"Howl Barrow’ll fall today." The isolation of the three sections from each other had crippled them. After the first excitement-frenetic weeks, the militia had cut the street-corridors linking Flyside to Howl Barrow, had taken Kinken, separating Howl Barrow from Skulkford and the Smog Bend chapter. There had been some attempts at air-corridors, but the Collective’s dirigibles could not defeat or bypass those of Parliament. The three rebellious areas were separated, and messages passed between them by desperate and unreliable means.

"Howl Barrow’s gone." It was the smallest of the chapters, one without industry, without factories or armouries. Howl Barrow was the revolt of the bohemians, and while their fervour was real, they had little beyond enthusiasm and some weakling thaumaturgy to resist the militia. At one time Dog Fenn would have sent troops through the sewers and buried roads of the undercity to join their comrades in Howl Barrow, but that would be a luxury now. They could only listen to bursts of masonry as the area was attacked. "Maybe Smoggers’ll go help them," some said, but it was not a real hope. Smog Bend could send no one. The artists’ commune was doomed.

Before noon one of those who had refused to leave Cockscomb Bridge emerged from his cellar waving a white flag, and was shot by the militia. There were screams just audible from other houses. "We have to get them out," Collectivists muttered. These citizens had been in their care.

Perhaps the militia were trying to draw the Collective onto the bridge. Perhaps those who had idiotically stayed behind had ceded their right to protection. Still, the officers tried to plan rescues.

A messenger came with orders from the tactics council. The leader of Wynion Way was a fierce young woman who, like other officers, carried a shield on which was nailed the torn-off streetsign for which her troop was named. She moved her men and women toward the bridge with their aging cannon, and opposite the militia began also to approach. From the south came the Glasshouse Gunners, a platoon of cactacae men.

So many debates over the pure-race squads! When the gangs of khepri guard sisters had come and said they would fight for the Collective, when the cactus squads had offered themselves as heavy infantry, some of the officers argued hard against it. "We’re Collectivists!" they had said. "Not cactus or human or Remade or vodyanoi or whatever! We stand and fight together." And it was an impressive, even moving position, but it did not always make sense. "Would the chaver," a vodyanoi delegate had, to laughter, asked one of the most strident human ultraequalitarian anarchs, "like to join me tonight as we trawl the riverbed for militia bombs?"