At that Ori cried, with the relief that someone else had come to this knowledge without him, that something would be done, that he did not have to do it alone. He was so tired. Seeing them, ranged and rugged by him, carrying their weapons with purpose, without the panic of those days, he felt something in him strain for them.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In the south, a salvage squad took a dangerous mission through the streets that separated Aspic from Sobek Croix Gardens. The park was a free-fire zone, inhabited by prison escapees and renegades from factions, not controlled by the Collective or by Parliament. The Collectivists needed fuel: they took axes and saws to the trees. But hauling through the streets under militia fire and returning weighed down by logs cost them. Men fell, shot on the corners of the park, lay on the cobbles, pinned and put down in the shade of walls.

Decisions were still made, but the overarching strategy that had made the Collective operate like a power, an alternative city-state, was breaking down. Some squads were commanded with strategic intelligence, but each action now was more or less its own end, part of nothing larger.

The Flyside Militia Tower had long been stripped of weapons, its thaumaturgic compounds deployed, its secret maps taken. Skyrails, thick and thrumming wires, extended south and north from its top, each stretched taut to its terminus. In the south the last militia tower in the city, in the suburbs of Barrackham; to the north the rail angled up, hundreds of feet above the tangle of slate and iron roofs, over the ghetto of the Glasshouse and the intricately twisted River Tar, up to the centre of New Crobuzon. It went to the Spike, stabbed into the sky by Perdido Street Station.

In these savage last days, the Collectivists of the Flyside tower filled two pods with explosives, chymical and blackpowder. A little before noon, they released one in each direction, throttles jammed. The little vehicles of brass tubing and glass and wood accelerated very fast, screamed over the city.

Wyrmen scattered in surprise as the wires bowed under the pods’ weight. They rose, shouted obscenities.

Perdido Street Station was the centre of the city, even more than Parliament, the atramentous keep now empty of functionaries (it was an irony of the time that the "Parliamentarian" government had suspended Parliament). The Mayor was making decisions from the Spike.

As the north-travelling pod careered over Riverskin the militia fired grenades. They landed short, with cruel billows, on Sheck or the riverside streets near Petty Coil. But the guards could not miss for long. The pod made the metal skyrail scream, and one two missiles sailed out, burst its windows and detonated.

The pod blew, its payload conflagrating in an apocalypse instant, and it plummetted in a smoke-described arc. It shattered across the shopkeepers’ houses and terraces of Sheck, crumbling into melting metal and fire.