There were few bridges left that crossed from Parliament territory directly into the Collective: each was a conduit they could not afford to cede to the militia. Below the surface of the Tar, the vodyanoi Collectivists guarding the sewer entrances sent out aquatic sappers.

None of them liked the job they had to do. None of them wanted to destroy these loved old things. They felt they must.

They found their way through the murked waters to where the arches of the bridge rose from mud, they groped, but with growing anxiety could not find their demolitions. They gripped at each other and barked their submerged tongue, but out of the dark water came enemy shapes. Betrayal, someone shouted, as militia vodyanoi came at them, shamans with roiling patches of clean water, undines that gripped the Collectivists and squeezed.

A rump escaped. Their information came through: We can’t explode the fucking bridge.

Sheer Bridge, then. But though this time the vodyanoi swimmers were careful of ambush, it was the same thing-their explosives were gone. Found gods-knew-when and removed. The plans of the Collective to cauterise the ingress of militia had been stymied.

"It’ll be the same on Mandrake Bridge, and Barrow. They’ve got ways in. "

And now here they were coming. With the suppressing fire of the Collective’s guns, the thanatic foci of their hexes, their boobytraps, it took the militia hours to advance through what they made a monstrous landscape, of jags that had been walls and windows without glass or purpose. But they were advancing. Cockscomb Bridge belonged to Parliament again.

As the Collectivists fell back, more barricades went up. The rubble from bombed buildings was hauled as foundation and anything went above it, slag from factories, sleepers, furniture, the stumps of trees from Sobek Croix. The Collectivists had to sacrifice a few streets west of Sedilia Square to focus on main streets. They sent word to the defenders of the south bank itself to prepare for invasion if the militia veered east over the bridge.

They did not. They crossed the river; and in the square they halted, commandeered buildings (one only just vacated by Collectivists, whose effects the militia began systematically to defile, throwing pissed-on heliotypes out of the windows).

In Griss Twist, the insurrectionists took decades-old rubbish from the dumps to block Sheer Bridge. Badside was being shelled, its desolate population and the token Collectivist units left to guard it conserving their ammunition. No one wanted Badside itself; but as a conduit to Echomire and Kelltree, and as the riverbank facing Dog Fenn, the Collective’s heart, it had to be defended.

In the city’s northwest, where the Dog Fenn Collectivists could not go, their sister chapters were in trouble. Something was being prepared in Tar and Canker Wedge, surely an attack on Smog Bend. Break it, with its machinofacture and its organised workers, and that chapter of the Collective was gone.