Isaac saw that she had a toffee-apple gripped in her mandibles. Her inner jaw chewed with gusto.

How was it, treasure? she signed.

“An unmitigated arsing disaster,” Isaac huffed miserably. “I’ll tell you all about it.”

He even risked grasping her hand briefly as they turned their backs on the fair.

The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky.

Chapter Nine

Across the city, through the shady alleys of Echomire and the hovels of Badside, in the lattice of dust-clogged canals, in Smog Bend and the faded estates of Barrackham, in towers in Tar Wedge and the hostile concrete forest of Dog Fenn, came the whispered word. Someone’s paying for winged things.

Like a god, Lemuel breathed life into the message and made it fly. Small-time hoods heard it from drug dealers; costermongers told it to decayed gentlemen; doctors with dubious records got it from part-time bouncers.

Isaac’s request swept through the slums and rookeries. It travelled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps.

Where putrefying houses loomed over courtyards, wooden walkways seemed to self-generate, linking them together, connecting them to the streets and mews where exhausted beasts of burden hauled third-rate goods up and down. Bridges jutted like splinted limbs across cess-trenches. Isaac’s message was couriered across the chaotic skyline in the paths of the feral cats.

Little expeditions of urban adventurers took the Sink Line train south to Fell Stop and ventured into Rudewood. They walked the deserted train tracks as long as they could, stepping from slat to wooden slat, passing the empty, nameless station in the outlands of the forest. The platforms had surrendered to green life. The tracks were thick with dandelions and foxgloves and wild roses that had shoved pugnacious through the railway gravel and, here and there, bent the tracks. Darkwood and banyan and evergreen crept up on the nervous invaders until they were surrounded, enclosed in a lush trap.

They went with sacks and catapults and big nets. They hauled their clumsy urban carcasses through the tangled roots and thick tree-shadows, yelling and tripping and breaking branches. They tried to pinpoint the birdsong that disoriented them, sounding on every side. They made faltering, useless analogies between the city and this alien realm: “If you can find your way through Dog Fenn,” one might say fatuously and wrongly, “you can find your way anywhere.” They would spin, look for and fail to find the militia tower of Vaudois Hill, out of sight behind the trees.

Some did not return.

Most came back scratching at burrs, stung and torn and angry, empty-handed. They might as well have hunted ghosts.

Occasionally they triumphed, and some frantic nightingale or Rudewood finch would be smothered with rough cloth to a chorus of ludicrously overblown cheers. Hornets buried their harpoons into their tormentors as they were swept into jars and pots. If they were lucky, their captors remembered to pierce airholes in the lids.

Many birds and more insects died. Some survived, to be taken into the dark city just beyond the trees.

In the city itself, children scaled walls to pull eggs from nests in decaying gutters. The caterpillars and maggots and cocoons they kept in matchboxes and bartered for string or chocolate were suddenly worth money.

There were accidents. A girl in pursuit of her neighbour’s racing pigeon fell from a roof, breaking her skull. An old man scrabbling for grubs was stung by bees until his heart stopped.

Rare birds and flying creatures were stolen. Some escaped. New predators and prey briefly joined the ecosystem in New Crobuzon’s skies.

Lemuel was good at his job. Some would only have plumbed the depths: not he. He made sure that Isaac’s desires were communicated uptown: Gidd, Canker Wedge, Mafaton and Nigh Sump, Ludmead and The Crow.

Clerks and doctors, lawyers and councillors, landlords and men and women of leisure…even the militia: Lemuel had often dealt (usually indirectly) with New Crobuzon’s respectable citizenry.

The main differences between them and the more desperate of the city’s inhabitants, in his experience, were the scale of money that interested them and the capacity they had not to get caught.

From the parlours and dining rooms there were cautious murmurings of interest.

In the heart of Parliament a debate was taking place about levels of business taxation. Mayor Rudgutter sat regally on his throne and nodded as his deputy, Montjohn Rescue, bellowed the Fat Sun party’s line, poking his finger aggressively across the enormous vaulted chamber. Rescue paused periodically to rearrange the thick scarf he wore around his neck, despite the warmth.

Councillors dozed quietly in a haze of dust motes.

Elsewhere in the vast building, through intricate corridors and passages that seemed designed to confuse, suited secretaries and messengers brushed busily past each other. Little tunnels and stairs of polished marble bristled from main thoroughfares. Many were unlit and unfrequented. An old man pulled a decrepit trolley along one such passage.

With the bustling noise of Parliament’s main entrance hall receding behind him, he dragged the trolley behind him up steep stairs. The corridor was barely wider than his trolley: it was a long, uncomfortable few minutes until he had reached the top. He stopped and wiped sweat from his forehead and around his mouth, then resumed his trudging plod along the ascending floor.

Ahead of him the air lightened, as sunlight tried to finger its way around a corner. He turned full into it, and his face was splashed with light and warmth. It gushed in from a skylight and, beyond that, from the windows of the doorless office at the corridor’s end.

“Morning, sir,” croaked the old man as he reached the entrance.

“Good morning to you,” came the reply from the man behind the desk.

The office was small and square, with narrow windows of smoked glass that looked out over Griss Fell and the arches of the Sud Line railway. One wall was flush with the looming dark bulk of Parliament’s main edifice. Set into that wall was a small sliding door. A pile of crates teetered in the corner.

The little room was one of the chambers that jutted from the main building, high over the surrounding city. The waters of the Gross Tar surged fifty feet below.

The delivery man unloaded his trolley of parcels and boxes in front of the pale middle-aged gentleman sitting before him.

“Not too many today, sir,” he murmured, rubbing his moaning bones. He went slowly back the way he came, his trolley jouncing lightly behind him.

The clerk sifted through the bundles and rattled out brief notes on his typewriter. He made entries in an enormous ledger labelled “acquisitions,” skimming the pages between sections and recording the date before each item. He opened up the packages and recorded the contents in a typewritten day-list and in the big book.

Militia reports: 17. Human knuckles: 3. Heliotypes (incriminating): 5.

He checked for which department each collection of items was bound, and he separated them into piles. When one pile had grown big enough, he put it in a crate and carried it over to the door in the wall. It was a four-by-four-foot square, which hissed with a rush of siphoned air and opened at the behest of some hidden piston when he tugged a lever. At its side was a little slot for a programme card.