Increasingly, criminals were conscripted instead of being Remade and jailed. Many of the cripples begging and screaming about the Tesh soulcannon and the efrit winds had been press-ganged and recruited solely for the war. They were not career militia. They were discomfiting, shambling reminders.

The veterans were welcomed and then not welcomed, unwelcomed, spurned. The militia, their erstwhile comrades, cleared them from the parks and squares uptown. Ori had seen them take a man from the petally Churchyard Square, his skin erupted and splitting from beneath with dental wedges, as he screamed about a toothbomb.

New Crobuzoners gave alms to charities that tended the thaumaturgically afflicted. There were still speeches and marches in support of the war: freedom parades they called them with their trumpeters and military floats. But the strangely wounded returnees found they were jinxes.

And those whose hurts were simple and somatic, unhexed? Scarred, stumped rather than too-limbed, blinded, with signs TESH WAR VETEREN, BROKEN FOR N. CROBUZON. Many were doubtless the everyday maimed giving their old injuries a spurious soldier’s glamour, and the resentment and anxiety of Crobuzoners about their city’s war had an outlet.

Only one voice had to raise a jeer- you was born that way, you lying fucker -and a mob might gather, and run the orthodox wounded down. It was for New Crobuzon that they did it, of course, they said- you bastard comparing yourself to our boys fighting and dying. The Murkside crowd approached the burly armless man they accused of lying, said had never been on a ship. He shouted his rank while they threw stones. Ori walked.

Other victims knew better than to raise complaint. The Remade, slave-militia built for war, survivors of their tour. Their integrated arms were decommissioned before their release on the streets of New Crobuzon. If they tried to claim that these Remakings themselves-forgetting even the wound-cut flesh, lost eyes and ill-splinted bones-were war injuries, they would be jeered at the very best. Ori walked.

It was cool summer, and he passed under lush trees until he could not hear the shouts of crowds or the man they were beating and accusing of treachery. Breezes came with him under the arches of Dark Water Station. Streets were tight like veins, houses of darkwood and white daub next to those in brick, and here one burnt-out with carbon bones jutting from uncleared ash. The walls of Pincod, in New Crobuzon’s west, drank water from the air and sweated it out, making plaster bulge like cysts. Their damp was coloured and shining.