There were scores, despite what depredations must have culled them. Made mad by what they had suffered, ready to revenge against these renegades whose flight had dragged them into the cacotopos. No wonder they were so light-armed, no wonder so few. They did not need equipment or ordnance when they called up their weapons out of the surrounds and the matter of the world.

Cutter saw their arcane whips. He saw them shaping the air. He knew it was luftgeists that had brought down the wyrmen and the dirigible, air elementals of tremendous power. This was a corps of invocators, whose weapons were the presences they raised. Beast-handlers, of a preternatural kind. A cadre of elementarii.

Cutter was shouting at his chaverim. He saw some understood. Some were startled into fear.

There were no elementalists in the Iron Council. One man had a tiny captive yag that lived in a jar, a fire-spirit no larger than a match-flame. Those few vodyanoi with undines were bound to them by agreement; they could not control them. But there were some who understood what they were facing.

The elementarii were ranging out, each subgroup preparing its calling. It had to be, Cutter thought. People who could fight without hauling weapons. It had to be either elementalists or karcists, and dæmons are too unsure. Gods damn, a cadre of elementalists. That New Crobuzon would risk losing these men showed how profound was the government’s desire to end the Council.

"Come on, let’s do it," he shouted to Thick Shanks, and wound the metaclockwork engine as well as he could. He focused the reflected light, levelled the beam, could not stop staring over his shoulder at the attack coming.

Which will it be? Cutter thought. Fulmen? Shudners? Undines? Lightning or stone or freshwater elementals, but of course it might be others: metal, sun, wood or fire. Or one whose elemental status was uncertain or disputed: elements made by history, born out of nothing and become real. Would it be a concrete elemental, a glass elemental? What would it be?

He could see already the coils of dust moving against any wind, extending air limbs. The luftgeists. The militia began to bring into being other things.

Sun? Darkness?

They threw all their torches to the ground, and the fire enlarged as if each individual flame loomed much larger than it should, so the ground was impossibly alight, and from the prodigious fire, with a tremendous cry of pleasure, came things like dogs or great apes made of the flames. A pack of yags, fire elementals that bounded in a motion between loping and burning. Cutter saw unridden horses corralled and chanted over and giving out equine screams. One by one they shuddered and let out dying wet noises and unfolded from inside: out of their shuddering carcasses came leaping creatures of their sinew and muscle and their organs all reconfigured into bloody skinless predators: proasmae, the flesh elementals.