Isaac had used Lemuel’s services before, when he had needed a rare or forbidden compound, or a manuscript of which there were only a few copies in New Crobuzon, or information on the synthesis of illegal substances. It appealed to Isaac’s sense of humour to think of the hardest elements of the city’s underworld earnestly scrabbling for birds and butterflies in between their gangfights and drugs deals.

It was Shunday the next day, Isaac realized. It had been several days since he had seen Lin. She didn’t even know about his commission. They had a date, he remembered. They were meeting for dinner. He could put his research aside for a little while and tell his lover everything that had happened. It was something he enjoyed, emptying his mind of all its accumulated odds and ends, and offering them to Lin.

Lublamai and David had gone, Isaac realized. He was alone.

He undulated like a walrus, scattering papers and prints all over the boards. He turned his gasjet off and peered up out of the dark warehouse. Through his dirty window he could see the great cold circle of the moon and the slow pirouettes of her two daughters, satellites of ancient, barren rock glowing like fat fireflies as they spun around their mother.

Isaac fell asleep watching the convoluted lunar clockwork. He basked in the moonlight and dreamt of Lin: a fraught, sexual, loving dream.

Chapter Seven

The Clock and Cockerel had spilt out of doors. Tables and coloured lanterns covered the forecourt by the canal that separated Salacus Fields from Sangwine. The smash of glasses and shrieks of amusement wafted over the dour bargemen working the locks, riding the sluicing water up to a higher level, taking off towards the river, leaving the boisterous inn behind.

Lin felt vertiginous.

She sat at the head of a large table under a violet lamp, surrounded by her friends. Next to her on one side was Derkhan Blueday, the art critic for the Beacon. On the other was Cornfed, screaming animatedly at Thighs Growing, the cactacae cellist. Alexandrine; Bellagin Sound; Tarrick Septimus; Importunate Spint: painters and poets, musicians, sculptors, and a host of hangers-on she half-recognized.

This was Lin’s milieu. This was her world. And yet she had never felt so isolated from them as she did now.

The knowledge that she had landed the job, the huge request they all dreamed of, the one work that could see her happy for years, separated her from her fellows. And her terrifying employer very effectively sealed her isolation. Lin felt as if suddenly, without warning, she was in a very different world from the bitchy, game-playing, lively, precious, introspective Salacus Fields round.

She had seen no one since she had returned, shaken, from her extraordinary meeting in Bonetown. She had missed Isaac badly, but she knew that he would be taking the opportunity of her supposed work to be drowning himself in research, and she knew also that for her to venture to Brock Marsh would anger him greatly. In Salacus Fields, they were an open secret. Brock Marsh, though, was the belly of the beast.

So she had sat for a day, contemplating what she had agreed to do.

Slowly, tentatively, she had cast her mind back to the monstrous figure of Mr. Motley.

Godspit and shit! she had thought. What was he?

She had no clear picture of her boss, only a sense of the ragged discordance of his flesh. Snippets of visual memory teased her: one hand terminating in five equally spaced crabs’ claws; a spiralling horn bursting from a nest of eyes; a reptilian ridge winding along goats’ fur. It was impossible to tell what race Mr. Motley had started out as. She had never heard of Remaking so extensive, so monstrous and chaotic. Anyone as rich as he must be could surely afford the best Remakers to fashion him into something more human-or whatever. She could only think that he chose this form.

Either that, or he was a victim of Torque.

Lin wondered if his obsession with the transition zone reflected his form, or if his obsession came first.

Lin’s cupboard was stuffed with her rough sketches of Mr. Motley’s body-hastily hidden on the assumption that Isaac would stay with her tonight. She had made scrawled notes of what she remembered of the lunatic anatomy.

Her horror had ebbed, over the days, leaving her with crawling skin and a torrent of ideas.

This, she had decided, could be the work of her life.

Her first appointment with Mr. Motley was the next day, Dustday, in the afternoon. After that, it was twice a week for at least the next month: probably longer, depending on how the sculpture took shape.

Lin was eager to begin.

“Lin, you tedious bitch!” yelled Cornfed and threw a carrot at her. “Why are you so quiet tonight?”

Lin scrawled quickly on her pad.

Cornfed, sweetheart, you bore me.

Everyone burst into laughter. Cornfed returned to his flamboyant flirtation with Alexandrine. Derkhan bent her grey head towards Lin and spoke softly.

“Seriously, Lin…You’re hardly speaking. Is something up?”

Lin, touched, shook her headbody gently.

Working on something big. Taking up a lot of my mind, she signed at her. It was a relief to be able to speak without writing every word: Derkhan read signing well.

I miss Isaac, Lin added mock-forlornly.

Derkhan creased her face sympathetically. She is, Lin thought, a lovely woman.

Derkhan was pale, tall and thin-though she had gained a small gut as she passed into her middle years. Though she loved the outrageous antics of the Salacus set, she was an intense, gentle woman who avoided being the centre of attention. Her published writing was spiky and merciless: if Derkhan had not liked her work, Lin did not think she could have been Derkhan’s friend. Her judgements in the Beacon were harsh to the point of brutality.

Lin could tell Derkhan that she missed Isaac. Derkhan knew the true nature of their relationship. A little over a year ago, when Lin and Derkhan were strolling together in Salacus Fields, Derkhan had bought drinks. When she handed over her money to pay, she had dropped her purse. She had bent quickly to retrieve it, but Lin had beaten her to it, picking it up and pausing only very slightly when she saw the old, battered heliotype of the beautiful and fierce young woman in a man’s suit that had fallen from it onto the street, the xxx written across the bottom, the lipstick-kiss. She had handed it back to Derkhan, who had replaced it in the purse without hurrying, and without looking Lin in the eyes.

“Long time ago,” Derkhan had said enigmatically, and immersed herself in her beer.

Lin had felt she owed Derkhan a secret. She had almost been relieved a couple of months later when she found herself drinking with Derkhan, depressed after storming out of some stupid row with Isaac. It had given Lin the opportunity to tell Derkhan the truth that she must already have guessed. Derkhan had nodded with nothing but concern for Lin’s misery.

They had been close since then.

Isaac liked Derkhan because she was a seditionist.

Just as Lin thought of Isaac, she heard his voice.

“Godshit, everyone, sorry I’m late…”

She turned and saw his bulk pushing through tables towards them. Her antennae flexed in what she was sure he would recognize as a smile.

A chorus of salutation greeted Isaac as he approached them. He looked straight at Lin and smiled at her privately. He caressed her back as he waved at everyone else, and Lin felt his hand through her shirt clumsily spell out I love you.

Isaac yanked a chair over and forced it between Lin’s and Cornfed’s.