Montjohn Rescue fingered his scarf again. He made a peculiar noise under his breath. “Ten or so,” he said.

“You’ll receive training, of course. You’ve worn a mirror-guard before, I think?” Rescue nodded. “Good. Because the sentience model of your kind is…broadly similar to a human’s, is it not? Your mind is as tempting to the moths as mine. Whatever your host?”

Rescue nodded again.

“We dream, Mr. Mayor,” he said in his flattened voice. “We can be prey.”

“I understand that. Your-and your kin’s-bravery will not go unnoticed. We will provide whatever we can to ensure your safety.” Rescue nodded without visible emotion. He stood slowly.

“Time being of such importance, I’ll make a start now on spreading the word.” He bowed. “You will have my squad by sundown tomorrow,” he said. He turned and left the room.

Stem-Fulcher turned to Rudgutter with pursed lips.

“He’s not too happy about this, is he?” she said. Rudgutter shrugged.

“He’s always known that his role might involve danger. The slake-moths are as much of a threat to his people as to ours.”

Stem-Fulcher nodded.

“How long ago was he taken? The original Rescue, I mean, the human one.”

Rudgutter calculated for a moment.

“Eleven years. He was planning to supersede me. Have you set the squad in motion?” he demanded. Stem-Fulcher sat back and drew lengthily on her clay pipe. Aromatic smoke danced.

“We’re going through two days’ intensive training today and tomorrow…you know, aiming backwards with the mirror-guards, that sort of thing. Motley is apparently doing the same. The rumours are that Motley’s troop includes several Remade specifically designed for slake-moth husbandry and capture…built-in mirrors, back-pointing arms and the like. We have only one such officer.” She shook her head jealously. “We’re also having several of the scientists who worked on the project work on detecting the moths. They’re at pains to impress on us that this is unreliable, but if they come through they may give us some kind of edge.”

Rudgutter nodded. “Add to that,” he said, “our Weaver, still out there somewhere, still hunting the moths busy tearing up his precious worldweave…We’ve got a reasonable collection of troops.”

“But they’re not co-ordinated,” said Stem-Fulcher. “That’s what worries me. And morale in the city is slipping. Obviously very few people know the truth, but everyone knows they can’t sleep at night, for fear of their dreams. We’re plotting a map of the nightmare hotspots, see if we can’t see some pattern, track the moths in some way. There’s been a spate of violent crime over the last week. Nothing big and planned: the sudden attacks, the spur-of-the-moment murders, the brawls. Tempers,” she said slowly, “are fraying. People are paranoid and afraid.”

After the silence had settled for a moment, she spoke again.

“This afternoon you should receive the fruits of some scientific labours,” she said. “I’ve asked our research team to make some helmet that’ll stop the moth-shit seeping into your skull when you sleep. You’ll look absurd in bed, but at least you’ll rest.” She stopped. Rudgutter was blinking rapidly. “How are your eyes?” she asked.

Rudgutter shook his head.

“Going,” he said sadly. “We just can’t solve the problem of rejection. It’s about time for a fresh set.”

Bleary-eyed citizens made their way to work. They were surly and unco-operative.

At the Kelltree docks, the broken strike was not mentioned. The bruises on the vodyanoi stevedores were fading. They heaved spilt cargos from the dirty water as always. They directed ships into tight spaces on the banks. They muttered in secret about the disappearance of the stewards, the strike-leaders.

Their human workmates stared at the defeated xenians with a mixture of emotions.

The fat aerostats patrolled the skies over the city with restless, clumsy menace.

Arguments broke out with bizarre ease. Fights were common. The nocturnal misery reached out and took victims from the waking world.

In the Bleckly Refinery in Gross Coil, an exhausted crane operator hallucinated one of the torments that had ripped up his sleep the previous night. He shuddered just long enough to send the controls spasming. The massive steam-powered machine disgorged its load of molten iron a second too early. It spewed in a white-hot torrent over the lip of the waiting container and spattered the crew like a siege engine. They screamed and were consumed by the merciless cascade.

At the top of the great deserted concrete obelisks of Spatters the city garuda lit huge fires at night. They banged gongs and saucepans and shouted, screaming obscene songs and raucous cries. Charlie the big man told them that would keep the evil spirits from visiting their towers. The flying monsters. The daemons that had come to town to suck the brains out of the living.

The raucous cafe gatherings in Salacus Fields were subdued.

The nightmares pushed some artists into frenzies of creation. An exhibition was being planned: Dispatches from a Troubled City. It was to be a showcase of art and sculpture and soundwork inspired by the morass of foul dreams in which the city wallowed.

There was a fear in the air, a nervousness at invoking certain names. Lin and Isaac, the disappeared. To speak them would be to admit that something might be wrong, that they might not just be busy, that their enforced, silent absence from regular haunts was sinister.

The nightmares were splitting the membrane of sleep. They were spilling into the everyday, haunting the sunlit realm, drying conversations in the throat and stealing friends away.

Isaac awoke in the throes of memory. He was recalling the extraordinary escape of the previous night. His eyes flickered, but remained closed.

Isaac’s breath caught.

Tentatively, he remembered. Impossible images assailed him. Silk strands a lifetime thick. Living things crawling insidiously across interlocking wires. Behind a beautiful palimpsest of coloured gossamer, a vast, timeless, infinite mass of absence…

In terror, he opened his eyes.

The web was gone.

Isaac looked around him slowly. He was in a brick cavern, cool and wet, dripping in the dark.

“You awake, Isaac?” said Derkhan’s voice.

Isaac struggled up onto his elbows. He groaned. His body hurt him in a variety of ways. He felt battered and torn. Derkhan sat a little way away from him on a ledge of brick. She smiled absolutely mirthlessly at him. It was a terrifying rictus.

“Derkhan?” he murmured. His eyes widened slowly. “What are you wearing?”

In the half-light emitted by a smoke-seeping oil-lamp, Isaac could see that Derkhan was dressed in a puffy dressing gown of bright pink material. It was decorated with garish needlework flowers. Derkhan shook her head.

“I don’t damn well know, Isaac,” she said bitterly. “All I know is I was knocked out by the officer with the stingbox and then I woke up here in the sewers, dressed in this. And that’s not all…” Her voice trembled for a brief moment. She pulled her hair back from the side of her head. He hissed at the raw, seeping clot of blood that caked the side of her face. “My…damned ears gone.” She let her hair fall back into place with an unsteady hand. “Lemuel’s been saying it was a…a Weaver that brought us here. You haven’t seen your own outfit yet, anyway.”

Isaac rubbed his head and sat up completely. He struggled to clear his mind of fog.

“What?” he said. “Where are we? The sewers…? Where’s Lemuel? Yagharek? And…” Lublamai, he heard inside his mind, but he remembered Vermishank’s words. He remembered with cold horror that Lublamai was irrevocably lost.