Bullets went through it, to break glass and china beyond. The woman in its shadow spat and died. In a fever of shot, the wasp trilled and scissored its limbs like a trap. The lead was taken into it with a bare ripple in its uncanny flesh, and some emerged and some was eaten. The thing was dancing in the officers’ fire. The leakage from the dead woman’s mouth was dark, her innards turned to tar.

An officer-thaumaturge cracked his fingers and made occult shapes, and filaments spun into sight between his fingers and the wasp, plasm made hexed fibres and webbing, but the predatory thing passed through the mesh, suddenly far-off or side-on or blinked closed like an eye, and in a spatter of unlight was there again and the net was evanescing. The others stricken by the wasp were still, and a seasick green was coming to the faces of the militia.

But then the wasp was gone. The air was clean. In a moment, the militia began slowly to straighten, Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

"It’s not the first of them," Petron said. They had run back to The Two Maggots, where they sucked at sugared rum tea, craving warm and sweet. "You not hear about them? I thought it was stupid rumours, at first. I thought it was nonsense."

Manifestations that killed by toxic ambience. "One was a grub-thing," Petron said, "in Gallmarch. There was one was a tree. And one was a dagger, up Raven’s Gate way, I heard."

"I heard of the dagger," Ori said. He remembered some strange headline in The Beacon. "And weren’t there others? A sewing machine? Wasn’t there a candle?"

"Goddamn Tesh, isn’t it? That’s what it is. We got to end this war."

Were the conjurations Tesh weapons? Each must cost countless psychonoms of puissance, especially if called from Tesh, and each took only a handful of victims. How could they be effective?

"Yeah but it isn’t just that, is it?" Petron said. "Not just the numbers. It’s the effect. On the mind. On morale."

The next day Ori heard of another manifestant. It was in Serpolet. It was two people gripped together and fucking. No one could see their faces, he heard. Just saw them adangle, turning on twine, mashing their lips, their hands pushed into each other’s flesh. When they went-driven out by the attacks of the locals or not, who knew?-they left five dead, leaked and spilled on the cobbles, turned bitumen.

When at last Spiral Jacobs came to the soup-house, Ori could not believe the look of him. The old man was twisted under the weight of his own bones; his skin was rucked and wretched on him.