Now Derkhan was crying, a little. She nodded.

“I’ll chase it, Ben. Promise.”

Ben nodded. There was a moment of silence.

“Dee…” said Ben eventually. “I…I don’t suppose there’s anything you could do with that communico-wossname that would…I don’t suppose…you can’t kill me, can you?”

Derkhan let out a gasp of shock and grief.

She looked around desperately and shook her head.

“No, Ben. I could only do that by killing the communicatrix…”

Ben nodded sadly.

“I really don’t know as I’m going to be able to…hold back from letting some stuff slip…Jabber knows I’ll try, Dee…but they’re experts, you know? And I…well…might as well get it all over with, know what I mean?”

Derkhan was holding her eyes closed. She wept for Ben, and with him.

“Oh gods, Ben, I’m so sorry…”

He was suddenly, ostentatiously brave. Stiff-jawed. Pugnacious. “I’ll do me best. Just you make damn sure you chase Barbile, all right?”

She nodded.

“And…thanks,” he said with a wry smile. “And…goodbye.”

He bit his lip, looked down, then up again and kissed her on the cheek for a long time. Derkhan held him close with her left arm.

And then Benjamin Flex broke away and stepped back, and with some mental reflex invisible to the distraught Derkhan, he told Umma Balsum that it was time for them to disengage.

The communicatrix rippled again, quivered and staggered, and with an almost palpable gust of relief her body collapsed back into its own shape.

The battery continued winding the little handle until Umma Balsum righted herself and walked closer, laid a peremptory hand on it. She stopped the watch on the table, and said: “That’s it, dear.”

Derkhan stretched out and laid her head on the table. She wept in silence. Across the city, Benjamin Flex was doing the same. Both of them alone.

It was only two or three minutes before Derkhan sniffed sharply and sat up. Umma Balsum was sitting in her chair, calculating sums on a scrap of paper with great efficiency.

She glanced over at the sound of Derkhan’s brisk attempts to reassert control over herself.

“Feeling better, deario?” she asked breezily. “I’ve worked out your charge.”

There was a moment when Derkhan felt sick at the woman’s callousness, but it came and went quickly. Derkhan did not know if Umma Balsum could recall what she heard and said when she was harmonized. And then even if she did, Derkhan’s was only one tragedy in the hundreds and thousands throughout the city. Umma Balsum made her money as a go-between, and her mouth had told story after faltered story of loss and betrayal and torture and misery.

There was a certain obscure, lonely comfort for Derkhan in realizing that hers and Ben’s was not a special, not an unusual suffering. Ben’s would not be a special death.

“Look.” Umma Balsum was waving her piece of paper at Derkhan. “Two marks plus five for connection is seven. I was there for eleven minutes, which makes twenty-two stivers: that’s two and tuppence, brings it to nine marks two. Plus a noble for Spike danger money, and you’re looking at one noble nine and two.”

Derkhan gave her two nobles and left.

She walked quickly, without thinking, tracing her way through the streets of Brock Marsh. She re-entered the inhabited streets, where the people she passed were more than shifty-looking figures skulking hurriedly from shadow to shadow. Derkhan shouldered through stallholders and vendors of cheap and dubious potions.

She realized that she was making her way towards Isaac’s laboratory-house. He was a close friend, and something of a political comrade. He had not known Ben-had not even heard his name-but he would understand the scale of what had happened. He might have some idea of what to do…and if not, well, Derkhan would make do with a strong coffee and some comforting.

His door was locked. There was no answer from within. Derkhan almost wailed. She was about to wander off into lonely misery when she remembered Isaac’s enthusiastic descriptions of some vile pub that he frequented on the river’s bank, The Dead Child or something. She turned down the little alley beside the house and looked up and down the pathway by the water, flagstones broken and erupting with tenacious grass.

The dirty lapping waves tugged organic filth gently towards the east. Across the Canker, the opposite bank was choked in snarls of bramble and thickets of serpentine weeds. A little way to the north on Derkhan’s side, some tumbledown establishment huddled by the trail. She walked towards it tentatively, speeding up when she saw the stained and peeling sign: The Dying Child.

Inside, the dark was foetid and warm and unnervingly damp; but in the far corner, past the slouching, collapsed human and vodyanoi and Remade wrecks, sat Isaac.

He was talking in an animated whisper with another man who Derkhan vaguely remembered, some scientist friend of Isaac’s. Isaac looked up as Derkhan stood in the door, and after a double-take, he stared at her. She almost ran towards him.

“Isaac, Jabber and fuck…I’m so glad I found you…”

As she gabbled at him, her hand nervously clenching the cloth of his jacket, she realized with a mortifying lurch that he looked at her without welcome. Her little speech faltered out.

“Derkhan…my gods…” he said. “I…Derkhan, there’s a crisis…Something’s happened, and I…” He looked uneasy.

Derkhan stared at him miserably.

She sat suddenly, collapsed onto the bench beside him. It was like a surrender. She leant on the table, kneaded her eyes which were brimming suddenly and irrevocably.

“I’ve just seen a dear friend and comrade get ready to be tortured to death and half my life’s been crushed and exploded and stamped on and I don’t know why and I’ve got to find a Doctor fucking Barbile somewhere in the city to find out what’s going on, and I come to you…for…because you’re supposed to be my friend and what, you’re…busy…?”

Tears oozed from beneath her fingertips and scored their way across her face. She wiped her hands violently across her eyes and sniffed, glancing up for a moment, and she saw that Isaac and the other man were staring at her with an extraordinary, absurd intensity. Their eyes gaped.

Isaac’s hand crept across the table and gripped her by the wrist.

“You’ve got to find who?” he hissed.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Well,” said Bentham Rudgutter carefully, “I couldn’t get anything out of him. Yet.”

“Not even the name of his source?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“No.” Rudgutter pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “He just shuts down. But I don’t think that’ll be too hard to find out. After all, there aren’t a huge number of people it can be. It’s got to be someone in R amp;D, it’s probably someone on the SM project…We may well know more when the inquisitors have interrogated him.”

“So…” said Stem-Fulcher. “Here we are.”

“Indeed.”

Stem-Fulcher, Rudgutter and Montjohn Rescue were standing, surrounded by an elite militia guard unit, in a tunnel deep under Perdido Street Station. Gaslamps made fitful impressions on the murk. The little points of grubby light went on as far as they could see before them. A little way behind them was the lift-cage they had just left.

At Rudgutter’s signal, he, his companions and their escort began to walk down into the darkness. The militia marched in formation.

“Right,” said Rudgutter. “You’ve both got the scissors?” Stem-Fulcher and Rescue nodded. “Four years ago it was chess sets,” Rudgutter mused. “I remember when the Weaver changed its tastes, it took about three deaths before we worked out what it wanted.” There was an uneasy pause. “Our research is quite up to date,” said Rudgutter with gallows humour. “I spoke to Doctor Kapnellior before meeting you. He’s our resident Weaver ‘expert’…something of a misnomer. Just means that unlike the rest of us, he’s only extremely damn ignorant about them, rather than totally. He reassures me that scissors are still very much the object of desire.”