So it was hard for Lin to penetrate the secrets of those first twenty years of the City Cycle. Kinken and Creekside were presented as fait accompli to her, and to her broodma, and the generation before that, and the generation before that.

Creekside had no Plaza of Statues. It had been a tumbledown slum for humans a hundred years ago, a rookery of found architecture, and the khepri home-grubs had done little more than encase the ruined houses with cement, petrifying them forever on the point of collapse. The denizens of Creekside were not artists or fruitbar owners, moiety chiefs or hive elders or shopkeepers. They were disreputable and hungry. They worked in the factories and in the sewers, sold themselves to whomever would buy. Their sisters in Kinken despised them.

In Creekside’s decrepit streets, strange and dangerous ideas blossomed. Small groups of radicals met in hidden halls. Messianic cults promised deliverance to the chosen.

Many of the original refugees had turned their backs on the gods of Bered Kai Nev, angry that they had not protected their disciples from the Ravening. But subsequent generations, not knowing the nature of the tragedy, offered their worship again. Over a hundred years, pantheon temples had been consecrated in old workshops and deserted dancehalls. But many Creeksiders, in their confusion and hunger, turned to dissident gods.

All the usual temples could be found in Creekside’s confines. Awesome Broodma was worshipped, and the Artspitter. Kindly Nurse presided over the shabby hospital, and the Tough Sisters defended the faithful. But in rude shacks that mouldered by the industrial canals, and in front rooms blocked by dark windows, prayers were raised to stranger gods. Priestesses dedicated themselves to the service of the Elyctric Devil or the Air Harvester. Furtive groups clambered to their roofs and sang hymns to the Wingsister, praying for flight. And some lonely, desperate souls—like Lin’s broodma—pledged their fealty to Insect Aspect.

Properly transliterated from Khepri into the New Crobuzon script, the chymico-audio-visual composite of description, devotion and awe that was the name of the god was rendered Insect/Aspect/(male)/(singleminded). But the few humans that knew of him called him Insect Aspect, and that was how Lin had signed him to Isaac when she told him the story of her upbringing.

Since the age of six, when she had torn the chrysalis from what had been her baby headlarva and was suddenly a headscarab, when she had burst into consciousness with language and thought, her mother had taught her that she was fallen. The gloomy doctrine of Insect Aspect was that khepri women were cursed. Some vile flaw on the part of the first woman had consigned her daughters to lives encumbered with ridiculous, slow, floundering bipedal bodies and minds that teemed with the useless byways and intricacies of consciousness. Woman had lost the insectile purity of God and male.