Howl Barrow was easy. "We can flatten a bunch of inverts, perverts and painters quicker than scratching our arses," one captured militia commander had said, and his disdainful claim had become notorious. The Howl Barrow chapter would not last long, with its Nuevist squads, its battalions of militant ballet dancers, its infamous Pretty Brigade, a group of Collectivist grenadiers and musketeers all of them dollyboy man-whores in dresses and exaggerated make-up, shouting orders to each other in invert slang. At first they had been greeted with disgust; then with forbearance, as they fought without restraint; then with exasperated affection. No one wanted them to be overrun, but it was inevitable.

The militia took Cockscomb Bridge, broke the Glasshouse Gunners, and were camped on the south bank of the River Tar. They were poised to push east into the heartlands of the Dog Fenn chapter, the stronghold of the New Crobuzon Collective. There was a sense that no Collectivist would voice, that this was the start of the end.

It was into this atmosphere, this war, that Judah, Cutter and their party entered the city.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Six

"Gods. Gods. How in the name of Jabber did you get here?"

Entering and leaving the New Crobuzon Collective was hard. The barricades were guarded by the tense and terrified. The sewers were patrolled. With the Parliamentarian aeronauts savaging any dirigibles not their own, with hexes protecting each side, coming in and out had become epic and dangerous.

There were lurid folk tales: the heroic guardsman who slipped out without fanfare to execute militia; the Parliamentarian unit that took a wrong turn in a backstreet maze to emerge in the middle of Collectivist territory. Now there was a story of the crusade coming, to take all the poor starvelings in the Collective away.

Of course hundreds had entered and left the Collective, through ill-guarded barriers, through thaumaturgy. The Mayor’s city was full of those who took the Collective’s side: in Chimer, in the industrial fringe of Lichford, areas under martial law but from which guilders, seditionists and the curious sometimes made their way into Dog Fenn or Creekside, begging entry. And the Collective itself contained many who passively or actively wished it ill, and crept out uptown or stayed as spies.

So arrivals were feted, but suspiciously. Judah and the others came from the east of the city, through the ruinous landscape by Grand Calibre Bridge. With Qurabin’s help they found hidden byways, more and more of the monk eroding with each journey. Past the barricadistes. Along brick gulches to the post office in Dog Fenn where the delegate council met. They addressed the representatives of the Caucus.