In a commandeered carriage they went fast through Echomire, under the colossal Ribs of Bonetown, across Danechi’s Bridge and through Brock Marsh, and the sky was dark-studded with dirigibles, many more than usual, black and lit against the black. There were militia on the streets, shielded, their faces hidden behind mirrors, specialist squads with hexed truncheons and blunderbusses for crowd control. Enoch whipped the pterabirds. Through the fringes of The Crow, where crowds were running to and from broken-open shopfronts and hauling away calico, jars of food, apothecaries’ remedies.

Over the roofs scant streets away was the Spike, the bleak splinter from where the militia ruled, tugged seven ways by skyrails. And beside it, its colossal paradox roofscape soaring, disappearing, soaring again into view, was Perdido Street Station.

They tore under the arches of the Sud and Sink Lines, listening to militia whistles. Stupid blind idiots, Ori thought, of the mass, the rioters out that night. Fighting the khepri, for Jabber’s sake. This is why you need us to wake you up. He checked his guns.

The first and worst flare of violence had ended when they arrived, but the ghetto was unquiet. They went through streets lit by rubbish fires. The century-old houses of Creekside had been made by and for humans, with poor materials and no care, and they sagged in toward each other like the sick. They were held by the wax and exuded byssus of the home-grubs, colossal maggoting larvae that the khepri used to reshape their dwellings. Ori and his comrades walked under houses half-seen through solid sputum that glowed fat-yellow in torchlight.

In a nameless square there was a last offensive. There were no militia, of course. Protecting the khepri was not their agenda.

Twenty or thirty men were attacking a khepri church. They had stamped to broken pieces the figure of Awesome Broodma that had stood by the entrance. It had been a poor, pathetic work, an oversized marble woman stolen or bought cheap from some human ruin, its head sawn off, supplanted with a carefully constructed headscarab in wire, thick with solder, bolted to the neck to mimic she-khepri shape. This chimera of poverty and faith lay scattered.

The men were battering at the door. Staring down from the first-floor windows were the congregation. Emotion was invisible in their insect eyes.

"Quillers," Ori said. Most of the men wore the New Quill Party’s fighting outfits: dark business suits with trousers rolled, bowler hats that Ori knew were lined with steel. They carried razors and chains. Some had pistols. "Quillers."