathematics.

Andrej whimpered unceasingly beside him.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Just before four o’clock, as they prepared to go, Derkhan embraced Isaac and Yagharek in turn. She hesitated only a moment before holding the garuda close. He did not respond, but he did not pull away either.

“See you at the rendezvous,” she murmured.

“You know what you have to do?” Isaac said. She nodded and pushed him towards the door.

He hesitated now, at the hardest thing. He looked over to where Andrej lay in a kind of exhausted stupor of fear, his eyes glazed and his gag sticky with mucus.

They had to bring him, and he could not raise the alarm.

He had conferred with Yagharek about this, in whispers easily hidden under the old man’s terror. They had no drugs, and Isaac was no bio-thaumaturge, could not insinuate his fingers briefly through Andrej’s skull and turn his consciousness temporarily off.

Instead, they were forced to use Yagharek’s more savage skills.

The garuda thought back to the fleshpits, remembering the “milk fights”: those that ended with submission or unconsciousness rather than death. He remembered the techniques he had perfected, adjusting them to his human opponents.

“He’s an old man!” hissed Isaac. “And he’s dying, he’s frail…Be gentle…”

Yagharek sidled along the wall to where Andrej lay staring at him with tired, nauseous foreboding.

There was a quick feral movement, and Yagharek was leaning behind Andrej, on one knee, the old man’s head pinioned with his left arm. Andrej stared out at Isaac, his eyes bulging, unable to scream through his gag. Isaac-horrified, guilty and debased-could not help but meet his eye. He watched Andrej, knew that the old man thought he was about to die.

Yagharek’s right elbow swung down in a sharp arc and smacked with brutal precision into the back of the dying man’s head, where his skull gave way into the neck. Andrej gave a short, constricted bark of pain, that sounded very like vomiting. His eyes flickered out of focus, then closed. Yagharek did not let Andrej’s head fall away: he kept his arms tense, pulling his bony elbow hard into soft flesh, counting seconds.

Eventually he let Andrej slump.

“He will wake,” he said. “Perhaps in twenty minutes, perhaps in two hours. I must watch him. I can send him to sleep again. But we must be careful-too much and we will starve his brain of blood.”

They wrapped Andrej’s motionless body with random rags. They hauled him up between them, each with one arm over a shoulder. He was wasted, his insides devoured over years. He weighed shockingly little.

They moved together, supporting the enormous sack of equipment between them with their free arms, carrying it as carefully as if it were a religious relic, the body of some saint.

They were still swathed in their absurd, wearisome disguises, bent and shuffling like beggars. Under his hood, Isaac’s dark skin was still dappled with tiny scabs from his savage shaving. Yagharek wrapped his head, like his feet, in rotten cloth, leaving one tiny slit through which to see. He looked like a faceless leper hiding his decaying skin.

The three of them looked like some appalling caravan of vagrants, a travelling convocation of the dispossessed.

At the door, they turned their heads once, quickly. They both raised their hands in farewell to Derkhan. Isaac looked over to where Pengefinchess watched them placidly. Hesitantly, he raised his hand to her, raised his eyebrows in a query-Will I see you again? he might have been asking, or Will you help us? Pengefinchess raised her great splayed hand in noncommittal response and looked away.

Isaac turned away, set his lips.

He and Yagharek began the dangerous journey across the city.

They did not risk crossing the rail bridge. They were afraid in case an irate train driver did more than blast them with a steam-whistle as he tore past. He might stare at them and clock their faces, or report to his superiors at Sly or Spit Bazaar Stations, or at Perdido Street Station itself, that three stupid dossers had blundered their way onto the rails and were heading for disaster.

Interception was too dangerous. So instead, Isaac and Yagharek clambered down the crumbling stone slope by the railway line, hanging on to Andrej’s body as it tumbled and sprawled towards the quiet pavements.

The heat was intense, but not fierce: it seemed instead like some absence, some enormous citywide lack. It was as if the sun was etiolated, as if its rays bleached out the shadows and cool undersides that gave the architecture its reality. The sun’s heat stifled sounds and bled them of substance. Isaac sweated and cursed quietly beneath his putrid rags. He felt as if he stalked through some vaguely realized dream of heat.

With Andrej supported between them like a friend paralysed with cheap liquor, Isaac and Yagharek tramped through the streets, making for Cockscomb Bridge.

They were interlopers here. This was not Dog Fenn or Badside or the Ketch Heath slums. There, they would have been invisible.

They crossed the bridge nervously. They were hemmed in by its lively stones, surrounded by the sneers and jibes of shopkeepers and customers.

Yagharek kept one surreptitious hand clamped on a cluster of nerve and arterial tissue at the side of Andrej’s neck, ready to pinch hard if the old man gave any sign of waking. Isaac muttered, a coarse babble of swearing that sounded like drunken rambling. It was a disguise, in part. He was also steeling himself.

“Come on, fucker,” he grunted, tense and quiet, “come on, come on. Fucker. Scum. Bastard.” He did not know who he was swearing at.

Isaac and Yagharek crossed the bridge slowly, supporting their companion and their precious bag of equipment. The flow of people parted around them, let them pass with only jeers behind them. They could not let the opprobrium grow and become confrontation.

If some bored toughs decided to kill time by harassing beggars, it would be catastrophic.

But they passed over Cockscomb Bridge, where they felt isolated and open, where the sun seemed to etch out their edges and mark them for attack, and slipped into Petty Coil. The city seemed to close its lips around them and they felt safer again.

There were other beggars here, walking in the train of local notables, earringed villains and fat money-lenders and pinch-lipped madams. Andrej stirred slightly and Yagharek closed his mind down again, laid hands on him efficiently.

Here there were backstreets. Isaac and Yagharek could peel away from the main roads and head down along overshadowed alleys. They passed under washing that linked the facing terraces of tall, narrow streets. They were watched by men and women in underclothes who idly leaned over balconies, flirting with their neighbours. They passed piles of rubbish and broken sewer coverings, and children leaned out from above and spat at them without rancour, or threw little pebbles and ran away.

As always, they sought the railway line. They found it at Sly Station, where the Salacus Fields trains branched away from the Sud Line. They sidled up to the raised path of arches that wove unsteadily above the cobbles of Spit Hearth. The air above the raucous crowds was reddening as the sun wound slowly towards gloaming. The arches were fouled with oil and soot, sprouting a microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants. They swarmed with lizards and insects, aspises sheltering from the heat.