He does not know the names of any or even if they have names, but there are those according to some faint specificity of physique he christens: Red-eyes and Oldster and The Horse. Judah asks Oldster about the mud figures. Toys, his informant says, or games: something like that. -So you’d no longer make them? Judah asks, and the stiltspear snorts and looks skyward in embarrassment. Judah no longer blushes at his gaffes. So far as he can tell it is a question of propriety not ability: it would be as inappropriate for an adult stiltspear to make the little figures as for a New Crobuzon adult to demand the lavatory like a toddler.

Judah accompanies the dams. They seem glazed with the daylight. They catch armfuls of shelled waterspider larger than Judah’s spread hands. They milk their silk, weaving webs between roots and submerged boughs, turning rivulets into fish-traps.

Judah sees something uncanny. A lithe musclefish jackknifes, lapis scales vivid. And then Judah hears a moment of song, a two- or three-layered stripped-down breath of rhythm, buh buh buh buh in quick intricate time, several dams together, and the musclefish is still. It is set in its coil, unmoving, frosted in place in the water, and a hunter spears it with her jag-hand and at the instant she stabs for it she and her companions cease singing and the musclefish twitches again but too late. Judah sees it happen again, days later, a little near-silent choir, a muttered hum that for a moment keeps prey still.

Freshwater dolphin pass in deeper channels. They are ugly, inbred-looking things. The snorts of a sarcosuchus spook them. The stiltspear young try to teach Judah to make a mud-figure of his own. They have decided he is a child like them. His models are desperately crude and make them breathe the sighs that are their laughs.

When they sing to their statuettes he tries good-humouredly to copy them, knowing he can only be a clown and, performing with good grace, -Shallaballoo, he says. -Callam callay cazah! And of course nothing happens, of course all the stiltspear children set their mud walking and his own folds sticky on itself and collapses.

It is the end of summer and the paludal air is stretched thin. Shots sound. With the distant percussion of the rifle every stiltspear freezes in camouflage and for seconds Judah is alone in a copse of sudden trees. With silence the swamplanders slowly return to their appearance. Every one of them looks at Judah.

There are hunters, draped in the little corpses of swamp mammals. They are exploring and collecting in the bogland.

Judah passes one within ten yards, but he has become local, so the man does not hear or see him, only hefts his rifle and looks stupidly past Judah to the watercourses. Another man is sharper. He aims directly at Judah’s chest in expert motion.