And there was outrage again. But these Flexibles were consummate-arrogant pranksters yes but serious-and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition was quick and funny dialogue, or jaunty music, and it was hard to sustain anger. But it was an extraordinary challenge or series of challenges and the crowd vacillated between bewilderment and discontent. Ori realised it was a question of how much of the play they could get done before it was unsafe to perform.

No one was sure what it was they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvred, but they should have been-were designed to be-wooden players in traditionalist moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow.

Images, even animations-pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns-came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and the other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form. This stilled the angry crowd somewhat-it was a popular story, and they wanted to see what this anarchic Nuevist crew would do with it.

The barebones introduction was familiar. "No one of us’ll forget, I’m sure," the narrator said and he was right, no one could, it was only twenty years ago. The puppets sketched it out. Some obscure betrayal and Jack Half-a-Prayer, the legendary Jack, the fReemade boss, was caught. They cut his great mantis claw from his right hand-they’d given it to him in the punishment factories, but he’d used it against them, so they took it away. The puppets made this a scene gruesome with red-ribbon blood.

Of course the militia always said he was a bandit and a murderer, and he did kill, no one doubted that. But like most versions of the story, this one showed him as he was remembered: champion-rogue, hero. Jack got caught and it was a sad story, and the censors let the people have it so.

It wasn’t quite a public hanging they gave him-that wasn’t in the constitution-but they found a way to show him off. They’d tethered him on a giant stocks in BilSantum Plaza outside Perdido Street Station for days, and the overseer had used his whip at the slightest wriggle, deeming it resistance. They paid people to jeer, it was mostly agreed. Plenty of Crobuzoners came and didn’t cheer at all. There were those who said it was not the real Jack- he’s no claw, they’ve found some poor bugger and lopped off his hand, is all -but their tone was more despairing than convinced.

The puppets came and went in front of the little plywood whipping post to which the wooden Jack was strapped.