dive! screamed the sinistral in sudden, mad fear. dive and away! mission abort! alone and doomed, escape, spitsear and fly!

A great wash of panic gushed into the dextrier’s mind. The child’s face twisted in terror and it began to spew fire. It plunged towards New Crobuzon’s sweating stones, its dank and rotting wood, like a soul towards Hell.

dive dive dive! screamed the sinistral, as the moths licked its terror trail with their vile tongues.

The night shadows of the city reached up like fingers and drew the handlingers in, back to the sunless city of mundane betrayal and danger, away from the mad, impenetrable, unspeakable menace in the clouds.

Chapter 40

CHAPTER FORTY

Isaac damned the Construct Council to Hell, demanded to be released. Blood streamed from his nose and clotted in his beard. Some way from him, Yagharek and Derkhan struggled in the arms of their construct captors. They battled with a miserable lassitude. They knew they were trapped.

Through the migraine haze, Isaac saw the great Construct Council raise its bony metal arm to the skies. At the same moment, the gaunt and bloody human avatar pointed up with the same arm, in an unsettling visual echo.

“It is coming,” the Council said in the man’s dead voice.

Isaac howled in rage and twisted his head skyward, bucking and whipping from side to side in a fruitless effort to dislodge the helmet.

Below the skittering clouds he saw a huge spreadeagled shape approaching haphazardly through the sky. It lurched in an eager, chaotic movement. Derkhan and Yagharek saw it, and faltered into immobility.

The perplexing organic shape moved closer with a terrifying speed. Isaac closed his eyes, then opened them again. He had to see the thing.

It drew closer, dropping suddenly, cruising low and slow over the river. Its manifold limbs opened and shut. Its body juddered in complex unity.

Even from that distance and even through his fear, Isaac could see that the slake-moth that approached him was a sorry specimen, compared to the terrible predatory perfection of the one that had taken Barbile. The twists and convolutions, the half-random whorls and skeins of intricate flesh that had made up that rapacious totality had been functions of some unthinkable, inhuman symmetry, cells multiplying like obscure and imaginary numbers. This, though, this eager flapping shape with gnarled extremities, body segments misshapen and incomplete, its weaponry stubby and mangled in the cocoon . . . this was a freak, malformed.

This was the slake-moth that Isaac had fed on bastardized food. The moth that had tasted the dripping juices from Isaac’s own head, as he lay trembling in a dreamshit fix. It was still hunting that taste, it seemed, that first delicious intimation of a purer sustenance.

This unnatural birth was the start, Isaac realized, of all the troubles.

“Oh sweet Jabber,” whispered Isaac in a trembling voice, “Devil’s Tail . . . Gods help me . . .”