Another cheer, and the leader of Wynion Way came forward firing a musket, but the handlinger flew down, spinning as it did, heavy black boots flailing. It flew into a column of Collectivists with a kind of angry playfulness, smashing them and spitting fire in an incandescent spiral, leaving brutalised dead and dying and fire-stained walls.

"Fall back! Now!"

The Glasshouse Gunners emerged on the streeted bridge and started to retreat, firing rivebows into the militia, who were no longer waiting, were beginning to advance dragging carronade with them. Their motorguns started again. The handlinger and the Collectivist thaumaturge faced each other. The man raised his fists to send out a bolt; the handlinger sent him burning out of the air.

"Get the fuck back now!" The militia were coming. The Glasshouse Gunners turned and in a sudden rage stormed them. The ranks of huge thorned fighters were tremendous. The militia faltered.

The dextrier spat but too early. It burned through several clotheslines. A cactus-man sent a machete into the host, shouted triumph. It was a huge knife; it ground deep into the human meat, sent him down. The cactacae kicked and stamped the parasite and host with tree-trunk feet. The Gunners’ random line was enfiladed and, even armoured in crude-cast metal, the motorgun bullets tore at them.

The weary cactus fighters began to retreat, toward their approaching weapons. The last of the Gunners was a Remade human. He wore a mottlesome thing on his foot. His cactus comrades turned to him, and he spat fire across their faces. They had killed the host but not the handlinger. It had crept onto him.

A train came tearing over the city on the close-by rail-bridge, within a few yards of the Cockscomb. At the north shore the rails were blocked by a barricade, but south of Petty Coil Station, the Sud Line was the Collective’s. The train stopped beside the bridge, and from its windows Collectivists fired grenades, directed by a shantytown garuda on updrafts over the bomb fires. The missiles ruined more and more of the Cockscomb Bridge skyline, and broke apart the militia lines.

But it was not enough. The militia were taking Cockscomb Bridge, firing back at the train. In the east, the black spine of Parliament stabbed up, an inselberg of dark architecture, watching this and the other fights (an airship raid on the Kelltree Docks, shunn-cavalry riding their bipeds into Creekside, a Mamluk regiment of loyal Remade fighting in Echomire while the Collectivists screamed and called them traitors).

It’s time. A whisper from the Collective’s Riverskin commanders. Under the railway arches by Saltpetre Station, a command headquarters, Frengeler, ex-militia, trained in tactics and turned to the radicals, the outstanding military thinker of the Collective, was screaming: Decide if you want to fucking win or not. We’re out of time, do it. Blow the bridges.