The Battle of Cockscomb Bridge started early. A sun that looked watered-down lit amassing troops on either side of the river. Cockscomb, a thousand years old and built up with houses, joined Riverskin on the south of the Tar to Petty Coil north. The Collective fought very hard for Cockscomb Bridge. After the first astonishing days, when for a brief moment most of the south of New Crobuzon had been at least officially in Collective control, their zone had been eroded. Now, weeks later, Cockscomb Bridge was the westernmost point controlled by the Collective’s Dog Fenn chapter.

Lookouts from the Flyside Militia Tower, long occupied by the insurgents, verified the movements of militia units before dawn, and the insurrectionist tacticians mobilised forces from several boroughs. The militia came from The Crow, through Spit Hearth where those renegade hierophants who had not left or gone into hiding said prayers for one or other or both sides, and on to the déclassé collapse of Petty Coil. There in the decaying baroque of Misdirect Square, looked on by architecture once sumptuous now a little absurd with its blistered paint and falling-down facades, the militia fanned out. Light went in thousands of directions from their mirrors. They wheeled cannons and motorguns to point at the old stones of the Cockscomb, and waited.

Across the water the Collective’s troops came, battalions named for their areas. "Wynion Way, to me."

"Silverback Street, left flank." Each corps identified by a scrap of coloured cloth, a sash, green for Wynion, grey for Silverback. Each officer wore a bandana in their colour, though their men and women would recognise them, having voted them in. They were mixed platoons, of all races. And Remade.

Rumours about militia tactics abounded. "There’ll be men-o’-war."

"There’ll be handlingers."

"There’ll be drakows."

"They’ve done a deal with Tesh-there’ll be haints on the bridge." Heading each Collective unit were ex-militia, who had trained their new comrades as quick and thorough as they could. Where populist enthusiasm had resulted in someone utterly callow, untrained or useless voted in as officer, and where misplaced loyalty let them retain their position, some ex-soldier was quietly installed as advisor, to whisper tactics.

Dirigibles gathered like carrion fish at the edges of Parliament airspace, overlooking the Collective, beyond the reach of explosive harpoons, of grenades or squads of Collectivist wyrmen. The lookouts on the south watched carefully for signs that the aerostats would do a bombing run.

The standoff continued. There was anxiety among the Dog Fenn chapter that this was a decoy, that some other great attack was about to occur somewhere else. Runners went to Sheer Bridge and the barricades south of Bonetown and Mog Hill, the shanties east of Grand Calibre Bridge, but they found nothing. In the midmorning the hand-claps of explosions began-the day’s bombardments against each of the Collective’s three chapters.