With a guilty, grateful haste, David stood and hurried to the door. He felt as if he was swimming in mire, his own shame engulfing him like a mucal sea. He was longing to walk away from this room, and forget what he had said and done, and not think of the coins and notes that would be sent to him, and think only of how loyal he felt to Isaac, and tell himself it was all for the best.

The other man opened the door for him, released him, and David rushed gratefully away, almost ran down along the passageway, eager to escape.

But hurry as he would through the streets of Spit Hearth, guilt clung to him, tenacious as quicksand.

Chapter 30

CHAPTER THIRTY

One night the city lay sleeping with reasonable peace.

Of course, the usual interruptions oppressed it. Men and women fought each other and died. Blood and spew fouled the old streets. Glass shattered. The militia streaked overhead. Dirigibles sounded like monstrous whales. The mutilated, eyeless body of a man who would later be identified as Benjamin Flex washed ashore in Badside.

The city tossed uneasily through its nightland, as it had for centuries. It was a fractured sleep, but it was all the city had ever had.

But the next night, when David performed his furtive task in the red-light zone, something had changed. New Crobuzon night had always been a chaos of jarring beats and sudden violent chords. But a new note was sounding. A tense, whispering undertone that made the air sick.

For one night, the tension in the air was a thin and tentative thing, that inveigled its way into the minds of the citizens and sent shadows across their sleeping faces. Then day, and no one remembered anything more than a moment’s nocturnal unease.

And then as the shadows dragged out and the temperature dropped, as the night returned from under the world, something new and terrible settled on the city.

All around the city, from Flag Hill in the north to Barrackham below the river, from the desultory suburbs of Badside in the east to the rude industrial slums of Chimer, people thrashed and moaned in their beds.

Children were the first. They cried out and dug their nails into their hands, their little faces crunching down into hard grimaces; they sweated heavily, with a cloying stench; their heads oscillated horrendously to and fro; and all without waking.

As the night wore on the adults also suffered. In the depths of some other, innocuous dream, old fears and paranoias suddenly crashed through mental firewalls like invading armies. Successions of ghastly images assaulted the afflicted, animated visions of deep fears, and absurdly terrifying banalities—ghosties and goblins they need never face—they would have laughed at when awake.