It fell back, it stood back on its fading heels as the lantern glow in its innards effaced it. Jacobs fought free of its shade hands. He bared dark-stained teeth. The haints swarmed. Jacobs was cobwebbed with darkness the golem had left; it was choking him. He retched up a gout of empty shadows. They spilled on the ground and crept away to their natural place below blockages of light. The darkness golem fell, and Judah fell with it, and while he lay flattened and unconscious for a second the golem disappeared.

Ori was crying, still trying to hit Jacobs, still missing. Spiral Jacobs did not look at him, turned away as the sobbing man flailed and lost his balance and flailed again. Jacobs pushed out his hand and Ori was yanked by matter and whipped to a wall. A clutch of the apparitions went through the air in a brief tentacle to slap Elsie without quite touching her, a moment’s halo of spinning uncoloured shapes around her-a bowl, a bone, a scrap of cotton. Her face greyed instantly, choked off sudden, her eyes gone bloodshot but the blood without colour. She did not fall. With a care as if she were going to bed, she settled herself to the floor, lay down and died.

The haints were maelstroming so fast they lost visible integrity, seemed to melt to a kind of swirling oil. Spiral Jacobs drew another shape and everything convulsed. Ori was shuddering from the wall where he was embedded, making little sounds.

Judah woke. Spiral Jacobs moved his hands. There were no haints now; instead the air was a dilute milk of their residue tracked through with vapour trails. Jacobs was shaking with effort, hauling something out of nothing, vividly trembling. As if from behind a rock, from underwater, a presence began to insinuate.

It was very small, or very big and very far away, and then it was perhaps much bigger than Cutter had thought or much closer, and moving very slowly or tremendously fast over a huge distance. He could not make out its parameters. He could see nothing. He heard it. He could see nothing. The thing made sound. The thing Spiral Jacobs was bringing, the murderspirit, the citykiller, he heard it howl. It came round and round like a rising vine, growing or rising up as if uncoiling from a well. It made a metal howl.

Cutter saw the lights of the city change below them. As the unseen palpable thing approached, the buildings glowered. New Crobuzon’s architecture glared. The streetlamps and the lights of industry became the glints in eyes.