I was eager to leave the sea behind me. The sea was an interlude. Four days on a sluggish, oily paddleship crawling across the Meagre Sea, when I had stayed below, knowing only by the lurches and the wet sounds that we were sailing. I could not walk the deck. I would be more confined deckbound under that huge ocean sky than at any time in those stifling days in my stinking cabin. I huddled away from the seagulls and the ospreys and the albatrosses. I stayed close to the brine, in my dirty wooden bolthole, behind the privy.

And before the waters, when I was still burning and raging, when my scars were still wet with blood, was Shankell, the cactus city. The many-named town. Sun-jewel. Oasis. Borridor. Salthole. The Corkscrew Citadel. The Solarium. Shankell, where I fought and fought in the fleshpits and the hookwire cages, tearing skin and being torn, winning far more than I lost, rampaging like a fighting cockerel at night and hoarding pennies by day. Until the day I fought the barbarian prince who wanted to make a helmet of my garuda skull and I won, impossibly, even as I shed blood in frightening gouts. Holding my intestines in with one hand, I clawed his throat out with the other. I won his gold and his followers, whom I freed. I paid myself to health, bought passage on a merchant ship.

I set out across the continent to become whole.

The desert came with me.

PART THREE

Metamorphoses

Chapter 18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The spring winds were becoming warmer. The soiled air over New Crobuzon was charged. The city meteoromancers in the Tar Wedge cloudtower copied figures from spinning dials and tore graphs from frantically scribbling atmospheric gauges. They pursed their lips and shook their heads.

They murmured to each other about the prodigiously hot, wet summer that was on the way. They banged the enormous tubes of the aeromorphic engine that rose vertically the height of the hollow tower like giant organ pipes, or the barrels of guns demanding a duel between earth and sky.

“Bloody useless bloody thing,” they muttered in disgust. Half-hearted attempts were made to start the engines in the cellars, but they had not moved in one hundred and fifty years, and no one alive was capable of fixing them. New Crobuzon was stuck with the weather dictated by gods or nature or chance.

In the Canker Wedge zoo, animals shifted uneasily in the changing weather. It was the dying days of the rutting season, and the restless twitching of lustful, segregated bodies had subsided some. The keepers were as relieved as their charges. The sultry pall of variegated musk that had wafted through the cages had made for aggressive, unpredictable behaviour.