Every night, the evening’s entertainments would begin with an open slot, a comedy show for the regulars. Scores of young, stupid, thickset farmboys, the toughest lads in their villages, who had travelled for days from the Grain Spiral or the Mendican Hills to make their names in the city, would flex their prodigious muscles at the selectors. Two or three would be chosen and pushed into the main arena before the howling crowd. They would confidently heft the machetes they had been given. Then the arena’s hatch would be opened and they would pale as they faced an enormous Remade gladiator or impassive cactacae warrior. The resulting carnage was short and bloody and played for laughs by the professionals.

The sport at Cadnebar’s was driven by fashion. In the dying days of that spring, the taste was for matches between teams of two Remade and three khepri guard-sisters. The khepri units were enticed out of Kinken and Creekside with massive prizes. They had practised together for years, units of three religious warriors trained to emulate the khepri guard gods, the Tough Sisters. Like the Tough Sisters, one would fight with hooknet and spear, one with crossbow and flintlock, and one with the khepri weapon that humans had christened the stingbox.

As summer began to well up under the skin of spring, the bets got bigger and bigger. Miles away in Dog Fenn, Benjamin Flex reflected morosely on the fact that Cadnebar’s Wax, the illegal organ of the fight trade, had a circulation five times that of Runagate Rampant.

The Eyespy Killer left another mutilated victim in the sewers. It was discovered by mudlarks. It was hanging like someone exhausted out of an outflow pipe into the Tar.

In the outskirts of Nigh Sump a woman died of massive puncture wounds to both sides of her neck, as if she had been caught between the blades of huge serrated scissors. When her neighbours found her, her body was scattered with documents which proved her to be a colonel-informer in the militia. The word went out. Jack Half-a-Prayer had struck. In the gutters and the slums, his victim was not mourned.

Lin and Isaac snatched furtive nights together when they could. Isaac could tell that all was not well with her. Once, he sat her down and demanded that she tell him what was troubling her, why she had not entered the Shintacost Prize this year (something which had given her usual bitchery about the standard of the shortlist an added bitterness), what she was working on, and where. There was no sign of any artistic debris at all in any of her rooms.