It was a hundred years since the first refugee ships had crawled, barely afloat, into Iron Bay. Their enormous clockwork motors were rusted and broken, their sails ragged. They were charnel ships, packed with Bered Kai Nev khepri who were only just alive. Contagion was so merciless that ancient taboos against waterburial had been overthrown. So there were few corpses on board, but there were thousands of dying. The ships were like crowded antechambers to morgues.

The nature of the tragedy was a mystery to the New Crobuzon authorities, who had no consuls and little contact with any of the countries of Bered Kai Nev. The refugees would not speak of it, or if they did they were elliptical, or if they were graphic and explicit the language barrier blocked understanding. All that the humans knew was that something terrible had happened to the khepri of the eastern continent, some horrendous vortex that had sucked up millions, leaving only a tiny handful able to flee. The khepri had christened this nebulous apocalypse the Ravening.

There were twenty-five years between the arrival of the first ships and the last. Some slow, motorless vessels were said to be crewed entirely by khepri born at sea, all the original refugees having died during the interminable crossing. Their daughters did not know what it was they fled, only that their dying broodmas had all bade them go west, and never to turn the wheel. Stories of the khepri Mercy Ships—named for what they begged—reached New Crobuzon from other countries on the eastern coast of the Rohagi continent, from Gnurr Kett and the Jheshull Islands, from as far south as the Shards. The khepri diaspora had been chaotic and diverse and panicked.

In some lands the refugees were butchered in terrible pogroms. In others, like New Crobuzon, they were welcomed with unease, but not with official violence. They had settled, become workers and tax-payers and criminals, and found themselves, by an organic pressure just too gentle to be obvious, living in ghettos; preyed on, sometimes, by bigots and thugs.

Lin had not grown up in Kinken. She was born in the younger, poorer khepri ghetto of Creekside, a grubby stain in the northwest of the city. It was nearly impossible to understand the true history of Kinken and Creekside, because of the systematic mental erasure that the settlers had undertaken. The trauma of the Ravening was such that the first generation of refugees had deliberately forgotten ten thousand years of khepri history, announcing their arrival at New Crobuzon to be the beginning of a new cycle of years, the City Cycle. When the next generation had demanded their story from their broodmas, many had refused and many could not remember. Khepri history was obscured by the massive shadow of genocide.