Those arbitrarily spared the ordeal were woken suddenly in the depths of the night by the moans and screams from their sleeping lovers, or their heavy despairing sobs. Sometimes the dreams might be dreams of sex or happiness, but heightened and feverish and become terrifying in their intensity. In this twisted night-trap, bad was bad and good was bad.

The city rocked and shivered. Dreams were become a pestilence, a bacillus that seemed to leap from sleeper to sleeper. They even inveigled their way into the minds of the waking. Nightwatchmen and militia agents; late-night dancers and frantic students; insomniacs: they found themselves losing their trains of thought, drifting into fantasies and ruminations of weird, hallucinatory intensity.

All over the city the night was fissured by cries of nocturnal misery.

New Crobuzon was gripped in an epidemic, an outbreak, a plague of nightmares.

The summer was clotting over New Crobuzon. Stifling it. The night air was as hot and thick as an exhaled breath. Way above the city, transfixed between the clouds and the sprawl, the great winged things drooled.

They spread out and flapped their vast irregular wings, sending fat gusts of air rolling with each sweeping motion. Their intricate appendages—tentacular and insectile, anthropoid, chitinous, numerous—trembled as they passed in febrile excitement.

They unhinged their disturbing mouths and long feathered tongues unrolled towards the rooftops. The very air was thick with dreams, and the flying things lapped eagerly at the succulent juices. When the fronds that tipped their tongues were heavy with the invisible nectar, their mouths gaped and they rolled up their tongues with an eager smacking. They gnashed their huge teeth.

They soared. As they flew they shat, exuding all the sewage from their previous meals. The invisible spoor spread out in the sky, psychic effluent that slid, lumpy and cloying, through the interstices of the mundane plane. It oozed its way through æther to fill the city, saturating the minds of the inhabitants, disturbing their rest, bringing forth monsters. The sleeping and the wakeful felt their minds churn.

The five went hunting.

Amid the vast swirling broth of the city’s nightmares, each of the dark things could discern individual snaking trails of flavour.

Usually, they were opportunistic hunters. They would wait until they scented some strong mental tumult, some mind particularly delicious in its own exudations. Then the intricate dark flyers would turn and dive, bear down on the prey. They used their slim hands to unlock top-floor windows, and paced across moonlit attics towards shivering sleepers to drink their fill. They clutched with a multitude of appendages at lonely figures walking the riverside, figures who screeched and screeched as they were taken into a night already full of plaintive cries.