His head ached with the weight of disturbed sleep. He could feel the mass of New Crobuzon’s dream-torture. His own dreams bickered and brooded just below his skull, ready to attack him should he succumb to sleep.

Eventually, he had taken up all the time he feasibly could. He grew more nervous as the night lengthened. He turned to the miserable pair on the bed, gestured briefly at Yagharek.

“We have to go,” he said.

Chapter 37

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Throughout the next hot, sticky day, the city sprawled in heat- and nightmare-induced choler.

Rumours swept the underworld. Ma Francine had been found dead, they said. She had been shot in the night, three times with a longbow. Some freelance assassin had earned Mr. Motley’s thousand guineas.

There was no word from the Kinken headquarters of Ma Francine’s Sugardrop Gang. The internal war of succession had doubtless begun.

More comatose, imbecile bodies were found. More and more. There was a gradual sense of slow panic building. The nightmares would not cease, and some of the papers were linking them with the mindless citizens who were found every day, slumped over their tables before shattered windows, or lying in the streets, caught between buildings by the affliction that came from the sky. The faint smell of rotting citrus clung to their faces.

The plague of mindlessness was not discriminating. Whole and Remade were taken. Humans were found, and khepri and vodyanoi and wyrmen. Even the city garuda began to fall. And other, rarer creatures.

In St. Jabber’s Mound, the sun came up on a fallen trow, its grave-pale limbs heavy and lifeless, even though it breathed, lolling face down beside a slick of stolen and forgotten meat. It must have ventured up from the sewers for a scavenging foray into the midnight city, only to be struck down.

In East Gidd, a still more bizarre scene awaited the militia. There were two bodies half hidden in the bushes that sur-rounded the Gidd Library. One, a young streetwalker, was dead—genuinely dead, having bled dry from tooth-holes in her neck. Sprawled over her was the thin body of a well-known Gidd resident, the owner of a small, successful fabric factory. His face and chin were caked with her blood. His sightless eyes glared up at the sun. He was not dead, but his mind was quite gone.

Some spread the word that Andrew St. Kader had not been what he seemed, but many more the shocking truth that even vampir were prey to the mind-suckers. The city reeled. Were these agents, these germs or spirits, this disease, these dæmons, whatever they were, were they all-powerful? What could defeat them?

There was confusion and misery. A few citizens sent letters to their parents’ villages, made plans to leave New Crobuzon for the foothills and valleys to the south and east. But for millions, there was simply nowhere to flee.