An hour or more had passed, and Lin had turned her back on the putrefying building. With her headlegs waving and her head-scarab flexing in agitation, in confusion and loneliness, she made her way back to the station.

She had grappled fiercely with her melancholy, stopping in The Crow and spending some of Motley’s enormous payments on books and rare foods. She had entered an exclusive women’s boutique, provoking the sharp tongue of the manageress until Lin had fanned her guineas and pointed imperiously at two dresses. She had taken her time in being measured, insisting each piece fit her as sensuously as it would the human women for whom its designer had intended it.

She had bought both pieces, all without a word from the manageress, whose nose wrinkled as she took a khepri’s money.

Lin had walked the streets of Salacus Fields wearing one of her purchases, an exquisite fitted piece in cloudy blue that darkened her russet skin. She could not tell if she felt worse or better than before.

She wore the dress again the next morning as she crossed the city to find Isaac.

That morning by Kelltree Docks, dawn had been greeted with a tremendous shout. The vodyanoi dockers had spent the night digging, shaping, shoving and clearing away great weights of cræfted water. As the sun rose hundreds of them emerged from the filthy water, scooping up great handfuls of riverwater and hurling them far out over the Gross Tar.

They had whooped and cheered raggedly, as they lifted the final thin veil of liquid from the great trench they had dug in the river. It yawned fifty or more feet across, an enormous slice of air cut out of the riverwater, stretching the eight hundred feet from one bank to the other. Narrow trenches of water were left at either side, and here and there along the bottom, to stop the river damming. At the bottom of the trench, forty feet below the surface, the riverbed teemed with vodyanoi, fat bodies slithering over each other in the mud, carefully patting at one or other flat, vertical edge of water where the river stopped. Occasionally a vodyanoi would have some discussion with its fellows, and leap over their heads with a powerful convulsion of its enormous froglike hind legs. It would plunge through the airwall into the looming water, kicking out with its webbed feet on some unspecified errand. Others would hurriedly smooth the water behind it, resealing the watercræft, ensuring the integrity of their blockade.

In the centre of the trench, three burly vodyanoi constantly conferred, leaping or crawling to pass on information to their comrades around them, then returning again to the discussion. There were angry debates. These were the elected leaders of the strike committee.

As the sun rose, the vodyanoi at the river’s bottom and lining the banks unfurled banners. FAIR WAGES NOW! they demanded, and NO RAISE, NO RIVER.