The dirty lapping waves tugged organic filth gently towards the east. Across the Canker, the opposite bank was choked in snarls of bramble and thickets of serpentine weeds. A little way to the north on Derkhan’s side, some tumbledown establishment huddled by the trail. She walked towards it tentatively, speeding up when she saw the stained and peeling sign: The Dying Child.

Inside, the dark was foetid and warm and unnervingly damp; but in the far corner, past the slouching, collapsed human and vodyanoi and Remade wrecks, sat Isaac.

He was talking in an animated whisper with another man who Derkhan vaguely remembered, some scientist friend of Isaac’s. Isaac looked up as Derkhan stood in the door, and after a double-take, he stared at her. She almost ran towards him.

“Isaac, Jabber and fuck . . . I’m so glad I found you . . .”

As she gabbled at him, her hand nervously clenching the cloth of his jacket, she realized with a mortifying lurch that he looked at her without welcome. Her little speech faltered out.

“Derkhan . . . my gods . . .” he said. “I . . . Derkhan, there’s a crisis . . . Something’s happened, and I . . .” He looked uneasy.

Derkhan stared at him miserably.

She sat suddenly, collapsed onto the bench beside him. It was like a surrender. She leant on the table, kneaded her eyes which were brimming suddenly and irrevocably.

“I’ve just seen a dear friend and comrade get ready to be tortured to death and half my life’s been crushed and exploded and stamped on and I don’t know why and I’ve got to find a Doctor fucking Barbile somewhere in the city to find out what’s going on, and I come to you . . . for . . . because you’re supposed to be my friend and what, you’re . . . busy . . . ?”

Tears oozed from beneath her fingertips and scored their way across her face. She wiped her hands violently across her eyes and sniffed, glancing up for a moment, and she saw that Isaac and the other man were staring at her with an extraordinary, absurd intensity. Their eyes gaped.

Isaac’s hand crept across the table and gripped her by the wrist.

“You’ve got to find who?” he hissed.

Chapter 28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Well,” said Bentham Rudgutter carefully, “I couldn’t get anything out of him. Yet.”

“Not even the name of his source?” asked Stem-Fulcher.

“No.” Rudgutter pursed his lips and shook his head slowly. “He just shuts down. But I don’t think that’ll be too hard to find out. After all, there aren’t a huge number of people it can be. It’s got to be someone in R&D, it’s probably someone on the SM project . . . We may well know more when the inquisitors have interrogated him.”

“So . . .” said Stem-Fulcher. “Here we are.”

“Indeed.”