The time is now. To make his new clan go deep and disappear. There is no other time for this. He has been beaten down. Though every night he says again what he has said-you must go, it is not safe, more will die-he has given up. He is disengaging. An observer again.

The stiltspear debate quietly. Their food grows scarce. The fish and the food-animals are fleeing or being choked. There is venom in the swamp, the runoff of a thousand men and women, the slurry from latrines and cleaning crystals, from black powder, from make-do graves.

There is another death, a lone dam surprised. The roar of industry is always audible.

A party of stiltspear hunters return and try to say what they have seen. A drained core, something approaching. By now there are steam shovels, Judah knows, ever-growing gangs.

-One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.

After that kill the stiltspear become prey.

The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.

Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.

They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.

Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.

-Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.

They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.