The corridor jacked under the impact, as innumerable gobbets of flaming paper spewed from the doorway, with hot ink and ripped snatches of pipe. Twists of metal and glass burst from the skylight in an industrial fountain. Like smouldering confetti, snippets of editorials and denunciations were sprinkled over the surrounding streets. we say, said one, and betrayal! another. Here and there the banner title was visible, Runagate Rampant. Here it was torn and burning, only a fragment visible.

Run…

One by one the militia attached themselves to the still-waiting ropes with a clip at their belt. They fumbled with levers embedded in their integral backpacks, setting in motion some powerful, hidden engine that dragged them off the streets and into the air as the belt-pulley turned, its powerful cogs interlocking and hauling the dark, bulky figures back up into the belly of their airship. The officer holding Ben clutched him tightly, but the pulley did not falter under the weight of the extra man.

As a weak fire played desultorily over what had been the slaughterhouse, something dropped from the roof, where it had caught on a ragged gutter. It tumbled through the air and crunched heavily on the stained ground. It was the head of Ben’s construct, its upper right arm still attached.

The thing’s arm twitched violently, trying to twist a handle that was no longer there. The head rolled, like a skull encased in pewter. Its metal mouth twitched and for a few ghastly seconds, it affected a disgusting parody of motion, crawling along the uneven ground by flexing and unflexing its jaw.

Within half a minute the last vestige of energy had leeched from it. Its glass eyes vibrated and snapped to a stop. It was still.

A shadow passed over the dead thing, as the airship, full now with all its troops, cruised slowly over the face of Dog Fenn, over the last brutal, sordid battles in the docklands, up past Parliament and over the enormity of the city, towards Perdido Street Station and the interrogation rooms of the Spike.

At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.

But this is not my land and that is not my choice to make. I have struggled to contain myself. I have struggled with the alien jurisprudence of this city, all sharp divides and fences, lines that separate this from that and yours from mine. I have modelled myself on this. I have sought comfort and protection in owning myself, in being my own, my isolate, my private property for this the first time. But I have learnt with sudden violence that I am the victim of colossal fraud.

I have been duped. When the crisis breaks, I cannot be my own here any more than in the Cymek’s constant summer (where “my sand” or “your water” are absurdities that would kill their utterer). The splendid isolation I have sought has crumbled. I need Grimnebulin, Grimnebulin needs his friend, his friend needs succour from us all. It is simple mathematics to cancel common terms and discover that I need succour, too. I must offer it to others, to save myself.

I am stumbling. I must not fall.

I was once a creature of the air, and it remembers me. When I climb to the city heights and lean out into the wind, it tickles me with currents and vectors from my past. I can smell and see the passage of predators and prey in the eddying wash of this atmosphere.

I am like a diver who has lost his suit, who can still gaze through the glass bottom of a boat and watch the creatures of the upper and deeper darkness, can trace their passage and feel the tug of the tides, even though distorted and distant, veiled and half hidden.

I know that something is wrong in the sky.

I can see it in the disturbed flocks of birds, that shy suddenly away from random patches of air. I can see it in the panicked passage of wyrmen that seem to glance behind them as they fly.

The air stills with summer, is heavy with heat and now with these newcomers, these intruders I cannot see. The air is laden with menace. My curiosity rises. My hunting instincts stir.

But I am earthbound.

Part Four. A Plague of Nightmares

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Something uncomfortable and insistent prodded Benjamin Flex awake. His head rocked nauseously, his stomach plunged.

He was sitting strapped to a chair in a small, antiseptic white room. On one wall was a window of frosted glass, admitting light but no sights, no clue at all as to what lay outside. A white-coated man stood over him, poking him with a long shard of metal attached by wires to a humming engine.

Benjamin looked up into the man’s face and saw his own. The man wore a mask of perfectly smooth, rounded mirror, a convex lens that sent Benjamin’s distorted face back at him. Even bowled and ridiculous, the bruises and blood that discoloured Benjamin’s skin shocked him.

The door was open slightly and a man was standing half in, half out of the room. He held the door and faced back the way he had come, speaking to someone in the corridor or main room beyond.

“…glad you like it,” Benjamin heard. “…off to the playhouse with Cassandra tonight, so you never know…no, these eyes are still killing me…” The man laughed briefly in response to some unheard pleasantry. He waved. Then he turned and entered the little room.

He turned towards the chair, and Benjamin saw a figure that he recognized from rallies, from speeches, from massive heliotypes plastered around the city. It was Mayor Rudgutter.

The three figures in the room were still, regarding each other.

“Mr. Flex,” said Rudgutter eventually. “We must talk.”

“Got word from Pigeon.” Isaac waved the letter as he returned to the table he and David had set up in Lublamai’s corner of the ground floor. It was where they had spent the hours of the previous day uselessly scrabbling for plans.

Lublamai lay and drooled and shat in a cot a little way away.

Lin sat with them at the table, listlessly eating slices of banana. She had arrived the previous day, and Isaac, stumbling and semi-coherent, had told her what had happened. Both he and David had seemed in shock. It had been some minutes before she had noticed Yagharek, skulking against a wall in the shadows. She had not known whether to greet him, and had waved a brief introduction that he had not acknowledged. When the four of them ate a miserable supper, he had drifted over to join them, his enormous cloak draped over what she knew to be fake wings. Not that she would tell him she knew him to be engaged in a masquerade.

At one point in that long, miserable evening, Lin had reflected that something had finally happened to make Isaac acknowledge her. He had held her hands on arrival. He had not even ostentatiously thrown up a duplicitous spare bed when she had agreed to stay. It was not a triumph, though, not the final great vindication of love that she would have chosen. The reason for his change was simple.

David and he were worried about more important things.

There was a slightly sour part of her mind which, even now, did not believe his conversion to be complete. She knew that David was an old friend, of similarly libertarian principles, who would understand-if he were even thinking about them-the difficulties of the situation, and who could be relied on to be discreet. But she did not allow herself to dwell on this, feeling mean-spirited and selfish to be thinking of herself with Lublamai…ruined.