"He’s here, boy… because he hates the chair-of-the-board more than we do. He’ll do whatever he has to, to bring you-know-who down. It was you brought him, Jabber’s sake. You was right to. We can keep an eye on him."

Ori said nothing.

"I know what I’m doing," Old Shoulder said. "We can keep him watched."

Ori said nothing.

Fires in Howl Barrow, in Echomire, in Murkside. Riots in Creekside and Dog Fenn. Race-hate in the ghetto, ineffectual powder grenades thrown from a Sud Line train at the Glasshouse, cracking two more of its frames. The Caucus put out posters deploring the attacks.

"What happened at the tower in Jabber’s Mound?"

"Three sallies: first time they got the militia running, made it into the base. Then got beat back. Same as always."

Some weird thaumaturgy in Aspic Hole; self-defence committees of the terrified respectable in Barrackham, in Chnum, in Nigh Sump where they were attacked by what everyone said was a mob of Remade.

"What a damn night. Gods." Things were breaking.

"And all because of that thing, that sun-thing."

"Nah, not really."

A critical mass of fear was what it had been, what it had released-a terror and a rage that found outlet. Protect us, people had shouted, tearing at the mechanisms that claimed to look after them. "It was just a catalyst," Ori said.

"What in the name of Jabber and his godsdamn saints was that thing?"

"I know." Whenever Baron spoke his comrades were quiet. "I know, or at least I know what I think it is, and I think so because it’s what the militia and the Mayor think too.

"What they call a witnessing. Remote viewer. Tesh camera. Come to see what we’re about. The state of us."

They were aghast.

"I told you. We ain’t winning the war. It ain’t as powerful as that-it didn’t touch us, did it? The war ain’t over yet. But yes, they’re spying on us. And as well as all them normal spies they must have, they ain’t afraid to show us, now, they’re watching. They got strange gris-gris, the Tesh. Their science ain’t ours. They’ve eyeballed us. There’ll be more."

At the other end of the world, around the corners of coastlines, where physics, thaumaturgy, geography were different, where rock was gas, where settlements were built on the bones of exploration, where traders and pioneers had died at the savage justice of the western Rohagi, where there were cities and states and monarchies without cognates in Crobuzoner philosophy, a war was being fought. The militia exerting New Crobuzon’s claims, fighting for territories and commodity chains, for theories, they said. Fighting for something unclear. And in response to bullets, the powderbombs, the thaumaturgy, burncurs and elementalists of New Crobuzon, Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, had sent this witnessing, to learn them.