The bullet burst through the gusts of gas, sending it coiling in intricate wreaths, and buried itself in the neck of the target. The third member of the vodyanoi strike committee fell squirming into the mire, the water dissipating in arcing spray. His blood pooled and thickened in the quag.

The watercræft walls of the trench in the river were splintering and collapsing. They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents. Polluted water buried the blood, the political papers and the bodies.

As the militia put down the Kelltree strike, cables burst from the fifth airship as from its kin.

The crowds in Dog Fenn were shouting, yelling news and descriptions of the fight. Escapees from the pickets stumbled through the ramshackle alleys. Gangs of youths ran back and forth in energetic confusion.

The costermongers on Silverback Street were yelling and pointing at the fat dirigible uncoiling its dangling rigging to the earth. Their shouts were effaced in the sudden boom and drone of klaxons in the sky as one by one the five airships sounded. A militia squad abseiled through the hot air into the streets of Dog Fenn.

They slipped below the silhouetted rooftops into the rank air, then down, their huge boots hammering down the slippery concrete of the courtyard in which they landed. They looked more construct than human, bulked up by bizarre and twisted armour. The few workers and dossers in the cul-de-sac watched them with mouths gaping until one of the militia turned briefly and raised a huge blunderbuss rifle, sweeping it in a threatening arc. At that, the watchers dived to the ground or turned and fled.

The militia troops stormed down a dripping staircase into the underground slaughterhouse. They smashed through the unlocked door and fired into the swirling, bloody air. The butchers and slaughterers turned dumbfounded to the doorway. One dropped, gargling in agony as a bullet burst his lung. His gory tunic was drenched again, this time from the inside. The other workers fled, slipping on gristle as they ran.

The militia tore down the swinging, dripping carcasses of goat and pigmeat and yanked at the suspended conveyor-belt of hooks until it ripped from the damp ceiling. They charged in waves towards the back of the dark chamber and stomped up the stairs and along the little landing. For all that it slowed them, the locked door to Benjamin Flex’s bedroom might have been gauze.